Foreign News: Trotskyist Trial

In Barcelona last week opened a political trial so engrossing that even a major air raid, even, the shattering concussion of bombs which exploded a few hundred yards from the courtroom did not distract the judges, prisoners or spectators. In an atmosphere electric with hate and Spanish passion, Andrés Nin was at last put on trial in absentia. Andrés Nin's small, blonde Russian wife or widow had a ringside spectator's seat.

According to Leon Trotsky, whose faithful secretary Andrés Nin was in Russia during the Revolution, there is little if any doubt that Mr. Nin was taken from a jail in Madrid last year by Communists of the Stalin persuasion and murdered. With this view many Socialists, including Norman Thomas, agree—while deprecating the further Trotskyist charge that the Government connived at the assassination. In court last week the Government prosecutor took the position that Señora Nin is the wife of a traitor who escaped from jail, fled abroad and has been in hiding for the past 26 months.

Dead or alive, Andrés Nin was the focus of the Barcelona trial last week, just as Leon Trotsky was the focus of the Moscow trial after which 16 Trotskyists were executed (TIME, Aug. 31, 1936). In the prisoners' box at Barcelona sat seven Ninists. The seven and Nin were charged, as members of his P.O.U.M., or Workers Party for Marxist Unification, with high treason, espionage and "ominous activities." As an example of these the long indictment charged: "They provoked a real revolution in Catalonia [in May 1937], fought against the police and even managed to make an army division in which they had been carrying on their criminal work abandon the front." What had happened was that the extremely independent P.O.U.M. militia had refused to become absorbed in the new, unified and reformed People's Army on the Aragon front.

The fact that this treason trial, held with full constitutional procedure, was open to the public—many traitors in the civil war's early days having been dispatched to their graves by star-chamber proceedings—was stressed by Barcelona correspondents as significant. The Leftist Government hoped that this trial would convince influential British opinion that it is not Red. Therefore, the most important charge, all correspondents agreed, was not any of the capital charges of treason for which the seven may be shot if found guilty. It was the charge that the defendants "did all they could to give the Government an extremist [i.e., Red] nature, which it never had and which is not the will of the Spanish people."

Spaniards, the seven prisoners reeled off no Russian tissue of confessions, but denied at the top of their lungs everything except that they had all had more or less to do with La Batalla, the Nin newspaper which the Leftist Government suppressed for noncooperation.

The prisoner known as Gorkin or Gómez, a revolutionist of several aliases, made most news in court. "Did you know any agents of the Nazi Gestapo?" asked the prosecutor, who was trying to prove that the P.O.U.M. was not really Marxist but Fascist. "No, I did not know any of the Gestapo," said Revolutionist Gómez, adding with the authentic Spanish touch, "but if I had known one I would have killed him."