[ingliz]

No normal “constitutional” ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletariat only by force.

It's not really the point.

It's not really the point that as early as 1931 he is actively plotting to overthrow the Soviet government??

Getty, Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International, Soviet Studies, vol. XXXVIII, no. 1, January 1986, 24-35

[daft punk]

Your link there says he was not plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime. It's a stupid allegation. There was no plot.

The Dewey Commission published its findings in the form of a 422-page book titled Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary the commission wrote: "Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:

That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.

That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.

That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR."
The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Commission

What Trotsky did do was eventually call for a political revolution in Russia, to establish socialism.

[ingliz]

What Trotsky did do was eventually call for a political revolution in Russia, to establish socialism.

What Trotsky did was call for civil war in Russia.

The essential condition of the revolution's victory is the unification of the international revolutionary vanguard under the flag of the Fourth International. The struggle for this banner must be conducted in the Soviet Union, with prudence but without compromise .... The proletariat that made three revolutions will lift up its head one more time. The bureaucratic absurdity will try to resist? The proletariat will find a big enough broom. And we will help it.

Your link there says he was not plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime.

My link:

Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International
By J. Arch Getty

Soviet Studies, vol. XXXVIII, no. 1, January 1986, 24-35

Leon Trotsky’s formal political break with the Bolshevik Party came in 1933 with his decision to renounce allegiance to the Third International (Comintern) and to form a Fourth International. The rupture had not come easily for him. Although the Bolshevik leadership had expelled him from the party in 1927 and exiled him from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky, for his part, had never formally split from the party or the Comintern.

From the time of his exile to the 1933 break, pro-Trotsky communists (‘Bolshevik-Leninists’) had tried to work both within and outside the official parties of the Comintern in order to influence their policies in a Trotskyist direction and Trotsky had been reluctant to organise or sanction new Bolshevik-Leninist parties outside the framework of the Comintern.

He had consistently maintained his allegiance to the Third International and expressed his willingness to defend the Soviet state and Bolshevik monopoly of power against internal and external class enemies.

His four-year loyalty to the party that had exiled him was based in part on his fears of the dangers facing the Soviet government. Trotsky defined the Stalinist regime in this period not as a rightist or ‘Thermidorean’ counter-revolution but rather as a centrist political faction which ‘zig-zagged’ between left and right.

He believed and feared that the zig-zagging and incompetence of Stalinist leadership could, however, produce a crisis in which the real political right (kulaks, nepmen, Whites, or even a man on horseback) could take advantage of the chaos and mount a genuine counter-revolution. In such circumstances, Trotsky would feel bound to support and defend even the Stalinist centrists from an attack from the right that could topple the Soviet state.

He therefore resisted suggestions that he adopt the slogan ‘overthrow Stalin’ or organise a new political party which could split the Bolsheviks in a time of crisis.1

When studying political actors and theorists it is always difficult to separate the subjective from the objective. Does a politician adopt a particular policy or stance as a result of subjective personal motivations or objective analysis? Treatments of most Bolshevik (and especially Stalinist) politicians have routinely stressed personal ambition as a determinant of political or theoretical pronouncements.

But few of the hagiographical or scholarly works on Trotsky have questioned his intellectual integrity or asked critical questions about the personal motives behind his theoretical and political positions. Since Isaac Deutscher’s pioneering biography, Trotsky has been ‘the prophet outcast’, a tragic hero whose personal and political life was shaped—often disastrously—by his objective theoretical views more than vice versa.2

In particular, Trotsky’s 1933 decision to form the Fourth International has been explained as a function of an objective economic, social, and political analysis of the situations in the Comintern and the USSR. Yet Trotsky’s private writings and activities suggest that his changing theoretical evaluations of the USSR and the Bolshevik Party resulted at least in part from the vicissitudes of his tactical position and partisan hopes and not vice versa.

Trotsky was a politician as well as a political analyst and one should not be surprised to discover that his private political activities continued in exile or, as with most politicians, influenced his public theoretical pronouncements.

Formation of separate political organisations and renunciation of allegiance to the Comintern would have made Trotsky and his followers members of a separate, anti-Bolshevik political party and would have placed him and his partisans completely outside the pale of Bolshevik politics. Such a stance would doom any chance for him to return to the Moscow party leadership.

With hindsight, for Trotsky to have harboured such hope seems naive and quixotic, but the uncertainties of the dynamic political and social crisis of 1929-32 made many things seem possible. Indeed, Trotsky believed in and hoped for the possibility of a return to the Moscow leadership and worked tirelessly for it. The collapse of his last hope for a recall to Moscow coincided with his decision to form the Fourth International.

Using Trotsky’s public writings of the 1930s, most writers have agreed that Hitler’s crushing of the German Communist Party (KPD) and workers’ movement in February-March, 1933 led Trotsky finally to question his allegiance first to the KPD and then to the Comintern and its member parties.3

Trotsky was angry with the KPD and its Comintern masters for not forming a ‘united front from above and below’ with the German socialists (SPD) to block Hitler’s victory. In March, he wrote a series of articles in which he called for the formation of a wholly new German Communist Party rather than the resuscitation of the KPD.4 Writing under the pseudonym ‘G. Gurov’, Trotsky suggested that the decision had been taken reluctantly:

‘Just as a doctor does not leave a patient who still has a breath of life, we had for our task the reform of the party as long as there was the least hope. But it would be criminal to tie oneself to a corpse.’5

Although Trotsky now sanctioned the formation of a new non-Comintern party in Germany, he stopped short of renouncing loyalty to the Third International or Soviet Communist Party and refused to approve the creation of new communist parties anywhere except Germany. In reply to a rhetorical question about giving up on the Comintern as a whole, ‘G. Gurov’ waffled: ‘In my opinion, it would be incorrect to give a rigid answer . . .’.

He then suggested that the German disaster could serve as an object lesson that could shock other communist parties into reforming Comintern policy. ‘The question has not been settled for the USSR, where proclamation of the slogan of the second party would be incorrect . . . It is not a question of the creation of the Fourth International but of salvaging the Third.’6

Again, on 9 April 1933, Trotsky maintained that ‘we do not break with the Third International’. In response to a question on whether it was not inconsistent to break with the Comintern in Germany and not elsewhere, Trotsky minimised the issue as a matter of ‘bookkeeping’. ‘If, however, the Stalinist bureaucracy should bring the USSR to ruin . . . it will be necessary to build a Fourth International.’7

For four months following a call for a new German communist party, Trotsky declined to extend his renunciation of the KPD to the Soviet or other communist parties. It was not until mid-July that he finally announced that one cannot remain ‘captive to one’s own formula’ and that hope for Comintern reform was dead.

In an article entitled It is Necessary to Build Communist Parties and an International Anew, he wrote that the Soviet Communist Party was no longer a party at all but merely ‘an apparatus of domination in the hands of an uncontrolled bureaucracy’. There was, therefore, no party with which to break.8 Five days later, he wrote that ‘the Bolshevik Party no longer exists’ and that accordingly it was time to ‘abandon the slogan of the reform of the CPSU’.9

Apprehensive that he would now be widely regarded as an anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary, Trotsky still refused to call for a revolution in the Soviet Union. In his view, Soviet Russia was still a workers’ state that ‘can be regenerated . . . without a revolution’.10 It was not until 1 October 1933 that he asserted: ‘No normal “constitutional” ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletariat only by force’. (emphasis Trotsky’s).

Still queasy about the implications of this position, he argued that such force would not be ‘an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat but the removal of a malignant growth upon it’. He was advocating not ‘measures of a civil war but rather the measures of a police character’.11

Trotsky’s October call for the use of force against the Soviet party regime was not qualitatively new. He was only dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s of his key July statements renouncing the Bolshevik party and denying its existence.12 If reform were impossible and if the Stalinist clique refused to abdicate power, then the July position already implied removing it by force.

Trotsky’s July renunciation of the Comintern and Bolshevik party and his simultaneous call for a new International comprise the chief watershed in the political activities of his exile.

Why, after the mid-March articles on Germany did it take Trotsky four months to follow the clear logic of his position and break with the Comintern? His admiring biographer Isaac Deutscher found the delay ‘illogical’ but explained simply that ‘the logic of his new venture soon got the better of Trotsky’ in the months that followed. Deutscher attributed Trotsky’s peculiar hesitation on the matter to his longtime loyalty to the Comintern and his fear of Russian counterrevolution.13

While these factors were pertinent to the 1929-32 period, an explanation based on them does not fully account for the illogical four-month pause between breaking with the KPD and renouncing its Moscow Comintern policymakers. Did either rightist danger or Trotsky’s loyalty to the Comintern decrease so dramatically after the March KPD disaster?

Trotsky himself anticipated questions about the delay. He had written in April that a Fourth International would not be necessary until the Stalinist clique brought the USSR to ruin. Since he never claimed that any action on Stalin’s part between March and July brought the USSR any closer to ruin than it already was, both the delay and the proposal of a Fourth International needed explaining. Indeed, on 27 July 1933, Trotsky admitted that logically the Comintern break should have come in April.

First, he explained that a disagreement between himself and his ‘German comrades’ on the question of a new party had caused friction in the ‘Left Opposition’ and delayed the total break. Trotsky had had to convince his German followers of the necessity for a break. Second, he claimed that between March and July he had been waiting to see if the parties or leadership of the Comintern would ‘wake up’ and abruptly change their policies.14

It is hard to weigh the importance of either these factors for Trotsky’s unusual indecisiveness. It is true that the German Trotskyists with whom he corresponded resisted the notion of a new party, although Trotsky had not taken them seriously enough to consult with them beforehand and had never shown much reluctance to break with the small European leftist groups which defied him.15

The other explanation, that Trotsky waited four months for the Comintern quickly to admit the error of its ways, is even less convincing. No one had less reason than Trotsky to be optimistic about the Comintern and no one had so relentlessly documented its failures over the preceding decade.

Trotsky could not have been so naive or ignorant of Comintern politics as to expect either a mea culpa from the Comintern Executive Committee or an independent, defiant policy from the member parties. It seems therefore that the lack of Comintern reform cannot explain the timing of the call for a Fourth International.

Yet Trotsky’s typically polemical, assertive, and self-justifying writings have led scholars to accept his version of the Fourth International decision and to ask few questions about his procrastination. The issue is of more than simple antiquarian or psychological interest since both published and archival documents suggest another side to Trotsky’s life in the 1930s quite apart from his journalistic and editorial activities.

Behind the scenes of his public reflections on the Comintern, Trotsky was trying both to organise illegal opposition groups in the USSR and to negotiate with Moscow for his legal return.

Long before the 1933 disaster in Germany, Trotsky had tried to maintain contact with followers in the USSR. Since 1929 he had corresponded with those of his adherents who were in internal exile in Serbia or Central Asia.16 He had tried to smuggle copies of his Byullenten’ oppozitsii into the Soviet Union, and through his son Lev Sedov (who lived in Berlin) had maintained contacts with tourists and Soviet officials travelling to and from the USSR.

As it became clear that his letters to the Soviet Union were being screened and intercepted by the secret police, he switched to postcards, since he believed that they were scrutinised less carefully.17

At the time of the Moscow show trials, Trotsky denied that he had any communications with the defendants since his exile in 1929. Yet it is now clear that in 1932 he sent secret personal letters to former leading oppositionists Karl Radek, G. Sokol’nikov, E. Preobrazhensky, and others. While the contents of these letters are unknown, it seems reasonable to believe that they involved an attempt to persuade the addressees to return to opposition.18

We know considerably more, however, about another clandestine communication between Trotsky and his supporters in the USSR late in 1932. Sometime in October, E.S. Gol’tsman, a former Trotskyist and current Soviet official, met Sedov in Berlin and gave him a proposal from veteran Trotskyist Ivan Smirnov and other left oppositionists in the USSR for the formation of a united opposition bloc.

The proposed bloc was to include Trotskyists, Zinovievists, members of the Lominadze group, and others. Sedov wrote to Trotsky relaying the proposal and Trotsky approved. ‘The proposition of the bloc seems to me completely acceptable’, Trotsky wrote, ‘but it is a question of bloc, not merger’. ‘How will the bloc manifest itself? For the moment, principally through reciprocal information.

Our allies will keep us up to date on that which concerns the Soviet Union, and we will do the same thing on that which concerns the Comintern’.19 In his view, the bloc should exclude those who capitulated and recanted: capitulationist sentiment ‘will be inexorably and pitilessly combatted by us’.20

Gol’tsman had relayed the opinion of those in the Soviet Union that participation in the bloc by the Right Opposition was desirable, and that formation of the bloc should be delayed until their participation could be secured. Trotsky reacted against this suggestion: ‘The allies’ opinion that one must wait until the rights can easily join does not have my approval . . . .’

Trotsky was impatient with what he considered passivity on the part of the Right Opposition. ‘One struggles against repression by anonymity and conspiracy, not by silence’.21 Sedov then replied that the bloc had been organized. ‘It embraces the Zinovievists, the Sten-Lominadze group, and the Trotksyists (old “—”)’22 ‘The Safarov-Tarkhanov group has not yet formally entered—they have a very extreme position; they will enter soon.’

Ironically, back in the Soviet Union, the leaders of the bloc were being rounded up by the police at this precise moment. Ivan Smirnov and those around him (including the economist Preobrazhensky) had been arrested ‘by accident’. It seems that a provocateur in their midst had denounced them on a separate matter. Moreover, Zinoviev and Kamenev had been arrested and deported for knowing about the oppositional Ryutin platform and not reporting it to the authorities.

Although these events certainly disrupted the bloc, Sedov was not despondent. He was sure that the police had found no documents or ‘Trotskyist literature’ on Smirnov, and while ‘the arrest of the “ancients is a great blow, the lower workers are safe’.23

At about this time, Trotsky attempted to contact his ‘lower workers’ directly. During a brief stay in Copenhagen, he handed a letter to an English supporter named Harry Wicks who was to convey it to oppositionists in Russia. The letter began: ‘I am not sure that you know my handwriting. If not, you will probably find someone who dies’.

Trotsky went on to call upon loyal oppositionists to become active: ‘The comrades who sympathize with the Left Opposition are obliged to come out of their passive state at this time, maintaining, of course, all precautions’. (emphasis Trotsky’s) He went on to give names and addresses of safe contacts in Berlin, Prague, and Istanbul to whom communications for Trotsky could be sent, and then concluded, ‘I am certain that the menacing situation in which the Party finds itself will force all the comrades devoted to the revolution to gather actively about the Left Opposition’.24

It is clear, then, that a united left oppositional bloc was formed in 1932. In Trotsky’s opinion, the bloc existed only for the purposes of communication and exchange of information, and from the evidence, it is clear that Trotsky envisioned no secret ‘terrorist’ role for the bloc, as Moscow would charge four years later.

There is also reason to believe that after the decapitation of the bloc (through the removal of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, and others), the organisation included mainly lower level, less prominent oppositionists: followers of Zinoviev, but not Zinoviev himself.

Finally, it seems that Trotsky attempted to maintain direct contact with the allies’. The seize and strength of the 1932 bloc cannot be determined and one does not know how threatening it was to the regime. In any case, events would show that both Trotskyists and Stalinists took it seriously.

Aside from the bloc, Trotsky was pursuing another strategy in these months. During the autumn of 1932 he had written to his son Sedov that it would be strategically important to offer to ‘cooperate with the regime in power’ in order not to alienate potential supporters within the Stalin apparatus.25 In March 1933 Trotsky made a final attempt to ‘cooperate’ with Moscow by magnanimously offering to return to the Moscow leadership.

Three days after his ‘G. Gurov’ article breaking with the KPD, Trotsky made his formal offer to return to the Politbureau leadership under certain conditions. He made his proposition in a remarkable secret letter sent to the Politbureau on 15 March.26Trotsky’s letter was based on his perception that economic catastrophe was overwhelming the party leadership which now needed the support and participation of all factions in order to rebuild the party and maintain power.

‘I consider it my duty to make one more attempt to appeal to the sense of responsibility of those who presently lead the Soviet state. You know conditions better than I. If the internal development [of the country] proceeds further on its present course, catastrophe is inevitable’.

Trotsky referred to the Politbureau to his recent articles in his Byulleten’ oppozitsii for his analysis. He cited Hitler’s recent victory in Germany as evidence of the bankruptcy of Comintern policy and asserted that disasters like that had led to a ‘loss of confidence in the leadership’. ‘Chto nado sdelat’?’ What was needed was a ‘rebirth of the party organisation’ in order to reestablish confidence, and the Left Opposition was willing to cooperate.

Some of you will say, Trotsky mused, that the Left Opposition merely wants a path to power and is offering to cooperate only to get back inside the leadership. However, the question, Trotsky replied, is not power [!] for this or that faction but rather the survival of the workers’ state and international revolution for many years:

Only open and honest cooperation between the historically produced fractions, fully transforming them into tendencies in the party and eventually dissolving into it, can in concrete conditions restore confidence in the leadership and resurrect the party.

Trotsky then promised that a returning Left Opposition would not persecute any party members who had opposed it in the past.

After describing the conditions which demanded the return of the opposition, Trotsky made the remarkable offer. Alluding to the platform of the Left Opposition, he insisted:

Renunciation of this programme is of course out of the question . . . But concerning the manner of presenting and defending this programme before the Central Committee and the party, not to mention the manner of putting it into effect, there can and must be achieved a preliminary agreement with the goal of preventing shocks or splitting.

Trotsky thus proposed that the Left Opposition be allowed to return to the leadership as a ‘tendency’ within the party, and insisted that his group would not publicly renounce its critique and programme. He was, however, leaving the door open for a deal under which agitation for this programme could be held in abeyance for an indefinite period.

Trotsky was willing to re-enter the leadership without the usual recantation but with the suggestion that for the sake of party unity he would refrain from criticism. This was a new proposal. Previously, he had demanded unlimited freedom of criticism for the opposition within the party, but now he was making oppositional criticism conditional on an ‘agreement’ to be worked out.

The contradiction with Trotsky’s previous conditions and demands explains the secrecy of the letter.28 Unlike his previous open letters to the Soviet leadership, this epistle was never released or published by Trotsky.29 He concluded the letter by informing the Politbureau that they were receiving the only copy of the document. This would leave the Politbureau ‘free to choose the means’ to begin discussions.

The 12 March article KPD or New Party? and the 15 March secret letter were interrelated. First, Trotsky may have thought that his call for a new party in Germany would put pressure on the Moscow leadership, which would conceivably opt to take Trotsky back rather than face a split in the Comintern. Second, the secret letter to the Politbureau also helps to explain why he wrote the 12 March article under a pseudonym.

Pending a reply to his 15 March offer, Trotsky was not yet committed to the Fourth International and the pseudonym would allow him later to deny that he had broken with the Comintern parties. Such ‘deniability’ would have been important to him if Moscow had responded favourably to his offer to return. In such a case, Trotsky’s restored position in the Moscow leadership would have been inconsistent with a call to break with the KPD and it would have been necessary to disavow ‘G. Gurov’.

Trotsky’s delay in breaking with the other parties of the Comintern (including the Bolsheviks) can thus be partially explained. After March, he was waiting for Moscow to answer his secret letter before committing himself publicly to a Fourth International. As much as waiting for the Comintern to admit its mistakes and reform itself, Trotsky delayed his break with Moscow in order to keep his personal options open.

A month and a half later, Trotsky despaired of receiving a reply from the Politbureau. On 10 May 1933 he set the Politbureau an angry coda to the March letter, which he entitled Explanation.30 This short statement began by noting that the Politbureau had only replied to him with silence.

He stressed again the danger facing the Bolshevik regime and pointedly warned that the regime could fall because of the mistakes committed by the Stalin faction. He then ominously served notice on the Politbureau that he now felt free to agitate among the lower ranks of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

‘We are sending this document [the March letter plus the May explanation] to responsible workers in the belief that among the blind, the careerists, and the cowards, there are honest revolutionaries from whose eyes one cannot hide the real state of things . . . We call upon these honest revolutionaries to make contact with us. Seek and ye shall find’.

The 10 May Explanation marked the end of Trotsky’s attempts to return ‘legally’ to the Moscow leadership. The disaster in Germany, the clumsy economic policy of the apparatus, and finally Stalin’s refusal to negotiate with him convinced Trotsky that any kind of cooperation with the Stalinist faction was impossible.

But his 15 July article It is Necessary to Build Communist Parties and an International Anew was still two months in the future. Why did he further delay his total break with the Bolsheviks and the Comintern?

While simple indecision was certainly part of the answer, it may well have been that Trotsky felt that the 1932 bloc still offered possibilities short of a total break with the Comintern. As we have seen, Zinoviev and Kamenev had been expelled from the party and exiled in October 1932 for their knowledge of the Ryutin platform.

In an article on their expulsion dated 19 October 1932, Trotsky had taken a generally soft, sympathetic, and conciliatory attitude toward the two leaders. (They were, after all, still members of the ephemeral bloc.) Their expulsion from the party and their lack of recantation still put them in Trotsky’s camp, as he saw it.31

Any hopes that Trotsky entertained about the viability of the bloc were shattered in May 1933. Fewer than 10 days after Trotsky appended his May ‘Explanation‘ to the secret letter, he learned that Zinoviev and Kamenev had capitulated to Stalin, recanted their sins and repledged their loyalty to the Stalinist faction. Their departure from the opposition embittered Trotsky.

In a 23 May article he described the two as pitiful, tragic, and subservient.32 On 6 July he rallied against them once again and denounced their capitulation in strong terms.33 The leaders (if not the lower workers) of the bloc were gone.

Both of Trotsky’s non-public strategies were now in ruins. The Politbureau had ignored his offer to return and the recantations of Zinoviev and Kamenev had decapitated the 1932 bloc. The options which Trotsky had sought to keep open were now closed and he could no longer hope for a return to Moscow in the near future. Nine days after his bitter article against Zinoviev, he penned the fateful 15 July article breaking with the mainstream Communist parties and the Comintern.

There was no longer any point in remaining ‘captive to one’s own formula’. The party which one month before Trotsky had sought to rejoin ‘no longer exists’ and was now incapable of reform. It is almost as if Trotsky equated reform of the party with his return to it.

There was more to Trotsky’s life in exile than theorising and publishing. Taking the formation of the Fourth International as a case study, one can see that his partisan activities affected the nature and timing of his theoretical assertions. Indeed, the failure of Trotsky’s secret political strategies was a major component in his decision to break with the Comintern and to go it alone.

His conspiratorial machinations were not only factors in the decision, but they were important and perhaps better account for the four-month delay in breaking with Moscow than do his public explanations.

It seems reasonable to suppose further that Trotsky’s activities were grist to the mill of those hard-line Moscow politicians who favoured repression of the opposition. His activities could not but have provided political ammunition for those in the Kremlin who demanded stern measures.

Trotsky’s secret letters to followers in the Soviet Union, his organisation of the 1932 bloc, his formation of the Fourth International, his call for the overthrow of the party leadership by force, and his continued opposition to Comintern policies (particularly to the Popular Front) later made it easy for hard-liners to portray Trotsky as a devious and ‘unprincipled’ plotter who was scheming to return, forming conspiracies, and opposing communist parties both politically and organisationally.

In looking back over Soviet history since 1933, Trotsky’s activities and writings’ might at first seem pointless and irrelevant. Indeed, there is considerable pathos in his actions and writings. After years in exile, he still wrote as if he were part of the leadership. In criticizing the first Five-Year Plan he often used the first person:

. . .we have not entered socialism. We have far from attained mastery of the methods of planned regulation. We are fulfilling only the first rough hypotheses, fulfilling them poorly, and with our headlights not yet on.34

With hindsight, his attempts to organise secret blocs and his offers to return to Moscow seem sad. Following Deutscher and others, Alec Nove observed ‘how few were his followers, how politically ineffective, even meaningless, were his eloquent, if sometimes dogmatic words’.35

But hindsight can be misleading. Bolshevik party history showed how quickly political fortunes could change. At the end of 1916 Lenin and his circle of expatriates must certainly have seemed dubious candidates to rule the Russian Empire, but war, social conflict, and political paralysis quickly changed the situation.

The social and political upheavals of the 1930s combined with the fascist threat of war offered the possibility of a similarly fluid and dynamic situation. Stalin’s removal and Trotsky’s return did not seem so far-fetched to either of them.

It seems that the Stalinists took the possibility quite seriously and never relaxed their pressure on Trotsky and Trotskyism. The Stalinist press constantly vilified Trotskyism as the ‘vanguard of counterrevolution’. Trotsky’s mail to the USSR was intercepted and his entourage was infiltrated by Stalinist agents.36 Secret police officer Yakov Blyumkin was shot simply for meeting Trotsky abroad.37

Later, in 1936, the 1932 bloc became the evidential base for the Moscow show trials and the massacre of Trotskyists in the Ezhov Terror which accompanied them.38 In the Spanish Civil War, hard-pressed Spanish and Russian communists took the trouble to round up and shoot Trotskyists. The Soviet government put continuous pressure on the governments of Norway, Belgium, France, and Mexico in an attempt to deny Trotsky an exile sanctuary or base of operations.

Finally, in 1940, with war on the horizon, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico. Stalin thus made sure that history would not repeat itself. In whatever crisis that might follow, there would be no brilliant exiled revolutionary personality to return home in a sealed train as Lenin had done in 1917.

University of California, Riverside

* The author is grateful for a research grant from the University of California, Riverside’s Academic Senate Committee on Research.

Notes
1 The Trotsky Papers (Exile Correspondence), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 10248, 4777 show Trotksy’s discussions with his son on such questions. Robert H. McNeal, ‘Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism’ in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, (New York, 1977) pp. 30-52, analyses Trotsky’s changing theoretical evaluation of Stalinism.

See also the summary in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. Trotsky: 1929-1940, (New York, 1963) pp. 172-5.2 Most writers on Trotsky in exile have concentrated on his writings rather than his political activities.

See Alec Nove, ‘A Note on Trotsky and the “Left Opposition” 1929-31′, Soviet Studies, Vol. 29, No 4, (October, 1977) pp. 576-89; Richard B. Day, ‘Leon Trotsky on the Problems of the Smychka and Forced Collectivisation’, Critique, No. 13, 1981, pp. 55-68; Warren Lerner, ‘”The Caged Lion”; Trotsky’s Writings in Exile’, Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. 10, (1977), pp. 198-203; Samuel Kassow, ‘Trotsky and the Bulletin of the Opposition’, Ibid., pp. 184-97; Siegfried Bahne, ‘Trotsky on Stalin’s Russia’, Survey, No. 41, (1962), pp. 27-42.

Exceptions include Jean van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Cambridge, Mass., 1978 and Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. op. cit.

3 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit. pp. 198-200; Michel Dreyfus, ‘Trockij dall’ opposizione di sinestra ai fondamenti di una nuova internazionale (1930-1935)’, Ponte, Vol. 36, No. 11-12 (1980), pp. 1316-31; Jean van Heijenoort, ‘How the Fourth International Was Conceived’, in Joseph Hansen, et. al, Leon Trotsky: The Man and His Work, (New York, 1969), p. 62; George Breitman and Bev Scott, eds., Writings of Leon Trotsky [1933-34], (New York, 1975), p. 10 (hereafter WLT [1933-34]).

4 ‘Tragediya nemetskogo proletariata’, Byullenten’ oppozitsii, (hereafter, BO) No. 34, pp. 7-11 (dated 14 March 1933); ‘KPG ili novaya partiya?’, Ibid., pp. 12-13 (dated 29 March 1933); ‘Krushenie germanskoi kompartii i zadachi oppozitsii’ Ibid., pp. 13-17 (dated 9 April 1933); ‘KPD or New York? (I)’, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932-1933], New York, 1972 (hereafter WLT [1932-1933], pp. 137-9 (dated 12 March 1933: not the same article as ‘KPG ili novaya partiya?’ cited above).

5 ‘KPD or New Party? (I)’, WLT [1932-33], p. 137.

6 Ibid., p. 138.

7 BO, No. 34, p. 15.

8 ‘Nuzhno stroit’ zanovo kommunistcheskie partii i International’, BO, No. 36-37, p. 21. (dated 15 July 1933).

9 ‘Nel’zya bol’she ostavat’ sya v odnom “Internationale” so Stalinym, Manuil’skim, Lozovskim, i Ko’, BO, No. 36-37, p. 24. (dated 20 July 1933).

10 Ibid.

11 ‘Klassovaya priroda sovetskogo gosudarstava’, BO, No. 36-37, pp. 1-12 (dated 1 October 1933) In the Moscow purge trials of 1936-38, Prosecutor Vyshinsky would quote from this article as evidence that Trotsky advocated the violent overthrow of the Soviet government.

12 The editors of the Writings of Leon Trotsky see the 1 October article as a qualitative evolution in Trotsky’s thinking, see WLT [1933-34], p. 10, Jean van Heijenoort, however, correctly notes that the ‘perspective of reform was definitely abandoned’ in July. (‘How the Fourth International Was Conceived‘, op. cit. p. 62.)

13 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit. pp. 205-7.

14 ‘For New Communist Parties and the New International’, WLT [1933-34], pp. 26-27 (dated 27 July 1933).

15 See ‘The German Decision Against a New Party’, Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement (1929-1933), (New York, 1979). pp. 218-9 (dated 19 March 1933); ‘We Must Have a Decision on Germany’, Ibid., pp. 223-5 (dated 3 April 1933).

16 Sedov’s address book contained the exile addresses of Trotskyists in the USSR. Trotsky Papers, 15741. The Exile Correspondence section of the Trotsky Papers contains copies of such letters.

17 See Trotksy’s account of these difficult communications in The Dewey Commission, The Case of Leon Trotsky, (New York, 1937), pp. 128-32, 261-6, 271-3. This volume is the transcript of the 1937 Commission of Inquiry chaired by John Dewey which investigated the charges made against Trotsky at the 1933-37 Moscow show trials. Trotsky participated willingly in the inquiry.

18 Trotsky Papers, 15821. Unlike virtually all Trotsky’s other letters (including even the most sensitive) no copies of these remain in the Trotsky Papers. It seems likely that they have been removed from the Papers at some time.

Only the certified mail receipts remain. At his 1937 trial, Karl Radek testified that he had received a letter from Trotsky containing ‘terrorist instructions’, but we do not know whether this was the letter in question.

19 Trotsky Papers, 13095 and 10107. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. See also Pierre Broue, ‘Trotsky et le bloc des oppositions de 1932′, Cahiers Leon Trotsky, No. 5, Jan.-Mar. 1980), pp. 5-37 for background on the bloc.

Included in file 13095 is a 1937 note from Trotsky’s secretary van Heijenoort which shows that Trotsky and Sedov were reminded of the bloc at the time of the 1937 Dewey Commission but withheld the matter from the inquiry.

20 Trotsky was always bitterly opposed to those who capitulated to Stalin or who recanted their opposition. He wrote such persons off completely.

21 Trotsky Papers, 13095. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. Alec Nove has shown that while there were some differences, Trotsky’s critique of Stalin’s industrialisation and collectivisation plans resembled that of Bukharin and the right. (Nove, A Note on Trotsky and the “Left Opposition“, op. cit. pp. 576-84).

Indeed, Trotsky’s spirited defence of the smychka and rural market relations, his criticism of the ultra-leftist campaign against the kulaks, and his advocacy of planning on the basis of ‘real potentials’ were similar to the strictures of Bukharin’s ‘Notes of an Economist‘.

See, for example, Trotksy’s ‘Problemy razvitiya SSSR’, BO, No. 22, pp. 1-15 and ‘Sovetskoe khozyaistvo v opasnosti’, BO, No. 31, pp. 2-13. (For another view which sees continuity in Trotsky’s critique from the 1920s to the 1930s see Day, Trotsky on the Problems of the Smychka.)

In the light of the apparent similarities between his and Bukharin’s critiques, Trotsky was anxious to maintain the separate identity of the Left Opposition. He wrote in 1932 that although ‘practical disagreements with the Right will hardly be revealed . . . it is intolerable to mix up the ranks and blunt the distinctions’. (WLT Supplement (1929-1933), p. 174).

In a secret letter to his son about the 1932 bloc, he warned Sedov not to ‘leave the field to the rights’ (Trotsky Papers, 13095). Despite Trotsky’s efforts, Moscow hard-liners were able to portray Trotsky as a scheming ‘unprincipled’ oppositionist and to denounce ‘Left-Right’ conspirators at the Moscow show trials.

22 Trotsky Papers, 13095 (excision of word in original document). Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. Shortly thereafter, Trotsky wrote cryptically that ‘As far as the illegal organisation of the Bolshevik-Leninists is concerned, only the first steps have been taken toward its reorganisation.’ WLT [1932-33], p. 34.

23 Trotsky Papers, 4782. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library.

24 Trotsky Papers, 8114. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. See also The Case of Leon Trotsky, pp. 274-5.

The editors of WLT claim that the letter was intended to help Wocks’ credibility among Russian Trotskyists in London, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932], (New York, 1973), p. 328 but the archival copy contains a notation which shows that the letter’s intended destination was the USSR.

25 Trotsky Papers, 10248 and T-3485. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library.

26 Trotsky Papers, T-3522. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. See also WLT [1932-33] p. 141-3.

27 Hard-liners in the Moscow leadership must have noted and argued that Trotsky’s proposal that his “fraction” retain is distinctive programme after readmission to the party ran counter to Lenin’s famous 1921 ban on factions and factional platforms. (On Party Unity, adopted at the X Congress in 1921).

28 Without revealing his offer to Moscow, Trotsky wrote that ‘mutual criticism . . . may have a different character depending on the extent to which it is consciously prepared by both sides and in what organisational framework it takes place’. (‘Nuzhno chestnoe vnutripartiinoe soglashenie’, BO, No. 34, p. 31, dated 30 March 1933).

These cryptic remarks may have been published in order to prepare his followers for Moscow’s possible acceptance of Trotsky’s proposal to make criticism by the opposition conditional and restricted.

29 For an example of the more common ‘Open Letter’, see Trotsky Papers, T-3423.

30 Trotsky Papers, T-3522. Quoted by permission by the Houghton Library. On the last page of the July issue of Byullenten’ oppozitsii, Trotsky referred vaguely to the 15 March letter to the Politbureau.

While mentioning neither his offer to defer the opposition programme nor his May ‘Explanation’, Trotsky claimed somewhat inaccurately that the March letter simply repeated his long-standing offer to return to the Bolshevik party ‘under conditions guaranteeing us the right to defend our views’, see ‘Pochtovyi yashchik’, BO, No. 35, p. 22.

31 ‘Stalintsky prinimayut mery’, BO, No. 31, pp. 13-18 (dated 19 October 1932).

32 ‘Zino’ev i Kamenev’, BO, No. 35, pp. 23-24 (dated 23 May 1933).

33 ‘Zinoviev on the Party Regime’, WLT [1932-33]. p. 286 (dated 6 July 1933).

34 ‘Sovetskoe khozyaistvo v opasnosti!’, BO, No. 31, pp. 2-13 (dated 22 October 1932).

35 Nove, A Note on Trotsky, op. cit., p. 589.

36 Van Heijenoort (With Trotsky in Exile, pp. 93-102) maintains that Sedov’s close assistant Mark Zborowski (alias ‘Etienne’) was a Stalinist agent. NKVD defector Alexander Orlov in testimony before a US Senate hearing, also denounced Zborowski and provided detailed information.

See US Senate, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, Testimony of Alexander Orlov, Washington, D.C., 1962. Trotsky Papers, 15765 is a file on the suspected Stalinist agents in Trotsky’s entourage.

37 See Rex Winsbury, ‘Jacob Blumkin in Russia, 1892-1929′, History Today, Vol. 27, No. 11, 1977, pp. 712-18, and Deustcher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., pp. 84-8.

38 See J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938, (New York, 1985), Chapter 5 for a discussion of how the 1932 bloc might have influenced Soviet party politics in 1936.

[ingliz]

The Dewy Commission

Carleton Beals was a member of the committee. He subsequently wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled "The Fewer Outsiders the Better" criticising the Commission as biased and in the hands of a "purely pro-Trotsky clique".


The Fewer Outsiders the Better

by Carleton Beals


NOTE--The American Investigating Committee, composed of liberals and radicals, went to Mexico City to investigate charges of treason, counter-revolution and terrorism preferred against Leon Trotsky by the Soviet Government. The committee announced that its purpose was to arrive at an impartial verdict on Trotsky's guilt or innocence. Carleton Beals was a member of the committee. When he asked Trotsky pointed questions he was told that they were improper. He resigned from the committee. THE EDITOR.


In a little adobe house on a frowzy half-cobbled street of stagnant water, in the Mexican suburb of Coyacan, sits the former great war minister of the Soviet Union, the man who forged the Red army, who led it to the gates of Warsaw, who scourged the enemies of the nascent workers' republic with pitiless iron hand. Here in a foreign land, in a tiny alien hamlet, founded by the Aztecs long before Mexico City, the hero who, a few years ago, shook the destinies of the world, now, hour after hour, he been presenting the fading record of his achievements to a hastily composed commission of Americans who are supposed to investigate into the charges leveled against him in the famous Moscow terrorist trials.


“My English is the weakest part of my defense,” he tells the commission on its preliminary visit to look over the locale where the proceedings were to be held—Trotsky's own residence, loaned to him by the outstanding pistol-toting Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, ramrod of the local Fourth International groups of which Trotsky is the head.


It is a humble place, with double entrance doors, guarded by the police, who frisk all comers. The rooms encircle a sunny patio, with a purple bourgainvillaea, and cluttered with grinning stone idols.


We are introduced to Trotsky. He is nervous, good-humored, vigorous, apparently supreme above defeat; and yet the crumbling walls of the old house, the gloomy reception room with all the street windows bricked up, emphasize the handicaps and futility of his position. Pathos hovers about his pround head with its wildly ruffled gray hair.


“I want to weep,” remakrs one commissioner as we pass out into the frowzy street, “to think of him being here.” All, including Doctor Dewey, chairman of the investigatory commission, join in the chorus of sorrow over Trotsky's fallen star—except one commissioner, who sees the pathos of human change in less personal terms.


Later, at the trial, Trotsky presents himself with a thrust of tiny gray beard, which covers a most phenomenal protruding chin. A beard is part of the equipment of all good revolutionists—Mr. Hearst's cartoons are not entirely bugaboo—for no disguise is better for a conspirator sought by the police than that of shaving off a beard. Trotsky's head and countenance are more Tatar than Jewish, and before the trial is over he proves the old Slavic proverb: “Scratch a Russian, and ----”


At the trial, Trotsky is ever aware that he is on a stage. His answers are uttered now with quiet simplicity, occasionally with laughing condescension; or suddenly he shouts a frothing defiance at the Stalin regime, giving vent to magnificent bursts of eloquence. He is always ready to sacrifice complete honesty of reply to a quip of bon mot that will set the court laughing. But underneath it all he is an embittered man, holding his choleric disposition in check, not always successfully, only by superhuman restraint. Now and then his peevishness turns to open anger in which he shows his sharklike teeth—chiefly at the writer of this article—and then he is injudicious, his soft blue eyes take on a hard glitter, and one realizes it would not be pleasant to be at this man's mercy, and that, unlike the liberal American investigators, he hasn't a shred of interest himself in the civil liberties that they ostensibly are here to defend.


His mind is a vast repository of memory and passion, its rapierlike sharpness dulled a trifle now by the alternating years of overweening power and the shattering bitterness of defeat and exile; above all, his mental faculties are blurred by a consuming lust of hate for Stalin, a furious uncontrollable venom which has its counterpart in something bordering on a persecution complex—all who disagree with him are bunched in the simple formula of G. P. U. agents, people “corrupted by the gold of Stalin.” This is not the first time that the feuds of mighty men have divided and shaken empires, although, possibly, Trotsky shakes the New York intelligentsia far more than he does the Soviet Union.


A Saturday morning, clear, limpid. The great bowl of the Valley of Mexico shimmers in the early sun. The volcanoes rise, lofty, snow-clad, mysterious. The commission is on its way in a body for the opening hearing.


“We must have no smoking,” remarks Suzanne La Follette primly. “Trotsky doesn't like smoking.”


“That is a marvelous opening statement, Doctor Dewey, of the aims and scope of the inquiry,” another commissioner remarks.


“It's not mine. It's the work of the whole commission,” Dewey mumbles in absent-minded fashion.


The Master Comes to Judgement


“All I did,” remarks Suzanne, “was to use the shears a bit. My inveterate editorial instincts.”


“It will be interesting to hear it,” remarked this commissioner, for I had not been consulted or shown the statement, giving out to the press the previous evening.


“You must throw away your chewing gum,” Suzanne tells me sharply. I was trying to cut down on smoking.


Three times Suzanne ordered me to throw away my gum.


In a session five days later, Mr. Trotsky was queried about an article he had written for a magazine. His attorney, Mr. Goldman, broke in:


“I believe, Mr. Trotsky, that in the magazine article you condemned the pernicious American gum-chewing habit.”


“Yes, yes I vas--”


And so I learned why Suzanne wanted me to throw away my gum. I fingered my tie nervously. I had forgotten to ask Suzanne what color Trotsky preferred.


And a this moment my horrified eyes fell upon Frieda Rivera, wife of the eminent painter. She had pushed into a seat right against the railing that separated the court from the spectators and right in front of Trotsky, and not only was she chewing gum, she was repeatedly drawing it out of her mouth in a long thread.


The first sessions opened. Doctor Dewey's statement. Trotsky's statement. Mr. Goldman, Trotsky's lawyer, began the presentation of the defense case.


Mr. Trotsky has rehearsed his answer. He has to be repeatedly warned not to begin answering before Goldman finished each question. The hearings are decorous, restrained. There is, on the part of the rest of the commission, an air of hushed adoration for the master. Suzanne, her head on her hand, gazes steadfastly, her eyes filled with expectant worship. Benjamin Stolberg—mustache, face, hair all one ash-gray color—nods, chuckles, snorts understandingly at each of Trotsky's sallies. Mr. Otto Ruehle, the former Reichstag member, who knows no English, never lets his eyes stray from the master's face. Doctor Dewey stares abstractedly, quizzically, once or twice asks a very, very respectful question. Everyone is so deucedly rapt.


In the back, beyond the high rail, sit the members of the press and the representatives of a few little rump unions under Diego Rivera's thumb, also a group of American Trotskyites, the only ones really meriting tickets to the crowded little room in Trotsky's house—this “public” hearing. The members of the Mexican press and the labor unions stir uneasily. Most of the latter finally solve the problem by going sound asleep, and during the six and a half days of the trial, a chorus of snores comes from the rear row, where a solitary gendarme looks bored and puzzled. A considerable number of Mexicans know no English. No proper provision has been made for translating the proceedings to them, though this would seem an elementary courtesy to those of this Spanish-speaking land in which the trial is being staged. “We can't afford the time,” this commissioner is told. “Besides, we're only interested in the foreign press. The fewer outsiders the better.”


The Omnipresent Publicity Man


There, at the back, towers Diego Rivera. When he is not also snoring, his quick froglike eyes move restlessly, or he busily sketches cartoons. A big peacock plume adorns his large sombrero. His wife provides the fashion note of the trial. Each day she appears in a new Indian costume with magnificent shawls and heavy silver Tarascan jewelry. She rarely sits; she perches. She perches on the arms of chairs, on tables, on the veranda railing.


Also in the back hovers Charlie Walker. Charlie is the press agent of the commission. He watches over the press table with a protective anxious air of a mother hen. He leans over and read the copy of the correspondents; when they whisper to each other, involuntarily he steps forward to try to overhear. The rest of the time he glowers at Kluckhohn, the New York Times correspondent, who has called the commission's efforts a “whitewash.”


Walker is said to be a long-standing and simon-pure Trotskyite. This commissioner has been able to elicit no information from his fellow members as to why, when or how Walker was appointed, except that “he's a good man,” and he seems to be. He has been in Mexico two months ahead of the commission, mostly in constant conference with Trotsky. That seems a bit odd to this commissioner.


Dewey, Stolberg, Suzanne La Follette, the commission's lawyer, John Finerty, along with the secretarial staff, live and eat at Walker's home; they travel to and from the sessions in Walker's or the commission's hired car. Ruehle, a resident of Mexico, has his own apartment. I and my wife were left to shift for ourselves, and live apart from the commission in a hotel, with little knowledge of the inner activities of the group. I hire my own taxicabs, and it is a long way out to Coyacan, and expensive.


The first sessions drones on. This commissioner, who has been told that questions should be limited at this stage, at last is unable to stand the worshipful atmosphere.


“Can you prove that point?” he unexpectedly barks at Trotsky.


The court jerks into startled surprise. Trotsky cranes his neck to look at the interlocutor, who has been put at the end of the table, out of the range of his view.


Trotsky evidently can't prove it. His archives on this point were stolen by the Norwegian Fascists, but he made an affidavit, and various journalists have corroborated this.


The journalists turn out to be Trotsky's own partisans. But Trotsky adds that the G. P. U. press—how he loves to snarl these initials!--proves his point. He offers no citations, though usually he is copious with them.


The commissioner subsides. The glowering eyes of the whole courtroom are upon him, including those of the members.


At the afternoon session, Mr. John Finerty, lawyer for the commission, has arrived by plane. He is a tall, thin, red-brown Irishman, dressed in a red-brown suit, with handsome tie and flowing silk kerchief. He wants to know where one gets a Turkish bath and a masseur. Gastronomically troubled by the altitude, he is living on tomato juice. He is even gentler with Trotsky than the commissioners, and hastens at every opportunity to put “alleged” into Trotsky's mouth, so the latter's record will read correctly; a constant usurping of the attributes of Mr. Goldman, the defense attorney. After each utterance, Finerty's large liquid eyes look about with hopeful expectancy to see how his words have been taken.


The Missing Archives


The afternoon session drones on. Trotsky is telling his life history. Mid-afternoon, the defense announces that this preliminary sketch has been completed.


Dewey asks a few questions. . . .


“Have you any questions, Mr. Stolberg?”


Stolberg gravely asks a few erudite, very respectful interrogations on dialectics and the tactical relations between Trotsky and Lenin. Trotsky understood the questions perfectly. Stolberg had hurried out to the master's house an hour ahead of the other commissioners.


“Have you any questions, Miss La Folette?” Dewey asks.


“Only one.”


Suzanne's question is so formulated as to give Trotsky a chance to spread his plumes.


“The session is declared in recess.”


After recess, Dewey tells Goldman to proceed with his next topic. But, to everyone's surprise, it seems that Ruehle has some questions; Commissioner Beals also has some.


My questions, I announce, are very elementary. I inquire concerning Trotsky's archives. He hems and haws, declines to state their whereabouts—information eagerly sought by the hateful G. P. U.-- but finally offers to disclose the matter in secret session. (He had offered to put them in the hands of the commission.) At any event, the archives are not in Mexico; most of his documents here are merely uncertified copies.


What assurance, I ask, has the commission that if he is guilty he has not, in the months since the Moscow trials, destroyed all the evidence inimical to himself?


The structure of the archives disproves such a thesis; he claims; they reflect the personality of the man. Besides, he will refute all charges with the documents he has brought with him from Europe for that purpose.


I question him on being a German agent, though several other commissioners are buzzing in Dewey's ear and pulling his sleeve, to get me suppressed. Trotsky has refuted the charge by a quotation from Lenin. But Lenin, was he not of Trotsky's own party? Is that good proof?


Don't embarrass the Defendant


Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky admits that he was then charged with a conspiracy with Prussian militarism, but that he then put the salvation of the Socialist state above territorial integrity of Russia—a tactic precisely to be able to better fight Prussian militarism.


“You are charged in the Moscow trials with conspiring with the German Nazi government and the Japanese government to sacrifice territory of the Soviet Union in order again to return to power. It is not logical to suppose that you would again consider your right to rule and your present brand of Socialism of greater importance than the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union?”


“I would be only a cheap adventurer,” exploded Trotsky, and he launched into a long-winded discussion of how he believed the only method of overthrowing Stalin was through the education of the workers.


Again this commissioner find himself the cynosure of glowering eyes. In the back of the room, my wife hears Diego Rivera telling his labor cronies, who have not understood the sharp interchange: “That is Carleton Beals. He's a G. P. U. agent.”


The session is adjourned. Stolberg retires into a back room, biting his mustache furiously.


“Don't you feel that my questions were necessary?” I ask him gently.


“Yes, yes, of course,” replied Ben. “But Trotsky answered them badly. That about the archives not being here. The Times man will snap that up—only copies--”


“You put fine questions,” the commission choruses to me. “But we have to get together and agree on questions. Mr. Finerty wishes it definitely understood that the commissioners' questions shall rfer to matters of fact only. Your questions about Brest-Litovsk were entirely out of place at this time. Later on, of course----”


The trial had its poignant moments. Trotsky told vividly of the persecution of his family—all of them apparently engaged in secret political activities—how his sister committed suicide in Paris because the Soviets withdrew her citizenship. Trotsky's eyes were filled with moisture, and it was one of the few times he did not burst into a diatribe against Stalin and the G. P. U. agents. At my side, Stolberg was furiously scribbling on a pad in a frame of sketched flowers, “I want to bawl—I want to bawl--” During the recess following this scene, the commissioners hotly berated Stalin's persecutions; Dewey was especially wrothful.


Saturday and Sunday the other commissioners consulted the procedure to be followed in the trial. This commissioner was not advised. Miss La Follette, the secretary, says she called him at his hotel Sunday morning, but he was there all day and received no telephone call and found no message.


Monday I surprised the court with an independent statement of my position and what I considered the proper aims of our work—that I had no connections with either Trotsky or the Stalin faction, that our work should not be improperly utilized by either. I pointed out a technical mistake in Dewey's opening statements, indicated my disagreement on various points.


Dewey leaped to his feet to declare that I had arrived in Mexico City after commission's statement had been prepared and that there had been no opportunity to show it to me. The truth was that I had been in Mexico, in touch with the commission, two days before the opening sessions, during which time the Dewey statement had been given to the press.


Mr. Finerty leaped to his feet, as usual, to do Goldman's work for him; to attack me for my correction of the commission's statement on the matter of Trotsky's extradition. I merely replied that I was not interested in being a party to the commission's errors.


At the afternoon session, Dewey read an apology for the rest of the commission. I replied that I was not concerned about the commission having ignored me, but merely hoped that it would still accept my constructive suggestions..


At the recess of the morning's session, I was informed by the rest of the commission that it had decided to abandon the original plan to take up the various aspects of the case topically and cross-examine on each section of the evidence, general cross-examination to come later. There was no time for such a method, I was informed, and so Goldman would present his defense in toto. Thereupon each commissioner was to draw up a line of cross-examination to be submitted to Mr. Finerty. Commissioners were to ask only such questions as fitted the scheme of the cross examination—preferably through Mr. Finerty—which arose in their minds at the moment.


The Examiner's Helping Hand


I had not been consulted regarding the original form of the procedure, nor was I even told of the sequence of topics, which was making it difficult to prepare any sort of intelligent examination of Trotsky on my part. The new plan quite smothered my liberty of action on the commission. But worse than that, it would defeat honest investigation. We could not run the investigation like a railroad train—on schedule. By leaving the entire cross-examination until the end, the original defense of Trotsky would be lost sight of, the points at issue dulled and forgotten, even with the best of note-taking. No transcript of the trial was to be available until long after the sessions ended. This made our work very blind, and it also made it impossible to guarantee a correct record. Nor was I content to let Mr. Finerty handle all the cross-examination. He had already shown himself pathetically gentle with Trotsky, he had hastened to put favorable words into Trotsky's mouth, and seemed to have little grasp of the case.


Despite the limitation put on our questioning, I did, as did also other members of the commission, ask a few questions. There were literally hundreds of queries that, as the case dragged on, I felt should be asked. But to have done so would merely have made me a nuisance in the eyes of the commission, invariably hostile toward my line of questioning, which almost invariably they sought to interrupt. Once, at a sharp interrogatory of Trotsky, Ruehle shuddered at my elbow “Sehr schade! Sehr schade!” How sad! How sad that I should speak in a peremptory tone to the master! Thereafter, every time I asked a question, Ruehle would writher in his seat and emit a series of low groans, like a man in pain.


The Pink-Tea-Party Trial


For five and a half days, Goldman presented Trotsky's defense. Late Friday morning, Finerty began his cross-examination. It consisted that first day, of a confused and elementary cross-examination of Trotsky on the history of the Russian revolution. When he got through, Trotsky positively had wings on his shoulders. A handful of questioned were asked Trotsky on terrorism and the one-party system. Several questions were asked regarding Piatakov's supposed trip to Oslo to see Trotsky. The Romm case was ignored completely. Neither the details presented by Trotsky in his defense nor the numerous crucial points of the transcript of the Moscow trials were adequately examined. For all practical purposes, Finerty merely continued Goldman's defense of Trotsky; he filled in the gaps left by Goldman in Trotsky's defense.


It must have been somewhat disillusioning, even to Trotsky. His table was piled high with books and papers which had not been presented in his defense, but which, apparently, he had expected to find useful in refuting the cross-examination. He had practically no use for any of this material.


The commission itself became alarmed at the banality and pointlessness of Finerty's questioning. At a recess that afternoon, the various members of the commission rushed up to me. “For God's sake, Carleton, ask some questions. This is terrible. The man doesn't have any background. He's getting nowhere.”


“Why should I ask questions?” was my rejoinder. “The ones I have do not fit into the arbitrary scheme the commission has accepted for the cross-examination. I do not wish to give questions to Finery to have him garble them.” Even Trotsky's official translator came to me to get me to ask some questions with some real import, and later, in the courtroom, passed me several good ones. The whole atmosphere of the trial had become that of a chummy clubroom, a pink-tea-party with everyone uttering sweet platitudes.


The day was now waning and there would be only half a day on the morrow to get at the truth of falsity of Trotsky's five and a half days of defense. But I was not to be a party even to that half day. Under the repeated urging of the commission, which had hitherto been so hostile to my questioning, I decided to jump into the arena once more with a line of questioning to show Trotsky's secret relations with the Fourth International, the underground contacts with various groups in Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union. Trotsky, of course, had steadfastly denied having had any contacts whatsoever, save for half a dozen letters, with persons of groups in Russia since about 1930. This was hard to swallow.


To lay the basis for this questioning, I had to go into Trotsky's previous secret relations with the outside revolutionary groups when he was a part of the Soviet state. I quizzed him on the secret activities of Borodin in Mexico in 1919-20.


The result was a violent explosion. Trotsky called my informants liars, and completely lost his temper. My informant, among others, I advised Trotsky, was Borodin himself.


Doctor Dewey hurriedly lifted the session. A junta of the commission was called to take me to task for my questions. Mr. Finerty declared that no commissioner could ask questions on the basis of unproved facts. Doctor Dewey declared that the commission had insisted Trotsky provide the proof of all his assertions. As a matter of fact, Trotsky for hours had been leaving charges of Moscow gold against everyone who disagree with him; frenziedly he accused all such of being G. P. U. agents. There was a touch of paranoia to it. The commission had never once asked him for the proof of such statements, and I was not going to be the one put in the position of challenging them. And so, now, once more, Mr. Finerty was eagerly doing Mr. Goldman's job for him.


Avoiding the Tight Spots


I mildly suggested to the commission that my word was a good as Trotsky's. I was willing to go on the stand myself if that would simplify matters. I had published the record of Borodin's activities in Mexico years ago; I could produce other witnesses. But it was all too patent that the commission would not tolerate anything that might put Trotsky in a tight spot. I finally told Mr. Finerty that, whatever the nature of my questions, I could not be accused, as he could, of being Mr. Trotsky's lawyer instead of the lawyer of the commission.


“Mr. Beals,” he raged, “henceforth our relations will be purely official, not personal.”


“they shall not even be official,” I answered. “Either you cease to be lawyer of this committee or I leave the commission.”


Suzanne burst into tears. “This is a great historical occasion, Carleton; don't mar it. Tell Mr. Finerty you're sorry.”


With that I left the premises. The commission, alarmed, pattered after me. I was through.


My resignation went in the next morning. Dewey accused me of prejudging the case. This was false. I was merely passing judgment on the commission. He declared that I had not been inhibited in my questioning. He declared that I had the privilege of bringing in a minority report. My resignation was my minority report. How could I judge the guilt or innocence of Mr. Trotsky, if the commission's investigations were a fraud?


As was to be expected, Mr. Trotsky accused me, by insinuation, of being a G. P. U. agent. Slightly bad taste, when I had, months before, wired President Cardenas a plea to give him asylum in Mexico. Trotsky should have been, if innocent, the first to desire that any and every question be asked him, regardless of the consequences.


A Trial That Proved Nothing


The net result of the labors of the commission? No adequate cross-examination, no examination of the Trotsky archives. A scant day and a half of questioning of Trotsky; mostly about the history of the Russian revolution, his relations with Lenin—this with an eye to his defense against Stalin charges—a lot of question on dialectics and a few scattered unorganized question on terrorism and the Piatakov incident. The only new documents of any moment were those covering the alleged Romm and Piatakov contacts with Trotsky. Trotsky had already, in the press, on the platform and in pamphlets, pretty well blown up the Soviet case on those two points. Unfortunately, Romm and Piatakov were not available for further cross-examination, so that little has been gained by such refutation. Trotsky's new documents were not overilluminating. One, for instance, was the sworn statement of a hotel-keeper that a party of five persons had stopped at his establishment on the date Trotsky claimed—no names, no registration, no official passport numbers. Trotsky's party was of six persons, not five. Aside from such matters, the evidence submitted by Trotsky consisted of his published articles and books. These could have been bought in New York or consulted at the public library without the commission having been put to the expense of such a fruitless trip.


Its work is not done. But no amount of fumbling over documents in New York can correct the omissions and errors of its Mexican expedition. This commissioner, on accepting membership, was told that the Mexican commission would include Doctor Beard, John Chamberlain and Louis Adamic. None of them were present on the Mexican scene. I was able to get not satisfaction regarding the future personnel of the larger New York commission, nor how it would be appointed—whether by the commission itself or the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. From the press I learned that seven other commissions were at work in Europe, and that these would send representatives to form part of the larger commission. I was unable to find out how these European commissions had been created, who were members of them. I suspected them of being small cliques of Trotsky's own followers. I was unable to put my seal of approval on the work of our commission in Mexico. I did not wish my name used merely as a sounding board for the doctrines of Trotsky and his followers. Nor did I care to participate in the work of the larger organization, whose methods were not revealed to me, the personnel of which was still a mystery to me.


Doubtless, considerable information will be scraped together. But if the commission in Mexico is an example, the selection of the facts will be biased, and their interpretation will mean nothing if trusted to a purely pro-Trotsky clique.


As for me, a sadder and wiser man, I say, a plague on both their houses.

[Sceptic]

Could someone please explain to me how a socialist government would deal with the issue of procrastination if material reward is not going to be directly proportional to productivity? Procrastination is obviously a self-evident phenomenon in any society amongst a significant proportion of the population or we wouldn't all be posting rubbish on here.

[daft punk]

What Trotsky did was call for civil war in Russia.

Trotsky;
The essential condition of the revolution's victory is the unification of the international revolutionary vanguard under the flag of the Fourth International. The struggle for this banner must be conducted in the Soviet Union, with prudence but without compromise .... The proletariat that made three revolutions will lift up its head one more time. The bureaucratic absurdity will try to resist? The proletariat will find a big enough broom. And we will help it.

I wish you would use proper verifiable quotes with links. This is not on the internet.

However, after 1934, it could be true, he was calling for political revolution to implement democratic socialism. So?

In 1932 when The Stalinists said he was in Copenhagen plotting terrorist acts to overthrow the regime, he was speaking to students, giving a speech called In Defence of October.

And if he was plotting in 1932, why the attempt at reconciliation in 1933?

No, he was loyal to the USSR up to 1933 and after that he concluded that it needed a political revolution in order to achieve socialism.

He was not plotting to restore capitalism, he was trying to prevent that. He failed, and capitalism did get restored, just as he predicted.

Can you summarise he better fewer thing, its too long. I know one person left because he didnt see eye to eye with them.

I think Trotsky did tell a couple of white lies. The reason is because the stuff the Stalinists were saying was 10% true, 90% lies, and that forces Trotsky to tell a couple of porkies to avoid getting sucked into a whole load of shite.

Could someone please explain to me how a socialist government would deal with the issue of procrastination if material reward is not going to be directly proportional to productivity? Procrastination is obviously a self-evident phenomenon in any society amongst a significant proportion of the population or we wouldn't all be posting rubbish on here.

We would close all internet forums

[ingliz]

Can you summarise he better fewer thing

The Dewey commission's investigations were a fraud perpetrated by a pro-Trotsky clique.

[daft punk]

I've been having an interesting debate elsewhere with another (presumably) Stalinist on the Spanish civil war. Well actually the actual Stalinist chickened out of it so someone else was kinda playing devils advocate, arguing both Stalinist and anarchist lines at the same time.

Do you know what happened in May 1937? Stalinists attacked Barcelona, held by the left. The workers there rose up against the attacks as you might expect. The Stalinists sabotaged all the left wing in Spain, sabotaged the revolution. They even admitted it, the French CP publishing a public assurance that socialism was not on the agenda! And one Stalinist writing that is was treacherous to advocate proletarian democracy!

So basically within the republican areas you had an anti-revolutionary government composed of capitalists and Stalinists on the one hand, battling against the POUM, the anarchists and so on on the other.

Stalin wouldn't send any arms at first but in the end he had no choice, so he sent some, but they were not given to the most politically advanced areas!

In the end the Stalinists tried to create a bourgeois army and disarm the workers militias that has spontaneously appeared.

I know you have probably had years of brainwashing, but I find it amazing that there are still Stalinists knocking about.

[ingliz]

sabotaged the revolution

Anarchist and Trotskyist militia refused to reorganise, accept discipline, and become integral units of the popular army.

What else could Negrín have done?

The POUM, acting in cooperation with well-known criminal elements, and with certain other deluded persons in the anarchist organisations, planned, organised and led the attack in the rearguard, accurately timed to coincide with the attack on the front at Bilbao.

In the past, the leaders of the POUM have frequently sought to deny their complicity as agents of a Fascist cause against the People's Front. This time they are convicted out of their own mouths as clearly as their allies, operating in the Soviet Union, who confessed to the crimes of espionage, sabotage, and attempted murder against the government of the Soviet Union.

Copies of La Batalla, issued on and after 2 May, and the leaflets issued by the POUM before and during the killings in Barcelona, set down the position in cold print.

In the plainest terms the POUM declares it is the enemy of the People's Government. In the plainest terms it calls upon its followers to turn their arms in the same direction as the Fascists, namely, against the government of the People's Front and the anti-fascist fighters.

900 dead and 2,500 wounded is the figure officially given by Diaz as the total in terms of human slaughter of the POUM attack in Barcelona.

In the Spring of 1937 an organization called the POUM instigated an armed insurrection in Barcelona against the government of the Republic. Consisting of Spanish Trotskyists and Anarchists, the POUM claimed the revolt was an effort at proletarian revolution and the immediate abolition of capitalism in Spain. The government, whose premier was a Socialist, looked upon the uprising as a stab in the back, as treason in the midst of a war against fascism, and proceeded to crush it. We in the International Brigade did not participate in Spain's internal politics and the POUM putsch did not directly affect our units then fighting at the front, but we considered the counter-measures of the government entirely reasonable.

[daft punk]

Call us old fashioned, but we Trost generally work on the idea that Marxists should carry out revolutions, not sabotage them.

In Spain, the Stalinists werent that numerous, but they had a lot of power because they were getting some arms off Russia. They got Negrin into power because they werent happy that the previous President had refused to repress the socialist POUM.

Trotsky warned that this right-wing approach of the Stalinists would lead to disaster, and it did.

Stalinism is directly responsible for fascism in Germany and Spain coming to power.

Stalin wanted to make sure there was no revolution in Spain, because it might lead to a political revolution in Russia (workers uprising for democratic socialism).

Unfortunately the Trots in Spain deviated from Trotsky's advice, and formed the POUM with some other group. They were still on the left, with the anarchists, but neither was prepared to lead a revolution, but the Stalinists killed them anyway.

good article here if anyone is interested
http://www.socialismtoday.org/102/spain.html

Negrin couldnt have done anything else I guess, because he was a right winger. These militias were spontaneously organised by the working class to fight fascism. They were the most advanced workers and peasants.

wikipedia sums it up:

"Soviet activities in Spain seemed to be focused as much or more on NKVD-directed purges of real or alleged Trotskyists and anarchists within the republican zone as on winning the war against the Phalange"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Negr% ... e_minister

[ingliz]

POUM

You seek to deny the Trotskites' complicity as agents of a Fascist cause, but this time they are convicted out of their own mouths as clearly as their allies, operating in the Soviet Union, who confessed to the crimes of espionage, sabotage, and attempted murder against the government of the Soviet Union.

Copies of La Batalla, issued on and after 2 May, and the leaflets issued by the POUM before and during the killings in Barcelona, set down the position in cold print.

In the plainest terms the POUM declares it is the enemy of the People's Government. In the plainest terms it calls upon its followers to turn their arms in the same direction as the Fascists, namely, against the government of the People's Front and the anti-fascist fighters.

The POUM, acting in cooperation with well-known criminal elements, and with certain other deluded persons in the anarchist organisations, planned, organised and led the attack in the rearguard, accurately timed to coincide with the attack on the front at Bilbao.

Early in May 1937 news reached the front of the fighting in the streets of Barcelona between supporters of the POUM aided by some Anarchists, on the one hand, and Government forces on the other. The POUM, who had always been hostile to unity, talked of "beginning the struggle for working-class power."

The news of the fighting was greeted with incredulity consternation and then extreme anger by the International Brigaders. No supporters of the Popular Front Government could conceive of raising the slogan of "socialist revolution" when that Government was fighting for its life against international fascism, the power of whose war-machine was a harsh reality a couple of hundred yards across no-man's-land. The anger in the Brigade against those who fought the Republic in the rear was sharpened by reports of weapons, even tanks, being kept from the front and hidden for treacherous purposes.

[daft punk]

You seek to deny the Trotskites' complicity as agents of a Fascist cause, but this time they are convicted out of their own mouths as clearly as their allies, operating in the Soviet Union, who confessed to the crimes of espionage, sabotage, and attempted murder against the government of the Soviet Union.

Yeah, and nobody ever makes false confessions when the lives of their family are threatened etc.

As to your pastes about the POUM, you forget that it was the Stalinists who attacked them in the first place.

At least you admit that the Stalinists were opposed to revolution. It's a start. But I don't really believe the POUM leaders were capable of leading a revolution. They told the workers to go back to work after four days in Barcelona. The POUM even entered the government for a bit. They were ex-Trotskyists, in an alliance with some other group Trotsky did not agree with.

You had the chance of a real socialist revolution. The anarchist leaders admitted they could have taken power, but didnt on principle.

You say, a socialist revolution was too risky because it might endanger the fight against fascism.

I say, the Stalinist spent so much time persecuting the left on their own side they forgot to fight the fascists and thus they lost.

And everything was a disaster, exactly as Trotsky predicted if the workers joined up with the capitalists.

The Stalinist refused to arm the most advanced workers. This is a recipe for disaster.

Stalinism was a disaster in Spain just as it was in Germany and later Indonesia to name a few. Plus China before and after WW2.

[ingliz]

They told the workers to go back to work after four days in Barcelona.

No, they did not. The CNT leadership demanded that the workers put down their arms (Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain).

[daft punk]

What I read was that it was both POUM and CNT leaders who told the workers to go back to work. I do not agree with them doing that, they should have been building the revolution not dampening it down. Still, it wasnt anti-revolutionary enough for the Stalinists was it?

[ingliz]

they should have been building the revolution not dampening it down.

Pragmatically;

first win the war, then make the revolution

The POUM put their own revolutionary ambitions before the effort to build a centralised war effort.

The May Riots were the direct consequence of an opportunist 'revolutionary' (objectively counterrevolutionary) agitation within the CNT/FAI carried out by Trotskyist wreckers who, blinded by ideology, collaborated with the fascists in crippling the popular government.

Hitler's ambassador to Franco Spain, Wilhelm von Faupel, admitted that "Franco had confirmed" that the counter-revolutionary events in Barcelona in 1937 were sparked by his own agents who were eager to exploit the divisions between the POUM and the Popular Front (Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War).

[Gw_]

In reply to the original post:

Simply, in the socialist system of society there will be no monetary wealth as there will be no money, as it will be useless in such a system because production will not exist to create money, wealth, capital; it will exist to feed, clothe, heal and help. It is not about being richer than someone else, or having more than someone else. It is about furthering the development of everyone in the most productive, effective and peaceful way as possible. Therefore, there can be no "rich person" or "poor person".

Also, it is important to note that the socialist system of society contradicts the need for a ruling class therefore, the need to have a state will be un-necessary and defunct.

It is also important to note that socialism is socialism. No form of "reform" or styled "social democratic" political theory is socialist, it is inherently anti-socialist, capitalist in nature and only seeks to protract the current way of working and living: that is to prolong a kind of acceptable level of poverty so as to prop-up those that enjoy having their billions while millions die suffering.

Too many misundertandings have arisen thanks to the Soviet Union, North Korea, China and others using the terms "communism", "socialism" and "people's" as white-wash terms in an attempt to give legitimacy to their drives for more power and their own wealth hoarding.

[daft punk]

The May Riots were the direct consequence of an opportunist 'revolutionary' (objectively counterrevolutionary)

Innit great how to Stalinists revolutionary = counter-revolutionary?

You couldnt make it up!

[ingliz]

revolutionary = counter-revolutionary?

Yes!

we could win the war without making the revolution, but we could not make the revolution without winning the war.

Portela could see that Trotsky was the naive idealist, ideologically without stain, but totally out of his depth when it came to politics... Why can't you?

Trotsky era fundamentalmente un intelectual, no era un político. Y esto explica que Stalin, con muchas menos cualidades intelectuales que él, le pudiera vencer, porque Stalin era un político...Sin escrúpulos, sin conciencia, todo lo que se quiera, pero un político. Bueno, pues ésta era la diferencia fundamental entre la ICE y el Bloc. Los trotskistas tenían una visión rígida de las cosas y no se adaptaban, no eran capaces de adaptar su política a la situación del país...".

[daft punk]

The POUM were led by a bunch of cop-outs. Interesting that you say Trotsky was ideologically without stain, seeing as Stalin said Trotsky and his followers were working for capitalist restoration.

They lost the civil war because of what the Stalinists did. The Stalinists were ultimately led by Stalin who ultimately wanted the revolution crushed. Meanwhile, back in Russia, he was busy killing all the socialists there.

[ingliz]

Interesting that you say Trotsky was ideologically without stain

I was being sarcastic.

Of course, he could stand on principle, his absurdly utopian vision of a perfect socialism was never tested. It is a perfect abstraction.

seeing as Stalin said Trotsky and his followers were working for capitalist restoration.

Stalin was correct for all practical purposes.