Delegates to the Socialist Equality Party’s founding congress held in Montreal from August 22 to 24 unanimously adopted a comprehensive document outlining the party’s Historical and International Foundations. It is being published on the World Socialist Web Site in ten parts. The first part can be found here.

The WSWS previously published a report on the congress, which marked a major milestone in the struggle to build the world party of socialist revolution, as well as the SEP Canada’s Statement of Principles.

The origins of the Trotskyist movement in North America

27. In the fall of 1928, American Communist Party leader James P. Cannon and Maurice Spector, the principal theoretician of the Communist Party of Canada and editor of its newspaper, jointly initiated a struggle to win their respective parties back to the program of world socialist revolution that had animated the 1917 October Revolution. While attending the Comintern’s Sixth Congress that summer, they had accidentally gained access to Trotsky’s critique of the draft program of the Communist International and reached agreement on the urgency of opposing the nationalist-opportunist politics of the Stalin leadership. At the center of Trotsky’s critique was the exposure of “socialism in one country” as a national-opportunist perversion of Marxism. Wrote Trotsky:

“In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e., of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, not a single communist party can establish its programme by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of development in its own country. This also holds entirely for the party that wields the state power within the boundaries of the USSR. On August 4, 1914, the death knell sounded for national programmes for all time. The revolutionary party of the proletariat can base itself only upon an international programme corresponding to the character of the present epoch, the epoch of the highest development, and collapse of capitalism.”^[18]

28. Although Spector was a founding member of the CPC and had been elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International, he was expelled from the CPC within days of his return to Canada for refusing to sanction Cannon’s hasty and no less arbitrary expulsion from the CP USA. In response to an order from the party leadership that he affirm his readiness to mount an “aggressive campaign against ‘Trotskyism’,” Spector submitted a defiant statement to the CPC Political Committee on November 6, 1928. It concisely summarized the essential differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism and demonstrated that it was the Stalinized CPSU and Comintern, not the Left Opposition, that had repudiated Leninism.^[19]

Spector’s statement detailed the opportunist maneuvers that had resulted in the squandering of the revolutionary opportunities in Britain and China. He contrasted the line that Lenin had elaborated at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920 on the colonial question with that the Comintern had imposed on the Chinese CP. Whereas Lenin had advocated “the independence of the Communist Parties and the working class movement even (when) in embryonic form” and the struggle “against the National bourgeoisie … for proletarian hegemony in the National emancipation movement”; “our Chinese party was subordinated to the National bourgeoisie in the Kuomintang under the cover of the old Menshevik Martynov’s policy of the ‘Bloc of Four Classes’ … The working class movement was subordinated to the Government of the National bourgeoisie (prohibition in certain cases of picketing and strikes, disarmament of workers etc.).”^[20]

Spector’s letter pointed to the “social basis of these opportunist deviations” in the adaptation of a layer of the ruling party to the delay in the world revolution and emphatically repudiated “socialism in one country” as a fundamental break with the program of Marxism-Leninism.^[21]

Spector denounced the Stalinist campaign of historical falsification aimed at discrediting Trotsky by dredging up his pre-1917 differences with Lenin. He noted that Stalin and those like Zinoviev and Kamenev who had spearheaded the attack on Trotsky in 1923-24 had voiced far sharper differences with Lenin in the course of the 1917 revolution. He referenced Lenin’s political rearming of the Bolshevik Party in April 1917, after Stalin and Kamenev had joined the Mensheviks in offering critical support to the bourgeois provisional government; and emphasized that in his last days Lenin had turned to Trotsky “to defend his views” against the right-wing nationalist shift in the party leadership on the “National Question, the Question of Workers and Peasants Control, the Monopoly of Foreign Trade, and the Struggle Against Bureaucracy.”^[22]

“It is high time,” declared Spector, “that a stop be put to the falsification of Party history that has accompanied the unscrupulous and demagogic campaign against the revolutionist who, next to Lenin, was the most authentic leader and organizer of the October Revolution, and was so recognized by Lenin himself. Trotsky today stands foursquare for the maintenance of the principles of Leninism, uncontaminated by the opportunist deviations that have been smuggled into the Comintern and USSR policy by the present Rykov-Stalin-Bukharin regime and to which the lessons of the Chinese revolution, the economic situation in the USSR, the situation within the CPSU and the experiences of the Anglo-Russian Committee bear eloquent witness.”^[23]

The contents of Spector’s letter exemplify the principled, socialist-internationalist foundations of Trotskyism in North America. Its point of departure was not a dispute over organizational issues or national tactics, but rather the decisive questions of international revolutionary program and strategy.

29. The expulsion of Spector and all those who refused to condemn him was a decisive step in the transformation of the Communist Party of Canada into a pliant tool of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy. Over the next period, the CPC would be torn by a series of factional struggles from which a clique led by Tim Buck that had demonstrated unflinching readiness to toe the Stalinist line, irrespective of any questions of principle, emerged the victor. A union militant prior to becoming a party functionary, Buck’s provincial outlook, Canadian nationalism, and ignorance of Marxism made him a suitable enforcer of Stalinist orthodoxy and sponsor of his own mini-personality cult. Under his leadership, the CPC would for the next three decades support every twist and turn of the Soviet bureaucracy at the expense of the international working class.

30. The expulsion of Spector from the CPC, together with Canon from the CP USA, was bound up with the turn of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union to ever more sweeping and violent repression of the Left Opposition. From 1923 onwards, Trotsky was the target of a campaign of slander and lies, with Stalin and his allies using their control of the party apparatus to suppress discussion and sideline opponents. At the 15th party congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in late 1927, Trotsky and his supporters were arbitrarily expelled from the party. Trotsky was then removed to distant Alma Ata, before being exiled from the USSR to Turkey in 1929. Opposition supporters were rounded up by the GPU secret police en masse, and imprisoned or subject to internal exile. This intensifying repression coincided with the bureaucracy’s cribbing key planks of the Left Opposition’s economic program of state planning and rapid industrialization—which it implemented in a panicked, ultimatistic, and pragmatic fashion—to combat the catastrophe produced by “socialism in one country” and its conciliatory policy to the kulaks and Nepmen. The foreign policy component of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s “left” shift was the Comintern’s proclamation of the “Third Period.” The crisis of capitalism was so deep, it now asserted, that the immediate struggle for workers’ power was posed in all countries and all that was required to win the leadership of the working class was the shouting of radical-sounding slogans.

The early struggles of the International Left Opposition and the German catastrophe

31. The courageous stand Cannon and Spector took in defence of political principle in 1928 proved decisive in breaking the isolation the Stalinists had sought to impose on Trotsky and his supporters in the USSR and thereby contributed to the emergence of the International Left Opposition. Within North America, Trotsky’s supporters founded in May 1929 the Communist League of America (Opposition), and for the next five years the Canadian Trotskyists functioned as a constituent element of the CLA, writing for and circulating its newspaper, The Militant. The first Canadian Trotskyist movement was thus established in the closest collaboration with its American co-thinkers and on the basis of agreement on the most fundamental questions of international revolutionary perspective.

32. Initially the CLA’s activity necessarily focused on the struggle, in the face of Stalinist ostracization and violence, to return the Communist Parties to the road of Lenin and Trotsky. Among those won to the CLA through its defence of the program of world socialist revolution and relentless exposure of the Stalinists’ national-opportunist doctrine of “socialism in one country” was Jack Macdonald, a worker militant who had been elected chairman of the Communist Party of Canada at its founding and served as its national secretary from 1923 to 1929. In a statement declaring his support for the International Left Opposition published in The Militant in May 1932, Macdonald answered the Stalinists’ willful falsifications of the program of Permanent Revolution; denounced the Comintern’s “tragic and catastrophic caricature of a Bolshevist-Leninist policy in China, with its complete subordination of the Communist Party to Chiang Kai-shek”; and pointed to the correspondence between the Stalinists’ attempt to revive the Menshevik two-stage theory of revolution and their promotion of opportunist politics within the Communist Party of Canada. “It will be instructive,” he wrote, “to retrace the directives to the Canadian Party, given by the opponents of the permanent revolution in their desire to find historical stages that might not be ‘skipped over’. These run the whole gamut, from the fight against the British monarchy, demand for constituent assembly, farmer-labor government, farmers political parties, national independence, etc., etc.”^[24]

33. In 1931, when the Canadian state declared the Communist Party an “unlawful organization” under Section 98 of the Criminal Code and jailed much of its central leadership, the CLA spearheaded defence efforts. While fighting to mobilize the working class against the state attack, the Canadian Trotskyists exposed the Stalinist CPC leadership’s own effective acquiescence to the party’s outlawing, which, in “Third Period” ultra-left style, it light-mindedly held up as proof of its revolutionary character. During the so-called Third Period, the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR adopted and imposed on communist parties internationally the ultra-left conception that since the revolution was imminent in every country, no collaboration was permissible with workers who retained allegiance to social democratic parties, which were absurdly labelled “social fascist.” Stalin insisted that no distinction should be drawn between fascism and social democracy, which he labelled “twins” because they both support capitalist rule. This radical demagoguery served as cover for the bureaucracy’s increasing entrenchment as a privileged social caste dominating the Soviet state and its corresponding hostility to the interests of the international working class.

34. The Stalinists’ criminal “third period” policy would have its most disastrous consequences in Germany, where it politically disarmed and disoriented the most revolutionary-minded workers, organized in the Communist Party or KPD, paving the way for Hitler’s rise to power. It served to paralyze Europe’s most powerful working class, whose political allegiance was divided between two mass parties, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the KPD. In November 1932, in the last election before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the combined vote for the two workers’ parties was greater than that of the Nazis. The election results provided only a pale reflection of the true relationship of class forces—of the immensely greater social power wielded by the millions of workers who stood with the Social Democrats and KPD as compared with the social dregs who backed the Nazis. “On the scales of election statistics,” wrote Trotsky, “a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Communist votes. But on the scales of the revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives, and their mothers-in-law. The great bulk of the fascists consists of human dust.”^[25]

35. From September 1930 on, Trotsky fought from his exile in Turkey untiringly for the Communist Party to forge a United Front with the Social Democrats to thwart the Nazi threat. This policy was aimed at mobilizing the social power of the working class against the fascists, including through the organization of workers’ defence guards, while creating the best conditions to expose the bankruptcy and complicity of the Social Democratic leaders, who placed their confidence in the bourgeois Weimar Republic and tied the working class to the capitalist state. In answer to the Stalinists’ boneheaded identification of social democracy and fascism as “twins,” because both in the final analysis serve capitalism, Trotsky fought for the KPD to exploit the relative contradiction between them. “Today the Social Democracy as a whole, with all its internal antagonisms, is forced into sharp conflict with the fascists,” Trotsky wrote in an article entitled “For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism.” “It is our task to take advantage of this conflict and not to unite the antagonists against us.”^[26] He urged the Communist Party to “show by deeds a complete readiness to make a bloc with the Social Democrats against the fascists” and “understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders in reality. But reality today is—the struggle against fascism.” A united front would “help the Social Democratic workers in action—in this new and extraordinary situation—to test the value of their organizations and leaders at this time, when it is a matter of life and death for the working class.”^[27] The tragedy of the German and world proletariat was that the Stalinists and Social Democrats prevented such a revolutionary struggle against fascism from developing. When the decisive moment arrived and Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg—with the full backing of the German bourgeoisie and in formal accordance with the constitution of its Weimar Republic—there was no organized resistance from the working class. Within a few brief months, all independent workers’ organizations had been destroyed.

The Struggle for the Fourth International

36. Trotsky waited several months to see whether any criticism of the catastrophic Stalinist policy in Germany would arise from within the Communist International or any of its national sections. None was forthcoming. This complacent and callous indifference to the greatest defeat in the history of the working class—a defeat for which the Moscow bureaucracy and the KPD leadership were themselves chiefly responsible—was, Trotsky would explain, the final proof that the Third International was dead for the purposes of the socialist revolution. In July 1933, he issued the call for the building of a new, Fourth International. “The Moscow leadership,” he declared, “has not only proclaimed as infallible the policy which guaranteed victory to Hitler, but has also prohibited all discussion of what had occurred. And this shameful interdiction was not violated, nor overthrown. No national congresses; no international congress; no discussions at party meetings; no discussion in the press! An organization which was not roused by the thunder of fascism and which submits docilely to such outrageous acts of the bureaucracy demonstrates thereby that it is dead and that nothing can ever revive it. To say this openly and publicly is our direct duty toward the proletariat and its future. In all our subsequent work it is necessary to take as our point of departure the historical collapse of the official Communist International.”^[28]

37. The defeat in Germany and the International Left Opposition’s emphatic conclusion that a new Fourth International had to be built had far-reaching implications for the work of the Trotskyist movement in North America. In 1934, the Trotskyists in the US and Canada founded separate organizations with a common name, the Workers Party. This initiative reflected the new tasks confronting the movement, which was no longer directed towards winning the Communist Parties and the Comintern back to the program of world socialist revolution, but to building new mass revolutionary working class parties, sections of the future Fourth International. The emergence of the Workers Party in Canada and the US was also a product of the numerical-organizational growth of the revolutionary party on both sides of the border, which was bound up with growing working-class resistance after the initial shock of the Great Depression. The previous year, CLA militants had played a leading role in the struggles of the predominantly Jewish textile workers of Toronto, including in organizing a one-day strike and demonstration against the actions of the Nazi regime that involved up to 25,000 people. The Toronto anti-fascist strike was the largest of its kind in North America and demonstrated, albeit on a modest scale, the effectiveness of the united front tactic proposed by Trotsky in combatting the threat posed by the far right. Welcoming the founding of the Workers Party in the US, Macdonald said it would give great impetus to the work of the Canadian Trotskyists: “Workers in both countries are in the closest connection with each other. Political as well as economic conditions in the United States exert an immediate and powerful influence upon its neighbor. The two new Workers Parties with the same name and a common revolutionary Marxist program are bound to be of great aid to each other and a potent force in the coming struggles of the American and Canadian working class.”^[29]

38. The victory of fascism in Germany and the ongoing impact of the Great Depression provoked a sharp radicalization of the working class across Europe. Millions of workers were moving to the left under conditions in which they had yet to draw the necessary lessons from the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy. This resulted in the emergence of centrist organizations and currents, characterized by Trotsky as standing between reformism and revolution. He drew a sharp distinction between the centrism of the workers, which he identified as a temporary stage in their passage to revolutionary politics, provided the Trotskyists could clarify key questions of strategy and program, and the professional centrist leaders of organizations like the Spanish POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification), Britain’s ILP (Independent Labour Party), and Germany’s SAP (Socialist Workers Party). These leaders and organizations declared in abstract formulae their support for revolutionary politics, while refusing to systematically expose the class collaborationist politics of the social-democratic and Stalinist parties. For them the “United Front” was not an instrument of revolutionary class struggle but a means to conciliate with the Soviet and labour bureaucracies. Trotsky defined the key elements of centrism in a 1934 article: “In the sphere of theory centrism is impressionable and eclectic. It shelters itself as much as possible from obligations in the matter of theory and is inclined (in words) to give preference to ‘revolutionary practice’ over theory; without understanding that only Marxist theory can give to practice a revolutionary direction”; “The centrist, never sure of his position and his methods, regards with detestation the revolutionary principle: State that which is; it inclines to substituting, in the place of political principles, personal combinations and petty organizational diplomacy”; and “On the international field the centrist distinguishes himself, if not by his blindness, at least by his shortsightedness. He does not understand that one cannot build in the present period a national revolutionary party save as part of an international party; in the choice of his international allies the centrist is even less particular than in his own country.”^[30]

39. One year later, Trotsky returned to the question of centrism in a July 1935 “Open Letter to All Revolutionary Organizations and Groupings,” that exposed the pernicious role the professional centrists were playing in blocking the political development of the working class and the necessary fusion of its class-conscious vanguard in the Fourth International. Marxists, he insisted, “openly say what is” “at all times, and under all conditions … (They) are not fatalists. They do not unload upon the ‘historical process’ those very tasks which the historical process has posed before them. The initiative of a conscious minority, a scientific program, bold and ceaseless agitation in the name of clearly formulated aims, merciless criticism of all ambiguity―those are some of the most important factors for the victory of the proletariat. Without a fused and steeled revolutionary party a socialist revolution is inconceivable.”^[31] To prosecute the struggle against centrist moods among revolutionary-minded workers, Trotsky called for tactical flexibility, underscored by his advocacy of what became known as the “French turn.” In June 1934, he urged his French followers to enter the French Socialist Party or SFIO. Under conditions of the Great Depression, the Nazi victory in Germany, the rise of the extreme right in France, and the ultra-left politics of the Stalinist PCF, the SFIO had become a pole of attraction for a section of workers and young people moving in a revolutionary direction. The aim of the Trotskyist entry was to remove any organizational barriers to waging a struggle to free the workers moving toward revolutionary politics from the SFIO’s right-wing leadership, not to push its leadership to the “left” or transform the SFIO apparatus into a revolutionary instrument for the working class. A major concern for Trotsky was that the French CP was beginning to turn from the sectarian politics of the Third Period to opportunist adaptation to social-democracy and the Popular Front. Absent an aggressive intervention on the part of the Trotskyists aimed at reaching the radicalized elements coalescing around the SFIO, Trotsky feared that the Stalinists would be able to link up with the social-democrats and work together to wall the Trotskyists off from the working class. This did indeed happen in Spain, where the centrist (and after 1935 POUM leader) Nin ignored Trotsky’s advice that his movement place emphasis on exposing the politics of the Spanish CP and intervene aggressively within the Socialist Party youth movement. The French Turn was a success, with the supporters of the Fourth International expelled from the SFIO after waging a systematic struggle to expose how the Popular Front was serving to prevent the working class from mobilizing its class strength to defeat the fascist threat, imbue it with national defencism, and tie it to the war preparations of French imperialism. A key ingredient for the success of the entry was that Trotsky and the International Communist League (the name taken at this time by those fighting to found the Fourth International) closely collaborated with the French section, maintaining constant oversight over its work so as to counteract the powerful national pressures resulting from work in a hostile political organization.

40. At the Comintern’s Seventh World Congress held in July-August 1935, the Stalinist policy of building “Popular Front” alliances with “democratic” bourgeois parties in the name of fighting fascism and war and advancing social reform was promulgated. The Popular Front was directed at suppressing the incipient revolutionary working-class offensive engendered by the Great Depression, fascist reaction and the growing threat of world war and at chaining the working class to the “left-liberal” parties of capitalist rule. Sold by its proponents as a necessary tactic to avoid “frightening” the petty bourgeoisie with the “threat” of revolution, the “popular front” in fact played the decisive role in politically derailing the working class upsurge and thereby propelling the middle class into the arms of authoritarian and fascist reaction.

Through the Popular Front, the Stalinist bureaucracy sought to demonstrate to the imperialist “democracies”—principally the US, France and Britain—that it constituted no threat to the world capitalist order and that they could advance their respective geopolitical interests by forming military-security alliances with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and other “revisionist powers.” In France, the working class responded to the election of a Popular Front government in early May 1936 by mounting a spontaneous general strike that lasted well into June. The Stalinists played the pivotal role in getting workers to evacuate occupied factories and return to work, ensuring the survival of the Popular Front government and French capitalism, with French Communist Party (PCF) Chairman Maurice Thorez declaring, “It is necessary to know when to end a strike.” Once the political situation was restabilized, the bourgeoisie passed over to the offensive, clawing back the social concessions it had had to grant to end the strike. Consequently, the far right (which the French ruling class ultimately brought to power in July 1940 under the Vichy regime) grew stronger.

41. The counter-revolutionary role of the Popular Front was most graphically and bloodily displayed in Spain. When General Franco launched a fascist coup in July 1936, the working class responded with a mass spontaneous uprising—forming workers’ militia, seizing factories, transport and other major enterprises and joining with oppressed peasants in the countryside to collectivize the large estates. More terrified of a socialist revolution than a fascist victory, the Popular Front government moved first gradually, and then with increasing haste and violence to restore bourgeois law and order, uphold capitalist property and snuff out all the incipient organs of working-class power. The Stalinist Communist Party, working in close concert with the Soviet Secret police, emerged as the most ruthless defender of bourgeois property. It led the crushing of the May 1937 Barcelona workers’ uprising and assisted the GPU in the seizure and murder of Nin, the Fourth Internationalist Erwin Wolf and numerous other left-wing opponents of Stalinism.

Summarizing the class content of the Popular Front, Trotsky called it an alliance between bourgeois liberalism and the GPU against social revolution. “Two irreconcilable programs,” wrote Trotsky, “thus confronted each other on the territory of republican Spain. On the one hand, the program of saving at any cost private property from the proletariat, and saving as far as possible democracy from Franco; on the other hand, the program of abolishing private property through the conquest of power by the proletariat. The first program expressed the interests of capitalism through the medium of the labor aristocracy, the top petty-bourgeois circles, and especially the Soviet bureaucracy. The second program translated into the language of Marxism the tendencies of the revolutionary mass movement, not fully conscious but powerful. Unfortunately for the revolution, between the handful of Bolsheviks and the revolutionary proletariat stood the counter-revolutionary wall of the Popular Front.”^[32]

The Revolution Betrayed and the Moscow Trials

42. Critical to the laying of the Fourth International’s theoretical and political foundations was Trotsky’s writing of The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?. In this masterwork published in 1936, Trotsky examined the objective laws of historical development that gave rise to the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and enabled it, under conditions of revolutionary Russia’s isolation and backwardness, to usurp political power. Defining the class nature of the Soviet state, he called it a “transitional” society whose ultimate fate would be determined in class struggle. It would either be returned to capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy or advance towards socialism. However, the latter outcome would only be possible if the working class overthrew the bureaucracy and re-established soviet democracy through a political revolution.

Trotsky vehemently objected to attempts to apply a fixed characterization to what was an unfinished social process, one, moreover, that was unprecedented in history. Trotsky wrote,

“The USSR is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character; (b) the tendency toward primitive accumulation created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the planned economy; (c) norms of distribution preserving a bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new differentiation of society; (d) the economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes the swift formation of a privileged stratum; (e) exploiting the social antagonisms, the bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism; (f) the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses; (g) a further development of the accumulated contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism; (h) on the road to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; (i) on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy. In the last analysis, the question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces, both on the national and the world arena.”^[33]

43. At the height of the Popular Front, between August 1936 and March 1938, the Stalin regime staged the Moscow show Trials, at which many of Lenin’s closest surviving political collaborators—including Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin—gave forced “confessions” of working, variously, with Nazi Germany, and Japanese and British imperialism to overthrow the Soviet Union. At all three trials Trotsky was the main accused—in absentia. The trials were the public face of a campaign of mass murder in which hundreds of thousands of socialists, the finest representatives of several generations of Marxist workers and intellectuals, perished. The purges were a pre-emptive strike born of the bureaucracy’s fear that the revolutionary upsurge in France and Spain would reawaken the long suppressed revolutionary aspirations of the Soviet working class, threatening its despotic rule. The history and record of this political genocide constitute an irrefutable refutation of the claims of the propagandists of the bourgeoisie that the Stalin regime based itself on the heritage of Marxism, and that Stalinism and Trotskyism were merely variants of one and the same Marxism. The true relationship between Stalinism and Trotskyism was best described by Trotsky. They were, he said, separated by “a river of blood.”^[34]

44. Led by the American Trotskyists, Trotsky’s supporters in Europe and North America assisted him in countering the Stalinist lies, culminating in the establishment of the Dewey Commission chaired by the renowned American philosopher-educator John Dewey. After carefully reviewing a vast body of evidence submitted by Trotsky and his collaborators, the Commission cleared Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov of all the charges and condemned the Moscow Trials as frame-ups.