Rally demands justice for victims of Moscow Trials

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By PETER ATWOOD and EMMA SILVER NEW YORK-On March 19, some 200 people attended a rally to publicize and broaden the support for a campaign to clear the names of all the accused in the Moscow Trials of 1937-38. The rally, held at the New School for Social Research, was organized and sponsored by the Moscow Trials Campaign Committee.

The event represented the successful culmination of a several-months-long campaign in the United States to gather signatures of academics, unionists, and other prominent people who support the demand for rehabilitation of all the Moscow Trials victims while opposing the cold-war policies of the U.S. government.

This effort has been part of an international campaign which has generated broad support and has been widely endorsed Several signatories—including Paul Siegel (author), Juliet Ucelli (New York Marxist School), Morris Schappes (editor, Jewish Currents), Conrad Lynn (NAACP lawyer), Marilyn Vogt-Downey (translator, "Samizdat"), and Esteban Volkov (the grandson of Leon Trotsky)-came to speak at the rally.

Messages from supporters Bill Henning, George Saunders, and Noam Chomsky were also read.

The Moscow Trials, engineered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, were a shameful parody of justice. Absurd charges and extracted confessions were devised to obliterate the historical stature of many of Lenin's comrades in the victorious October 1917 Revolution.

Following the show trials of famous Communist Party leaders, millions of people from every walk of life were killed in the purges that ensued. Moreover, the ideals of socialism and the prestige of the Russian Revolution were indelibly tarnished.

Today, the Gorbachev regime, confronted by economic near-paralysis, is pushing for restructuring (perestroika) and openness (glasnost). In the process, several of the Moscow Trials defendants, among them Nikolai Bukharin, have been cleared.

But the rehabilitation must not be reserved only for those with whom Gorbachev finds himself in ideological agreement. The rehabilitation must include Leon Trotsky, who while in exile was presented as the "mastermind" of the conspiracy, and other members of the anti-Stalinist Left Opposition. The rehabilitation must be total.

As the chairperson, Naomi Allen, stated in opening the rally, the fight for rehabilitation is urgent today. There is no solution to the problems faced by Soviet society without a "thoroughly democratic participation by the Soviet people."

We reprint below portions of Paul Siegel's speech given to the March 19 rally on behalf of the victims of the Moscow Trials. Siegel is an author and professor emeritus at Long Island University.

The Moscow Trials of 1936-38 were a turning point in Soviet history, marking the consolidation of Stalin's autocratic rule. They were also a gigantic frameup on a scale that has few if any historical parallels.

Virtually the entire surviving Bolshevik leadership, including all of the six surviving members of the October Revolution Political Bureau with the exception of Stalin, was charged with having made secret agreements with Hitler and the Mikado to destroy and dismember the Soviet Union.

It was necessary for Stalin to 1 months for $6. 6 months for $3.

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14 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1988 to destroy all those capable of leading opposition to him by branding them as traitors and agents of enemy powers and to stamp out the Bolshevik tradition of a full and open debate and the right to fight for ideas diverging from those of the leadership.

It would be wrong, however, to attribute the trials simply to the malevolence of one man. This would be the "cult of the personality" in reverse. The cumulative effects of the war, the Allied blockade and military intervention, the civil war, famine, and typhus were devastating for a backward country subject to the pressures of its barbaric past and of imperialism's barbaric present.

Under these conditions, workers' democracy receded and a bureaucracy faithless to the ideals of the revolution achieved supremacy. Stalin based himself on this bureaucracy, whose privileges and power he extended.

Today, Soviet society-as Gorbachev has freely admitted—has reached an impasse. The command structure built under Stalin has become increasingly a brake on the economy, especially in the spheres of quality and of creative initiative.

The section of the bureaucracy now dominant in the Soviet leadership, in seeking to cope with these crucial problems, has found it necessary to pursue a policy of greater openness. This means, among other things, taking up past history—the official version of which Soviet historians have admitted the Soviet people do not believe.

The historian Yuri Afanasiev has said, "Let us talk about the past, but it is the future of socialism that is in question." Afanasiev, however, came under sharp attack and has lost his post in the Communist Party. It is very far from certain, therefore, that complete rehabilitation of all the victims of the Moscow Trials will take place.

A great international campaign for such rehabilitation is being conducted in solidarity with the courageous people in the Soviet Union who have spoken up on the matter. It has obtained the endorsements of 97 representatives of socialist, labor, and radical parties in [] Send me more information about Socialist Action.

Socialist trade-union, cultural, academic, and civil-libertarian fields in these and 17 other countries.

The U.S. Moscow Trials Campaign Committee salutes all those engaged in the campaign and urges all of you to join in the effort.

We reprint below portions of Esteban Volkov's speech to the March 19 rally on behalf of the victims of the Moscow Trials. Volkov is the grandson of Leon Trotsky.

First, I want to thank you for the invitation to speak in this very important historical event, because really we are assisting in a very important and decisive historical moment.

The original idea of socialism in its empirical form and letter, its most articulate and scientific form-thạt is to say Marxism-arose in response to the social conditions of exploitation, injustice, and alienation of the human being.

This condition, which has prevailed in all societies accounted for by history, and has taken its most sophisticated and extended forms in capitalist society, still persists, unfortunately, in post-capitalist and presocialist societies with their stratified economies under bureaucratic dominion.

If Gorbachev and his leadership really want to succeed in achieving perestroika and glasnost, and return to the road of authentic socialism, it is sine qua non that light should be cast on all the crimes of the Stalinist era. All the names of the innocent victims have to be made known and must be cleared. The historical truth must be reestablishea Among these long lists of victims, we have to emphasize once more the indomitable Russian revolutionary and Marxist theorist, Leon Trotsky. He was a key protagonist in the triumph of the Russian Revolution, and afterward he became its fiercest defender in a deadly fight against the Stalinist counterrevolution.

Leon Trotsky will show us how far glasnost will advance. The avalanche of lies, falsification, and calumnies that have covered the Soviet Union and the other Communist countries for more than half a century have to be exposed and eliminated forever. Free and open discussion has to be reestablished, as it was at the beginning of the Bolshevik Party.

The last pages of history have shown us that the abolition of private property over the means of production is not a magic formula that will automatically take humanity into an earthly paradise. A second element of great importance to reach socialism is the solution of the equation of power; like property, it has to be shared by all the working sector of society.

If the power is only in the hands of one social group, chances are that this group will sooner or later keep the best and the most of what society offers and will not have very much concern about what is left over for the remaining groups.

The third important factor is to establish an adequate level of abundance which would permit the fulfillment of all human needs. Scarcity will always generate stratification of society, with inequalities on a national and international scale.

The fourth factor will be the prevailing of internationalism. "Socialism" within national borders will always be a potential source of conflicts and wars.

Man came out of the cave semi-naked. He has reached the moon, has freed the energy of the atom, developed the super-computer, and has created the new science of genetic engineering. Is he then unable to create a more just and harmonic social organization on the earth, or has human history reached its last page?

Until the present, the train of history has not reached its final destination: authentic socialism. It had to make a previous stop in an inhospitable desert. Fortunately, little by little, the train is resuming its forward motion.

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'Stalin staged show trials to stamp out open debate'

'Trotsky became the revolution's fiercest defender'