Eighty years since the first Moscow Trial
In carrying out these trials, Joseph Stalin was launching an assault on the legacy and the leaders of the first successful socialist revolution.
Fred Williams•
The Moscow Trials and the political genocide in the Soviet Union
In the course of the 1930s, the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy in the Soviet Union headed by Joseph Stalin murdered virtually the entire leadership of the October Revolution. Show trials of Bolshevik leaders were organized between 1936 and 1938, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Rakovsky. These gruesome proceedings, in which the defendants were compelled to denounce themselves (having been falsely promised that such confessions would save them and their families), ended invariably with the announcement of death sentences that were carried out within hours. In the few cases where prison sentences were imposed—as with Rakovsky and Radek—the defendants were later murdered in secret. The trials were the public image of an unprecedented campaign of mass murder conducted away from public view.
Hundreds of thousands of socialists, the finest representatives of several political generations of Marxist intellectuals and workers, were physically exterminated. Nearly one million people were killed in a wave of counter-revolutionary violence from 1936 to 1939. This liquidation—which confirmed, in the most direct sense, Trotsky’s assessment of Stalin as the “gravedigger of the revolution”—dealt a blow to the revolutionary consciousness of the Soviet working class from which the Soviet Union never recovered. The history and record of these unparalleled crimes constitute the unanswerable refutation of the claim of countless bourgeois propagandists that Stalinism based itself on the theoretical and political heritage of Marxism, let alone the claim that Stalinism and Trotskyism were merely variants of one and the same Marxism. The real relationship between Stalinism and Trotskyism was described best by Trotsky: they were separated, he wrote, by “a river of blood.”
Leon Trotsky speaks on the Moscow Trials
“There are no crimes in history more terrible in intention or execution than the Moscow trials”
“Stalin’s trial against me is built upon false confessions, extorted by modern Inquisitorial methods, in the interests of the ruling clique,” Trotsky said. “These trials develop not from communism, not from socialism, but from Stalinism, that is, from the unaccountable despotism of the bureaucracy over the people!”
Featured essays and lectures
By Vadim Rogovin
Never before in history were hundreds of thousands of people torn away from their apartments, thrown into prison, subjected to torture, made to confess to crimes, and then either exterminated or sent to concentration camps.
By Vadim Rogovin
Never before in history were hundreds of thousands of people torn away from their apartments, thrown into prison, subjected to torture, made to confess to crimes, and then either exterminated or sent to concentration camps.
By Leon Trotsky
Written in the midst of Stalin's Terror, which exterminated the Old Bolsheviks who had led the October Revolution, this pamphlet by Trotsky analyzes Stalin's claim to be the continuator of Bolshevism.
By Fred Mazelis
The assassination of the elder son of Leon Trotsky was an integral part of the counterrevolutionary campaign of frame-up and terror that wiped out an entire revolutionary generation inside the Soviet Union.
Though the ruling completely discredits the judicial frame-ups employed by Stalin to physically destroy all that was left in the Soviet Union of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, the Supreme Court still failed to rehabilitate the one man who was the principal target of the Moscow trial frame-ups: Leon Trotsky.
Sixty years since the Dewey Commission
This essay was first published on the sixtieth anniversary of the convening of the Dewey Commission. The commission, whose official name was the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, was established in 1937 by supporters of the exiled revolutionary to establish the truth about Joseph Stalin's purge trials. It was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey.
Shannon Jones•
Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Marxism in the USSR
This lecture was delivered by Professor Vadim Rogovin at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, on June 3, 1996
Vadim Rogovin•
More about the life and work of Vadim Rogovin (1937-1998)
Rogovin’s greatest work was accomplished in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR. Beginning in 1992, he began intensive work on what would become a seven-volume history of the revolutionary Marxist opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, to the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR.
Covering the years from 1923 to 1940, Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative? is an unsurpassed work of historical scholarship, indispensable for an understanding of the Stalinist regime and the deep-rooted socialist opposition to its betrayal of the principles and program of the October Revolution.
Rogovin documented the immense popularity of Trotsky, even after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1929, and established that the principal purpose of Stalin’s bloody terror in the 1930s was the eradication of Trotsky’s political influence.
Interviews with children of the Left Opposition
WSWS publishes interviews with children of the Left Opposition
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing interviews with three children of Soviet Left Oppositionists—Tatiana Smilga, Zorya Serebryakova and Yuri Primakov—and with Tatiana Isaeva, granddaughter of the outstanding Marxist literary critic, Alexander Voronsky.
Fred Williams, Clara Weiss•
Interview with Zorya Serebryakova
Zorya Leonidovna Serebryakova’s father, Leonid Petrovich Serebryakov, was a leading Bolshevik and Left Oppositionist. One of the main defendants in the Second Moscow Trial, he was found guilty and shot on February 1, 1937.
our reporter•
Interview with Tatiana Smilga-Poluyan, daughter of leading Soviet Left Oppositionist
Tatiana Smilga-Poluyan (May 1919-September 2014) came from a remarkable family with longstanding revolutionary traditions. Not only her parents, but also her uncles and aunts were active participants in the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War.
Clara Weiss•
Interview with Tatiana Isaeva
Tatiana Isaeva is the granddaughter of the Marxist literary critic Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky, a Bolshevik from 1904 and participant in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 who later became an important figure in the Left Opposition.
our reporter•
Interview with Yuri Primakov
Vitaly Markovich Primakov was a hero of the October Revolution and the Civil War and later an important member of the Left Opposition.
our reporter•
Available from Mehring Books
A major work of original historical research, 1937 provides a detailed and penetrating analysis of the causes and consequences of Stalin’s purges.
By Vadim Rogovin
This volume examines the bloodiest period of the Stalinist repression of political opposition in the Soviet Union, debunking the myth that the Great Purges were merely the product of Stalin’s paranoia and had no overriding political logic.
By Leon Trotsky
In the annals of political literature, few works have withstood the test of time so well as Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. More than 70 years after its initial publication, its analysis of the structure and dynamics of Soviet society and of the Soviet Union remains unsurpassed.
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