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Washington.""So!"cried the
prosecutor. "So you were correspondent for Izvestia and special
correspondent for Trotsky?" Red Romm: "Yes."
"Communist Al Smith." The Al Smith of the Soviet Union is Leon
Trotsky. He might have been and Communists in numbers running very
high think he ought to have been and should be Dictator of Russia today
instead of Stalin. Keynoted Trotsky, who issued a fresh statement
every few hours in Mexico on the Moscow trial: "Stalin's crimes
put Caesar Borgia in the shade!" The brains of Trotsky are
strictly first-class. Scathingly he asked why the letters he was
supposed to have written had not yet been produced in Moscow; he once
more offered to produce the whole of his voluminous correspondence to
prove that he broke with Radek as far back as 1928; he demanded that
prisoners who confess in Moscow that they saw him in Oslo or elsewhere
describe the room in which these confessed encounters (which Trotsky
denies) took place. He heaped his most biting scorn upon the charges
& confessions of Red Romm. Where did Romm say he met Trotsky? In
a describable room? No. Romm said they met in a "dark alley."
"Romm deposes that 'he agreed to keep Trotsky informed on
Washington happenings,' "observed Trotsky. "It would be
fine if he would give an example of the type of happening in Washington
that I could learn from him and not from the American newspapers,
including the Communist press. . . . This 'Romm,' indeed— a name
which I heard for the first time in my life since the trial in Moscow
began! . . . The Soviet Government want to make it impossible for me to go
to the United States or even to remain in Mexico. My hypothesis is
that Romm's story was concocted after my arrival in the New World. .
Romm's and Radek's confessions are made particularly to compromise me
before public opinion in the United States."Truth in Moscow-An
Ambassador watching the Moscow trial arose to say of the confessing
prisoners, "If these men are not speaking the truth, then I have
never heard it!" Walter Duranty, who obtained the second
interview ever given to a correspondent by Joseph Stalin, cabled from
Moscow last week that he believed the confessions, notably those of his
close personal friends of many years, Radek and Romm, adding that he
believed the unfortunate Radek will be shot and that the chances of
Romm are not much better. Like all newsfolk actually working in Moscow
and getting their dispatches past the Soviet censor, Mr. Duranty is in
a delicate position, all the more delicate because every Soviet
official knows that he was constantly in and out of the houses of the
prisoners who last week confessed a plot to kill Stalin. But Why Do
They Confess? The first quoting interview ever given by J. Stalin to a
foreign journalist was obtained by Eugene Lyons, manager of the United
Press Moscow Bureau for many years (TIME, Dec. 8, 1930). Now resident
in the U. S. and writing widely, Mr.
