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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 14, 2 April 1938, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The first “break” in the Robinson-Rubens-G.P.U. case in several months came Monday night with the arrest in New York of Ossip Garber, a Fifth Avenue photographer. He is charged with being a member of a conspiratorial ring which aided in obtaining for Adolph Arnold Rubens, G.P.U. agent, the false American passports in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Donald L. Robinson on which Rubens and his wife entered Russia last fall.
Garber’s name first entered the case more than a month ago, when he was hailed before the Federal Grand Jury investigating the passport fraud. Several newspapers then indicated that he had been linked with passport photographs made for Rubens.
Like almost every figure in the case, Garber is a known sympathizer of the Communist Party. Only last week he was heard telling newspaper reporters in a city room which occasionally buys photographs from him, that all critics of the Moscow trials are allies of “Trotskyite-Bukharinite-Gestapo-Japanese agents.”
Thus the first arrest on this side of the water in connection with this case confirms the repeated statements made in the Appeal that the Robinson passport game was a Stalinist performance. Among known Stalinists involved, besides Garber, are Arthur Sharfin, Helen Ravitch, Marshall Shaw (one-time hero of Corliss Lament’s “Friends of the Soviet Union”), and a number of residents at an East 17th Street address once used by the Robinson-Rubens couple. Rubens’ former attorney is also a Stalinist.
Mrs. Rubens herself, of course, is a Stalinist. She is apparently still in Butirky Prison in Moscow, having repudiated the offer of the United States Government to aid her. Rubens, whose entire record establishes his connection with the G.P.U., is also still held.
The New York Post, in reporting the Garber arrest, ventures the guess that the reason Mrs. Rubens repudiated aid from America was that she feared that would guarantee the death of her husband at the hands of the G.P.U. In a recent article in the New Leader, Herbert Solow disclosed that the family of Mrs. Rubens in Florida has received from her a secret message conveyed by the U.S. State Department, pleading with them not to intervene on her behalf. As a consequence, it is believed that the family instructed their attorney, a Mr. Throop of New York, to undertake no action. The State Department, moreover, is absolutely passive as far as the Moscow prisoners are concerned, and also refuses to make public the data it has gathered on the Robinson-Rubens-G.P.U. affair.
What the Stalin regime proposes to do with its prisoners, at least one of whom, Mrs. Rubens, is an American citizen, is not clear. The scheme of using them in one of the show-trials, a scheme which Isvestia and the Daily Worker indicated was afoot some months ago, was postponed. This was necessitated, apparently, by the publication of articles in this country (in the New York Sun and the New Leader, as well as in the Appeal) which exposed the nature of the frame-up plans and the G.P.U. connections of Rubens.
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Last updated: 30 July 2015