"They Always Confess"

Another Red record was added last week to the 117 executions and 97 other sentences meted out by Soviet star-chamber courts after the assassination of Dictator Joseph Stalin's "Dear Friend Sergei" Kirov (TIME, Dec. 10). For the first time since the Russian Revolution of 1917, eminent agents of the dread Gay-pay-oo or secret police were themselves dragged before one of the drumhead courts they have made odious.

Up before famed Judge Vassily Ulrich, "Stalin's Executioner," stood Comrade Feodor Medved, Chief of the Gay-pay-op in Leningrad where Kirov was assassinated. With Comrade Medved were arraigned eleven other high Gay-pay-oo chiefs. In Russia today the accused always confess when their case is of importance to the State. Last week's trial was no exception. According to the State's press handout, the Gay-pay-oo chiefs confessed that the Gay-pay-oo knew Stalin's friend Kirov was threatened with assassination, did nothing to prevent it.

Except for the confession of Assassin Nikolaev who was later shot, the confessions last week were by far the most important to the Kirov case. Over 100 Russians had been shot for confessing less, some after admitting mere "ideological community" with the "spirit of the crime." What super-punishment could Judge Ulrich mete out to these super-guilty secret police?

They were let off by Judge Ulrich with sentences averaging three years each, by far the mildest in the Kirov case. Russians shrugged. The Gay-pay-oo, they observed, is an invincible state within the State. Even after confessing what amounted to collusion in the killing of Stalin's friend Kirov, Comrade Medved of the Gay-pay-oo will go scot free in exactly three years.

Rigidly barred from the Soviet Union last week was a brief blast from Great Exile Leon Trotsky, scholarly elaborator of the Doctrine of Permanent Revolution and No. 1 enemy of Stalin. At the Kirov trials, the State has charged that an unnamed "foreign consul" in Leningrad gave Assassin Nikolaev money and asked him for "a letter to Trotsky."

Asked Trotsky: "Did the consul obtain this letter? ... It is precisely on this score that we cannot gather a single word. . . . Is it conceivable that neither the examining magistrate nor the prosecutor became at all interested? . . Was the letter written and transmitted? Was a reply received? To these unavoidable questions we get no answer. The Gay-pay-oo could not permit the prosecutor any indiscretion within that sphere over which it has been compelled to draw a curtain of silence."

Comrade Trotsky proceeded to infer, not without irony, that the Leningrad Gay-pay-oo attempted to plant upon a foreign consul and upon Exile Trotsky responsibility for a crime in which the Gay-pay-oo was itself involved, as appeared from the Gay-pay-oo confessions last week. By way of anecdote, Comrade Trotsky added: "On the eve of my exile to Central Asia (January 1928) a foreign journalist made me an offer through Radek, to transmit secretly, if need be, a letter to my friends abroad. I expressed to Radek my conviction that the journalist was an agent of the Gay-pay-oo. However, I wrote the letter, because I had nothing to say to my friends abroad that I could not repeat openly. The very next morning the letter was published in Pravda as proof of my secret connections 'with foreign countries.' "

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