The Face on the Courtroom Wall

The stage seemed set for another Communist show trial. In the dock sat the accused, ready to plead guilty and to confess. On the courtroom wall, over the grey head of the comrade president of the tribunal, hung the Red star emblem with hammer & sickle, and under the flag was the portrait of the all-powerful leader. But the face of the leader seemed to have changed: it was not the slyly benign mask of Joseph Stalin; it was the square, rather brutal face of Josip Broz Tito.

Only last September, Stalin's faithful satellite Hungarians had tried (and hanged) Interior Minister Laszlo Rajk on charges of conspiring with Tito to overthrow the Hungarian government and plotting war against Soviet Russia; Bulgaria last week was preparing to try former Deputy Premier Traicho Rostov on charges of conspiring with Tito to overthrow the Bulgarian government and sabotaging the interests of Soviet Russia.

Meanwhile, at Sarajevo, the minaret-studded Bosnian town where in 1914 Austria's Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated, Tito was having his own show. The defendants in the dock were accused of spying for Soviet Russia, collaborating with prewar Yugoslav fascists and plotting to overthrow the Tito regime.

The Wheel of History. The accused were twelve White Russian emigres who had become Soviet citizens in 1946, when Stalin granted an "amnesty" to the White refugee colonies in China, France and Yugoslavia. The Russians had given Soviet passports to thousands of emigres, who, although antiCommunist, were tired of life in exile and wanted to go back to Russia, but Moscow had held up the actual entry permits, used them as bait to force some of the emigres to work for Soviet foreign agents. That, apparently, was what had happened to the twelve accused.

The trial started two defendants short. Russian Orthodox Priest Vladislav Nekliudov, chief among the accused, had hanged himself with a bedsheet in his cell. One Alexander Krasilnikov, a former colonel in the Czarist army, was said by the court to be too ill to stand trial. Soviet, Hungarian and Bulgarian newspapers promptly cried that Tito had deliberately eliminated the two defendants, that the trial was fixed. To refute these charges, the Yugoslavs invited reporters to the bedside of ailing defendant Krasilnikov, who showed no evidence that Tito's police had maltreated him. Said he contentedly: "I was never a big shot. And now in my old days I become famous--like Stalin."

The Yugoslavs also released the suicide notes of Father Nekliudov to show that he had really died by his own hand. To his wife (if the notes were genuine) the priest had written: "My Veronika, forgive me. Goodbye . . . Those who are 'creating history' [are to blame], and perhaps not even they." To his court and jailers: "I blame nobody . . . Food was good." To his prosecutor: "The wheel of history has passed over a worm." To God: "How stupid it is. Before my life's end, I am lunching and dining and taking exercise . . . God, where are you?"

The notes, read to the court by beady-eyed young Prosecutor Enver Krzic, made it pretty plain that Nekliudov and his alleged accomplices were relatively minor characters who had been trapped in the cold war between Dictator Stalin and Dictator Tito. But in Sarajevo's show they were being passed off by Tito as grand conspirators and spies. The examination of one of the defendants, Orthodox Priest Alexei Kryshkov, illustrated what Tito's prosecutors meant by "espionage."

Judge: "Did you listen to enemy propaganda?" Kryshkov: "Yes."

Judge: "Did you agree with it?" Kryshkov: "When it was true, yes."

Judge: "Did you talk about [atomic] bombs?" Kryshkov: "I did."

Judge: "Did you compare the living standard in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union with that in the United States?" Kryshkov: "Perhaps I did."

The Experienced Hand. Tito's show did not have the weird perfection of the trials staged in Moscow, or even in Budapest. Not all defendants cringed. One of the accused, pint-sized Arseny Boremovich, was asked by the judge: "Do you plead guilty to anything?" Retorted Boremovich: "To nothing!"

The trial, like the portrait of the Yugoslav dictator on the courtroom wall, was supposed to tell his Cominform enemies (see above) that anything Stalin could do, Tito could do better. But from the exhibition that appeared on the stage, it was plain to see that Joe Stalin was by far the better and the more experienced hand when it came to travesties of justice.

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