Foreign News: Supreme Propaganda

A million feet tramp-tramping through ankle-deep snow. Night coming on. Torches, banners, the roar of the Internationale from half a million throats. White breath & red noses. People stamping and shouting to keep warm. Men and women from everywhere—mostly Russians, but Tartars too, Uzbeks, Little Russians, White Russians, Tadjiks, Chinese students and a group of Communist literati from New York, just arrived but exulting with the boldest. Thus last week Moscow staged one of the largest, most impressive demonstrations in Soviet history, as her second, epochal Counter-Revolutionary Trial began (TIME, Nov. 24).

On the banners of the marching, milling throng appeared such strange devices as:

Down with Poincaré and the Oil Kings!

Strangle the Jackals of Foreign Imperialism !

Death to Enemies of the Proletariat!

And most complex of all: We Demand the Supreme Punishment for Counter-Revolutionaries and the Order of Lenin (highest Soviet decoration) for the Ogpu! (secret police).

Shouting these and many another slogan the people crowded round and edged as near as they dared to what in Tsarist times was the Nobles' Club, containing one of the most sumptuous ballrooms in all Russia, the famed "Hall of Columns." Red soldiers in their peaked caps kept the people back. Only those with tickets (all the New Yorkers had them) were admitted to the dazzling show: a session of the Supreme Tribunal of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

Judges in Flannel, Prisoners in Starch. White as when they looked down upon the Tsarist Court, the huge pillars of the "Hall of Columns" stood last week like a double row of sentinels guarding the Red Court. The vast oblong hall was draped and festooned in Red. At a Red desk on the right of the Supreme Court Bench sat Nikolai Vassilievitch Krylenko. dreaded prosecutor, famed for his sneer. He seemed a bit plumper but no less tense and tigerish than at the famed Schakhta Trial two years ago when he sent five counter-revolutionaries to Death (TIME. July 2 & 16, 1928).

With ash trays at their elbows the Supreme Court judges smoked incessantly, seemed frankly bored. Their President Comrade Alexy Vyshinsky, also presided at the Schakhta Trial. Two of the judges had come to the Supreme Court Bench directly from their workbenches in a Moscow and a Leningrad factory.

All the Judges, most of the male spectators, were in workmen's flannel shirts. Only the prisoners wore "bourgeois clothes," dark business suits, starched collars and neat ties—the costume most calculated to prejudice Court and spectators against them.