THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Trotskyism and Fascism

THE reactionary reformist leaders and their press, which have -*• taken the Trotsky-Zinoviev gang under their protection, now have to defend themselves from the anger of the members of their own organizations. For not a single worker, not a single honest, reasonable man, no matter what his political opinions may be, can fail to understand that the real meaning of the action of Messrs. Citrine, Bauer and Co. is not insistence upon any particu­lar form of court procedure, but defense of despicable terrorists, an attempt to secure immunity for the counter-revolutionary mis­creants who worked in collaboration with the Gestapo. 

More than that. The direct results of this defense of terrorists are already apparent: the chief organizer of these terrorists, the arch-provocateur Trotsky, is taking advantage of the protection afforded him by the secret police as well as by the reactionary leaders of reformism openly to utter threats against the leaders of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government, openly to call for vengeance. 

After the verdict of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., can anybody plead ignorance of the significance of these threats uttered by the adventurer who has not only lost the last traces of human dignity but every possible political means of carrying out his threats? Have any of Trotsky’s protectors grounds for saying that they cannot guess by what means this absolutely bankrupt counter-revolutionary counts on wreaking his vengeance upon the great people of the Land of the Soviets? Has he any other means than the help of the Gestapo and terror?

In order to escape from political responsibility for protecting the Trotsky-Zinoviev terrorists, the reactionary leaders of reform­ism are pouring slander upon the Soviet court, and they are doing all they can to discredit its verdict. In their cynical insolence they have gone to the lengths of hinting that the honest, proletarian trial of the criminal gang of Trotsky-Zinoviev agents recalled the 

Leipzig trial staged for the provocateur purpose of throwing upon the Communists the blame for the crimes committed by the Hitler government. 

But, while uttering these slanderous hints, the reactionary leaders refuse to say what there is “in common” between the Leipzig trial and the Moscow trial. And this is understandable, for nothing so exposes Trotsky’s protectors as a simple and con­scientious comparison of these two trials. The slanderers know this; and that is why, having uttered a crude lie, they try to get out of it in the hope that, as the saying goes: “Throw mud, some of it will stick.” 

But this trick won’t work! 

The workers must bowl the slanderers out; they must say to them: 

Gentlemen, you are throwing ambiguous hints—and because they are ambiguous they are particularly disgusting—hoping thereby to conceal the shameful part you are playing in pro­tecting despicable murderers. Remember that on September 23, 1933, three years ago, in his first speech at the fascist trial in Leipzig, Comrade Dimitroff changed roles: from an accused he became the menacing accuser of the fascist incendiaries and provocateurs. Please understand that a fair comparison between the honest proletarian trial and the provocateur, fascist trial merely emphasizes the malicious part you are now playing for the purpose of disrupting the united front and of sabotaging proletarian solidarity in helping the Spanish people. 

Both at the Leipzig trial and the Moscow trial a fight between two worlds was waged. On the one side was the historically con­demned—without any right of appeal, Sir Walter Citrine!— world of exploitation and oppression represented by its most reactionary and morally most corrupt elements, fascism. On the other side was the new world of socialism which has opened for humanity a free and joyous life of creativeness. 

The profound historical difference and the impassable gulf which divide Moscow from Leipzig are seen first of all in the alignment of the forces which are engaged in a life-and-death struggle—freedom and socialism on the one side, enslavement and fascism on the other. 

In Leipzig, the judge’s bench was occupied by fascism—that most ruthless enemy of human progress and civilization, the in­carnation of the most savage and unbridled obscurantism. In Leipzig, fascism played the role of judge because it, the most inveterate enemy of the overwhelming majority of the German people, had succeeded in establishing its bloody and barbarous power. 

In the prisoner’s dock at the Leipzig trial was Comrade Dimi- troff, the great proletarian warrior, though physically tortured in fascist captivity, with the scars inflicted by his manacles still vis­ible on his wrists, an indomitable, merciless and passionate ac­cuser of fascism. He was in the clutches of that most bloodthirsty fascist beast of prey because the working class of Germany had suffered a temporary, but severe, defeat, because German Social- Democracy had opened the gates to fascism, and the Communist Party was not yet strong enough to lead the masses into the decisive, victorious battle against it. 

In Moscow, in the Red capital of all the toilers, the alignment of class forces was entirely different. 

In Moscow the judge was socialism, organized as a state in which all forms of exploitation of man by man have already been abolished, a state which, thanks to the self-sacrificing and undeviating struggle of the toilers of the Land of Soviets under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party headed by the great Stalin, has become the most monolithic, strong and powerful state in the world. 

In the dock were the agents of the exploiting classes already routed in open battle, dregs which had nothing to support them in the present, and no prospects for the future. 

The Leipzig trial, like the burning of the Reichstag itself, was an act of provocateurs. Its object was to throw the blame for the burning of the Reichstag upon the Communists, to shield the real culprits, to create a pretext for releasing a fresh wave of brutal terror against the working class in order to exterminate the best of the German people. 

The Moscow trial was an open act of social defense by the people of the Soviet Union for the purpose of purging the Land of Soviets of the Trotsky-Zinoviev terrorist bandits, who, under the cloak of Marxism and even of Party membership, tried to do the work of the Gestapo. 

In Leipzig, cynical liars and provocateurs who feared the most elementary truth worse than a sentence of death upon themselves were on the judge’s bench. In Moscow, similar liars, who more than once have been caught in acts of despicable hypocrisy and deception, were in the prisoners’ dock. It is not surprising, therefore, that the preliminary investigations as well as the court proceedings, even from the standpoint of judicial procedure, were entirely different in Leipzig and in Moscow.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE LEIPZIG TRIAL—THE CHARGES IN THE PROLETARIAN COURT PROVED