"Thank God!"

That Communist Dictator Stalin means to continue the Moscow trials & executions, which have been going on since 1928, was suggested last week by the closing summary of Public Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky. "Let your sentence, Comrade Judges, resound as a bell calling for new victories!" he cried. "Crush the accursed vipers . . . foul dogs . . . disgusting villains!

"We cannot leave such people alive. . . . They can do such things in America-- where Al Capone remains alive--but not here. . . . Thank God, Russia is not America!"

A party of Communist cameramen swept into court with batteries of klieg lights for the kill. Movie cameras recorded that Communist Alexei Rykov, who succeeded Nikolai Lenin as Soviet Premier (1924), wept in the dock of 21 prisoners as he awaited death, while the great Communist ideologist and "Heir of Lenin," Nikolai Bukharin, onetime editor of official Izvestia, stared dry-eyed at the floor. The, 21 did not know that, so far as could be ascertained last week, the only daily or weekly papers in the world whose editors expressed the opinion that justice was being done in Moscow were exclusively Communist papers of the Stalin faction. Very much alone under the klieg lights, as Stalin's cameras looked them in the eye, the 21 did not know that such a typical U. S. liberal as Oswald Garrison Villard, who for years has been a friendly observer of Communism, was declaring last week in The Nation: "The Kremlin is undermining everything good the Revolution sought to accomplish. . . . Madness has taken charge of the Soviets. . . . Great states fall . . . when the masses awake to the fact that justice no longer reigns among them, that murder stalks in the very halls of justice."

The sentence in important Soviet cases must be wholly in the holograph of the presiding judge, who can thus be held personally responsible by Stalin for every word and punctuation mark. Last week Judicial Field Marshal Vasily Ulrikh, delivering the sentence of the Soviet Supreme Court upon 21 Russian civilians, read clear through his long manuscript without once looking up at any of the 18 he condemned to death,* or the three he sentenced to imprisonment./- The sentence was delivered at 4:30 a. m. and out went the three judges quickly into the dead of night.

Bukharin, up to the time he was sentenced to death last week, had made no less than five public recantations of opposition to Stalin in & out.of court during the past 15 years. A novelty in court was that the Jewish prisoner Rozengolts was discovered last week to have been unconsciously going around with a piece of consecrated bread sewn into his clothes by his wife together with a Christian prayer. The court found that Rozengolts alone of the 21 had wished to kill Stalin with his own hand, had for this purpose sought as many interviews with the Dictator as possible. After so confessing, Communist Rozengolts wound up: "Millions of Soviet children, including my own, sing that There Is No Other Land In This World Where One Breathes With Such Freedom! ... I say farewell. . . . Long live the Bolshevist Party under the leadership of Stalin! . . . Long live Communism!"

Thus the Dictator can hope other Russian bigwigs who might want to kill him have now been made to realize that such impulses lead, via the secret police, into the court cheering section for Stalin, thence down into the cork-lined cellars where this week the 18 were due to be noiselessly executed. Rozengolts' protestation that his children are loud in the Stalin chorus may save them, but the piece of consecrated bread may well mean death for his wife. Nothing was known last week, nothing is ever published, about the fate of members of the families of men shot after the trials in Moscow. In the Soviet Union they are subject to confiscations of property and transportation to exile in such places as Siberia.

Soviet Borgias. The Soviet Political Police have long been suspected of using poison in dealing with political opponents of Stalin, particularly in Asia, and revelations at the trial last week disclosed that the OGPU had a poison laboratory. It was at the disposal of former OGPU Chief Yagoda, sentenced to death, presumably is at the disposal of his successor, OGPU Chief Yezhov.

Yagoda, according to various testimony, attempted to poison Yezhov by having his own office, which his successor would occupy, sprayed with an atomized mercuric poison. Recent analysis of the urine of Yezhov was said to have proved that the poison has been partially effective and his health gravely affected.

In other cases Yagoda was testified to have used the OGPU's power to force eminent Soviet physicians to put such Big Bolsheviks as Novelist Gorki quietly out of the way. "In order to poison a man it is not absolutely necessary to use action poison," testified the Kremlin Hospital's chief, Dr. Leon G. Levin, about to be executed. "The simplest medicine, if used at the wrong time and in the wrong doses, will serve as poison."

* Rykov, Bukharin, former Chief of Ogpu Yagoda, Finance Commissar Grinko, former President of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic Khodzhaev, former All-Union Foreign Trade Commissar Rozengolts, former All-Union Agriculture Commissar Chernov, former All-Union Timber Chief Ivanov, former All-Union Cooperative Stores Chief Zelensky, former All-Union First Assistant Foreign Commissar Krestinsky, former Kremlin Hospital Chief Dr. Levin, Endocrinologist Dr. Kazakov, the late Maxim Gorki's secretary Kruchkov, and the lesser Communists Ikramov, Sharangovich, Zubarev, Bulanov and Maximov-Dikovsky.

/-Former Soviet Ambassador to Britain & France Rakovsky (20 years); the greatest Soviet physician and "renowned European heart specialist," Professor Pletnev (25 years); former Counselor of Soviet Embassy in Berlin Bessonov (15 years).

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