Stalin- The Enduring Legacy

by Kerry Bolton

  While The Times’ Halpin commented that Putin nonetheless gave the obligatory comments about the brutality of Stalin’s regime, following a forceful condemnation of Stalin by Medvedev on 9 October, 2009, it is nonetheless worrying that Putin could state that positive aspects to Stalin’s rule ‘undoubtedly existed’. Such comments are the same as if a leading German political figure had stated that some positive aspects of Hitler ‘undoubtedly existed’. The guilt complex of Stalinist tyranny is supposed to keep Russia subservient like the guilt complex over Hitler in regard to Germany. The Times article commented on Putin’s opposition to Russian oligarchy, which has been presented by the Western news media as a ‘human rights issue’:

  During the television programme, Mr Putin demonstrated his populist instincts by lashing out at Russia’s billionaire class for their vulgar displays of wealth. His comments came after a scandal in Geneva, when an elderly man was critically injured in an accident after an alleged road race involving the children of wealthy Russians in a Lamborghini and three other sports cars. ‘The nouveaux riches all of a sudden got rich very quickly, but they cannot manage their wealth without showing it off all the time. Yes, this is our problem,’ Mr Putin said.[157]

  This all seems lamentably (for the plutocrats) like a replay of what happened in Russia when Stalin deposed Trotsky after Lenin’s death. Under Trotsky, the Bolshevik regime would have eagerly sought foreign capital.[158] As the Stalinists contended, Trotsky was an agent of foreign capital. It is after all why business, political and intelligence interests ensured Trotsky’s safe passage back to Russia from New York in time for the Bolshevik coup.[159] In 1923 the omnipresent globalist think tank the Council on Foreign Relations was warning investors to hurry up and get into Soviet Russia before something went wrong,[160] which it did a few years later. Under Stalin, even Western technicians were not trusted.[161]

  The purging of Trotskyites and their allies from the USSR by Stalin constituted the first significant move against foreign aims for Russia. The subsequent Russophobia that continues among American foreign policy and other influential circles has an ideological and historical framework arising to a significant extent from that period. The Moscow Trials, and the reaction symbolized by the Dewey Commission, gave impetus to a movement that was to change from Trotskyism to post-Trotskyism and ultimately to the oddly named ‘neo- conservatism’ (necons) and led to the formation of organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, working for ‘regime change’ around the world in the interests of the USA. In the spirit of this legacy, the oligarchs, who were unleashed on Russia after the destruction of the USSR, are being defended in the West as victims of neo-Stalinism, and their trials are being compared to those of Stalin’s ‘Moscow Show Trials’. Hence, American Professor Paul Gregory, a Fellow of the Hoover Institution, and co-editor of the ‘Yale-Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism, and Cold War’, wrote of the trial of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

  When the history of Russian justice is written fifty years from now, two landmark court cases will stand out: The death sentence of Nikolai Bukharin in his Moscow show trial of March 1938 and the second prison sentence of Mikhail Khodorkovsky expected December 27, 2010. Both processes teach the same object lesson: anyone who crosses the Kremlin will be punished without mercy. There will be no protection in the courts for the innocent, and the guilty verdict and sentence will be already predetermined behind the Kremlin walls. It also does not matter how preposterous or ludicrous the charges. Vladimir Putin was born in 1952, only one year before Stalin’s death. But Stalin’s system of justice was institutionalized and survived Stalin and the collapse of the Soviet Union, for use by apt pupils such as Putin…[162]

  If Russia continues to take a ‘wrong turn’ (sic) as it is termed by the US foreign policy Establishment,[163] then we can expect the regime to be increasingly demonized[164] by being compared to that of Stalin. John McCain stated on the Floor of the US Senate, speaking of the ‘New START Treaty’ with Russia, that the Khodorkovsky trial indicated the flawed nature of Russia, although McCain admitted that he was ‘under no illusions’ that some of the gains of the oligarch might have been ‘ill-gotten’.[165] However, to those who do not like the prospect of a revived Russia, Khodorkovsky became a symbol of the type of state they hoped would emerge after the demise of the USSR, and criminal oligarchs are portrayed as victims of Stalin-like injustice.[166] Trotskyite veteran Carl Gershman, founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy, used the Khodorkovsky sentencing as the primary point for condemning Russia in his summing up of the world situation for democracy in 2010, when stating that:

  As 2010 drew to a close, the backsliding accelerated with a flurry of new setbacks—notably the rigged re-sentencing of dissident entrepreneur Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia, the brutal repression of the political opposition in Belarus following the December 19 presidential election, and the passage of a spate of repressive new laws in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez assumed decree powers. [167]

  Background of The Trials

  The Moscow Trials comprised three events: The first trial, held in August 1936, involved 16 members of the ‘Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc’. The two main defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. The primary accusations against the defendants were that they had, in alliance with Trotsky, been involved in the assassination of Sergey Kirov in 1934, and of plotting to kill Stalin.[168] After confessing to the charges, all were sentenced to death and executed.

  The second trial in January 1937 of the ‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite-Centre’ comprised 17 defendants, including Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov, who were accused of plotting with Trotsky. Thirteen of the defendants were executed, and the remainder died in labour camps.

  The third trial was held in 1938 against the ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyists’, with Bukharin as the chief defendant. They were accused of having planned to assassinate Lenin and Stalin in 1918, and of having plotted to dismember the USSR for the benefit of foreign powers.

  These trials have been condemned as ‘show trials,’ yet the very openness to foreign journalists and diplomats, as distinct from secret tribunals, is surely an approach that is to be commended rather than condemned. It also indicates the confidence the Soviet authorities had in their charges against the accused, allowing the processes to be subjected to foreign scrutiny.

  The world generally has come to know the Moscow Trials as a collective travesty based on torture, threats to families, and forced confessions, with the defendants in confused states, declaring their confessions of guilt by rote, as if hypnotised. The trials are considered in every sense modern-day ‘witch trials’. For example, Professor Sidney Hook expressed the widely held view of the trials many years later that, ‘The confessions, exacted by threats and torture, physical and psychological, whose precise nature has never been disclosed, consisted largely of alleged ‘conversations about conversations.”[169] However the opinions of first-hand observers are not unanimous in condemning the methodology of the trials. The US Ambassador to the USSR, himself a lawyer, Joseph E Davies, was to write of the trials in his memoirs published in 1945 (that is, about seven years after the Dewey Commission had supposedly proven the trials to have been a travesty):

  At 12 o’clock noon accompanied by Counselor Henderson I went to this trial. Special arrangements were made for tickets for the Diplomatic Corps to have seats.…[170] …On both sides of the central aisle were rows of seats occupied entirely by different groups of ‘workers’ at each session, with the exception of a few rows in the centre of the hall reserved for correspondents, local and foreign, and for the Diplomatic Corps. The different groups of ‘workers,’ I am advised, were charged with the duty of taking back reports of the trials to their various organizations.[171]

  Davies stated that among the foreign press corps were the following representatives: Walter Duranty and Harold Denny from The New York Times, Joe Barnew and Joe Phillips from The N
ew York Herald Tribune, Charlie Nutter or Nick Massock from Associated Press, Norman Deuel and Henry Schapiro from United Press, Jim Brown from International News, and Spencer Williams from The Manchester Guardian. The London Observer, hardly pro-Soviet, opined that: ‘It is futile to think the trial was staged and the charges trumped up. The Government’s case against the defendants is genuine’.[172]

  Of Soviet prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, Davies opined that: ‘the prosecutor … conducted the case calmly and generally with admirable moderation’. Especially notable, given the subsequent claims that were made about the allegedly confused, brainwashed appearance and tone of the defendants, Davies observed: ‘There was nothing unusual in the appearance of the accused. They all appeared well nourished and normal physically’.[173] A delegation of the International Association of Lawyers stated:

  We consider the claim that the proceedings were summary and unlawful to be totally unfounded. The accused were given the opportunity of taking counsels.... We hereby categorically declare that the accused were sentenced quite lawfully.[174]

  In 1936 the British Labour Member of Parliament and distinguished lawyer D N Pritt KC, wrote extensively of his observations on the first Moscow Trial. In the lengthy article published in Russia Today, Pritt, after alluding to the good condition of the defendants who, in accord with the observations of Davies, did not appear to have suffered under Soviet detention, wrote:

  The first thing that struck me, as an English lawyer, was the almost free-and-easy demeanour of the prisoners. They all looked well; they all got up and spoke, even at length, whenever they wanted to do so (for the matter of that, they strolled out, with a guard, when they wanted to).

  The one or two witnesses who were called by the prosecution were cross-examined by the prisoners who were affected by their evidence, with the same freedom as would have been the case in England.

  The prisoners voluntarily renounced counsel; they could have had counsel without fee had they wished, but they preferred to dispense with them. And having regard to their pleas of guilty and to their own ability to speak, amounting in most cases to real eloquence, they probably did not suffer by their decision, able as some of my Moscow colleagues are.[175]

  Pritt was struck by the informality of the proceedings, and commented on how the defendants could interrupt at will, in what seems to have been a freewheeling debate:

  The most striking novelty, perhaps, to an English lawyer, was the easy way in which first one and then another prisoner would intervene in the course of the examination of one of their co-defendants, without any objection from the Court or from the prosecutor, so that one got the impression of a quick and vivid debate between four people, the prosecutor and three prisoners, all talking together, if not actually at the same moment—a method which, whilst impossible with a jury, is certainly conducive to clearing up disputes of fact with some rapidity. [176]

  Pritt’s view of Vyshinsky is in accord with that of Davies, stating of the prosecutor: ‘He spoke with vigour and clarity. He seldom raised his voice. He never ranted, or shouted, or thumped the table. He rarely looked at the public or played for effect’.[177] Pritt stated that the fifteen defendants[178] ‘spoke without any embarrassment or hindrance’. Pritt’s concluding remark states: ‘But it is equally clear that the judicature and the prosecuting attorney of USSR have taken at least as great a step towards establishing their reputation among the legal systems of the modern world’.[179]

  Although Pritt was not a Communist party member, he was pro-Soviet. Was he, then, capable of forming an objective, professional opinion? Anecdotal evidence suggests he was. Jeremy Murray-Brown, biographer of the Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta, writing to the editor of Commentary in connection with the Moscow Trials, relates that he had had discussions with Pritt in 1970, in the course of which he asked Pritt about the trials:

  His reply astonished me. ‘I thought they were all guilty’, he said, referring to Bukharin and his co-defendants. It was as simple as that; Pritt made no attempt at political justification, but reaffirmed what was for him a matter of clear professional judgment. …In terms of the Soviet Union’s own judicial system, Pritt said, he firmly believed the defendants in the Moscow trials were guilty as charged. It was an argument which came oddly from the man who defended Kenyatta.[180]

  Kenyatta, accused of being leader of the terrorist Mau Mau, whom Pritt went to Kenya to defend before a British colonial court, had been ‘evasive’ under cross-examination, Pritt stated.[181] Pritt, despite his support for Kenyatta, was able to judge the veracity of proceedings regardless of political bias, and had maintained his view of the Moscow trials even in 1970, when it would have been opportune, even among Soviet sympathizers, to conform to the accepted view, including the declarations of Khrushchev. Indeed, Sidney Hook, long since having become a Cold Warrior in the service of the USA, retorted:

  In reply to Jeremy Murray-Brown: the significance of D N Pritt’s infamous defense of the infamous Moscow frame-up trials must be appraised in the light of Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes available to the public (outside the Soviet Union) long before Pritt’s avowals to Mr Murray-Brown. Pritt cannot have been unaware of them.[182]

  Of course Pritt was not unaware of Khrushchev’s so-called ‘revelations’. Unlike many former admirers of Stalin who found it opportune to change sides, he was simply not impressed by their veracity, and it must be assumed that his scepticism was based on both his eminent judicial experience and his first-hand observations. Certainly, Sidney Hook’s leading role in the formation of the Dewey Commission for the exoneration of Trotsky, was itself a cynical travesty, as will be considered below.

  If there was a general consensus that the proceedings of the Moscow Trials were legitimate, and a quite sceptical attitude towards the findings of the Dewey Commission, what has since caused an almost universal reversal of opinion? It was a change of perception in regard to Stalin in the aftermath of World War II, and not due to any sudden revelations about the Moscow Trials or about Stalin’s tyranny. The wartime alliance, which, it was assumed, would endure during the post-war era, instead gave way to the Cold War.[183] Such was the hatred by the Trotskyites for the USSR that they were willing to enlist in the ranks of the anti-Soviet crusade even to the extent of working for the CIA[184], and supporting the US in Korea and Vietnam to counter Soviet influence.[185] Their services as experienced anti-Soviet propagandists were eagerly sought by the CIA. Hence the findings of the Dewey Commission, largely ignored in their own time, are now heralded as definitive. The nature of this Dewey Commission will now be considered.

  ‘Preliminary Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials’

  The so-called Dewey Commission, the full title of which was the ‘Preliminary Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials’, having a legalistic and even official sound to it, was convened in March 1937 on the initiative of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky as a supposedly ‘impartial body’.[186] The purpose was, ‘to ascertain all the available facts about the Moscow Trial proceedings in which Trotsky and his son, Leon Sedov, were the principal accused and to render a judgment based upon those facts’.[187] However, the composition of the Commission indicates that it was set up as a counter-show trial with the preconceived intention of exonerating Trotsky, and was created at the instigation of Trotsky himself.

  The stage was set with the founding of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky by Professor Sidney Hook, who persuaded his mentor, Professor John Dewey, to front for it. Just how ‘impartial’ the Dewey Commission was might be deduced not only from its having been initiated by those sympathetic towards Trotsky, but also by a comment in a Time report at the occasion of Trotsky’s deportation from Norway en route to Mexico: ‘The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky spat accusations at the Norwegian Government last week for its “indecent and filthy” behavior in placing the Great Exil
e & Mme Trotsky on the Norwegian tanker Ruth…’[188]

  The mock ‘trial’ organised by the Dewey Commission was prompted by a ‘demand’ from Trotsky from his new abode in Mexico, who ‘publicly demanded the formation of an international commission of inquiry, since he had been deprived of any opportunity to reply to the accusations before a legally constituted court’.[189] A sub-commission was formed to travel to Mexico and to allow Trotsky to give testimony in his defence under what was supposed to include ‘cross-examination’. The sub-commission comprised:

  John Dewey as chairman, described by Novack as America’s foremost liberal and philosopher;

  Otto Ruehle, a German Marxist and former Reichstag Deputy;

  Alfred Rosmer, former member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (1920-21);

  Wendelin Thomas, leader of the sailor’s revolt in Germany in 1918 and a former Communist Deputy in the Reichstag; and

  Carlo Tresca, Italian-American anarchist.[190]

  Other members, whose political orientations are not mentioned by Novack, were:

  Benjamin Stolberg, American journalist;

  Suzanne La Follette, American journalist;

  Carleton Beals, authority on Latin-American affairs;

  Edward A Ross, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin;

  John Chamberlain, former literary critic of the New York Times; and

  Francisco Zamora, Mexican journalist.

  Of these, Stolberg was a supporter of the Socialist Party, described by fellow commissioner Carleton Beals as being, along with other commissioners, thoroughly under Trotsky’s spell.[191] Suzanne La Follette was described by Beals as having a ‘worshipful’ attitude towards Trotsky.[192] Edward A Ross, who had gone to Soviet Russia in 1917 had come back with a pro-Bolshevik sentiment, writing The Russian Bolshevik Revolution (1921) and The Russian Soviet Republic (1923). John Chamberlain, a Left-leaning liberal by his own description[193], was among those who became so obsessively anti-Soviet that they ended up as avid Cold Warriors in the US camp.[194] In 1946 Chamberlain and Suzanne La Follette, along with free market guru Henry Hazlitt, founded the libertarian journal The Freeman.[195] Both can therefore be regarded as among the many Trotsky-sympathizers who became apologists for American foreign policy,[196] and laid the foundation for the ‘neo-con’ movement. Chamberlain and La Follette continued to pursue a vigorous anti-Soviet line at the earliest stages of the Cold War.[197]