“Taranaki Central Press" MONDAY, JANUARY 25. 1937. “STALIN’S SPOKESMAN” ON TRIAL.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 342, 25 January 1937, Page 4

“Taranaki Central Press" MONDAY, JANUARY 25. 1937. “STALIN’S SPOKESMAN” ON TRIAL.

One of the seventeen prisoners on trial now in Moscow for alleged plotting against the Soviet rule is Karl Berngardovich Radek, the greatest journalist in Russia, repeatedly in recent years the spokesman of Joseph Stalin, and in the few months before his arrest so potent that Moscow correspondents were calling him “the Second Foreign Commissar."

Now Radek is on trial for his life, charged with conspiring with Leon Trotsky against the present Government 1 and negotiating with foreign diplomats. To these charges he, like the other sixteen accused, has pleaded guilty, and the outcome of the trial is only a matter of formality.

Radek is one of the most picturesque figures in modern Russia. Bolsheviks who disliked him have called him “that ugly little Jewish monkey,” but he has for years, as editor of the “Izvestia (News), the official daily of the Soviet Government, been the mouthpiece of Stalin and the one who gave wit and penetration to Stalin’s blunt and stolid ideas. It was Journalist Radek who comparatively recently, just before the Zinoviev trial, in fact, made for Stalin trenchant replies to Herr Hitler, for the Soviet Dictator has had “no stomach to speak out himself” and risk war with Germany. Of Hitler, scathing Radek has said: “The donkey’s ears stuck out! His Nazi doctrine is utter humbug. Nonsensical!”

His masterpiece, so the Communists say, was an editorial, “A Lesson in History for the Archbishop of Canterbury,” in which he sneered: “Most Reverend Thomas Davidson .... if you tel! too many lies, the Communist International will appoint two if its experts to write a history of the Archbishopric of Canterbury which will make you feel sorry for yourself. . . A considerable part of the property belonging to the present English aristocracy had its origin in the plundering of Church property by Henry VIII . . .

And now that the descendants of those pillagers cry out about the ‘pillage’ of church property (in Soviet Russia) and protest against such ‘sacrilege’ in the name of religion, every class-conscious English worker must be laughing in their faces.’’

Radek disappeared for a time before his arrest in connection with the present charges. But before doing so he printed a scorching editorial in which he flayed Trotsky and demanded Death for all “decaying-souled traitors." He claimed that he personally sabotaged and foiled the Trotsky plots against Stalin, and this bold claim was expected to constitute is chief defence in court. Now, however, he has pleaded guilty and nothing can wipe away the sins of his alleged plotting.