THE SERVILITY TO FASCISM OF TROTSKY AND COMPANY
THE HEROISM OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PROLETARIAT AND THE SERVILITY TO FASCISM OF TROTSKY AND COMPANY
A T THE Leipzig trial Comrade Dimitroff was able to achieve a 1 great historical moral victory over the powers of darkness and reaction only because throughout his struggle he showed how to combine Leninist-Stalinist principle with personal courage and fearlessness. The heroic behavior of Comrade Dimitroff, the moral elevation of every one of his pronouncements, compelled not only the advanced sections of the workers to watch his fearless struggle with great intensity, but even those who mistrusted and were prejudiced against the Communists. As Comrade Dimitroff has pointed out more than once, fearlessness in the face of death is not a personal quality, but the quality of the revolutionary proletariat, the quality of every real Communist. This quality is developed and molded in ceaseless work among the masses, in constantly overcoming the difficulties and dangers of the everyday struggle.
His example roused in the masses determination to fight against the bitterest enemy of the workers, against fascism. All over the world a powerful mass movement arose in support of Dimitroff. And into this movement w7as drawn all that is honest in international public opinion. This international solidarity displayed itself in the most varied and in increasingly emphatic forms. It became a really great force directed against the fascist incendiaries who set fire to the Reichstag. The Leipzig trial was transformed from an anti-Communist trial into a great antifascist demonstration and a fiasco for fascism.
Hitler fascism found itself hopelessly isolated all over the world. The mask was torn from the faces of the incendiaries. They were surrounded by universal hatred and contempt. Fascism stood in danger of this wave of universal anger spreading to Germany and sweeping away its demagogic influence even among its own
Brown Shirts. Hitler could do nothing else but release and deport the prisoners of Leipzig.
The fascist murderers, insolent provocateurs and incorrigible criminals in the prisoners’ dock in the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. displayed a depth of moral degradation that is rarely met with even in purely criminal cases. The Trotsky-Zinoviev gang of malicious saboteurs of socialist construction and enemies of socialism, who hated the people of the Soviet Union and feared it, strove to seize power by means of terroristic assassination and resorted to the most subtle and shameful methods of provocation, camouflage and deception adopted by the fascist secret police. They did all they possibly could to deceive the Bolshevik Party, to deceive the organs of the government, to deceive the people of the Soviet Union, and to deceive all honest people. Even their relations among themselves were based on mutual deception and the readiness of the chiefs to betray their subordinates at any moment.
“Who will believe a single word of ours?” asks Evdokimov in opening his last plea. “Who will believe us, who played so detestable a comedy at the fresh grave of Kirov whom we had killed? Who will believe us, who only by accident, not through any fault of our own, did not become the assassins of Stalin and other leaders of the people? Who will believe us, who are facing the court as a counter-revolutionary gang of bandits, as allies of fascism, of the Gestapo? Did the heart of even a single one of us, who were convicted in last year’s trial of the Zinovievites in Leningrad, shudder at the thought of our accomplices remaining at liberty, knowing as we did, although in prison, that any day, any hour, another dastardly shot might be fired? Not one of us did what he should have done had we been bound by the thinnest of threads to the cause of the revolution.” (Ibid., p. 166.)
The diabolical cunning and base deception by which the Trotsky-Zinoviev gang succeeded, happily only for a time, in removing the traces of their complicity in the foul murder of Comrade Kirov are characteristic of the whole system of duplicity and provocation which for a period of many years Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their henchmen pursued against the building of socialism, against the Bolshevik Party and against the Soviet government.
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