A Path of Treachery

 Trotsky The Traitor

Alex Bittleman

CHAPTER II

TROTSKY, Zinoviev, Piatakov and Co. are "Old Bolsheviks", 

some people say. They are the "fathers" of the Russian revolution, it is claimed. On this false basis, the question is asked: How is it possible for these "founders" of the Soviet system to try to betray it, and to join for this pur· pose with the worst enemies of socialism? 

Those who genuinely ask such questions apparently do not know that this gang of counter-revolutionary bandits have had a long history, that their transformation into allies of fascism is no sudden or overnight affair. They were moving in that direction for a long time. 

State Prosecutor Vyshinsky, in his summing up speech, stated the thing very clearly:

"Like a moving picture film operated backwards, this trial has called to our memory and has shown us again all the basic stages of the historic path of the Trotskyites and of Trotskyism which spent more than thirty years to prepare at last this final transformation into the storm troops of fascism."

This historic path of Trotskyism was a path of struggle against Lenin and Bolshevism, a path of double-dealing and treachery. It is worse than ridiculous therefore to speak of Trotsky, whom Lenin branded as a Judas, and of his agents, as "Old Bolsheviks". 

Just a few high lights of this "historic path of Trotskyism": As far back as 1904, almost 33 years ago, Trotsky started on his historic path. He published four pamphlets entitled: Our Political Tasks. In these pamphlets Trotsky challenged Bolshevism. He denounced and slandered the Bolshevik path to victory over tsarism and capitalism outlined by Lenin and accepted by the Bolsheviks. He had the brazenness to attack Lenin as "a leader of the reactionary wing" of the Party.

Between 1904 and 1911, Lenin and Stalin were busy training the future Bolsheviks who led the people to victory over the tsar and capitalism; they were busy organizing the working class and its a1lies in daily struggle against their exploiters. Thus they have built the Bolshevik Party. 

What was Trotsky doing? Fighting Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks, organizing combinations of all sorts of opportunists and servants of capitalism to block the road of proletarian victory. 

In 1911-12 Trotsky organized the infamous "August Bloc", the prototype of the latter day "Trotsky-Zinoviev Bloc". The chief aim of the "August Bloc" was to fight Lenin and the Bolshevik policies. And who were the people that went into the making of this "August Bloc"? Mensheviks, agents of capitalism in the labor movement, people thrown out of the ranks of the Bolshevik Party. 

Study Lenin's writings and you will see how much time and energy he had to devote to unmasking and combating Trotsky, the Judas. Twenty years ago Lenin found it necessary to warn the workers against Trotsky in these words:

"The young generation of workers should know well with whom they are dealing."

Recalling these facts of the Trotskyite path of treachery, State Prosecutor Vyshinsky asked :

"Is it an accident that the Trotskyites were finally transformed into a nest and hot-bed of degeneration and thermidorian policy, as Stalin once said? Is it an accident that Trotsky who, after the Revolution made his way into the ranks of our Party, slipped up and adopted a counter-revolutionary Menshevik position and was thrown out beyond the borders of our state, beyond the borders of the Soviet Union?"

By this time, the reader should be in a position to answer this question for himself. And to answer the correct way, the way Vyshinsky did. 

"It is not an accident because prior to the October Revolution as well, Trotsky and his friends fought against Lenin and Lenin's Party as they fight now against Stalin and the Party of Lenin and Stalin.

They come to their shameful end because they have followed this role for many years, have sung the praises of capitalism and have lacked faith in the success of socialist construction and in the victory of socialism.

"That is why they come finally to develop a program of capitalist restoration. That is why they proceeded to betray and sell our native land."

Trotsky never believed in the possibility of socialism in the Soviet Union. He always claimed-and that can be found in all his writings-that in a backward agricultural country like old Russia, where the peasantry was predominant and the peasantry could not be won to support the socialist revo] ution, socialism was impossible. This is the foundation of Trotskyism. 

Holding such views, it was not at all surprising to see Trotsky propose in 1922 that the industrial plants of the Soviet Union he mortgaged to private capital in order to secure the much needed credits at the time. In fact, Trotsky quite freely theorized on this question. He declared-and that again is a matter of public record-that the Soviet economy was "more and more fusing with capitalist economy", that the Soviet Union "would all the time be under the control of world economy". 

Recalling these incidents of the "historic path of Trotsky­ism", Vyshinsky recalls the answer which Stalin had given:

"Capitalist control, said Stalin, means political control. It means the destruction of the political independence of our country and the adaptation of the laws of our country to the interests and tastes of international capitalist economy."

Trotsky was willing to accept that. Not Stalin. Not the Bol­sheviks. Stalin made that quite clear at the time. He said:

"If it is a question of such real capitalist control, then I must declare that such control does not exist and .never will exist here as long as our proletariat is alive and as long as we have the dictatorship of the proletariat here."

Some ''clever" writers are exhausting their ingenuity in trying to construct a "fight for power" between Stalin and Trotsky as individuals. It is not that at all. Trotsky defames Stalin and plot" against him, organizes terrorist acts against Stalin, "to remove him", using the conspiratorial language of the Trotskyites, because Stalin leads in the building of socialism, because under his daily guidance socialism in the Soviet Union became triumphantly victorious. 

Yet, if it will help some people to understand the matter more easily by looking at it as a struggle between two individuals for power, all right, let us grant that for a moment. And having done so, we must ask: And what are these individuals fighting about? What do they want power for and what do they propose to do with it? This is a fair question. And when you try to answer it, where do you get? Exactly where we were a while ago. You discover once more that it is a fight of a group of counter-revolutionists and allies of fascism, led by Trotsky, against the Soviet Union and its socialist system, headed by Stalin. You find out again that "Trotsky fights Stalin" because Trotsky seeks the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union which Stalin opposes, which he has opposed all the time in "his fight against Trotsky" and Trotskyism. 

Yes, some people say; but Trotsky and the Trotskyites are Socialists. No, is the answer. They are not. What is true is that they say they are Socialists. But so does Hitler. His fascist party calls itself "The National German Socialist Workers' Party". And what does that prove? 

The Russian revolution (and not only the Russian) has many examples to show how people calling themselves "socialists" were in reality the worst enemies of socialism. 

There were the "Socialist Revolutionaries" who joined with White Guard generals and foreign intervention to def eat the socialist revolution and to dismember Russia. There were the Mensheviks who, in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, called upon the Kaiser's Germany and upon England to come in and help destroy the socialist revolution and to establish there foreign imperialist rule. Trotsky and the Trotskyites are fallowing a similar path. 

Once more it is necessary to keep in mind that this latest chain of treason did not come of a sudden. It is the culminating point of the historic path of Trotskyism.

Already more than ten years ago--ten years-the Trotsky ­Zinoviev combination began to resort to open crimes against the Soviet government, crimes punishable by Soviet criminal law. The so-called "New Opposition", headed by Trotsky, Zi­noviev and Kamenev, and participated in by Piatakov, Radek, Serebriakov, Muralov, Sokolnikov, Drobnis and Boguslavsky, the defendants in the January trial, took the path of struggle against the Soviet government into the streets. They tried to organize demonstrations and to involve the masses in the fight. And it was not their fault that they failed. The masses were against them. 

It will be recalled that at that time the Soviet government was meeting with a number of difficulties in the construction of socialism. The Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc attempted to exploit these difficulties in order to deliver a blow at the Soviet government. In 1932, also, the Soviet government was struggling to over­come certain difficulties, and the Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc was on the job again-waiting for difficulties and seizing upon them to fight the Soviet government and the socialist system. 

State Prosecutor Vyshinsky summed up on the "socialist past" of these criminals in a very convincing way.· He said:

"The question may arise in some minds-how is it that these people who fought for socialism so many years can now be accused of these monstrous crimes? Perhaps these people are accused of something that by the very essence of their whole past socialist revolutionary Bolshevik activity they cannot be accused of?

"I answer this question. We accuse these gentlemen of being traitors to socialism. We motivate this accusation not only by what was committed (this is the subject of the accusation) but we say the history of their downfall began long before they organized the so-called 'Parallel Center', this off-shoot of the criminal Trotsky­ist-Zinovievist united bloc.

"The organic link is here at hand. The historic link is here at hand. From the platform of 1926, from anti-Soviet street demonstrations, illegal print shops, and the league with White Guard officers which they also accepted then, to destructive work, espionage, terror and betrayal of the fatherland-from 1932 to 1936 is one step. And they took this step."

They took this step and became the allies of fascism, plotters for the defeat of the Soviet Union ; bandits dismemberment collaborators with Hitler Germany and military-fascist Japan; terrorists, assassins and wreckers. 

Some still maintain that if Trotsky did come to assassination and individual terror as a "method" of struggle against the Soviet government, he must have come to it all of a sudden and at the last minute. But this too is not so. Vyshinsky quoted at the trial from articles in the Trotsky Opposition Bulletin, numbers 36 and 37 from October, 1934, such statements as this:

"It would he childish to think that the Stalinist bureaucracy can be removed with the help of the Party or of the Soviet Congress. There are not left any normal constitutional ways for removing the ruling cliques. They can be forced to hand over power to the proletarian vanguard ... only by force."

Never mind the brazen audacity of the Trotskyites calling themselves "the proletarian vanguard". They called themselves Socialists, also, and Communists. The important thing is the open call to force and violence to compel the Soviet government "to hand over power" to Trotsky so he can restore capitalism; the open call to force "to remove" the Stalinist leadership. The murder of Kirov was the fruit of this appeal. The terroristic conspiracies exposed at the August and Janu­ary trials are the result and further development of Trotsky's call in 1934 for force and violence. 

Together with Trotsky, Hearst and Lloyd George may de­plore the fact that there are in the Soviet Union "no normal constitutional ways" for overthrowing the Soviet government, for restoring capitalism, or for selling out the territories of the Soviet Union to German fascism and to military-fascist Japan. All honest workers and sincere progressives will say: thank the dictatorship of the proletariat that there are ·'no normal" and easy ways of attempting to destroy the Soviet Union. Trotsky, Hearst and Hitler will continue to miss these "normal ways". Progressive and genuinely democratic human­ity will applaud this fact in the full realization that the dic­tatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union, embodied in the new Stalinist Constitution, has proven most effective in building socialism, and in creating a powerful fortress for peace and democracy throughout the world.

Confessions and Objective Evidence