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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 8, 19 February 1938, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A variety of developments during the past week, confirming our earlier predictions, have lifted the Robinson-Rubens mystery to a new level and have exposed still further the systematic character of the frame-up methods employed by the Stalinist international to discredit its political opponents and drive the U.S.A. into war with Japan.
1. The G.P.U., after two months of “sweating” Ruth Marie Rubens, got her into line sufficiently to be able to show her to U.S. Embassy officials in the presence of a group of G.P.U. agents. These officials were permitted to ask after her health and to be told that she desired no legal counsel or other assistance. No questioning was allowed regarding the circumstances of her arrest, past activities, or the movements of Donald L. Robinson, her supposed husband, which were the usual ones of a G.P.U. Agent.
2. The G.P.U., through Walter Duranty, New York Times correspondent and cover-up journalist for Stalin, has begun a campaign to sell the Robinson-Rubens frame-up to the American public, which has been highly skeptical of Moscow’s hints that these G.P.U. agents are “Trotskyite-Bukharinite-fascist” agents of the Rome-Berlin-Tokio axis.
His first contribution was an “imaginative” account of the interview between Mrs. Rubens and the Embassy representatives in which he described how the G.,P.U. inquisitors had established their “moral ascendancy” over the woman and thus bent her to their will. All that he succeeded in revealing was the extent of Stalin’s “moral ascendancy” over Duranty.
Duranty, who has frequently referred his readers to Dostoievsky as a guide to an understanding of Stalin’s Russia, now adds Freud as an additional indispensable reference for an understanding of the methods of the G.P.U.
There was frightful truth in his “imaginary” account of how Mrs. Rubens looked fearfully at her G.P.U. captors before daring to answer the pertinent and vital questions put to her by Henderson. But Duranty breezily explained it all as “moral ascendancy.”
3. A sensational statement concerning the Juliet Stuart Poyntz case was made by Carlo Tresca, anarchist and outstanding Italian anti-fascist in this country. Tresca charged publicly that the disappearance of Miss Poyntz is connected with the Robinson-Rubens-G.P.U frame-up. He has volunteered details and been subpoenaed to appear before a Federal Grand Jury. When the appearance was postponed Monday, Tresca, who was a member of the Dewey Commission on the Moscow trials, issued the following statement to the press:
“I regret the postponement of my appearance before the Grand Jury in the Robinson passport fraud matter. You know I am not permitted to reveal what I intend to say to the Grand Jury. Last week I charged publicly that a Russian secret police agent made off with Miss Poyntz. She has not appeared since, nor has the Communist Party cited a single fact to cast doubt on my charge. Moreover, her attorney has belatedly conceded that my charge is not impossible. It is more than that. It is true.”
“I have been asked repeatedly whether the man I accuse is the one named in an article in a New York newspaper, Shachno Epstein, former editor of a Communist paper here. If I had wanted to tell the man’s name to the press, I would have done so. I will tell his name to the Grand Jury. I can add nothing publicly at this time. I can only say that, as far as I know, Shachno Epstein has not filed any libel suits or even protested.
“We are on the trail of people who know important relevant facts. One is an American agent of the G.P.U., who, before being sent from Moscow to Barcelona, where he played a role in the murder of my dear comrade, Professor Camillo Berneri, sterling anti-fascist and anarchist philosopher and educator, spent a term in a Danish prison after being convicted as a Russian spy. His name is George Mink. He is a New York Communist Party functionary. His past is a matter of public record. He and others of his stripe whom we are seeking could cast light on the Poyntz affair.”
“We are not dealing with a petty passport fraud, but with a conspiracy originating in Moscow, in which that fraud is a mere link. The object is the staging of a Moscow frame-up trial, designed to stimulate war fever here through a spy scare, and thus drive this country toward war for Stalin’s benefit.
“We are going to get to the bottom of the Robinson-Rubens-Poyntz-G.P.U. case and expose the war-mongering conspirators and their master in the Kremlin.”
Panic-stricken by the revelations concerning Stalin’s latest frame-up, the Daily Worker has denounced Tresca as a Japanese-Fascist spy and has applied the same term to Herbert Solow, a journalist who ran a series of articles in the New York Sun last week exposing the details of the Rubens conspiracy.
It has also made insinuations against Dr. Charles A. Beard, advocate of an “isolationist” program in foreign affairs, who recently attacked the Roosevelt-Browder big navy program, by suggesting that Beard’s attitude springs from his Japanese connections, i.e., the fact that he served the Tokio municipality after the great earthquake in 1923 as an expert on municipal government reform.
And, of course, the time-honored gangster methods of the Stalinists are being brought into play to prevent the truth reaching the light. A witness supporting Tresca’s charges this week received anonymous threats over the telephone from a pay station.
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