A Spectator's Notebook
THE second and third volumes of the verbatim report of the Moscow Trial (in an English translation) have now reached me, and the question of whether the Report has been in any way " edited " can be answered. At some points at any rate it has. I turned naturally to the speeches of the Public Prosecutor, Vishinsky, to trace the outrageous outburst in his final address to the court, when he deliCately suggested that the only use for Mr. Thornton was as manure for Soviet fields. It is not there. The sentence which presumably represents it in the official document runs :
" Citizen Thornton, you are already useless both here and there, because as a spy you have proved your utter bankruptcy, because you, twenty-four hours after your arrest, betrayed your agents and did that because you are a coward and a traitor by nature, so that even your own British spying organization can no longer trust you. And in the U.S.S.R. you are useless because after all that has passed nothing useful can be expected of you."
Monkhouse's outburst a day or two earlier, when he described the whole proceedings as a frame-up, is, however, reported in full. The full text of Vishinsky's utterance, with its declamatory laudation of the Soviet State and its equally declamatory denunciation of the capitalist world—the newspaper correspondents, of course, could not cable a fraction of this windy verbiage—is as good a demonstration as could be needed of the inex- tricable confusion between law and politics in Russia. But nothing of this kind affects the question of the wisdom of the British Government's action. All I hear from many different quarters goes to confirm the impression that if Sir John Simon could have left the embargo alone Mr. Thornton and Mr. Macdonald would have been in England long before this. That was quite definitely indicated to the Foreign Office by the Russian Ambassador, but the Foreign Secretary and the Cabinet preferred what has not inaptly been described as thud and blunder methods.
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