The horror of the Purges was such that for a time the Soviet working class was stunned. All the Old Bolshevik leaders, Lenin’s comrades in arms, were accused of being agents of the Gestapo. In this way, the living links with October were broken. This prepared the way for reaction at a later stage. A particularly pernicious role was played by the leaders of the Communist Parties internationally. Despite the monstrous nature of the charges and the history of the defendants, the leaders of the Communist Parties lost no time in condemning the accused and vindicating the hangman. So Stalinised had they become, that not one leader of the Communist Parties of the world spoke out against the horrors of the Purges. They had become the yes-men and -women of Moscow. The complicity of these ‘Communist’ leaders in Stalin’s crimes is one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the world labour movement. They participated in every zig-zag of Moscow’s policy, justifying the murder of the Old Bolsheviks, and praising Stalin. By dishonestly covering up all the crimes of the bureaucracy, they prepared the way for the collapse of the USSR decades later, and must bear a heavy responsibility for the present catastrophe.
According to the English Stalinist Andrew Rothstein in a book written while Stalin was still alive: “The citizens of the Soviet Union felt the strength of their country, during these years, in a way that they had never felt before.” He went on:
In the late spring of 1936, a series of arrests of Nazi agents and Trotskyist conspirators revealed the existence of a much wider organisation – a central terrorist committee which included, not only Zinoviev and Kamenev, but several leading Trotskyists. Preliminary investigations and evidence given at the trial revealed that, through Germans who had been sent to the USSR by Trotsky himself, the organisation was in close contact with the German Gestapo. Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates were sentenced to be shot. (A. Rothstein, A History of the USSR, pp. 239-42.)
In a book published in 1939, another member of the CPGB ridiculed the idea that torture had been used to extract false confessions. J.R. Campbell quotes a passage from the official transcript of the trial of the Trotskyist and civil war hero Muralov:
Vyshinsky: Were you badly treated?
Muralov: I was deprived of my liberty.
Vyshinsky: But perhaps rough methods were used against you?
Muralov: No. No such methods were used. I must say that in Novosibirsk and here I was treated very decently and politely. (J.R. Campbell, Trial of Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre, pp. 231-2.)
This was a period when repressive measures in Stalin’s jails acquired the cruellest expression. With the replacement of Yagoda by Yezhov at the top of the GPU, torture was permitted in interrogation for the first time. Yet Campbell could write:
We are asked by Trotsky to believe that one of his more outstanding followers, a man who never made his peace with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not only confessed to crimes of which he was guiltless, but actually falsely declared that he was treated most politely. (Campbell, Soviet Policy and its Critics, p. 250.)
Elsewhere he describes Trotsky’s comments on the case of Muralov as “a hypothesis from the padded room”. (Ibid., p. 252.) Campbell says: “Some of these activities were carried out on the direct instructions of the German Intelligence Service.” (Ibid., p. 220.) And again: “It is unfortunate that these people were in important positions. It is not unfortunate that those who were traitors have been executed and those who were degenerate and inefficient removed. The Trotskyist traitors also believed in a purge, a purge possible only on the basis of a fascist victory… The purge is the final and crushing answer to this fantasy. It reveals, not the triumph of bureaucracy, but the triumph of Socialist Democracy. It reveals the people of the Soviet Union against faint-hearts, renegades and deserters.” (Ibid., p. 236.)
The foul accusation that well-known revolutionists collaborated with Hitler to overthrow the Soviet Union was decisively disproved when the German archives were opened after the war:
The great mass of new material which has emerged since the defeat of Germany in 1945 has produced some evidence of conspiracy between the NKVD and the Gestapo, but none of any contacts between the Germans and the Oppositionists. Finally, wherever the evidence adduced at the trial related to past events, the distortion and falsification to which these events were subjected by the prosecution can easily be exposed by anyone in possession of the sources available to the historian. (L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, p. 424, my emphasis.)
The British Daily Worker carried articles demanding the execution of the accused with slogans such as “Shoot the reptiles”. During the Second World War the British Communist Party actually published a pamphlet directed against the British Trotskyists with the title “Hitler’s Secret Agents”. They even demanded that we be illegalised. This was typical of the hooligan methods which were the stock-in-trade of the Stalinists in the international labour movement at the time. Yet there was no substance whatsoever in the accusations. Every one of the victims was innocent of the crimes imputed to them. This was one of the vilest crimes committed in the whole of history. And the ‘mark of Cain’ will be forever branded not only on the perpetrators, but also on those who applauded them from the side-lines.
It cannot be argued that they were ignorant. Throughout this period, Leon Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov published a vast amount of material showing conclusively that the charges were false. The CP leaders had access to this material. In one of the trials great stress was laid on an alleged meeting of Trotsky with one of the defendants who was supposed to have flown to Norway. Trotsky proved that no aircraft had landed at the relevant airport on or near the date alleged. There were many other similar discrepancies. In 1937, an impartial International Commission of Enquiry, under American philosopher John Dewey, conducted hearings into the Kremlin charges made against Leon Trotsky and his son, Leon Sedov. After extensive examination of detailed evidence presented to the Commission, it concluded that the Moscow trials were frame-ups and Trotsky and Sedov were not guilty of the 18 specific charges of the prosecution against them. In 1956, in the secret session of the 20th CPSU Congress, Khrushchev admitted the trials were a frame-up, and that those shot were innocent of the crimes of which they were accused.
Khrushchev attempted to put the blame for these crimes against socialism on the shoulders of one man – as if one man could be responsible for such a monstrous regime! Leopold Trepper, who became the leader of the Soviet intelligence network in occupied Europe during the Second World War, refutes this idea. “How could they have looked on while their comrades in arms were sentenced without proof?” asks Trepper.
After the 20th Congress in 1956, all these leaders feigned astonishment. To hear them, Khrushchev’s report was a real revelation. In reality, they had been knowing accomplices of the liquidations, including those of members of their own Parties.
He continues:
I still have memories from this dark period that time has not erased… The fear for tomorrow, the anguish that we might be living our last hours of freedom, dictated our actions. Fear, which had become our second skin, induced caution, guided us towards submission. I knew that my friends had been arrested and I said nothing. Why them? Why not me? I waited for my turn, and prepared myself for this end. (L. Trepper, The Great Game – Memoirs of a Master Spy, p. 54.)
Despite Khrushchev’s revelations, very few victims of the Purge trials were rehabilitated. With the coming to power of Gorbachev, some progress was made as part of glasnost (openness). In July 1987, a decision was taken to rehabilitate Bukharin and Rykov, who were shot in 1938. In February 1988, the Soviet Supreme Court reversed the verdict of its Military Collegium in the case of the Right Trotskyite Bloc of 1938. However, the trials of 1937, 1936 and 1935 as well as earlier show trials from 1928 to 1932 were left in abeyance. Gorbachev had a vested interest in rehabilitating Bukharin as he had drawn close to a number of his ideas, particularly the need to re-establish the market. Whereas in November 1987, Gorbachev denounced Trotsky as “a cunning politician”, and Trotskyism as “a current, whose ideologies… in essence occupied capitalist positions”, whilst “the political centre of the Party, headed by Stalin, defended Leninism in the ideological struggle” squarely against the Trotskyist Opposition.
Although the Purge trials were completely exposed as frame-ups, Trotsky was not rehabilitated, and there were renewed attempts to demonise him. This showed that the ruling elite still feared his ideas, the genuine ideas of Bolshevism-Leninism. As late as October 1988, Pravda published an article on Trotsky entitled The Demon of the Revolution, which accused Trotsky of causing the wave of political terror within the USSR by his propaganda activity outside of the country!
“Specifically in regard to Leon Trotsky,” says Medvedev, “his activities and tragic fate require a precise and carefully weighed political and legal evaluation.” He says, nevertheless, “Trotsky was never a spy for the Gestapo. And, we must remember, the death sentences passed against Trotsky in absentia at the three major Moscow trials did not remain a dead letter. The ‘verdict’ was carried out in 1940 in Mexico by an NKVD group ‘for special assignments abroad’.” (Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 18-9.)
We will give the final word to a man who, while never a Trotskyist, was well able to judge what happened in the light of his own tragic life. Examining his conscience decades later, Leopold Trepper recalled his harrowing experience in the university in Moscow at the time of the Purges:
Yugoslavs, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs – all disappeared. By 1937, not one of the principal leaders of the German Communist Party was left, except for Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht. The repressive madness had no limits. The Korean section was decimated; the delegates from India had disappeared; the representatives of the Chinese Communist Party had been arrested. The glow of October was being extinguished in the shadows of underground chambers. The revolution had degenerated into a system of terror and horror; the ideals of socialism were ridiculed in the name of a fossilised dogma which the executioners still had the effrontery to call Marxism.
And yet we went along, sick at heart, but passive, caught up in machinery we had set in motion with our own hands. Mere cogs in the apparatus, terrorised to the point of madness, we became the instruments of our own subjugation. All those who did not rise up against the Stalinist machine are responsible, collectively responsible. I am no exception to this verdict.
But who did protest at the time? Who rose up to voice his outrage?
The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honour. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did. By the time of the great Purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands where they had been dragged in order to be exterminated. In the camps, their conduct was admirable. But their voices were lost in the tundra.
Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess,’ for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism. (L. Trepper, op. cit., pp. 55-6, my emphasis.)