TROTSKY

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXV, Issue 3371, 29 September 1931, Page 2

TROTSKY

STILL AN EXILE. LOYAL TO SOVIET REGIME. For the first time in almost two years Leon Trotsky has unlocked the iron gates of his retreat to admit an interviewer, says the New York Times. He received an Associated Press correspondent in his small wooden villa at Moda, an Asiatic suburb of Istanbul and a favourite summer resort of the Anglo-American colony. The house which the exile rented after fire destroyed his residence on Prinkipo Island is a modest unpainted eight-roomed structure, standing in a neglected garden. High walls and locked barbed wire gates surround it on three sides and the front gate gives directly over the wide expanse of the shiningMarmora Sea. From his window Trotsky can watch day after day ships churningout from the Bosphorus carryingmillions of tons of Soviet exports to

the four corners of the capitalistic world.

Within, Trotsky's ■ writing room and its ante-room on the second floor of the two-storey house are lined with crowded bookshelves, the volumes being freshly selected from Europe and America since fire destroyed his huge library. At a long table covered with manuscripts sits Trotsky. He is ruddier and more elastic and his. face reflects humour rather than bitterness. The heaviness and sallowness are gone.

The sports costume he wears — white shirt open at the throat, white trousers-and blue jacket, adds to the atmosphere of vitality now about him. His thin pointed face is sunburned from hours spent fishing on Marmora Sea—his one recreation. His bristling hair and pointed beard are almost white. Despite recurrent attacks of malaria, he is a man of such power the air about him tingles. Trotsky shot out cordial greetings in French, with some English "How are yous" and "All rights" thrown in. He reads English easily, but prefers not to talk it. "During the past week a dispatch passed through the world Press which attributed to me some opinions directly opposed to those which I have expressed and defended," he said.

"The enemies of the Soviet regime, at least the most obdurate and least perspicacious, expected,, after my expulsion from the Soviet Union, hostile action on my part against the regime hated by them. They were mistaken, and it only remains for them to take refuge in falsifications, relying on credulity or bad faith.

"I use the opportunity of the questions asked by you to declare again my relations to the Soviet regime have not vacillated even one iota since the days when T participated in its creation."