Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials
§ 172. According to the Definition of the Charge in the August trial, the only purpose of the alleged Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc was the assassination of the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union (ZK 37). In the January trial, terrorism was one of the charges against the alleged parallel center (PR 18). The principal accused in both trials confessed to knowledge of Trotsky’s alleged terrorist instructions and of the existence of various terrorist groups. Following is a partial list of these “terrorist groups”:
1. Zinoviev-Kamenev trial: The Shatskin-Lominadze group; the Gayevsky group; the Esterman group; the Nikolayev-Kotolynov group (or the Rumyantsev-Kotolynov group – Leningrad); the Yakovlev group (Moscow or Leningrad).
2. Pyatakov-Radek trial: The Zaks-Gladneyev group (Zinoviev’s group – Moscow); the Mdivani group (Transcaucasia); the Prigozhin group (Leningrad); the Friedland group; the Byeleborodov group (Rostov-on-Don); the Dityateva group (Tula); the Yurlin group (Urals); the Zeidel group; the Ukraine group; the Kashkin-Nikolayev group (Tomsk); the Khodoroze group (Western Siberia); the Cherepukhin group (Western Siberia).
A number of individual terrorists were also named by the various accused and witnesses. The Prosecutor made no attempt to establish the exact membership of the groups mentioned.
§ 173. It is evident even from this incomplete list of alleged terrorist groups that the alleged conspiracy ramified widely – into Caucasia, Transcaucasia, the Ukraine, Siberia – and involved a large number of people. It is therefore astonishing, assuming that the evidence represents the truth, that it was discovered only after five years (according to several accused it began in 1931), and that during those five years, in spite of “intense activity,” it resulted, according to the records themselves, in precisely one assassination: that of Commissar S. M. Kirov, on December 1, 1934. One is forced to assume, and the records go far to bear out the assumption, that the “intense activity” imputed to the alleged terrorists was chiefly in the line of conversation. Indeed the records contain so much conversation about conversations on terrorism that they are likely to conceal from any but the most careful scrutiny the extreme disproportion between the extent and duration of the alleged terrorist activity, and its concrete result.
More particularly is this true because various “for attempts” are confessed to and are duly characterized by the Prosecutor as “dastardly crimes.” Few details of these alleged attempts are given, and such as are given indicate such feebleness in planning and such want of resolution on the part of the executants as to inspire skepticism rather than conviction. Certainly there is nothing about them in the slightest degree in keeping with the records of certain principal accused, such as Smirnov, leader of the famous Fifth Army during the Civil War and conqueror of Kolchak; Muralov, a leader of the October Revolution in Moscow and former Commander of the Moscow Military area; Mrachkovsky, one of the heroes of the Civil War in the Urals and former head of the Urals Military District; Drobnis, a soldier of the Civil War, twice condemned to death by the Whites and once shot by them and left for dead. These men had records of courage, resolution, and action in the service of the Communist revolution and the Soviet state. It is hardly credible that if they had decided to overthrow the Soviet government through terrorism they would have gone about it in such dilatory and amateurish ways as the alleged preparations for terrorist attempts indicate they used, or that they would have selected such questionable agents as the accused Arnold, for example, whose fantastic testimony concerning his biography takes up many pages of the record of the January trial, and who testified that through his reluctance to sacrifice his own life he twice failed to kill Soviet leaders – Ordjonikidze, Molotov, Eiche, and others – in automobile wrecks. (PR 328-9.)
We have already remarked Vyshinsky’s failure to establish any credible motivation on the part of people who confessed to plans for terrorist attempts which must certainly have cost them their lives. It is one of the outstanding features of both records. According to these records, the principal accused, and the alleged director of their activities, Leon Trotsky, hoped to attain power through the conspiracy. Their agents could hardly hope for anything but death. The Prosecutor grants them no revolutionary motive. The records, therefore, would have been more convincing had he attempted to establish what their motives were.
§ 174. The records would also have been more convincing had the Prosecutor taken the trouble to secure corroboration of the testimony concerning the one murder which allegedly resulted from the alleged terrorist conspiracy.
Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bakayev, and others confessed that the assassination of Kirov was ordered by the united center on direct instructions from Trotsky (e.g., Kamenev, ZK 31-2). As Trotsky pointed out before the Preliminary Commission (PC 484), the Soviet Government had witnesses available who must have been able to corroborate this testimony, if it was true. For on January 23, 1935, the head of the Leningrad GPU and eleven other GPU agents were secretly tried, convicted, and sentenced to from two to ten years at hard labor, on the ground that they “possessed information concerning the preparations for the attempt on S. M. Kirov ... and failed to take the necessary measures.” Why were these men not summoned to tell what they knew about this alleged work of the united TrotskyiteZinovievite terrorist center? Why were Medved and his associates never even mentioned in either the August or the January trial? We must assume that their guilty knowledge was established at their own trial, for the verdict stated that they “took no measures for the timely exposure and prevention” of the plot “although they had every possibility of so doing.” Why, then, did that evidence not lead immediately to the exposure of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite center? One must assume either that the evidence brought out in their trial involved no such center, or that for some inexplicable reason the “intense terroristic activity” of the Trotskyites-Zinovievites was allowed to proceed with impunity for some eighteen months after the Soviet government had knowledge of it – in other words, that the regime placed itself open, in case of a further assassination, to precisely the same criminal charge upon which it had convicted Medved and his associates.
§ 175. The principal accused in both trials testified that they adopted terrorism as a means of coming into power. The testimony of the alleged instigator of the conspiracy by which this end was to be accomplished was neither taken nor asked for. The attitude, past and present, of Leon Trotsky toward individual terrorism as a means to power is highly relevant to the credibility of this charge, on which he was twice convicted without a hearing.
Trotsky’s position is stated in the following passages, among others, from his testimony and his final argument before the Preliminary Commission:
... If we were to be for terror, if we were to be of the opinion that by individual terror we could help the working class in its movement forward, I would proclaim it and appeal to the best elements of the working class to resort to individual terror. Say what is, what is necessary; that is the first rule of my thoughts and my actions. If I say I am against terror it is not because I am afraid of Stalin’s police or any other police; it is only because I am a Marxist, for mass action and not individual terror. (PC 272-3.)
... On the part of an opposition, terror presupposes the concentration of all forces upon preparing acts of terror, with the foreknowledge that every one of such acts, whether successful or unsuccessful, will evoke in reply the destruction of scores of its best men. An opposition could by no means permit itself such an instant squandering of its forces. It is precisely for this, and for no other reason, that the Comintern does not resort to terroristic attempts in the countries of fascist dictatorships. The Opposition is as little inclined to the policy of suicide as the Comintern. (PC 488-9.)
Trotsky stated that he began his active opposition to individual terrorism with an article published in London in 1902, when “the question of terrorism became very important in the Russian revolutionary movement (PC 16). On the origin of this issue he testified:
We had two great parties, the “Narodnaya Volya,” “Will of the People” Party, and the Social Revolutionaries, which based their tactics upon individual terror. All Marxists in Russia began in the historic fight against individual terror. It was not a mystical or religious principle with the Marxists. It was a question of organizing the soul against the monster, of organizing the masses and educating them. Because the terrorist fight was a very glorious page in our revolutionary history, with great sacrifices of the best youth of our people, the Marxists made a terrible fight, ideological fight, against the ideology of terrorism, in order to turn the best elements of the youth to the workers. In this fight between Marxism and terrorism it is the action of the masses versus individual terror, the school which differentiated the strategy of individual terror, and the organized movement. It penetrated our psychology and our literature for decades. (PC 45.)
§ 176. We cite below typical passages from Trotsky’s published writings at various points in his career:
Terrorist work, in its very essence, demands such a concentration of energy upon the “supreme moment,” such an over-estimation of personal heroism, and lastly, such an hermetically concealed conspiracy as ... excluded completely any agitational and organizational activity among the masses... . Struggling against terrorism, the Marxian intelligentsia defended their right or their duty not to withdraw from the working class districts for the sake of tunnelling mines underneath the Grand Ducal and Tsarist palaces. (“The Collapse of Terror and of Its Party,” published in Przeglad Socyal-demokratczny, May, 1909. “Collected Works,” Moscow and Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1926. Vol. IV, pp. 347-8.)
Whether or not the terrorist act, even if “successful,” throws the ruling circles into turmoil, depends on the concrete political circumstances. In any case such turmoil can only be of short duration; the capitalist state is not founded upon ministers and cannot be destroyed with them. The classes it serves will always find new men, the mechanism remains whole and continues its work.
But the turmoil which the terrorist act introduces into the ranks of the toiling masses themselves is far more profound. If it is enough to arm oneself with a revolver to reach the goal, what need is there for the strivings of the class struggle? ... (“Terrorism,” published in Der Kampf, 1911. “Collected Works,” Vol. IV, p. 366.)
In “The Kirov Assassination” Trotsky quoted the above passages from Der Kampf, and said:
To this article which counterposed to terrorist adventurism the method of preparing the proletariat for the socialist revolution, I can add nothing today, twenty-three years later. But if Marxists categorically condemned individual terrorism ... even when the shots were directed against the agents of the Tsarist government and of capitalist exploitation, they will even more relentlessly condemn and reject the criminal adventurism of terrorist acts directed against the bureaucratic representatives of the first workers’ state in history... . (“The Kirov Assassination,” p. 16-17, December 30, 1934. New York: Pioneer Publishers, February, 1935.)
§ 177. In the August trial the Prosecutor cited only one of Trotsky’s writings as substantiating the charge of Terrorism:
Trotsky’s Open Letter to the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. mentioned and its contents falsified by the accused Olberg (§§ 73, 83). We quote from Vyshinsky’s summation:
... in March, 1932, in a fit of counter-revolutionary fury, Trotsky burst out in an open letter with an appeal to “put Stalin out of the way” ... (ZK 127.)
The Prosecutor here repeated the falsification of the accused Olberg. The text of Trotsky’s Open Letter to the C.E.C. of the U.S.S.R. was published in 1932 in many languages and countries. In this letter, which was published in the United States in The Militant (New York) of April 2, 1932, Trotsky called for the removal of Stalin in accordance with Lenin’s last advice. We quote the relevant passage:
Stalin has brought you to an impasse. You cannot come out on the road without liquidating Stalinism. You must trust to the working class, give the proletarian vanguard the possibility through free criticism from top to bottom to review the whole Soviet system and pitilessly cleanse it of the accumulated rubbish. It is time, finally, to fulfill the last urgent advice of Lenin, to remove Stalin.
We see no honest way to interpret this passage as calling for the assassination of Stalin, or to identify the free criticism for which it calls with individual terrorism. Indeed, the “last urgent advice of Lenin” might with quite as much justice be so interpreted. We quote from his so-called testament:
Postscript: Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority... . (“The Real Situation in Russia,” pp. 322-3. Edited by Max Eastman. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.)
We are not aware that the Soviet government has ever discovered anything terroristic about this passage from Lenin.
That Stalin himself puts quite a different construction upon it is clear in the following quotation from a speech of his before the C.C. and the C.C.C. of the C.P.S.U.:
It is said that in the “testament” in question Lenin suggested to the Party Congress that it should deliberate on the question of replacing Stalin and appointing another comrade in his place as General Secretary of the Party. This is perfectly true... . (International Press Correspondence, November 17, 1927.)
Since Lenin’s advice to “remove Stalin” has never been interpreted to imply terrorism, and since Trotsky’s repetition of that advice was not so interpreted for four years after the publication of his Open Letter, the reason for Olberg’s reference to it becomes clear. Sedov’s alleged implication that the words “remove Stalin” were a “diplomatic wording” for a call to assassinate him appeared to provide authority for the Prosecutor’s falsification of this document. We have already held (§ 108) that Olberg’s confession is worthless. Moreover, in our opinion it would be absurd to assume that Trotsky would suggest Stalin’s assassination to the Stalinist Executive Committee of the Soviet Union, in a “diplomatic wording” or otherwise.
§ 178. Summing up in the January trial, Vyshinsky again mentioned “that letter of 1932 in which Trotsky issued his treacherous and shameful call, ‘Remove Stalin.’ “ In addition he cited
... a later document, the Trotskyite Bulletin of the Opposition No. 36-37, of October, 1933, in which we find a number of direct references to terrorism as a method of fighting the Soviet Government... . Trotsky speaks quite frankly about terrorism as a method which already in those years was put on the agenda of the practical activities of the Trotskyites.
In that programmatic article there is a section in which the question is asked: “Can the bureaucracy be removed by peaceful methods?” Trotsky and the Trotskyites regard our Soviet apparatus as a bureaucratic apparatus. In this chapter it is stated:
“Take the important question of how to proceed to reorganize the Soviet state.” ... An opponent of terrorism, an opponent of violence, should have said: Yes, peaceful means are possible on the basis, say, of the constitution.
But what do the Trotskyites say? They say:
“It would be childish to think that the Stalin bureaucracy can be removed by means of a Party or Soviet Congress. Normal, constitutional means are no longer available for the removal of the ruling clique.” (This is what they slanderously call our government.)
“They can be compelled to hand over power to the proletarian vanguard” (they speak of themselves as a vanguard and evidently have in mind a “vanguard” like these gentlemen who engaged in murder, diversion and espionage) “only by force.” (PR 507-8.)
We find that these quotations occur in the original text. However, Vyshinsky omitted those passages which show what Trotsky meant by “force,” and which completely invalidate Vyshinsky’s interpretation. For example:
We must set down, first of all, as an immutable axiom, that this task can be achieved only by a revolutionary party. The fundamental historic task is to create a revolutionary party in the U.S.S.R. from among the healthy elements in the old Party and from among the youth... . Through what ways could it assume power? As early as 1927 Stalin said, addressing the Opposition, “The present ruling group can be eliminated only through civil war.” This challenge, Bonapartist in spirit, was addressed not to the Left Opposition but – to the Party. Having concentrated all the power in its hands, the bureaucracy proclaimed openly that it would not permit the proletariat to raise its head any longer. The subsequent course of events has added great weight to this challenge. After the experiences of the last few years, it would be childish to suppose that the Stalinist bureaucracy can be removed by means of a party or Soviet Congress.
In reality the last congress of the Bolshevik Party took place at the beginning of 1923, the 12th Party Congress. All subsequent congresses were bureaucratic parades. Today even such congresses have been discarded. No normal “constitutional” ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletarian vanguard only by force.
All the hacks will immediately howl in chorus: The “Trotskyites,” like Kautsky, are preaching an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat. But let us pass on. The question of seizing power will arise as a practical question for the new party only when it shall have consolidated around itself the majority of the working class... .
Quite clearly Trotsky in this passage is calling not for individual terrorism but for revolutionary mass action. And equally clearly the Prosecutor, in his partial quotations and his comments upon them, deliberately identifies revolutionary mass action with individual terrorism. The distinction is obvious and historical.
§ 179. One may assume that if Trotsky anywhere at any time had come out for individual terror, the Prosecutor would have quoted him honestly. This he could not do because the fact is that all of Trotsky’s writings on the problem reject individual terror and justify only revolutionary mass action. We therefore find that apart from the evidence in our possession which disproves the testimony connecting Leon Trotsky with the alleged terrorist conspiracy, the charge of individual terrorism is not only not proved but incredible.
§ 180. The charge of sabotage is defined as follows in the official record of the second Moscow trial:
4) that, for the purpose of undermining the economic strength and defense capacity of the U.S.S.R., this center organized and carried out a number of wrecking and diversive acts at certain enterprises and on the railways, which caused loss of human life and the destruction of valuable state property. (PR 18.)
In his closing argument, Vyshinsky traced this alleged sabotage back to the struggle, in 1926, of the Left Opposition bloc of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, against the Stalinist majority of the Party:
The Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc of 1926 was a bloc which turned the edge of its struggle against the cause of socialism in our country and for capitalism. Under cover of false and sometimes outwardly seeming “Left” phrases about “super-industrialization” and so forth, the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang in 1926-27 put forward proposals which, if adopted, would have undermined and broken the alliance between the workers and peasants, would have undermined the foundation of the Soviet state. They put forward such proposals as increasing the pressure on the peasantry, as ensuring “primitive socialist accumulation” by ruining and robbing the peasantry; they advanced a number of demands which if conceded would have broken the bond between town and country and thereby would have made real industrialization utterly impossible. Strictly speaking, these proposals and demands were on a line with the present acts of diversion and wrecking. Strictly speaking, there is only a difference in form between the wrecking and diversive acts of 1926-27 and those of the present time.... These proposals advanced by the then Opposition were merely a special form of the struggle against the Soviet state corresponding to the historical situation at that time. Ten years have elapsed and we see that they have taken to the path of wrecking, the path of destructive work, but in much sharper forms, corresponding to the new conditions, to the conditions of the fierce class struggle against the remnants of the capitalist elements. (PR 471.)
§ 181. The program of the “New Opposition” is available, at least in the United States, to anyone who wishes to compare the text with the Prosecutor’s interpretation of it. It was published in 1928 by Harcourt, Brace and Company (New York), in a book edited by Max Eastman, under the title, “The Real Situation in Russia.” This program discussed the industrial, agricultural, social and political, international and military situation of the U.S.S.R. at that time, under such headings as: The Situation of the Working Class and the Trade-Unions; The Agrarian Question and the Socialist Construction; State Industry and the Building of Socialism; The Soviets; The National Question, etc. It sharply criticized the policies of the majority and submitted certain “practical proposals.” The section under this title in the chapter, “The Agrarian Question,” begins as follows:
In the class struggle now going on in the country, the Party must stand, not in words but in deeds, at the head of the farm hands, the poor peasants, and the basic mass of the middle peasants, and organize them against the exploitative aspirations of the Kulak... .
Agricultural credits must cease to be for the most part a privilege of the well-off circles of the village. We must put an end to the present situation, which permits the savings of the poor, insignificant enough already, to be spent, not for their intended purpose, but in the service of the well-off and middle groups.
The growth of private proprietorship in the country must be offset by a more rapid development of collective farming. It is necessary systematically and from year to year to subsidize the efforts of the poor peasants to organize in collectives. (“The Real Situation in Russia,” pp. 67-8.)
This appears to us more like a proposal for equalization of condition among the peasantry than a proposal to rob them. We note, with reference to the Prosecutor’s statement that the proposals of the Opposition would have “undermined and broken the alliance between the workers and peasants,” that the Opposition program makes that same criticism of the results of the majority’s policies:
The “scissors,” representing the disparity of agricultural and industrial prices, have drawn still farther apart during the last year and a half. The peasant received for his product not more than one and a quarter times the pre-war price, and he paid for industrial products not less than two and two-tenths times as much as before the war. This overpayment by the peasants, constituting in the past year a sum of about a billion rubles, not only increases the conflict between agriculture and industry, but greatly sharpens the class-differentiation in the country. (Ibid., p. 29.)
Without presuming to pass judgment upon the relative merit of Soviet policy and the Opposition’s program at that period, the Commission finds that the Prosecutor, in representing this program as part of a struggle against the Soviet state which ended logically in the sabotage charged against the accused in the January trial, identified political opposition with criminal activity, and the majority of the Communist Party with the Soviet state. That the Stalinist majority itself did not regard this platform as criminal in 1926 and 1927 is evident in the fact that although it expelled the Opposition from the Party, it did not bring criminal charges against the leaders, but on the contrary later reinstated in the Party those who “capitulated,” and even employed some of them, such as Radek, Pyatakov, and Smirnov, in responsible posts.
§ 182. In his testimony, Leon Trotsky stated as follows his attitude toward the economic development of the U.S.S.R.:
... I defend the Soviet economy against the capitalist critics and the Social Democratic reformist circles, and I criticize the bureaucratic methods of the leadership. (PC 248.)
With reference to the industrialization of the Soviet Union, he said:
During the period from 1922 until 1929 I fought for the necessity of an accelerated industrialization. I wrote in the beginning of 1925 a book in which I tried to prove that by planning and direction of industry it was possible to have a yearly coefficient of industrialization up to twenty. I was denounced at that time as a fantastic man, a super-industrializer. It was the official name for the Trotskyists at that time: super-industrializers... .
The march of events showed that I was too cautious in my appreciation of the possibility of planned economy, not too courageous. It was my fight between 1922 and 1925, and also the fight for the five-year plan. It begins with the year 1923, when the Left Opposition began to fight for the necessity of using the five-year plan.
GOLDMAN: And Stalin at that time called you a super-industrialist?
TROTSKY: Yes.
GOLDMAN: He was opposed to the rapid industrialization of the country?
TROTSKY: Permit me to say that in 1927, when I was chairman of the commission at Dnieprostroy for a hydro-electric
station, a power station, I insisted in a session of the Central Committee on the necessity of building up this station. Stalin answered, and it is published: “For us to build up the Dnieprostroy station is the same as for a peasant to buy a gramophone instead of a cow....”
The Five-Year Plan had a long pre-history. It was elaborated, I believe – the beginning of the elaboration was 1926 or even 1925. The first plan was not announced publicly, but presented only to the Politburo. It was a plan in which the first year had a coefficient of nine, the second eight or seven, the last year only four – a declining line of growth. That was the beginning of a terrible fight. I named this plan “The Sabotage of Industry,” not in the criminal sense as here charged, but in the sense that it was an absolutely cowardly conception of the possibilities created by the October Revolution. The second plan, elaborated in 1926, had a general coefficient of nine for all the five years. The Commissioners can find that in the book,
“The Real Situation in Russia,” in our platform. That was the second plan. At that time I fought for the possibility, and I tried to prove the possibility of having a coefficient of twenty – until twenty.... After our criticism, the first plan was rejected by the Politburo. The second, with the coefficient of nine, was confirmed by the Politburo.... The results of the first year showed that we were right. Then they changed the plan....
During the second year the bureaucracy proposed to accomplish the Five-Year Plan in four years. In the Bulletin I protested vehemently. All impractical men – it is very characteristic of impractical men that before they began they did not see the possibilities, but when the possibilities were realized against themselves they were very frightened by the possibilities and then saw no limit. They began, under the whip of the bureaucracy, to raise the coefficients without paying any attention to the living conditions of the workers. They built up factories but no houses for the workers. It was necessary now to have a coefficient of 30 per cent and 35 per cent.
GOLDMAN: What was there to the contention that it was necessary to make haste in order to defend – prepare the Soviet Union against a possible attack?
TROTSKY: I wrote, and it was published and translated in several languages, that this hasty bureaucratic industrialization signified the inevitable accumulation of inner contradictions in industry itself. In the capitalist system, the necessary proportions are reached by competition between different capitalists, capitalist industries and enterprises. But in a planned economy it is necessary to foresee all the necessary proportions. It is not possible to foresee by abstractions. It is necessary to foresee, correct and perfect the plan by the opinion of the people, by the experience of the people, by the degree of satisfaction of its needs, by the proportion between the different industries, the different factories, and even the different sections of the same factories. Nobody built up Socialist economy before us. It is the first experience and the greatest in history. And then I warned more cautiously: “It is not possible to run away with yourselves. You will land in a crisis.” .. .
GOLDMAN: Can you give us an idea, very generally, of the successes of the industrialization in the Soviet Union?
TROTSKY: The successes are very important, and I affirmed it every time. They are due to the abolition of private property and to the possibilities inherent in a planned economy. But they are – I cannot say exactly – but I will say two or three times less than they could be under a regime of Soviet democracy. (PC 245-9.)
Questioned concerning his attitude on collectivization, Trotsky replied:
It was parallel to my attitude toward industrialization, with a certain delay. Our fight for collectivization began a year or eighteen months later than our fight for industrialization. Our fight against the hasty collectivization also a year later than our fight against the hasty industrialization. In the Five-Year Plan adopted by the Politburo, not in the second version but in the third version with the high coefficient for industry – it was adopted that at the end of the Five-Year Plan the Soviet Union would have 20 to 22 per cent of the peasants in collective farms. But in the third year it was more than 60 per cent – in the third year of the plan. It was decided that all peasants must be collectivized during the first plan.
We protested that this was not possible: “You do not have the necessary agricultural machinery – tractors, and so on; and, what is more important, the necessary level of culture in the country, no roads, no cultivated technicians, and so forth.”
... I never denied the successes of collectivization. On the contrary, I defended the collectivization against the bourgeois critics and the reformist critics. But at the same time I tried to defend the collectivization against the Soviet bureaucracy. This complete collectivization during five years did not give the economic, the necessary economic results, but it gave – I don’t know the figures, but it is hundreds, thousands and millions of exterminated peasants. (PC 250-1.)
In answer to a question by Counsel for the Commission whether in his opinion sabotage of the Five-Year Plan by the Opposition would have been a practical measure for discrediting and overthrowing the Stalinist bureaucracy, Trotsky replied:
No. From my Marxian point of view every progress is based upon the development of the productive forces of mankind, and of the nation in that case. Now, the overthrow of the bureaucracy by the people is possible only on a higher political and cultural level of the people. It is necessary to raise the people, and not push them into the depths. By the disorganization of economy, we could create only the basis for social reaction. How can we hope then to vanquish the bureaucracy? (PC 388.)
In his final argument, Trotsky said:
The task of the prosecution is extremely complicated by the additional fact that from February, 1930, onwards, I exposed in the press, systematically and persistently ... the self-same vices of bureaucratized economy which are now being charged against a fantastic “Trotskyist organization....” (PC 505.)
... I am ready to demonstrate with a collection of my articles in my hand that for seven years, on the basis of the official Soviet press reports, I untiringly warned against the ruinous consequences of skipping the period of laboratory preparation, of putting incomplete plants into operation, of supplanting technical training and correct organization by frantic and senseless reprisals, and, not infrequently, fantastic premiums. All the economic “crimes” referred to at the last trial were analyzed by me countless times – beginning in February, 1930, and ending in my latest book, “The Revolution Betrayed....” (PC 507.)
The system of Stalin and his police and prosecution agents is quite simple. For major accidents in plants, and especially for train wrecks, usually several employes were shot, often those who shortly before had been decorated for achieving high tempos. The result has been universal distrust and discontent. The last trial was intended to personify in Trotsky the causes for the accidents and disasters.... For the GPU, it is no great labor to place before their victims the alternative: Either be shot immediately, or preserve a shadow of hope on the condition that you agree to appear in court in the guise of “Trotskyists,” conscious saboteurs of industry and transportation. ... (PC 508.)
183. Trotsky’s writings on Soviet economy are very numerous and readily available. We find them consistent with his testimony. For example, he sharply criticizes “bureaucratic methods” in an article which appeared in the Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 9, February-March, 1930. We quote:
Industry is racing towards a crisis, above all because of the monstrous bureaucratic methods of collating the plan. A five-year plan can be drafted, preserving the necessary proportions and guarantees, only on the condition of a free discussion of the tempos and the terms set, with the participation in the discussion of all the interested forces in industry, the working class, all its organizations, and above all the Party itself; with the free verification of the entire experience of Soviet economy in the recent period, including the monstrous mistakes of the leadership.... (“The New Course in the Economy of the U.S.S.R.: Economic Adventurism and its Dangers.”)
His statement that he at once defends the Soviet economy and criticizes the bureaucratic methods of the leadership, is borne out by the following quotation:
The bitter character of the present campaign against “Trotskyists” has inspired the Russian emigrant press to new prophecies of the coming downfall of the Soviet power... .
As a matter of fact, there is not the slightest foundation for this talk of the approaching long awaited “end.” The development of the productive forces of the Soviet Union is the most colossal phenomenon of contemporary history. The gigantic advantage of a planned leadership has been demonstrated with a force which nothing can ever refute. The near-sightedness and zig-zagging of the Stalin bureaucracy only the more clearly emphasizes the power of the methods themselves. Only the maniacs of the restoration can imagine that the toiling masses of Russia want to turn back to the conditions of backward Russian capitalism.
But it is no less an error to imagine that the economic successes in strengthening the new industrial régime have also automatically reinforced the political position of Stalin and his faction.... A people who have achieved a mighty revolution may temporarily, in difficult circumstances, hand over the guidance of their destinies to a bureaucracy. But they are not able to renounce politics for long. It would be blindness not to see that the very strengthening of the economic situation of the country sets the toiling masses in more and more hostile opposition to the omnipotence of a bureaucracy. The workers, not without justification, attribute to themselves the achieved successes, and follow the bureaucracy with more and more critical eyes... .
The campaign against “Trotskyism” now developing signalizes the twilight of the omnipotence of the Stalin bureaucracy. But therewith it foretells, not the fall of the Bolshevik power, but on the contrary, a new rise of the Soviet régime – not only its industry, but its politics and culture.... (“Is Stalin Weakening or the Soviets?” by Leon Trotsky, The Political Quarterly, London, July-September, 1932, pp. 320-2; also New York Times, May 8, 1932.)
Again, in the following passage, he criticizes the leadership and stresses the need for democratic control:
The role of the Soviet bureaucracy remains a dual one. Its own interests constrain it to safeguard the new economic machine created by the October Revolution against the enemies at home and abroad. ... In this work, the world proletariat supports the Soviet bureaucracy without closing their eyes to its national conservatism, its appropriative instincts and its spirit of caste privilege. But it is precisely these traits which are increasingly paralyzing its progressive work.... An equilibrium between the various branches of production and, above all, a correct balance between national accumulation and consumption can be achieved only with the active participation of the entire toiling population in the elaboration of the plans, the necessary freedom to criticize the plans, and the opportunity of fixing the responsibility and of recalling the bureaucracy from top to bottom.... The partial crises converge towards the general crisis, which is creeping onward and which expresses itself in the fact that despite the titanic expenditure of energy by the masses and the great technological successes, the economic achievements keep lagging far behind, and the overwhelming majority of the population continues to lead a poverty-stricken existence. Thus, the singular position of the bureaucracy, which is the result of definite social causes, leads to an increasingly more profound and irreconcilable contradiction with the fundamental needs of Soviet economy and culture. Under these conditions, the dictatorship of the bureaucracy, although it remains a distorted expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat, translates itself into a primitive social crisis. The Stalinist faction is compelled ever-anew to destroy “completely” the “remnants” of old and new oppositions, to resort to ever more violent methods and to place in circulation amalgams which become more and more envenomed.... (“The Kirov Assassination,” p. 12, Dec. 1934. New York: Pioneer Publishers, February, 1935.)
In the pamphlet, “Soviet Economy in Danger,” we find the following criticism of the tempo of collectivization:
The headlong race after breaking records in collectivization, without taking any account of the economic and cultural potentialities of the rural economy, has led in actuality to ruinous consequences. It has destroyed the stimuli of the small commodity producer long before it was able to supplant them by other and much higher economic stimuli. The administrative pressure, which exhausts itself quickly in industry, turns out to be absolutely powerless in the sphere of rural economy. (p. 23. October, 1932. New York: Pioneer Publishers, February, 1933.)
Reviewing the history of collectivization in “The Revolution Betrayed,” Trotsky wrote as follows:
... The real possibilities of collectivization are determined, not by the depths of the impasse in the villages and not by the administrative energy of the government, but primarily by the existing productive resources – that is, the ability of the industries to furnish large scale agriculture with the requisite machinery. These material conditions were lacking. The collective farms were set up with an equipment suitable only for small scale farming. In these conditions an exaggeratedly swift collectivization took the character of an economic adventure... . Collectivization appeared to the peasant primarily in the form of an expropriation of all his belongings. They collectivized not only horses, cows, sheep, pigs, but even new-born chickens. They “dekulakized,” as one foreign observer wrote, “down to the felt shoes which they dragged from the feet of little children.” As a result, there was an epidemic selling of cattle for a song by the peasants or a slaughter of cattle for meat and hides.... The destruction of people – by hunger, cold, epidemics and measures of repression – is unfortunately less accurately tabulated than the slaughter of stock, but it also mounts up to millions. The blame for these sacrifices lies not upon collectivization, but upon the blind, violent gambling methods with which it was carried through. (pp. 38-40. 1936. New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1937.)
§ 183. In weighing Trotsky’s testimony and his writings on Soviet economy against the allegations of the Prosecutor, we find (1) that Vyshinsky misrepresented the 1927 program of the Opposition; (2) that he identified criticism of the economic policies of the régime with sabotage of Soviet economy; (3) that Trotsky defended industrialization and collectivization even while he criticized the methods by which they were carried out; (4) that his criticisms of the economic policies of the régime during the period of the alleged conspiracy reveal an eagerness to prevent disaster which, if the charges against him were true, would be explicable on no other theory than that of camouflage, advanced by the Prosecutor himself (PR 509). Since, however, these criticisms develop in a consistent line both before and during the alleged conspiracy, and since, moreover, they are consistent with his theoretical position throughout his career, whereas the allegations of sabotage, wrecking, and diversion are not, we hold the theory of camouflage to be untenable.
§ 184. Trotsky’s contention that these allegations constitute an attempt to cover up the mistakes of the régime is supported by evidence in our possession. The engineer Ivar WindfeldHansen, the “Wienfeld” mentioned in the January trial as a Danish Trotskyist (PR 431) by the accused Hrasche, self-confessed spy for the German intelligence service, has submitted a long deposition (PC Exh. 34, 1) concerning his professional connection with the chemical fertilizer industry in the Soviet Union and his relations with various officials, among them people formerly in the chemical industry who were either accused or mentioned as wreckers or “Trotskyites,” such as Hrasche, Rataichak, Yushkewich, and the Danish engineer Kjerulf-Nielsen. He has submitted also a voluminous documentation of his statements. These documents are contemporary in date with Windfeld-Hansen’s employment in Russia (May, 1932-July, 1934) or earlier. It cannot be charged, therefore, that they represent ex post facto reflections on the situation. They include his correspondence with the defendant Hrasche, his letters to other officials connected with the chemical industry, his reports to Soviet officials on matters pertaining to conditions in that industry, his journal during his second stay in Russia, and articles from the Soviet technical journals Tekhnika and Za Industrialzatsiu. From this material three facts emerge:
(1) Windfeld-Hansen was extremely critical of the processes in use in the chemical fertilizer industry, and the methods of planning, construction, and research. He tried to persuade the officials to adopt foreign methods which he considered more efficient; and also, in making their plans, to take more into account the nature of Soviet raw materials, geographic conditions, and problems of transportation.
(2) Windfeld-Hansen, in spite of his differences with certain officials, was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and eager to help in building up its fertilizer industry. He repeatedly warned the officials, and even the GPU, that the methods in use in this industry would lead to disaster.
(3) His criticisms provoked a struggle in the chemical fertilizer industry over the processes in use, the consequences of bad planning, extravagance, etc. This struggle was reflected in critical articles in the Soviet technical papers.
§ 185. According to the accused Hrasche, “Wienfeld” (Windfeld-Hansen) was
enlisted in Berlin by Davidson, the former vice-president of the All-Union Committee on Chemical Industries, and as was said in a letter which I afterward found by chance, Davidson wrote to Norkin [another accused] that this man was close to us in his views. (PR 431.)
Hrasche later testified that he found this letter “belonging to my predecessor,” in his desk when he returned from his vacation in the middle of 1932. The accused Norkin thereupon declared that
... as far as I know, Davidson never had any connection with Trotskyism. (PR 435.)
§ 186. Windfeld-Hansen declares that he was employed at the beginning of May, 1932, at the Soviet trade representation in Berlin, by Davidson, whose name was not told him. A few days earlier he had presented himself at that office and offered his services as an engineer. He had dealt with the trade representation for several days, when one day there appeared in the office a man who allegedly held a high position in the Soviet chemical trust, who looked at his references and made all arrangements for his employment. Among these references was a letter of recommendation from the Soviet Ambassador to Denmark, Kobetzky, who had lived in Denmark before the Revolution and was a friend of Windfeld-Hansen’s father.
Windfeld-Hansen states that he arrived in Moscow about May 12, 1932, and soon after his arrival was appointed as consuiting engineer in the state planning office for the chemical industry, known as Giprokhim; that he remained in this position until the end of his first stay in Russia, February 1, 1933; that he returned to it in the beginning of August, 1933, and remained for a normal working year of eleven months.
He states also that he was never a member of any political party; that having lost his position as a result of the world crisis he looked toward the U.S.S.R. as a place where an experienced engineer might hope to find scope for his ability and experience, and that this hope influenced his political sympathies, although he knew little of communism or Marxist theory. Beginning in May, 1931, he says, after his return from Germany where he had been employed by the Dorr Company, he frequently delivered lectures of an economic-political character in which he dealt with the possible future economic development of the U.S.S.R. (The manuscript of one of these lectures is among the material submitted by him to the Commission, PC Exh. 34, 2.) He states that at that time he knew nothing of the controversy between Stalin and Trotsky, or of the existence of a Trotskyist organization (Left Opposition).
Windfeld-Hansen’s deposition is divided into two parts. The first is a memorandum on the technical development of the Soviet phosphate fertilizer industry during and after his employment in Moscow; the second is a statement in the form of an interview with a German journalist (an émigré; name in our possession) concerning his activities in Soviet Russia, his relations with and impressions of Soviet officials, etc. The memorandum begins:
Immediately after I had been employed in Giprokhim engineer Vogt showed me the drawings of the plants then under construction, namely: (1) the precipitate plant in Voskressensk, (2) a test plant in Tshernoretshe for production of ammonium phosphate, and (3) a test plant at the same place for production of ammonium sulphate from gypsum. I explained to him on the spot why these two test plants could never work (see memorandum to Kobetzky, of August 7, 1932). He did not seem to be very impressed by these statements, nor did he try to defend the faults which had been committed. He only declared that NIU [Scientific Institute for Fertilizers, in Moscow] had the responsibility for the research work and the processes constituting the base of the project work. To the memorandum to Kobetzky I may only add that I specially asked Vogt how they could have made such a blunder as to construct a big evaporation plant for ammonium sulphate solution exclusively of wrought iron, every technician knowing that this material is rapidly corroded by this solution. He could not give any explanation, but finally he remarked that it was after all only a test plant to serve for a limited time. I pointed out that a laboratory corrosion test would have proved in some days that wrought iron was impossible even for a test plant. I stated these facts in two or three memoranda, which I handed over to him two or three days later, saying that I was sorry to be compelled to do so, but that otherwise I should perhaps be implicated in the responsibility. The 13th of June, 1932 (one month after my arrival), I submitted to him a calculation demonstrating that the precipitate process consumed not less than 30 per cent more sulphuric acid than double superphosphate, having in view the same grade of Central Russian phosphate rock. His attitude on this occasion will be seen from my memorandum to Kobetzky.
Windfeld-Hansen states that after some delay he was put to work temporarily in the laboratories of NIU in order
to show them in the laboratory how to produce a workable gypsum by the phosphoric acid process. I also took up the very difficult question of the high iron oxide content in the Russian phosphate rocks. I was very astonished when I discovered that apparently they had not considered this important question.
After a few weeks Professor Volfkovich[28] appeared and reproached him with having started his work without submitting any plan to the NIU; also because they remained without reports which they had expected a foreign engineer would be able to produce within a short time. Windfeld-Hansen says that Volfkovich was evidently trying to pick a quarrel with him because of his criticisms; that he told Volfkovich that a “plan” was of course incompatible with the nature of most research work; that he had first of all to demonstrate the elements of phosphoric acid working practice to the NIU chemists, and that he would give reports as soon as he had some results; however, if Volfkovich was discontented with his work, he would not disturb him any more. Thereupon, he says, he returned to Giprokhim, where he remained until Volfkovich himself requested him to return to NIU, having been compelled to do so by the chemists there. During the rest of his first sojourn in Moscow, he says,
I tried from time to time to take up some of the most urgent problems in the laboratories and test plants of NIU but without real results, because they lacked all necessary means for carrying out proper research and failed to give the necessary support.
He states that when Ambassador Kobetzky visited Moscow in August, 1932,
I explained to him how bad the state of affairs was in the phosphate fertilizer branch and that a thoroughgoing reorganization would be necessary if a general breakdown was to be avoided at some future time. He asked me to write a memorandum on the whole situation, and I gave it to him the following day.
This memorandum, which explains the problems involved in utilizing the low-grade impure phosphates of Central Russia and the methods by which the Soviet fertilizer industry was attempting to solve them, has been submitted to the Commission by Windfeld-Hansen in a certified English translation. Because of its technical nature and its important bearing upon the testimony of the accused Rataichak in the January trial, we append it to this report (Appendix III). It shows that Windfeld-Hansen, three months after his arrival in the Soviet Union, informed the Soviet Ambassador to Denmark that the processes which Soviet engineers were attempting to use in the chemical fertilizer industry were not adapted to the raw materials to be treated, and that in consequence the plants projected or under construction would prove impracticable. We call special attention to his remarks about the plant at Voskressensk, which the accused Rataichak confessed having sabotaged in 1934 (PR 410-12); also to his statement that the men who were responsible for the experimental work and planning in the fertilizer industry, of which he is extremely critical, were the engineer Vogt and Professor Volfkovich. This memorandum, Windfeld-Hansen says, produced no results until late in the autumn, when a conference was held with the engineer Wolfsohn[29] as chairman, at which Britzke,[30] Volfkovich, and some of the leading chemists in the NIU were present and answered his complaints in long speeches “trying to explain all their faults and failures during the last years.” Wolfsohn, he says,
was very eager to conciliate with me the people of NIU and asked me warmly to collaborate with the leaders of NIU who had already admitted that they had falsely understood many of their tasks. I declared that I was ready to do so but I maintained all my standpoints in the technical questions. The session was finished without a clear decision. Nothing was changed during the rest of my sojourn.
In the summer of 1932, he says, the engineer Küster, formerly employed by the Dorr Company and employed in 1932 by Giprokhim in Leningrad, came to Moscow. Windfeld-Hansen arranged that his experience should also be utilized by Giprokhim in Moscow. He took Küster to the experimental plants of the NIU, and by request of Giprokhim Küster wrote a memorandum stating that all the equipment in those plants was rather unfitted for the tasks in view.
When Volfkovich heard of this he became very agitated and reproached me for taking outsiders to the plants without his knowledge.
Windfeld-Hansen says that although engineer Vogt several times announced that they would make a trip to Voskressensk together he systematically avoided permitting him to visit the plant. However, he often sought Windfeld-Hansen’s advice concerning matters connected with it. Although the latter made certain suggestions, he states that from the beginning of his connection with Giprokhim he considered this plant a hopeless failure that could never be remedied.
Windfeld-Hansen says that the Danish engineer, Kjerulf-Nielsen (also mentioned as a Trotskyist by Hrasche – PR 431), a member of the Russian Communist Party who was working in the analine industry in Moscow, interested himself in the struggle and tried to get the officials to heed Windfeld-Hansen’s criticisms. His efforts also were without results. Windfeld-Hansen left Moscow in February, 1933, and went to Copenhagen, where he remained for five months, negotiating with Giprokhim about the conditions of his re-employment. During his absence there was a violent discussion in the Russian technical papers, Tekhnika and Za Industrializatsiu, beginning with a long article signed “Gagorin,” in Tekhnika (February 27, 1933),
in which the whole work of NIU was severely criticized and mainly based on my memoranda. In the same issue appeared an article by me on the subject: double super-phosphate versus precipitate. I later on learned that the name Gagorin was a collective pseudonym for five chemists from the technical opposition in NIU.
Later a decision was reached by the Central Economic Board on the question of the chemical industry, which Glavkhimprom[31] had submitted to the board. This decision, which was not unanimous because several members had walked out of the meeting in protest against the procedure, Windfeld-Hansen calls “scandalous.”
Although it was at first stated that all the important points to which I drew attention were to be carried out without delay and that the new foreign methods should be utilized, the decision on the other hand made reproaches against the opposition in NIU on the ground of their “uncritical attitude” towards and their blind submission to foreign methods. Those people – the opposition – are characterized as being of low qualification in contrast to the “high quality leaders of NIU.”
In August, 1933, Windfeld-Hansen resumed his work in Giprokhim. In the autumn he began research work in the laboratories of NIU. During this work he kept a journal which he has transmitted to the Commission. In the spring of 1934 he finished his experiments, with the following results:
I succeeded in working out a process for mine-run phosphate rock which had previously been calcinated in a rotary furnace at furnace at about 1100 degrees C. By this process only 10-20% of the iron oxide went into solution, the strength of the acid was about 20% P2O5 and the gypsum was obtained chemically pure. This latter feature should make it possible to regenerate nearly all the sulphuric acid used for the process by means of the well-known Bayer process invented in Germany during the war and still employed by I. G. Farbenindustrie in one large plant, I think at Leverkusen. The pyrites in Western Europe and America ... are in general too cheap to make this Bayer process economical. But in Russia there can be no doubt that it would afford great advantages as the pyrites mostly had to be transported by rails from Ural to the other parts of Russia. I did not succeed in convincing the NIU professors and Dobrovolski[32] on this point and their interest seemed to be drawn towards the flotation possibilities. They had carried this work out themselves, but I did not need any flotation. As far as I know they never considered the cost price of the pyrite in their calculations, or that the railways were always heavily overloaded.
Windfeld-Hansen states that in the spring of 1934 Kjerulf-Nielsen urged him to renew his complaints about the general situation,
which seemed to us to be completely hopeless. The initial running of the Voskressensk plant had been started in the spring and a brigade of chemists from NIU was sent to Voskressensk to assist in the operation of the plant.... The plant yielded nearly no production at all. Breakdowns happened incessantly in all parts of the plant. Now of course I knew from my experience in other countries that this is quite normal during the initial running of such a chemical plant and this period of troubles can last for several months. But I felt more and more uneasy in view of the fact that no lines were still laid down for the whole future development, as will be seen from the newspapers quoted below. It seemed to me absolutely necessary to alarm authorities independent from the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Kjerulf-Nielsen proposed to me to inform the GPU in order to avoid any responsibility for myself. I therefore at his request wrote a letter to him, which he immediately and personally brought to the headquarters of the GPU. In this letter I repeated the information which I had formerly given to Kobetzky and stated in very strong expressions that the large plants about to be constructed or projected in Ural were in great danger of being completely muddled and destroyed in the same way as the plant of Voskressensk which I considered as lost. We never heard anything from the GPU and no signs of attention from the GPU could be observed.
Later in the spring Windfeld-Hansen and Kjerulf-Nielsen visited Jurewich, head of the chemical section of the Central Control Commission, and Windfeld-Hansen recorded the conversation in his journal:
... I mentioned no personality and made no complaints of anybody. However, to his question whether NIU solved their tasks I answered: that in general they did not solve their tasks. I oriented him on the pitiable situation at Voskressensk but added that the misfortune was not very great as the process was not workable! ... (PC Exh. 34, 4.)
§ 187. Windfeld-Hansen’s contract was not renewed, and he left Russia in July, 1934. Immediately after his departure there was a discussion in the technical press on “the most fundamental questions of raw material base, transportation possibilities, and production program, even of the plants already existing.” Windfeld-Hansen has sent us four copies of Tekhnika and one of Za Industrializatsiu. The first of these (Tekhnika, Oct. 9, 1933) antedates this discussion. It contains an article by Windfeld-Hansen himself on new foreign methods for the production of phosphoric acid. It criticizes the NIU for not having taken account of the first Dorr process (Appendix III). An appended editorial note urges the great need of taking into consideration the latest results of foreign experience in this field.
An article by A. Chavin in Za Industrializatsiu of July 6, 1934, attacks the Glavkhimprom because of the excessive expense and the delays in construction of the fertilizer plant at Aktjubinsk, and states that there is no guarantee that the equipment will resist phosphoric acid. It points out that the equipment at Voskressensk was very seriously damaged by phosphoric acid, and that the same thing may happen at Aktjubinsk. The author states his opinion that Glavkhimprom is not qualified to do the work as it should be done.
An article by the engineer I. Mirkin (chemist in the NIU) in Tekhnika of July 15, 1934, discusses the future of the Voskressensk plant. Mirkin points out that raw material rich in oxides of iron and aluminum is not suitable for the production of phosphate fertilizers, and that the precipitate, a sulphuric acid derivative, is the most expensive of fertilizers; therefore, bad quality and high cost definitely eliminate that type of raw material. He says that nevertheless the Voskressensk plant insists, on Britzke’s advice, on using this raw material, thus producing the lowest possible quality of fertilizer at the highest possible cost of production. An editorial note published with this article recalls that the most competent experts on phosphate fertilizers, among them Windfeld-Hansen, declared two years earlier that usable fertilizers could not be produced from non-concentrated (only washed or screened, not flotated) Jegorewski phosphate rock (the local raw material at Voskressensk). Later research work, it says, as well as the initial running of the Voskressensk plant, has proved that they were right.
An article in Tekhnika of July 21, 1934, is signed by the engineer S. Perelman, a chemist of the NIU who, according to Windfeld-Hansen, was jockeyed out of his position by Volfkovich because of his criticism of the methods in use. The article reports a conference of experts in the phosphate industry, and points out the sharp divergence of opinion among members of the Fertilizer Institute on the questions of raw materials and methods. An extremely critical article in Tekhnika of August 6, 1934, is signed A. Yakovlev. (One Yakovlev testified in the trial of August, 1936, that he had been commissioned by Kamenev to organize a terrorist group in the Academy of Sciences (ZK 70-1). We do not know whether this writer is the same Yakovlev.) This article quotes the engineer Levensohn concerning a special conference on raw materials in the office of the head of Glavkhimprom, Rataichak. The article states:
It is exceedingly characteristic that except Academician Britzke, Professor Volfkovich and Engineer Vogt – people who are directly involved in the present not amusing state of affairs – all the experts participating in the conference decidedly expressed themselves against the use of non-concentrated phosphorites in the initial running of the Voskressensk plant. The chief engineer in Glavkhimprom, Professor Yushkevich,[33] the chief of the planning section in Glavkhimprom, Ritzling, the leader of the phosphate section in Glavkhimprom, Engineer Levensohn, and Engineer Gosberg of Glavkhimprom, thereupon insisted that the Voskressensk plant should work with apatite concentrates. The reasons of these comrades are sufficiently clear.... Against this unanimous and authoritative opinion of a majority of experts of the phosphate industry, the voices of only three people are raised, the least objective in this matter.
The article also contains the following passage about the accused Rataichak:
While discussing the question of what to do now with the Voskressensk plant, Comrade Rataichak flung altogether just reproaches at the management of NIU and the phosphates section of Giprokhim, the substance of which might be reduced to the one phrase, “What was the matter with you then?”
§ 188. Returning now to the deposition of Windfeld-Hansen, “Such,” he says,
was the state of affairs after I had left Russia as far as I have obtained information. That the solution of the questions should be that Pyatakov, Rataichak and Hrasche should dishonor themselves with completely inexplicable confessions, sentenced to death and shot, and further, Yushkewich and some of the leading engineers in the nitrogen branch (as it appears from the official trial report: Pushin, Golovanov, Tamm, whom I did not know) should be arrested and put under similar accusations – this solution I never would have dreamed of.
Questioned concerning the personality of the accused Hrasche, Windfeld-Hansen refers to his interview in Politiken (Copenhagen). This interview, which appeared on Jan. 29, 1937, was read into the record of the Preliminary Commission. In it Windfeld-Hansen states that during his stay in Russia Hrasche was head of the foreign bureau of the Russian nitrogen industry. In this capacity, he was in charge of arrangements concerning the living and working conditions of foreign engineers and technicians in that industry. His own conditions of work, he states, were arranged in Hrasche’s office. Since Hrasche occupied a poor room in the building of the nitrogen trust, where Windfeld-Hansen also lived during his first stay in Russia, he came to know him well and to esteem him highly. Windfeld-Hansen states that in his controversies with the Russian specialists, he was often supported by Hrasche or his staff; that Hrasche often visited him, and met his Danish friends. (PC 232-34.)
In his deposition Windfeld-Hansen mentions among these friends Kjerulf-Nielsen and Sigvard Lund, author of the novel “Bread and Steel."[34] Windfeld-Hansen says that both Lund and Kjerulf-Nielsen were and are today completely loyal members of the Communist Party, and that Hrasche’s statement that they were Trotskyites was a deliberate falsification. He says that he often spoke with Hrasche about politics, and that Hrasche intelligently defended the official policy of the Party. Hrasche’s own description of himself as a professional spy without political convictions, is wholly irreconcilable, says Windfeld-Hansen, with his impression of the man and his high political standards.
Asked what, in his opinion, were the real reasons for the removal and criminal prosecution of Hrasche, Rataichak and Yushkevich, he answered:
Scapegoats had to be found for the catastrophic development in the chemical industry. There is no indication that acts of sabotage were involved. My documents submitted and mentioned above will give you a better clue as to where the really guilty people are to be found. I cannot believe that my friend Hrasche could have committed acts of sabotage or espionage. I knew him too well for that.
QUESTION: Rataichak is charged in particular with sabotage in the starting up of the Voskressensk plant. [PR 410-12.] Your material indicates that you undertook a special study of this plant as early as 1932. Do you consider it possible or probable that Rataichak could have committed sabotage as indicated in the record of the trial?
ANSWER: No. The local raw material (Jegorewski phosphorite) was so poor and the technical procedure employed so uneconomical that the whole combination in all its fundamentals was a mistake. Furthermore, such a complete mess was made of all details in connection with the designing, purchase of equipment, and actual construction of the precipitation plant, that sabotage on the part of Rataichak or any other administrative officer was wholly superfluous, indeed, one can even say impossible.
QUESTION: With whom, in your opinion, does the responsibility rest for the technical errors embodied in the Voskressensk combine?
ANSWER: The documents I have submitted partly show this. As time went on more and more people made themselves co-responsible inasmuch as they participated in the planning or later in the starting up of the plant. In addition, all the administrative and supervising agencies made themselves co-responsible inasmuch as they remained refractory to all complaints. Finally, the highest technical and scientific council of the Soviet Union made itself co-responsible inasmuch as in the year 1933 it backed up the methods and practices of the Fertilizer Institute (NIU) in Moscow after they had been subjected to severe criticism by technicians in the technical press (see the copies submitted of the periodical Tekhnika). The leading administrators in the Commissariat, Pyatakov and Rataichak, could feel themselves reassured and relieved of the burden of responsibility in view of such a stand by this supreme technical authority.
§ 189. The testimony of Windfeld-Hansen and the documents he has submitted convince this Commission that the testimony of the accused Hrasche that Windfeld-Hansen was a “Trotskyite” saboteur is false. Moreover, this material reflects a struggle in the chemical industry from which, it appears, the officials named by Windfeld-Hansen and other critics as responsible for the “catastrophic development” of that industry emerged victorious. We note that whereas Britzke, Vogt, Volfkovich, were not involved or mentioned as wreckers or “Trotskyites,” at least five men who had opposed them – Rataichak, Hrasche, Yushkevich, Windfeld-Hansen, Kjerulf-Nielsen – are so involved or mentioned; and of these five, two were accused, convicted, and executed. We hold that Windfeld-Hansen’s testimony and his documents provide strong justification for the assumption that he is correct in charging that these men were victimized as scapegoats.
§ 190. On an alleged specific act of sabotage, an explosion in the Tsentralnaya mine at Kemerovo in September, 1936, for which the accused Drobnis confessed responsibility at the Novosibirsk trial of November, 1936, and again in the Moscow trial of January, 1937 (PR 212-15), we have the opinion of a delegation of the French National Federation of Miners, of the Confédération Générale du Travail, who were in Russia at the time. Its members were: Vigne, national secretary, KléberLegay, associate secretary, Sinot, secretary of the Carmaux Miners, Planque, miners’ delegate to Vermelles (Pas de Calais), and Quinet, Communist deputy. Drobnis stated that the explosion was brought about by damaging the ventilation system and allowing gas to accumulate in the pits (PR 212). The opinion of the French trade-unionists (Quinet excluded) on this testimony appeared in the French paper, Syndicats, of February 25, 1937, in the form of a letter from Kléber-Legay to Magdeleine Paz. Kléber-Legay wrote:
... We did not believe and never will believe the accusations, we told Smerling [the interpreter]. And this is why:
They (the responsible trade unionists) told us that there was a most severe service of inspection for the security of the mines.This functioned in the following manner: (1) an engineer designated by the people’s commissar; (2) local and inter-local presidents of workers’ unions, designated by the workers themselves; (3) delegates of the pits, of sections of the mines, designated by the workers themselves. These delegates, it appears, have full power. They can stop either a mine or a section of a mine, or even a whole field, if they consider that there is danger or threat of danger.
We are unable to understand how with such an apparatus of inspection for the security of the mines it would be possible for engineers to operate in all secrecy in the preparation for such crimes, above all over a period of years.
As a miner, knowing perfectly the difficulties of a mine, having worked at it more than thirty years during twelve of which I was delegate for workers’ security in one of the most gaseous mines of France, I defy any technician, however competent, to organize the systematic placing of a mine in an explosive state without the inspectors, even if they were complete idiots, perceiving it within an hour. If the service of inspection for the security of the mines at Kemerovo did not perceive this thing, it is either incompetent or non-existent. If it exists, it is even more culpable than the other accused, and since it is the mode in Moscow to shoot, its members should be the first to be shot. If it did not exist, then we were lied to about the protection of the workers’ safety... .
But even if the service of inspection did not exist, I still say that it is impossible for a mine to be placed in an explosive state without anyone noticing it. There is the management, the supervision, the thousands of workers in these mines who would have seen and announced it. Is one to admit that all, even though they knew their lives to be in danger, would have maintained silence for the sole purpose of establishing with greater certitude the proof of the culpability of the accused, while at any moment they might all have perished if the thing existed?
No; technically, all are agreed, it is not possible to keep a mine in a permanently explosive state by the accumulation of fire-damp. The least-informed person on mining affairs would say as we do: No one could ever make us believe in such a possibility.
§ 191. To the testimony and documents of Windfeld-Hansen and the letter of Kléber-Legay we add the testimony of an engineer who has worked many years in the Soviet Union and who has informed us frankly and fully concerning conditions in Russian industry as he had occasion to observe them. He requests that his name be withheld, on the ground that its disclosure in connection with his criticisms might cause reprisals against his friends in the U.S.S.R. The Commission is able to vouch for his high standing, his integrity, and his good-will toward the people and the economy of the U.S.S.R. We regret the necessity of asking the public to take our word for the reliability of his testimony, but in the circumstances we can not do otherwise; and we offer it with full recognition of the reservations which this mode of procedure may put upon its acceptance. We may remark, however, that a similar procedure was adopted concerning the testimony of certain witnesses in the unofficial Reichstag Fire trial, which was organized with the cooperation of the official Communist Party of Germany, and was generally understood and accepted.
With regard to damages to industrial equipment in the U.S.S.R., this engineer testified as follows before the New York Sub-Commission:
First, of course, even in America, there is a lot of damage that happens in plants. Machines break down and defects in a design will come up which require it to be changed. It was exactly the same in the Russian plants.... We had, first, machines break down due to carelessness in handling and overloading. We had a few cases, owing to poor material and poor design, where we had to do reconstructing. We had one or two minor cases where apparently there was direct sabotage, but not very serious, apparently done by somebody not very important. Some workman saw his chance, dissatisfied probably for some reason – saw his chance to do something. That was very rare; probably it did not happen any oftener than in American plants. ... there was very much more breakdown and failure of equipment than there was in America.
GOLDMAN: What would you say is responsible for this larger percentage?
WITNESS: Poor materials, poor workmanship in construction, and in some cases, designs were poor.... They really went and carried the idea of mechanization too far for the character of the plant. When you are over-mechanized, if you have too much machinery in a plant, especially with inexperienced people, you will have a larger percentage of breakdowns and a larger percentage of repair-costs.
There were continuous minor breakdowns, mostly at the beginning, and due to poor material and workmanship, and later on, due to the habit which they have of forcing production too fast, inexperienced men, machinery that has not been properly tuned up to put it rapidly into operation. And even after they get started, after the machinery is tuned up, by overloading. That is characteristic of plants all over the Soviet Union and the cause of very much trouble, very many breakdowns. It is the idea of the Udarniki, the theory of the Stakhanovite movement to force ... speed-up movements. It is characteristic of all their industry to force everything too fast, speed it up too much, and that caused many breakdowns. (NY 155-7.)
Concerning the service of inspection in Soviet mines and plants, this witness testified that there always are workers’ committees of inspection; that whereas these committees used to be appointed by the trade unions independent of the administration, they are now under the Central Control Commission and that whereas the former Workers and Peasants Inspection represented the workers, the inspection service of the Commission of Soviet Control represents also the government and the trusts. This change, he testifies, has placed the service of inspection in the hands of the bureaucracy. He states that the committees of inspection sent out by the Central Control Commission are often incompetent and that they often “simply whitewash the administration.” (NY 178-82.)
He testified that there are abnormal delays in the construction and operation of Soviet plants, but that such delays as he has personal knowledge of were due not to sabotage but to confusion, incompetence, and the attempt to do more than was possible in the condition of Russian industry. There was a shortage of raw materials, construction materials, electric power, labor. There were delays in transportation, but his own experience convinced him that these were due entirely to inefficiency and the overloading of the railways. He declared that such “speed-up” campaigns as the “Udarniki,” “Sabatnik,” and “Stakhanovite” movements had had a bad effect on Russian industry, because they resulted in destruction of equipment through haste and bad workmanship. The Stakhanovite movement tended to disorganize plants because the necessary coordination of operations was sacrificed to the necessity of keeping the Stakhanovites supplied with work, so that they could maintain their records. Such workers earned as much as fifty rubles a day as against five for the average worker; and the special privileges granted them, such as apartments to themselves, tickets to sanitariums, etc., made the spread even greater. Besides, the Stakhanovite worker was granted honors, had his picture in the papers, etc. “The temptation to do poor work was inevitable.” And the ordinary workers became discontented and resentful. (NY 184-93.)
They can’t do or say a thing. They lay it all on the Party. Of course, most of this Stakhanovite movement has also made it very disagreeable for the administrators in the plant. They have given these Stakhanovites every advantage. If they don’t, they may be reported as sabotaging the Stakhanovite movement and being opposed to it. Sometimes it is quite serious. They lose their jobs, are demoted, lose their standing. Also, the ordinary director, the technical director, the average manager, gets considerably less than the Stakhanovite worker. This causes their resentment. (NY 193.)
Asked whether he thought this dissatisfaction might have found expression in sabotage, he said:
It may be, but I didn’t see any evidence of it. I saw an increase in breakdowns, in the poor quality of the work, but I don’t think it was actually premeditated sabotage. It was just that they were losing their morale, their interest. (NY 194.)
He stated that throughout his stay in Russia he was continually in controversy with the officials of the trusts over these methods. He said:
But the people in charge, the clique that surrounds Stalin in Moscow, I don’t see how they can help seeing these things, see how it damages things in building up. I am not the only engineer there who has seen these things and pointed them out to them. When I left I had a pile of reports on just this one subject of organization. But they had almost no effect. (NY 186-7.)
This witness also testified to one incident from his personal experience which has particular interest in relation to the testimony of Windfeld-Hansen. He tells of three Soviet engineers who had supported the correct contention of a foreign specialist that the designs for a certain plant were unworkable and should be revised before construction was begun. They were arrested and charged with being Trotskyite saboteurs. The contract of the foreign specialist was not renewed. (NY 165-8.)
Asked whether the general inefficiency in industry was such as to make sabotage superfluous in bringing about the conditions that are complained of, this witness said:
You might put it this way: It was the general condition of inefficiency which made it easy to accuse a person of sabotage, to try to hold a man responsible for it when really it was just due to conditions over which he had no control.
FINERTY: It was also easier for a person responsible for the inefficiency, so far as any person could be responsible, to blame it on sabotage than acknowledge his inefficiency?
WITNESS: Yes, that is the key, I think, to the whole situation. (NY 211-2.)
§ 192. This Commission does not presume to judge whether or not those men who were actually tried in January, 1937, were guilty of sabotage. It can and does, however, state after careful study of the record that the fabric of the trial was so rotten as to render impossible a conclusion by any honest person concerning their guilt or innocence, or the nature of their crimes, if any. Preceding chapters of this report have sufficiently demonstrated this fact. We add here only a few considerations which relate to this specific charge.
We begin these considerations by quoting from Trotsky’s final argument. After stating that the chronic diseases of Soviet industry were presented in the trial as the fruits of a malicious conspiracy led by Pyatakov, he says:
However, it remains perfectly incomprehensible what, while all this went on, was the role of the state organs of industry and finance, and of the accounting authorities, not to speak of the Party, which has its nuclei in all institutions and enterprises. If one believes the indictment, the leadership of economy was not in the hands of the “genial, infallible leader,” but in the hands of an isolated man, already nine years in banishment and exile. (PC 504.)
We find this argument amply warranted by the confessions. We refer our readers to the testimony on sabotage of Pyatakov, alleged leader in sabotage under Trotsky’s instructions. Pyatakov testifies to subversive administrative activities so various and extensive that it is impossible to see how they could have been carried on without the connivance of a great many officials and engineers, and even of government and Party functionaries. And Pyatakov’s is by no means the only such testimony in this record.
Moreover, sabotage carried on all over the Soviet Union, in mines, factories, on the railways, must necessarily have required at least the passive cooperation of a great many workers (see, e.g., the opinion of the French trade unionists – § 190). Yet the accused repeatedly stated that they had no support among the workers. Again, the motivation of the accused is uniformly unconvincing. The accused Knyazev, for example, testifies that his “waverings” were caused largely by his conviction that “it was impossible to improve the work of the railways by the methods that were then being employed” (PR 360). He thereupon admits that he knew that the railways were working badly because of Trotskyite wreckers, and then goes on to state that he believed the Trotskyites “were right in their struggle against the Party and that they could solve these problems in another way.” The obvious absurdity of abetting saboteurs because he thought they would be able to solve the problems which troubled him – and which he knew to be of their making – was ignored by the Prosecutor; but it can hardly be ignored by the person who is looking for a motivation that at least makes sense.
The record, therefore, inspires grave doubt of the charge of sabotage. Since, according to the testimony, the sabotage was instigated by and carried on under the instructions of Leon Trotsky, the disproof of the evidence linking Trotsky with the alleged conspiracy impugns the testimony concerning acts of sabotage. On the other hand, the testimony of Windfeld-Hansen and our anonymous witness corroborates Trotsky’s contention that the delays, disproportions, extravagance, etc., which the accused confessed were due to sabotage, are the chronic diseases of Soviet industry; that they are due to haste, overreaching, inefficiency, etc.; and that the expiation of these shortcomings by scapegoats is a usual method of whitewashing the regime.
§ 193. In view of all these considerations, and of the evidence cited, we find that the charge of conspiracy to sabotage Soviet economy, especially as it concerns Leon Trotsky and Leon Sedov, stands not only not proved but not credible.
§ 194. In the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial, the Definition of the Charge says nothing of agreements with foreign powers. However, the accused Olberg, M. Lurye, and N. Lurye, are quoted in the indictment as having confessed that they were connected with agents of German fascism. The Luryes confessed that they belonged to a terrorist group organized by one Franz Weitz, whom they described as an agent of Himmler, head of the Nazi Gestapo after its organization some time later (ZK 27-9, 75, 102-3, 107-8). The accused Olberg is quoted in the indictment as having testified in the preliminary examination that he was connected with the Gestapo and discussed with one of its officials
my first journey to Moscow and my plans concerning the preparation of the terrorist act. (ZK 25.)
He is also quoted as saying that this connection
was the line of the Trotskyites in conformity with the instructions of Leon Trotsky given through Sedov. (ZK 25.)
He testified that his Honduran passport was obtained with the help of Tukalevsky, an agent of the fascist police (§§ 73, 75, 76, 82), with whom his brother Paul was connected; and that Sedov sanctioned the arrangement and provided the money to pay for the passport. (ZK 89.) He also testified that after his return from his first trip to the Soviet Union he
visited Slomovitz in Berlin, and she told me the following: During my absence the Trotskyite cadres dwindled to a small group, and they were now confronted by the dilemma: either to dissolve or to come to an agreement with the German fascists. The basis for the agreement was the preparation and carrying out of acts of terrorism against the leaders of the C.P.S.U. and the Soviet Government. Trotsky had sanctioned the agreement between the Berlin Trotskyites and the Gestapo, and the Trotskyites were in fact left free. (ZK 90.)
The Prosecutor made no attempt to identify Slomovitz.
Both Berman-Yurin and David testified that in their alleged conversations with Trotsky in Copenhagen he stated that in case of intervention against the Soviet Union the Trotskyites must adopt a defeatist attitude (ZK 95, 113). Dreitzer is quoted in the indictment as having testified that in 1934 he received a letter from Trotsky stating that one of the tasks before the Trotskyites was
in the event of war to take advantage of every setback and confusion to capture the leadership. (ZK 22.)
The accused Mrachkovsky, to whom Dreitzer alleged that he had passed on this letter, testified that Trotsky had stated in it the necessity of adopting a defeatist attitude in case of war (ZK 43).
§ 195. Leon Sedov denied having had any connection whatever with the procuring of Olberg’s Honduran passport (CR 21, 23). He declared that he had never known the Slomovitz of whom Olberg had spoken, and never heard of such a person before the trial (CR 24).
§ 196. Eugene Bauer denied that anybody by the name of Slomovitz had belonged to the German Trotskyist movement. (PC Exh. 16, S II/8.) Concerning the alleged connection with the Gestapo, Bauer testified before the Commission Rogatoire:
It is not only abominable that they have ever been capable of speaking of a connection between the Trotskyist movement and the Gestapo, but I can bear witness, having belonged to this movement until October, 1934, that never did such connections exist. I have seen in the Reports of the Court Proceedings five or six persons supposed to have played the rôle of intermediary between the Trotskyists and the Gestapo. Not one of these persons ever belonged to the Trotskyist movement while I belonged to it. And to my knowledge, never did an agent of the Gestapo succeed in slipping into our ranks. Finally, I must emphasize the fact that the Gestapo has in no way spared us in the persecution it has carried on against all the anti-Communist movements in Germany, which is another absolute proof that this is a slander (CR 45-6.)
§ 197. In his testimony concerning Slomovitz, Olberg says, “I had known her previously.” (ZK 90.) We quote from the deposition of Olberg’s mother:
I know nothing at all about the existence of such a person, but I am inclined to think that this is an invented personality. The fact is, that in 1930, 1931, 1932, with a few breaks, I often visited my son in Berlin. In his house I met many of his friends and acquaintances and never heard the name Slomovitz. But when my son was yet a child, and lived with me in Riga, I had a client whose name was Slomovitz. She was an old woman who never left Riga, and had nothing whatever to do with politics. I often sent Valentine to her to collect money. For this reason I think that he mentioned the first name that came into his head, happening to recall the old lady. (PC Exh. 8, S III/6, a.)
§ 198. Among the documents in our possession are two handbills issued by the International German Communists, the Trotskyist organization in Danzig, and two issues of its illegal publication, Spartakus, one dated the end of September, the other the beginning of October, 1936. One handbill deals with the dissolution of the Social Democratic Party of Danzig by the fascist police, and states among other things that this party brought about its own destruction by feeding its followers on illusions and holding them back from the fight against fascism. The other accuses the Polish and German fascist régimes of sending the Spanish fascists arms with which to shoot down Spanish workers. The first Spartakus deals with the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial; it quotes the illegal paper of the Danzig Communist Party to the effect that
“The connection with the Gestapo does not surprise us. The Trotskyist group in Danzig have long been a center of stool-pigeons and provocateurs of the Danzig Gestapo.”
To this charge Spartakus replies that shortly before the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial the official Communist Party in Danzig offered a united front to the Trotskyist organization.
The second number of Spartakus deals with the alleged betrayal of the Spanish revolution by France, Soviet Russia, and the Caballero régime; with the situation in Danzig, stressing again the need of a united workers’ party to fight fascism; with the Nuremberg party-congress of the National Socialist Party, stating that Hitler offers himself as a super-Wrangel for the imperialist crusade against the Soviet Union.
In the same exhibit are issues of Der Danziger Vorposten, organ of the Danzig National Socialists (Nazis), of December 9, 1936, and January 8 and 12, 1937. They contain accounts of the arrests and trial of members of the Spartakus (Trotskyist) organization. We quote the headlines:
THE END OF THE DANZIG “SPARTAKUSBUND.” Sixty communists arrested. Collaboration with Trotsky established. Comprehensive propaganda material confiscated. (December 9, 1936.)
THE “SPARTAKUSBUND” OF THE TROTSKYITES. The Jew Dr. Franz Jakubowski as organizer of the secret organization, the slanderous handbill campaign and incitement to strikes. (January 8, 1937.)
THE JUDGMENT AGAINST THE TROTSKYITES. Long prison-terms for the functionaries. The result of yesterday’s session. (January 12, 1937.)
LONG PRISON TERMS FOR THE SPARTACISTS. The Jew Dr. Jacubowski sentenced to three and a quarter years in jail. Combined sentences thirteen years. (January 12, 1937.) (Com. Exh. 1.)
§ 199. We have also among our documents the text of a sound-film made by Trotsky for Left Opposition propaganda during his sojourn in Copenhagen – that is, during the period when he is alleged to have given defeatist instructions to the accused David and Berman-Yurin. In this film Trotsky sharply criticizes the policies of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. The industrial conquests, he says, are important, and the cultural plane of the masses has visibly risen in the fifteen years of the Revolution. Therefore, party democracy should have been greatly expanded, but thanks to the bureaucracy the exact opposite has taken place. He also condemns the Communist policy in Germany, its identification of social democracy with fascism, its rejection of a united front, and the consequent refusal to create soviets, since soviets are possible only as the organizations of a united front of different workers’ parties and organizations.
He then says:
We of the Left Opposition remain loyally devoted to the Soviet Union and the Comintern, with another loyalty, another devotion, than the official bureaucratic majority. (PC Exh. 16, III/2.)
The Commission has had the opportunity to compare this film with the text submitted to us. In the film there are a few minor omissions, and one significant interpolation. Toward the end, Trotsky injected these words, which do not appear in the typescript:
The Soviet Union is our fatherland! We will defend it to the end.
We shall later cite further evidence submitted by Trotsky and other witnesses to prove that he has steadily advocated the defense of the Soviet Union. We cite this sound-film here because of its direct bearing upon the testimony of two accused in the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial that they received defeatist instructions from him in Copenhagen.
§ 200. We note that Dreitzer and Mrachkovsky, both of whom allegedly read the letter from Trotsky which they quote, give two different versions of his instructions concerning the attitude to be adopted in case of war – a fact which illustrates the dubious evidential value of testimony to the contents of written instruments not produced in court (§ 47). We have already found, moreover, on the basis of the record and of the evidence offered in rebuttal, that this alleged letter never existed. We have also found that Berman-Yurin and David did not see Trotsky in Copenhagen. Therefore, he can not have told them that a defeatist attitude must be adopted in case the Soviet Union became involved in war. Moreover, the probability of such instructions is disproved, in our opinion, by the sound-film quoted above, and also by the evidence on Trotsky’s attitude toward defense of the U.S.S.R., quoted in succeeding sections of this chapter.
The falsity of Olberg’s testimony has been demonstrated by his own letters and by the other documents and testimony of witnesses cited in Chapter XIII of this report. In view of this fact, we hold his mother’s explanation of his mention of Slomovitz to be plausible. We note also that his mother’s testimony contradicts Olberg’s on the reason why Paul Olberg, alleged fascist agent, went to Russia. Olberg states that he advised Paul
to go to the Soviet Union so that he could help me to gain a foothold.... He is an engineer, and it was much easier for him to obtain employment. He had genuine documents. At any rate not such fictitious papers as I had. (ZK 91.)
According to his mother, it was she who conceived the idea of giving Paul Olberg a trip to Russia as a pleasant surprise after his graduation as a chemical engineer in 1934 from the Technological Institute in Prague. She applied to the Riga Intourist for a visa, without informing Paul, and when it was granted sent for her son, outfitted him, paid Intourist for his visa and a two weeks’ stay in the Soviet Union and
sent him off to the Soviet Union with the following plan in mind: Should he be able to place himself, good. If he failed, he would come back. (PC Exh. 8, S III/6 a.)
Her son, she states, obtained a position in Gorky, and was well satisfied with his work. He applied for Soviet citizenship, which he apparently received just before his arrest.
Thus the evidence in our possession contradicts on every point the allegations concerning the connection of Trotsky and his followers with the Gestapo. We also attach weight to the fact that among the depositions accepted in evidence are those of the following Trotskyists or former Trotskyists who are refugees from Hitler’s Germany: Leon Sedov, Adolphe, Eugene Bauer, K. Erde, Walter Held, Erich Kohn, Anton Grylewicz, Schneeweiss, Anna Grylewicz, Georg Jungclas, Oscar and Bruno (full names in our possession). We have rejected the depositions of two other Trotskyist refugees because they were not properly authenticated. If the German Trotskyists made a deal with the Gestapo whereby they “were in fact left free” after Hitler came into power, then why did they share the general fate of official Communists and other opponents of the Hitler régime? Again why were they arrested and placed on trial in Danzig? The literature of both the Trotskyists and the Hitlerites in Danzig (§ 198) shows the characteristic relation between a revolutionary opposition and the Hitler régime.
§ 201. The allegations in the August trial linking the Trotskyists outside Russia with German fascism warrant the following observations: If one assume that Trotsky was acting in agreement with the Gestapo, then his followers outside Soviet Russia either knew about it, or they did not. If they knew about it, then the question must arise, Why, in the various splits which have taken place in the Trotskyist organization (of which there is ample evidence in the material before the Commission), did not some disgruntled Trotskyist reveal the plot? If they did not know about it, then Trotsky must have been betraying his own followers, and the current campaign on the part of the official Communist Party, its press and its sympathizers against the Trotskyists as “agents of fascism” is wholly unjustified. We find, on the basis of the evidence cited in this and previous chapters, that there is no reason whatever to believe that Trotsky or his followers ever had any connection with agents of German fascism, as alleged by Olberg and the Luryes, or that Trotsky ever advocated defeatism as testified by Mrachkovsky, David, and Berman-Yurin. Therefore, in our opinion, the current campaign against Trotsky and his followers as fascist agents is unjustified by any evidence whatever.
§ 202. In the January trial, the Definition of the Charge states:
1) that, on the instructions of L. D. Trotsky, there was organized in 1933 a parallel center consisting of the following accused in the present case: Y. L. Pyatakov, K. B. Radek, G. Y. Sokolnikov, and L. P. Serebryakov, the object of which was to direct criminal, anti-Soviet, espionage, diversive and terrorist activities for the purpose of undermining the military power of the U.S.S.R., accelerating an armed attack on the U.S.S.R., assisting foreign aggressors to seize territory of the U.S.S.R. and to dismember it and of overthrowing the Soviet Power and restoring capitalism and the rule of the bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union.
2) that, on the instructions of the aforesaid L. D. Trotsky, this center, through the accused Sokolnikov and Radek, entered into communication with representatives of certain foreign states for the purpose of organizing a joint struggle against the Soviet Union, in connection with which the Trotskyite center undertook, in the event of its coming into power, to grant these states a number of political and economic privileges and territorial concessions.
3) that, moreover, this center through its own members and other members of the criminal Trotskyite organization, systematically engaged in espionage on behalf of these states, supplying foreign intelligence services with secret information of the utmost importance.
The accused Radek, in his final plea, made the following statement which went unchallenged by the Prosecutor:
... But the trial is bicentric, and it has another important significance. It has revealed the smithy of war, and has shown that the Trotskyite organization became an agency of the forces which are fomenting a new world war.
What proofs are there in support of this fact? In support of this fact there is the evidence of two people – the testimony of myself, who received the directives and the letters from Trotsky (which, unfortunately, I burned), and the testimony of Pyatakov, who spoke to Trotsky. All the testimony of the other accused rests on our testimony. (PR 543.)
This last statement is borne out by the trial record.
§ 203. The accused Radek testified that he received two letters from Trotsky, one in April, 1934, and another in December, 1935, in which he discussed the question of agreements with foreign powers. In the April letter, according to Radek,
... Trotsky stated that he had established contacts with a certain Far Eastern state and a certain Central European state, and that he had openly told semi-official circles of these states that the bloc stood for a bargain with them and was prepared to make considerable concessions both of an economic and territorial character. (PR 106.)
Radek testified that he and Pyatakov decided that they could not go beyond “endorsing the mandate for negotiations” since they themselves could only negotiate with third-rate people, did not know just what Trotsky had said, and moreover considered it unwise to conduct negotiations under the eyes of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Therefore, he sent a letter to Trotsky through Romm in May, 1934. In this letter, he said, he told Trotsky that the bloc approved the fact that he was seeking contact with foreign powers and that he personally considered that it could only compromise itself by establishing such contact directly. Moreover, he warned Trotsky, he said,
that it was one thing to take the stand that war would create the conditions under which the bloc would come to power, and another thing to try to bring about this war. (PR 108.)
Trotsky’s letter of December, 1935, according to Radek, discussed two “so-called variants – coming to power in time of peace and coming to power in time of war” (PR 56). The first variant, Radek testified, Trotsky considered impracticable.
Consequently the practicable plan remained that of coming to power as a result of a defeat. And this ... signified for him that while up to that time Trotsky abroad and we here in Moscow had spoken of an economic retreat within the framework of the Soviet state, a radical change was indicated in this letter. (PR 113.)
The main points of the letter, he said, were (1) the maintenance of the stand of 1934 that defeat was inevitable; (2) “that now the problem of restoring capitalism was openly set before us... . As an inevitable result of the defeat of the U.S.S.R., of the social consequences of this defeat; and of an agreement on the basis of this defeat”; (3) the condition of replacing the Soviet power by a Bonapartist government, which meant fascism without its own finance capital and serving foreign finance capital; (4) the partition of the country, including the surrender of the Ukraine to Germany and the Maritime Province and the Amur region to Japan; the payment of indemnities in the form of supplies of food, raw materials, and fats, extending over a long period of years, and the guarantee to the victorious countries of a certain participation in Soviet imports; (5) Japan to be supplied with Sakhalin oil and to be guaranteed oil in event of a war with the U. S. A., and no obstacles to be placed in the way of the conquest of China by Japanese imperialism; (6) no obstacles to be placed in the way of the expansion of German fascism. (PR 115-16.)
§ 204. In his account of his alleged conversation with Trotsky near Oslo in 1935, Pyatakov said:
He told me that he had come to an absolutely definite agreement with the Fascist German government and with the Japanese government that they would adopt a favorable attitude in the event of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc coming to power. ... He then told me that he had conducted rather lengthy negotiations with the Vice-Chairman of the German National-Socialist Party – Hess. (PR 63-4.)’
... He then proceeded to list the conditions on which German support was to be had, as Trotsky allegedly stated them. These were, a general favorable attitude toward German interests and the German government on questions of international policy; the cession of certain territories to Germany, German exploitation of certain natural resources of the Soviet Union; coordination of “the destructive forces of the Trotskyist organizations” with forces from without acting under the guidance of German fascism in case of war; and within the country a “very serious retreat” in the direction of capitalism. (PR 64, 65.)
§ 205. Such, in brief, were the alleged directives of Trotsky concerning agreements with foreign powers, and the consequences which those agreements would have upon the territorial integrity and the economy of the Soviet Union. According to Radek, Trotsky stressed the necessity of “spreading and intensifying wrecking and diversive activities,” pointing out that the recognition of the bloc by Germany and Japan would be only a “scrap of paper” unless the bloc were strong, and that its strength would be measured by the extent of its subversive activities. He stated that the diversive actions of the Trotskyites were to be agreed upon with the general staffs of the two countries (PR 116). Radek testified that the new feature of these directives was that “defeat was linked up with foreign instructions” (PR 119); that the direct arrangements with foreign general staffs had not existed before. He went at length into the reasons why this letter was disturbing to the leaders of the bloc. In 1934, he said, they had regarded defeat as inevitable; now the Soviet power had grown so strong that to follow a defeatist course would be to thwart a possible victory. (PR 124.)
A significant feature of Radek’s testimony on Trotsky’s alleged letter of 1935 is his statement that Trotsky
realized that the master of the situation, with whose aid the bloc could come to power, would be fascism – on the one hand German fascism and on the other the military fascism of another Far Eastern country.... we were confronted with the prospect of having to accept everything, but if we remained alive and in power, then owing to the victory of these two countries, and as a result of their plunder and profit a conflict would arise between them and the others, and this would lead to our new development, our “revanche.” But this was a prospect from the realm of fiction. (PR 114-5.)
Radek stated also that he believed Trotsky’s new program would break up the bloc, since all of its leaders could not be depended upon to support a policy of partition of the U.S.S.R. He and Pyatakov, he said, decided that this formula had become untenable; that they could not take responsibility for it, and, therefore, they decided to call a conference. (PR 120-1.) He says:
Pyatakov went to see Trotsky; I don’t know why Pyatakov did not speak about this here, for it was perhaps the most vital point in his conversation with Trotsky – when Trotsky said that a conference meant exposure or a split. (PR 121.)
Thus it appears that Trotsky, too, believed that the alleged policy would break up the bloc. Radek said that after Pyatakov’s return the center decided to hold the conference anyhow, and agreed upon a number of persons whom they would invite, and that this was his last talk with Pyatakov, Serebryakov and Sokolnikov. (PR 121.) In his final speech he gave a confused account of the reasons why this conference never took place. In the terrorist organization, he said, there were people of various kinds, and people connected with foreign intelligence services, but he did not know this at the time. He had to admit, he said, the possibility that
someone was prowling around us. And the moment we allowed this secret to escape from the control of these four people, from that moment we should be absolutely powerless to control the situation. (PR 547.)
He intimated that he was suspicious of Dreitzer, and said:
.. . But when Dreitzer failed to appear in January and, after having received my summons to the conference, came to Moscow and did not come to see me – he was in Moscow in 1935 and did not come to see me – it became clear that Trotsky, on the basis of the correspondence I had had with him, and perceiving Pyatakov’s resistance and our misgivings about the defeatist line, was creating some other devilish business in addition to the parallel center. I conclude this from the fact that Dreitzer avoided us in 1935. (PR 547-8.)
Radek himself testified that it was in January, 1936, after Pyatakov’s return from Berlin, that they decided to call the conference, and agreed upon a number of persons to be invited (PR 121). Therefore, if Dreitzer failed to see Radek in 1935, his failure can obviously have had nothing to do with the proposed conference. And since Radek dated his and Pyatakov’s misgivings from the receipt of Trotsky’s alleged “December directives” of 1935, he could hardly have concluded, from Dreitzer’s failure to appear in 1935, that Trotsky was “creating some devilish business” inspired by those misgivings. Radek went on to say that Pyatakov told him Trotsky had said during their alleged conversation in Oslo that “cadres of people were being formed who had not been corrupted by the Stalin leadership.” When he read about Olberg, he said, it became clear to him that
Trotsky was organizing agents who had passed through the school of German fascism. And I found the direct reply to this when the question of the conference arose. It was clear to me that if Dreitzer learnt that we were putting the question of Trotsky’s directives on such a footing that it might again lead to a split, as was the case in 1929, then before we succeeded in doing so we should be put out of the way ourselves. (PR 548.)
Thus it would appear that Radek realized, after reading about Olberg during the trial of August, 1936, that Trotsky was using German fascist agents; and therefore he became afraid in January, 1936, that Dreitzer might put the parallel center out of the way if it “put Trotsky’s directives on such a footing that it might lead to a split.” He went on to state that he therefore could not tell people about the conference, and that
when we did tell them, the arrests had begun and it was impossible to get them together. (PR 548.)
§ 206. At least one alleged fact emerges clearly from what purports to be Radek’s explanation of the “backstage aspect of this conference”: the conference never took place. Vyshinsky in his final speech commented upon Radek’s failure to convene the conference, and asked rhetorically:
What would they have discussed at this conference? The restoration of capitalism? The dismemberment of the U.S.S.R.? The partitioning of the territory of the U.S.S.R.? Territorial concessions? Selling our territory to the Japanese and German annexationists? Espionage and wrecking? They concealed these points of their program, its main points. But we know that hidden things shall be brought to light. And this shameful program of the anti-Soviet Trotskyite bloc was also brought to light. (PR 493.)
To prove that this program really existed, he quoted No. 10 of the Bulletin of the Opposition of April, 1930, which he said “contains what in essence is the same thing.” (PR 494.)
We have examined the article from which Vyshinsky quotes, and we find:
(1) This article by Trotsky is an Open Letter to the members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. We note that it is the same letter about which Trotsky wrote in his correspondence with the accused Olberg, mentioning its introduction into the Soviet Union (§ 79, 1). If the alleged program set forth in this article was really treasonable, it seems strange that Trotsky should have announced it publicly in his Bulletin of the Opposition rather than in a secret letter to his alleged co-conspirators. It seems even more strange that he should have announced it in an Open Letter to the ruling party of the Soviet Union. But strangest of all is the fact that it took the Soviet government six years to discover the treasonable nature of this document.
(2) The Prosecutor, as in other cases already cited, falsified the contents of this Open Letter by omitting pertinent passages. The Letter begins with the words:
Dear Comrades: The present letter is impelled by a feeling of greatest alarm over the future of the Soviet Union, and the destiny of the proletarian dictatorship. The policy of the present leadership, that is, the narrow group of Stalin, is driving the country at full speed towards the most dangerous crises and convulsions.
Even Vyshinsky’s quotations from this Open Letter indicate that it was a criticism of government policy, and not a program for dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the restoration of capitalism, etc. We give his quotations:
“... All the same, retreat is inevitable. It must be carried out as soon as possible... .
“... Put a stop to ‘mass’ collectivization... .
“... Put a stop to the hurdle race of industrialization. Revise the question of tempo in the light of experience... .
“... Abandon the ‘ideals’ of self-contained economy. Draw up a new variant of a plan providing for the widest possible intercourse with the world market... .
“... Carry out the necessary retreat, and then strategical rearmament... .
“.. . It will be impossible to emerge from the present contradictions without crises and struggle....” (PR 494.)
And here are the passages from which Vyshinsky lifted his quotations. The slight, but sometimes significant, differences in the wording of the passages he actually quoted are due to the fact that we have had these passages retranslated directly from Trotsky’s original Russian:
The immediate tactical task is: To retreat from the positions of adventurism. A retreat is in any case inevitable. It is therefore necessary to carry it out as soon as possible, and in the most orderly manner possible.
To call a halt to “wholesale” collectivization, and to replace it with a careful selection based on genuine voluntary desire [of the peasants].
To put an end to record-breaking jumps in industrialization. To reconsider the question of tempos in the light of experience, from the standpoint of the necessity of raising the living standard of the working-class masses.
To abandon the “ideals” of a self-contained economy. To work out a new variant of the plan, calculated on the widest possible interaction with the world market.
To carry out the necessary retreat and then a strategic rearming, without too great damage and, above all, without losing its sense of perspective – this can be done only by a Party clearly cognizant of its aims and strength. This demands a collective criticism of the entire experience of the Party in the post-Leninist period. The fraud and the falsehoods of “self-criticism” must be replaced by honest Party democracy. A general verification of the general line – not of its application but of its leadership – this is where we must begin!
It is impossible to find a way out from the present contradictions without crises and struggle. A favorable change in the relation of forces on a world scale, i.e., important successes of the international revolution, would, of course, introduce a very significant and even decisive factor into Soviet internal affairs. But it is impermissible to build a policy on expectations of some saving miracle “in the shortest possible period of time.” To be sure, in the coming period there will be no lack of crucial and revolutionary situations, especially in the countries of Europe and Asia. But this does not yet solve the problem.
If the defeats of the post-war years have taught us anything at all, they have taught us that without a strong and self-confident party that has conquered the confidence of the class, victory is unthinkable. Meanwhile, on this decisive point the balance of the post-Leninist period shows a great deficit.
As the foregoing passages show, this Open Letter can be regarded as treasonable only if one accept the position of the Prosecutor, upon which we have had frequent occasion to comment in preceding chapters of this report, that opposition to the policies of the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet government is synonymous with criminal activity against the Soviet state and people.
§ 207. Leon Trotsky, testifying before the Preliminary Commission on this charge, said:
My opinion is that now the key to the situation in the Soviet Union is not in the Soviet Union, but in Europe. If the people in Spain are victorious against the fascists, if the working class in France will assure its movement to Socialism, then the situation in the Soviet Union will change immediately, because the workers are very dissatisfied with the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. They, as I say, are in an impasse. They say, “Given choice only between Hitler and Stalin, we prefer Stalin.” They are right. Stalin is preferable to Hitler... .
FINERTY: I take it that you do not think, from what you say, that it will help the cause for the proletariat to overthrow Stalin by using Hitler as a means.
TROTSKY: This accusation is so absurd! Every time I repeat it, it makes – I am so perplexed that I cannot find arguments against this absurdity – thinking I can use Hitler against Stalin. For what purpose? What can I win by this? Vyshinsky did not explain to me what I can win by this procedure. I must sacrifice all my past, all my friends and all my future, and what can I win? I cannot understand it.
FINERTY: As you see the situation now, Hitler must first be overthrown before Stalin will be overthrown?
TROTSKY: I hope it will be so. All the articles I wrote about this – and I repeat it in dozens of interviews and articles – if a war comes, the first revolution will be in Japan, because Japan is like the old Tsarist Russia, with a most brutally organized authority; and the contradictions of the social body of Japan will burst out. The first revolution will occur in Japan. The second, I hope, in Germany, because Germany, hermetically sealed, will during the war inevitably explode, as during the imperialist war with the Hohenzollerns, because now all of the contradictions, the social contradictions and the economic, remain in more sharp form in Germany. (PC 278-80.)
Concerning his attitude, past and present, on the defense of the Soviet Union, he stated:
... With the Left Opposition, we declared many times we will sustain Stalin and his bureaucracy, and we repeat it now. We will sustain Stalin and his bureaucracy in every effort it makes to defend the new form of property against imperialistic attacks. At the same time we try to defend the new forms of property against Stalin and the bureaucracy, against inner attacks against the new form of property. That is our position. (PC 282.)
Trotsky said that he has continuously met with opposition among his own followers to his stand for defense of the Soviet Union; and that he has broken not only with individual members but with organizations on this question:
There was in Germany the “Leninbund,” an organization connected with us; but we separated ourselves in 1929, the beginning of 1929, over this question. Then we have in France a paper of a group which divided from us. One of the editors is Laste, who is our witness, a very important witness. He is my adversary, and attacks me especially on this question. (PC 286.)
Questioned concerning his attitude toward German fascism, he said:
... I have many pamphlets, brochures, and articles beginning in 1930. I tried to draw the attention of the Comintern to this tremendous danger [of Hitler’s rise to power], and they accused me of being in a panic, that I overestimated the Nazis in Germany, and that the most immediate foe was the Social-Fascists.
STOLBERG: You mean the so-called Social-Fascists?
TROTSKY: The Social Democrats.
STOLBERG: You don’t subscribe to that characterization?
TROTSKY: No. I was a Left Social-Fascist, not a genuine fascist but a Left Social-Fascist. The reason was, I insisted upon the necessity of the united front between the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, the united front against Hitler. But you know that in Germany the Communist Party concluded a united front with Hitler in Prussia against the Social-Democratic Government on the 9th of August, 1931. It was the famous Prussian plebiscite initiated by Hitler and supported by the Communists... .
GOLDMAN: After Hitler took power, what was your attitude toward the relationship between Hitler and the Soviet Union? TROTSKY: I didn’t try to provoke a war. But I showed in my writings how the Soviet bureaucracy in their hopes to remain in good relations with Hitler were absolutely wrong. Then I wrote in the French press in 1933 or 1934 – I wrote a series of articles in the bourgeois press denouncing the genuine plans of Hitler.... (PC 309-10.)
Of the attitude of the Soviet government after Hitler came to power, he said:
Stalin in the first six months of 1933 hoped to keep in good relations with the fascists in Germany. I can introduce articles, my articles against him on that occasion. I quote from Izvestia about the 15th of March, 1933 [March 4, 1933]: “The U.S.S.R. is the only state which is not nourished on hostile sentiments towards Germany and that independent of the form and the composition of the government of the Reich.” It was Hitler who repulsed it, not he. Then only did he begin to look in the direction of France, and so on. The first half of 1933, I was an agent of France, the United States and Great Britain. I changed my profession only after the crushing of Stalin’s hopes to remain in friendship with Hitler. I can prove it. It was in the Pravda. I am represented as “Mr.” Trotsky. I am “Mr.” Trotsky in spite of my English. (Laughter.) (PC 293.)
Trotsky further testified that after the victory of Hitler and the change of policy by Stalin and the Comintern, and after the Opposition had become convinced that the Comintern was incapable of drawing the necessary conclusions from the defeat of the German proletariat, the Opposition declared that the Comintern was no longer a revolutionary organization or its leading party, the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary party. It had considered the Party the necessary instrument for the peaceful reform of the Soviet state. Now it declared that there must be a new revolutionary party and that the bureaucracy could be removed only through a new political revolution. (PC 271.)
During the hearings of the Preliminary Commission, Mr. Goldman, counsel for Leon Trotsky, quoted, with reference to the arrest of Trotsky in Canada in 1917 as an alleged German agent, an article of Lenin from Pravda, No. 34, April 16, 1917. In this article, Lenin said:
Can one even for a moment believe in the trustworthiness of the statement that Trotsky, the chairman of the Soviet of Workers’ Delegates in St. Petersburg in 1905 – a revolutionary who has sacrificed years to disinterested service of the revolution – that this man has anything to do with a scheme subsidized by the German Government? This is a patent, unheard-of, and malicious slander of a revolutionary.... (PC 20.)
Questioned whether this statement of Lenin could be regarded as proof, in view of the fact that Lenin himself had been charged with being a German agent, Trotsky replied:
... My proof is not an absolute proof for people who suspect Lenin of having been an agent of Germany. But my accusers, my prosecutors, are sure that Lenin was not an agent of Germany.... My proof is that Lenin affirmed that I could not have been a German agent in 1917, before the October Revolution, before the Civil war, before the creation of the Communist International. Now, I think it is an argument in my favor against Prosecutor Vyshinsky and his superior, Stalin. (PC 53.)
Trotsky was also asked whether, in ceding Russian territory through the Brest-Litovsk treaty, the Soviet government had not acted in favor of Germany as a means of obtaining power. In answer, he stated that although the Soviet government did cede territory, it was forced to do so in order to save Socialism. On the other hand, he pointed out, he was accused in the trial of having agreed to make territorial concessions in order to replace Socialism by capitalism. (PC 53-4.)
In his final argument Trotsky dealt with these questions, as follows:
To bolster up the improbable accusation of an alliance of the “Trotskyites” with Germany and Japan, the foreign attorneys of the GPU are circulating the following versions:
1. Lenin, with the agreement of Ludendorff, crossed Germany during the war, in order to be able to carry out his revolutionary tasks.
2. The Bolshevik government did not shrink from ceding enormous territory and paying indemnity to Germany, in order to save the Soviet régime.
Conclusion: Why not admit that Trotsky entered into agreement with the same German General Staff in order to secure, through the cession of territory, the possibility of realizing his aims in the rest of the country? (PC 509.)
Trotsky pointed out that while Lenin did cross Germany by utilizing Ludendorff’s false hopes that Russia would disintegrate as a result of the internal struggle, he concealed neither his program nor the purpose of his trip. He called in Switzerland a small conference of internationalists from various countries, who approved his traveling to Russia through Germany; he entered into no agreements with the German authorities and made the condition that no one was to enter his car during his passage through Germany; upon his arrival in Petrograd he explained to the Soviet and the workers the purpose and nature of his trip. Trotsky repeated that although the Bolshevik government did cede large territories to Germany after the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, it did so in order to save the Soviet régime in the rest of the country; that it had no other choice; that the decision was adopted not behind the backs of the people but after open and public discussion; that the Bolshevik government never concealed from the masses that the Brest-Litovsk treaty signified a transitory and partial capitulation of the proletarian revolution to capitalism. On the other hand, he pointed out, the activities ascribed to himself in the January trial have nothing in common with these examples of Lenin’s activity because they imply (1) an agreement to renounce socialism in favor of capitalism, (2) an attempt to destroy Soviet economy and exterminate workers and soldiers, (3) concealment of his real aims and methods from the whole world, and (4) that his entire public political activity serves only to fool the working masses about his real plans into which Hitler, the Mikado, and their agents are initiated.
To be sure, Trotsky said,
some attorneys of the GPU are inclined to dilute with water the over-potent wine of Stalin. It may be, they say, that Trotsky agreed only verbally to restore capitalism, but in reality was preparing to realize in the remaining territory a policy in the spirit of his program. In the first place, this variant contradicts the confessions of Radek, Pyatakov and others. But, independently of this fact, it is just as senseless as the official version given in the indictment. The program of the Opposition is the program of international Socialism. How could an experienced adult imagine that Hitler and the Mikado, possessing a complete list of his treasons and abominable crimes, would permit him to realize a revolutionary program? How could one hope, anyway, to achieve power at the price of acts of high treason in the service of a foreign general staff? Is it not clear in advance that Hitler and the Mikado, after using such an agent to the limit, would fling him aside like a squeezed lemon? Could the conspirators, headed by six members of Lenin’s Political Bureau, have failed to understand this? The accusation is thus internally meaningless in both its variants – the official variant, which speaks of the restoration of capitalism, and the semi-official variant, which concedes to the conspirators a hidden design – to fool Hitler and the Mikado. (PC 511.)
§ 208. Several witnesses who appeared before our sub-commissions made statements bearing upon the charge of agreements with foreign powers. We have already quoted (§ 196) Eugene Bauer’s testimony on the alleged connection with the Gestapo. Herbert Solow, journalist, testified before the New York Sub-Commission that he belonged to the Workers’ Party of the U. S. in 1934 and 1935; that he agrees with Trotsky on certain questions but on others is in what he considers such fundamental disagreement that he could not belong to the same organization (NY 113). He testified that he visited Trotsky at Prinkipo on August, 1930, after a visit to the U.S.S.R. At that time, he said,
... I had been very much disappointed by what I had seen in Russia ... and came into that discussion at Prinkipo with an attitude that ... those who had the slogan of defending the Soviet Union were really sort of half-hearted Stalinists, Trotsky among them. I attempted to characterize him on that basis. He replied by calling me an ultra-Leftist and in a long discussion endeavoring to prove to me that the revolutionary or any progressive must stand on the basis of defending the Soviet Union despite what Stalin was doing, even with Stalin at the head of the government.... He made what seemed to us almost like Stalinist speeches because they were so enthusiastic about the potentialities of the Soviet Union. (NY 109-110.)
B. J. Field (identified § 66) testified that during Trotsky’s stay in Copenhagen, and also during the preceding four months while Field was working with him at Prinkipo, the question of the attitude of the Trotskyist organization toward Hitler was often discussed by Trotsky in his presence. He said:
... The question of the defense of the Soviet Union in relation to stopping the advance of Hitler, was a very vital issue throughout the whole International Left Opposition.... One of the views of Comrade Trotsky regarding the danger of Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, was the direct immediate danger to the Soviet Union. He expressed at that time the thought that, if Hitler came to power, his function would be to act as a super-Wrangel, that is, the spearhead of foreign intervention against the Soviet Union.... The Communist Party, on the contrary, took the position that the question of Hitler’s coming to power was a secondary question, that there was little likelihood of Hitler’s coming to power, and if he did come to power he would not last more than a very few days. ... The Stalinist organization, in our opinion, was weakening the defense of the Soviet Union by minimizing the danger of Hitler. Our tendency, on the contrary, regarded the campaign against Hitler as the most burning issue for the international labor movement. (NY 127-8.)
A. J. Muste (identified § 138) questioned about the views expressed by Trotsky during Mr. Muste’s conversations with him at Weksal, near Hoenefoss, Norway, in June, 1936, said:
Both in conversations that I had at Hoenefoss and throughout the period of my connection with the Trotskyist movement, when there was correspondence with Comrade Trotsky on the subject, the Opposition constantly had been saying that for one thing, this was not the period when any important Opposition work could be done in the Soviet Union because of the severity of the repression ... ; that the task of the Trotskyist movement was to build an effective Marxist leadership and organizations in the capitalist countries. That would have the result, for one thing, of making it impossible for these countries to wage war upon the Soviet Union. The defense of the Soviet Union, regarded by Comrade Trotsky as a workers’ state, should constantly be one of the dominant aims of the entire movement. Furthermore, the building up of effective Leninist organizations in the capitalist countries would eventually make it possible to have an Opposition within the Soviet Union to change conditions there in such a way as to secure the defense of the workers’ state, and the correction of the evils which, Trotsky holds, exist in that state today. (NY 43.)
§ 209. Among the depositions in our possession there are many references to Trotsky’s attitude and that of his followers toward the Soviet Union and toward fascism during those years when he was alleged to have been plotting with the German and Japanese governments for the assassination of Soviet officials and the overthrow of the Soviet government. We quote briefly from typical statements:
Raymond Molinier (identified § 68, g, a) says that
... all the political activity of Trotsky at Copenhagen, his public lectures as well as his speeches for the films had an orientation diametrically opposed to that of the famous terrorist center.... At Copenhagen Trotsky called together the principal militants of the international organization who were present.... This interview took place, and it is not without interest to recall that the whole axis of the discussion was precisely the menace of Hitler’s coming to power in Germany and the need of an energetic propaganda for a united proletarian front in order to block his way. (PC Exh. 16, I/22.)
Erich Kohn, in an affidavit (Oslo), states that as a member of the leadership of the Hamburg organization of the Left Opposition, he was in Copenhagen during the period of Trotsky’s stay there and was with Trotsky daily; that since that time he has become widely separated from Trotskyism and the Trotskyist organization. Concerning Trotsky’s attitude toward the Soviet Union at that time he says:
In so far as questions concerning the Soviet Union were discussed in the conversations held at that time (which was seldom the case), Trotsky and all his friends held firmly to the point of view of peaceful reform of the Soviet régime and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union with the right of political criticism of the ruling faction. (Ibid., I/6.)
H. Sneevliet (identified § 159, 9) states that he visited Trotsky in Copenhagen November 27-29, 1932. Concerning Trotsky’s attitude toward the Soviet Union at that time, he says:
Between himself and L. D. Trotsky the existence could be stated of a common opinion about many problems, but the great difference was there, that undersigned and his Dutch friends had already accepted the point of view of the necessity of a new revolutionary party and international in 1929, whereas L. D. Trotsky at the end of 1932 still defended oppositional work inside the parties of the Third International. It seems to him absolutely superfluous to state that L. D. Trotsky strongly stood for the defense of the Soviet Union and in general represented the spirit of revolutionary Marxism which makes it impossible that he, Trotsky, could be responsible for the activities of which he has been accused in the different political “trials” of Moscow. (PC Exh. 18, S VIII, 26.)
Sneevliet states that he also saw Trotsky in Trotsky’s house at Royan, France, August 18-20, 1933, and that
The establishment of the Hitler dictatorship in Germany and the responsibility of the German Stalinist Party (KPD) for this greatest defeat of the European proletariat of the later years proved to have pushed L. D. Trotsky towards recognition of the unavoidableness of the Fourth International and for that reason also of new revolutionary parties in the different countries.... It was clear that also at that time L. D. Trotsky maintained totally the revolutionary Marxist principles and that he defended revolutionary Marxist practice. (Ibid.)
J. Laste (identified § 151; see also § 207) testifies concerning Trotsky’s political preoccupations during his stay at Royan:
... Trotsky was then much absorbed by a change in his estimate of the Communist International.... He passed most of his time writing arguments in favor of his new conceptions. ... Another meeting took place one Sunday afternoon with Trotskyist comrades who had come from Paris by car... . The principal theme of the discussion was the creation of the new International and the new party; the sabotage of the German revolutionary movement by the Stalinists appeared to Trotsky as the definitive bankruptcy of the Communist International. The coming of Hitler to power was attributed in large part to Stalinism; on this subject Trotsky recalled the united front policy he had advocated for Germany, and showed how Stalinism, by its political incapacity, was placing the U.S.S.R. in danger between the pincers formed by Japan and Hitler Germany. (PC Exh. 18, VII/8.)
§ 210. Besides such statements of witnesses as the above, our exhibits contain various other documents indicating the nature of Trotsky’s political preoccupations during the periods of his visit to Copenhagen and his stay at St. Palais. We have already cited (§ 199) the sound film which he made in Copenhagen for Left Opposition propaganda. We have also the resolutions and manifestos adopted by an improvised conference of Left Oppositionists held during his visit to Copenhagen, which chiefly concern a proposal for the creation of an Oppositionist international defense organization, and the report of a commission on the situation of the Left Oppositionists in Spain. (PC Exh. 16, III/8.)
We quote the following paragraph from notes made by J. Schwab of the German Socialist Workers’ Party, on a series of conversations with Trotsky, August 17-20, 1933 (on the fourth day H. Sneevliet was present and took part in the discussion). These notes were sent to Trotsky by Schwab:
... [Trotsky] was of the opinion that it did not appear possible within a predictable time to bring about a World Labor Congress through the initiative of the parties represented in Paris. But since such a congress would be very useful for the organization of the struggle against the war danger and fascism, especially for the organization of a boycott against Hitler-Germany, the mere propaganda for such a congress would have good results and help the campaign for a new international. (PC Exh. 18, IX/1, a.)
A letter from John Paton (identified § 159, g) to the Manchester Guardian of February 16, 1937, states that at the time he saw Trotsky in Southern France in 1933, Trotsky’s objective and entire policy were,
unless he was playing an elaborate part designed to mislead me and all others in contact with him, including his own followers throughout the world (a meaningless foolery which is inconceivable),
the exact opposite of those attributed to him during that period in the January trial. All Trotsky’s main activities in recent years, says Mr. Paton,
have been devoted to exposing the dangers for the international working class movement of “collaboration with bourgeois parties and capitalist governments” and to preaching the need for intensification of Communist revolutionary activity as the real bulwark against fascism. (Ibid., VIII/21.)
§ 211. In support of his statement that he had formerly been denounced in the Soviet press as an ally of British, French and American imperialism, Trotsky introduced, among other documents, Pravda of March 8, 1929, containing an article by Yaroslaysky, entitled “Mr. Trotsky in the Service of the Bourgeoisie.” Yaroslaysky says:
As a matter of fact Trotsky in his articles conducts a propaganda against the Soviet Union, the Communist Party and the Comintern. It is precisely for this that he is being paid by the money-bags of England and America... .
Isn’t it strange that Trotsky is being paid tens of thousands of dollars for “propaganda” by the very same English overlords who organized a break with the Soviet Union precisely on account of “propaganda"? ... (PC Exh. 26.)
Trotsky also introduced excerpts from l'Humanité, organ of the official Communist Party of France (July 24, 25, 26 and August 29, 1933) denouncing him as an agent of the French government and the Social Democracy and stating that he has been granted asylum in France in order that he may aid the offensive against the Soviet Union. (PC Exh. 18, X/2-5.) Also l'Humanité of August 1, 1933, in which his picture appears as one of “The General Staff of the Counter-Revolution in France,” along with those of the Grand Duke Cyril, General Miller, Leon Blum, Rosenfeld, Kerensky and Tseretelli. (PC Exh. 18, S X/6.)
§ 212. Trotsky’s published writings revealing his attitude toward capitalism in general and fascism in particular, and toward the defense of the Soviet Union, are so numerous and so well known that we cite here only two or three. In “What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat,” published in 1932, he discusses the rise of fascism in Germany. Fascism, he says, is
a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society. The task of fascism lies not only in destroying the Communist advance guard but in holding the entire class in a state of forced disunity. (New York: Pioneer Publishers; p. 12.)
He sees Stalin as retarding the proletariat in the struggle against fascism:
The key to the situation is in the hands of the Communist Party; but the Stalinist bureaucracy attempts to use this key to lock the gates to revolutionary action. (Ibid., p. 40.)
The Stalinist policy, he maintains, is paralyzing the German masses at the very moment when, weak and disorganized as they are, they might still turn Germany from fascism to revolution. He warns that the same Stalinist policy prevented the organization of soviets in China during the period of revolutionary upsurge, and then, when the recession began, urged their formation – too late.
Typical of Trotsky’s attitude toward German fascism in his writings after Hitler came to power, is the pamphlet, “What Hitler Wants,” copyrighted 1933 and published by the John Day Company, New York. We quote:
... Taken as a whole, the Hitler program for the reconstruction of Europe is a reactionary-Utopian medley of racial mysticism and national cannibalism. It is not hard to submit it to an annihilating criticism.... (p. 11.)
... Europe needs a new organization. But woe betide it if this work falls into the hands of fascism.... (p. 30.)
His attitude toward Japan is illustrated by the following excerpt from an article, “Japan Heads Toward a Catastrophe,” written on July 12, 1933, and published in the Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 38-39, February, 1934:
To summarize. Economically Japan is weaker than any of its adversaries in a major war. Japanese industry is incapable of assuring an army of several millions with armaments and equipment over a period of years. The Japanese financial system which is unable to bear the burden of militarism in peacetime would completely collapse at the very beginning of a major war. The Japanese soldier en masse does not comply with the requirements of new technology and new tactics. The population is profoundly hostile to the régime. Goals of conquest would prove incapable of uniting the divided nation. Simultaneously with mobilization hundreds of thousands of revolutionists or candidates for revolutionists would flow into the army.... The social warp of the country is ripped, the bolts are loose. In the steel corset of military dictatorship official Japan appears to be mighty, but war will ruthlessly dispel this myth.
Trotsky’s opinion of the probable effect which imperialist intervention would have upon the Soviet masses has an important bearing upon the charges of defeatism, and of having plotted to bring about such intervention. In “War and the Fourth International: Draft Theses Adopted by the International Secretariat of the International Communist League,” point 46 reads in part as follows:
Within the U.S.S.R. war against imperialist intervention will undoubtedly provoke a veritable outburst of genuine fighting enthusiasm. All the contradictions will seem overcome or at any rate relegated to the background. The young generations of workers and peasants that emerged from the revolution will reveal on the battlefield a colossal dynamic power.... (New York: Communist League of America, 1934, p. 21.)
§ 213. We have already found, on the basis of the evidence, that the testimony of Radek and Pyatakov is worthless. Therefore, the charge of conspiracy between Trotsky on the one hand and Hitler and the Mikado on the other stands not proved. Moreover this charge seems to us absurd and incredible. If we are to believe the testimony in the Moscow trials, Trotsky and his alleged co-conspirators in Russia were in treasonable relations with Hitler both before and after Hitler came to power. And if we are to believe the official Communist press of the period, both inside and outside the U.S.S.R., he was at the same time an agent of French, British, and American imperialism, and in counter-revolutionary collusion with the Social Democracy. Such indiscriminate conspiratorial activity as all these accusations imply would be more characteristic of a crackpot busybody than of an intelligent man. It would also, one would think, indicate that Trotsky must have had in the Soviet Union a very large and devoted following, ready to accept not only his published program but also its exact opposite, his alleged secret program. It can hardly be assumed that the governments of five great powers would conspire for the overthrow of another great power with a mere individual who could bring nothing more to the bargain than his own personal hatred of its governing group. Yet the indictment in the August trial clearly states that
Lacking all support in the working class and the toiling masses of the people of the U.S.S.R.... the leaders of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite counter-revolutionary bloc, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, sank definitely into the swamp of white-guardism, joined forces and merged with the most inveterate enemies of the Soviet Power.... (ZK 12.)
And the indictment in the January trial affirms that
... deprived, as a result of the complete victory of socialism in the U.S.S.R., of all support among the masses of the people, and constituting an isolated and politically doomed group of bandits and spies, branded with universal contempt by the people of the Soviet Union, L. D. Trotsky and his accomplices ... outrageously betrayed the interests of the working class and the peasantry, betrayed their country and became an agency of the German and Japanese fascist forces for espionage, diversive and wrecking activities. (PR 17-18.)
In their testimony, several of the accused stated that they could not count on mass support. The accused Kamenev said:
It was no use counting on any kind of serious internal difficulties to secure the overthrow of the leadership which had guided the country through extremely difficult stages.... Two paths remained: either honestly and completely to put a stop to the struggle against the Party, or to continue this struggle, but without any hope of obtaining any mass support whatsoever, ... by means of individual terror. (ZK 65.)
The accused Shestov claimed to have told Sedov in 1931 that “we had no support at all among the workers and peasants.” (PR 162.) The witness Loginov said he had it from Pyatakov that “... this was just how Trotsky thought, that ... it was impossible to rely on the workers and proletarian masses within the country, ...” (PR 180.) The accused Sokolnikov said, “We could not count on the support of the masses.” (PR 553.) According to Pyatakov, Trotsky told him during their interview in Norway that
The organization of a mass struggle was impossible, in the first place because the worker masses and the peasant masses were in the main at present under the hypnotic influence of the huge constructive work that was going on in the country, constructive work which they took to be socialist construction. Any attempt on our part in that direction .. . would rapidly lead ... to the destruction of the comparatively insignificant Trotskyite cadres at present in the country. (PR 61.)
These and similar statements in the records indicate that the accused, and Trotsky too, allegedly sought foreign help precisely because they realized the futility of looking for any support within the U.S.S.R. Even if one assume that Trotsky misrepresented to the governments of Hitler and the Mikado the extent of his influence over the Russian masses, it seems absurd to suppose that they would have taken his word for it if they regarded the overthrow of the Soviet government as a serious business; more especially since, according to the records of both trials, they had their own agents at work in Russia, who might have been supposed to be in a position to inform them correctly about the solidarity of the Russian people behind the existing régime.
If we assume that these Governments knowingly conspired with a “politically doomed group of bandits,” then the question arises, what could this group have given them which would merit in exchange the gift of power over the Soviet state? Power, according to the indictments and confessions in both trials, was the stake for which the alleged conspirators risked their heads. But no man of political experience could reasonably expect to attain power by such means under such circumstances; and the principal accused were men of long political experience who had had occasion to learn a great deal about the mechanics of power. One might assume that, blinded by their ambition, they permitted themselves to be duped by the false promises of their alleged foreign allies. But their own testimony concerning the doubts and fears inspired in them by Trotsky’s “December directives” indicates conviction that these allies would never permit them to enjoy power; that Trotsky’s agreements with Japan and Germany meant that the Soviet state would become an appendage of fascism.” Indeed, the accused Radek, as we have shown, testified to the danger that these agreements would break up the bloc. Moreover, he indicated that Trotsky realized this, too, and therefore forbade the calling of the proposed conference (§ 205). The accused Pyatakov, in telling about his alleged conversation with Trotsky, characterized this “line” as “downright, undisguised high treason” and said that Trotsky warned him that it was not expedient or possible not only to make it public, but even to communicate it to more than a small, restricted group of “Trotskyites” (PR 62).
In his final argument, Vyshinsky said:
But how to “come to an agreement"? Will the fascists be willing to “come to an agreement"? Will they not prefer to act without an agreement, as they act everywhere, all over the world, by grabbing everything, throwing themselves upon, crushing and exterminating the weak? Radek said that it was clear that:
“The masters of the situation would be fascism – German fascism on the one hand, and the military fascism of a Far-Eastern country on the other.”
And, of course, Trotsky, their teacher, understood this no less than they did. The whole Trotskyite centre understood it. They accepted it with open eyes. This was the second point of their “remarkable” program. (PR 489.)
This, like many of the Prosecutor’s statements, is not quite exact. The accused, as we have seen, had testified that they were alarmed by Trotsky’s alleged agreements, and unready to accept them without discussion. As concerns Trotsky, the evidence clearly alleges that he was trying to impose this line on his followers in full knowledge of the risk that it would disrupt them – in other words, that he was following a course which would seem remarkably stupid. Moreover, if Radek had the wit to see that the prospect of “revanche” which Trotsky allegedly set forth was “a prospect from the realm of fiction” it would be a little far-fetched to assume that Trotsky did not himself have the wit to see it.
§ 214. The alternative placed before us in comparing the trial record with the evidence introduced in rebuttal by Trotsky and others is either to assume that Trotsky was plotting to come to power by methods which he knew in advance would be self-defeating – see the above quotation from Vyshinsky’s speech – or to believe that his attitude toward German fascism, Japanese imperialism, and the defense of the Soviet Union during the period of the alleged conspiracy was as his own testimony, that of witnesses, the documents cited above, and his published writings represent it. There is no other choice, for the testimony of the accused precludes the assumption that his purpose was to yield a part of Soviet territory in order to carry out a Marxist program in the remainder.
In order to accept the conclusions of the Moscow Court, one would either have to believe that Trotsky is the most interesting case of split personality in all history, or accept the Prosecutor’s contention that his public activity constituted nothing but an elaborate camouflage for his secret counter-revolutionary intrigues. Our study of the trial records convinces us that Trotsky is fully justified in contending that the counter-revolutionary activity ascribed to him is characterized by an extraordinary stupidity. On the other hand, we find that his whole public activity, including his voluminous writings, has followed a consistent theoretical line throughout his long career, and that line is diametrically opposed to the activity ascribed to him in the two Moscow trials. We do not presume to judge the aims to which he has devoted himself, or the methods by which he has pursued those aims. But we can and do state that his career has been that of a man of extraordinary intelligence and ability. To believe that his prodigious public activity was intended merely to cloak conspiratorial enterprises as stupid, inept and feeble as those ascribed to him in the trials, would be to abandon any claim to common sense.
§ 215. We therefore hold the charge of conspiracy with foreign powers to be not only not proved, but preposterous.
§ 216. As stated in Chapter III of this report, the scope and content of our inquiry was determined by the proceedings in the Moscow trials. In his final argument in the January trial, Prosecutor Vyshinsky defined two categories of
proofs which in our hands may serve as a test of the assertions of the indictment, of the theses of the indictment. First, there is the historical connection which confirms the theses of the indictment on the basis of the Trotskyites’ past activity. We have also in mind the testimony of the accused which in itself represents enormous importance as proof. (PR 513.)
This passage appears at the beginning of the final summary of the Prosecutor’s address. That the weight attached to the historical connection is not accidental and that it is not wholly a matter of accident that it is placed before the probative value of the testimony of the accused, is evident from the fact that the speech opens with eleven pages of the Prosecutor’s version of the history of Trotskyism in general, followed by as many pages dealing mainly with his version of the past of Pyatakov, Radek and Sokolnikov in particular.
We quote a few of the passages in which Vyshinsky lays special emphasis upon past history:
Like a reversed cinema reel, this trial has reminded and shown us all the main stages of the historical path traversed by the Trotskyites and Trotskyism, which spent more than thirty years of its existence in preparing for its final conversion into a storm detachment of fascism, into one of the departments of the fascist police. (PR 463-64.)
It is not an accident that the Trotskyites are playing this role of vanguard of the anti-Soviet fascist forces. The descent of Trotskyism into the anti-Soviet underworld, its conversion into a fascist agency, is merely the culmination of its historical development. (PR 466.)
He goes on to say that the alleged terrorism, wrecking and collusion with foreign powers
merely crowns the struggle Trotskyism has been waging against the working class and the Party, against Lenin and Leninism, for decades. (PR 466.)
We know that at the turning points of our struggle, at the sharp upsurges of our proletarian revolution, the Trotskyite leaders were always, as a rule, found in the camp of our enemies, on the other side of the barricades. (PR 470.)
The importance of the alleged history is summed up in this final quotation:
... the history of their fall began long before they organized the so-called parallel center, this offshoot of the criminal Trotskyite-Zinovievite united bloc. Organic connection is proved. Historical connection is proved. And what I have said would be sufficient to remove all doubt that the principal charge made ... against the accused sitting in the dock of attempting to restore in our country the capitalist system which was overthrown 19 years ago is fully proved, proved documentarily. (PR 470.)
§ 217. We are not here concerned with these generalizations of past history beyond remarking that all the leading persons accused in the two trials had occupied for years positions of great responsibility within the Soviet government and the Party organization; that the trials resulted in the removal from office and the execution or imprisonment of every surviving leader of the October Revolution save Trotsky, who is condemned in exile, and Stalin in power. Enemies of the Revolution could find no more convincing ground upon which to condemn it; that is, if they accept the Prosecutor’s version of history.
The Commission does not accept that version, for the simple reason that it does not accord with the facts. Every one of its members is old enough to have followed the history of the Russian Revolution in the making; and every one of them was sufficiently interested to do so. We endorse this statement in the report of our Preliminary Commission:
Impartiality in this case does not of course require the abandonment by the Commission of its knowledge of the simple facts of history. (PC xv.)
We shall not, therefore, make any exhaustive analysis of the history of the Russian Revolution for the purpose of determining whether the Prosecutor’s sweeping statements about the historical development of Trotskyism are true. The mere statement that they are a complete falsification is sufficient; more especially since the history of the Russian Revolution is easily accessible, at least outside the Soviet Union, in sources which have not been subjected to the revision to be found in the speeches of Vyshinsky. On the other hand, the importance attached by the Prosecutor to the alleged evidence which he adduced in support of these generalizations, as proof of the charges against the accused in general and Trotsky in particular, requires of us that we establish its historic truth or falsity. This we shall do as briefly as is consistent with accuracy.
§ 218. First, however, it must be noted that the men against whom the Prosecutor inveighed as Trotskyists in his speeches, and identified with
the struggle Trotskyism has been waging against the working class and the Party, against Lenin and Leninism for decades,
had not, during their political activity, belonged to one same political formation or consistently defended the same conceptions or the same line of conduct. This could be established precisely of each of them. It suffices to consider the cases of two of the most important, Kamenev and Zinoviev. A comparison of their biographies, from official sources, with that of Trotsky in Appendix II to this report clearly shows that during most of their careers they were not his political allies. And it was precisely these two men who, with Stalin, carried on most savagely the fight against Trotsky and the Left Opposition from 1923 to 1926. During Lenin’s second illness they formed, with Stalin, the ruling Troïka of the Party, and together with Stalin they decided to invent Trotskyism, as they later admitted. (“The Stalin School of Falsification,”[35] pp. 89-96. New York, Pioneer Publishers, 1837.)
Among our exhibits is the pamphlet Leninism or Trotskyism (PC Exh. 5) written by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev during this period. As its title indicates, it is an attack upon Trotskyism by the Troïka. After Zinoviev and Kamenev had broken with Stalin and joined Trotsky in opposition, Zinoviev said at a joint Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (July, 1926) that
... the main nucleus of the 1923 Opposition ... correctly warned against the dangers of the departure from the proletarian line, and against the alarming growth of the apparatus régime. (Minutes, IV, p. 33. “Stalin School of Falsification,” p. 91.)
Together with Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev formulated the program of the Left Opposition (see The Real Situation in Russia). But in 1927, during the Fifteenth Congress, at which the Opposition was expelled from the Party, they signed (December 18) the so-called Statement of the Twenty-three, abjuring this program and declaring that Stalin was, and always had been, right. The break with Trotsky was complete; and as the material cited in Chapter VIII of this report indicates, it continued throughout the period of the alleged conspiracy. There is every reason to believe, therefore, that these two men who were tried and condemned in August, 1936, were Trotskyites only for the purposes of the prosecution.
§ 219. The complete shift in the attitude of Stalin toward Zinoviev and Kamenev after they broke with him is worth noting here because of its bearing upon the subject of this chapter. It is clearly shown in two statements of his, the first on November 19, 1924, before the Plenum of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, and the second in the Political Report of the Central Committee to the 15th Congress of the C.P.S.U., on December 3, 1927. In the first speech he defended Zinoviev and Kamenev from attacks by the Opposition. Referring to their votes against the October Insurrection (the other ten votes, including Lenin’s and Trotsky’s, were in favor of this insurrection), he made light of their opposition to Lenin, remarking that they
entered the organ of the political leadership of the uprising on a par with the advocates of the uprising.... No split took place and the differences of opinion lasted only a few days because and only because Comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev were Leninists, Bolsheviks. (“The October Revolution,” by Joseph Stalin. Vol. XXI of the Marxist Library, p. 70. New York: International Publishers. Printed in the U.S.S.R. – in other words, a volume having official approval.)
He made no reference in this speech to Lenin’s motion to have them expelled from the Party.
In 1927, however, this opposition to Lenin had become, in Stalin’s opinion, the beginning of a sliding down toward Menshevism:
... It is obvious to all that the Opposition denies the possibility of the victorious construction of Socialism in our country. And by denying this possibility, it slides down directly and openly to the position of the Mensheviks. Such a line taken by the Opposition to the question is not new, for its present leaders, Kamenev and Zinoviev, started with this line when they refused to proceed to the October uprising.... You know that Kamenev and Zinoviev went to the uprising only when shown the rod. Lenin drove them with a rod, threatening to expel them from the Party ... and they were constrained to drag their feet to the uprising ... (Ibid., pp. 165-6.) (Italics ours.)
The contradiction speaks for itself. A truly remarkable change in Stalin’s attitude toward political opposition becomes apparent when one juxtaposes the two documents. In the speech of 1924, for example, he emphasizes the existence of disagreements within the Party, and their permissibility:
Our Party would have been a caste and not a revolutionary Party had it not allowed certain shades of opinion in its midst, ... (Ibid., p. 76.)
Were there any differences of opinion during that period within the Central Committee [before the October Insurrection]? Yes, there were, and they were of no small importance. (Ibid., p. 83.)
There is talk about measures of repression against the Opposition and of the possibility of a split. This is all nonsense, comrades.... As for repressions, I am decidedly opposed to them. (Ibid., p.94.)
In 1927, however, differences of opinion on the part of an Opposition still within the Party
denotes a spirit of capitulation ... to the capitalist elements in our country ... to the world bourgeoisie. (Ibid., p. 168.)
and furnished the basis for the repressive acts of expulsion and exile. It is no very long step from this to Vyshinsky’s consistent identification of opposition to the policies of the régime with criminal activity against it, which we have repeatedly had occasion to note in the course of this report.
§ 220. In examining the pronouncements of political leaders in all matters involving historical facts, elementary caution necessitates careful consideration of the current political pressures under which such pronouncements are made, and an equally careful comparison with the historical sources for the period to which they refer. The change, illustrated above, in Stalin’s attitude toward Zinoviev and Kamenev is of course explained by the fact that in the period between the two pronouncements they had joined Trotsky in opposing him; and the change in his attitude toward opposition within the Party was possibly due to the strengthening of Opposition forces, and the consequent threat to the supremacy of his faction, which the new oppositional alignment involved. When we turn to the historical sources of the period to which these two documents refer we find that Stalin in 1917, as in 1924, sought to minimize the opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev to the October Insurrection. Zinoviev and Kamenev had opposed the insurrection in the non-Party press. Lenin, in a letter to the Central Committee, characterized this action as infinitely vile and suggested their expulsion from the Party. On the same day, October 20, Stalin, who was one of the editors of Pravda, published a Statement by the Editorial Board in which the other editor, Sokolnikov, later declared he had had no part. This statement said:
We on our part express the hope that the matter will be considered as closed with the statement made by Comrade Zinoviev (and also Comrade Kamenev’s statement in the Soviet). The sharp tone of Comrade Lenin’s article does not alter the fact that we are fundamentally in agreement. (“Stalin School of Falsification,” p. 192.)
As a matter of fact, the majority of the Central Committee refused to expel Zinoviev and Kamenev; and Trotsky, testifying on this matter, said that Lenin
was, two days after the insurrection, very well satisfied with our decision (PC 423) –
a statement borne out by the fact that Zinoviev and Kamenev remained members of the Politburo and close collaborators of Lenin, and held responsible official posts.
To show with what caution one must approach such accusations as Stalin’s statement that Zinoviev and Kamenev started sliding down into Menshevism when they opposed the insurrection, we may cite Stalin’s own attitude toward Menshevism in the period immediately preceding Lenin’s return to Russia, in 1917. One instance will suffice to illustrate. At the Party Conference of March, 1917, during the discussion of a proposal for unification of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks which had been made by the Menshevik leader, Tseretelli, Stalin said:
We ought to go. It is necessary to define our proposals as to the terms of unification. Unification is possible along the lines of Zimmerwald-Kienthal. (Session of April 1. “Stalin School of Falsification,” p. 190.)
It is evident from this passage that if Stalin’s attack upon Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1927 was justified, he might himself with equal justice have been attacked on the same grounds.
§ 221. That Lenin himself considered free criticism of the Party’s policy a fundamental right of its members becomes clear from even a superficial examination of his utterances on that question – and from this it clearly follows that he by no means regarded opposition to his policies as a counter-revolutionary offense. We could cite many quotations on this point, but one is sufficient in view of the peculiar circumstances which produced it. The Tenth Party Congress, in 1921, adopted as an emergency measure on Lenin’s own motion a resolution forbidding fractional groupings and platforms within the Party. At this same Congress Riazanov moved to prohibit the election of delegates to future congresses on the basis of fractional platforms. Lenin opposed him in these words:
If fundamental disagreements exist on a question we cannot deprive the Party and the members of the Central Committee of the right to address themselves to the Party.... The present Congress can in no way and in no form engage the elections to the next Congress. And if, for example, such issues as the Brest-Litovsk peace should arise? It cannot be guaranteed. It is possible that it will then be necessary to elect by platform. (Lenin’s Collected Works, Third Russian Edition, 1935. Vol. XXVI, p. 276.)
It is clear from the foregoing that Lenin regarded the authority of the Party Congress as supreme; and that even in a period of emergency he was unwilling to hamper Party members in the exercise of their right to have their views represented in the Congress – even on the basis of fractional platforms; indeed that he even envisaged issues so important as to render fractional opposition to the leadership not only justifiable but necessary.
It would even appear that Lenin considered opposition outside the ruling Party vital to the interests of the proletariat and the state. We quote the following striking passage from his discussion of the trade union issue, on December 30, 1920, before the Party fraction of the Eighth Soviet Congress:
Comrade Trotsky speaks of the workers’ state. Permit me, that is an abstraction.... The whole joke is that it is not quite a workers’ state. That is where the basic mistake of Comrade Trotsky lies! ... Our state is in reality no workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state.... From our party program it follows that our state is a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations... .
Our present state is such that the organized proletariat must defend itself and we must utilize these workers’ organizations for the defense of the workers against their state and for the defense of the state by the workers. (Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, Part I, pp. 11-12. Russian Edition. State Publishers, 1925.)
This attitude of Lenin must be borne in mind in examining certain of Vyshinsky’s specific historical proofs against Trotsky. The Commission wishes to emphasize, before taking up these proofs, that it does not invoke Lenin as an infallible authority; but since one of the Prosecutor’s basic historical proofs against Trotsky and several of the accused was their having opposed Lenin in the past, it becomes pertinent to establish Lenin’s own attitude toward the authority of the leadership which he exercised and the question of opposition to that leadership by Party members.
§ 222. We shall now proceed to consider, point by point, the Prosecutor’s specific historic evidence against Leon Trotsky, adduced as proof of his contention that
The conversion of the Trotskyite groups into groups of diversionists and murderers operating on the instructions of foreign secret services and of General Staffs of aggressors merely crowns the struggle Trotskyism has been waging against the working class and the Party, against Lenin and Leninism, for decades.... The whole history of the political activities of the Trotskyites represents an uninterrupted chain of betrayals of the cause of the working class, of the cause of socialism. (PR 466-7.)
§ 223. Immediately after the foregoing passage in his summation in the second trial, Vyshinsky says:
As we know, in 1904 Trotsky came out with a most despicable pamphlet entitled Our Political Tasks. This pamphlet was packed full of filthy insinuations against our great teacher, the leader of the international proletariat, Lenin, against the great Leninist teaching regarding the paths of the Bolshevik victory, the victory of the toilers, the victory of socialism. In this pamphlet Trotsky squirts venomous saliva at the great ideas of Marxism-Leninism. With it he tried to poison the proletariat, tried to turn the proletariat from the path of irreconcilable class struggle, slandered the proletariat, slandered the proletarian revolution, slandered Bolshevism, slandered Lenin by calling him Maximilian, after Robespierre, the hero of the French bourgeois revolution, and thereby tried to humiliate the great leader of the international proletariat. (PR 467.)
A copy, in Russian, of this despicable pamphlet was submitted to the Preliminary Commission (PC Exh. 4. Published by the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Geneva: Party Print Shop. 1904.) We quote from Trotsky’s testimony concerning it:
It is a theoretical and political pamphlet, and it is not objectionable. I believe it has many errors in it.... I can find in this book chapters which are not so bad. There are chapters which are wrong. You know, as a young man I characterized Lenin in ... a spirit absolutely not found in the relations between him and me. But ... by my subsequent attitude – I corrected the error. But it is not objectionable, and nothing abominable. (PC 59-60.)
Before discussing this work, we briefly summarize the events which led to its writing. Following the ideological split in the Russian Social Democratic Party at the London Congress of 1903, there was a bitter controversy in the Russian Social Democratic movement over questions of party policy. Lenin stood for strong centralization, which Trotsky and others opposed. Trotsky was not alone in attacking Lenin as a Jacobin at this period. Martov and Axelrod had preceded him, and Lenin had answered with the pamphlet, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Part of Our Political Tasks deals with this pamphlet, which was also criticized by Rosa Luxemburg in the new Iskra (No. 69).
Such, in briefest summary, was the political background of this work of Trotsky, which was written in the harsh polemical style of the period. Trotsky contends that the Party should lead the proletariat, rather than act for it. In speaking of how the Party leadership acts, so to speak, behind the backs of the workers, he quotes as follows from Lenin’s pamphlet, What’s To Be Done,
We ... greeted the illegal Zemstvo convention, encouraging (sic!!!) the Zemstvo workers to fight rather than humbly petition.... We encouraged statisticians who protested, and reproved (sic!) statisticians who were scabs (p. 51),
and remarks,
That’s what we were doing with Comrade Lenin! Another step and we would begin to encourage solar and lunar eclipse. (pp. 51-2.)
In the section, Problems of Organization, Trotsky argues that Lenin’s plan of organization would result not in a party but in a Social Democratic factory in which most of the members would be revolutionists, and that further the plan does not provide for the training of leaders. In discussing democracy within the Party, he argues that
the régime of barracks cannot be the régime of our Party, just as the factory cannot be its model. (p. 75.)
He accuses Lenin of intellectual inconsistency, revolting demagogy, and cynicism. In this connection he says:
Marxism for him is not a method of scientific investigation which imposes heavy theoretical obligations, but a floor-rag to be used when you must wipe up your traces, a white screen against which to parade your grandeur, a collapsible yardstick when you have to show your Party conscience. (p. 75.)
The third and last section begins with this quotation from Lenin’s pamphlet, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back:
A Jacobin closely allied with an organization of the proletariat conscious of its class interests, that is what a Social Democrat is. (p. 90.)
Trotsky argues that a Jacobin is a bourgeois radical, idealistic, rationalist, Utopian. True, he says, the Jacobins
were intransigent, and so are we. The Jacobins knew a terrible political accusation, which they expressed with the word moderation. We know the accusation of opportunism. But these intransigencies are qualitatively different: We place between ourselves and opportunism the wedge of the theoretical apparatus of proletarian class ideology, and each full blow of the class struggle drives this wedge deeper and deeper. We purge ourselves in this way of opportunism.... The Jacobins placed between themselves and moderation the iron of the guillotine. The logic of the class movement was against them and they sought to behead it. Madness! The hydra’s heads kept multiplying, while the heads devoted to the ideas of virtue and truth grew fewer with every day.... The guillotine was only a mechanical instrument of political suicide, and the suicide itself was the fatal result of their hopeless historical position: the heralds of equality on the basis of private property, the announcers of universal morality within the framework of class exploitation. (p. 94.)
There is no doubt, says Trotsky,
that the entire international movement of the proletariat would have been accused by the Revolutionary Tribunal of moderation – and that Marx’s leonine head would have been the first to fall under the blow of the guillotine. Nor is there any doubt that any attempt to introduce the methods of Jacobinism into the class movement of the proletariat is and will be the purest opportunism, the sacrifice of the historic interests of the proletariat to the fiction of temporary success. (p. 95.)
He proceeds to attack Lenin’s policies as Jacobin, and says that Robespierre’s political axiom,
Je ne connais que deux partis, celui des bons et celui des mauvais citoyens is engraved on the heart of Maximilian Lenin. (p. 96.)
He refers to Lenin’s Jacobinism as the
secret of his failures and the cause of his petty suspiciousness. (p. 98.)
He calls Lenin the leader of the reactionary wing of our Party (p. 98), accuses him of a theoretical attempt upon the class character of our Party (p. 98), and indirectly refers to him as a nimble statistician and slovenly lawyer (p. 100). He charges Lenin’s followers from the Urals with preaching not dictatorship of the proletariat, but dictatorship over the proletariat (p. 102). Trotsky does not believe that such a policy will succeed,
for it is all too obvious that the proletariat capable of dictatorship over society will not tolerate dictatorship over itself. The working class, having seized the helm, will undoubtedly have in its ranks many political invalids and in its baggage train much ideological lumber. In the era of dictatorship it will be necessary for it, as it is necessary for it now, to purge its consciousness of false theories, of bourgeois relics, to free its ranks from political phrasemongers and revolutionary diehards.... But this complicated task cannot be obviated by placing over the proletariat a well chosen group of people, or better still, one person empowered with the right to dismiss and degrade. (p. 105.)
The attitude of the Ural group, Trotsky believes, is not a local absurdity but rather a significant thing:
Did not the Siberian delegation, long before the appearance of the Ural document, write that, according to the logic of a state of seige, the hegemony of Social Democracy in the struggle for liberation meant the hegemony of one person over Social Democracy? And again, does not Lenin know who is being groomed for the central rôle in the system of Ural Social Democratic Boulangism? ... he is silent on these matters so eloquently that it seems to all as if he were savoring his rôle in advance and privately preening himself. (p. 106.)
Such is the content and style of this despicable pamphlet. The Commission is not in the least concerned with the question whether Trotsky was or was not justified in his criticisms of Lenin, but only with the question whether or not the pamphlet bears out what Vyshinsky says about it. We note, in the first place, nothing in this pamphlet that could possibly be construed as a slander upon the proletariat or the proletarian revolution. We note that nothing in it can possibly be construed as an attempt to poison the proletariat or to turn it from the path of irreconcilable class struggle. The quotations we have given above sufficiently disprove this charge. Nor is there anything to justify Vyshinsky’s statement that Trotsky squirts venomous saliva at the great ideas of Marxism-Leninism. The book attacks Lenin not on questions of theory but on questions of tactics; it does not attack Marx at all. Trotsky’s method of attack upon Lenin, as the above quotations show, was not one of filthy insinuation but of harsh and forthright accusation. It was not exceptional in the polemics exchanged at the period among all tendencies in the Russian Revolutionary movement; nor is it likely to shock people today who are accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of political campaigns in democratic countries. And it is positively mild and polite in comparison with polemics of the official Soviet press of today as illustrated in several articles among our exhibits.
Lenin was not outdone by Trotsky in this field. Anyone who knows his works at all is aware that he was a master of harsh invective. In illustration we confine ourselves to two quotations cited by the Prosecutor himself, in discussing his next historical proof, the August bloc:
Lenin wrote that this bloc was built up on lack of principle, on hypocrisy and empty phrases. ... Concerning Trotsky, Lenin wrote: Such types are characteristic as the wreckage of yesterday’s historical formations, or systems, of the time when the mass working class movement in Russia was still sleeping. (PR 467.)
We do not know the source of these quotations; but Trotsky, questioned on the first, said:
I believe the style is absolutely Lenin’s. He was right, the bloc was a sterile attempt, and Lenin did not play with the thing. He gave serious blows to his adversaries. (PC 60.)
We could quote even harsher characterizations from Lenin’s writings, but space does not permit. It is sufficient to state here that between Trotsky and Lenin in the exchange the honors were at least even.
§ 224. The abortive revolution of 1905 intervened between the period of the controversy over Jacobinism and the August Bloc of 1911-12. Vyshinsky omits all mention of this revolution in discussing the Trotskyites’ uninterrupted chain of betrayals of the cause of the working class, of the cause of socialism (PR 467). Trotsky, as president of the St. Petersburg Soviet, led this revolutionary attempt and was condemned to Siberian exile after it had failed; a chapter in his political history which stands in sharp contradiction to the Prosecutor’s contention. And we note that Lenin, about whom Trotsky had used in 1904 the harsh language quoted above, said that
the passage of the direction of the Soviet from Khrustalev to Trotsky will be an immense step forward.
§ 225. According to the Prosecutor,
... In 1911-12, Trotsky also organized a bloc as he later organized the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc; he organized the so-called August bloc consisting of the lackeys of capital, of Mensheviks, and those who had been expelled from the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, of flabby intellectuals, and the refuse of the working-class movement.... (PR 467.)
We have cited above Vyshinsky’s quotations from Lenin on this bloc, and Trotsky’s statement that Lenin was right in refusing to play with the thing. According to Trotsky, the bloc was an attempt to bring together the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. He further testified that
Lenin designated all reformists as lackeys of capitalism, and he named in such a manner the Mensheviks who participated in the conference. It is a question of political appreciation and not of criminal thought. (PC 61.)
The history of the August Bloc is given as follows by Lenin and Zinoviev, in a pamphlet entitled Socialism and War, written in August, 1915, and first published as a pamphlet in the autumn of that year by the Sozialdemokrat, Geneva:
The history of those Social-Democratic groups which struggle against our party is a history of breakdown and degeneration. In March, 1912, all of them, without exception, united in reviling us. In August, 1912, however, when the so-called August Bloc against us was created, disintegration set in. Part of their groups split away. They were in no position to create a party and a Central Committee. What they created was an Organization Committee for the re-establishment of unity. In reality, this Organization Committee proved an ineffective shield for the Liquidationist group in Russia. Through the whole period of a tremendous rising wave of the labor movement in Russia and of the mass strikes of 1912-1914, the only group of the August Bloc which conducted work among the masses was Nashe Zarya, whose strength is in its liberal connections. At the beginning of 1914, the August Bloc was formally relinquished by the Lettish Social Democrats (the Polish Social Democrats did not belong to it), whereas Trotsky, one of the leaders of Bloc, relinquished it informally, having created his own separate group. (Lenin’s Works, Vol. XVIII, p. 256. New York: International Publishers, 1930. The only edition authorized by the V. I. Lenin Institute, Moscow.)
It is evident in this quotation, from a source by no means favorable to the August Bloc, that its purpose was the reestablishment of unity – even though Lenin and Zinoviev call it a bloc against us. It is also evident that Lenin and Zinoviev, in writing about it in 1915, criticized it as politically ineffectual, not as criminal. It may be noted here that less than two years after the publication of this pamphlet, Lenin and Trotsky began that close collaboration which was to last until Lenin’s death.
§ 226. The next proof in Vyshinsky’s historical connection is as follows:
In 1915 Trotsky came out in opposition to Lenin’s doctrine of the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country. Thus he completely capitulated to capitalism over twenty years ago! (PR 468.)
It is impossible to examine this charge without going into the hotly contested question of socialism in one country. Therefore the Commission wishes to state emphatically that it is not in the least interested in the question of the correctness or incorrectness of the theory that socialism can be built in a single isolated country, or of the opposite theory that socialist revolution in one country can not be successful unless it is supported by socialist revolutions in several of the more advanced countries. And it is certainly not concerned to show that Trotsky either was or was not right on this question or any other in so far as he agreed with Lenin. But since Vyshinsky, not only in the passage quoted but in others as well (e.g., pp. 475-477) imputed to Lenin the idea that socialism can be successfully established in a single country, and represented Trotsky’s alleged opposition to Lenin on this question as a link in the chain of historical proofs against him, it becomes necessary to establish by reference to the historical sources (1) what in fact was Lenin’s attitude toward socialism in one country, and (2) whether the charge that Trotsky opposed Lenin on this issue is true or rests upon falsification.
We begin by pointing out that even if Lenin had advanced such a doctrine in 1915 as Vyshinsky attributes to him, and Trotsky had opposed it, the Prosecutor’s second sentence would still be a non sequitur, and a false non sequitur at that. Capitulation to capitalism is by no means a necessary alternative to the acceptance of the idea that socialism is possible in a single country. Moreover, the most superficial examination of Trotsky’s voluminous writings on the question shows that he has always opposed to the idea of socialism in a single country the idea that socialism can ultimately triumph only on an international arena. And it is precisely on this ground that Stalin himself attacked him, as will be seen in the subsequent quotations.
This controversy, which had an importance by no means merely theoretical, began in 1924. Involved in it was the whole policy, internal and external, of the Soviet Union. It is no part of our task either to trace its development or judge its merits. Our sole interest, as we have already said, is to establish whether or not Lenin advanced the doctrine of victorious socialism in one country and whether Trotsky came out against it.
In December, 1924, Stalin published a pamphlet entitled, The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists, in which he maintained that the building of socialism in a single country was possible, and cited Lenin as authority for this idea. This pamphlet followed one published eight months earlier, in April, under the title Foundations of Leninism, in which Stalin had said that
It used to be supposed that the victory of socialism in one country alone would be impossible, the assumption being that the conquest of the bourgeoisie could only be achieved by the united action of the proletarians of all advanced countries, or at any rate in the majority of these. This contention no longer fits the facts. We must now set out by assuming the possibility of such a victory; for the varying speed of social evolution in different capitalist countries (proceeding in some, under imperialist conditions, by leaps and bounds); the development of catastrophic conflicts as the outcome of imperialist rivalries, inevitably culminating in wars; the growth of the revolutionary movement in all countries throughout the world – these factors, working together, make proletarian victories in separate countries not merely possible, but necessary... .
But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country alone does not, per se, mean the complete victory of socialism. The chief task, the organization of socialist production, still lies ahead. Can this task be performed, can the final victory of socialism be gained, in one country alone, and without the joint efforts of the proletarians in several of the most advanced countries? No, this is out of the question. The history of the Russian Revolution shows that the proletarian strength of one country alone can overthrow the bourgeoisie of that country. But for the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the strength of one country (especially a peasant country, such as Russia) does not suffice. For this, the united strength of the proletarians in several of the most advanced countries is needed ... (“Leninism,” by Joseph Stalin. New York: International Publishers, 1928. pp. 52-53.)
This second paragraph is even stronger in the second edition, where it contains the words:
Does this mean that the workers in one country alone, unaided, can definitively install socialism, guaranteed against intervention, guaranteed against a restoration of the old regime? No, certainly not. For that, the victory of the revolution, if not everywhere, at least in several countries, will be requisite. ... (Ibid., p. 109.)
In Problems of Leninism, dated January 25, 1926, Stalin speaks of these two paragraphs as two formulations of the problem of the victory of socialism in one country alone,[36] and says that the second formulation (he quotes paragraph two, first edition)
was directed against some of the critics of Leninism, against the Trotskyists who declared that the dictatorship of the proletariat could not be maintained against conservative Europe in one country alone, and in the absence of a proletarian victory in other lands. In view of its purpose (and only in view of this), that formulation was adequate in April, 1924, and doubtless had its uses. (Ibid., p. 53.)
What was wrong with the formulation, he said, was that
it may be interpreted as implying that the organization of a socialist society by the unaided forces of one country is impossible – a manifest error. (Ibid., p. 53.)
Therefore, he says, he rectified it in December, 1924, in The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists.
In this December pamphlet, as we have said, Stalin quotes Lenin as authority for the idea that the victory of socialism is possible in an isolated country. One of the passages upon which he bases himself is to be found in Lenin’s article, The United States of Europe Slogan, first published in Switzerland in the Sozialdemokrat (central organ of the Bolshevik Party at the time), August 23, 1915. Before quoting the relevant passage, it is necessary to give the historical background of the article. At a conference in Berne of the Foreign Sections of the Bolshevik Party, February 16-March 4, 1915, the question was raised of adopting The United States of Europe as a slogan. But
the discussion took a one-sided political turn and it was decided to postpone the question pending an analysis of the economic side of it in the press. (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, p. 145. New York: International Publishers.)
Lenin’s article of August 23 explained why the slogan, in the existing economic conditions, was incorrect; that
... if the United States of Europe slogan, conceived in connection with a revolutionary overthrow of the three most reactionary monarchies of Europe, headed by Russia, is entirely impregnable as a political slogan, there still remains the most important question of its economic content and meaning. From the point of view of the economic conditions of imperialism, i.e., capital export and division of the world between the progressive and civilized colonial powers, the United States of Europe under capitalism is either impossible or reactionary. (Ibid., pp. 269-70.)
After setting forth the reasons for this conclusion, the article goes on to state that the United States of the World (not of Europe alone), is a state form of national unification and freedom envisaged in connection with socialism. Then follows the passage containing the reference to the victory of socialism in one country (italics ours):
... we think of [the United States of the World] as becoming a reality only when the full victory of Communism will have brought about the total disappearance of any state, including its democratic form. As a separate slogan, however, the United States of The World would hardly be a correct one, first because it coincides with Socialism, second, because it could be erroneously interpreted to mean that the victory of Socialism in one country is impossible; it could also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to others.
Unequal economic and political development is an indispensable law of capitalism. It follows that the victory of Socialism is, at the beginning, possible in a few capitalist countries, even in one, taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organized Socialist production at home, would rise against the rest of the capitalist world, attracting the oppressed classes of other countries, raising among them revolts against the capitalists, launching, in case of necessity, armed forces against the exploiting classes and their states. The political form of a society in which the proletariat is victorious, in which it has overthrown the bourgeoisie, will be a democratic republic, centralizing ever more the forces of the proletariat of a given nation or nations in the struggle against the states that have not yet gone over to Socialism. It is impossible to annihilate classes without a dictatorship of the oppressed class, the proletariat. It is impossible freely to unite the nations in Socialism without a more or less prolonged and stubborn struggle of the Socialist republics against the other states. (Ibid., pp. 271-2.)
From this second paragraph, Stalin, in his December pamphlet, deduces Lenin’s
own theory of the proletarian revolution, which is: that socialism can be victorious in one country alone even when that country is in a condition of backward capitalist development. (“Leninism,” p. 191.)
We are obliged to note here that this formulation of Lenin’s own theory of the proletarian revolution is in distinct contrast to Stalin’s formulation of that theory in his April pamphlet. We quote from the second edition, from the word requisite in the passage quoted on page 337, to the end:
... That is why a country in which the revolution has triumphed must not look upon itself as an independent magnitude, but as an auxiliary, as a means for hastening the victory of the proletariat of other lands. Lenin expressed this idea pithily as follows:
“In any country, the victorious revolution must do its utmost to develop, support, and awaken the revolution in all other countries.” (Works, Russian edition. Vol. XV, p. 502.) [Citation in original.]
Such, in broad outline, are the characteristics of Lenin’s theory of the proletarian revolution. (“Leninism,” p. 109.)
In the December pamphlet Stalin maintains that Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution[37] conflicts with Lenin’s theory of the proletarian revolution as Stalin defines it in that pamphlet. He quotes from Trotsky’s pamphlet, The Program of Peace,[38] the following passage:
The only concrete and historical objection to the slogan of the United States of Europe was formulated by the Sozialdemokrat. Here we read: Irregularity in political and economic development is the supreme law of capitalism. From this the Sozialdemokrat concluded that socialism may be victorious in one country alone, and that, consequently, it was not necessary to make the dictatorship of the proletariat dependent in each country upon the inauguration of the United States of Europe. It is an indisputable fact that the development of capitalism is irregular. But this irregularity is, itself, irregular! Certainly the degree of capitalist development is not the same in Great Britain, in Austria, in Germany, and in France. Nevertheless, in comparison with Africa or Asia, these countries represent capitalist Europe ripe for the social revolution. No country can afford to wait for the others to join in the struggle; this is an elementary truth which it is well to reiterate, so that the idea of simultaneous international action be not replaced by the idea of international postponement and inaction. Without awaiting the others, we have to begin and continue the struggle on a national scale, urged on by the conviction that our initiative will set the ball rolling in other lands. Should this not happen, it would be futile to expect (and historical experience no less than theoretical considerations are there to prove the contention), for instance, that Revolutionary Russia could hold its own in face of a conservative Europe, or that a socialist Germany could be maintained in isolation in the midst of a capitalist world. (Trotsky, Collected Works, Russian edition, Vol. III, Part I, pp. 89-90; “Leninism,” p. 193.)
Here, says Stalin, we have
... the theory that the triumph of socialism must take place simultaneously in the leading countries of Europe. This theory conflicts with the Leninist theory of revolution and the victory of socialism in one country. (“Leninism,” p. 193.)
And here, apparently, we have the source of Vyshinsky’s charge that
In 1915 Trotsky came out in opposition to Lenin’s doctrine of the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country.
It seems to us that the passage Stalin quotes from Trotsky is in very close agreement with Stalin’s April version of Lenin’s theory of the proletarian revolution. It is also, we think, very close to Lenin’s statement of 1915. Lenin ,says that the proletariat, victorious in one country, will rise against the rest of the capitalist world, attracting the oppressed classes of other countries, raising among them revolts against the capitalists ... Trotsky says that without awaiting the others, we have to begin and to continue the struggle on a national scale, urged on by the conviction that our initiative will set the ball rolling in other lands. And Stalin, in his pamphlet of April, 1924, says that because the unaided workers of one country can not definitively install socialism, ... the fostering of revolution, the support of revolution, in other countries, is incumbent upon the country where the revolution has triumphed.
In that same pamphlet from which Stalin quotes, and which was directed not at Lenin but at the Socialist patriots of the warring countries, Trotsky said that
the unification of Europe ... through an agreement between capitalist governments is a Utopia,
but that its
economic unification ... is becoming a revolutionary task of the European proletariat. (Trotsky. Collected Works, Russian edition, Vol. III, p. 85.)
He attacks the Messianism of such Socialist patriots as Vaillant (who to his dying day considered France the promised land of social revolution; ... stood for national defense to the end) and Lensch. Trotsky says:
If the victorious revolution were really conceivable within the boundaries of a single more developed nation, this Messianism together with the program of national defense would have some relative historical justification. But as a matter of fact it is inconceivable. To fight for the preservation of a national basis of revolution by such methods as undermine the international ties of the proletariat, actually means to undermine the revolution itself, which can begin on a national basis but which cannot be completed on that basis under the present economic, military, and political interdependence of the European states, which was never before revealed so forcefully as during the present war. (Ibid., pp. 90 ff.) (Italics ours.)
We find nothing whatever in this article to bear out Vyshinsky’s charge. On the other hand, we find that (i) Lenin’s article on The United States of Europe Slogan can be taken to mean that socialism can be definitively established in a single country only if one leaves out the crucial phrase at the beginning and wrenches the quotation from its context in the matter under discussion; (2) that Trotsky and Lenin are in essential agreement that the socialist revolution can begin on a national basis, but that it will be completed internationally; (3) that Trotsky’s contention that the revolution, to be successful, must be international was not new in 1915 in opposition to Lenin, as the Prosecutor’s remark might be taken to imply, but goes back to the period before the revolution of 1905; and that Stalin himself indicates that it was not new in his pamphlet of December, 1924, where he quotes from Trotsky’s book, Our Revolution, published in 1906, in order to show that Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution had nothing in common with Lenin’s own theory of the proletarian revolution (Stalin’s December version). (Leninism, p. 192.)
Since the Prosecutor, as we have said, lays great stress on Trotsky’s alleged opposition to Lenin’s alleged doctrine of the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country, it is pertinent here to determine what really was Lenin’s conception of the socialist revolution. Since much is made of the early disagreements between Lenin and Trotsky, we begin by quoting from an article, Social Democracy and the Provisional Revolutionary Government, which was edited and approved by Lenin and published in the Bolshevik paper, Vpered, of which he was editor-in-chief, on March 26 and 30, 1905:
If the democratic revolution succeeds in Russia then the revolutionary conflagration will set fire to Europe.... The European workers will rise in turn ... ; then the revolutionary rising of Europe will have a retroactive effect upon Russia. The epoch of several revolutionary years will become an epoch of several revolutionary decades. (“Leninsky Sbornik,” Vol. XXVI, pp. 177-8. Moscow: Gosizdat, 1984. A publication of the V. I. Lenin Institute.)
Upon leaving for Russia in April, 1917, Lenin wrote a Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers, in which he said:
The great honor of beginning the series of revolutions caused with objective inevitability by the war has fallen to the Russian proletariat. But the idea that the Russian proletariat is the chosen revolutionary proletariat among the workers of the world is absolutely alien to us. We know full well that the proletariat of Russia is less organized, less prepared, and less class-conscious than the proletariat of other countries. It is not its special qualities but rather the special coincidence of historical circumstances that has made the proletariat of Russia for a certain, perhaps very short, time, the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole world. Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward of Europe. Socialism cannot triumph there immediately. But the present character of the country ... may make our revolution a prologue to the world Socialist Revolution, a step forward in that direction... .
The Russian proletariat single-handed cannot bring the Socialist revolution to a victorious conclusion. But it can give the Russian revolution a mighty sweep such as would create most favorable conditions for a Socialist revolution, and, in a sense, start it.... The objective circumstances of the imperialist war make it certain that the revolution will not be limited to the first stage of the Russian revolution, that the revolution will not be limited to Russia. (Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. XX, Book 1, pp. 85-86, and p. 87. New York: International Publishers.) (Our emphasis.)
If it should be said that Lenin changed his position after reaching Russia, the following quotations are decisive.
During the period between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, a resolution (On the Current Moment) written by Lenin and adopted at the April (May) conference of the Bolshevik Party, declared:
The proletariat of Russia ... cannot set itself the goal of an immediate realization of the socialist transformation. (Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. XX, p. 281. Russ. Ed., 1935.)
In spite of this fact, the resolution continued, the proletariat can not renounce its leading rôle in the coming revolution, or fail to advocate the urgency of a number of practical mature steps toward socialism (Ibid. p. 281). In his speech in defense of the resolution Lenin emphasized that
The principal question taken up in the resolution is what tasks will confront the Russian proletariat in case the worldwide movement brings us face to face with a social revolution. (Ibid., p. 280.)
In September of the same year, in an article Will the Bolsheviks Be Able to Hold Power, Lenin said:
There is no power on earth which can prevent the Bolsheviks, if they do not let themselves be frightened and succeed in seizing power, from holding it until the triumph of the world-wide socialist revolution. (Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. XIV, Pt. 2, p. 253. Russ. Ed. State Publishers, 1921.)
After the victory of the October Revolution, Lenin repeatedly emphasized the vital need of the Soviet power for the support of revolutions elsewhere. In a Letter to the American Workers, in 1918, he said:
We know that circumstances have pushed to the fore our Russian detachment of the socialist proletariat, ... We are in a besieged fortress, until other detachments of the international socialist revolution come to our aid. (Works, Vol. XX, pp. 188-89. Russ. Ed., 1935.)
On March 7 of that year, he said:
Without a revolution in Germany we shall perish. (Works, Vol. XV, p. 123. Russ. Ed., State Publishers, 1925.)
And again in April:
We will perish unless we are able to hold out until we have the mighty support of the insurrectionary workers of other countries. (Ibid., p. 174.)
In March, 1919:
The existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist states for any length of time is inconceivable. (Ibid., Vol. XVI, p. 102.)
In November, 1920:
As long as capitalism and socialism exist side by side, we cannot live peacefully – one or the other will triumph in the end.... At present we have only a respite in the war. (Works, Vol. XVII, p. 398. State Publishers, 1923.)
In July, 1921, at the third congress of the Comintern, Lenin said, referring to the failure of the German Revolution:
It was clear to us that without aid from the international world revolution, a victory of the proletarian revolution is impossible. Even prior to the revolution, as well as after it, we thought that the revolution would occur either immediately or anyway very soon in other more advanced capitalist countries, otherwise we should perish. Notwithstanding this belief, we did our utmost to preserve the Soviet system under any circumstances and at all costs, because we knew we were working not only for ourselves but also for the international revolution. (Works, Vol. XVIII, Part 1, p. 297. State Publishers, 1925.)
These quotations could be multiplied many times over. However, since the position they indicate was a commonplace of the whole movement until the latter part of 1924 (it was reaffirmed by Stalin in his April pamphlet of that year, as the quotations we have given indicate), it is not necessary. We give only two further quotations from Lenin, the first of which is among those cited by Stalin in support of his December version of Lenin’s theory of the proletarian revolution:
In actual fact, all the means of large-scale production are in the hands of the State, and the powers of the State are in the hands of the proletariat; there is the alliance of this same proletariat with the many millions of middle and poor peasants; there is the assured leadership of these peasants by the proletariat; and so on, and so forth. Have we not already, here and now, all the means for making out of the cooperatives (which, in the past, we have treated as trading concerns, and which, even today, we have a certain justification for treating similarly under the new economic policy), out of the cooperatives alone – have we not all the means requisite for the establishment of a fully socialized society? Of course we have not yet established a socialized society; but we have all the means requisite for its establishment. (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, Part II, p. 140. Russ. Ed.)
This article was published after Lenin’s death. Therefore, even if it be interpreted as indicating that Lenin at the end of his life changed his position on the question of socialism in one country, it can hardly be adduced in support of the theory of a continuous struggle between Lenin and Trotsky on this question. Since in the same article Lenin refers to our duty to fight for our position on an international scale, it seems probable that he had no idea of reversing the earlier position defined by Stalin in his April pamphlet – also, it should be noted, published after Lenin’s death. Moreover, it seems most unlikely that Lenin would have reversed himself on a question of such fundamental importance casually and by implication only, in an article devoted to another subject – the Cooperatives.
Our last quotation from Lenin on this subject is one which is used by the Prosecutor himself in speaking of Pyatakov’s alleged opposition to Lenin in 1918:
This was the year when Lenin said: Better suffer and bear and put up with infinitely great national and state humiliation and burdens and remain at our post as the socialist unit which events had cut off from the main body of the socialist army and which is compelled to wait until the socialist revolution in other countries comes to its aid. (PR 476.)
The italics are ours; and we confess to a certain surprise at finding this particular quotation (which sounds authentic) in a paragraph immediately following the accusation that Pyatakov had opposed Lenin’s thesis on the possibility of building socialism in one country.
A careful study of the relevant historical material has convinced this Commission that Lenin’s actual view on this subject was that while the Socialist revolution could triumph initially in a single country, it could not be ultimately successful without the aid of successful socialist revolutions elsewhere; but that the initial victory of socialism in one country, and the organization of socialist production in that country, would stimulate the oppressed masses of other countries to rise against the class in power, aided by the proletariat of that country in which the revolution had already succeeded. We are not in the least concerned with the correctness of Lenin’s view. What does concern us is (i) that the Prosecutor falsified Lenin’s position; and (2) that Trotsky, far from opposing Lenin on the question of socialism in one country was in essential agreement with him. Obviously, if Trotsky had not held this position he would have opposed instead of vigorously supporting the October Revolution.
§ 227. It is significant that Vyshinsky, in his attempt to establish the uninterrupted chain of betrayals of the cause of the working class, of the cause of socialism which he imputed to Trotsky, passed over in silence the universally known facts that Trotsky, as President of the Petrograd Soviet and Chairman of its Revolutionary Military Committee, led the October Insurrection; and that as Commissar of War he organized the Red Army and led it to victory in the Civil War. Since the present Soviet régime owes its existence to the success of the insurrection and the Civil War, and since it also considers itself a Socialist workers’ state, it can not take the stand that those events in world history were of no benefit to the workers or to Socialism. Trotsky’s rôle in those events may perhaps help to account for the Prosecutor’s silence concerning them. The close collaboration of Lenin and Trotsky throughout this period and up until Lenin’s death may also have had something to do with it; a supposition which gains weight from the fact that Vyshinsky mentioned Trotsky’s relations with Lenin at that time only in such a way as to indicate that he continued his alleged struggle against Lenin. We quote:
Jointly with Trotsky, Pyatakov rose against Lenin in the stern days of Brest. Jointly with Trotsky, Pyatakov rose against Lenin at the time our Party was effecting the complicated swing toward the New Economic Policy. Jointly with Trotsky, Pyatakov opposed Lenin’s plan to build socialism in our country, opposed the industrialization and collectivization of our country ... (PR 477.)
Since these statements, although mainly directed against Pyatakov in the Prosecutor’s summation, nevertheless constitute alleged historical proofs against Trotsky, we are obliged to include them in the specific charges whose truth or falsehood it is our duty to examine.
(1) The facts about Brest-Litovsk are well known. The majority of the Bolshevik leaders strongly opposed signing the terms proposed by the Germans, and the more extreme among them, led by Bukharin, were in favor of continuing the war as a revolutionary war. Both Lenin and Trotsky believed that a revolutionary war was impossible. Lenin favored trying to delay the negotiations, and in case of a German ultimatum, capitulating immediately. Trotsky favored delaying negotiations, and in case of an ultimatum, declaring the war at an end but refusing to sign the peace treaty. On January 22, 1918, the Central Committee adopted Trotsky’s proposal. On February 14, the Central Executive Committee approved the action of the Brest-Litovsk delegation, headed by Trotsky, taken in pursuance of this decision. The Germans answered by announcing the resumption of the state of war. Lenin thereupon favored immediate capitulation, while Trotsky favored waiting until an actual German offensive began, in order to demonstrate to the workers of Germany and other countries that the capitulation was forced by German aggression. On February 3, new and extremely humiliating terms were offered by the Germans. Lenin held that they must be accepted, and Trotsky abstained from voting in order that he might secure a majority in the Central Committee. On March 3 the Soviet delegation signed the treaty without reading it. On October 23, Trotsky, in a public speech before representatives of the Soviet government, declared that Lenin had been right in his policy on Brest-Litovsk, and the others wrong. Among these others was Stalin. At the session of the Central Committee, February 1 (January 19), 1918, he said:
... The way out of the difficult situation was provided us by the middle point of view – the position of Trotsky. (Protocols of the C.C. for the year 1917, p. 214. State Publishers, 1929; “Stalin School of Falsification,” p. 193.)
Again, at the session of February 23, after the Germans had resumed hostilities:
COMRADE STALIN: We need not sign, but we must begin peace negotiations.
COMRADE LENIN: ... Stalin is wrong in saying that we need not sign. These conditions must be signed. If you do not sign them, you will sign the death sentence of the Soviet Power within three weeks. (Ibid., p. 249; p. 194.)
That Trotsky disagreed with Lenin concerning Brest-Litovsk is true. That he rose against Lenin is no more true of Trotsky than of Stalin, who endorsed Trotsky’s position. The fact is that a majority of the Central Committee opposed Lenin’s position until the German offensive forced its adoption.
(2) There was no dispute between Trotsky and Lenin on the subject of the New Economic Policy, known as the Nep. This policy was adopted at the Tenth Party Congress, in 1921. Except for the Workers’ Opposition headed by Shliapnikov and Kollontai, there were no differences of opinion. In fact, Shliapnikov attacked both Lenin and Trotsky indiscriminately as the authors of the Nep. At the Congress, Trotsky emphasized that he not only welcomed the new policy proposed by Lenin, but that he had himself proposed the substance of it a year earlier. (Speech of Leon Trotsky, Minutes of the Tenth Party Congress, p. 146. Russ. Ed. State Publishers, 1921.) At the Third Congress of the Communist International, which followed the Tenth Party Congress, Trotsky and Lenin jointly defended the Nep against the criticism of the Workers’ Opposition. Because of Trotsky’s opposition to Lenin on the Trade Union question, the world press had reported that he opposed Lenin on the Nep. Trotsky referred to these reports at the Third Congress of the International and declared his solidarity with Lenin. (Protokoll des III. Weltkongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale, Moskou, 22 Juni bis 12 Juli 1921. Hamburg, 1921. pp. 782 ff.)
Since the Nep was adopted at the Tenth Party Congress, it seems useful here to quote the following passage from Lenin’s closing speech at that Congress, in summing up the dispute on the trade unions:
The Workers’ Opposition said: Lenin and Trotsky will unite. Trotsky, taking the floor, replied: Whoever does not understand that it is necessary to unite is going against the Party; of course we will unite because we are Party men. I supported Trotsky. To be sure, Trotsky and I have differed. When more or less equal groupings arise in the Central Committee, the Party decides, and decides in such a way that we unite according to the will and directives of the Party. That is the announcement with which Trotsky and I went to the Miners’ Congress and have come here.... (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, Part 1, p. 121. State Publishers, 1925.)
We find that there is no historical basis whatever for Vyshinsky’s statement that Trotsky rose against Lenin at the time when our Party was effecting the complicated swing towards the New Economic Policy. Trotsky did not oppose the Nep. If Vyshinsky’s statement, on the other hand, be taken to refer to the dispute over the trade unions, the above quotation from Lenin sufficiently indicates the facts.
(3) The charge that Trotsky opposed the industrialization and collectivization of Russia is without the slightest foundation in fact. Indeed, the precise opposite is true. We refer our readers to Chapter XXIII of this report, and also to the Platform of the Opposition referred to therein (The Real Situation in Russia).
§ 228. The Prosecutor claimed, as a proof of the progression of Trotskyism in the direction of a program of capitalist restoration, that Trotsky
in 1922, proposed that our industrial enterprises, our trusts, be permitted to mortgage our property, including our basic capital, to private capitalists in order to obtain credits, which the Soviet state really needed at that time. (PR 469.)
Here, as in other instances – notably the charge that Trotsky opposed Lenin’s alleged doctrine of the possibility of socialism in one country – Vyshinsky cites no documentary evidence in support of his historical proof. We have queried Trotsky on this matter; and in reply he states that the Prosecutor evidently refers to a letter he wrote to the Politburo during a discussion connected with the inauguration of the New Economic Policy, which was never published, and which no doubt remains in the archives of the Politburo. The question had arisen, What should be the relationship between the industrial enterprises and the banks in the sphere of credit operations? It was proposed that industrial enterprises be permitted to mortgage to the banks only their floating capital. In answer to Trotsky’s question, Why? Rudzutak (now imprisoned) said that the mortgaging of fixed capital could signify the beginning of the de-nationalization of the means of production. Trotsky pointed out – and the next day put in writing – that the banks and the industries were both state property, and that, since private capital could play only a subordinate rôle limited by the state, the relation between the factories and the banks was a question not of ownership, but of the state’s bookkeeping; that the distinction between fixed and floating capital had no importance for nationalization, since both were state property; and also that since in the backward industries fixed capital might represent as little as twenty-five per cent of the total, whereas in important and highly organized industries it might represent as much as seventy to ninety per cent, to permit only floating capital to be mortgaged would be to create an absurd situation in which the most important and modern factories would be able to borrow the least money. He therefore recommended that in this question the distinction between floating and fixed capital be abandoned and that industries be permitted to mortgage their whole capital up to a certain level – say, twenty-five per cent. The matter was never publicly agitated in any way, and the actual later development proceeded largely along the line suggested by Trotsky.
A fact which is of public record, and which shows how little truth there is in the Prosecutor’s assertion that
... this proposal of Trotsky’s was a step towards the return to the rule of the capitalists (PR 469)
is that in December, 1922, the Central Committee entrusted to Trotsky the responsibility of reporting to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern on the economic development of Soviet Russia and the perspectives of world revolution. In the conspectus of this report, which is to be found in Vol. XII of his Collected Works (Russ. Ed. pp. 346-56), Trotsky showed that the state managed 4,000 enterprises with an average of 207 workers in each, whereas private capitalists had been permitted to lease some 2,000, with an average of seventeen workers; and that whereas 75 per cent of industrial credit was utilized by state enterprises and 20 per cent by the cooperatives, no more than 5 per cent was utilized by private enterprises. He said:
The affirmation of the Social-Democrats on the capitulation of the Soviet state before capitalism presents thus an obvious and brutal deformation of reality.... (Paragraph 14)
There is not the slightest reason to believe that the State’s accumulation will grow more slowly than that of private capitalists and that private capitalists will thereby issue victorious in the fight. (Paragraph 16)
§ 229. Vyshinsky’s statement that in 1926-27 the Trotskyites
carried their struggle against the leadership of our Party, against the Soviet government, into the streets or at least tried to (PR 470)
is so vague that it is hardly worthy of note except for its complete identification of the Stalinist leadership with the government – since Trotsky and the Opposition were quite as much a part of the Bolshevik Party at that time as Stalin and his followers. Presumably Vyshinsky’s reference is to the placards, with their slogans, carried by the Opposition in the parade of November, 1927, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. The slogans were as follows: Fulfill Lenin’s testament! Turn the Fire on the Right – Against the Nepman, the Kulak, and the Bureaucrat! For Genuine Workers’ Democracy! Against Opportunism, against Splits – For the Unity of the Party of Lenin! For the Central Committee of Lenin! (PC 422.) No argument is needed to show that if, and only if, opposition within the Party to its controlling group was open anti-Soviet crime, was the action of the Oppositionists in attempting to carry their banners in that parade counter-revolutionary.
§ 230. Vyshinsky’s statement that
The Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc of 1926 was a bloc which turned the edge of its struggle against the cause of socialism in our country and for capitalism
has already been dealt with in Chapter XXIII of this report. We refer our readers to that chapter, and repeat that we are not concerned to determine who was right or wrong in the struggle between the majority and the Opposition. It is theoretically possible that in first opposing and later adopting, with an increased tempo, the economic plan offered by the Opposition, Stalin was a better judge of actual conditions than were the Oppositionists. But such speculations have nothing to do with the fact that the very measures proposed by the Opposition and later adopted by the régime were represented in the January trial as counter-revolutionary; as a special form of diversion, a form of destructive acts against the dictatorship of the proletariat and the cause of socialist construction; as a special form of struggle against the Soviet state corresponding to the historical situation at that time; and as a logical prelude to the particular crimes with which the accused were charged.
§ 231. We must remember, said Vyshinsky, in his final argument in the January trial,
that ten years ago Trotsky justified his defeatist position in regard to the U.S.S.R. by referring to the famous Clemenceau thesis. Trotsky then wrote: We must restore the tactics of Clemenceau, who as is well known, rose against the French Government at the time when the Germans were 80 kms. from Paris. ... It is not an accident that Trotsky and his accomplices advanced the Clemenceau thesis. They reverted to this thesis once again, but this time advancing it not as a theoretical proposition, but as a practical preparation, real preparation, in alliance with foreign intelligence services, for the defeat of the U.S.S.R. in war. (PR 497.)
In the August trial Vyshinsky referred to this same thesis as historical support of the testimony of David and Berman-Yurin concerning Trotsky’s defeatism in their alleged interviews with him in Copenhagen. (ZK 131.)
It is clear that the so-called Clemenceau thesis is advanced as one of the historical connections which serve as proof of the charges against Trotsky – in this case proof that as far back as 1926 he took a defeatist position from which his alleged practical preparation for the defeat of the U.S.S.R. logically followed. The implication is two-fold: first that Trotsky was a defeatist in 1926, and, second, that Clemenceau was a defeatist during the World War. Obviously, unless Clemenceau was a defeatist there is no point whatever in the allegation that Trotsky was a defeatist in citing his behavior as an example. (Incidentally, although the Prosecutor put Trotsky’s alleged argument in quotation marks, he made no attempt at verification or documentation of what Trotsky actually said in referring to Clemenceau.)
We quote from Trotsky’s comment on the above passage from Vyshinsky, in his closing argument before the Preliminary Commission:
It is hard to believe that the text of this speech was printed in foreign languages, including the French. One would imagine that the French were not unastonished to learn that Clemenceau, during the war, rose against the French Government. ... The fact is that the Stalinist bureaucracy, to justify violence against the Soviets and the Party, has, since 1926, appealed to the war danger – classic subterfuge of Bonapartism! In opposing this, I always expressed myself in the sense that freedom of criticism is indispensable for us not only in time of peace but also in time of war. I referred to the fact that even in bourgeois countries, France in particular, the ruling class did not dare, despite all its fear of the masses, completely to suppress criticism during the war. In this connection I adduced the example of Clemenceau, who, despite the proximity of the war front to Paris – or rather, precisely because of it – denounced in his paper the worthlessness of the military policy of the French Government. In the end, Clemenceau, as is well known, convinced Parliament, took over the leadership of the Government, and assured victory. Where is the uprising here? Where is the defeatism? Where is the connection with foreign intelligence services? ... (PC 575-6.)
The actual facts concerning Clemenceau’s opposition to the War government in France are as follows:
(1) Clemenceau refused from the beginning of the war to enter the French Cabinet, because he thought it incapable of achieving victory and wished to be able to criticize it publicly.
(2) He did vigorously criticize the Cabinet and its conduct of the war; and his articles were often suppressed by the government censor and his paper forbidden to publish for several days.
(3) His criticisms were reproduced by the press of Germany and its allies, and he was denounced as a defeatist by the supporters of the Cabinet in France.
(4) In fact, Clemenceau was attacking the government in the interests of victory. He finally succeeded in overturning it, not by arms but in conformity with parliamentary procedure.
(5) The coming to power of Clemenceau was followed by a more vigorous prosecution of the war, and by the defeat of the enemy.
These facts are so much a matter of public knowledge that we should be obliged to apologize for mentioning them, were it not for the Prosecutor’s absurd falsification, which is only a repetition of earlier falsifications against which Zinoviev, Radek and others vainly protested. Trotsky’s real attitude toward the defense of the Soviet Union at the time when this falsification was being circulated, is clearly stated in the following passage from his speech at the Joint Plenary Session of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission on August 1, 1927, on The War Danger – the Defense Policy and the Opposition:
Do we, the Opposition, cast any doubts on the defense of the socialist fatherland? Not in the slightest degree. It is our hope not only to participate in the defense, but to be able to teach others a few things. Do we cast doubts on Stalin’s ability to sketch a correct line for the defense of the socialist fatherland? We do so and, indeed, to the highest possible degree... . Every Oppositionist, if he is a genuine Oppositionist and not a fraud, will assume in the event of war whatever post, at the front or behind the lines, that the Party will entrust to him, and carry out his duty to the end. But not a single Oppositionist will renounce his right and his duty, on the eve of war, or during the war, to fight for the correction of the party’s course – as has always been the case in our party – because therein lies the most important condition for victory. To sum up: For the socialist fatherland? Yes! For the Stalinist course? No! (“Stalin School of Falsification,” pp. 175-7.)
From this passage it clearly appears that Trotsky in Russia, as Clemenceau in France, criticized the ruling group not in the interest of defeatism but in that of national defense.
§ 232. We regret having been obliged to dwell at such length on matters which are almost entirely of public record and therefore easily accessible to anyone outside Russia who is interested in ascertaining the reliability of Vyshinsky’s historical proofs. But Vyshinsky’s falsifications, presumably designed mainly for home consumption, have left us no other course; particularly in view of the importance which he himself attached to them. In our opinion, such wholesale falsification as our examination of this material reveals fully justifies the presumption of falsification in all details of this evidence which, according to Vyshinsky, confirms the theses of the indictment on the basis of the Trotskyites’ past activity. And the fact that he resorted to such falsification inevitably reflects back upon the entire conduct of the trials, justifying the suspicion that their purpose was to discredit a political opposition, past and present, rather than to establish the actual truth through a fair procedure.