RED COURT PASSES DEATH SENTENCES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19248, 9 December 1930, Page 1

RED COURT PASSES DEATH SENTENCES.

PROFESSORS TO DIE WITHIN THREE DAYS. (United Press Assn.—By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) MOSCOW, December 7. The sentences in the conspiracy trial have been announced. Ramzin, Larichev, Charnovsky, Kalinikoff and Fedotov have been sentenced to death. Kuptianov, Ochkin and Sitnin have been sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, in addition to deprivation of their property'. The greatest excitement marked the close of the trial, the sentences being greeted with continuous applause from the excited crowd in the They apparently expected that the prisoners would be shot the same night. Meetings have been held in the chief Soviet centres during the week-end, at which orators harangued the crowds, promising that the Government would teach foreign Governments that it was futile to plot with the internal enemies of the Soviet. The Court announce that the professors would be executed privately. They will be shot within three days unless they succeed in their appeal to the Central Executive Committee. Propaganda. A London message says that, in a leader commenting on the trial, “ The Times ” says:—“ It was clear from the beginning that the trial was intended to be, not a judicial inquiry,. but a great political demonstration in order to divert to foreign Governments the odium which the privations suffered by the Russian people was bringing upon the Communist system. The whole proceedings have been elaborately stage-managed with a view to producing the greatest effect in Russia and abroad. The chief effect upon foreign opinion has been to strengthen the conviction that an oligarchy which employs such methods to maintain itself must be desperately afraid that its power is slipping from its grasp. It may well be that those who arranged the trial wanted to prepare public opinion for a foreign war as a possible issue out of its difficulties. The Soviet Press have been busier than usual for months past in inciting their readers against foreign Governments, and predicting their collapse.”