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Outside the cozy court, the citizens of Moscow were being warmed up by the Soviet press which invariably, before and during every big Red trial, assumes that all the accused are guilty, blackens their characters with its highest-powered adjectives, and ordinarily writes of the more distinguished prisoners as if their execution by firing squads in the cork-lined cellars of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs ("Ogpu") was a foregone conclusion. Last week the Moscow editors were writing with higher-powered vituperation than ever before. This was because the Star Prisoner was their intimate friend and colleague of many a year, Comrade Karl Radek, until recently the No. i writer on foreign affairs of the Stalin official press. It was as if Walter Lippmann or the late Arthur Brisbane or the New York Times's Arthur Krock should be in the dock of the Supreme Court at Washington, about to be rubbed out by the G-men because the President was no longer quite happy about Mr. Krock. Old Bolsheviks- Dictator Stalin is no longer quite happy about the following most eminent Soviet Comrades, in addition to Comrade Radek, who sat jammed in the Moscow dock before the fascinated eyes of new U. S. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies (see p. 17): 1) Leonid Petrovich Serebriakov, who from 1919 to 1921 held Stalin's present post, Secretary General of the Communist Party, and in 1929 was president in Manhattan of the Soviet trade monopoly Amtorg Trading Corp.; 2) Grigoriy Piatakov, until recently Vice-Commissar for Heavy Industry under one of Stalin's greatest cronies, Commissar for Heavy Industry Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze, whose department has made headlines by lagging behind the current Five-Year Plan; 3) Grigoriy Sokolnikov, once Vice-Commissar of Foreign Affairs and onetime Soviet Ambassador to the Court of St. James; 4) N. I. Muralov, leader of the proletarians who seized Moscow while Lenin & Trotsky were seizing Petrograd in 1917 and for many years Soviet Commandant of the Moscow Garrison. At the unique sort of trial which is Communism's gift to Jurisprudence, every Russian present, as well as the experienced Moscow diplomatic corps and foreign press, knew last week that the charges which Prosecutor Vishinsky was going to make in an hour-long lecture would immediately afterward be repeated by the prisoners as each confessed to what he had been accused of with only trifling discrepancies. As in previous Moscow trials it was again the case that, since each charge was answered by confession, there was little or no introducing of evidence to prove the charges, except insofar as one prisoner's confession tended to corroborate another's. The chief prisoners, as usual, said they preferred not to be defended by the only lawyers obtainable in Russia, the State's lawyers, and these were busy only with the troubles of small fry. In a general way the object of Prosecutor Vishinsky was to get 17 men condemned to Death by proving that they had conspired against the Soviet Union and to assassinate Dictator Joseph Stalin with Leon Trotsky of Mexico City (TIME, Jan. 25 et ante), who had written great quantities of letters in the hatching of this conspiracy, as would have to be the case, since Comrade Trotsky has not been inside the Soviet Union since 1929.