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Junius

Moscow in Difficulty with Robinson Case

State Dept. Refused Right to See Arrested Woman

(29 January 1938)


From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 5, 29 January 1938, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).



Bulletin!

As we go to press, Washington announces a new demand to see Mrs. Rubens, sent to Moscow despite pressure of the C.P.-Tory bloc favoring connivance with Stalin. Hull, however, continues to keep all details secret.



The closeness of the jam the Stalin regime finds itself in because of the Robinson-Rubens frame-up fizzle, was startlingly illuminated early this week when a Moscow cable cited Americans in that city as believing that “the failure of the Soviet government to permit American Consular officials here, despite the recognition agreement, to see Mrs. Ruth Marie Rubens, now under arrest in a Soviet prison,” will continue indefinitely.

At the same time, the Appeal learns from Washington that the refusal of permission, coming on the heels of the G.P.U.’s six-week-long failure to admit they had Mrs. Rubens in their clutches, has caused annoyance in the State Department.

The insistence of the G.P.U. on keeping Mrs. Rubens to themselves until they have finished “questioning” her – which creative process may take several months – is presumably due to the difficulties, both subjective and objective, in getting her to play the role of penitent “Japanese-Trotskyite-Bukharinite spy” which the G.P.U. has written for her.

The fact remains that Stalin’s adventurous frame-up course has led to a situation that strains relations between Washington and Moscow, to establish which Stalin long ago pledged himself to demobilize the American Marxist movement.
 

Stalinist Jitters Mount

And while the Daily Worker, like the genial Dictator himself, continues mum as a clam on the whole subject of the Rubens case, Stalinists in New York are working to dispel interest in the case. A growing feeling among non-Stalinist radicals, laborites and liberals that the Rubens case is a crucially rotten expression of Stalinist degenerate methods has frightened local Stalinists into the jitters. They fear that the Appeal’s series of startling disclosures of their role in the Rubens passport fraud will shortly be followed by even more sensational exposes of the criminal anti-working class activities of the G.P.U. here and abroad.

Other new developments in this latest of Stalin’s frame-up attempts are as follows:
 

New Developments

1. Fred Beal, Gastonia and Moscow class-war refugee now held by the Massachusetts police for extradition to North Carolina where he would face a 20-year prison term resulting from an anti-labor murder frame-up, on his arrest told newspaper men that he believed the G.P.U. was simultaneously trying to involve him in the Rubens frame-up.

Beal, of course, has been defended by Trotskyites against the vicious slanders spread against him by the Stalinist mud-slinging machine.

Hence, it would seem, he has been under consideration on 13th Street as raw material for the phony link which must be forged in an effort to connect the Rubens couple with the Trotskyites. A G.P.U. agent masquerading in the relatively innocent guise of a capitalist reporter got Beal’s address in New York (where he was hiding from the North Carolina bloodhounds), and questioned him about the Rubens case in such a way, Beal said, as to make “me feel that an attempt was being made to implicate me in some way.”

“The Communists,” Beal continued, “have heaped abuse and vilification upon me.) I do not put it beyond them to involve me in alleged espionage in Russia. If they do, I shall not be the first person to have suffered in this manner for daring to criticize the rule of the Communists. I know nothing about the Robinsons. I am not a Trotskyite. I am a labor organizer in jail today for leading the textile strike in Gastonia. It is true that, like the Robinsons, I went to Soviet Russia after my conviction on a false passport furnished me by friends in the C.P. That was years ago, and I have told the story frankly in my book, published long before the Robinson case broke!”
 

Photographer Questioned

2. Another name entered the picture early this week when the Federal “passport racket” Grand Jury in New York questioned Ossip Garber, Fifth Avenue photographer, who is reputed to have known both Mr. and Mrs. Rubens. The nature of his revelations is unknown, as the Grand Jury continues to operate behind an almost unprecedented “wall of secrecy.”

3. Rumors in circles close to 13th Street are that a special delegation of Stalinist Central Committee members is now in Moscow, summoned by special ukase. Their tasks include guarding the G.P.U. scenario writers against boners in the Rubens script, such as a “Trotskyite conference” in 1937 in the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, torn down years ago.


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