We will eradicate the spies and saboteurs – agents of fascism
The struggle against saboteurs, traitors and trotskyites
From the days following the victory of the October Revolution on 7th November 1917 (new style) the young workers’ state, which was declared the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics a few years later, was under attack from the aggrieved and vicious capitalist and imperialist states who couldn’t countenance the workers and peasants of any country taking matters into their own hands.
In many ways the documents below share much in common with those posted on the Foreign Intervention page. Although there’s very much a crossover the documents presented here concentrate on how the Soviet Union sought to deal with this very, existential problem.
Even though the socialist revolution was for the majority of the population that didn’t mean to say all those who were the ‘beneficiaries’ of such a revolution would choose to go with the revolutionary workers and peasants. Some have been, are and will always be sycophants and forelock-tuggers and will follow whatever the ruling class (in whatever historical epoch) decide and will do their bidding even though it goes against their class.
Within pre-revolution Russian society there were many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) who would have seen the old Tsarist, feudal society as more to their liking than the new society based upon equality and justice. These included the old aristocracy (of an infinite number of levels on Romanov society), the kulaks (the richer peasants) as well as merchants and the petty bourgeoisie involved in an innumerable number of self employed activities.
In this issue the petty bourgeoisie play a particularly significant part. They will sit on their bitterness and hated and will bide their time to take vengeance upon any who they consider have robbed them of their potential. They are especially dangerous to a socialist society because, as Lenin said, they everyday, in every way, engender capitalism. The socialist state, therefore, by curtailing their activity produces for itself even more enemies.
And then we have the Communist Party itself. It is an unfortunate (and almost integral) aspect of the development of parties of the left (especially those who claim a revolutionary strategy) that there will be splits at some time. The First and Second Internationals are littered with such examples. However, it was the Russian Revolutionaries who were the first to actually attain (and retain) state power and put their theory into practice.
Therefore, there were, within the Party, those who had joined long before the opportunity for the taking of state power was on the cards. In such a situation many of them would have had different attitudes towards what the strategy should have been in the building of this new society. It cannot be stressed enough this was entirely new territory and if there had not been serious disagreements then that would have been a surprise. The problem in a socialist state surrounded by hostile forces is that such dissatisfaction could be – and was – used by the enemies of socialism and hence the eventually arrest and trial of some of those who had been ‘revolutionaries’ for decades. But past achievements don’t guarantee they will continue to follow the same revolutionary road.
When we consider this period of Soviet history we should remember the worlds of Chairman Mao Tse-tung from 1927, ‘a revolution is not a dinner party’.
Wreckers on trial, a record of the trial of the Industrial Party held in Moscow, November/December 1930, edited with a foreword by Andrew Rothstein, Workers’ library, New York, 1931, 214 pages.
The Moscow Trial – April 1933, the trial of British engineers involved in sabotage in the Soviet Union, Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee, London, 1933, 165 pages.
Trotskyism – Counter-Revolution in disguise, MJ Olgin, Moscow, 1935, reprint Proletarian Publishers, San Francisco, 1976?, 160 pages.
Report of court proceedings in the case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre, heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Moscow, August 19-24, 1936, People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1936, Red Star reprint 1976, 180 pages.
Trotskyism in the service of fascism against Socialism and Peace, from the court proceedings in the case of the Trotsky-Zinoviev Terrorist Center, Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky, Workers Library Publishers, New York, 1936, 67 pages.
Report of the court proceedings in the case of Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre, heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Moscow, January 23-30 1937, People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1937, Red Star reprint 1983, 580 pages.
The recent Russian ‘Trotskyite Centre’ trial, William Renwick Riddle, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Volume 28, No 3, September-October 1937, pp335-339, 5 pages.
Report of Court Proceedings in the case of the ‘Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’, heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Moscow, March 2-13 1938, People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1938, Red Star reprint 1983, 800 pages.
Mission to Moscow, Joseph E Davies, United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1936-1938, a record of confidential dispatches to the State Department, official and personal correspondence, current diary and journal entries, including notes and comment up to October 1941, Victor Gollanz, London, 1945, 472 pages.
Against Trotskyism, The Struggle of Lenin and the CPSU against Trotskyism, a collection of documents, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, 271 pages.
The Murder of Sergei Kirov, History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm, Grover Furr, Erythros Press and Media, Kettering, corrected edition November 2013, 435 pages. [too big for blog]
Trotsky’s Amalgams, (Trotsky’s Lies, The Moscow Trials As Evidence, The Dewey Commission), Trotsky’s Conspiracies of the 1930s, Volume One, Grover Furr, Erythros Press and Media, Kettering, corrected edition March 2016, 536 pages.
Yezhov vs. Stalin, the truth about mass repressions and the so-called ‘Great Terror’ in the USSR, Grover Furr, Erythros Press and Media, Kettering, corrected edition April 2017, 250 pages.
Leon Trotsky’s collaboration with Germany and Japan, Trotsky’s Conspiracies of the 1930s, Volume Two, Grover Furr, Erythros Press and Media, Kettering, 2017, 386 pages. [too bog for blog]
The Fraud of the Dewey Commission, Leon Trotsky’s Lies, Grover Furr, Red Star Press, New York, July 2018, 99 pages.
The Moscow Trials as evidence, Grover Furr, Red Star Press, New York, July 2018, 169 pages.
Trotsky’s Lies, Grover Furr, corrected edition, August 2019, Erythros Press and Media, Kettering, 2019, 196 pages.
Stalin, waiting for … the truth, exposing the falsehoods in Stephen Kotkins ‘Stalin, waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941’, Grover Furr, Red Star Publishers, New York, corrected edition April 2019, 393 pages.
New evidence of Trotsky’s conspiracy, Grover Furr, Erythros Press and Media, Kettering, 2020, 196 pages.
