Not Guilty Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials PDF
Preview Not Guilty Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials
NOT GUILTY NOT GUILTY: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials First published in English in 1938 by the Commission of Inquiry headed by John Dewey This edition January 2005 New preface by Pierre Broue Copyright © Wellred Publications UK distribution: Wellred Books, PO Box 50525 London E14 6WG, England Tel: +44 (0) 207 515 7675 Email: [email protected] USA distribution: Wellred Books, PO Box 1331 Fargo, ND, 58103, USA Wellred on-line bookshop sales: wellred.marxist.com Typeset by Wellred Printed by intypelibra, London, England British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 1 9000 07 19 3 Cover design by Espe Espigares NOT GUILTY REPORT OF THE COMMISSION OF INQUIRY INTO THE CHARGES MADE AGAINST LEON TROTSKY IN THE MOSCOW TRIALS JOHN DEWWY, Chairman JOHN CHAMBERLAIN ALFRED ROSMER EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS OTTO RUEHLE BENJAMIN STOLBERG WENDELIN THOMAS CARLO TRESCA FRANCISCO ZAMORA SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE, Secretary JOHN F. FINERTY, Counsel l l e w (cid:127) LONDON WELLRED PUBLICATIONS 2005 1938 PREFACE The Commission of Inquiry, at its session of September 2 1 , 1937, drew up and signed the findings which appear as the Introduction to this volume. It appointed an editorial committee - John Dewey, Suzanne La Follette, and Benjamin Stolberg - to write its final Report in accordance with these findings. The Report which forms the present volume of its publications has been approved by all the ten members of the Commission. The actual writing of this Report, and most of the painstak- ing research required in verifying the wealth of documentary material and other evidence submitted to the Commission and in weighing these against the charges and testimony in the trial records, has been done by Suzanne La Follette. We, as the other members of the editorial committee, wish to express our deep sense of indebtedness to Miss La Follette. And we do so the more gladly because we believe that in acknowl- edging our own obligation to her we speak for all those who want to know the truth and are not afraid of it. The importance of this task, it seems to us, can hardly be exaggerated. And to its performance Miss La Follette has brought unwearied industry and rare intellectual integrity. JOHN DEWEY BENJAMIN STOLBERG NEW PREFACE by Pierre Broue Under the title of Not Guilty, the report of the Commission of Inquiry into the accusations launched during the Moscow trials against Trotsky was published in 1938. The Commission completed its task in New York on 21 September 1937, when it appointed a commission of three members (John Dewey, President, Suzanne La Follette, Secretary, and also Benjamin Stolberg) to write the unanimously approved final report. The conclusion of the report is very brief: 22. We therefore find the Moscow trials to be frame-ups. We therefore find Trotsky and Sedov not guilty. In reality, between the time that Trotsky fought to persuade his com- rades to struggle for the formation and then for the activation of the Commission of Inquiry and the moment when the commissioners signed their definitive report, the situation was changing. The Popular Front continued to peddle the debilitating illusion of a so-called strug- gle between the “democracies” and “fascism”. Many people still see the Spanish Civil War through these spectacles. In reality, however, this was a genuine revolution, which Stalin did not want and which was therefore derailed by the Stalinists. The defeat of the Spanish Revolution was the prelude to the Second World War which broke out just one year later. Nobody yet knew, or even suspected, that war would break out shortly after the conclusion of the treaty of alliance between Hitler and Stalin in 1939. The real Soviet accomplices of Hitler’s Germany were not those unfortunate people who were accused of treason, tortured and persecuted, and finally executed in Moscow. The real accomplices of Hitler were the leaders of the country that they had loyally served and who repaid them by murdering them in the crudest possible manner, having first charged their victims with the very acts of treason of which they themselves were guilty! Only in the course of the last few years has light finally been shed on some of the murky circumstances of these trials, such as the non- appearance before the Soviet tribunal of men accused of being links in the chain of traitors supposedly preparing crimes against the Soviet Union. A careful examination of the declarations of the witnesses and of those of the accused who were supposed to have accused others, and a comparison of the charges made against the accused enable us to clarify a number of hitherto unresolved questions. I have used some of the results of this research in my recent book Communistes contre Staline to clarify the fate of those unfortunates who were executed during the interrogation for having refused to col- laborate with their tormentors. These include the historian Prigozhin and the veteran Communist Yuri Gaven. The latter had written to Trotsky from Berlin, where he was receiving medical treatment. It was there that he met Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. For this he was shot ... on a stretcher. The reader will follow with passionate interest the way in which, brick by brick, the entire edifice of false accusations is demolished. The alleged “confessions” of just one man would send many others to their death. But the Commission of Inquiry completely destroys the entire basis of the charges. To cite just one instance: the Commission of Inquiry proved that Piatakov’s alleged journey to Oslo in December 1935 was a material impossibility. Therefore, all of the accusations made by him fall of their own accord, as do the statements of the witness Boukhartsev, the “con- fessions” of I.N. Smirnov, of Karl B. Radek, of Chestov, of Muralov, of Vladmir Romm and others. Today, practically nothing remains of all these lies, except, perhaps, a sense of shame on the part of a few former disciples and enthusiasts of the Stalinist school. We now know that there were a large number of prisoners who were held “in reserve”, only to be shot when they refused to confess. Some traces of them remain, despite all the odds. On the other hand, both the prosecution and the accused quoted from letters, for whose existence no one can produce the slightest evidence and which probably never did exist! As a matter of fact, it would have been sheer madness to have sent letters from abroad to the USSR giving details of terrorist plots, and moreover through the normal postal services. Yet this is what Trotsky was accused of doing! Two years ago I took part in a debate in the Trotsky Museum (now called the Museum of Exile) in Mexico City. The subject was the impor- tance of the Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky and the Commission of Inquiry in contemporary history. It was quite interest- ing. One of the participants, Thomas R. Poole, the author of a very good work about the “Counter-Trial” drew pessimistic conclusions. In his opinion, “the totalitarian apparatus triumphed over those who upheld the truth and were completely isolated.” At the end of his work he writes: “It was Stalin who won, even if Trotsky had right on his side.” How curiously short sighted are those who cannot see the wood for the trees! Thomas Poole typical of the kind of investigator who has been so immersed in the detail that he is not capable of grasping its meaning or else reading into it things that are not there. For the 100th anniversary of the birth of Trotsky, which took place exactly thirty-eight years to the day before the October Revolution, the Leon Trotsky Institute published a special issue entitled “The Moscow Trials around the World” which is concerned to large extent to what we have called “The Missing Trials” — in other words, to the murders of people such as Juliet Stuart Poyntz, Andres Nin, Grylewicz, who were liquidated without even the pretence of a trial — and the attempts to imitate the Moscow Trials which were made in other countries. Our summary ended in the following terms: “It is the fighting spirit of Trotsky which led and inspired the organ- ised resistance to this terrifying and powerful machine. We dedicate this issue to him, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, and suggest the fol- lowing phrase of Trotsky, pronounced at the time of the struggle, as a fitting epitaph: ‘The highest degree of human happiness is not to be found in the present, but in the preparation of the future.’ There is no doubt that Trotsky’s struggle against the Moscow Trails was an essen- tial part of that struggle for the future of mankind.” THE COMMISSIONERS John Dewey: Educator and author. Professor Emeritus of Phi- losophy, Columbia University. Founder of Progressive Education in the United States. Leader of American Pragmatism. Member of Sacco-Vanzetti and Tom Mooney Defense Committees. Author of numerous books on phi- losophy, psychology, education and social problems. John R. Chamberlain: Author and journalist. Former literary critic, New York Times. Former lecturer, School of Jour- nalism, Columbia University, and associate editor, Satur- day Review of Literature. Alfred Rosmer: Author and labor journalist. Member of Executive Committee of the Communist International, 1920-21; member of Praesidium, Second Congress of the C.L, 1920. Editor-in-chief of I’Humanite, 1923-1924. Edward Alsworth Ross: Educator and author. Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Wisconsin. Author of numerous volumes on economics, sociology and politics, including “The Russian Bolshevik Revolution” and “The Russian Soviet Republic.” Otto Ruehle: Author, biographer of Karl Marx. Former Social Democratic member of the German Reichstag. Leader of the Saxon revolution, November, 1918. Benjamin Stolberg: Author and journalist. Former editor of labor and literary journals. Writer for many years on American Labor. Wendelin Thomas: Leader of the Wilhelmshaven revolt, No- vember 7, 1918. Independent Socialist and later Communist member of the German Reichstag, 1920-24. Editor, daily
The list of books you might like
