“AGENT OF NAZIS”

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21865, 19 August 1936, Page 11

“AGENT OF NAZIS”

* — RUSSIAN PRESS ATTACKS M. TROTSKY INTENTION TO ASSASSINATE M. STALIN ALLEGED MOSCOW, August 17. The newspapers are conducting a campaign of unprecedented violence against M. Zinoviev, M, Kamenev and 14 other so-called terrorists, who will be tried on August 19. They allege that M. Leon Trotsky, who is now in exile in Norway, is’ an agent of the Nazis, and they declare that the German Secret Police supplied his emissaries with false passports to enter Russia for the purpose of assassinating M. Josef Stalin. . Among the objects of the trial r an effort to scotch the idea abroad that M. Stalin and M. Trotsky have patched up their quarrel and are co-operating in support of the Spanish communists in the revolution.

[lt was officially announced in Moscow on August 14 that an anti-Govern-ment plot, allegedly directed by M. Trotsky, had been discovered. The police had consequently ordered the. trial of M. Zinoviev, M. Kamenev, M. Smirnov, and 13 others. Zinoviev and Kamenev were sentenced in January, 1935, to 10 years’ and five years’ imprisonment respectively for counterrevolutionary activity over the murder of M. Sergie Koriv, the Soviet leader in Leningrad. M. Trotsky was to be interviewed at Christiansund by Norwegian police officers.! CHARGE DENIED BY M. TROTSKY NO COMMUNICATIONS WITH RUSSIA LONDON. August 17. The Oslo correspondent of “The Times” says that M. Trotsky has issued the following statement*. “The charge against me is one of the greatest fakes in political history. I have had no connexion with Russia since I arrived in Norway. I have hot written to Russia, nor have I received "hj letter from there. I am unable even to write to my son, who is working in Russia as a non-political scientist.” M. Trotsky has left his island refuge at Christiansund for an unknown destination because of numerous- visitors arriving in sailing boats and motor-boats denouncing him as a murderer. _