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Thus the Dictator can hope other Russian bigwigs who might want to kill him have now been made to realize that such impulses lead, via the secret police, into the court cheering section for Stalin, thence down into the cork-lined cellars where this week the 18 were due to be noiselessly executed. Rozengolts' protestation that his children are loud in the Stalin chorus may save them, but the piece of consecrated bread may well mean death for his wife. Nothing was known last week, nothing is ever published, about the fate of members of the families of men shot after the trials in Moscow. In the Soviet Union they are subject to confiscations of property and transportation to exile in such places as Siberia.
Soviet Borgias. The Soviet Political Police have long been suspected of using poison in dealing with political opponents of Stalin, particularly in Asia, and revelations at the trial last week disclosed that the OGPU had a poison laboratory. It was at the disposal of former OGPU Chief Yagoda, sentenced to death, presumably is at the disposal of his successor, OGPU Chief Yezhov.
Yagoda, according to various testimony, attempted to poison Yezhov by having his own office, which his successor would occupy, sprayed with an atomized mercuric poison. Recent analysis of the urine of Yezhov was said to have proved that the poison has been partially effective and his health gravely affected.
In other cases Yagoda was testified to have used the OGPU's power to force eminent Soviet physicians to put such Big Bolsheviks as Novelist Gorki quietly out of the way. "In order to poison a man it is not absolutely necessary to use action poison," testified the Kremlin Hospital's chief, Dr. Leon G. Levin, about to be executed. "The simplest medicine, if used at the wrong time and in the wrong doses, will serve as poison."
* Rykov, Bukharin, former Chief of Ogpu Yagoda, Finance Commissar Grinko, former President of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic Khodzhaev, former All-Union Foreign Trade Commissar Rozengolts, former All-Union Agriculture Commissar Chernov, former All-Union Timber Chief Ivanov, former All-Union Cooperative Stores Chief Zelensky, former All-Union First Assistant Foreign Commissar Krestinsky, former Kremlin Hospital Chief Dr. Levin, Endocrinologist Dr. Kazakov, the late Maxim Gorki's secretary Kruchkov, and the lesser Communists Ikramov, Sharangovich, Zubarev, Bulanov and Maximov-Dikovsky.
†Former Soviet Ambassador to Britain & France Rakovsky (20 years); the greatest Soviet physician and "renowned European heart specialist," Professor Pletnev (25 years); former Counselor of Soviet Embassy in Berlin Bessonov (15 years).