Response to a Stalinist, Did Trotsky Murder Gorky in Collaboration With Hitler? [Photo: Joseph Stalin shaking hands with Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact on August 23rd, 1929. It was Stalin who collaborated with Hitler, not Trotsky.] So you claim Trotsky worked with German and Japanese fascist agents to murder Maxim Gorky in 1936. This is absurd. First a little timeline. Leon Trotsky was in power in the USSR from the October Revolution in 1917 until he was exiled by Stalin in 1927. Up until 1923 Trotsky and Lenin were the two most important leaders of the revolutionary government, but Stalin had successfully undermined their strength in several ways before Lenins death in 1924. Stalin eventually moved against almost every original leader of the Russian Revolution, murdering almost every single one of them, Trotsky included. Maxim Gorky, who had been exiled by the tsar, returned to Russia with the successful revolution in 1917. He, however, died in June 1936 at a time when neither Lenin nor Trotsky were in power. Accusations have been made that Stalin murdered Gorky with his NKVD at that time. This is entirely possible, especially since Stalin was carrying out brutal repression of the left at that time. The Left Opposition to Stalin, which supported Trotsky and who were eventually all murdered by Stalin, was functioning in the USSR at that time as well, but they had absolutely no motive to murder Maxim Gorky. In addition, that simply was not the way in which the Left Opposition functioned. It was the way in which Stalin functioned, however. You present zero evidence for your claims and not even a plausible story. You claim, as the Stalin falsifiers of history did, that Trotsky worked with German and Japanese fascists in this plot. This is absolute absurdity. Between Trotsky and Stalin, the only one who supported Hitler was Stalin who did so for a brief period of history under the Hitler-Stalin Pact. After that pact was broken with Nazi Germanys invasion of the USSR, Trotskyists firmly supported the USSR against Hitler. We even sent a letter to Stalin from the GULAG work camps offering to fight at the front against Hitler. Stalin turned this down. The Trotskyists then decided to help in the war effort by increasing their work hours. Eventually Stalin had them all shot. Trotskyists have never held the position the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We do, however, side with countries that have elements of systems we do not like in wars when we know that the alternative is far worse. The USSR under Stalin was a prime example. Hitlers brutal capitalist system had brought mass murder to a level of industrial production never seen before or since in the world. Meanwhile, the planned socialist economy of the USSR, won under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, advanced one of the poorest countries in the world to the point of being an industrial powerhouse capable of defeating two major imperialist invasions and rebuilding to provide everyone with a job, free education, and free healthcare. We defended that socialist economy from imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution while at the same time calling for the overthrow of the brutal Stalinist bureaucracy to bring authentic workers democracy. The GULAG system was ended after Stalin died, but the top down form of bureaucratic rule and privilege that Stalin established continued, so we continued our calls for political revolution while defending the gains of the revolution. In addition, we continue to celebrate the USSRs victory over Nazi Germany as a world historic victory for the working class. Through all of this, it was ONLY the Stalinists who made an alliance with Hitler, and they did that openly under the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Under that agreement, Hitler and Stalin divided Poland, with Stalin allowing Hitler to carry out his carnage in half of Poland. Here is how Trotsky denounced this crime carried out by Stalin and Hitler in Poland: 18 September 1939, Leon Trotsky War, like revolution, is distinguished by the fact that at a blow it destroys idiotic formulas and reveals the naked reality underneath. “Defense of democracy” is an empty formula. The invasion of Poland is a bloody reality. Today it is clear that in the very same years in which the Comintern was bringing to a head its clamorous campaign for an alliance of the democracies against fascism, the Kremlin was preparing a military understanding with Hitler against the so-called democracies. Even complete idiots will have to understand now that the Moscow trials, with the aid of which the Bolshevik Old Guard was destroyed under the accusation of collaboration with the Nazis, were nothing but camouflage for the Stalinist alliance with Hitler. The secret is out. While the British and French missions were discussing with Voroshilov the problem of the most effective defense of Poland, the same Voroshilov, together with the representatives of the German general staff, was discussing the best manner in which to smash and divide Poland. The Kremlin not only deceived Chamberlain, Daladier, and Beck, but also, and systematically, the working classes of the Soviet Union and the entire world. Some fatuous people and snobs accuse me of being impelled to make horrible predictions out of “hatred” of Stalin. As if serious people allow themselves to be swayed by their personal feelings in questions of historical importance! The inexorable facts prove that reality is more horrible than all the predictions that I made. In entering Polish territory, the Soviet armies knew beforehand at what point they would meet — and as allies, not as enemies — with the armies of Hitler. The operation was determined in its main points by the secret clauses of the German-Soviet pact; the general staffs of both countries were to be found in constant collaboration; the Stalinist invasion is nothing but a symmetrical supplement of the Hitlerite operations. Such are the facts. Until very recently the Kremlin, trying to gain the friendship of Warsaw (in the given case, to deceive it), declared that the slogan of self-determination for Western Ukraine (Eastern Galicia [i.e. the Ukrainian areas in eastern Poland]) was criminal. The purges and executions in the Soviet Ukraine were provoked mainly by the fact that the Ukrainian revolutionists, against the will of Moscow, aspired to the liberation of Galicia from Polish oppression. Now the Kremlin covers its intervention in Poland with a penitent concern for the “liberation” and “unification” of the Ukrainian and White Russian peoples. In reality, the Soviet Ukraine, more than any other part of the Soviet Union, is bound by the ferocious chains of the Moscow bureaucracy. The aspirations of various sections of the Ukrainian nation for their liberation and independence are completely legitimate and have a very intense character. But these aspirations are directed also against the Kremlin. If the invasion gains its end, the Ukrainian people will find itself “unified”, not in national liberty, but in bureaucratic enslavement. Furthermore, not a single honest person will be found who will approve of the “emancipation” of eight million Ukrainians and White Russians, at the price of the enslavement of twenty-three million Poles! Even if the Kremlin eventually organized a plebiscite in occupied Galicia, on the Goebbels pattern, it would not fool a soul. For it is not a question of emancipating an oppressed people, but rather one of extending the territory where bureaucratic oppression and parasitism will be practiced. The Hitlerite press gives absolute approval to the unification and “liberation” of the Ukrainians under the claws of the Kremlin. With this Hitler is accomplishing two tasks: first, drawing the Soviet Union into his military orbit; second, taking a further preparatory step on the road towards the solution of his program of a “Greater Ukraine”. Hitler’s policy is the following: the establishment of a definite order for his conquests, one after the other, and the creation by each new conquest of a new system of “friendships”. At the present stage Hitler concedes the Greater Ukraine to his friend Stalin as a temporary deposit. In the following stage he will pose the question of who is the owner of this Ukraine: Stalin or he, Hitler. There are people who dare to compare the Stalin-Hitler alliance with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. What a mockery! The Brest-Litovsk negotiations were carried out openly before all humanity. The Soviet revolution, at the end of 1917 and beginning of 1918, didnt have even a single battalion capable of carrying on the fight. Hohenzollern Germany attacked Russia, taking Soviet provinces and military supplies. The young government had no other physical possibility than to sign the peace treaty. This peace was openly defined by us as a capitulation of a disarmed revolution before a powerful enemy. We did not worship the Hohenzollerns but rather denounced the Brest-Litovsk peace publicly as extortion and robbery. We did not deceive the workers and peasants. The present Stalin-Hitler pact was concluded despite the existence of an army of several millions, and the immediate task of the pact was to facilitate Hitlers smashing of Poland and its division between Berlin and Moscow. Where is the analogy? The words of Molotov to the effect that the Red Army would cover itself with “glory” in Poland, are to the ineradicable shame of the Kremlin. The Red Army received the order to defeat in Poland those who had been defeated by Hitler. This is the shameful and criminal task that the Red Army was assigned by the jackals of the Kremlin. -Leon Trotsky, 1939 Feel free to chime in, discussion at the end of the article: Escalated Government Attacks on Homeless, Journalism, & Public Criticism: Santa Cruz & SJ by Steven Argue https://indybay.org/newsitems/2015/01/18/18767130.php
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 19:59:16 +0000
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