As thick clouds rolled over Moscow one afternoon last week the ornate chandeliers of the onetime Nobles Club were lighted, Soviet soldiers in blue caps appeared with fixed bayonets, and some 500 people were admitted to the stately Hall of Columns after their credentials had been checked and rechecked by sentries at the doors.
Observer for President Roosevelt was Second Secretary Loy Henderson in charge of the U. S. Embassy in the absence of Ambassador William Bullitt. On a dais four judges in Soviet Army khaki took their places. President of the Court was thickset Judge Vassily Jakovlevich Ulrich, famed ever since he presided at the Soviet trial of British Metropolitan-Vickers engineers (TIME, April 24, 1933). Somewhat less light of step and pantherlike than usual entered Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky, longtime pouncer in broadcast Bolshevik trials. At the left of Judge Ulrich was the box of 16 prisoners around whom stood Red Army guards, changed every half hour.
The Rt. Hon. James Ramsay MacDonald would have recognized the unshaven, round-faced, wild-haired prisoner in the first row of the box as Grigory Zinoviev (ne Apfelbaum). once famed as "Bomb Boy of Bolshevism" and trusted colleague of Nikolai Lenin. The so-called "Zinoviev Letter," since proved a forgery, was used by British Conservatives to upset the first MacDonald Cabinet with insinuations that British Labor was taking orders from Moscow signed by Zinoviev as head of the Comintern bureau for making "The World Revolution of the
World Proletariat" (TIME, Dec.1, 1924).
The next most eminent prisoner was Lev Kamenev (ne Rosenfeld), onetime President of the Moscow Soviet and Ambassador to Italy, professorial in his fastidious dark suit,' trim white beard and twinkling pince-nez. The other 14 prisoners, obscure at first, were destined for notoriety last week as the trial proceeded.
It was enough for eager spectators that the whole boxful had been lumped together the day before by Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin as "the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union, leagued in a conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet Government—men who have stooped so low that they have lost their human aspect!" A clerk at Judge Ulrich's elbow read rapidly an indictment of the accused so complex that his swift sentences left spectators blurred as to details. Quite clear, though, were the main charges that the 16 prisoners had contrived among themselves at least four separate plots to kill Joseph Stalin, Secretary General of the Communist Party and as such Dictator of Russia. It was announced that the prisoners had all chosen not to be defended by Soviet lawyers but to defend themselves.