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From New Militant, Vol. II No. 4, 25 January 1936, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
ON OCTOBER 19 the New Militant printed the revelations of A. Tarov – Bolshevik-Leninist who escaped from Siberian exile – on Stalin’s persecution of revolutionists in the Soviet Union.
Three months later, on Sunday, January 19, William Randolph Hearst, without authorization or permission from Leon Trotsky, or his American literary agents, or from us, lifted the Tarov article and Trotsky’s comment on it, from the New Militant and printed it in his chain of anti-labor rags.
On the very same day, the Sunday Worker, in true Hearstian style, blared forth headlines to the effect that Leon Trotsky is an agent of Hearst, and a promise to reveal at a later date the price received for them.
There is not a modicum of truth in this slander learned from the gutter methods of Hearst himself and employed against all revolutionists. It is meant to be a smoke-screen to divert attention from the revelations of Stalin’s terror against the Leninists.
Before the entire labor movement we challenge the corrupt scribblers of the Daily and Sunday Worker to prove their assertions.
Furthermore we challenge them to disprove one single charge made in Tarov’s article.
On our part we charge the Stalinists with furnishing Hearst with ammunition against the revolutionary movement.
This they do by persecuting, torturing, yes! and even murdering genuine revolutionary internationalists in the Soviet Union, men who have fought and bled in the Russian Revolution and in the Civil War and against foreign intervention.
So long as this Thermidorian repression continues, we take no responsibility for whatever effects their publication may have. The stigma for this rests upon Stalin’s gangster clique as does the almost medieval torture of the Bolsheviksin the Soviet Union.
On our part we will not be silent when revolutionists of unimpeachable integrity and years of service and sacrifice to the working class languish in jails, solitary confinement and concentration camps.
We propose to publish authentic information as broadly and as widely as our means permit until such a time as an aroused labor movement throughout the world will force Stalin to call a halt to his criminal course.
In this issue we publish new revelations of the persecution of Communist opponents of Stalin in the Soviet Union. The article of comrade Ciliga shows that foreign Communists as well as Russians are imprisoned and hounded by Stalin for factional reasons.
The workers of the world must know these facts.
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