Stalin- The Enduring Legacy

by Kerry Bolton

  However these factors were ignored by the Dewey Commission, and are still ignored. Instead the Commission accepted a falsely sworn affidavit by Esther and B J Field, Trotskyites, who claimed that the Bristol café was two doors away from the Grand Hotel and that there was a clear distinction between the two enterprises. Goldman, Trotsky’s lawyer, had stated at the fifth session of the Dewey hearings in Mexico that despite the statements that Holtzman was forced to make at the 1936 Moscow trial that he had met Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol, and was ‘put up’ there, ‘…immediately after the trial and during the trial, when the statement, which the Commissioners can check up on, was made by him, a report came from the Social-Democratic press in Denmark that there was no such hotel as the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen; that there was at one time a hotel by the name of Hotel Bristol, but that was burned down in 1917…’

  Goldman sought to repudiate a claim by the publication Soviet Russia Today that stated that the Bristol café is not next to the Grand Hotel, and used the Field affidavit for the purpose, and that there was no entrance connecting the two, the Fields stating,

  As a matter of fact, we bought some candy once at the Konditori Bristol, and we can state definitely that it had no vestibule, lobby, or lounge in common with the Grand Hotel or any hotel, and it could not have been mistaken for a hotel in any way, and entrance to the hotel could not be obtained through it.[225]

  The question of the Bristol Hotel was again raised the following day, at the 6th session of the Dewey hearings. Such was – and is – the importance attached to this in repudiating the Stalinist allegations as clumsy. In 2008 Sven-Eric Holström undertook some rudimentary enquiries into the matter. Consulting the 1933 street and telephone directories for Copenhagen he found that – the Field’s affidavit notwithstanding - the Grand Hotel and the Bristol café were located at the same address.[226] Furthermore, photographs of the period show that the street entrance to the hotel and the café were the same and the only signage from the outside states ‘Bristol’.[227] Again, contrary to the Field affidavit, diagrams of the building show that there was a lobby and internal entrance connecting the hotel and the café. Anyone walking off the street into the hotel would assume, on the basis of the signage and the common entrance, that he had walked into a hotel called Hotel Bristol. Getty states that Trotsky’s papers archived at Harvard show that Holtzman, a ‘former’ Trotskyite, had met Sedov in Berlin in 1932 ‘and gave him a proposal from veteran Trotskyist Ivan Smirnov and other Left Oppositionists in the USSR for the formation of a united opposition bloc’,[228] although Trotsky stated at the Dewey hearings on questioning by Goldman that he had never had any ‘direct or indirect communication’ with Holtzman.

  If the statements of Trotsky at to the Dewey Commission and his statements in My Life are considered in the context of the allegations presented by Vyshinsky at the Moscow Trial, a number of conclusions might be suggested:

  From 1925 there was a Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev bloc, or an ‘Opposition Centre’, which Trotsky states had an ‘executive committee; which functioned as an alternative party ‘central committee.’”

  Although Zinoviev and Kamenev were aligned for a time with Stalin in a troika, they repudiated this in favour of a counter-revolutionary alliance with Trotsky, and spoke at mass demonstrations, along with others such as Radek.

  Trotsky subsequently condemned Kamenev, Zinoviev et al as ‘contemptible’ for ‘capitulating’, but Zinoviev, on Trotsky’s own account, was writing to him in November 1928 and warning of what he expected to be Stalin’s attacks.

  Was the vehemence with which Trotsky attacked Kamenev, Zinoviev and other Moscow defendants a mere ruse to throw off suspicion in regard to a united Opposition bloc, which, according to Rogovin,[229] had been formalized as an ‘anti-Stalinist bloc’ in 1932?

  On Trotsky’s own account he and Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, et al had been at the forefront of a vast counter-revolutionary organization that was of sufficient strength to organize mass disruptions of official events in Moscow and Leningrad, which also had support among military and police personnel.

  From his exile in Siberia in 1928, Trotsky on his own account, despite the ever-watchful eye of the Soviet secret police, the GPU, made his home the centre of opposition activities.[230] Trotsky had been treated leniently in Siberian exile, and was asked to refrain from opposition activities, but responded with a defiant letter to the All-Union Communist Party and to the Executive Committee of the Communist International, in which he referred to Stalin’s ‘narrow faction’. He refused to renounce what he called, ‘the struggle for the interests of the international proletariat...’ In the letter to the Politburo dated 15 March 1933, Trotsky warned in grandiose manner:

  I consider it my duty to make one more attempt to appeal to the sense of responsibility of those who presently lead the Soviet state. You know conditions better than I. If the internal development proceeds further on its present course, catastrophe is inevitable.[231]

  As a means of saving the Soviet Union from self-destruction Trotsky advocated that the Left Opposition be accepted back into the Bolshevik party as an independent political tendency that would co-exist with all other factions, while not repudiating its own programme:[232]

  Only from open and honest cooperation between the historically produced fractions, fully transforming them into tendencies in the party and eventually dissolving into it, can concrete conditions restore confidence in the leadership and resurrect the party.[233]

  With the failure of the Politburo to reply to Trotsky’s ultimatum, he published both the letter and a statement entitled ‘An Explanation’.[234] Trotsky then cited his ‘declaration’ in reply to the ‘ultimatum’ he had received to forego oppositionist activities, to the Sixth Party Congress from his remote exile in Alma Ata. In this ‘declaration’ he stated what could also be interpreted as revolutionary opposition to the regime, insofar as he considered that the USSR under Stalin had become a bureaucratic state composed of a ‘depraved officialdom’ that was working for ‘class interests hostile to the proletariat’:

  To demand from a revolutionary such a renunciation (of political activity, i.e., in the service of the party and the international revolution) would be possible only for a completely depraved officialdom. Only contemptible renegades would be capable of giving such a promise. I cannot alter anything in these words ... To everyone, his due. You wish to continue carrying out policies inspired by class forces hostile to the proletariat. We know our duty and we will do it to the end.[235]

  The lack of reply from the Politburo in regard to Trotsky’s ultimatum to accept him back into the Government resulted in Trotsky’s final break with the Third - Communist - International (Comintern) and the creation of the Fourth – Trotskyite - International in rivalry with the Stalinist parties throughout the world. Trotsky declared that the Bolshevik party and those parties following the Stalinist line, as well as the Comintern now only served an ‘uncontrolled bureaucracy’.[236] That his aims were something other than mass education and the acceptance of a ‘tendency’ within the Bolshevik party became clearer in 1933 when he wrote that, ‘No normal “constitutional” ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletariat only by force’.[237]

  What he was advocating was a palace coup that would remove Stalin with minimal disruption. This did not mean ‘an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat but the removal of a malignant growth upon it…’ These would not be ‘measures of a civil war but rather the measures of a police character’.[238] The intent was unequivocal, and it appears disingenuous for Trotsky and his apologists up to the present day to insist that nothing was meant other than for Trotskyism to be accepted as a ‘tendency’ within the Bolshevik party that could debate the issues in parliamentary fashion.

  If Trotsky was less than honest with the fawning Dewey Commission, the farcical ‘cross examination’ by the Commission’s counsel was not going to
expose it. Heaven forbid that Trotsky could lie to serve his own cause, and that he could be anything but a saintly figure. A less than deferential attitude toward Trotsky by Beals was sufficient to set the one objective Commissioner at loggerhead with the others.

  Of the lie as a political weapon, Trotsky was explicit. Trotsky had written in 1938, the very year of the third Moscow Trial, an article chastising a grouplet of German Marxists for adhering to ‘bourgeoisie’ notions of morality such as truthfulness. He stated, ‘that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character’.[239]

  Norms ‘obligatory upon all’ become the less forceful the sharper the character assumed by the class struggle. The highest pitch of the class struggle is civil war which explodes into mid-air all moral ties between the hostile classes. … This vacuity in the norms obligatory upon all arises from the fact that in all decisive questions people feel their class membership considerably more profoundly and more directly than their membership in “society”. The norms of “obligatory” morality are in reality charged with class, that is, antagonistic content. … Nevertheless, lying and violence “in themselves” warrant condemnation? Of course, even as does the class society which generates them. A society without social contradictions will naturally be a society without lies and violence. However there is no way of building a bridge to that society save by revolutionary, that is, violent means. The revolution itself is a product of class society and of necessity bears its traits. From the point of view of “eternal truths’ revolution is of course ‘anti-moral.’ … It remains to be added that the very conception of truth and lie was born of social contradictions.[240]

  Given the lengthy ideological discourse on the value of the lie and the relativity of morality, it is absurd to rely on any statement Trotsky and his followers make about anything. He lied and obfuscated to the Dewey Commission in the knowledge that he was among friends.

  Kirov’s Murder

  The year after Trotsky’s ultimatum to the Politburo (1934) the popular functionary Kirov was murdered. Trotsky’s view of Kirov was not sympathetic, calling him a ‘rude satrap [whose killing] does not call forth any sympathy’.[241] The consensus now seems to be that Stalin arranged for the murder of Kirov to blame the Opposition as justification for launching a murderous purge against his rivals. For example, Robert Conquest states that Kirov was a moderate and a popular rival to Stalin, whose murder was both a means of eliminating a rival and of launching a purge.[242] Not only Trotskyites and eminent historians such as Conquest share this view, but it was also implied by Khrushchev during his 1956 ‘secret address’ to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party denouncing Stalin.[243] After Stalin’s death several Soviet administrations undertook investigations to try and uncover definitive evidence against him in the Kirov murder.

  The original source for the accusations against Stalin regarding Kirov seems to have been an anonymous ‘Letter of an Old Bolshevik’ published in 1937.[244] It transpired that the ‘Old Bolshevik’ was a Menshevik, Boris Nicolaevsky, who claimed that his information came from Bukharin when the latter was in Paris in 1936. In 1988 Bukharin’s widow published a book on her late husband, in which she denied that any such discussions had taken place between Bukharin and Nicolaevsky, and considered the ‘Letter’ to be a ‘spurious document’.[245]

  In 1955 the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party commissioned P N Pospelov, the Secretary of the Central Committee, to investigate Stalinist repression. It had been the opinion of the party by this time that Stalin had been behind the murder of Kirov. Another commission of enquiry was undertaken in 1956. Neither found evidence that Stalin had a hand in the Kirov killing, but Khrushchev did not release the findings. Former foreign minister Molotov remarked of the 1956 enquiry: ‘The commission concluded that Stalin was not implicated in Kirov’s assassination. Khrushchev refused to have the findings published since they didn’t serve his purpose’.[246] As recently as 1989, the USSR was still making efforts to implicate Stalin, and a Politburo Commission headed by A Yakovlev was set up. The two year enquiry concluded that: ‘In this affair no materials objectively support Stalin’s participation or NKVD participation in the organisation and carrying out of Kirov’s murder’.[247] The findings of this enquiry were not released either.

  Dr J Arch Getty writes of the circumstances of the Kirov murder that the OGPU and the NKVD had infiltrated opposition groups and there had been sufficient evidence obtained to consider that the so-called Zinovievites were engaged in dangerous underground activity. Stalin consequently regarded this group as being behind the assassin, Nikolayev. Although their former followers were being rounded up, Pravda announced on December 23, 1934 that there was ‘insufficient evidence to try Zinoviev and Kamenev for the crime’.[248] When the trial against this bloc did occur two years later, it was after many interrogations, and was therefore no hasty process. From the interrogations relative to the Kirov assassination, Stalin found out about the continued existence of the Opposition bloc that focused partly around Zinoviev. Vadim Rogovin, a Professor at the Russian Academy of Sciences, wrote that Kamenev and Zinoviev had rejoined Trotsky and formed ‘the anti-Stalinist bloc in June 1932’, although Trotsky had maintained to the Dewey Commission and subsequently, that no such alliance existed and that he had nothing but contempt for Zinoviev and Kamenev. Rogovin, a Trotskyite academic having researched the Russian archives, stated:

  Only after a new wave of arrests following Kirov’s assassination, after interrogations and reinterrogations of dozens of Oppositionists, did Stalin receive information about the 1932 bloc, which served as one of the main reasons for organizing the Great Purge.[249]

  Hence, the primary reason for the Moscow Trials and the purge of the Opposition was found by the most recent research of Dr Rogovin, a pro-Trotsky academic, to be valid.

  In 1934 Yakov Agranov, temporary head of the NKVD in Leningrad, had found connections between the assassin Nikolayev and leaders of the Leningrad Komsomol at the time of Zinoviev’s authority over the city. The most prominent was I Kotolynov, whom Robert Conquest states ‘had, in fact, been a real oppositionist’.[250] Kotolynov, a ‘Zinovievite’, was among those of the so-called ‘Leningrad terrorist centre’ found guilty in 1934 of the death of Kirov. The investigation had been of long duration and the influence of Zinoviev’s followers had been established. However, there was considered to be insufficient evidence to charge Zinoviev and Kamenev.[251]

  In 1935 other evidence came to light showing that Zinoviev and Kamenev were aware of the ‘terrorist sentiments’ in Leningrad, which they had ‘inflamed’.[252] While several trials associated with the Kirov killing took place in 1935, in 1936 sufficient evidence had accrued to begin the first of the so-called Moscow Trials of the ‘Trotsky -Zinoviev Terrorist Centre’, including Trotsky and his son Sedov, who were tried in absentia. The defendant Sergei Mrachovsky testified that at the end of 1932 a terrorist bloc was formed between the Trotskyites and the Zinovievites, stating:

  That in the second half of 1932 the question was raised of the necessity of uniting the Trotskyite terrorist group with the Zinovievites. The question of this unification was raised by I N Smirnov… In the autumn of 1932 a letter was received from Trotsky in which he approved the decision to unite with the Zinovievites… Union must take place on the basis of terrorism, and Trotsky once again emphasised the necessity of killing Stalin, Voroshiloy and Kirov... The terrorist bloc of the Trotskyites and the Zinovievites was formed at the end of 1932.[253]

  Despite the condemnation that such testimony has received from academia and media, this accords with the relatively recent findings of the Trotskyite academic Professor Rogovin, and the letter from Trotsky sent to Radek et al, in 1932, referred to by J Arch Getty. The Kirov investigations, which were a prelude to the Moscow Trials, were carefully undertaken. Wh
en there was still insufficient evidence against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev et al, this was conceded by the party press. When testimony was obtained implicating the leaders of an Opposition bloc, this testimony has transpired to have conformed to what has come to light quite recently in both the Kremlin archives and the Trotsky papers at Harvard.

  Rogovin’s Findings

  The reality of the Opposition bloc in relation to the Moscow Trials was the theme of a lecture by Professor Rogovin at Melbourne University in 1996. The motive of Rogovin was to present Trotskyism as having been an effective opposition within Stalinist Russia, and therefore he departs from the usual Trotskyite attitude of denial, stating:

  …This myth says that virtually the entire population of the Soviet Union was reduced to a stunned silence by the terror, and either said nothing about the repression, or blindly believed in and supported the terror. This myth also claims that the victims of the repression were completely innocent of any crimes, including opposition to Stalin. They were, instead, victims of Stalin’s excessive paranoia. Since there was no serious opposition to the regime of Stalin, according to this myth, the victims were not guilty of such opposition.[254]