Discreetly continuing never to express opinions in the Soviet Union, U. S. Ambassador Joseph Davies took his accustomed front-row seat as the latest Big Bolshevik trial opened in Moscow last week. He had already learned from the official Soviet newspaper Pravda ("Truth") that Death was going to be meted out to all 21 prisoners (TIME, March 7), no matter what happened in the courtroom. Pravda is seldom wrong in such a case. Thus the U. S. Ambassador could look across at the witness box to the right of the judges' table and figure that certain death hung over the distinguished Russian diplomat who welcomed him on his arrival (TIME, Feb. 1, 1937), and presented him to Soviet President Mihail Kalinin in the Kremlin, Nikolai Krestinsky, who in Washington terms would be the right-hand man of Secretary Hull. Death also hung over former Foreign Trade Commissar Rozengolts who had dined with Ambassador & Mrs. Davies and entertained them at his own country place, a magnificent dacha almost as splendiferous as the former Galitsin Palace which today is Stalin's dacha (TIME, Oct. 4).
The star prisoner last week was, however, no habitué of Moscow embassies. He was Genrikh ("Henry") Grigorevich Yagoda, who, next to Dictator Stalin, was for many years the most dread official in the Soviet Union, the head of Stalin's Secret Political Police. Harold Denny of the New York Times wrote of what the 250 spectators in the courtroom saw as they studied the star prisoner last week:
"This man, once so agile and fox-faced, smartly uniformed and lordly sinister in manner, sat as if in a daze. In appearance he is the most crushed of all the defendants. He has lain for at least ten months in the same prison cells to which he has consigned so many others. He sits lackadaisically in a rear seat of the courtroom. He is dressed in a dark suit. He is only 47, but his hair has whitened in the past year, and his face is lined with despair."
Mighty Fallen. Tass, the official Soviet news agency, supplied U. S. newsorgans with the full 9,000-word indictment against the 21 prisoners. If cabled from Moscow at press rates this would have cost $1,000. It is what the Soviet Government wants to have believed, amounts to this:
Leon Trotsky continues from exile to machinate against Joseph Stalin with such dreadful success that, as his agents and fellow conspirators, the 21 who now face death nearly succeeded in remaking the maps of Asia and of Europe by detaching from the Soviet Union and attaching to adjoining Capitalist countries territories with a total area of 625,000 square miles.