RUSSIA: Shahkta

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Everyday an eager audience of 3,000 Soviet Comrades assembles in Moscow, to witness the slow unfolding of a most ominous drama—the so-called Shahkta or Technicians Trial.

Forty-nine Russians and three Germans face the Soviet Supreme Court, the Russians charged with High Treason and all defendants with conspiracy to sabotage* the vital Soviet coal mines in the region of the River Don.

So eager are the trial-goers that many stand in line all night to obtain small pink tickets good for one day only. Every syllable of the grim proceedings flashes over all the Russias by radio broadcast. Cinema cameras whir at intervals. Flashlight powders occasionally blaze and boom. Fifty Russian and Asiatic correspondents keep 28 telegraph lines busy. Delegations of spectators pour in, daily, from provincial Soviets, plump down on especially reserved benches and marvel at their surroundings.

They, peasants and factory workers, have entered the vast, rectangular Imperial Hall of Columns—white columns of pearly marble, twinkling in the radiance of a myriad crystal chandeliers. Here the Romanovs and some of their Windsor and Hohenzollern kinsfolk moved to stately music amid the white fire of diamonds. But now the bench of the Soviet Supreme Court dominates, draped with a coarse cloth, blood red.

Though the phenomenon of the Shahkta Trial is now in its second month, proceedings are still in the most preliminary stage. No evidence has been heard concerning the Prosecution's astounding charge that the sabotage ring was partially financed by one of the greatest public utility corporations in the world, the A. E. G. (Allgemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft) or General Electric Company of Germany.

The German Ambassador to Soviet Russia, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, has been present or represented from the first, striving constantly to assure a fair trial for employes of the A. E. G. who stand accused.

Secondly there has been no real examination of the supposed Master Mind of the sabotage conspiracy, a Jew, one Rabinovich.

The late Nikolai Lenin held M. Rabinovich in such esteem that the Jew, although a "bourgeois," was seated as technical expert on highest Soviet commissions and was, at the time of his arrest, virtually the industrial dictator of the region of the Don.

Lastly bold hints by the Prosecution that the French and Polish governments have given aid and comfort to the conspirators have been sternly hushed by the presiding Chief Justice, Professor A. Y. Vyshinsky, Principal of the First State University at Moscow.

Nervous and low-voiced, the Dean is under the stigma of having been a Menshevik, not a Bolshevik. That is to say, he once belonged to the "Smaller Group" or "Mensheviki" of the Russian Social Democratic Party. The "Larger Group" or "Bolsheviki" have long since obliterated their rivals, now constitute the Communist Party, and are the political masters of Russia. As a mere Menshevik, the Chief Justice is notably deferential to the potent Soviet Prosecutor. He, the dread Nikolai Vassilievich Krylenko, onetime Commander of the Red Army, plays both hero and villain in the Shahkta Trial.