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Lyons turned out in the January American Mercury a dispassionate, detailed six-point analysis of how it happens that in the Soviet Union there is so much abject confessing of whatever it would do the Dictator good to have confessed. Mr. Lyons, veteran of innumerable Moscow trials, says in sum that Soviet prisoners who do not succeed in convincing the henchmen of Justice that they can be depended on to confess fairly convincingly in open court are never brought to trial at all, just taken downstairs and shot. Justice today, in Russian cases of importance, according to Mr. Lyons, does not in the great majority of cases ever reach a courtroom. Scores, even hundreds of Russians are quietly executed after the Soviet police have satisfied themselves that Death is required. In perhaps 1% of cases involving crimes for which Death is the penalty, sound Red propaganda makes a public trial advisable. Writes Eugene Lyons: "The prisoners brought to trial are always a handful carefully selected from a larger number arrested on the same charge . . . hand-picked specimens painstakingly sorted out." After Soviet news-organs have announced the confessions, convictions and executions, "a condemned man whose execution was announced may still be alive, as a result of a bargain or for some other reason. . . . The Soviet State does not deliver up the bodies of the men and women it executes. . . . There is not even habeas cadaver and of course no habeas corpus in the Soviet Union." In a dispatch from Moscow not long ago the rumor that Soviet scientists had invented a gas with the special property of deranging the mentality of a prisoner so as to make him speak and behave for some hours afterward as hypnotically required by Justice, was cautiously mentioned, the writer being still employed in Moscow. Without resorting to the hy- pothesis of such "confession gas,"Mr. Lyons mentions that the use of hostages (wives, children or others dear to the prisoners) is an old Soviet custom, and moreover that in Moscow the authorities have now had 20 full years in which to perfect their "third degree methods, familiar enough in all police systems"to "an extreme of refined cruelty. . .
.""There have been instances when . . . the victim's children were tortured before his eyes—a more terrible ordeal for the father than any that could be inflicted on his own body."Eugene Lyons is a thoroughly professional journalist, but Isaac Don Levine is an avowed, outspoken partisan of Trotsky against Stalin.
His slant on Moscow from Manhattan last week was to charge that the Red Army, which is supposed to have been thoroughly indoctrinated with Communism during all these years, has in fact now become disgusted with the way Communism is working in Russia, and has in recent months obtained under J. Stalin mastery of the frame-up and third-degree apparatus of Justice in Russia. According to Mr. Levine, the New Generation represented by the Red Army now "regards the Old Guard Leninists as the greatest obstacles in its path. .