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SOCIALIST PEAL an Organ of Revolutionary Socialism Published Monthly by Socialist Appeal, 1654 W SPECIAL INTERHTATIONAL IS§UE REGULAR OCTOBER ISSUE WILL BE OUT OCTOBER 15th SOCIALIST PEAL An Organ of Revolutionary Socialism Published Monthly by Socialist Appeal, 1654 W. 87th St., Chicago, IB. SUBSCRIPTION: One dollar for 84 issues Vol. II.—No. 9 OCTOBER 1, 1936 Price 6 Cents CONTENTS Max Shachtman: The Moscow Trial 1 Ben Herman: Caballero at the Helm ...10 Leon Trotsky: An Interview 4 Editorial: Secession in Pennsylvania Theodore Dan: Executions in Moscow.. 5 and Connecticut 12 Felix Morrow: How The Workers Can John Stirling: ) Should Socialists Work For Win In Spain 6 Maurice Spector: From People's Front to R. L. Burke: } A Labor Party 13 French Front 8 THE MOSCOW TRIAL BY MAX SHACHTMAN NLESS we are the "gullible idiots" who Trotsky says munists; founder and first editor of the party's scientific would have to people the world if the charges made review, "Under the Banner of Marxism." U Mrachkovsky: defender of Ekaterinoslav from the in- against the sixteen men just tried and shot in Moscow, were to be believed, we must conclude that the very in- terventionist Czechs and the White troops during the dictment and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and the civil war. fourteen others constitute in actuality the most crushing Bakayev: old Bolshevik leader in Moscow; member of indictment yet made of the Stalin regime itself. The real the Central Committee and Central Control Commission accused in the trial were not on the defendants' bench during Lenin's time. before the Military Tribunal. They were and they re- Sokolnikov: Soviet ambassador to England; creator of main the usurping masters of the Kremlin—concocters the "chervonetz," the first stable Soviet currency. of a hideous frame-up. Tomsky: head of the Russian trade union center for The official indictment charges a widespread assassina- years; old worker-Bolshevik; member of the Central tion conspiracy, carried on these five years or more, direc- Committee and Political Bureau for years. ted against the head of the Communist party and the Rykov: old Bolshevik leader; Lenin's successor as government, organized with the direct connivance of chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. the Hitler regime, and aimed at the establishment of a Serebriakov: Stalin's precedessor in the post of secre- Fascist dictatorship in Russia. And who are included tary of the C.P. in these stupefying charges, either as direct participants Bukharin: for years one of the most prominent theore- or, what would be no less reprehensible, as persons ticians of the Bolsheviks; chairman of the Comintern with knowledge of the conspiracy who failed to disclose it? after Zinoviev; editor of official government organ, Leon Trotsky, organizer and leader, together with "ISVESTIA" to this day. Lenin, of the October Revolution, and founder of the Kotsubinsky: one of the main founders of the Ukrai- Comintern. nian Soviet Republic. Zinoviev: 35 years of his life in the Bolshevik party; General Schmidt; head of one of the first Red Cavalry Lenin's closest collaborator in exile and nominated by him brigades in the Ukraine and one of the country's libera- as first chairman of the Communist International; chair- tors from the White forces. man of'the Petrograd Soviet for years; member of the Other heroes of the Civil War, like General Putna, Central Committee and the Political Bureau of the C.P. military attache till yesterday of the Soviet Embassy in for years. London; Gertik and Gaevsky; Shaposhnikov, director of Kamenev: also 35 years spent in the Bolshivik party; the Academy of the General Staff; Klian Kliavin. chairman of the Political Bureau in Lenin's absence; Heads of banking- institutions; chiefs of industrial chairman of the Moscow Soviet; chairman of the Council trusts; heads of educational and scientific institutions; of Labor and Defense; Lenin's literary executor. party secretaries from one end of the land to the Smirnov: head of the famous Fifth Army during the other; authors (Selivanovsky, Serebriakova, Katayev, civil war; called the "Lenin of Siberia;" a member of the Friedland, Tarassov-Rodionov) ; editors of party papers; Bolshevik party for decades. high government officials (Prof. Joseph Lieberberg, chair- Yevdokimov: official party orator at Lenin's funeral; man of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Autono- leader of the Leningrad party organization for many mous Republic of Biro-Bijan; etc., etc. years; member of the Central Committee at the time Kirov died. Accusation Constitutes Admission by Bureaucracy Ter-Vaganian: theoretical leader of the Armenian com- Now, to charge, as has been done, all these men and SOCIALIST APPEAL women, plus hundreds and perhaps thousands of others, one to believe that after four to five years of intensive with having engaged to one extent or another, in an activity, men of the intellectual and organizational calibre assassination plot, is equivalent, at the very outset and of these old Bolsheviks, with their years of conspirative on the face of the matter, to an involuntary admission experience under Czarism, having at their command a by the accusing bureaucracy. widespread illegal apparatus that penetrated into the high- 1. That its much-vaunted popularity and the universal- est circles, composed of men having daily access to the ity of its support among the population, is fantastically "intended victims," aided and abetted by the whole of exaggerated. Hitler's machinery, disposing of the services of such men 2. That it has created such a regime in the party and as Bakayev (described by Prosecutor Vishinsky "as a the country as a whole, that the very creators of the resolute man, persevering and persistent, with a very Bolshevik party and revolution, its most notable and strong will, strong character and stamina, who would valiant defenders in the crucial and decisive early years, not stop at anything to achieve the aims which he had set could find no normal way of expressing their dissatisfac- himself"), could not succeed, with all this and in all this tion or opposition to the ruling bureaucracy and found time, in accomplishing anything more than the assassina- that the only way of fighting the latter was the way tion of one person, Kirov. chosen, for example, by the Nihilists in their struggle Equally preposterous is the assumption that would against Czarist despotism, namely, conspiracy and in- have to be made that the G.P.U., the most efficient police dividual terrorism. and espionage agency in history, required at least four 3. That the "classless socialist society irrevocably" years to unearth a conspiracy in which at least hundreds established by Stalin is so inferior to Fascist barbarism were involved, among them men who acted as freely, on the political, economic and cultural fields, that hun- loosely and vocally during the years of the plot itself as dreds of men whose whole lives were prominently devoted they did du.ring the trial, and whose directors appear to the cause of the proletariat and its emancipation, de- to have been less careful in their choice of collaborators cided to discard everything achieved by 19 years of the and agents than the average person is in his choice ot Russian Revolution in favor of a Nazi regime. toothpicks. Anyone who happened along was promptly 4. And, not least of all, that the Russian Revolution told about the "plot" and invited to join in. Also, ap- was organized and led by an unscrupulous and perfidious parently, everyone who was told of this "plot"—its band of swindlers, liars, scoundrels, mad dogs and assas- "Fascist connections" included!—did join in! Either the sins. Or, more correctly, if these were not their charac- G.P.U. is composed, from top to bottom, of the most in- teristic in 1917 and the years immediately thereafter, competent muttonheads that ever disgraced the role of then there was something about the gifted and beloved a Praetorian Guard, or else Stalin takes it for granted leadership of Stalinism that reduced erstwhile revolution- that the rest of the world is composed of persons no ists and men of probity and integrity to the level of less muttonheaded, but ten times as credulous. swindlers, liars, scoundrels, mad dogs and assassins. These are the outstanding counts in the self-indictment Reason for "Confession" of the bureaucracy. To them must be added the charge But why did they confess? We do not refer here to of a clumsy and cynical frame-up. Even a casual examina- the all too obvious G.P.U. agents like Olberg and his ilk, tion of the very carefully edited record of the trial that but to defendants like Zinoviev and Kamenev. There is, has thus far been made public, so thoroughly reveals^ its to our minds, only one logical explanation which, while trumped-up, staged nature, as to deprive all the avidly it is not flattering to the moral stamina of the accused, made "confessions" of so much as an ounce of validity. i? a thousand times more discreditable to the bureaucracy which framed the whole affair. Contradictions in Testimony 1. Of the hundreds and perhaps thousands arrested for Considerations of space prevent a detailed listing of the purposes of the trial, it is significant that only a small the multiplicity of contradictions with which the published handful were found who could be prevailed upon to make slabs of testimony fairly bristle. But the following facts the "confessions" that fell in so neatly with every charge and conclusions, briefly stated, are both inescapable and of the prosecution. Every single one of them (the G.P.U. unassailable: provocateurs excepted) was a capitalator, who had once, As is known by everyone who is at all acquainted with twice and three times in the past signed whatever state- the inner-party fight in the Soviet Union, Trotsky broke ment was dictated to him by Stalin.
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