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charge was well out in the world Press, it was entirely dropped by the prosecution, and on the last day, when Prisoners Holzmann and Moses Lurye commenced to bring it into their final confessions, Judge Ulrich cut them short with the sharp order: "Leave events in Germany and the German leader alone!"
Norwegian police, who keep close and constant watch upon Leon Trotsky in his retreat near Oslo where he has been permitted to remain only on condition that he engage in no political activity whatever, inclined this week to the view that if Moscow really had anything on Trotsky as a conspirator against the life of Stalin which would stand up outside Russia, this evidence would long ago have been laid before the Norwegian Government by the Soviet Government with high-power diplomatic demands. The Norwegian Ministry of Justice recently investigated Exile Trotsky's affairs, ruled that no evidence of misconduct appeared.
Still an active contributor to radical journals in many parts of the earth. Writer Trotsky has a great body of intellectual disciples who refer to themselves as the "Fourth International." Communists of the Third International hoped this week that the Moscow trial would tend to reduce Trotsky from the status of a great radical ideologist to that of a common instigator of killings and thus weaken his Fourth International in its ideological competition with their Third. Certainly the Moscow trial had the effect of giving Communists all over the world something else to think about instead of why Joseph Stalin had still not sent a single Soviet bomber to aid the Red militia armies in Spain (see col. 3). Active mothering by Moscow of the activities of Communists abroad was always strongly upheld by Trotsky so long as he was in Russia, and he was run out by Stalin after their historic quarrel upon that very point (TIME, June 13, 1927, et seq.). Prominent Soviet figures found it a great nerve strain to have been even remotely mentioned in court last week as having known some-thing was afoot against Stalin, even though charged with nothing themselves. Among half a dozen Bolshevik bigwigs who thus jittered, first to commit suicide was Comrade Mikhail Tomsky, onetime chairman of the Soviet All-Union Council of Trade Unions and Director of the State Publishing House.
Perhaps the most significant Moscow fact was that at the trial last week almost nothing came out which was not directly or indirectly to Stalin's personal advantage. He emerged from the court records so great that even his worst enemies quarreled over the honor of killing him; so well-guarded that would-be assassins sat in his presence not daring to pull the trigger; so idolized that Zinoviev's secretary, rather than kill Stalin, killed himself; so lucky that every plot against him failed; and finally so wise that a whole boxful of Bolsheviks intent on killing him did not try to justify themselves by uttering one critical or abusive word against the Perfect Dictator.
—In 1934 a fellow Communist assassinated in Leningrad that city's Party boss, Dictator Stalin's ''Dear Friend" Sergei Kirov. Stalin is supposed to have grilled the assassin personally.