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Thoroughly professional Journalist Isaac Don Levine, sharp biographer of Joseph Stalin, has for years delivered such pungent judgments as, "No Government in the world is corroded by such internal abject fear as the Stalin Dictatorship." TIME repeats that his dynamic fact-marshaling has consistently been antiStalinist, which in official Moscow's view is always the chief evidence of "Trotskyism." (See Red Smoke by Isaac Don Levine—McBride, 1932, $2.) As to who first interviewed Joseph Stalin, the technically prior claims of able, Russian-speaking Yale Professor Jerome Davis and an earlier Japanese as well as a German correspondent have been noted (TIME, Jan. 8, 1934), but Nikolai Lenin did not die until 1924, Leon Trotsky was not fully mastered and exiled until 1929, and the first correspondent to interview the No. 1 Bolshevik after he reached the plenitude of J. STALIN, DICTATOR, was Eugene Lyons in 1930, followed by Walter Duranty a few days afterward.
Brotsky & Trotsky
Sirs:
Your account of Leon Trotsky recalled to me a record of his New York life that has been in our family for years. During the War Joe Brotsky, my mother's cousin by marriage, ran a tailoring shop on Canal Street on the Bowery.
One day a man calling himself Bronstein entered the shop and asked for a job. My uncle immediately put him to work pressing pants. However, Bronstein, or Trotsky, seemed less interested in pants pressing than in the Communist literature which he read in his spare time. He had been working only a few days when my uncle returned to the shop after a brief absence to find the room in smoke, the pants burning, and Trotsky in the corner reading his literature.
After several similar incidents my uncle fired Trotsky. Some time later when Trotsky had risen from pants pressing to dictatorship, my uncle recognized him, both by the name and by his pictures. The story may be verified by Mr. Brotsky, who is now in the oil business in New York. Although we are now disappointed that my uncle had to fire Trotsky, we were glad to see that in his picture on the cover of TIME he looked as though he would make a good tailor.
JACK MATTHEWS
Heidelberg College Tiffin, Ohio
Duplicate Hats
Sirs: If the picture of President & Secretaries Mclntyre, Early, Roosevelt on p. 13 (TIME, Jan. 18) is not identical with that of four silk hats, President Roosevelt, Mr. Mclntyre, Mr. Early and James, appearing on p. 21 (LIFE, Jan. 18), then the two are from two cameramen huddled together so closely that the difference is barely noticeable.
Pardon a subscriber for mentioning it, but isn't it possible never to duplicate such ordinary pictures in LIFE and TIME, even if one has to show the President in the background, just to be different—for which TIME is notorious?
J. PAUL GLEASON
Enid Chamber of Commerce Enid, Okla.
Although published by the same corporation, LIFE and TIME are independent and to some extent competing magazines which draw their photographs from the same sources, the picture agencies. Some duplications are inevitable, unpreventable, unimportant.—ED.
Between Haystacks
Sirs: