The Moscow Trials
• The first trial. Called the "Trial of the 16," it soning" to economic sabotage. Only those who had opened on August 19, 1936. The main defendants were "confessed" were brought before the court. Vyshinsky representatives of the Bolshevik old guard, such as of course tried to prove that it was Trotsky who was pull-
Zinoviev, Kamenev, Evdokimov and Bakaiev; well- ing the strings. Fifteen were sentenced to death. But known personalities such as Pickel and Reingold; Left Piatakov, Radek and Sokolnikov got prison sentences.
Opposition activists such as Smirnov and Mrachovsky;
and an airforce officer, Dreitser. Ter Vaganian, a writer • The third trial was held from March 2 to 13, 1938.
and journalist; and Goltsmann, a high government offi- There were 21 defendants, including Bukharin; Rykov;
Rakovsky; Krestinsky; Yagoda, the former chief of po-
They were accused of being involved in a "center" en- lice; people's commissars, such as Grinko and Checharged with preparing and carrying out terrorist at- mov; former Central Committee members; officials and tacks against leaders of the party and the country. The three doctors, plus a handful of lowlives and informers prosecutor, Vyshinsky, launched a call to "shoot these thrown in for good measure. They were accused of hav-
" these "clowns, these pygmies," these ing joined in a "bloc of rightists and Trotskyites" and of having made a deal with enemy powers through the in-
Although absent, Trotsky was the main defendant, termediary of Trotsky aimed at overthrowing Soviet
"the soul and organizer of the terrorist bloc, power and dismembering the USSR. Nineteen were exeto the "confession" of one of the accused. On August
25, the sixteen defendants were executed.
• The execution of the generals. On June 11,
• The second trial was held from January 23 to 1937, a communiqué announced the arrest and trial on
January 30, 1937, before the same tribunal. This time the same day of a group of generals including Tukhathere were 18 defendants, chosen by the method of the chevsky, Yakir, Uborevich, Feldman and other Red amalgam - Piatakov, Radek, Serebriakov, Sokolnikov, Army officers, some of whom had already been under arrest since 1936. It has not been established that a
The general scheme of the trial hardly differed from real trial took place. The executions of the generals, the first. The defendants were accused of having rebuilt which were followed by those of tens of thousands of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite center." The most absurd lower-ranking officers, decapitated the Red Army on the charges were heaped on them, going from "mass poi- eve of the second world war.
cated and honest communists, and that therefore their writings deserve to be
If they are to be criticized, this has to be done in an objective way, based on what their writings actually contain and not on the basis of "intentions" attributed to them or "a double meaning" that is generally falsely imputed. These writings wraps. Even a partial and selective reprinting is inadmissible. No debate, no what happened in the USSR from 1917 to the murder of the Old Bolsheviks or even up to today will be possible any longer without finally taking account of these writings.
Of course, the question of legal rehabilitation of the Moscow trials, including restoration of civil and political rights for them, their companions and their descendents, must not be mixed up with the of political endorsement of all, or most, of the opinions they held in opposition to the "general line" of the majority in the Central Committee in the CPSU, that is the Stalin faction.
In the first place, such political endorsement would run up against the obvious problem that these defendants advocated very different ideas. Contrary to the myth invented by the repressive services and propagated by the StalinMolotov group in the USSR and in the Communist International, there was clal, were also included in the lot.
Drobnis, Muralov and so on.
never a "bloc of Trotskyists and rightists" in the CPSU, neither before or after the expulsion of the oppositionists.
Left Opposition supported by Krupskaya
Likewise, Zinoviev and Kamenev were never Trotskyists. At the most, were associated publicly openly not secretly through some unimaginable "plot" - with the Left Opposition in the United Opposition of 1926-27, which, moreover, was also by Lenin's widow, Krups-
The defendants in the Moscow trials would have to be classified politically in at least five different categories: the "Trotskyists" properly speaking (even this term lends itself to misunderstanding - it would be better to call them supporters of the ideas of the Left Opposition); the Zinovievites; the partisans of the so-called Bukharin right opposition; those who were fully-fledged Stalinists in the years 1923-29, but broke with Stalin on some political points at the beginning of the 1930s; and some without very clear political convictions.
It is, therefore, impossible to say that all their political opinions were correct, since they were mutually exclusive.
*according
USSR
Secondly, the objective of a rehabilitation of Stalin's victims cannot be acceptance or rejection of their views. That would mean adopting Stalin's terms, accepting the "ideological" basis of the trials and the terrorist rep-
The right to make political mistakes has to be reaffirmed. Without democracy or even honest debate is possible.
If voicing an idea that may prove incorrect is more or less automatically condemned as criminal behavior leads to repression, deportation death, no one will any longer dare to express ideas different from those of the general secretary. And since history has abundantly demonstrated that no Central Committee and no general secengenders an incapacity to correct errors, even catastrophic ones, for long
We remain convinced that essentially Trotsky and the Left Opposition had a correct view of the issues in the great controversies that shook the CPSU between 1923 and 1933. But we will never ask that a resolution of the CPSU Central Committee, and still less a verdict of the Supreme Court of the USSR, 7. In his "secret report" to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev mentioned by name only the members of the Stalin faction who fell victim to the purges. 13
October 26, 1987 • International Viewpoint
USSR solemnly declare so. That verdict belongs to history. It belongs to revolutionary workers and intellectuals today and tomorrow. No "leading body" can substitute for history. But the authoritative bodies can, and must, take a position on whether or not the accusations of criminal acts against the Moscow trials defendants were well founded or slanderous. They must accept the evidence. These accusations were totally without foundation.
### Rehabilitations imply judgement on Stalinism
The question of rehabilitating the victims of the Moscow trials is the oban open and fierce political battle in the USSR itself. Only what has happened in the apparatus remains under the seal of secrecy, despite a glasnost that, while real, remains quite
The problem for the Soviet authorities is that a legal rehabilitation of the Moscow trials defendants implies at the same time a judgement on Stalin, Stalinism and the main turns in the "general line" between 1923
For even 1953; on the scope of the "errors" of the Stalin era and their after-effects. It requires a materialist and not simply psychological, ideological or purely political explanation of these phenomena. Moreover, it involves a judgement on the limitations of "de-Stalinization" under Khrushchev, that is, a critical re-examination of the entire history of the USSR, the CPSU and the "international Communist movement" over more than a half century. No less evident are the implications such an examination would have about the origins and nature of the Gorbachev reforms.
The fact that factions in the apparatus are not cheerfully accepting such a reexamination is hardly surprising. It is true that the number of those personally implicated in the crimes of the great purges has become small, mainly for there is less fear of "reprisals" and of the consequences, including penal prosecutions, of Stalin's henchmen than there was at the time of the Twentieth Congress. But it is still true that a whole layer of the nomenklatura, those over 60 years of age, have been, if not accomplices, at least passive and tolerant witnesses of these crimes. In particular they were witnesses to the frantic efforts to curb de-Stalinization between 1953 and 1962 and correct it
The maneuvers of this faction of the nomenklatura, which undoubtedly also includes younger elements drawn to it interests and judgements, have gone very attested to by the following report: International Viewpoint • October 26, 1987
" The Soviet judicial archives from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s are being destroyed at a rate of 5,000 files a month, on the pretext that there is "no room" to keep them, ' the dissident bulletin Glasnost' wrote in its latest is-
"According to this bulletin published by former political prisoners, including Mr. Sergei Grigoryants, millions of Soviet victims of the terror have been stored in the archives of the Military Tribunal and Supreme Court of the USSR. were "cleaned out" of the the USSR prosecutor's office and Ministry of Defence in 1970s. As for those of the KGB, practically no one knows where they are
"For several years, according to Glastwo presiding judges of the Supreme Court, Mr. Gorkin and Mr. Smirnov, managed to rescue the archives from destruction. But 'when the minister of justice, Vladimir Terebilov, became presiding judge of the Supreme Court, with Sergei Gusev as his chief deputy, the "weeding out" of the arsuddenly got underway? This these two officials took office in April
"At first, the archives were burned in the fireplace of the Supreme Court palace. But, Glasnost' pointed out, 'that makes a lot of smoke in the city. Now they are burning them outside Mos-
(Le Monde, August 23-24, Downplaying Stalin's crimes
Alongside the efforts made to make it formally difficult, if not impossible, to rehabilitate all the victims of the purges, there have been strenuous attempts to partially "rehabilitate" Stalinism, to systematically downplay the after-effects of Stalin's crimes in the areas of human rights, in the Communist movement, and in the economic, military, ideological and cultural fields, and play up the "positive side" of the 1930s.8 The number two figure in the bureaucratic hierarchy, Ligachev, is an old hand at that. He comes back to this theme indefatigably in almost all his speeches (especially his August 26, 1987, speech reported in Pravda on
Gorbachev speaks very carefully on this subject. But he has also felt it necessary to make statements of this sort on several occasions, in particular in famous interview Communist Party paper, l' Humanité, in
1986, in which he said: "Stalinism is a notion invented by the enemies of communism and used widely
Ht'
BLAS NOST
to blacken the image of the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole." Does that not amount to repeating the substance of the slanders against all the oppositionist tendencies in the CPSU in Stalin's time, that is, the ideological starting point of the Moscow trials slanders?
The debate that is proceeding stealthily in the top spheres of the apparatus is unfolding more frankly in the public arena. For example, in the August 20 issue of Moscow News — which is generally considered the organ of the advanced wing of the Gorbachevite intellectuals, those who are in the forefront of glasnost' - there is an article by the economist Boris Bolotin that justified the forced collectivization of agriculture and called for reprinting Stalin's theoretical works, in particular The economic problems of socialism in
In its August 19 issue, Literaturnaya gazeta published a series about Anatoly Rybakov's famous novel, Arbat's Children, which sharply condemns the Stalinist terror. Most of the letters supported the novelist. But the paper also published a series of letaccused the book of being "harmful," and even called for sanctions against Rybakov.
This debate has already led to dramatic public confrontations. In its issue of July 13, 1987, the Austrian journal Profil reports on two public meetings recently held in Moscow. The first was announced discreetly by a hand-written poster stuck up on the gate of the History and Archives Institute. It attracted several thousand people at the end of 8. These efforts were not only continued under Brezhnev but have even been seen quite recently. When Gorbachev felt obliged to cite Stalin's name in his speech commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the USSR's victory over Nazi Germany, he was interrupted by frenetic applause from the section where the apparatchiks were sitting. Twice he tried to stop this outpouring, twice he failed.
"Stalin, politician and man," was delivered by Professor Yuri Borisov. It was in general an apology for the dictator, although Borisov acknowledged there had been errors and abuses.
The great majority of the crowd reacted indignantly. Questions and protests
"How many victims were there?" "How many have been rehabilitated?" Many speakers mentioned explicitly that their fathers had perished in the camps and that their mothers had been sent into internal exile." 9
In June 1987, the Communist youth organization, the Komsomol, organized a public discussion with Yuri Afanasiev, director of the History and Archives Institute and the main promoter of a sharp criticism of Stalin. The hall was packed. Hundreds of people could not get in. Written questions were passed to the speaker. One of them, the Profil reporter noted, was, "Are you in favor of publishing Trotsky's works?'
"Afanasiev replied: 'Yes, I am, so that our students can read and study all the literature of Soviet history, including Trotsky's works.' Behind me an old gentlemen exclaimed indignantly, "That's the last straw!' Immediately, some people turned toward him and said, 'Have you read his works? Do you know what he wrote?' 'Yes, I know what he wrote,' the man shot back defensively.
"This response prompted others to chime in: 'Well, it's obvious where you're coming from. You have read Trotsky, and you are sitting comfortably here. Do you know how many people have been sent to Siberia for nothing more than that?'
"More and more people joined in the discussion, a real little storm broke out before people addressed questions again to the platform. Memories poured out with an unexpected violence, feelings that must have been suppressed for decades. Looks of an explosive anger that frightens the reformers came over faces.
"Another episode at the same meeting indicated how deeply the need is felt for a final settling of accounts. A note from the audience asked that people stop talking about the 'cult of the personality, deviations.
guilty of crimes against humanity. A monument should be erected to his victims, and he should be con lemned as a criminal.'°
"Afanasiev read the note aloud in a pensive way. He supported the proposal for erecting a monument; he did not respond to the other proposal. The audience burst into and rhythmic applause. I turned around and saw a sea of serious and determined faces, seeming to say, •We have waited long enough. Now it's our turn!' Despite all my skepticism, at that moment, I felt the determination of these people not to let themselves be pushed back again, i as happened in Brezhnev's cannot leave these men and women in the USSR to fight an isolated battle. It is our duty, the duty of the entire international workmovement, to support them with all our strength in their historic struggle for truth and justice. This is why the campaign for full legal rehabilitaall the Moscow trials defendants is indispensable today.
An elementary duty of solidarity
I say, "the entire international workers' movement, " because this is not only an elementary duty of solidarity with all those who are fighting for this cause in the USSR itself. It has to be remembered that the defendants in the trials were nearly all international activists. Zinoviev and Bukharin chaired the Communist International (CI) in succession. Rakovsky and Trotsky were activists of the Second International before becoming leaders of the Third. Rakovsky was a leader in the Socialist parties of Bulgaria and Ruma-
Trotsky was author of the Zimmerwald Manifesto, of the call for the founding conference of the CI and of the manifestos of its first four congresses. Radek for years was secretary of the CI, after having been one of the leaders of the Polish and German social democratic parties. Piatakov was CI's representative to the German CP during the revolutionary weeks of 1923. And many others were full-time officials of
A great part of the international workers' movement failed in its task at the time of the Moscow trials. (An honorable exception was Friedrich Ad-
USSR ler, who as secretary of the Socialist
International, acted in 1936, 1937 and
1938 to defend the Old Bolsheviks against their murderers.) This sin of omission must not be repeated again today.
A critical re-examination of the CPSU's history
When he was named rector of the History and Archives Institute in Moscow in January 1987, Afanasiev launched an appeal for a critical re-examination of the CPSU history manuals. Extensive excerpts from his inaugural speech were published in the weekly Moscow News on January 11, 1987. He said, for in-
"Let's just take the way that Lenin's last letters and articles are presented in some of our manuals.
"There is a long commentary on his last letters and articles, while only a page or two are devoted to what Lenin actually said. The rest abounds in generalities on the epoch of the transition of humanity from capitalism to socialism, that is, things that Lenin never spoke of, except on rare occasions. Lenin's assessments in his last letters to the CC leaders are still more unfortunate!
"Detached from his scheme, they are transferred into the chapter about the Twelfth Congress of the CP (Bolshevik) of Russia. They are quoted in a one-sided way. All the positive assessments of future oppositionists have been taken out, and only the negative characteristics remain. The result is that the complex and intensive struggle of concrete ideas and people, the living drama of that age, are replaced either by detective-story plots or sterile schematism."
This stand provoked a virulent reaction from historians who were not only defending their writings and their livelihoods but also their patrons, that is, the interests of a whole wing of the bureaucracy. They were obliged to defend Stalin, and consequently Stalin9. Borisov, however, was seriously shaken when he gave the same lecture on April 13 before the writers at the Central House of Culture. On this occasion, speakers in the hall confronted him with precise and terrible facts. One historian working in the archives cited the file on the interrogation of the great theater director Meyerhold, one of the victims of the purges. Meyerhold was tortured, as was recognized by GPU Lieutenant-General Rodos who interrogated him. His right hand was broken. He was forced to drink his own urine. (Report in the Berlin left daily TAZ, July 27, 1987.) 10. With his exceptional political intuition, Trotsky ended his book The crimes of Stalin with these prophetic words: "History will not pardon one drop of blood sacrificed to the new Moloch of injustice and privilege. Ethical feeling finds a supreme satisfaction in the unshakeable certainty that the verdict of history will fit the enormity of the crime. The revolution will open up all the secret cabinets, it will review the trials, acquit all those who have been slandered, it will erect monuments to the honor of the vesame of injust end mel heap 15 eternal obloquy on the names of their executioners."
October 26, 1987 • International Viewpoint
USSR ism, by repeating the substance of the slanders against the oppositionists, beginning with Trotsky.
Moscow News published some excerpts from the flood of letters that they got on this question. Claiming to represent the "unanimous" (sic) opinion of all his fellow professors in the department of the Institute of History where he works, as well as of the members of the Scholarship and Methodological Council of the Moscow region of the Znanie society, Anatoly Borissov wrote:
"The author [Yuri Afanasiev] has taken up questions on which he is hardly competent. Regardless of his intention, he is playing the game of the bourgeois historians....
"The attempts to draw us into discussions of the past threaten to distract us from the tasks of restructuring posed by the party for the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU and to hold back everything that must be decided on and done today." (Moscow News, May 24,
Still clearer is the letter signed by four chiefs of the CPSU history department, including the chief of the CPSU Central Committee's Academy of Social Sciences, L. Shirikov:
"Y. Afanasiev refers only to Lenin's letters "To the Congress' [Lenin's Testament], saying nothing about the sharp and continuing struggle that Lenin and the party waged before and after October against Trotsky and the Trotskyists on the question of the driving forces and perspectives of the revolution in Russia, of the victory of socialism in our country....
"Trotsky tried to overthrow Soviet government by force"
"After the victory of fascism in Germany in 1933.Trotsky persisted in his course of trying to overthrow the Soviet government by force and of using for his 'main objectives' the possibility of an 'inevitable' defeat of the Soviet Union in a future war against fascism....
"The line of Trotskyism amounted to restoring capitalism in the USSR." (Moscow News, May 10, 1987.)
This is not an isolated case. A specialist in the "struggle against Trotskyism," Nikolai Vasetski, wrote pamphlet called Contemporary Trotskyism against peace and detente, which was published in several languages in 1986 and very largely disseminated by the USSR's embassies, including, in a Spanish version, in Cuba. In it one can read for example: "The Trotskyists pinned their hopes on war for being able to settle accounts with the Soviet would suffer defeat if there was a war International Viewpoint • October 26, 1987
And to that end, they were not sparing of praise for fascist Germany. That is where they found their real ally in the fight against the USSR.
"In the directives he sent to his collaborators, Trotsky called on them to establish direct contacts with the govemments of fascist Germany and militarized Japan."11 All this is "proved" by a letter Radek quoted in the second Moscow trial, which is nothing but a crude forgery.
In his answer published in the same issue of Moscow News, Afanasiev sidesteps the question of Trotsky's real positions and the falsification of them, of the slanders that were the basis for the Moscow trials and the massive and monstrous purges, that is, for the massacre of the Old Bolsheviks and hundreds of thousands of communists.
of Gorbachev's contradictions and dilemmas were revealed in this evasion. But at the same time, Afanasiev strongly countered the argument "let's stick to the tasks of the future and not discuss the problems of the past." The of his answer itself struck back forcefully: "Let us talk about the past, but it is the future of socialism that is in question."
Afanasiev wrote that there is no possibility of socialist democracy when "the struggle of opinions, the search for an authentic revolutionary road and the differences between party leaders are described as plots by an invisible enemy. After the event, the groupings established were labeled 'anti-party' and attributed counter-revolutionary motives. Political differences were replaced with fantastic charges drawn from the penal code."
The new holder of the CPSU history chair in the Academy of Humanities, Nikolai Maslov, discussed more concretely what should be the content of the CPSU history manual for secondary and higher education for which Ministry of Higher Education in the USSR has just opened a competition. In this connection, he quoted Lenin's words, "Our strength lies in the truth." As an example, he held up an anthology of Leninism published in 1925, which contained articles by Martov, Trotsky, Bukharin, Shliapnikov and other revolutionists with whom Lenin had polemicized during his life.
In passing, it might be said that Maslov himself played fast and loose with historical truth, because in the list he gave of the works on the history of the Communist Party of Russia (B) published after the October revolution, he did not mention Zinoviev's history.
The stand taken by another leading "Gorbachevite," the writer Aleksandr Nezhniy was more peremptory. Under the title, "Cure by truth, Notes on reshaping consciousness," he wrote for example: "Our moral education loses almost all its qualities if it is deprived of the vitamins of truth. The masters of the closed mouth, the magicians of demagogy, the false guardians of the people's morality existed and they still do. It is in large measure thanks to their efforts that our best workers have been banished and quietly defamed, in select committees, without publicity...They have invented a multitude of open and secret instructions, some of which almost automatically imposed a 'veto' on any information about the real state of the environment, or gave the workers in the state and party archives the right not only to check the notes made by researchers but also to suppress those that, according to them naturally, were harmful to the historian or the writer." (Moscow News, June 21, 1987.)
Perestroika of the
All of this argument has been summed up in lapidary and strikingly sensible formulas. Stalin greater defeats on the revolutionary movement in Russia than any of our adversaries," the Gorbachevian writer Mikhail Shatov proclaimed in the mag-
"You cannot have perestroika without a perestroika of the memory," the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko echoed. And Literaturnaya gazeta set the tone in its October 22, 1986,
"If we turn to the past, it is to get answers to the questions that are tormenting us."
In fact the two central questions posed by Gorbachev's reform current are how did we end up here in this quasi-stagnation after so tions and so many sacrifices masses? And, how can we get out of this, without falling back into a rut and into crisis in a few years time?
The answer to these two questions is inextricably bound up with the entire history of the CPSU and the country. It leads back to the problems of Stalinism and the debates of the 1920s, notably to the question of the fate and contradictions of the NEP and the worldwide evolution of capitalism. It leads back inevitably also to the problems of "socialism in one country," to the problems of "Trotskyism." This involves both questions of content what to discuss - and of form - how to discuss it. All this raises the question of socialist democracy and Workers' power. That is what is frightening the whole bureaucracy and making Gorbachev hesitate. * 11. Nikolai Wasetzki, Hedendaags trotskisme tegen vrede en onispanning, Uitgeverij Persagentschap Novosti, Moscow, 1986, p.15.
Economic reform
USSR and democratization?
economic reform
701
The January 1987 issue of the Soviet journal EKO (Economy and the Organization of Production), published in the and democratization academic centre of Novosibirsk, carrica an article entitled "The facade and kitchen of the "great' reform", under the rubric "Pages from History". Its author, economist G. Popov, analyzes the process, as well as the causes for the failure, of the emancipation of the serfs by Tsar Alexander II in 1861.
BY FAR the most original aspect of the perestroika