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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 9, 26 February 1938, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The week’s developments in the widening expose of the activities in this country of Stalin’s G.P.U. – an exposé set in motion by the Robinson-Rubens arrests in Moscow last December – threw new light on Stalinist connections with the mysterious A.A. Rubens and heightened the significance of the charge made by Carlo Tresca, anti-fascist leader, that the mysterious disappearance of Juliet Stuart Poyntz, once a prominent Communist Party leader, is linked with the Rubens case.
Tresca, summoned before a Federal Grand Jury in New York, is reported to have given the names of more than fifteen witnesses who could support his charge that Miss Poyntz was “lured or kidnapped” to the Soviet Union by the G.P.U. “because she knew too much” about the G.P.U.’s activities, including the mysterious Rubens affair.
The Stalinist Daily Worker continued to curse Tresca, but has not dared to refer to its erstwhile outstanding woman leader otherwise than by cautiously describing her as “an American woman” – as if she had never been for years on end a comrade and close confidante of Earl Browder and company in the Central Committee of the Communist Party!
On Feb. 22, Hearst’s New York Journal and American quoted State Department officials as saying that Rubens “was in reality an O.G.P.U. agent,.” and that a connection between Rubens and a man calling himself “Mr. Weston,” who posed as an under-secretary of state and was taken into custody last week after he had applied for 25 passport application blanks, “has been proved.”
Investigators are also understood to have established the existence of friendly connections between Mrs. A.A. Rubens, who is being held incommunicado in a Stalin prison cell in Moscow, and Christian Rudewitz of Wisconsin, whose naturalization papers Rubens (her supposed husband) was earlier said to have stolen.
The State Department continues to maintain silence, despite increasing demands that it open the Robinson-Rubens-G.P.U. dossier and reveal the full facts about Stalin’s plot to stir up a reactionary, war-inspiring spy scare in the United States. The department’s behavior, it is learned, may shortly become a subject for discussion on the floor of Congress.
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