STALIN
PURGE TRIALS OPEN;
WESTERN OBSERVERS CRITICAL
New
England Banker's Verdict: "Nothing
More Than a Revolting Travesty of
Justice"
By Geoffrey Dawson
By Cable to
The Massachusetts Spy
MOSCOW, U.S.S.R – With an impressive
display of judicial pomp in Moscow's magnificent October
Hall, the People's Court of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
convened the trial of 16 former Communist
Party officials charged with the capital offense
of "anti-Soviet
terrorism." The
long-delayed trials are intended by Stalin's regime to demonstrate to
the world that the U.S.S.R. was in fact threatened with terror attacks
aimed at subverting the two-decade-old October Revolution.
Further, they are intended to shock and awe the world with
the
terrible majesty of Russian justice.
 Stalin's
prosecutor Andrei Vishynsky instructs the judges as to the
verdict they are to render, as NKVD boss Henrikh Yagoda looks on
attentively
The
first
trials, of old Bolsheviks Lev Kaminev and Grigori Zinoviev, have been
carefully choreo- graphed by Russian officials to produce verdicts of
guilty and sentences of death while assuring Western observers that the
defendants have received the due process of Soviet law. The
two defendants appeared haggard and pale in court, perhaps as a result
of their rumored mistreatment and torture at the hands of the NKVD,
Stalin's dreaded secret police. Each man had been held
incommunicado at Moscow's fearsome Lubyanka Prison, with no contact
with families, friends or outside observers. Stalin's
spokesmen have dismissed the allegations of torture and mistreatment as
"anti-Soviet propaganda" and noted that counterrevolutionaries are
trained to make false claims of ill treatment. According to reliable reports reaching the Spy, Kaminev and
Zinoviev endured months of ill-treatment,
including sleep deprivation, beatings, extremes of heat and cold,
humiliation and other gross violations of human rights.
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Hacky Sez: Red
Nightmare
Should
Scare Us
By
Hacky Carp
Columnist
You
don't have to be some fancy-pants Connecticut swell to smell a big red
rat at Stalin's purge trials. Some
pinko fellow travelers like Amb. Joe Davies might be taken in
by his idol Joe Stalin's elaborately
staged production, but not Mrs. Carp's boy. It's
obvious that the hapless defendants dragged into the court had had the
stuffing knocked out of them by Stalin's NKVD goons. A
confession obtained by torture isn't worth the blood it's written with,
I say. Thank God this kind of
thing could never happen here in the good ol' U.S. of A.
– unless, of course, the American people refuse to come to
their senses and instead re-elect that mad Dutch Socialist in the White
House. If Roosevelt gets his
mitts
on a second term, he might have the ability to appoint a majority of
Supreme
Court judges. And
if Roosevelt's Red stooges from New York, if you catch my drift, ever
take over our last bulwark of liberty,
you can bet dollars to doughnuts that Andrei Vishynsky and his
Communist clown college will be over on the next boat.
ADVT
– HAPPY
DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN at Wonderland Park . . . Nine Big Races Nitely Plus
Nickel 'Gansetts with Paid Admission! | | Asked about such reports, Vishynsky said:
"Comrade Stalin does not torture. Period." He
refused to define what he meant by torture. Although
the trial was held in a courtroom before robed judges, it bore no
resemblance to Western notions of a fair trial. The
hand-picked Stalinist judges also acted as jurors. The unfortunate accused were not allowed to put
on a defense. Nor were they permitted to confront their
accusers or review the evidence of their supposed crimes. Further, although observers believe the chances
of an acquittal are exactly nil, Vishynsky said that the U.S.S.R.
retained the right to detain "dangerous counter-revolutionaries"
indefinitely regardless of the outcome, or indeed the occurrence, of a
trial. While Soviet citizens,
constantly bombarded by propaganda emphasizing the grave dangers of
so-called
"Menshevik terrorism," seem to have been persuaded of the defendants'
guilt, few Western observers other than Walter Duranty
of The New York Times have
been impressed. A prominent New
York investment banker passing
through Moscow on his way to meetings with his German business partners
in
Berlin rendered a harsh judgment. "There's
no way anyone with a mental age of more than eight could regard this
proceeding as other than a shabby charade," said Prescott Bush, a
partner of the Harriman Bank of New York. "This
kind of state-sanctioned kangaroo court threatens to undo centuries of
progress and respect for human dignity," Bush said. "If
this kind of outrage is allowed to flourish in this century, who knows
what future generations might be subjected to at the hands of an
insecure,
inadequate man of limited intelligence who has unaccountably seized the
machinery of power?"
he asked, no doubt rhetorically.
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