Stalin, Navachine & Blum

In her little Paris flat last week Mme Dmitri Navachine joined the ranks of Russian widows who say their husbands have been murdered by Joseph Stalin's accomplished Secret Service or Ogpu.* Husband Dmitri Navachine was perhaps the ablest Soviet banker, economist and financier Communism has produced. As Director of the Soviet State Bank's Paris branch for some years, Red Navachine won the confidence of such leading French statesmen as the present Premier Leon Blum and his predecessors, Premiers Herriot & Laval. The Bolshevik banker convinced these statesmen that France could trust Dictator Joseph Stalin and the result was the present Franco-Soviet Pact, negotiated by Herriot, signed by Laval, upheld by Blum (TIME, May 13, 1935 et seq.). From the point of view of Comrade Stalin, it was appalling that Comrade Navachine, who had quietly resigned his Soviet bank directorship in Paris sometime ago, should have been scheduled one day last week to deliver a lecture that evening "Exposing the Moscow Trial" (see col. 2).

Among Exposer Navachine's audience would have been perhaps Statesmen Herriot, Laval and Blum themselves, certainly many of their friends. Soviet Russia has, in all western Europe, only one treaty-ally, the French Republic. Therefore, since Comrade Navachine, who had sold France on Stalin in the first place, was now going to try to unsell France on Stalin, the situation in which Paris agents of the Ogpu found themselves was "vital to the Soviet Fatherland."

Two great dogs accompanied Comrade Navachine whenever he stirred abroad, and being a courageous man the Soviet economist persisted that morning in his habit of taking a brisk constitutional in the Bois de Boulogne. Several witnesses last week heard and saw what happened. A man with a pistol coolly fired three shots at close range, next grappled Dmitri Navachine, drove home four blows with a long thin knife, and nimbly escaped as Paris passers-by rushed to help the stricken man but only drew to themselves the snarling attentions of his two big dogs. These faithful beasts stood guard over their stricken master as he lay weltering in a dark puddle of mud and blood, died before any human could reach him.

Paris detectives found two pairs of spectacles, apparently those of Navachine and his killer. The Surete Nationale at once sent detectives to guard Mme Navachine. Said she: "My husband was not killed. He was executed."

No hobnailed dictator but a silky Jewish intellectual of the Leon Trotsky type is Socialist French Premier Leon Blum. Smart Paris wiseacres guessed last week that Blum's shock at the killing of Nava, chine caused him to remonstrate by telegraph with Joseph Stalin, perhaps accounted for the unexpected action of the

Soviet Supreme Court in handing down a verdict so comparatively mild as to take Moscow's veteran corps of correspondents completely by surprise and astound all Russia (see below).

* Accomplishments by secret servicemen of various Great Powers in committing political murders from time to time with great neatness were well described in Harper's for last August. A favorite weapon is the pistol with Maxim silencer. After its slight "phht" the secret agent, having accomplished a murder which his Government highly approves and considers "vital to the safety of the Fatherland," hails a passing taxi, speeds to the nearest convenient railway station, is usually over the frontier of the country in which his pistol went "phht" before the killing is discovered.

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