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Socialist Appeal, March 1937, Volume 3 No. 3, Page 44
Transcribed and Marked Up by Damon Maxwell in 2009 for the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line.

Resolution Adopted on the Moscow Trials

THE MOSCOW Trials resulting in the execution of Old Bolsheviks on charges of terrorism and treason have profound significance for revolutionary Socialists and for the whole working class. Tainted juridically and reactionary politically, the effect of the trials is a criminal undermining of the confidence of the masses in the cause of the socialist revolution and in the principles which form the basis of the Soviet Union. Juridically, the complete absence of documentary evidence, the transparently clumsy fabrications of agents provocateurs, the theatrically hollow confessions of the accused and the inquisitorial methods of the GPU, when taken in conjunction with former Stalinist amalgams points to the most infamous of frame-ups. Politically the trials are a stab in the back of the working class at a time of deep international crisis, of civil war in Spain, of the approaching struggle in France, the gathering war clouds.

It has become increasingly apparent that the aim of the trials is to stamp out the traditions of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union and to destroy the independent revolutionary working class movement internationally. The Stalinist bureaucracy, admittedly basing itself on a program of national socialism, attempts to stifle the discontent of the Soviet masses with the conditions of social inequality and bureaucratic despotism. Having abandoned its faith in the principles of the revolutionary class struggle the Stalinist bureaucracy wishes to seal its alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie in the blood of the Old Bolsheviks. The trials are staged to suppress all criticism of the League of Nations, neutrality in Spain, and the treachery of the Popular Front. Because he is the greatest living survivor of the generation that made the October Revolution and indefatigably bears aloft the banner of the principles of Marxism and the World October, the principal target of the Moscow Trials is Leon Trotsky.

Today the bureaucracy hopes to strike him down and destroy his influence by the same falsifications and fabrications with which the reaction and Kerensky hounded Lenin as a German spy and with which Marx was accused as being an agent of Bismarck. Because the trials are a savage attack against the revolutionary honor and integrity of a world leader of the revolutionary movement and the whole generation of the architects of October: and because they are likewise a plot to compromise the whole revolutionary socialist movement, this Socialist Appeal Institute held in Chicago records itself in favor of the setting up of an International Commission of Inquiry, a tribunal of the socialist and labor movement and its intellectual sympathizers, which will be competent to inquire into the truth of the Stalinist allegations and give Trotsky the hearing to which he is justly entitled.

 
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