Foreign News: Stalin's Mafia

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¶ Marc Rein, an anti-Stalinist writer who served in a Catalan factory as an engineering expert "disappeared" from his Barcelona hotel nine months ago, has not been heard of since.

¶ Andres Nin, onetime secretary to Leon Trotsky and head of Leftist Spain's POUM (Dissident Communist Party), was murdered and tossed into a ditch outside Madrid eight months ago.

¶ The bullet-riddled body of Ignace Reiss, a Soviet secret agent who renounced Stalinism, was found in a ditch outside Lausanne, Switzerland, seven months ago.

¶ Erwin Wolf, Czech secretary to Trotsky during his exile in Norway, "disappeared" while serving in Spain as a volunteer.

¶ Polish-born Hans Freund, who went under the name "Moulin" while serving as Trotskyist leader in Spain, is now reported "missing."

Citing the above instances and others last week, Great Exile Leon Trotsky dispatched a letter to the juridical section of the League of Nations Secretariat charging that a centralized "mafia" of Soviet terrorists, like the famed Sicilian terrorist society, is now operating in Europe, killing and kidnapping opponents of the Stalinist regime. Trotsky demanded that a League tribunal be set up for investigation of these terroristic activities.

Not only Trotsky, but also Mexico's President Lázaro Cárdenas is convinced that Stalin's secret agents are bent on the Great Exile's assassination. Cárdenas' contribution to the Trotskyist cause is a guard of policemen who day & night patrol with fixed bayonets around Trotsky's home in the Coyoacán suburb of Mexico's capital. The house, placed at Trotsky's disposal by the wife of Mexico's Trotskyist painter, Diego Rivera, is elaborately wired to sound warnings of intruders. At night it stands out like a three-alarm fire in dim-lit, sleepy Coyoacán as floodlights blaze on the pastel blue walls. Trotsky's three secretaries carry pistols, practice target shooting in their spare moments. The Great Exile himself parks a big revolver on his desk as a paper weight whenever he sits down to write. Small, white-haired Mrs. Trotsky goes about her housework packing a Webley .25. Ironically, the immediate benefits of these safeguards for Trotsky, the foe of private property, have gone to the landlords in the vicinity who have upped their rents because the day & night police guard has eliminated robberies in the neighborhood.