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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 7, 12 February 1938, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
While Loy Henderson, U.S. charge d’affaires, in Moscow waited for the G.P.U. “to arrange the time and place” of his interview with Mrs. Rubens, Carlo Tresca, veteran anti-Fascist leader, this week delivered a withering attack on the Stalin frame-up machine charging it with the abduction of Juliet Stuart Poyntz, noted Stalinist leader who disappeared last summer.
Tresca offered to go before the Grand Jury now investigating the Rubens passport mystery and to give evidence implicating the G.P.U. in the disappearance of Miss Poyntz.
He also indicated that a connection might be established between the Poyntz disappearance and the Rubens case, which seems about to flower into a first class “spy” plot seeking to involve American Trotskyists with Japan’s espionage system in this country. Tresca was promptly subpoenaed.
Tresca declared that Poyntz was “lured or kidnapped” to the Soviet Union because “she knew too much.” He said he knew the man who he believed was responsible for spiriting the woman leader out of the country after she had broken with the Stalinist party.
(The Jewish Daily Forward said on February 8 that the man referred to was Schachno Epstein, former editor of the New York Stalinist Jewish paper, the Freiheit, who was long suspected of being a G.P.U. agent.)
Elias Lieberman, at one time attorney for Miss Poyntz, came forward with an attempted denial, but admitted that some months ago there had been suspicious pointing to the man Tresca had in mind. Since Tresca had mentioned no names, Lieberman’s statement caused some astonishment. Lieberman himself named no names nor did he disclose what action, if any, had been taken by him in the matter.
In his statement, Tresca said it was high time for all American radicals who oppose the Stalin regime to take “some measure of defence, against the terrorism of the Soviet G.P.U.”
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Last updated: 30 July 2015