DEFENDING A COMRADE

DEFENDING A COMRADE:

AMERICAN JOURNALISTS AND

THE CASE OF VLADIMIR ROMM



Abstract:



During the 1930s the Soviet Union underwent the "great terror"—Stalin's
purges of top Soviet government and Party leaders. One aspect of the
purges were the show trials of these veterans of the Russian Revolution and
the Civil War. They were accused of espionage, sabotage, and counter-
revolutionary plotting at the behest of Stalin's archenemy—Leon Trotsky.
During the second public purge trial in 1937 one of the witnesses against
defendant Karl Radek, the Soviets' most famous journalist, was Vladimir
Romm, the correspondent in the U. S. for Izvestia, the Soviet government
newspaper. Romm testified that he had carried correspondence from Trotsky
to Radek. Romm's testimony shocked his American colleagues who then
conducted a campaign to defend Romm as a loyal Communist and an effective
representative of the Soviet government. Using contemporaneous sources,
this paper discusses the efforts of some of America's leading journalists
to defend their Soviet colleague.