"Trotskyists Liquidated"

The trial in absentia at Barcelona of famed Andres Nin (secretary to Leon Trotsky in Russia during the Revolution) and seven members of his Spanish P. O. U. M. Party ended almost unnoticed this week by the world press.

Star witness for the defendants was Francisco Largo Caballero, former Premier of Leftist Spain, who testified during the trial that the Poum did not instigate the May 1937 uprising in Barcelona, that Poum Party executives were "sincerely anti-Fascist," not the reverse, as charged by the prosecution.

Officers of the Leftist Army, to each of whom is attached a "political commissar" as in the Russian Army, appeared in court accompanied by their commissars as witnesses for the State. Officers and commissars testified that in 1937 Poum soldiers on the Huesca front had for some time a "pact of nonaggression'' with the Rightist soldiers facing them, that a Leftist staff officer who "denounced such trafficking with the enemy" was found murdered in a ditch.

The verdict this week was described in Barcelona dispatches as "finally liquidating the Trotskyists," although during the trial Poum defendants stressed that, while they "admired Trotsky," they regarded his Fourth International as too academic and favored a fighting Fifth International. Of the seven defendants, all charged with high treason and a variety of other political crimes, two were freed and five sentenced to from eleven to 15 years' imprisonment.

Whether Andres Nin is alive or dead remained an open question. In Manhattan last week Alexander Kerensky commented that he talked recently with a former fellow prisoner of Nin in the Madrid jail where Nin was held for a time last year. The fellow prisoner told Kerensky that the jail was then in charge of Soviet Russians, and that he believed Nin was taken from Madrid to Moscow. The prosecution insisted at the trial that Nin escaped from Madrid to the Rightist lines, but he has never been reported in Rightist Spain.

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