THE MOSCOW TRIAL

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4954, 11 February 1937, Page 6

THE MOSCOW TRIAL

SURVEY OF EVIDENCE. EXPLAINING THE CONFESSIONS. London, January 29. Now that all the chief accused in the great mass trial in Moscow have repeated in Court the confessions they made to officials of the 0.G.P.U., the Moscow correspondent of the Daily Telegraph says the prosecutor (M. Vishinsky) has developed a sudden interest in the question of how these confessions were obtained. His suddenly awakened interest coincides with publication i n the Pravda of a statement by Leon Feuchtwanger, the novelist, expressing the hope that in the interest of finally ■establishing truth, the prisoners' motives in making detailed confessions would be revealed. M. Vishinsky, therefore, obtained from the prisoners a series of satisfactory psychological reasons for thus committing suicide. “The problem of the confessions,” the correspondent says, “none the less, remains. There are no witnesses for the defence because there is no defence. All the witnesses the prosecution has so far produced have been brought from the O.G.P.U. prison, where they are awaiting trial on similar charges. There is nothing abnormal about this from a Russian point of view. “Presumably, all the real free witnesses connected with the case are persons who are too valuable to have their identity revealed in Court. Some such devoted men may have joined the alleged Trotskyist parallel Centre, double-crossing it for the highest idealistic motives. Popular Aspect. “It seems to have been established that several leading accused carried on clandestine and seditious correspondence with Trotsky, although no documentary evidence has been produced to prove this, all Trotsky’s

letters and written massages exchanged between their old friends having naturally been destroyed. But one cannot send a batch of Lenin’s oldest lieutenants to public trial on a charge of treasonable correspondence against Stalin. The man in the street needs stronger meat that that. Hence we have what may be called the popular and ornamental side of M. Vishinsky’s case —deliberate wrecking of coalmines, derailing of trains, with heavy loss of life, caused on the direct orders of Piatakoff. “I doubt whether Piatakoff ordered such things, or that he deliberately made bad industrial plans. I believe that when these old Bolshevist friends occasionally met and criticised Stalin’s political methods, which, they said, must lead straight to famine, misery, and working-class discontent, one or other of them did use the silly old Russian phrase, ‘The worse it gets, the better it is.’ And such remarks were probably reported by secret agents.

‘Piatakoff, although far the best industrial administrator Russia has produced, is still up in the clouds politically, compared with the realist Stalin. I can imagine him rather than be badgered by O.G.P.U. officials, impatiently signing confessions to such, for him, minor matters as wrecking. He might even have signed a statement that he ordered some minor accused to make contacts with the German intelligence service, but he clearly boggled at that when he was reminded of it in Court. Strange Confessions. “I am unable to express any real opinion regarding the strange confessions of Piatakoff, Radek, and Sokolnikof, that they were preparing under Trotsky’s orders, to sell Russia to Germany and Japan, and to cede the Ukraine to Germany and the Far East to Japan. I believe they discussed what line they ought to take after what they regarded, at least until early in 1935, as the inevitable defeat of the Red army in the field, and how to undertake new Bolshevist revolution on orthodox Lenin lines. These

men, unlike ZinoviefF and KamenefF, had courage. “It is significant regarding the wrecking charges, as such, that the real root of this side of M. Vishinsky’s case is the terrible coalmining disaster late in September, which was after most of the accused had been arrested. They now confess that they knew the disaster was going to happen, and could have prevented it if they had confessed immediately. Wrecking is a vague matter under present conditions. When a major disaster occurs the benefit of the doubt is usually denied those held responsible. “There remains the charges of wrecking and combined espionage on behalf of certain German firms. These charges ought to have been the subject of separate trial. Stroiloff, a young Bolshevik engineer, and other second-line accused, have confessed. Stroiloff obviously had fallen under German Nazi influence partly, it is believed, for reasons of graft. But as this has to be a trial of financially interested idealogical ruffians, M. Vishinsky avoided making this point."