The 'Selfless Defender'

ON November 23, a ceremony took place at Moscow University, when the degree of Doctor of Law was conferred on an outstanding British barrister. Mr. D. N. Pritt, QC, the recipient, was described as a selfless defender of the common people' and 'an active fighter against fascism and for peace.

Pritt recalled that he first visited the Soviet Union in the "30s. He did not specifically mention his visit to Moscow in August 1936.

OBSERVER

On that occasion, he was able to attend the hearing of the case against Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and others. He heard those defendants who were in custody 'confess' to conspiring with Hitler against the USSR. He saw Prosecutor Vishinsky prove with the aid of these 'confessions' , that these Bolwww wwww shevik leaders had murder of Kirov.

On his return home, Pritt became one of the chief defenders of the genuineness of the trial and the authenticity of the confessions. In the Daily Worker' of September 3, 1936, he wrote a special article, afterwards reprinted as a leaflet called: * What are my impressions of the conduct of the Zinoviev trial?

REPORTER

"And throughout the hearing', he wrote, 'when the result was a foregone conclusion, and nothing that was or could be said could do much to lessen the guilt or the complete social worthlessness of the accused, they received the same courteous treatment, the same liberty to intervene at almost any moment and say anything they wanted at any length, as would any ordinary accused in any ordinary trial in the Soviet Union (and that is saying a very great deal).* In 1956, Khrushchev implied what many people in the labour movement had known: that this trial and its successors were monstrous frame-ups, gigantic frauds, mockeries of socialist justice.

And what did Mr. Pritt, QC, have to say? Nothing!

Now, Khrushchev's reférences to the Kirov assassination expose Pritt's 'guarantees' as worthless. All can see that this member of the Bar was helping to slander the finest representatives of international Communism. By quieting the fears of socialists about the first of Stalin's trials, Pritt aided in the preparation of the later purges.

SILENCE

Pritt and all those who acted like him must be forced to speak out publicly about their role in the '30s. His continued silence now is as shameful as the part he played 25 years ago. wwww ww The Editor, Daily Worker.

Dear Sir, —Walter Holmes* quotation from Maurice Thorez on Trotsky simply proves that the British, like the French Communist Party leadership, remains Stalinist at heart. They have learned nothing and are incapable of learning anything.

The quotation itself is an assembly of lies, half-truths and sentences torn out of their context. The "famous August bloc", for instance, never included all the Mensheviks'. Organisationally, Trotsky broke with the Mensheviks before Lenin did. 'He always failed to understand the peasantry." This is an old and hoary chestnut. Did the great Stalin understand the peasantry so much better when he introduced his policy of forced collectivisation? Three million peasant deaths and years of famine was the price the Soviet Union paid for this policy. That is why agriculture is today still - and admittedly so by Khrushchev— the weak spot in Soviet economy.

Without the background to the Brest - Litovsk negotiations the phrase 'Neither war nor peace" has no meaning at all. Thorez gives in quotes that Trotsky wanted to stimulate revolution by