SOVIET TRIAL

Stratford Evening Post, Volume II, Issue 223, 19 April 1933, Page 5

SOVIET TRIAL

"A WANTON OUTRAGE" Excuse to Pick a Quarrel REPUDIATION OF INCONVEIENT DEBTS London Press Opinion Press Association, —Copyright. London, April 18.— ,: The Soviet's wanton outrage of our subjects could have been devised only with one object," says the Morning Post, "namely, in order to pick a quarrel and use it as an excuse to repudiate inconvenient debts. Under the export guarantee system we incurred a liability of £7,000,000 in order to encourage Anglo-Russian trade. This is likely to become a bad debt. It will bo some compensation, however, to know it ends an arrangement to use British money and credit to bolster up and strengthen an avowed enemy."

The Riga correspondent of the Times emphasises that M. Vlshinsky completely ignored the reports of the Soviet's own investigating commissions that the breakdowns at the Moscow, Ivanovo. Zlatovst, Chelyabinsk and other electrical stations were due to mismanagement, bad transport and scarcity of skilled labour which constantly caused serious damage at thi Moscow stations. The correspondent adds that none of the Soviet's reports mentions foreign engineers or wilful wrecking as a cause of damage. The Daily Mail says: "The O.G.P.U. spies should be expelled from England to prevent the execution of M. Vishinsky's threat to investigate Thornton's activities in London, else it may result in a repetition of crimes like the shooting by Kutepoff of President Doumer at Paris."

In a letter to The Times, a scientist, Professor Tchernavih, formerly head of the laboratories of the Northern Fisheries Trust, discloses the O.G.P.U. methods of extracting confessions..Tchernavin was accused of sabotage in 1931 and placed with 100 others in a cell 75 yards square infested with bugs and lice. He was threatened that if he did not sign a confession he would be shot and hi. wife would be arrested. Tchernavin refused and was sent without trial to jfive years' penal servitude at the Solovetsky concentration camp, from which he escaped in 1932. The measures the O.G.P.U. applied to Tchemavin's fellow-prisoners included forcing them to stand without food and drink for six days and nights, placing them undressed before windows oDen to the winter cold and crowding 300 men and women into a single room kept at a high temperature for six days and then forcing them to run in batches of 40 from the room until they signed confessions or dropped senseless. THORNTON EXPECTS HEAVY SENTENCE Press Association. —Copyright. London, April 18. —Thornton's wife has received through the Foreign Office a personal cryptic message from her husband warning her "not to be shocked" at the result of the trial. The message added: "I have little doubt my punishment will be the severest." All the Englishman asks his wife is to be brave but he cannot stand the agoriy of awaiting the sentence much longer.