Not Guilty
Source: Not Guilty, published by Wellred Publications 2005;
Transcribed: by Martin Fahlgren.
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 comrades 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 struggle 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 cruelest 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 nonappearance 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 collaborate 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 “confessions” 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 importance of the Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky and the Commission of Inquiry in contemporary history. It was quite interesting. 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 organised resistance to this terrifying and powerful machine. We dedicate this issue to him, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, and suggest the following 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 essential part of that struggle for the future of mankind.”