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They chuckled and even laughed aloud between phrases of their most damaging admissions. As Vishinsky would get half through a sentence the prisoner he was supposed to be grilling would snatch the words out of his mouth and finish the sentence before the prosecutor could—and since it was the agreed sentence Vishinsky let it go at that. The usual dramatic effects Vishinsky has standardized were also given. Thus when a prisoner named Prokopy Zubarev testified that in the remote past the Tsarist police gave him 15 rubles ($7.50) on two successive occasions, Vishinsky responded with his menacing stage whisper: "Aha, thirty silver pieces. Twice more than Judas."* One of the neatest signals was given by former Premier Faidsula Khodzhaev of Uzbekistan, a swarthy Asiatic speaking Russian as thick and soft as a Negro drawl. "I ask you to believe me!" he cried at the climax of his confession, "but of course you cannot believe me, because of my position here!" To this wily Asiatic it fell to confess that the British Government had figured in the conspiratorial arrangements of Trotsky & Co.
Yagoda, Nothing could distract the main interest from prisoner No. 1, Henry Yagoda, who not only was chief power of the Stalin Secret Political Police in Russia from 1920 to 1936, but according to the pro-Soviet British Historians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, was once "Vice-Chairman of the Intelligence Department of the U. S. S. R. for the United States."
Yagoda this week is to appear as one of the accused, last week testified as a witness against the accused Alexei Rykov, who succeeded Lenin as Premier of the Soviet Union (1924-30), and Nikolai Bukharin (probably the closest friend of the founder of the Soviet regime alive today) for years known as "Heir of Lenin."† Rykov and Bukharin said last week that they had nothing to do with the assassination at Leningrad in 1934 of the Dictator's "Dear Friend" Sergei Kirov. Yagoda, who had been standing with head down, snapped up at this to testify in a dull, flat voice:
"Bukharin and Rykov lie. We did not want to do it, but we yielded to Trotsky's insistence."
Stalin, it came out last week, was escorted by Yagoda from Moscow to Leningrad to investigate Kirov's murder, now confessed to have been the work of Escort Yagoda & accomplices whose confessed main objective was to kill Stalin. Yagoda always personally commanded in the Red Square the Secret Police guards of Stalin and other Soviet leaders when reviewing parades atop the Tomb of Lenin. Thus Yagoda for years was the one man in Russia who could certainly have killed Stalin. Also Yagoda, as head of the secret police, was better able than any other Russian to frame someone else with an assassination. He is scheduled to confess this week that he succeeded in forcing the official Kremlin physicians, who care for Stalin's health, to cause the deaths of other Bolsheviks. One of these might have been Nikolai Yezhov, 42, today the secret police chief under whom the present trial was prepared. Yezhov, it appeared, had suffered from "slow poisoning" and would certainly have died had not the plot against him been discovered.