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Back to 1929. Bukharin last week expansively announced that he confessed ''responsibility" for all major crimes mentioned, both those he had known of and those he had not. He compared himself to the chief operator of a telephone switchboard who must accept responsibility for all the operators' "wrong numbers." He then went back to 1929, rehearsed as a confession the gist of his editorials publicly printed then. This seemed greatly to bore the judges. Russian quick-wits at once saw that Bukharin's "confession" of what he called last week the secret program of the conspirators was only a rehash of his public program of 1929, rejected then by Stalin, but amicably. "Our program," confessed the Heir of Lenin, "was greater freedom for the kulaks; greater freedom for the private traders and foreign concessions; and slower industrialization."
It was this advice which the Dictator rejected when he decided to wipe out the kulaks, crack down on private traders, and industrialize at super speed. It was made more like a confession by Bukharin's describing it in court last week as "the platform for the restoration of Capitalism, as we visualized it"—whereas neither Editor Bukharin nor his readers in 1929 visualized it as anything but a slower, perhaps better way to "build Socialism."
It was not Stalin's way. Today that equals Death.
Money for Trotsky. Prisoners examined by Prosecutor Vishinsky last week testified that both before and after Trotsky's expulsion from Russia (TIME, Jan. 1, 1928, et seq.), they have kept him always supplied with enormous sums: one time 20,000 German marks; then 15,000 Sterling pounds; in all a cool $1,000,000. Exile Trotsky, who issued voluminous heated replies to Moscow daily from Mexico City last week, included this: "I state categorically that the only sum I have received from the Soviet Treasury since my banishment from Russia was $2,500. . . . This sum of money was given me with complete legality and the agent secured a receipt from me."
* The gallery consists always of some 200 Russians who appear to be workmen let out for a boisterous holiday, crack jokes and jubilate among themselves during the trials of bigwigs, invariably cheer the death sentences. †To whom Krestinsky like the others had made his signed confession.
* Godless Vishinsky is misquoting. Judas received 30 pieces of silver. †Before the Revolution he and Lenin published in Vienna Pravda ("Truth"), today in Moscow the official organ of the Communist Party. In 1917 Bukharin was in the U. S. with Trotsky. In Moscow he was editor of Izvestia ("News"), official organ of the Soviet Government, from 1934 until his arrest last year, and as such was Stalin's official Spokesman.