Communications on the conditions of political prisoners
Subtitle: the English advocates of the Moscow trial methods again
By: issued by the Commission of Inquiry set up by the Labour and Socialist International, Vol. XIV, No. 4, March 8th, 1937
Language: eng
Subjects: Political prisoners
Notes: 1. Dudley Collard's Interventions -- 2. The Ghost Aeroplane in Oslo -- The Judicial Murder of Eduard D. Holtzman.

The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials held in the Soviet Union at the instigation of Joseph Stalin between 1936 and 1938 against Trotskyists and members of Right Opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The defendants were Old Bolshevik party leaders and top officials of the Soviet secret police. Most defendants were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with the Western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism.

William Dudley Collard was a British barrister and writer on law in the Soviet Union, and he represented the Communist Party of Great Britain as a lawyer. His affiliation with communism led to the intelligence services keeping a file on him.

British barrister Denis Nowell Pritt was one of the ornaments of the British Bar and had the title of ‘King’s Counsel'. Pritt was in Moscow during the trial and he telegraphed to the Liberal News Chronicle and later gave an interview to the Communist Daily Worker. He then wrote a preface to a pamphlet on the Moscow Trial, published by the Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee.

Friedrich Adler (1879-1960) was a long-standing Austrian Social Democrat and dealt fully with the arguments put forward by D.N. Pritt.