That Communist Dictator Stalin means to continue the Moscow trials & executions, which have been going on since 1928, was suggested last week by the closing summary of Public Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky. "Let your sentence, Comrade Judges, resound as a bell calling for new victories!" he cried. "Crush the accursed vipers . . . foul dogs . . . disgusting villains!
"We cannot leave such people alive. . . . They can do such things in America— where Al Capone remains alive—but not here. . . . Thank God, Russia is not America!"
A party of Communist cameramen swept into court with batteries of klieg lights for the kill. Movie cameras recorded that Communist Alexei Rykov, who succeeded Nikolai Lenin as Soviet Premier (1924), wept in the dock of 21 prisoners as he awaited death, while the great Communist ideologist and "Heir of Lenin," Nikolai Bukharin, onetime editor of official Izvestia, stared dry-eyed at the floor. The, 21 did not know that, so far as could be ascertained last week, the only daily or weekly papers in the world whose editors expressed the opinion that justice was being done in Moscow were exclusively Communist papers of the Stalin faction. Very much alone under the klieg lights, as Stalin's cameras looked them in the eye, the 21 did not know that such a typical U. S. liberal as Oswald Garrison Villard, who for years has been a friendly observer of Communism, was declaring last week in The Nation: "The Kremlin is undermining everything good the Revolution sought to accomplish. . . . Madness has taken charge of the Soviets. . . . Great states fall . . . when the masses awake to the fact that justice no longer reigns among them, that murder stalks in the very halls of justice."
The sentence in important Soviet cases must be wholly in the holograph of the presiding judge, who can thus be held personally responsible by Stalin for every word and punctuation mark. Last week Judicial Field Marshal Vasily Ulrikh, delivering the sentence of the Soviet Supreme Court upon 21 Russian civilians, read clear through his long manuscript without once looking up at any of the 18 he condemned to death,* or the three he sentenced to imprisonment.† The sentence was delivered at 4:30 a. m. and out went the three judges quickly into the dead of night.
Bukharin, up to the time he was sentenced to death last week, had made no less than five public recantations of opposition to Stalin in & out.of court during the past 15 years. A novelty in court was that the Jewish prisoner Rozengolts was discovered last week to have been unconsciously going around with a piece of consecrated bread sewn into his clothes by his wife together with a Christian prayer. The court found that Rozengolts alone of the 21 had wished to kill Stalin with his own hand, had for this purpose sought as many interviews with the Dictator as possible. After so confessing, Communist Rozengolts wound up: "Millions of Soviet children, including my own, sing that There Is No Other Land In This World Where One Breathes With Such Freedom! ... I say farewell. . . . Long live the Bolshevist Party under the leadership of Stalin! . . . Long live Communism!"