NOT CHANGED

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 60, 8 September 1931, Page 3

NOT CHANGED

TROTSKY'S ATTITUDE

RELATION WITH SOVIETS

Vov the first time in almost two years Leon Trotsky lias unlocked the iron gates of his retreat to admit an. interviewer, says the "New York Times." He received an Associated Press correspondent in his small •wooden, villa at Moda," an Asiatic suburb of Istanbul and a favourite summer resort of. the Anglo-American colony. The house which the exile rented after fire destroyed his residence on Prinkipo Island is a modest unpainted eight-room structure, standing in a neglected garden. High walls and locked barbed-wire gates surround it on three sides and the front gives directly over the wide expanse of the shining Marmora Sea. From his • window Trotsky can watch day after day ships churning out from the Bosphorus carrying millions of tons of Soviet exports to the four corners.of the capitalistic world. Within, Trotsky's writing room and its anteroom on the second floor of the two-story house are lined with crowded bookshelves, the volumes being freshly collected from Europe and America since lire destroyed his huge library. At a long table covered with manuscripts sits Trotsky. He is ruddier and more elastic and his face reflects humour rather than bitterness. The heaviness and sallowness are gone. The sports costume he wears—white shirt open at the throat, white trousers and blue jacket, adds to the atmosphere of vitality now about him. His thin, pointed face is sunburned from hours spoilt fishing on Marmora Sea —his one recreation. His bristling hair and pointed beard are almost white. Dospite recurrent attacks of malaria, he is a man of such power the air about him tingles. Trotsky shot out cordial greetings in French, with some English "How are yous" and "All rights" thrown in. He reads English easily, but prefers not to talk it. "During the past week a "dispatch passed through the world Press which attributed to mo some opinions directly opposed to those which I have exposed and defended. "The enemies or! the Soviet regime, at least the most obdurate and least perspicacious, expected, after my expulsion from the Soviet Union, hostile actions on my part against the regime hated by them. The}' were mistaken, and there only remains for them to take refuge in falsifications, relying on credulity or bad faith. "I use (ho opportunity of the questions asked by you to declare again my relations to tho Soviet regime have not vacillated »vcn an iota since the days when I participated in its creation."