Memorandum on a Forgery in Spain

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1. I do not doubt that the Spanish falsification, the alleged Life of Lenin, never appeared in Russian. If there existed three copies in the entire world, one would have reached me. The Russian emigre press would certainly have written about such a scandal. In reality, outside of Spain no one knows anything about this book. It doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. Never and nowhere has it been published. The falsifiers counterfeited only the title page [in Russian].

2. This single page, taken by itself, is deadly evidence against the falsifiers.

a. In the small text of the title page there are two very crude violations of Russian spelling, against the old style as much as the new. The first word, “Zhizn’,” is printed as “Zhizn,” without the “soft sign.” The falsifiers heard, evidently, that the Soviet power abolished the “hard sign” and decided on this occasion to abolish the “soft sign.” This is ungrammatical: the soft sign plays a large role in pronunciation. The very same mistake is made also in the final word, “Konstantinopol [Constantinople].”

If the book were published in Russian, any typesetter of any Russian printing office would certainly point out the illiteracy of the heading.

b. I have never put my patronymic on my books. In general no one does this. It violates all the literary customs, especially revolutionary ones.

c. I have never placed my civil name, “Bronstein,” on a single one of my books or articles. For the past 30 years I have not signed them otherwise than as Trotsky.

In order to show, evidently, how well informed they were, the falsifiers heaped up on the title page all their knowledge: my patronymic, my civil, and my literary names. By so doing they only underlined the crude character of the forgery.

d. A brief biography of Lenin was written by me only once, in 1926, for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Anyone who is interested may read this article in the most recent edition of that encyclopedia. It defines my actual attitude toward Lenin. Perhaps it would follow to offer this article for the attention of the court?

4. My bond with Lenin was sealed by the October Revolution, the construction of Soviet society and the Red Army, the years of the civil war, the work on the creation of the Communist International, etc. A series of my books, which defines my attitude toward Lenin with exhaustive completeness, is translated into Spanish. The publisher of Dedalo or its editor cannot help but know these facts. With the slightest attention to his responsibility, with the slightest honesty, even in the absence of any literary insight, the publisher could not have helped doubting, at the very least, the authenticity of the manuscript, and he was obligated to apply to me for information about it. Actually the publisher of Dedalo, in the interests of sensation and sales, obviously tried to cover up the falsification.

The court, I hope, will declare that the social function of publisher cannot coincide with the role of poisoner of the wells of public opinion.

5. I offer in my books and articles a definite theoretical and political course. Whether my ideas are good or bad, they are my own, and I have fought for them in the course of the more than three decades of my political life.

The book published by Dedalo under my name is not a simple literary falsification, capable only of causing the author a certain material loss. No, the case is incomparably worse. This book does not counterfeit my views, as happens in ordinary forgeries, but ascribes to me views and estimates directly opposite to those I defend. Commercial forgery becomes complicated here by political slander, by calumny of my past and present, by slander that is the more detestable in that the slanderers force me to cover a slander against myself with my own name.

The moral and political damage of the forgery is beyond measure. It will not, however, be exaggerated to say that this is the most poisonous, the most dishonorable form of literary slander of all those that generally are possible.

6. I notified the publisher by a letter on October 24,1932, of the fact that he was deluding Spanish public opinion, dealing in slander. And what did the publisher do? He converted my warning into an advertisement for his poisonous wares. In order to heighten the interest of his readers and customers, he suggests to them the thought that I am forced by some kind of unworthy motives to deny my own work. The criminal violation of the moral and material interests of a writer and political figure acquires here an especially ill-intentioned character.

I hope that the court of the Spanish republic, irrespective of its attitude toward my views and aims, will bring down a fitting verdict on the heads of those who introduce into the field of literature and publishing the methods of Chicago gangsters.