Trotsky
Page 50
The call for revolution was tantamount to calling for a coup d’état, an utterly Utopian and futile desire with no chance of realization. On the other hand, leaving aside the form, the timing and the character of his desperate appeal, Trotsky was perhaps the first person to place on the open agenda the need to liquidate Stalinism as a system, as an ideology, as a mode of operations and as a way of thinking. For Trotsky, Stalinism was the worst form of totalitarianism, comparable only with Fascism. Genuine democratic development could only occur if the Stalinist system was first dismantled. Only then could socialism have a future.
The publication of The Revolution Betrayed had a fatal consequence outside its author’s control. Having completed the manuscript and in August 1936 sent it to his Paris publishers, Trotsky also sent a copy to his son Lev, with instructions to publish extracts in the Bulletin of the Opposition, or some bourgeois newspapers. This was duly done, but, thanks to Zborowski, the manuscript, or at least parts of it, turned up on Stalin’s desk even before it was published in Paris in the summer of 1937. Indeed, Trotsky had scarcely sent the manuscript to France when the head of the 7th Section of the Main State Security Board of the NKVD, Slutsky, had reported to Yezhov, who reported to Stalin: ‘Sedov is negotiating with various publishers over this book. It is intended to publish it in several languages. It will be translated in French by V[ictor] Serge (publisher Grassi). The German translation will be done by [Alexandra Ramm] the wife of the German Trotskyist, Pfemfert. B. Burian will do the Czechoslovak edition. An offer has also been received from the Polish publishing house Wydawnicwo Polske.’113
Indirect information about Trotsky’s publications also occurs in the ‘Sneevliet collection’ which the Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism received from the Party History Institute of the Polish Workers Party. The collection came into the hands of the Polish Communists because it was purportedly discarded by the Germans in Poland in 1944-45, and it contains several hundred documents, reports, letters, circulars and minutes dating from between 1922 and 1940. It no doubt includes material that had earlier reached Moscow by way of the NKVD.114
It is known that, when trying to save his archives, Trotsky transferred part of them to the Paris Institute of Historical Research at 7, rue Michelet. Lev Sedov, in the company of Zborowski, had handed over the documents to the curator of the Institute, the Menshevik Boris Nikolaevsky. A few days later, on the night of 6 November 1936, there was a break-in and some of the material was stolen. Apart from Trotsky and Lev, the only people who had known the new location of the archives were Nikolaevsky and Zborowski. Like Lev, Nikolaevsky was being watched by Soviet intelligence. A report to Moscow by OGPU agent ‘Gamma’ noted that ‘in view of the agreement between Norway and the [Soviet] Union, Trotsky’s correspondence is being opened.’115 Plainly, Moscow could learn practically everything that could be known about Trotsky from a variety of sources.
Thus it was that extracts of his manuscript of The Revolution Betrayed turned up in Moscow. Zborowski had given Stalin long notice of its impending publication, and it is not difficult to imagine the effect Trotsky’s call for a ‘political revolution’ had on him. It is not impossible that this played a part in Stalin’s decision to carry out a major purge in the country. The manuscript might have been a factor in his decision to launch mass repression, although he was ready enough as it was to begin the process. The Revolution Betrayed finally convinced Stalin that Trotsky was a real danger, and that by his pen he could still inflict telling ideological blows. Stalin, moreover, had determined to liquidate the potential soil for Trotskyism in the country. The main attack in the forthcoming trials in Moscow would be aimed at Trotsky.
Meanwhile, as the Moscow press was reporting, the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev and their ‘accomplices’ was depicting Trotsky as the mastermind of terrorist ‘bands’. The chief prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky—who had incidentally moved into Trotsky’s apartment on Granovsky Street the minute its disgraced tenant moved out and was exiled to Alma-Ata—claimed that Trotsky was directing terrorist operations from Norway. The reporters descended on Trotsky, who told them with his customary eloquence that everything being said about him in Moscow was ‘the lie of the century’, fully in keeping with ‘the chief creator of this lie, who is hiding himself behind the walls of the Kremlin’.
On 29 August 1936 the Soviet ambassador in Norway carried out the instructions he had received from Moscow and demanded Trotsky’s expulsion by the Norwegian authorities.116 The Norwegians, however, had already taken their own measures and placed Trotsky under house arrest. He had fallen ill from the shock of what was being said about him at the Moscow trials. After reading a letter from Natalya to Lev Sedov in Paris, Zborowski duly informed Moscow that ‘ “the Old Man” is very sick, has stopped going out altogether, he is sweating profusely which weakens him drastically. He should be in a sanatorium, but the Norwegian authorities are making his position more difficult.’117 To Moscow’s undoubted disappointment, however, Trotsky had a tough constitution and soon recovered.
Trotsky’s semi-arrest had been prompted by his efforts to use the Western press to counter Stalin’s accusations. He was in a kind of quarantine, in which journalists were denied access to him, his mail was opened and he was not allowed to leave the house. He remained in these circumstances until mid-December 1936, when he finally heard that Mexico was prepared to admit him. The Norwegian government chartered the oil-tanker Ruth and on 19 December Trotsky and Natalya left the inhospitable shores of Norway. The Atlantic at that time of year was not a more hospitable place, and Trotsky, who feared the ship might sink, sent his will to Lev in Paris before embarking.
The trip turned out be uneventful, and in early January the passengers were safely put ashore in Mexico. Three days after Trotsky’s departure from Norway, ‘Mack’ reported to Moscow that Lev had received a telegram on 23 December saying that his father and mother had left for Mexico: ‘ “Sonny” is very upset by this, as he had expected “the Old Man” to pass through France and meet him and his friends. The French transit visa had already been received … “Sonny” at once decided to send van [Heijenoort] and Jan Fraenkel to Mexico as completely trustworthy people.’ He further reported that in future all the mail would be addressed to van Heijenoort poste restante in Mexico. ‘Important letters will be sent to the address of Diego Rivera and less important ones to that of one of the more serious American Trotskyists or other.’118
The year 1937 has gone down in Russian history as synonymous with Stalin’s unbridled terror against his own people. For Trotsky it was a year of monstrous slander and ostracism. Stalin’s campaign against him had, of course, begun much earlier. In February 1934, for instance, G.A. Molchanov, head of the OGPU’s Secret Political Section, had signed an indictment of the so-called ‘Case of the All-Union Trotskyist Centre’, leading to the arrest and sentencing of dozens of people, almost all of whom were to be executed in 1937-38. The apotheosis of collective madness to which Stalin brought the Party, the society and the state, occurred at the Plenum of the Central Committee which took place in February-March 1937. This meeting effectively approved and reinforced the most savage methods for dealing with ‘enemies of the people’.
According to the information Trotsky was receiving from Moscow, Stalin had told the plenum that the ‘counter-revolutionary Fourth International was made up of two-thirds spies and saboteurs’, and that the Norwegian Schöffle’s ‘group of scoundrels was harbouring the super-spy Trotsky and helping him to blacken the Soviet Union’.119 The plenum, which lasted two weeks, was essentially dedicated to one issue, ‘the lessons of the sabotage, the diversionary actions and espionage by Japanese-German and Trotskyist agents’. It is plain from the proceedings that absolutely no attempt was made at a rational analysis or to make sense of the charges, simply because the object under judgement was a mirage.120 Nevertheless, every speaker unanimously condemned Trotskyism.
The chief arguments were of course made by Stalin himse
lf in his report ‘On the Deficiencies of Party Work and Measures to Liquidate Trotskyist and other Double-Dealers’. Speaking in a soft voice, making the delegates strain to hear his words, Stalin put the question: ‘What does present-day Trotskyism consist of?’ After a brief pause he explained: ‘It is a frenzied band of saboteurs. Seven or eight years ago it was a false anti-Leninist political tendency. Kamenev and Zinoviev denied they had any political programme. They were lying. Pyatakov, Radek and Sokolnikov did not deny there was such a platform at their trial in 1937: it was to restore capitalism, dismantle the Soviet Union territorially (Ukraine to the Germans, the Maritime Provinces to the Japanese), and in the event of an attack by enemies, to use wrecking tactics and terror. That is precisely the platform of Trotskyism.’121 The ‘Trotskyist wreckers and spies’, he told the plenum, aimed to carry out terroristic acts against the Soviet leaders, and it was therefore necessary to ‘smash and root out the Japano-German agents of Trotskyism’.122 The unanimous applause that greeted the speech was needed by Stalin to legitimize, or give the appearance of legitimizing, the huge scale of the terror then being perpetrated throughout the country.
Stressing the importance of the Party organization as the foundation of the regime, Stalin outlined its scale very much as a general would define his army: ‘Our Party has 3-4000 senior leaders. I would call this the top brass. Then, 30-40,000 middle-ranking leaders make up the Party’s officer corps; 100-150,000 lower ranks are the Party’s NCOs.’123 In this militarized order, which was the way he wanted to see the Party, and which, incidentally echoed Lenin’s vision of the Party at the turn of the century, the entire personnel must go through stringent checks for ‘utter reliability’.
Many delegates to the plenum, on hearing the call ‘mercilessly to unmask the Trotskyists’, fell to the task at once. Kosior, for instance, reported that ‘in the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party there have been quite a few Trotskyists. We have removed many already and we shall continue to do so.’124 He then proceeded to read a long list of names. Other delegates were quick to follow suit. Kaganovich, the People’s Commissar for Transport who loved to make precise, concrete statements, peppered his report with statistics on how the great work of ‘uprooting the Trotskyists’ and other enemies had begun: ‘In the political organization of the Transport Commissariat we unmasked 220 people. Transport has dismissed 485 former [tsarist] police, 220 SRs and Mensheviks, 572 Trotskyists, 1415 White officers, 285 wreckers and 443 spies. All of them had ties with the Right-Trotskyist Bloc.’125 It is doubtful if anyone at the plenum accepted at face value that all these spies and wreckers had been merely ‘dismissed’, as if they were now free to find other jobs.
People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs Voroshilov then reported on how Trotskyists were being dealt with in the armed services: ‘In 1923-24 the Trotskyists had practically the entire Moscow garrison. Almost all the military academies, the government school, the artillery school, the Moscow Military District Headquarters, where Muralov was in charge, and other units were all for Trotsky.’126 Voroshilov was wrong: while it was the case that the army followed Trotsky, he never used it in the political struggle, although that was the accusation against him.
Reports were followed by sinister resolutions calling for the intensification of the struggle with Trotskyism at home and abroad. Yezhov complained that ‘the struggle with Trotskyism and the Trotskyists has been started at least four years too late, as a result of which the traitors to the motherland—the Trotskyists and other double-dealers, working with the German and Japanese intelligence services—have been able to carry out their wrecking diversionary spying and terroristic activities with relative impunity.’ He went on: ‘The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs has been pursuing an incorrect, lenient punishment policy towards the Trotskyists … and the Secret Political Section of the NKVD’s Security Department had the possibility as early as 1932-33 of exposing the monstrous Trotskyist plot (there was the link between Soviet officials and Trotsky’s son and so on). Molchanov, the head of the section, was linked to the Trotskyist Fourier.’ The plenum passed a resolution ‘instructing the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs to deal with the unmasking and smashing of Trotskyist and other agents to the very end, in order to crush the least sign of their anti-Soviet activity. The staff of the Security Department and the Secret Political Section must be strengthened with reliable people. Reliable agencies at home and abroad must be organized. Intelligence officials must be strengthened.’127
The Secret Political Section of the Main Administration of State Security of the NKVD has already been mentioned as an agency which, alongside the Foreign Section of the OGPU was responsible both for intelligence gathering and, ‘when necessary’, the elimination of political and ideological opponents abroad. Many hundreds of people died at the hands of the elaborate network of operatives at their command. Personnel from these bodies had been hunting Trotsky and his entourage for a long time. The Secret Political Section was directly subordinate to the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, while especially important tasks, such as those connected with eliminating Trotsky, were assigned by Stalin himself.
On 23 January 1937, before the Central Committee Plenum, the so-called ‘Trial of the Seventeen’ took place in Moscow. Pyatakov was the chief defendant, and the object of the trial was to show that Trotsky, with the aid of the defendants, had organized wrecking actions in preparation for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. Pyatakov told the court everything he had been ordered to under torture. He described in graphic detail his meeting with Lev Sedov in Oslo, where he had never been in his life, and recounted that Trotsky’s orders included two variants ‘for our coming to power’. In the first, the Trotskyists would have to deliver a major terroristic blow before the war, simultaneously wiping out Stalin and other Party and state leaders. The second variant would operate during the war as a result of military defeat. Trotsky allegedly thought this latter course the more realistic.128 Zborowski had reported from Paris that he had managed to establish, in a cautious conversation with Lev Sedov, that Trotsky had never spoken to Pyatakov.129 The Chief Prosecutor and Yezhov, however, were not guided by the need to establish the truth. Their justice was dictated by the supreme leader.
The transcript of the trial is peppered throughout with the words ‘Trotsky’, ‘Trotskyism’, ‘Trotskyist murderers’, ‘Trotskyist sabotage’, and nothing could have been plainer but that the chief defendant was indeed the absent Trotsky. However, the most painful impression on world opinion was perhaps created in March 1938 by the trial of Bukharin, Rykov, Krestinsky, Rakovsky and the rest of the twenty-one defendants, the so-called Right-Trotskyist Bloc. Stalin used this grandiose show trial in an effort to deliver a mortal blow to Trotsky and his supporters, accusing Trotsky of being a terrorist, spy, murderer and ‘international scum’. After such ‘ummaskings’, he calculated, no government in the world would give Trotsky shelter, and eventually he would be handed over to the Soviet authorities. He also calculated that public opinion abroad would not overreact to the liquidation of Trotsky. The fact that he had long before deprived Trotsky of his Soviet citizenship and thus put him beyond the reach of Soviet claims was of no consequence to Stalin. In this trial, as in the other Moscow trials, the chief target was Trotsky. In the indictment of Pyatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov et al Trotsky’s name is mentioned no less than fifty times. The same was true of the indictments of Bukharin and his co-defendants.
From distant Mexico Trotsky issued protests and mocked the monstrous spectacle whose director remained firmly behind the scenes. He had already anticipated the outcome of the trials and their purpose. Countless failures in Soviet industry, agriculture and construction, and the slow rise in the standard of living, meant that ‘wreckers’ would have to be found: such was the logic of Stalin’s method. Abnormal, forced rates of construction, for instance, led to poor workmanship, a vast number of accidents and breakdowns. There could only be one explanati
on: ‘sabotage’. And one man was responsible for all this … But Trotsky was far away, across the ocean, and therefore Vyshinsky could only spray the wretched defendants in Moscow with the epithets of Stalinist justice: ‘stinking carrion’, ‘pitiful scum’, ‘damned vermin’, ‘chained curs of imperialism’. Pravda described Soviet justice as ‘the most democratic people’s court in the world’.130
At all the show trials, one of the most alarming accusations was that of ‘terrorism’, ‘plots to assassinate the leaders of the Party and government’, the intent ‘to kill Stalin’. Not a single concrete fact was, however, ever brought as evidence for such intentions. Today, it is relevant to ask whether in fact there was at least an intention to get rid of Stalin. Is there any documentary evidence to support such a possibility, and how reliable is it? In order to address this question, it is necessary to digress slightly.
In June 1938 the name of Genrikh Samoilovich Lyushkov would not have been heard on Soviet radio nor seen in the Soviet press, yet early on the morning of i 3 June 1938 this former NKVD Chief of the Far Eastern Region, taking with him his code-books, a number of lists and some operational documents, crossed the Soviet Manchurian border and asked the Japanese for political asylum. Lyushkov was well known to Yezhov, and even enjoyed the confidence of Stalin himself, having been appointed a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR with Stalin’s knowledge. Having worked in the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD since 1920, Lyushkov was familiar with the rules and conventions of Soviet intelligence. He had taken an active part in the purge of state, Party and military senior ranks, so when two of Stalin’s special trusties, Mekhlis and Frinovsky, arrived in the Far East on Stalin’s orders, Lyushkov knew that his own hour had come. He was told laconically that his job was ‘to sort out Blyukher’.131 Lyushkov realized that by not sending a timely signal to Moscow about Marshal Blyukher’s ‘wrecking activities’, he had condemned himself. Such omissions were not forgiven. Before crossing the frontier he managed to arrange for his family to get out of Russia to Finland. Once in Manchuria, he actively cooperated with Japanese intelligence in the hope of being given passage to a third country, but he was to be disappointed. According to a book by the Japanese historian E. Hiyama, Plans to Assassinate Stalin, Japanese intelligence was planning to use Lyushkov to kill the Soviet leader. It has not proved possible to confirm or refute this claim.