BOOKS
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For if Romm was guilty, why did Mr. Davies save this "Fifth Col–
umnist"?
If
leniency was proper in his case, why not in others? Because
Romm had powerful connections in the United States? In that case, Mr.
Davies' whole thesis as to the quality of Soviet "justice" collapses. And
there are others cases like Romm's: Rakovsky was not condemned to
death because a French politician intervened in his favor. And if Radek
and Sokolnikov also benefitted by a similar bit of sleight-of-hand, inex–
plicable and unjustifiable from the point of view of the executioners for
whom Mr. Davies is the apologist, it is also for reasons quite foreign to
justice. For, according to the official reports and their own confessions,
which Mr. Davies accepts at face value, they were all just as guilty as
those condemned to death, if not more so.
Mr. Duranty, who strikes his own peculiar note in the fellow-travel–
lers' concert, will no doubt make some such reply as: Don't worry, Stalin
was smart enough to have those defendants executed secretly whom it was
impolitic to condemn publicly. We agree entirely. But in that case, what
becomes of Mr. Davies' thesis? Over 300 alleged accomplices were named
in
the course of the Trials who have not yet been publicly tried.
One more essential point must be made apropos Romm: all his
American colleagues refused to believe in the · crimes to which he con–
fessed. The same scepticism, even better grounded, was expressed in
other instances: Leon Blum, the celebrated Fifth Columnist, the Social
Democrats and the Russian Social Revolutionaries now refugees in New
York-all who. could speak from their own personal knowledge have
igreed on the fraudulence of the charges. They have also agreed that the
confessions are curiously identical, so uniform indeed as to betray the
trade-mark of the same factory: the GPU. Has such agreement ever before
been seen, in fact, between several dozen defendants and witnesses? On
Broadway or in Hollywood, it takes many rehearsals to obtain such a
1111ooth performance. How could it have been done without a scenario
learned by heart?
If
Mr. Davies had taken the trouble to look into pre–
vious Soviet trials, he would have found that the same scenario had
already done duty, with Poincare in the role of Hitler and the British
Intelligence in the part of the Gestapo. And he might then have hesitated
to endorse so unreservedly Stalin's legal methods.
There is hardly a sentence in Mr. Davies comments on the Trials
which cannot be shown, with equal ease, to be false and improbable. It
would take another book to set the record straight.
If
Mr. Davies really
lw
at heart the interests of his country and of "democracy" in the world,
he
will realize it is his duty to rise above any considerations of personal
ftllity
and see to it that Simon
&
Schuster publish such a book as a
companion volume to his own. The preservation of democracy, or of
111ch little of it as remains to us, is inseparable from simple truth, and the
United States cannot collaborate safely with the Soviet Union without a
realistic understanding of its partner.
