The failure of this optimistic scenario became apparent as early as 1920, as the Russian civil war was winding down. The Revolution had triumphed in Russia but had failed to spread. The ruling Bolshevik Party—since 1918 officially called the Communist Party—was forced to retreat from its radical economic program and begin an experiment in limited capitalism known as NEP, the New Economic Policy. Lenin died in 1924 having declared that at some unspecified future date the Party would abandon NEP and resume the socialist offensive. In the power struggle to succeed Lenin, Stalin championed the slogan “socialism in one country,” as a nationalistic alternative to Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.” Trotsky’s theory was now turned against him by Stalin, who portrayed his rival as a defeatist, someone who believed that Russia could not proceed to build socialism without assistance from the Western proletariat.
Just the opposite was true, however. Although Trotsky believed that securing the ultimate victory of socialism in Russia hinged on the spread of socialist revolution, he did not propose to wait for Europe. In fact, as leader of the opposition in the 1920s, Trotsky urged the Soviet leadership to adopt a faster-paced industrialization and to impose tighter curbs on capitalism in the countryside. Trotsky’s enemies, Stalin among them, accused him of being a reckless “super-industrializer” and the enemy of the peasant.
And yet, after Trotsky was defeated and banished from the USSR in 1929, Stalin turned sharply to the left, initiating a crash industrialization drive under the five-year plan and, simultaneously, the forced collectivization of the peasants. This revolution-from-above was far more extreme than anything ever advocated by Trotsky. The human toll was steep. Peasant resisters were branded “kulaks” and slaughtered by the millions, many as a result of the man-made famine in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.
Questioned by the Dewey commission about Soviet Russia’s great leap to a state-controlled economy, Trotsky explained that while he had opposed the use of “brute force” to achieve collectivization, he never denied its “successes.” He also lauded the imposition of state planning in industry, even though he believed it had been carried out recklessly and with unnecessary brutality. Trotsky testified before the commission that the Soviet state’s ownership of the means of production made the USSR the most progressive country in the world. Only the Stalinist regime itself was objectionable. Trotsky defined that regime as a parasitic bureaucratic caste, a product of Russia’s backwardness and isolation.
Trotsky advocated a revolution to overthrow Stalin’s ruling bureaucracy, but he had in mind a narrowly political, as opposed to a social, revolution. The October Revolution created the world’s first workers’ state, and it remained a workers’ state even under Stalin, albeit one that was “degenerated” or “deformed.” To Trotsky, the class structure of the USSR made it worth defending against its enemies, despite the purge trials and the terror that were destroying the men and women who had made the revolution and eliminating Trotsky’s comrades and loved ones. “Even now under the Iron Heel of the new privileged caste, the U.S.S.R. is not the same as Czarist Russia,” he explained to a wealthy American sympathizer who helped finance the Dewey hearings. “And the whole of mankind is, thanks to the October Revolution, incomparably richer in experience and in possibilities.”
DEWEY, LIKE FINERTY, probed Trotsky but never seriously challenged him, and the other commission members followed suit—all, that is, except for Carleton Beals, the Latin Americanist. Beals treated Trotsky as a hostile witness, and he provided the hearings with their one moment of contentious drama and scandal. From the beginning, Beals had behaved like the commission’s odd man out. He was absent from its pre-hearing meetings held in Mexico City and then missed the opening session. When he spoke, he exhibited a prickliness toward his fellow commission members, especially Dewey.
During the hearings Beals was often seen huddling with The New York Times correspondent on the scene, Frank Kluckhohn. Kluckhohn’s reporting from Mexico City made it apparent that he had an ax to grind. He wrote a hostile profile of Trotsky and insinuated that the hearings were a whitewash. Even before the commission protested to the Times, Kluckhohn’s editor had wired him to say that he should do more reporting and less editorializing. This he managed to do for a few days, then he was absent for two more before returning in time for the Beals affair.
On April 16, the penultimate day of the hearings, Beals’s questioning veered into provocation when he asked Trotsky whether, as Soviet war commissar in 1919, he had sent a Soviet agent to Mexico to foment revolution. Everyone in the room recognized that the question was intended to jeopardize Trotsky’s asylum in Mexico. There was a suspicion that Kluckhohn, who had a habit of posing similarly provocative questions at Trotsky’s press conferences, had inspired Beals. His question led to a testy exchange with Trotsky, who bluntly told Beals that his informant was a liar. The next day, Beals informed Dewey by letter of his resignation from the commission. The hearings had proved to be a waste of time, he wrote, and “not a truly serious investigation of the charges.”
That same day, April 17, Trotsky delivered his closing statement before the commission. Its text was so long—Dewey called it “a book”—that Trotsky could read only a portion of it at the hearings, the rest being added to the record. He began speaking toward five o’clock in the afternoon and finished close to 8:45.
Most of his presentation was an exhaustive analysis of the Moscow trials, which he called “the greatest frame-up in history.” He made the case for his own impeccable Marxist-Leninist credentials and assured his audience of “my faith in the clear, bright future of mankind.” He closed with a diplomatic flourish, thanking the committee and its distinguished chairman. “And when he finished,” the court reporter testified, “the audience, a singularly diverse one, burst out into applause, which was, believe me, most spontaneous. This moment I shall never forget.” Dewey avoided stepping on the moment: “Anything I can say will be an anticlimax.” The hearings of the preliminary commission came to a close.
Trotsky and Dewey had thus far been introduced only formally. The organizers had decided that, for appearances’ sake, the two men ought to be kept apart, and so they were, even in the Blue House patio during recesses in the hearings. A cartoon in one of the popular Mexican daily papers gave a different impression. It showed Trotsky and Dewey seated side by side in the hearing room. The caption had one audience member remarking to another, “What does Trotsky mean by saying he has been denied liberty when he has been all over the world?” The other man replies, “Yes, so he has, just like a lion [léon] in a circus.”
Late in the evening after the final session, there was a social gathering for commission members, staff, and journalists at the home of an American well-wisher in Mexico City, an event attended by both Trotsky and Dewey. No longer constrained by protocol, the two men, surrounded by guests, were able to exchange pleasantries. Dewey said to Trotsky, “If all Communists were like you, I would be a Communist.” Trotsky replied: “If all liberals were like you, I would be a liberal.” The nearby guests erupted in laughter at this good-natured display of mutual diplomacy.
Dewey was disappointed to have to leave for New York without being able to converse privately with Trotsky. He wrote to his former student Max Eastman, who had encouraged him to go to Mexico: “You were right about one thing—If it wasn’t exactly a ‘good time,’ it was the most interesting single intellectual experience of my life.”
Dewey canceled his summer vacation plans in Europe in order to direct the work of the full commission in New York. There was other testimony and much documentation to collect, some of it to be supplied by a parallel commission of inquiry set up in Paris. Aside from Dewey and the remaining members of the subcommission—Stolberg, Rühle, and La Follette—there were six other commission members: Wendelin Thomas, a former Communist deputy in the German Reichstag; Alfred Rosmer, former member of the French Communist Party and editor of its newspaper, L’Humanité John R. Chamberlain, former literary critic o
f The New York Times; Carlo Tresca, an Italian-American anarchist leader; Edward Alsworth Ross, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin; and Francisco Zamora, a Mexican economist and journalist.
When Dewey and the others returned from Mexico, they were surprised to find Trotsky’s defenders in such a gloomy state. The American press coverage of the hearings had been less than flattering to the commission. Kluckhohn’s reporting in The New York Times, including his earnest coverage of the Beals resignation, was reprinted in the Communist and other pro-Moscow publications, which treated the hearings as a sham. With Dewey’s encouragement, the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky decided to go on the offensive. It arranged a public meeting for May 9 at the Mecca Temple in midtown Manhattan, with Dewey as the featured speaker.
Dewey came out fighting. Before a crowd of more than 3,000 people, he upbraided the pro-Moscow liberals for attempting to create the impression that the hearings were a farce. “When did it become a farce in the United States to give a hearing to a man who had been convicted without a hearing?” Dewey accused the liberal apologists for Stalin of suffering from “intellectual and moral confusion.” As a past defender of socialism in the USSR, he said he understood that certain liberals were hostile to Trotsky because they wished to protect and preserve the one successful attempt in all history to build a socialist society.
But something more was at work here, Dewey observed. Moscow’s defenders believed that Trotsky’s theories and views were mistaken. Yet Trotsky had not been convicted for his theories or his views, but rather for the most heinous of crimes, including assassination and treason. To declare Trotsky guilty because of his opposition to the rulers in the Kremlin was “not fair or square,” said Dewey. “It is in the name of justice and truth as the end that we ask for your support. We go on in confidence that we shall have it. As Zola said in the Dreyfus case: ‘Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.’”
Dewey had given the best speech of his career, said his friends, who were surprised by the intensity and emotion he displayed, quite unlike his usual professorial manner. Sidney Hook told Dewey that if he wrote his philosophy in the same engaging style in which he delivered that speech, more people would be able to understand it. Dewey replied that he could not get mad writing philosophy.
The full committee went about its business, momentarily interrupted on June 11 by another thunderclap out of Moscow, where the authorities announced they had uncovered a treasonous plot involving the Red Army command in a conspiracy with Nazi Germany, under the banner of Trotsky. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the outstanding civil war commander, and seven other top-ranking officers were tried in secret and executed the following day. This was the start of a massive purge of the army’s officer corps. Tens of thousands would perish, including a large majority of the civil war commanders.
This time there was no show trial, so there was no call to battle stations at the Blue House. Instead, Trotsky was forced to deal with a challenge from an entirely different quarter. Friends and former comrades in the United States and Europe, without questioning Trotsky’s legal innocence in the trials, began to raise doubts about his moral right to challenge Stalin. In doing so, they threatened to erase the thick line Trotsky had drawn between Bolshevism and Stalinism. Had not Lenin and the Bolsheviks, they asked, suppressed the rival socialist parties shortly after the Revolution so that Soviet power quickly came to mean Bolshevik power? Had not Lenin’s regime conducted a Red Terror against its declared enemies during the civil war? Had not War Commissar Trotsky, who now condemned Stalin for threatening to execute the wives and children of the trial defendants, seized as hostages the families of former czarist officers serving in the Red Army?
Trotsky had been asked such questions during the hearings in Coyoacán. Typically he invoked the exigencies of the civil war in order to justify Bolshevik violence. Those who confronted him now, however, were far more knowledgeable about these matters. And they believed they could identify Bolshevism’s defining moment: the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. Kronstadt was a fortress city and naval base on an island in the Gulf of Finland, some twenty miles west of Petrograd. The sailors there had played a crucial role in the revolutionary events of 1917. Trotsky, who was their favorite, honored them at the time as “the pride and glory” of the Russian Revolution.
Only a few years later, however, Kronstadt came to symbolize something entirely different. In the frozen winter of 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt, which was the main base of the Baltic fleet, rose up in rebellion against Bolshevik rule. They demanded an end to the Communist monopoly of power, genuine elections to the Soviets, and the cessation of political terror, among other things. A special target of their wrath was “the bloody Field Marshal Trotsky.”
The Bolsheviks portrayed the uprising as an act of counterrevolution, in danger of being exploited by Western imperialists and White Guard generals, who perhaps had instigated it. Red Army troops under the command of General Tukhachevsky crossed over the ice to crush the rebellion, which they managed to do only with great difficulty and after suffering heavy losses. Fifty thousand Red Army soldiers made the final assault against nearly 15,000 defenders. Afterward, hundreds if not thousands of rebels were executed without trial.
Trotsky’s critics now revived the memory of Kronstadt, making it the centerpiece of their case for an essential continuity between Bolshevism and Stalinism. Trotsky could hardly believe the bad timing of this assault on his reputation, in the middle of his campaign against the Moscow trials. “One would think that the Kronstadt revolt occurred not seventeen years ago but only yesterday,” he complained. He accused his critics of romanticizing the Kronstadt sailors, and he claimed he played no role in suppressing the rebellion, although in fact as war commissar his role was central. When he learned of the revolt, he issued a demand for unconditional surrender. The Petrograd authorities then warned the sailors not to put up resistance, or “you will be shot like partridges.”
Trotsky answered his critics in a series of short articles and in correspondence, while worrying about the effect this discussion might have on the deliberations of the Dewey Commission. A special source of concern was that one of his most troublesome antagonists on Kronstadt happened to be a member of the commission: Wendelin Thomas, the former German Communist, who had helped lead the Wilhelmshaven sailors’ revolt in November 1918. Thomas was still at it, accusing Trotsky of hypocrisy, in December 1937, on the eve of the commission’s announcement of its verdict. “That you should seek vindication, I regard as well and proper,” he wrote, “that you should deny vindication to your political opponents I regard as good Bolshevism.” Trotsky’s portrayal of the Kronstadt sailors as political rednecks seeking privileged food rations was a slander, said Thomas. “You call to arms against the calumnies of the Russian state machine of 1937 but at the same time you attempt to excuse and justify the calumnies of the Russian state machine of 1921.”
On December 12, simultaneous with the publication of the complete record of the Coyoacán hearings, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials announced its verdict: the trials were a frame-up; Trotsky and his son were not guilty as charged. Trotsky was jubilant. He told his American secretary, “My boy, we have won our first great victory. Now things will begin to change.” The blow to Stalin, he said, was “tremendous.” The verdict would deliver a “great moral shock” to public opinion. The initial press coverage of the verdict he described as “the best we could hope for.” Even the Mexican press was “extremely favorable.”
Yet, unhappily for Trotsky, the truth kept marching on. On December 13, as the first stories about the verdict appeared in the American newspapers, Dewey made a radio broadcast on CBS, warning American liberals away from Soviet Communism. Now more than ever, Dewey said, he disagreed with the “ideas and theories of Trotsky,” including his defense of the USSR. “A country that uses all the methods of fascism to suppress opposition can hardly be held
up to us as a democracy, as a model to follow against fascism. Next time anybody says to you that we have to choose between fascism and communism, ask him what is the difference between the Hitlerite Gestapo and the Stalinite G.P.U., so that a democracy should have to choose one or the other.”
Dewey expanded on this theme in an interview published in The Washington Post a few days later. The results of the Soviet experiment were now in, Dewey said, and one of the fundamental things they demonstrated was that democracy could not survive if it was restricted to a single political party. In Russia, the October Revolution had led to the gruesome travesty of justice enacted in the October Hall. Elsewhere, the outcome would differ only in degree. “The dictatorship of the proletariat has led and, I am convinced, always must lead to dictatorship over the proletariat and over the party. I see no reason to believe that something similar would not happen in every country in which an attempt is made to establish a Communist government.”
When Trotsky learned about Dewey’s statements he was indignant, though of course he could say nothing publicly. Meanwhile, his critics kept nipping at his Achilles heel. Kronstadt would not go away. Well into 1938, Trotsky was forced to defend himself in articles about the rebellion and in one long essay on politics and morality. “Idealists and pacifists have always blamed revolution for ‘excesses,’” Trotsky wrote. “The crux of the matter is that the ‘excesses’ spring from the very nature of the revolution, which is itself an ‘excess’ of history.” In this sense, Trotsky said, “I carry full and complete responsibility for the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.”
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