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Statement By Leon Trotsky

In Reply To The Charges Made Against Him By The Tass Bureau

At the moment when I am preparing this statement, I have not had available the original text of the sensational TASS report. I am familiar with it only through a secondary source. But the main features of it, which have been transmitted to me, are sufficient to brand this report immediately as one of the greatest falsifications in the history of politics.

The TASS agency speaks of a conspiracy of the so-called Trotsky-Zinoviev group. The ruling bureaucracy calls every criticism directed against it a conspiracy. I assume that criticism is spreading to wider and wider circles in the Soviet Union. This phenomenon I can only greet with joy. It is quite possible that many, and quite diverse, elements who represent this critical feeling have referred to my name—i.e., to my ideas and my writings. But the TASS report also declares that the charges concern a terroristic plot against the leaders of the regime, and that this conspiracy is directed by me from Norway.

I herewith declare that this contention does not contain an iota of truth. To everyone who is acquainted with recent political history, it is indubitable that the report circulated by TASS stands in sharpest contradiction to my ideas and to the whole of my activities, which at the present time are devoted exclusively to writing.

Ever since my entry into the revolutionary movement in 1897, I have been, as have all Russian Marxists, an uncompromising opponent of individual terror as a method of struggle, a method which in the final analysis can only serve the interests of absolutism and Bonapartism.

I emphatically assert that since I have been in Norway I have had no connections with the Soviet Union—nor have I received a single letter from the Soviet Union, neither have I written a single letter to anybody there either directly or through other persons.

My sole activity in connection with the Soviet Union has been restricted to the writing of articles which were published in the world press and to a book which will be published in the near future in several countries. My wife and I have not been able even once to exchange a single line with our son, who has been employed in the Soviet Union in a scientific capacity and who has had no political connections whatsoever.

Because I am a man without a country and am now utilizing the right of asylum in Norway, I believe that the accuracy of the contention that has been advanced that I have directed a terroristic conspiracy from Norway can be best determined by the appointment of a competent government commission which would investigate the charges contained in the documents. On my part, I am prepared to furnish such a commission a full accounting of my activities in Norway—day by day, and hour by hour. It is also my opinion that this measure could be made more complete by the nomination of an impartial international commission by the labor organizations of the entire world, or better still of it international leaders, to investigate the charges made in the Soviet Union. This commission could make a public report of their investigation. I maintain that their report would expose the charges in all their falsity. I am also prepared to accept any other method of investigation that would give public opinion a better explanation of the principal motives which have prompted the charges against the others and myself. In this matter I have nothing to fear and nothing to hide. As for myself, I am only concerned with establishing the truth.

— Signed, LEON TROTSKY.

Kristiansand, August 15, 1936.

Editorial from Socialist Appeal on this Statement

“THE MOST colossal fabrication in the history of world politics.” So Trotsky has characterized the latest attempt of the Stalin regime to implicate him as well as Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other Old Bolsheviks in a terrorist plot against the Soviet leaders.

The trumped-up character of the charges is obvious to the naked eye. The entire careers of these associates of Lenin prove that they are irreconcilably opposed, in theory and in practice, to individual terrorism as a method of political struggle.

The trial with its nonchalant “confessions” by the defendants and, for that matter, the nature of these obviously extorted avowals do not alter the real situation for a moment. We are being asked to believe that virtually every prominent leader of the Russian Revolution who is still alive, was involved in one way or another in the fairy-tale “assassination plot”—including Radek, Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov, all of whom were up to yesterday the most vociferous advocates of the regime.

Such “confessions” have absolutely no value for an intelligent person. They remind one of similar “confessions” in the past: especially the one made during the Menshevik trial a few years ago concerning the participation of Abramovitch in a clandestine conference in the Soviet Union at a time when he was in quite another country; and the other during the trial of the technical specialists who stated that they had conspired with individuals who, it was later proved, had long ago been dead.

The very elaborateness and fantastic nature of the “confessions,” the alternating eagerness and indifference with which the defendants vied with one another for the distinction of being labelled the most heinous criminal, even arouse the feeling that some, at least, of the accused had resolved to answer the sinister frame-up with a mocking satire of the whole affair such as was common in the “legal literature” issued by revolutionists under the reign of the Tsar.

It is a shameful spectacle to see the first workers’ government resorting to a political frameup reminiscent of the method used by the Nazis in the case of the Reichstag fire.

What lies back of this action? The answer is to be found first of all in the growing dissatisfaction with the new turn in the Comintern policies following the Seventh Congress. In line with the foreign policy of the Soviet Government, the Communist International is striving desperately to preserve the world’s status quo at the same time that events in Spain and France are rising to revolutionary crises and the new imperialist war looms on the immediate horizon. Within the Soviet Union the government is bringing about an ever greater stratification among the workers, and basing its rule more and more clearly on the privileged and highly paid sections. Incipient opposition to these policies, growing among the advanced workers everywhere, including the sections of the Comintern and the Soviet Union itself, endanger the possibility of carrying them through; and Stalin is meeting the danger—ironic comment on the new “democratic” Constitution!—by persecution, police terror, and frame-up.

At the very time that the communist press accuses Trotsky of “being in league with the Fascists,” Norwegian Fascists raid Trotsky’s home, and demand his expulsion from Norway on account of his revolutionary activities.

The terrific haste with which the Stalinist bureaucracy conducted the “trial” and carried out the executions is in itself evidence that the proof, even as against those who “confessed,” was worthless. No time was allowed to organize an international commission of labor representatives to be sent to the Soviet Union to be present at the trial and act as a jury for world labor. Such a precedent was set at the trial of the Social Revolutionaries in 1922, when under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, the Soviet Government was willing to produce the evidence before the whole world.

Trotsky has indicated his willingness to appear before any impartial commission and testify to the utter falseness of the charges levelled against him. We can be perfectly sure that the Stalinist clique will never consent to come before an impartial tribunal. The frame-up would be too quickly exposed.

All correspondents agree that the trial had only one purpose : to discredit Trotsky and the revolutionary ideas for which he stands. Not only to discredit Trotsky but actually to incite fanatical Stalinists to make an attempt on his life.

A few Old Bolsheviks made miserable and demoralized by terror and suffering were murdered. The ideas which made possible the November Revolution cannot be executed by Stalin’s firing squad. And in those ideas, the most authoritative spokesman of which is Leon Trotsky, lies the hope of the international proletariat.

(The next issue of the Socialist Appeal will carry a more detailed analysis’ of the significance and the outcome of the trial of Moscow.—Editors.)