Wright Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 19, 10 May 1948, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The issue of the Moscow Frame-up Trials together with the accompanying blood purges has been revived once again. This time by none other than Winston Churchill in his “history” of World War II and the events leading up to it. The text of Churchill’s memoirs has been appearing serially in the New York Times and in Life magazine.
Churchill raises this issue in passing. (It would have been embarrassing for any historian to have omitted all reference to these events which played so important a role in preparing the stage for the second imperialist world slaughter.)
But although his treatment is sketchy, Churchill nevertheless lends his voice to corroborating the Stalinist lie that the victims of the Kremlin’s frameups and blood purge – the entire generation of Lenin’s co-workers plus the outstanding Soviet military leaders – had plotted with Hitler to overthrow Stalin and to install a capitalist regime in Russia, favorable to the Nazis and the Mikado.
Churchill asserts this not on the basis of any information he possesses himself, nor on the basis of any historical research or documents, but solely on the basis of a private conversation with Premier Benes of Czechoslovakia, which reportedly took place in January 1944.
According to Churchill, Benes told him that in the autumn of 1936, “he (Benes) became aware that communications were passing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between important personages in Russia and the German Government.”
Without specifying anything further – neither the content of these alleged “communications” nor the identity of these “important (Soviet) personages” nor any other key data which a conscientious historian is duty-bound to produce in such a situation – Churchill then goes on to say coolly:
“This was a part of the so-called military and Old-Guard Communist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin, and introduce a new regime based on a pro-German policy. President Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless, but perhaps not needless, military and political purge in Soviet Russia, and the series of trials in January 1937, in which Vyshinsky, the Public Prosecutor, played so masterful a part.” (N.Y. Times, April 26.)
Churchill, it will be observed, not only dates the events connected with the Moscow Frame-ups back to the “autumn of 1936,” – on the alleged say-so of Benes – but also declares on his own authority that the trials themselves began only in “January 1937.”
This is an outright falsehood. It was not the first but the second trial, that of Pyatakov-Radek and others, that took place in January 1937. The actual series started in August 1936, when the Zinoviev-Kamenev juridical farce was staged.
In other words, by the “autumn of 1936” when Premier Benes allegedly became cognizant of mysterious communications in Prague the press of the whole world had been trumpeting for weeks the sensational news of the Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial, and of Prosecutor Vyshinsky’s “masterful part” in the proceedings.
The indictment of the Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial contains not ä single word concerning any agreements between the defendants and any foreign powers. The only ones in this trial who “confessed” to even connections with German fascist agents were three obscure figures (Olberg, M. Lurye and N. Lurye) who likewise breathed not a syllable about “agreements.”
At the trials not a single document, not a single verifiable fact was adduced to substantiate any of the key charges of the prosecution, let alone agreements with foreign powers. This was confirmed by the Dewey Commission which investigated the Moscow Trials and branded them in its verdict as frameups.
Churchill boasts time and again about the full documentation and objectivity of his history, yet in this connection he blandly ignores all the key documents, testimony and facts that were brought out in the work and verdict of this Commission of Inquiry (see The Case of Leon Trotsky, and Not guilty, Harper & Bros., 1937 and 1938).
Churchill ignores just as deliberately the damning fact that in the Nuremberg Trials, where the chief figures of Nazism were on trial for months, not a single piece of evidence, let alone documentary proof, was produced to show that there was any such conspiracy as Churchill now affirms there was. There was not even a reference to it, although Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedov Trotsky, and many public figures in England and in the U.S. repeatedly demanded at the time that they be permitted to question the Nazi leaders on this issue.
Moreover, among all the German documents and secret files seized by the victorious Allies, not a shred of evidence has ever been produced in all these years.
How could any conscientious historian have ignored all this?
The chief defendants at the Moscow Trials, as well as the central figures in the alleged conspiracy, were not military men or any of the accused themselves but Leon Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov. Churchill is well aware of this. Nor is. he ignorant of the fact that before the Moscow Trials, Trotsky was accused by the Kremlin of being the “agent of Churchill.” Furthermore, England herself was “implicated” in the Bukharin-Radek Trial, the last in the series of the Moscow Trials. And finally, in the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, Trotsky and the Trotskyists were once again accused of serving not as agents of Hitler or the Mikado, but of Britain and of Wall Street. Churchill disregards all this, although it has a direct bearing on the whole matter.
The political essence of the Moscow frameups and the aims of all these fantastic and self-contradictory charges were one and the same, namely, to serve the Kremlin’s foreign policy at the given time and to discredit Trotsky and Trotskyism, and to provide a political cover fob the physical annihilation by Stalin of political opponents inside and outside the Soviet Union. For reasons best known to himself, Churchill omits all reference to Trotsky but nevertheless finds it expedient to help the Kremlin cast a cloud over Trotsky and Trotskyism, the most consistent and irreconcilable political opponents of Stalinism.
Let it be recalled that Churchill was a prominent member of the English government when a similar attempt was made, through the notorious Sisson documents, to discredit Lenin and the Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, as the agents of the Kaiser in the early days of the Russian Revolution. English diplomacy, with Churchill’s undoubted knowledge, played at the time a prominent part in concocting this particular frame-up.
It is also an historical fact that the most prominent English Tories, including Churchill, voiced their strongest approval of Stalin’s fight against Trotsky from its very inception in 1923, and called upon Stalin to place Trotsky before the firing squad, many years before the Moscow courts condemned him to death in absentia.
The political motives which dictated Churchill’s past conduct in relation to Lenin and Trotsky are the very ones which motivate him today in his role äs “historian.” This rabid enemy of the working class and the socialist revolution remains true to himself and to his class. He is consistent in the political aims he pursues. He is always ready to use any means or weapons no matter how foul in order to deal blows to revolutionary leaders and their movement. If Stalin’s crimes can be used to this evil end, so much the better. If history must be falsified, then Churchill is no more averse to it than Stalin and the “masterful” Vyshinsky.
This is precisely what Churchill did by cynically disregarding all the proven facts in connection with the Moscow Trials and the purges, and by deliberately attempting to fit the “information” of Benes (which incidentally Churchill himself admits in a footnote might very well have been planted by the GPU!) into the sequence of events connected with the Moscow Trials.
This is highly embarrassing, especially to those who like the editors of the Social Democratic New Leader specialize in sermons on morality, and who are now beating the drums for another war of “democracy against totalitarianism” in the preparation of which Churchill (and his latest volume of memoirs) play by no means a minor role.
These gentlemen, who have prided themselves up till now, on denouncing in strongest terms all’ apologists of the Moscow frameups (when obvious flunkies of the Kremlin were involved), are singularly restrained on this occasion. They reprint Churchill’s comments; they correctly point-out that “not one fact has ever been adduced to prove” the very same contention that Churchill suddenly supports and they politely conclude: “If Churchill has any facts, he should cite them, instead of seemingly (!) justifying the purge”. (The New Leader, May 1)
To demand the facts is, of course, eminently proper. But why stop there? While there are no’ facts or documents to prove the, charges made at the Moscow trials, there is no lack of facts and documents that disprove them. Disregard by any historian, cf such authenticated material suffices to disqualify him.
Instead of being in a position to accuse anybody else, Churchill must first answer accusations that are justifiably levelled, against him.
Wright Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 2 February 2022