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| Title | World voices on the Moscow trials |
| Alternative Title | World voices on the Moscow trials: a compilation from the labor and liberal press of the world |
| Creator (LCNAF) |
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| Publisher | Pioneer Publishers |
| Place of Creation (TGN) |
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| Date | 1936? |
| Subject.Name (LCNAF) |
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| Genre (AAT) |
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| Language | English |
| Type (DCMI) |
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| Original Item Extent | 64 pages: 1 illustration; 20 cm |
| Original Item Location | DK266.3.A45 |
| Original Item URL | http://library.uh.edu/record=b8304404~S11 |
| Original Collection | Socialist and Communist Pamphlets |
| Digital Collection | Socialist and Communist Pamphlets |
| Digital Collection URL | http://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/scpamp |
| Repository | Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries |
| Repository URL | http://libraries.uh.edu/branches/special-collections |
| Use and Reproduction | In Copyright: This item is protected by copyright. Copyright to this resource is held by the creator or current rights holder, and the resource is provided here for educational purposes. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without permission of the copyright owner. Users assume full responsibility for any infringement of copyright or related rights. |
| File Name | index.cpd |
| Title | Image 37 |
| Format (IMT) |
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| File Name | uhlib_2774257_036.jpg |
| Transcript | ness who is not a codefendant but due to be tried on other charges. This witness is his wife, Safonova. Like all the important political trials that preceded it, this one was conducted in a manner foreign to democratic ideals of justice. The pre-trial conduct of the government controlled press was particularly shocking. On August 16, three days before the trial began, the Soviet papers, according to the Daily Worker, recorded that the Russian masses were demanding that the defendants be shown no mercy. On the same day a dispatch quoted Pravda as follows: "Investigations disclose a monstrous plot. ... In an open court, before the whole world, these criminals will answer for their abominable work, and receive the punishment they deserve." Given this overwhelming presumption of guilt, it is at least a question whether the proceedings could be in any true sense a trial. An underground opposition undoubtedly exists in the Soviet Union, if only because public opposition is impossible. It seems probable that Trotsky's open and persistent criticism of Stalin's regime provided the ideological basis of this opposition. It is inevitable that the Soviet government should try to stamp it out; and if Trotsky was actually directing it, he was liable to the penalties an established government exacts in such cases. But the Soviet government, by conducting an open trial, was under every obligation to conduct that trial according to the ordinary rules of evidence and the ordinary personal safeguards. Genuine evidence of guilt, if any existed, would only strengthen the government's case. To the outside world the charge that Trotsky conspired with the Gestapo is on its face the most serious and least credible. Yet it is precisely on this point that the fabric of proof, as it is spread out in the official record, becomes most thin. Trotsky is actually linked with the Gestapo only by the testimony of Valentine Olberg, who made his first and last world appearance in the Moscow trial. Before his forcible internment in Norway Trotsky, whose position in world affairs is of somewhat longer standing, stated that he had documents to show that Olberg attempted to become his secretary and was rejected as being a possible spy in the beginning of 1930. It is Olberg's word against Trotsky's. Olberg at least has had his day in court. Trotsky is entitled to no less, and he has asked that his case be submitted to an international proletarian commission. Yet it was at least partly as a result of the Soviet demand for his deportation that the Norwegian government chose to interpret political asylum as imprisonment incommunicado and confined Trotsky without notice to a remote villa shortly after the close of the Moscow trials. On another page appears the letter which Trotsky wrote to the Minister of Justice Trygve Lie, telling him why he could not accept the more stringent conditions then laid down for his continued stay in Norway. This letter, except for a copy smuggled abroad, was interned with Trotsky along with other 35 |