Foreign News: Old & New Bolsheviks

One more such trial as can be found only in Moscow opened last week, as usual in the palace which belonged in Tsarist days to the Nobles Club, but this time in a less spacious chamber than the great "Hall of Columns"hitherto used (TIME, Aug. 31). In all the experience of Moscowite Walter Duranty he had never before seen the Soviet Supreme Court do business with other than red-cloth-covered tables but last week for the first time they were green-cloth-covered. As usual, the apple-cheeked Red Army soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets mounting guard over the prisoners' box were changed every 30 minutes of the otherwise leisurely proceedings. There were the usual tall glasses of smoking hot tea without which ponderous Judge Vassily Jakovlevich Ulrich and pouncing Public Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky could never have got through all the years in which they have gradually worked up from Communist obscurity to the reputation of having convicted and sentenced to Death more statesmen than any other team of justice in the world. There was even plenty of tea for the prisoners, and the Soviet Supreme Court has always functioned amid a blue haze of Russian cigaret smoke.