THE VERDICT OF THE PEOPLE

For twenty days the attention of a people one hundred and seventy million strong was riveted on the trial of the anti-Soviet “Right-Trotskyist bloc.”

Day after day a terrible picture of monstrous crimes unfolded; a dreadful abyss of duplicity, treachery, betrayal, and treason was revealed.

The court irrefutably established that the “Right-Trotskyist bloc,” headed by Bukharin, Rykov, and Yagoda, did not represent any political current or party whatsoever. It, this “bloc,” turned out to be a bloc of spies, saboteurs, provocateurs of the tsarist Okhrana, who had set themselves the vilest goal of overthrowing the socialist system and restoring capitalism; this bloc gathered into itself all the rotten, all the bankrupt refuse of defeated capitalism, and this whole gang of scoundrels and bandits was commanded from abroad by the arch-bandit Trotsky.

All these jackals understood perfectly well that they had no support whatsoever inside the Soviet country. This did not deter them. It merely impelled them to come to an agreement with a number of fascist and other capitalist states on assistance in overthrowing Soviet power. The conspiracy took place; the price was—in the opinion of Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, and others—a bargain: merely the dismemberment of the USSR, the severing from it of Ukraine, Belorussia, the republics of Central Asia and Transcaucasia, Primorye, and the Far East. For the time being, however—on the instructions of Trotsky, Bukharin, and Rykov—the traitors and spies—Krestinsky, Rozengolts, Rakovsky, Grinko, Sharangovich, Khodjaev, Ikra-

mov, Ivanov, Zubarev, Zelensky, Chernov, Bessonov, and others paid with espionage information, acts of sabotage, terrorist acts, and the undermining of the economic and military might of the USSR.

This entire company proved to be a gang of old, hardened intelligence agents and spies of the capitalist states. The court established that the very leader of the spies, Trotsky, had been in the German intelligence service since 1921, and in the British since 1926. Rakovsky had been a British spy since 1924, and a Japanese one since 1934. Krestinsky, on Trotsky’s instructions, made contact with German intelligence in 1921 and received from it annually 250,000 marks in gold for Trotskyist work. Rosengolts worked as a spy in the German General Staff from 1923, and in British intelligence from 1926. Chernov was a German spy; Sharangovich, from 1921, was a Polish spy; Grinko had simultaneously been both a German and a Polish spy since 1932.

In this gang of spies, merited provocateurs and informers of the tsarist Okhrana also found refuge: Zelensky, who served in the Samara Okhrana from 1911 to 1913; Ivanov—an agent provocateur of the security department and the gendarme administration in Moscow from 1911 to 1916; Zubarev—an agent provocateur from 1908 to 1917.

The activity of all these spies and provocateurs was directed by Bukharin, Rykov, and Yagoda. They sold the land of the Soviets to its sworn enemies—foreign intelligence services and staffs; they carried out diversionary actions, wrecking acts within the country: they killed livestock, spread an artificial epizootic, reduced the harvest, destroyed horses, having exterminated 25,000 in Siberia in 1936, and 30,000 head in Ukraine. They widely employed terror against the leaders of the Party, the government, against the best sons of the Soviet country.

It was they, the Trotskyite-Bukharinite-Rykovite bandits, together with Yagoda, who killed the splendid Bolsheviks Kirov, Menzhinsky, and Kuibyshev. They too, at the signal of the enemy of the people and arch-bandit Trotsky, with the aid of the bandit Kryuchkov and the “doctors” Levin, Pletnev, Kazakov, put to death the great writer [[unclear: obscured word]] Maxim Gorky and his son M. A. Peshkov. Yagoda, with the help of [[unclear: obscured words]], his faithful slave Bulanov

prepared an attempt on Comrade N. I. Yezhov, in order to conceal the crimes of the “bloc.” But it did not succeed; it failed.

Here they are, the bandits of the “Right-Trotskyite” bloc, who sought to destroy the power of the Soviets and replace it with the power of the capitalists.

From the first days of the establishment of Soviet power, Trotsky and Bukharin kept a knife ready against it. In the spring of 1918, Trotsky and Bukharin tried to wreck the Brest peace and at the same time prepared to overthrow the Soviet government, to arrest and kill Lenin, Stalin, Sverdlov. The attempt on Lenin’s life, on August 30, 1918, by the SR woman Kaplan, was committed with the direct participation of the “Left” Communists, headed by Bukharin, and their friends the “Left” and “Right” SRs.

For twenty years this black deed was hidden in darkness; now it has come out, into the light, and its bloody shadow has fallen upon the bandits of the “Right-Trotskyite” bloc.

Soviet intelligence and the Soviet court unraveled the tangle of crimes and exposed the vilest enemies of the working class of the whole world. It is precisely these bandits, together with their friends, who support General Franco against the Spanish people, the Japanese interventionists against the Chinese people fighting for their national independence; it is they who everywhere disrupt the struggle of the working class against capital.

When all this became known to the people through the stern and incorruptible language of the facts of the preliminary and judicial investigation, through the remarkable interrogation of the defendants by Comrade Vyshinsky, the Soviet people, all as one, rose up in anger, hatred, and contempt and demanded the shooting of the villains.

And therefore the sentence passed by the Supreme Court is the sentence of the entire Soviet people.

The Soviet people have drawn serious lessons from this trial. Clearer than ever before have become the words of the friend of the people, the great Stalin, about the capitalist encirclement in which the Soviet country lives. In a new way, especially intelligibly and convincingly, have sounded the appeals to the people for vigilance, for watchfulness, for the mobilizational readiness of the entire people in the face of the danger of war—*

The Verdict of the People

of a sudden attack, so that no one and nothing can take us by surprise.

The criminals have suffered their deserved punishment.

“Time will pass. The graves of the hated traitors will be overgrown with weeds and thistles, covered with the eternal contempt of honest Soviet people, of the entire Soviet people.

And above us, above our happy country, our sun will continue to shine brightly and joyfully with its radiant rays. We, our people, will continue to march along the road cleansed of the last filth and abomination of the past, at the head with our beloved leader and teacher—the great Stalin—forward and forward, toward communism!” (From the speech of the State Prosecutor A. Ya. Vyshinsky).