SIXTEEN CONDEMNED IN MOSCOW; ZINOVIEV AND KAMENEV TO DIE

MOSCOW, 24 August 1936. — MOSCOW, Monday.—The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court has sentenced all sixteen prisoners in the alleged Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist conspiracy to death. Among the condemned are Gregory Zinoviev and Leo Kamenev, once counted among the foremost men of the Bolshevik revolution and formerly associates of Stalin in the direction of the party. The judgment, delivered in the early hours after a trial which opened on 19 August, accepts the prosecution’s contention that the accused organised the murder of Sergei Kirov and prepared further assassinations of Soviet leaders. No acquittal, lesser sentence, or distinction in the ultimate punishment relieves the completeness of the verdict.

The tribunal, presided over by Vasily Ulrikh, has thus brought an extraordinary public proceeding to its appointed judicial conclusion. The prisoners have acknowledged guilt, though their accounts have not always agreed in particulars, and the prosecution has treated their admissions as the principal demonstration of a single terrorist design. Sixteen men have stood together before the court; behind them, in the indictment, stands the absent figure of Leon Trotsky, now living in Norway. Stalin, whose assassination was said to be a chief object of the conspiracy, has not appeared as a witness. His authority nevertheless supplies the political centre about which the entire prosecution has revolved.

Andrei Vyshinsky, the State prosecutor, demanded death in language belonging as much to a campaign platform as to a court of law. His description of the accused as “mad dogs” expressed the temper of an address which allowed no possibility of political error, repentance, or diminished responsibility. Zinoviev’s own declaration was scarcely less terrible: “I am guilty of having been an organiser, second only to Trotsky, of that bloc whose chosen task was the killing of Stalin.” Such words, spoken by a former chairman of the Communist International, have furnished the official press with a spectacle of self-condemnation which ordinary prosecution testimony could hardly equal.

The transformation of these defendants is the most arresting circumstance of the case. Zinoviev and Kamenev belonged to Lenin’s intimate political circle, although both opposed the immediate launching of the October rising in 1917. After Lenin’s death they joined Stalin against Trotsky; later they opposed Stalin in alliance with the man whom they had helped to defeat. Their subsequent history has been one of removal, expulsion, submission, and qualified restoration. They were already prisoners before the present hearing. To-day’s judgment therefore does not overthrow men still exercising governmental power. It converts the long defeat of an opposition into a declaration that its former leaders were common murderers.

The immediate foundation of the proceedings is the killing of Kirov in Leningrad on 1 December 1934. His assassin, Leonid Nikolayev, was tried and executed shortly afterwards. Zinoviev and Kamenev were subsequently sentenced to imprisonment in a separate case which attached political responsibility to their opposition activities. The present indictment advances much further. It represents the assassination as the work of an organised centre and alleges preparations against Stalin and other leading Communists. This enlargement is of considerable importance: a crime already punished is now made the entrance to a much wider conspiracy, whose supposed membership reaches across old factions and beyond the Soviet frontier.

Yet the observer must distinguish between what the prisoners have said and what has been independently established. The confessions are extensive; the publicly tested corroboration is markedly less substantial. Much depends upon reported conversations, alleged instructions, and meetings whose circumstances cannot readily be examined by an outside witness. There has been no independent defence conducting a sustained challenge to the State’s account. The prosecution consequently presents an appearance of overwhelming unanimity without providing the ordinary means of testing how that unanimity was obtained. It would be improper to invent an explanation for every admission; it would be equally improper to regard an admission, merely because it is abject, as proof of every charge.

Beyond the courtroom, the authorised public response has been emphatic. Soviet newspapers have carried resolutions and demands for the sternest punishment, giving the prosecution the accompaniment of factory and party indignation. Such declarations establish the line which public organisations are expected to take; they cannot safely be read as a free reckoning of private opinion. For Communists elsewhere, the spectacle presents a severe test. Men lately described as comrades who had committed grave political mistakes are now displayed as deliberate servants of counter-revolution. Acceptance of the new account requires not merely approval of a sentence, but a substantial rewriting of the opposition’s place in Bolshevik history.

There is no ordinary stock-exchange barometer in this capital by which to measure the effect of the judgment. Soviet industry, banking, and foreign trade are directed by the State, and no Moscow share list can register the doubts which such proceedings might awaken in a commercial city. Nor would it be sound to manufacture a foreign market movement and attribute it to this verdict alone. The immediate consequences are political and administrative: the security of officials, the conduct of party organisations, and the freedom with which economic difficulties may be discussed. A manager or secretary who has associated with an accused faction must now consider how political acquaintance may be construed.

The broader question is whether the trial closes an affair or supplies a pattern for others. Its method has been to join former opposition, personal disloyalty, and murderous conspiracy into a single accusation, then to make the accused themselves its most conspicuous witnesses. Under such a construction, a dispute over policy may cease to be a dispute at all and become evidence of concealed criminal purpose. This danger does not require a forecast of particular arrests. It follows from the argument already advanced in court. Once political defeat is taken as the beginning of a terrorist career, submission may offer little protection against a renewed examination of the past.

For the condemned, the prospect is immediate and grave. The exceptional procedure governing terrorist cases affords no ordinary appeal, and the sentences leave scant ground for expecting clemency. No report of their execution is incorporated in this dispatch. For the party, the outlook is less readily bounded. To-day’s official lesson is vigilance; its practical meaning will be determined by those empowered to discover fresh enemies. The proceedings have demonstrated not only the destruction of sixteen defendants, but the authority of the leadership to define the meaning of their entire political lives. Whether that demonstration satisfies the demand for security, or gives it further scope, remains the question hanging over Moscow.