THE MOSCOW TRIAL

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3825, 23 October 1936, Page 8

THE MOSCOW TRIAL

PLAN TO KILL STALIN. REVEALED PY PRISONERS. A plan to murder Stalin as he stood on the roof of Lenin’s tomb watching the May Day parade in Moscow this year was described at the trial of Zinovieff, Kemeneff, and fourteen others accused of plotting with Trotsky and the German Secret Service to overthrow the Soviet Government (telegraphed the Moscow correspondent of the Daily Telegraph on August 20). Valetin Oldberg, alleged to be a Nazi agent, said that it had been arranged for a group of students to throw bombs at Stalin as they marched past the tomb. This was one of several plans to kill Stalin described to the Court. There was an uncanny atmosphere about the trial. The evidence given by the prisoners repeated in a parrotlike manner the charges made in the 35-page indictment drawn up by M. Vishinsky, the Attorney-General. Zinovieff had recovered sufficiently to make an eloquent “fighting'’ speech ■ —but only to accuse himself and everybody else, including Trotsky. Kameneff took much the same line when interrogated. The sixteen men in the dock, nearly all of whom were once hardy and fearless “Old Bolsheviks,” continue to accuse themselves and each other of all, and more than all, the crimes with which M. Vishinsky charged them. They seem to take a delight in implicating in the plot to murder Stalin and all his best assistants almost every other “Old Bolshevik” of the Left, Right, or Centre who, during the last twelve years, opposed or criticised the Stalin regime. Named as Accomplices. Those, not at present on trial, whom they accused of complicity were:— Sokolnikoff, formerly Ambassador in Britain, now under arrest; Rykoff, at one time Premier of the Soviet Cabinet; Tomsky, the veteran trades union chief; Bukharin, present editor of the official newspaper Isvestia; and Karl Radek, Stalin’s Press mouthpiece on foreign affairs. Strangely enough, to-day’s newspapers suppress all reference to the charges made against these men, and Government officials state that, ex•cept for Sokolnikoff, they are not yet under arrest. This adds to the general strangeness of the proceedings. To-day’s papers publish articles and resolutions headed “Shoot the Reptiles,” but nowhere do they mention where the trial is being held. Precautions have been taken to prevent the general public noticing arrivals and departures at the court-

house. The 300 people admitted to the court are for the most part newspaper representatives, officials, and Secret Police, some in splendid uniforms and others in plain clothes. Some members of the Communist Youth Movement are also allowed to be present. Entirely contrary to all precedent, no photographs have been taken. Trotsky’s Son a Link. There was a poignant incident today when the woman Red Army officer, Sofonova, was brought into court from prison, where she awaits trial for a subsidiary “plot by a Trotskyist cell in the Red Army to murder Marshal Voroshiloff, Minister of Defence and Soviet Military Chief.” M. Vishinsky required her as a witness against her former husband, ex-Commissar Smirnoff, a leading former Trotskyist. Smirnoff takes full responsibility for establishing a “secret TrotskyZinovieff conspirators’ centre in Moscow,” but, alone among the prisoners, denies all knowledge of murder plots. He is needed as an essential link with Trotsky, and the other prisoners yesterday and to-day did their best to help M. Vishinsky to incriminate him. Sofonova, a grey-faced and hollowcheeked woman of about forty-five, was dressed in a new but drab beige frock with red facings. At the microphone, through which all the prisoners gave evidence, she slowly repeated in a dull voice the charges she had already made against Smirnoff when under interrogation by the Secret Police. She said: I am fully as guilty as the sixteen prisoners in the dock. In 1931, after Smirnoff had returned from abroad, he informed the conspiracy centre through one of the accused, Ter-Vaganian Mrachkofsky, and me, that he had received instructions from Trotsky’s son, Sedoff, for the centre to begin terrorist activities. “A resolution was then passed to accept those instructions and start the terror, beginning with Stalin. But it was not mere obedience to Trotsky’s instructions—the terror idea lurked in the minds of the centre already. “Smirnoff then said, ‘Stalin shall be killed.’ ” 1 Smirnoff, smiling but with his hands trembling, admitted that he had been to see Sedoff in Berlin, but declared that the terror was Sedoff’s idea alone, and not Trotsky’s. Smirnoff added that he had disagreed with Sedoff. Sofonova thereupon retorted .“Smirnoff now lies.” Smirnoff replied, “It is unfortunate that there were no witnesses to this conversation.” This reference to his relations with his former wife made the audience rock with laughter. In accordance with Soviet custom, M. Vishinsky again confronted Smirnoff with the confession which he had signed when under interrogation in Lubianka prison. Smirnoff smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Kameneff, who is Trotsky’s brotherin law and who once for a short

time shared supreme power with Stalin and Zinovieff, was interrogated for an hour and three-quarters by Vishinsky. The astute Polish prosecutor proved more than a match for the elderly Jewish intellectual Bolshevik, who is fifty-three and looks now much older. “Lust for Power.” He placed him in a position in which he had to choose between admitting “power lust” as the motive for seeking to assassinate Stalin and owning disapproval of Stalin’s successes in “building Socialism.” He wisely chose “power lust” as his explanation. With great dignity he denied M. Vishinsky’s right to judge his Socialistic ideals, claiming that he wanted power not for himself but for his cause. His statement, otherwise, was a complete repetition of the indictment. Complete solidarity, he said, existed between himself, Zinovieff and Trotsky. Terror was the sole means left to them since Stalin’s Government was so firmly entrenched that foreign attack alone could not overthrow it. They had had to decide either to abandon opposition or to carry out a terrorist conspiracy. They had chosen terror. “I was the organiser of this conspiracy,” Kameneff declared, adding that he had sought and found adherents in all groups, Right as well as Left, in which Stalin had enemies. M. Vishinsky asked him whether he had discussed terrorism with the former Right Wing opposition leaders, Bukharin and Tomsky. “Only with Tomsky,’’ he replied, adding that Tomsky had agreed that a “terrorist catastrophe was the proper tactics.' Tomsky had reported that Bukharin’s idea ,was to win the party’s confidence and form a secret group in the Central Committee, the supreme authority in Russia. Sokolnikoff, as soon as Stalin had been murdered, was to have started negotiations to bring back Zinovieff and Kameneff to power. Kameneff also expressed his conviction that Radek would have joined them. His fellow-prisoner, Bakaef, he went on, was to have been appointed Chief of the Secret Police and to have covered the traces of the conspirators by killing all those who had taken part in the murder of Stalin. Zinovieff’s Eloquence. Zinovieff, whose cross-examination followed, was to-day extremely eloquent. He denied the truth of the opinion generally held until now that there had at one time been a breach between Trotsky and his own group. That breach was feigned, he said, to “double-cross the Bolshevik party.” He declared: “ There merely existed a division of labour between us and Trotsky, and we were really a secret branch of Trotsky's organisation abroad. I admit, of course, that Marxism and individual terrorism are incompatible, but the evolution of

our struggle inevitably led to terrorism, and 1932 appeared to us a favourable moment to intensify our activities.”

At this point Zinovieff blithely implicated Sokolnikoff and the old Georgian Bolshevik, Lominadze, and then made this important statement: “I went all the way from opposition through counter-revolution to terrorism, and from there actually to Fascism. Trotskyism plus terrorism is Fascism.

“Hitherto I have always lied, but now I will speak the truth.” He went on to try to incriminate Smirnoff as key man and link with Trotsky. “Trotsky’s role, as organiser and instigator of everything, was greater than mine,” he exclaimed. After an interval, Smirnoff gave his version of an “accidental meeting” in 1931 with Trotsky’s son, Sedoff, in Berlin. This was followed by a rendezvous in a private flat. Sedoff urged that the time was ripe for terrorism. Smirnoff claims that he rejected this suggestion, but made notes of two addresses from which letters to Trotsky would be forwarded. A shart tussle followed between Smirnoff and Vishinsky, who wanted to know why the former reported Sedoff’s suggestion to his wife Safonova, and other confederates if he attached no importance to it. Zinovieff helped Vishinsky by declaring that Smirnoff was really Trotsky’s gobetween in the plot. Valentin Oldberg, a young prisoner, caused a sensation during the night session by asserting that Smirnoff went to Berlin in 1931 specially to seek out Trotsky’s son and obtain Trotsky’s opinion on the advisability of starting a terroristic drive. Oldberg is alleged to be an agent of the German Secret police and to have come to Russia with a forged Honduras passport, obtained from a Nazi agent, to kill Stalin A weak spot in the indictment reveals, however, that Oldberg had to pay the Nazi agent £lOO for this passport. To the general surprise, Kameneff interposed to declare that neither Trotsky’s son nor Smirnoff himself carried any weight with the Zinovieff wing in the plot. No love is lost between the two factions of the conspirators. Oldberg, who is a Jew, said that he obtained a false passport to enter Russia through a certain Friedmann in Prague, whom he knew to be connected with the German Secret Police. Later, Oldberg said that the Trotskyists made a regular practice of maintaining relations with the Nazi police. “My brother Paul,” Oldberg continued, “put me in touch with a German agent, Tukhalevsky, who got me the Honduras passport. Until then I had no nationality. “My father was German and my mother from Riga. I was born in Switzerland.

“ After visiting Berlin, where I saw a certain Nazi agent, who promised

to help me, particularly in my terrorist plans against Stalin, I came to Russia for the third and last time in June, 1935. My brother Paul, who is affiliated with the German police, rived here a little ahead of me to work as an engineer.”

Trotsky, in a long statement to the Chief of Police at Oslo, denied that he had been engaged in any political activity in Norway, reported the “I tried to,” was the dolefu' reply, Daily Telegraph of the same date. Referring to the Moscow trial, he says:—

“In a few days I shall lay before the public all the information at my disposal. I hope to prove that, if a crime has been committed, it is not I who have committed it. but the Russian Secret Police.

“The present Moscow trial is a revised edition of that of January, 1935, <, which resulted in the Secret Police chief, Medved, being sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. The Ogpu have taken nearly two years to correct the faults committed then, to find new witness, fabricate new letters, and force “confessions.’

“It is possible that the new presentation of the case is superficially more imposing than last time. The trial has been staged by the bureaucrats because they are afraid of my literary activity, which, according to Soviet newspapers, has been sympathetically received by the Russian population.

“No one at all politically enlightened can believe in earnest that I plot terroristic acts against the Soviet leaders or co-operate with the German Secret Police.”

Trotsky denies accusations by Norwegian Nazis that he assisted the Norwegian Socialist Party in forming its agricultural policy. “On one side I am accused,” he concludes, “of leading, with Stalin, a revolutionarymovement in France, Spain, Belgium, Greece, and other countries. On the other side, I am charged with organising, with the Nazis, terroristic acts against the Soviet leaders. Many newspapers accuse me of both crimes. Both are false.”

Trotsky states that his eldest son is in Russia, but he does not know where. He has. had no connection with him for two years.