Priznayu

(See front cover)

Ornate but dusty chandeliers. Blue walls between stained white Ionic columns. A plaster frieze of dancing nymphs like a Wedgwood plaque. That is October Hall in the House of the Labor Unions in Moscow, and before the Revolution the gay dining room of the Nobles' Club. The world's eyes were on October Hall last week when six British engineers--together with twelve Russian defendants, in which neither Soviet nor world Press took much interest--went on trial for their lives charged with espionage and sabotage (TIME, March 27 et seq.). If these men were found innocent millions of Russians might think the Soviet was afraid to mete out the same justice to the subjects of Imperial Britain as it does to its own Comrades. If they were found guilty, King George V had just put his signature to a bill empowering his Government to declare a complete embargo of Russian goods and cut off from Russia some $130,000,000 a year of her best customer's trade. Every diplomat, every reporter in Moscow fought for a seat in that blue & white room and gazed eagerly at the tables covered with red cloth where sat three sack-suited judges.

No stranger to Soviet propaganda trials was the prosecutor. Stocky Andrey Y. Vyshinsky, decorated like a prize Percheron with the ribboned rosette of the Order of the Red Flag, served as presiding judge at another Soviet circus, the famed Shakhta Trial of five years ago (TIME, July 2, 1928 et seq.). But the presiding judge last week was not at all what foreign correspondents expected. Judge Vassily Ulrich, a chubby, baldish, moon-faced little fellow, was amiable, quite as eager to exchange quips with witnesses as any periwigged British magistrate.

One by one the Russian defendants were called to the stand. A long list of charges was rattled off by a clerk. When Prosecutor Vyshinsky put the question, "Do you admit these charges?" each bowed his head and answered, "Priznayu" ("I do'').

"William MacDonald!"

A pale nervous Briton with a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard and a twisted hip hobbled forward to the witness stand. Again the clerk's voice droned on--carrying on military espionage under orders from his colleague, W. H. Thornton. . . . Helping wreck a power plant at the Zlatoust munitions factory. . . . Bribing Soviet citizens. ... At the end came the question, "Do you admit these charges?"

In a voice that hardly reached the judges' table William MacDonald answered :

"Priznayu."

"Specific Statement" Britain was thunderstruck. In the House of Commons up popped Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon, his voice sharp with excitement:

"In view of the nature of the charges made against six British subjects at the trial in Moscow, I desire to make a specific statement.

"None of these men ever has been employed directly or indirectly in any connection with any branch of our intelligence service. None of them ever has supplied any information to any such branch. None of them ever has been paid or promised any reward for such information. ... All of these statements are equally true of the Metropolitan-Vickers Co. it-elf."

The Morning Post, already shocked to its Conservative soul by the results of Lieut. Baillie-Stewart's treason trial, blankly refused to believe crippled Engineer MacDonald's guilty plea. Under the headline SINISTER MYSTERY IN MOSCOW TRIAL it hinted that Engineer MacDonald must have been tortured, drugged or hypnotized.

1,000 Rubles. It was a hypnotism that lasted. After a mumbling attempt to change his Guilty plea to Not Guilty, limping Engineer MacDonald was faced by one Kotlyarevsky, head of the Zuievka power station. Kotlyarevsky testified that he had accepted a bribe of 1,000 rubles to wreck a turbine in 1932 and conceal the fact that a number of Metropolitan-Vickers oil pumps were defective.

"That man was responsible for my downfall," cried he. "MacDonald had a phonograph and I was lonesome. . . ."

Called to the stand again, Engineer MacDonald passed the other Britons without looking up, and admitted every charge.

Thornton. Just as cocky as Engineer MacDonald was cringing, was ruddy William H. Thornton, the next defendant. He too had signed a confession, one even more damaging, which listed as military spies 27 separate British subjects including the six on trial, all acting under orders from a new character, the London export manager for Metropolitan-Vickers, C. Richards. Speaking fluent Russian with a flat British accent, Defendant Thornton snapped:

"I deny that document in toto. I was frightened. I did not realize what I was doing."

"But why exactly 27?" asked Prosecutor Vyshinsky, returning to the confession and the list of accused Britons, "and why some charged with sabotage and some specifically with military espionage?"

Engineer Thornton waved his arms: "Oh, I wrote it any old way! I was asked to confess, so I confessed."

Presiding Judge Ulrich popped up his head: "Are you always so obliging?"

Engineer Thornton: "I didn't pay much attention to what I said earlier, because I knew there would be a trial in open court later."

"You just wanted to give the court more work," grumbled Judge Ulrich.

"Comrade Judge-- "CITIZEN JUDGE TO YOU!" roared the Assistant Prosecutor, and Engineer Thornton subsided.

Monkhouse & Gregory. Defendant Allan Monkhouse, 46, who signed no confession himself, made an unsuccessful attempt to re-establish the chief British thesis: that the engineers' confessions had been forced. From the Russian point of view, the most effective defendant was a wrinkled, red-haired little Welshman, Albert W. Gregory. The worst that Soviet witnesses could say against him was that he had delayed unnecessarily the erection of some giant switches. Sputtering a thick Welsh brogue he leaped forward:

"That man has made a statement affecting my reputation and that of my firm. Would you let it go by without giving me a chance to defend myself? Is that justice? Is that fair? ... I entered the switches during the hottest days of July. I succeeded in erecting three switches, weighing 45 tons each, in 48 days." .

Maisky. While these fireworks sizzled in Moscow, diplomatic spade work went on in London. Soviet Ambassador Yvan Maisky quietly called on Sir John Simon and on Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade. The result of these conversations was reported to Moscow and to Ramsay MacDonald: When the trial ends, a verdict of Guilty will almost certainly be pronounced, a verdict that will flame in every Soviet newspaper, BUT this verdict may be appealed to the Presidium of the Union Central Executive Committee which has the power to transmute death or prison sentences to deportation from Russia--IF the British embargo is not proclaimed and a new trade agreement is signed.

Litvinov. Responsible for Russia's end of such an agreement is the Soviet's shrewd, roly-poly Foreign Commissar

Maximovitch Litvinov, who three weeks ago indignantly refused British Ambassador Sir Esmond Ovey's curt demand that the British engineers be released instantly and without trial.

Comrade Litvinov, born Wallach, first attracted world attention 27 years ago in Paris. In the streets of Tiflis in the Caucasus an armored truck of the Russian Imperial Bank had just been held up by a hard-eyed young revolutionary, later to be known as Josef Stalin. Pudgy Comrade Litvinov appeared at a window of the Credit Lyonnais in Paris with a sheaf of 500-ruble notes recognized as part of the Tiflis loot. Litvinov escaped to Britain after convincing French Republicans that the bank robbery was a political not a criminal act. In Britain he became a traveling salesman and married Ivy Low, niece of the late Sir A. Maurice Low. His revolutionary career was crowned with his appointment as Commissar for Foreign Affairs in 1930. Even before then he had invariably been the Soviets' delegate to Europe's endless post-War conferences.

To Stalin the bourgeois world is as unreal as Soviet Russia was to Calvin Coolidge. Maxim Litvinov knows the outside world, understands the way capitalists think. Tactfully he dissociates himself from Communism's missionary society, the Third International, and its fight to spread world revolution.

The fact that Maxim Litvinov, a moderate at heart, has been able to hold his popularity and power in the Communist Party is just another paradox of the Stalin regime. Some 100% Bolshevists excuse him for the position he holds. As Foreign Commissar it is his duty to move among tainted bourgeois, wear bourgeois clothes. It is not unnatural that he should occasionally think bourgeois thoughts. With his wife and two children and one "house worker" he occupies a four-room apartment over a garage behind the former palace of a Moscow tycoon. Official dinners are held in state rooms at the Foreign Office where Host Litvinov dispenses champagne and caviar on solid silver plates--belonging to the government.

All Russia delights in Comrade Litvinov's best known performance: a blunt demand at every European disarmament conference for complete and immediate disarmament, which never fails to show up the quibbling and hypocrisy of his Capitalist colleagues, despite the Soviet Army of 800,000 men. But Comrade Litvinov does really believe in total disarmament and has frequently presented a plan calling for reduction, not limitation, of armaments, according to a mathematical formula. He blazed with anger in 1929 when little U. S. Ambassador Hugh Simons Gibson privately denounced the Litvinov Plan as presented in bad faith, then presented a plan of his own paralleling its two most important points.

"I should call Gibson a contemptible little bounder," drawled British-born Mrs. Litvinov.

In 1931 Comrade Litvinov again showed his desire to cooperate with the enemy, again anticipated an official U. S. move, this time by two years. At a League session to discuss world depression he proposed a pact to outlaw not only physical but economic war. Nub of the matter was an international agreement to refrain from dumping, to batter down all discriminatory tariff walls, and to require the sale of products on home markets at prices no higher than those demanded for the same products abroad. Most observers expect something very like the first two points to emerge from the World Economic Conference now brewing in conversations at Washington but excluding Russia. Two years ago M. Litvinov said:

"It is time to realize that the Soviet Union is a fact which has got to be reckoned with, that cannot be made to disappear by incantations of abuse. ... I do think, however, that something might be done for the removal of phenomena unnecessarily aggravating our relations and prolonging the world crisis. ... I may describe my proposal as a kind of economic non-aggression pact. It will at least serve as evidence of the readiness of the Soviet Union to adhere to the principle of the peaceful co-existence of the two systems [Communism & Capitalism] and of having no aggressive intentions, whether of a political or economic nature."

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