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From New International, Vol. XII No. 5, May 1946, pp. 145–150.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Great Conspiracy
by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn
Little, Brown & Co., $3.60
It is far from coincidence that the lurid volume called The Great Conspiracy appears just after the announcement that Trotsky’s book on Stalin would appear this April. The Stalinists had their copy of the work on Stalin when it was first issued for review and then withdrawn. It was easy for them, with their connections in the publishing field, to secure foreknowledge of the exact date of release of the book that was banned by the State Department for four years.
The Great Conspiracy is hardly the work of Sayers and Kahn alone. They had every kindly assistance from the GPU. The book is a calculated attempt once again to confuse public opinion. Its obvious intent is to counteract beforehand the profound effect that Trotsky’s new exposure of the totalitarian dictator in the Kremlin must inevitably create. The Stalin work, soberly based on the most critical analysis of real documents, not blatant frauds, will be the best answer to the GPU and its hacks. The dispassionate, scientific spirit evident in. the writing of Leon Trotsky, even when he deals with Stalin, the most sinister and terrible figure in all history, dissolves into nothingness the transparent attempt to characterize Trotsky as almost demented in his “personal” hatred of Stalin. Sayers and Kahn write:
“He wrote articles asserting that the Soviet leader derived sadistic pleasure from ‘blowing smoke’ in the faces of infants. More and more, his consuming, personal hatred of Stalin became the dominating force of Trotsky’s life. He sets his secretaries to work on a massive, vituperative 1,000-page life of Stalin.”
No, the dominating force of Trotsky’s life was to guide the working class toward the achievement of socialism and to help it on this course by means of complete truth and clarity.
These Stalinist word-men attempt to mask their major objective by
appearing to deal with a broader theme, the secret plotting of war
and intervention against the Soviet Union during the last twenty-five
or more years. This affords them, the opportunity to “set the
stage,” to heighten the atmosphere to the proper degree of
saturation with intrigue, assassination and betrayal. The fetid
breath of the underworld of imperialist politics is breathed on the
Moscow Trials in a vain effort to give them life. Trotsky and the Old
Bolsheviks are bracketed on the one side with the British agent,
Lockhart, the “master spy,” Reilly, the White Guardists, Kolchak,
Denikin, Wrangel and Yudenitch; on the other with the Nazis and
fascists and imperialist reactionaries of all lands. The Stalinists
dare not desist in their clumsy effort to force a vast and fantastic
amalgam down the throat of history.
How can one doubt when there is such an air of scholarly research about this Great Conspiracy? Just look at the staggering load of books, papers, documents that went under the heavy mental press of the authors to be so richly condensed! There are those delightful footnotes too that do not disturb the even flow of the “main theme” (the complete Stalinist line to date), and yet add just the right pinch of “fairness” in alluding, in small print to be sure, to works that utterly refute the text on the Moscow Trials. With what an engaging air of bland innocence do the writers inform us:
“None of the incidents or dialogue in The Great Conspiracy has been invented by the authors. The material has been drawn from various documentary sources which are indicated in the text or listed in the Bibliographical Notes.”
This list includes official records of the United States State Department, hearings and reports of Congressional committees, official British documents, biographies, newspapers, books and – “the verbatim reports published by the Soviet government of the proceedings at the espionage, sabotage and treason trials which have taken place in Soviet Russia since the Revolution.”
Taken as official documents, after all, are not those of the Soviet government just as good and authentic as those of other governments? That naïve logic will influence, of course, only naïve people. The truth of any document rests on itself and all its relations to facts, events and other documents. The Sisson documents became for a brief spell official United States affairs – until their fraudulent nature became so obvious that they had to be thrown out as forgeries. Those documents – what irony in relation to the Moscow Trials! – purported to show that both Lenin and Trotsky were mere German agents. To this day the trial records exist showing the conviction for murder of Sacco and Vanzetti. Yet not a single thinking person accepts their conclusion, although on their basis these two martyrs were executed. The Mooney trial is another case in point. The Dreyfus affair is also part of history. Yet objection will be made that there were no confessions in these trials. But the history of the Inquisitions presents the most fantastic confessions of all time and who today, including the fathers of the Church, would quote as truth those old “official” documents. Indeed the nearest analogy to the Moscow Trials is precisely that of the Witch Trials of the Inquisition. Sayers and Kahn mention but completely ignore the conclusions of the Dewey Commission that all the Moscow Trials were false, and an attempt to frame up Leon Trotsky. These Stalinist scholars, in short, make not the slightest faint effort to analyze or sift or weigh the documents that they choose to present. Their assigned task is to narrate the proper versions.
We readily agree that the Stalinist writers did not invent anything themselves. They merely use the inventions of Stalin and his GPU from start to finish. But if they are ordinary copyists in this respect, they have nevertheless the proper light-fingered touch in their use of material. A minor detail will reveal that “slant” on “documents.” They quote Lenin at the Congress of Soviets in December, 1920, as calling for the New Economic Policy and then advocating the speedy electrification of the country.
“There was a huge map of Russia on the platform. At a signal from Lenin, a switch was touched and the map was suddenly illuminated. It showed the Congress how Lenin envisaged the future of his country. Electric lights sparkled on the map.”
This scene is taken “verbatim” from a motion picture of rather
late Stalinist vintage. It never existed in this form and is
obviously entirely out of keeping with Lenin’s simplicity. The mind
of Lenin needed no “shows”!
Stalin has carried “The Lie” back so as to make it appear that the struggle against his Thermidorean apparatus was the continuation of an older struggle carried on against Lenin. Trotsky is to be exiled, if Stalin has his way, not only from Russia but from all history. Thus they would like to make it appear that Trotsky was opposed to Lenin on the New Economic Policy. In reality it was Trotsky who had first proposed such a change to Lenin a year before its adoption. The authors repeat with their instructors: “When Lenin announced the ‘temporary retreat’ of the New Economic Policy, Trotsky exclaimed: The cuckoo has cuckooed the end of the Soviet government!” Trotsky’s speech shows that he, with Lenin, considered the move a temporary retreat. The expression is evidently torn out of context and given a distorted meaning, for Trotsky understood that the Whites abroad would hail the new policy as the end of the regime. It was they would would “cuckoo” the end of the regime, not Trotsky.
The greatest contempt for the reader is revealed in the deliberate
confusing of terms and times, indicating the reliance of the
Stalinists on sheer ignorance. The word “opposition” is made a
catch-all to link together an the oppositions that existed at various
times on different issues and with different persons involved.
Specifically the attempt is constantly made to link up every other
opposition with the Left Opposition which was established on the eve
of Lenin’s death not as an opposition to Lenin (as Stalin wants it
to appear) but, on the contrary, to become the instrument of both
Lenin and Trotsky against Stalin. Lenin died before the fight to
remove Stalin (as proposed by Lenin to Trotsky) could be started.
Trotsky then continued the struggle through the Left Opposition as a
faction within the Communist Party. Sayers and Kahn commit the fraud
of insinuating and then accepting as authentic the identity of the
Left Opposition with the Left Communists who opposed Lenin during and
after the peace of Brest-Litovsk, and with other oppositionist
groupings that existed be fore Lenin’s death. This projection
backward in history is the rotten fruit of the later Moscow Trials in
which all the oppositions, right and left, are lumped together and
made to appear as a united group from the very start, fighting first
Lenin and then, by inheritance, Stalin. One form of The Lie is given
as follows: “First as Foreign Commissar and then as War Commissar,
Trotsky was the chief spokesman of the so-called Left Opposition
within the Bolshevik Party.” The Left Opposition led by Trotsky did
not exist when he was Foreign Commissar and began only after Lenin
died. History is thus again and again ante-dated in accord with the
needs of the later frame-ups.
The question of “inheritance” brings to mind the famous “will” of Lenin. The authors, in line with the needs of The Great Conspiracy against Trotsky and Bolshevism, arrive this late at the denial that such a testament existed. Naturally, since it is so damning to Stalin’s pretensions at being the follower and disciple of Lenin. The teacher took exceptional care in this instance to disown the “pupil”! There is the letter in which Lenin broke off all relations with Stalin. There is also the testament urging the party to remove Stalin as general secretary. These scribblers know how to omit real documents and to hide the fact that Stalin was forced to produce the testament and have it read before the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in 1927. More flagrantly they leave in darkness Stalin’s own admission published in the official organ of the Comintern, the International Press Correspondence for November 17, 1927. A speech of Stalin’s is there quoted as follows:
“It is said that in the ‘testament’ in question Lenin suggested to the party 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.”
The other comrade was to be one whose qualities Lenin posed in sharp contrast to those of the “rude and disloyal” Stalin.
You will look in vain in this “historical study” for the replica of another document in which Lenin showed such complete trust in the Commissar of War, Trotsky. It was given without request during the Civil War when Trotsky was meeting with opposition engineered from behind the scenes by Stalin. Trotsky never used the document which was a blank sheet of paper with an endorsement at the bottom signed by Lenin, as follows:
Comrades: Knowing the strict character of Comrade Trotsky’s orders, I am so convinced, so absolutely convinced, of the correctness, expediency and necessity for the success of the cause of the order given by Comrade Trotsky that I unreservedly indorse this order.
This simple document is enough in itself to refute all the frauds
and forgeries attempted by Stalin in his desperate effort to besmirch
the name of Lenin’s co-worker. The totalitarian dictator uses all
the weight of the government, all the power of the reactionary
bureaucracy, to recreate history in his own fell image. Psychologists
of the future will be faced with the problem of explaining why Stalin
found it necessary, after usurping the power of the October
Revolution, to try to have attributed to himself all the great deeds
of Trotsky while, on the contrary, attributing to Trotsky all the
murderous deeds of Stalin. The Great Conspiracy is but a new
effusion devoted to this ignoble task. Its shoddy structure can be
readily demolished by the truthful use of actual documents. The very
breadth of the fraud it attempts to perpetrate involves so many
contradictions internally as well as with well-established facts that
it is all the easier to expose.
How could Stalin rest with the Moscow frame-up trials which tried to picture Trotsky as plotting at one and the same time with France and England, and with Germany and Italy against the Soviet Union, and yet leave alone the Trotsky of the Revolution and the Civil War? Trotsky himself predicted that the “plotting” attributed to him would be carried back further and further to show him as a foreign agent even under Lenin. Stalin found this all the more necessary in order to convince the world that the struggle against him was really the continuation of the same struggle against Lenin. Thus we have a hobgoblin parade of bizarre fantasies, insinuations, innuendos, distortions. What an amazing man, this Trotsky of the Great Stalin Conspiracy! At one and the same time he is the agent of Germany during Brest-Litovsk and yet plots with Anglo-American imperialism through Lockhart and Reilly, not merely for intervention as against Germany, but for outside aid in overthrowing Lenin! He is in conspiracy with all of the defendants of the Moscow Trials at one and the same time – with Bukharin and Rykov on one side, with Zinoviev and Kamenev and Radek on the other, and with the Social Revolutionaries of Left and Right, not to mention the White Guards and Mensheviks. And all this support remains secret; it is never out in the open. The Stalinists never stop to explain how such a Trotsky needed anything more to displace Lenin, had he so desired, but the majority in the ruling institutions of the period. The figures later done to death by Stalin formed a majority of the Executive Committee of the party as well as of the Soviet. There is one explanation, one which casts shame on Lenin. Stalin pictures him as a dictator who, like himself, kept all in check!
The startling talents of the imaginary Trotsky pictured by people apparently suffering from nightmare, are shown after he has lost power and is in exile. Let us quote from the Sayers-Kahn condensation:
From the moment Trotsky left Soviet soil, agents of foreign intelligence services had been eager to contact him and to make use of his international anti-Soviet organization. The Polish Defensive; the Italian fascist Ovra; the Finnish Military Intelligence; the White Russian émigrés who directed anti-Soviet secret services in Rumania, Yugoslavia and Hungary, and reactionary elements with the British Intelligence Service and the French Deuxième Bureau were all prepared to deal with Russia’s “Public Enemy Number One” for their own purposes. Funds, assistants, a network of espionage and courier services were at Trotsky’s disposal for the maintenance and extension of his international anti-Soviet propaganda activities and for the support and reorganization of his conspiratorial apparatus inside Soviet Russia.
A powerful man, indeed! All the governments of the world ready to
support him in all kinds of ways – except one! A trifling detail.
They all unanimously declined to provide him with so simple a thing
as a haven, a refuge from which to carry on such multifarious
activities! England never invited him. He was driven out of France
and Norway after very brief sojourns. Germany allowed him in neither
before nor after the advent of Hitler to power. Only little Mexico
permitted his entry, and that under the exceptional period of
Cardenas’ rule. Trotsky was and remained a man without a passport.
Is it possible. we ask somewhat timidly, in the light of the mass of
“evidence” so lavishly supplied by the GPU, that all these
governments had an even greater fear than Stalin of the power of the
revolutionary ideas of the co-founder of the October Revolution?
We highly recommend the book of the two historians of conspiracy to every student of law as a source book in the study of innuendo. Examples tumble over each other. Trotsky is quoted from the Dewey Commission Report, The Case of Leon Trotsky, as follows:
“Monsieur Thome and Monsieur Cado, the general secretary of the police and the prefecture of the Department of Charente Intérieure-all the summits of the police were very well acquainted with my situation. It was the secret agent of the police who was informed of every step of mine.”
Clearly here is the admission of a link with the secret police of France! The unsuspecting reader would never know that Trotsky was forced to agree to report his every whereabouts to the French police in order to be permitted to stay in France. Nor would it be inferred from the quotation that Trotsky had demanded in his defense that the French police make public all that they knew of his itinerary while in France precisely in order to refute the charges hurled at him during the Moscow Trials. Finally, let it be remembered, it was precisely the Franco-Soviet Pact in existence during the trials, that kept the mouths of the police firmly shut in aid of the “ally” of France, Stalin.
There is unconscious humor in the purported conversation of Rakovsky with a Japanese Intelligence officer in Japan, and in the pictured plight of Ambassador Yurenev. The officer supposedly says to Rakovsky:
“I must ask you to write to him (Trotsky) that our government is dissatisfied with his articles on the Chinese question and also with the behavior of the Chinese Trotskyites. We have a right to expect a different line of conduct on the part of Mr. Trotsky. Mr. Trotsky ought to understand what is necessary. There is no need to go into details, but it is clear that an incident provoked in China would be a desirable pretext for intervening in China.”
Sadly the Moscow Trial of Rakovsky does not relate just how Trotsky changed his writings on Japan and China to suit the Mikado. It is, of course, a matter of record that he firmly supported the Chinese against Japanese imperialism and predicted the defeat of Japan. The innuendo in the quotation, as used, does not concern Trotsky’s writings. It is rather the slur cast on the Chinese Trotskyists that they somehow or other (the details are unnecessary!) created the pretext for the Japanese penetration of China. These drops of poison are never distilled any further.
Rakovsky supposedly reports these matters to Ambassador Yurenev. By this time the stories concocted (at Moscow, not in Tokyo) have reached such fantastic proportions as one lie piles up on the other like a ship wrecked on the rocks, that comment on the contradictions become unavoidable. The prosecutor therefore has a “depressed” Yurenev saying to Rakovsky:
“We have gotten into such a mess that sometimes one does not know how to behave! One is afraid that by satisfying one of our partners we may offend another. For instance, here at present antagonism is rising between Great Britain and Japan in connection with the Chinese question, while we have to maintain connections both with the British and the Japanese Intelligence Services ... And here I have to find my bearings in all this!”
Neither Vyshinsky nor Stalin could help them out of such a mess –
of lying testimony!
The real service performed by this Stalinist manual lies in the fact that it tries to bridge the glaring gaps left from one trial to the next. Thus the evolution of The Lie becomes quite apparent. Each trial witnessed “full and honest confessions” on the part of the defendants brought into court. Yet each new trial went back over the previous one to show that the confessions bringing convictions, even of death, had not been one-tenth enough. This peculiarity of the trials needed explanation. The explanation, need we say, we usually even more fantastic than that which needed explaining. The trials therefore present the appearance, with all the clever workmanship of the writers after the fact, of constructing a house starting with the roof and working down deeper and deeper into the foundations. Sayers and. Kahn try to correct this weirdness by recounting the “relevant” parts of the later trials before presenting the “verbatim” accounts of the earlier ones. How stubborn real time can be in refusing to reverse itself at the behest of the all-powerful GPU!
We are here concerned with the eight trials based on the Kirov assassination in 1934. The previous trials of the Industrial Party and the Mensheviks showed the same elements of frame-ups and preparation for the later ones. The Menshevik Trial also reversed the time order by showing “witnesses” meeting with two persons long dead. It showed Abramovitch ignoring the laws of space by appearing in Moscow when even the Soviet press had his picture as being in Brussels. These are minor details which Sayers and Kahn feel no need to discuss since they do not appear in the “official” versions of the trials.
The eight trials were those of Nikolayev and others in December 1934; that of Zinoviev-Kamenev in January 1935; the trial of Medved and other GPU men in January 1935; that of Kamenev and others in July 1935; the retrial of Zinoviev-Kamenev in August 1936; the Novosibirsk trial of November 1936; the Pyatakov-Radek trial of January 1937; and the Bukharin-Yagoda trial of March 1938.
The assassination of Kirov was followed by the death of 104 “white guards.” The public was given to believe that the whites were responsible for the plot. It came out in the course of the Nikolayev trial, however, that he was a member of the Communist Youth organization. The minutes of his trial were never published, but not a single word at the time attempted to link the others with the plot. A frame-up was tentatively tried, but quickly dropped. The indictment stated that Nikolayev had been approached and helped by a Latvian consul, Bisseneks. This consul offered to transmit a letter abroad to Trotsky, with whom he claimed to be in touch. Nikolayev did not write. Bisseneks disappeared abroad and was never heard of again. Wisely, Sayers and Kahn ignore him completely. The GPU touch was too obvious.
Stalin next brought Zinoviev and Kamenev to trial in January 1935
for the same assassination. They were made to confess “moral guilt”
in helping to create an “atmosphere” in which terrorism could
breed. Not a word was said about actual complicity with Nikolayev;
not a word about terrorist plots; not a word about sabotage; and not
a single word about links with foreign governments. There followed
the trial of some Leningrad GPU men who had known about the plot to
kill Kirov in advance, but had failed to take proper precautions. The
minutes of this trial never appeared and it is not even mentioned by
our two scribblers. What did appear in no way implicated the GPU
officials of having participated in the actual plot. That came later.
Kamenev was dragged back from prison in July 1935 to face trial on the same issue. This time he was accused of a terrorist plot against Stalin. Nothing was published on this trial at all. Sayers and Kahn do not mention it. It was a mere rehearsal for the later trials. Zinoviev and Kamenev were again haled to court – from prison – in August 1936. By this time they were ready to confess – no evidence ever appeared, new or old – that they had participated in terrorist plots, including that against Kirov. They were sentenced to death. Here again not a single word appeared on sabotage or on links with foreign governments to bring about intervention, etc.
Accusations of sabotage appeared for the first time in connection with the Old Bolsheviks in the Novosibirsk Trial of November 1936. Pyatakov appeared as defendant in this trial and in die later one of January 1937. The last two trials added confessions not merely about the defendants then alive, but also for the men already killed, Zinoviev, Kamenev and others. They were charged after their death with all the other crimes “admitted” for them by apparent co-conspirators who had not even been tried with them. Pyatakov, Bukharin, Radek “confessed” terrorist plots as in the previous trials, but added sabotage, wrecking activities, treason abroad.
The Great Conspiracy is an addition to the trials. It relates them backward, giving the final version as an introduction to the very first one. Its function becomes quite understandable. The trial of Nikolayev is given in a single paragraph. Then we find the following:
“The Military Collegium sentenced Nikolayev to be shot. Nikolayev did not divulge the fact that Zinoviev, Kamenev and the other leaders of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist center had been directly involved in the plot to murder Kirov.”
Such a statement might strike one as a queer description of a trial if there had not appeared on the preceding page a portion of the “testimony” of the later trials used to link them together. Bakayev in the 1936 trial “explains” this as due to instructions from the ill-fated Zinoviev:
“The principal task is to organize the terrorist work so secretly as to preclude our being compromised in any way ... When under examination, the main thing is to persistently deny any connection with the organization. If accused of terroristic activities, you must emphatically deny it and argue that terror is incompatible with the views of Bolshevik-Marxists.”
If this “explains” Nikolayev’s silence, how does it explain why Bakayev, released from all vows since Zinoviev and Kamenev had confessed to their terrorist center themselves, did not reveal still more? This contradiction at a later date required the invention of a still more secret “parallel center” not mentioned at all in the earlier trials.
The fore-shortened description of the first Zinoviev trial is followed by its explanation:
The trial had only scorched the surface of the conspiracy. Among the many facts which the Leningrad trial failed to bring to light, perhaps the strangest were these: When Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested, four agents of the Soviet secret police had brought them to NKVD headquarters. The agents were Molchanov, chief of the secret political department of the NKVD; Pauker, chief of the operations department; Volovich, assistant chief of the operations department; and Bulanov, assistant to the chairman of the NKVD. In arresting Zinoviev and Kamenev, the four NKVD men acted in a most extraordinary fashion. They not only failed to search the apartments of the suspects for incriminating material; they actually permitted Zinoviev and Kamenev to destroy a number of incriminating documents ... Still more remarkable were the records of these four NKVD agents. Molchanov and Bulanov were themselves secret members of the Trotskyite-Right conspiratorial apparatus. Pauker and Volovich were German agents. These men had been specially picked to make the arrests by Henry G. Yagoda, the Chairman of the NKVD.
Need we add that this “information” came at the later trial of these GPU men and that Yagoda was tried only still later in March 1938?
It is a tenet of science to accept the simplest explanation, the one involving the fewest number of assumptions. Stalin and his GPU, unfortunately for their trials, paid not the slightest heed to this well-recognized doctrine. That is why the trials left so sour a taste and could not be swallowed by the world at large. The trials were characterized by Trotsky as “conversations about conversations.” Not a scintilla of actual evidence was ever produced. The “links” between trials were intended as answers to world criticism on this and other scores. The attempts to allay world suspicion in this fashion were themselves so obvious and. so bizarre that they served to confirm suspicion all the more. The hypothesis that the trials were GPU frame-ups conformed too well to the known facts to be swept aside. The defendants are all dead, Trotsky murdered in Mexico by a tool of the GPU. The Stalinist need to have the world accept the verdict of the trials remains. The Great Conspiracy against Trotsky and the other leaders of the October Revolution continues. But its brazenness is far from carrying conviction. The repetition of the exploded lies concerning Pyatakov’s flight to Norway in an airplane that never existed; the lies concerning a meeting between Trotsky and Romm in Paris, when Trotsky proved he had not been in Paris at the time; the lies about meetings in a Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen that no longer existed at the time, etc. – all this calculated, bare-faced effrontery convinces nobody.
Nobody? There are the Stalinists and their close collaborators, the Browders, the Sayers and the Kahns. Browder, even after his expulsion from the Communist Party, finds it necessary to reaffirm his belief in the Moscow Trials. Sayers and Kahn have every confidence in their verdicts, or so they say. These people should be the very first to welcome every new opportunity to secure new, objective corroboration of the trials. Such an opportunity presents itself at this very time. The defendants at the later trials confessed that they had made contact with the Nazis through Hess, Rosenberg. and others. They gave “testimony” that Trotsky and his son had met with Hess and plotted with the Nazis for war against the Soviet Union. The Nuremberg Trials offer a new ground for a test of the Moscow Trials. Not only are all the Nazi leaders, and particularly those involved in the “confessions,” in the hands of the Allies, but even better, all their archives seem to have fallen intact into the hands of the Court. Will not Browder, Sayers, Kahn and all the Friends of Stalin join in requesting the questioning of these witnesses and the production in open court of all relevant documents? It has been made clear through what has been produced, that the Nazis, true Germans in this respect, kept the most meticulous records of conversations and agreements. Why not ask the defendants whether there ever were such records, and if so, what became of them?
Not the Stalinists have made this request. They have remained as silent as the grave on this matter, showing how much real confidence they have in the possibilities of producing proof. It has remained instead for the English section of the Fourth International to make demands of this kind on the Court at Nuremberg. It has remained for men like H.G. Wells and Arthur Koestler, James T. Farrell, Oswald Garrison Willard and Norman Thomas – all of them disbelievers in the Moscow Trials – to challenge the Russian prosecutor and the Russian judge, who form part of the Nuremberg staff, to produce proofs. There are those who fear that the Russians may make a “deal” with the Nazis on this score. We fear nothing that the Stalinists can do, for everything can be subjected to the same scientific, critical analysis to which was subjected the material, or rather lack of material, of the trials themselves.
The Stalinists must of necessity pile fraud on fraud to cover up all the lies of the past. The Great Conspiracy is evidence that they are impelled to drown with noise and bluster, with calumny and innuendo – and with murder when no other remedy suffices – the voices of truth and honesty. Let no one think that we speak here of the Nazi scoundrels in the criminal dock at Nuremberg! Those beasts deserve the death that will be meted out to them. But it is nonetheless important that they be questioned before their sentence. The Stalinists have too black a record for the suspicion not to arise that after the death of the figures mentioned at the Moscow Trials, documents will not be forged as the “proof” completely lacking at the trials themselves. That is why it is necessary to demand that questions be put to the men in the dock before their death. Every bit of their testimony can be subjected to scientific analysis and judgment, including anything they may say about documents bearing on the case.
The world cannot forget the Moscow Trials. Their infamy remains a dark blot on the conscience of humanity. The real verdict can only come with the end of a regime, the regime of the totalitarian bureaucracy headed by the Kremlin dictator. History will vomit forth with the bloody clique that usurped the October Revolution, its own image of fraud and frame-up as painted by itself in the Moscow Trials. The vindication and victory of the Bolsheviks will be the resurgence of the proletarian revolution dammed up by the Stalinists.
March 15, 1946
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