AT THE TIME of Trotsky’s Hippodrome speech, there was some uncertainty as to whether the much-discussed commission of inquiry would ever become a reality. The Trotsky defense committee, which sought to lay the groundwork, had recently been buffeted by a series of resignations, nine altogether, which mired it in controversy. The committee’s detractors accused it of being a tool of the Trotskyists. They barraged it with letters and telephone calls lobbying against the staging of a counter-trial. Some sixty prominent American journalists and intellectuals signed a petition denouncing the idea.
Those who defended the Moscow trials often took their cue from the two influential liberal magazines of the day, The New Republic and The Nation, both of which ran editorials asserting there was no reason not to take the trials at face value. They were hurting Moscow’s international reputation at a time of mounting international danger, so why would Stalin choose to stage them unless the Trotskyist conspiracy was legitimate? As for Trotsky’s claim that the trials had been orchestrated for the purpose of apprehending him, it was impossible to believe that Stalin would go to such lengths and jeopardize the unity of the Popular Front for the sake of personal revenge.
Some friends of the Soviet Union who doubted that Trotsky was guilty as charged reasoned that he was nevertheless morally responsible for the conspiracy uncovered in Moscow. And even if Trotsky were entirely innocent, his personal predicament could not take precedence over the interests of the only socialist country in the world. The trials, in other words, must not be allowed to obscure the Soviet Union’s positive achievements, such as its collective economy and the democratic promise of its 1936 constitution, the most progressive in the world. Besides, fascism was on the rise, so first things first.
This was not how John Dewey viewed the matter. At a meeting of the Trotsky defense committee on March 1, he declared that the stakes involved in the Trotsky case ranked with those of the Dreyfus affair, and Sacco and Vanzetti. Here Dewey was invoking two landmark cases of miscarried justice. Alfred Dreyfus was a French army officer of Jewish extraction who was wrongly convicted in 1894, after an irregular trial, of spying for Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment. Only a sustained effort by a small number of parliamentary deputies, journalists, and intellectuals exposed the travesty of justice and eventually led to the release and reinstatement of Captain Dreyfus.
Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrant anarchists arrested in 1920 for armed robbery and murder in Massachusetts, a case that provoked an international outcry. Although the evidence against them was compelling, it was widely believed that they had been unjustly tried because of their political views and their avowed atheism. They went to the electric chair in 1927, despite worldwide protest demonstrations and impassioned appeals by men of conscience such as Dewey.
By March 1937, any hope that Trotsky would be given a fair hearing seemed to hang on Dewey, who was not only an eminent philosopher and educational reformer, but the most respected public intellectual in America. Dewey was by reputation a friend of the Soviet Union. Soviet educators had been influenced by his writings on progressive education, and he had visited the country in 1928 to observe the results. He came away endorsing Soviet central planning and social control, although he sensed that this particular brand of socialism was especially suited to the Russian national character.
Dewey, now seventy-eight years old, was resisting the effort to draft him into service on a commission of inquiry. His age was a factor, as were his family’s strong objections to his dirtying his hands in Communist politics. Dewey’s reluctance also stemmed from the fact that, despite his métier and his interest in the Soviet Union, he had not studied Marxism nor paid much attention to Soviet politics. Yet one of his most illustrious former doctoral students at Columbia University was Sidney Hook, a leading Marxist philosopher and a professor at New York University. Hook was not a Trotskyist, but after years of tortured relations with the American Communist Party, he had turned against Soviet Communism. He worked assiduously to persuade Dewey to chair the commission of inquiry.
Trotsky himself was enlisted in this cause. On March 15, he addressed a letter to Suzanne La Follette, a radical journalist and a member of the defense committee working closely with Dewey. Trotsky took the position that the sage of Morningside Heights had an obligation to act. “I understand that Mr. Dewey is hesitant about descending from the philosophical heights to the depths of judicial frame-ups. But the current of history has its own exigencies and imperatives.” Trotsky pointed out that the philosopher Voltaire had taken it upon himself to redress a gross miscarriage of justice committed in his own day, while the novelist Émile Zola’s “J’accuse,” his open letter to the French press, had made the Dreyfus affair an international cause célèbre—“and neither lessened his stature by the ‘sidestep’ in the eyes of history.”
Four days later, on March 19, Dewey relented, agreeing to serve as chairman of the newly christened Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. One of the major factors behind his decision, he said, was the campaign of harassment and intimidation aimed at dissuading him. He encountered similar resistance as he attempted to recruit upstanding Americans to serve on what was intended to be a politically neutral commission. Dewey and his colleagues had planned to request U.S. visas for Trotsky and his son so that they could testify before the commission in New York City. But as the prospect of success seemed slight and time was wasting, they decided instead to send a “preliminary commission” to Mexico to take Trotsky’s testimony. Dewey agreed to lead it.
Trotsky was overjoyed upon hearing the news. The day he learned that John Dewey was coming to Mexico, he said, was “a great holiday in my life.” Friends voiced concern that Stalinists might succeed in infiltrating the commission, as they had the defense committee, and subject him to a hostile interrogation. Trotsky said he had nothing to fear from the questions of the GPU, because truth was on his side: “Dragged into the light of day, the Stalinists are not fearsome.” On April 2, Dewey, accompanied by his fellow commissioners and a team of support staff, boarded the Missouri Pacific “Sunshine Special” bound for Mexico City.
In the days before the hearings, Trotsky and his staff at the Blue House went into overdrive. That staff now included Jan Frankel, who had served as Trotsky’s secretary in Turkey and Norway and who arrived in Mexico from Czechoslovakia on February 18. For his defense, Trotsky needed to obtain dozens of affidavits from individuals in numerous countries who could vouch for his innocence of one or another of the Moscow charges. The staff combed through Trotsky’s voluminous archives for documents that could be used to rebut Moscow’s phony evidence.
As the date of the hearings approached, Mexico City was once again plastered with calls for Trotsky’s expulsion. Out of security concerns, the organizers decided to abandon the idea of conducting the hearings in a public hall; instead they arranged for them to take place at the Blue House in Coyoacán, a twenty-minute drive from the city center. Recent rains had flooded the partly paved roads near the house, but on the eve of the hearings there was abundant sunshine and a clear view of the twin snow-capped volcanic peaks rising in the distance to the southeast. The bougainvillea were in bloom, and the houses in the neighborhood were draped in resplendent magenta blossoms, as were the inner walls of the garden patio at the Blue House.
The hearings were to be held in the long dining salon, forty by twenty feet, on the south side of the house facing Avenida Londres. This room had three very tall French windows, which had to be completely covered and then fortified from the inside with six-foot barricades made of adobe brick and sandbags as a protective measure against Stalinist pistoleros. The commission’s support staff rushed to complete these defenses the night before the hearings began.
The atmosphere inside the Blue House was tense on the morning of April 10, 1937. The hearings were scheduled to begin at ten o’clock. The police detail outside the house was doubled in strength; inside, an armed secretary veri
fied the credentials of the journalists and the invited guests, and searched them for weapons. Members of the press occupied about twenty of the forty seats set up for the audience, while the rest of the seats were reserved mostly for representatives of Mexican workers’ organizations. Each day, would-be spectators had to be turned away at the door.
The five members of the preliminary commission sat at a wooden table at the head of the room. Dewey, tall, bespectacled, with a white mustache and thin white hair parted in the middle, sat in the center. Alongside him were Suzanne La Follette, the commission’s secretary; Carleton Beals, a specialist on Latin America; Benjamin Stolberg, a labor journalist; and Otto Rühle, a former Communist member of the German Reichstag and a biographer of Karl Marx.
To the commission’s left, at a separate table, the court reporter was flanked by the two legal advisers: John Finerty, counsel for the commission, had argued for the defense in famous radical cases, including Sacco and Vanzetti. Albert Goldman, a Trotskyist lawyer from Chicago, was there to represent Trotsky. At a table across from the lawyers and to the right of the commission sat Trotsky, Natalia, and Trotsky’s secretaries.
Klieg lights illuminated the room, creating the feel of a special event. Trotsky was dressed in a gray business suit and a red tie; his hair was neatly groomed. He had decided to testify in English, which would put him at a disadvantage, because although his command of the language had improved since his arrival in Mexico, it was far from fluent. Despite this fact, his American facilitators worried that he would talk too much. Attorney Goldman, coaching him on the workings of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, had dissuaded him from opening the hearings with a speech. Goldman also advised him to try to keep his answers short. The preliminary commission hoped to complete its work within a week.
After brief opening statements, Goldman briskly led Trotsky through a series of questions pertaining to his personal background and his career as a Marxist revolutionary. Those hearing the great orator of the Russian Revolution speak for the first time were always struck by the pitch of his voice, which was higher than expected, though vigorous and captivating. Trotsky’s English was thickly accented, and he sprinkled it with solecisms, such as “expulsed” instead of “expelled.” Except for a brief appearance by secretary Frankel, Trotsky was the only witness during the hearings, which extended over eight days, usually divided into morning and late-afternoon sessions. Trotsky remained seated throughout, frequently turning to ask his secretaries for one or another pertinent document or publication.
Trotsky and Jean van Heijenoort inside the Blue House during the Dewey Commission hearings, April 1937.
Bernard Wolfe Slide Collection, Hoover Institution Archives
Trotsky’s testimony about his political career and his relations with the defendants in the Moscow trials ran along smoothly, until Goldman asked him to describe the fate of his children. His two daughters from his first marriage were both dead, one from sickness, the other by suicide in Berlin after the Soviet government stripped her of her Soviet citizenship. The younger of Trotsky and Natalia’s two sons had recently been arrested in the USSR. Goldman asked whether under Soviet law, the children of a traitor, or alleged traitor, were also considered guilty. Formally, no, Trotsky replied, but in practice, yes. “All the criminal proceedings, all the trials, and all the confessions are based upon the persecution of the members of the family.”
Dewey then asked if this statement would be verified by documentary evidence. “This is simply an opinion,” Goldman responded. “It is an opinion of the witness. I will ask him whether there is any documentary evidence—” “Excuse me, it is not an opinion,” Trotsky cried in anger. He stuttered, searching for the right words in English, his face twisted in anguish as tears welled up in his eyes. “It is my personal experience,” he said at last. “In what way?” Goldman asked. Trotsky replied, “I paid for the experience with my two children.”
When Goldman turned to the evidence presented in the two Moscow trials, Trotsky clearly relished the opportunity to expose the Soviet prosecutor’s sloppiness in cooking up evidence against him. One of the defendants in the first trial claimed to have had an incriminating meeting with Trotsky’s son, Lyova, in the lobby of the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in November 1932—but the hotel had burned down in 1917. In the second trial, defendant Pyatakov confessed to having flown from Berlin to Oslo in December 1935 to receive conspiratorial instructions from Trotsky—when in fact no airplane had been able to land at the snowbound Oslo airfield in December, or for the remainder of the winter.
Everyone in the room, and Trotsky more than anyone, wished that a Soviet, or pro-Moscow, attorney could have been present to challenge his testimony and inject some drama into the proceedings. In fact, the commission had invited representatives of the Soviet government, the American Communist Party, the Mexican Communist Party, and the Confederation of Mexican Workers to present evidence and cross-examine Trotsky, but they all declined or ignored these invitations.
After an exhaustive review of the trial evidence lasting three days, Trotsky was questioned at great length about his ideological convictions and his political views. This aspect of his testimony was considered essential to his defense: Would a dedicated Marxist revolutionary like Trotsky, a man who had always repudiated individual terrorism as a political tool, and who even now championed Soviet socialism over Western capitalism, be remotely likely to conspire with fascists against the USSR, to seek the restoration of capitalism there, or to plot the assassination of Stalin and other Soviet leaders?
Trotsky held forth on a wide variety of topics related to Marxist theory, Bolshevik politics, Soviet history, and Stalin’s treachery, sprinting ahead without concern for the hurdles of English vocabulary, grammar, and syntax he toppled along the way. Dewey was riveted, edified by Trotsky’s excursions into the theory and practice of communism, and entertained by his flashes of humor and wit. Halfway through the hearings, Dewey wrote to his future second wife in New York, “‘Truth, justice, humanity’ and all the rest of the reasons for coming are receding into the background before the bare overpowering interest of the man and what he has to say.”
ENLIVENED BY THE occasion, Trotsky was determined to take maximum advantage of the opportunity to set the record straight about his ideas and to dispel the myths propagated in Moscow about a diabolical “Trotskyism.” He excoriated Stalin’s dictatorial regime, while passionately defending the October Revolution and the actions he took as a Soviet leader to safeguard it.
Trotsky’s interrogators showed a special interest in the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” established by the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky, and how it had evolved into the personal dictatorship of General Secretary Stalin. Finerty asked “if the more correct designation would be dictatorship for the proletariat, rather than dictatorship of the proletariat,” since of course an entire social class could not govern the country. Trotsky maintained, as he had for two decades, that the interests and destiny of the Bolshevik Party and of the Russian proletariat were identical: The Party merely acted as the advance guard of the working class.
Dewey remained skeptical: “I want to ask you what reason there is for thinking that the dictatorship of the proletariat in any country will not degenerate into the dictatorship of the secretariat.” “It is a very good formula,” Trotsky remarked, though without conceding the point. Stalin’s dictatorship, he said, had resulted from Russia’s backwardness and isolation. The dictatorship of the proletariat would fare much better in more advanced and less isolated countries.
Dewey was unaware that Trotsky himself, as early as 1904, had warned of the dangers of Bolshevik centralism. His misgivings caused him to turn against Lenin, his mentor, who insisted that only a tightly organized and disciplined group of professional revolutionaries could lead Russia’s workers to revolution. Trotsky accused Lenin of engaging in “substitutionism,” which was bound to end in authoritarianism. In Trotsky’s prophetic formulation: “The party orga
nization substitutes itself for the party, the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization and, finally, a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.” Lenin, Trotsky warned, was threatening to transform Marx’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat into one of dictatorship over the proletariat.
Trotsky remained one of Lenin’s harshest critics until 1917, when both men rushed to Petrograd from abroad after the fall of the Romanovs. It was then, during the heady days between the February and October revolutions, that Trotsky embraced Bolshevism, recognizing that the Party machinery created by Lenin was the only vehicle capable of carrying out a socialist revolution in Russia. This was his Faustian pact. Lenin’s part of the bargain was to endorse Trotsky’s concept of the Russian Revolution, which provided the theoretical basis for the Bolshevik seizure of power.
Orthodox Marxism claimed that a socialist revolution could take place only in an advanced capitalist country. Russia in the early twentieth century, although rapidly industrializing, was still a relatively backward country, both economically and politically. It had yet to undergo a bourgeois-democratic revolution to overthrow the autocracy and clear the way for advanced capitalist development. In fact, Russia lagged so far behind the industrialized European countries that its bourgeoisie had grown impotent and was politically unfit to fulfill its historical role. So said Trotsky, who declared that Russia’s proletariat, with the support of the peasantry, could make both the bourgeois revolution and, close on its heels, the socialist revolution. Trotsky called his theory “permanent revolution.”
And the chain reaction would not stop there. A socialist revolution, according to Trotsky’s theory, could not be successfully completed within a backward country like Russia. Its ultimate success would depend on its spread to the advanced capitalist countries, starting most likely with Germany. Trotsky and the Bolsheviks thus justified taking power in Russia and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat by reasoning that their own revolution would serve as the detonator for an international socialist revolution.
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