Shahkta

Everyday an eager audience of 3,000 Soviet Comrades assembles in Moscow, to witness the slow unfolding of a most ominous drama--the so-called Shahkta or Technicians Trial.

Forty-nine Russians and three Germans face the Soviet Supreme Court, the Russians charged with High Treason and all defendants with conspiracy to sabotage* the vital Soviet coal mines in the region of the River Don.

So eager are the trial-goers that many stand in line all night to obtain small pink tickets good for one day only. Every syllable of the grim proceedings flashes over all the Russias by radio broadcast. Cinema cameras whir at intervals. Flashlight powders occasionally blaze and boom. Fifty Russian and Asiatic correspondents keep 28 telegraph lines busy. Delegations of spectators pour in, daily, from provincial Soviets, plump down on especially reserved benches and marvel at their surroundings.

They, peasants and factory workers, have entered the vast, rectangular Imperial Hall of Columns--white columns of pearly marble, twinkling in the radiance of a myriad crystal chandeliers. Here the Romanovs and some of their Windsor and Hohenzollern kinsfolk moved to stately music amid the white fire of diamonds. But now the bench of the Soviet Supreme Court dominates, draped with a coarse cloth, blood red.

Though the phenomenon of the Shahkta Trial is now in its second month, proceedings are still in the most preliminary stage. No evidence has been heard concerning the Prosecution's astounding charge that the sabotage ring was partially financed by one of the greatest public utility corporations in the world, the A. E. G. (Allgemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft) or General Electric Company of Germany.

The German Ambassador to Soviet Russia, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, has been present or represented from the first, striving constantly to assure a fair trial for employes of the A. E. G. who stand accused.

Secondly there has been no real examination of the supposed Master Mind of the sabotage conspiracy, a Jew, one Rabinovich.

The late Nikolai Lenin held M. Rabinovich in such esteem that the Jew, although a "bourgeois," was seated as technical expert on highest Soviet commissions and was, at the time of his arrest, virtually the industrial dictator of the region of the Don.

Lastly bold hints by the Prosecution that the French and Polish governments have given aid and comfort to the conspirators have been sternly hushed by the presiding Chief Justice, Professor A. Y. Vyshinsky, Principal of the First State University at Moscow.

Nervous and low-voiced, the Dean is under the stigma of having been a Menshevik, not a Bolshevik. That is to say, he once belonged to the "Smaller Group" or "Mensheviki" of the Russian Social Democratic Party. The "Larger Group" or "Bolsheviki" have long since obliterated their rivals, now constitute the Communist Party, and are the political masters of Russia. As a mere Menshevik, the Chief Justice is notably deferential to the potent Soviet Prosecutor. He, the dread Nikolai Vassilievich Krylenko, onetime Commander of the Red Army, plays both hero and villain in the Shahkta Trial.

Prosecutor Krylenko is stocky and kinetic, with large, Asiatic features, and a close-cropped bullethead. His tongue is adept at wooing a prisoner into indiscretion and then lashing him upon the raw.

A smile that verges easily into a sneer, a peculiar hypnotic stare, and a pantherlike bound are other useful attributes of Comrade Krylenko. On the first day of the Shahkta Trial he strode in wearing what U. S. citizens would call a hunting costume: khaki coat and breeches, soft roll collar, homespun stockings, hobnail shoes. To be sure all Russians present in the Hall of Columns were roughly attired; but Hunter Krylenko's costume seemed significant. Within a few hours he had wrung confessions from three small-fry technicians which should set them before a firing squad, and ever since his hunting has been good--though the game small.

Day after day the 3,000 constantly changing auditors have sat breathless under the spell of Krylenko, as he brought son to implicate father, blandished brother into betraying brother, and lashed an old technician who was accused of accomplishing the death of his housemaid until the wench suddenly turned up last week.

Out of such shoddy human stuff the Shahkta Trial is providing an unprecedented thrill for Soviet Russians--who are deprived of porno-tabloids, sex dramas, and even mystery plays by the wisdom and dictatorship of the Communist Party.

Incidentally but most importantly the thrill finders are also absorbing an unshakable conviction that the Capitalist Powers have launched a vast conspiracy to wreck the vital industries of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

Strange is the fact that in comparison with the vague and awful charge of "conspiracy to sabotage" the specific charges of sabotage committed are trifling. Major specific charges: turning off a ventilator fan so that several miners suffocated; wrecking turbines by bending the blades; and installing new equipment known to be defective.

La Russie Opprimee is the Paris news organ of M. Alexandre Kerensky, the post-Tsarist and pre-Communist head of the Russian State. Though M. Kerensky is cordially detested by most Tsarists and by all Communists, he is now publishing an "expose" of the Shahkta Trial.

M. Kerensky quotes a Latvian citizen, M. Vladimir Brunowsky, who has deposed that on May 10, 1923, in Moscow, he was approached by Comrade Unschlicht, a responsible official of the G. P. U. or Secret Police, and offered a round sum to pose as a spy employed by Great Britain and Norway. He was assured that, after being publicly tried, convicted and sentenced to death, he would be secretly set free. Meanwhile the Soviet State would have proved that it was menaced by Capitalist Spies.

It is the bizarre theory of M. Kerensky that the Shahkta Trial is a rehearsed drama with hired "conspirators" confessing right and left at the behest of Prosecutor Krylenko. Curiously enough this extreme view is cautiously echoed by Mr. Walter Duranty, the New York Times' permanent Moscow correspondent who has supplied the only full account of the 'Shahkta Trial carried by any U. S. daily.

Writer veteran-journalist Duranty: "The prosecution has shown by the testimony of the accused themselves that an organized conspiracy existed. It has been shown how the money came and how it was spent, but serious flaws remain. For there is but little proof, real valid proof, of any actual instances of sabotage. Also the whole story dovetails together too perfectly. It is felt that things may so happen in books or in the theatre, but not in real life."

* Sabotage is the malicious waste or destruction of an employer's productive property by a workman. French workmen coined the deed and word by throwing their sabots or wooden shoes into whirring machinery. The Anglo-Saxon equivalent is "throwing a monkey wrench."