[D66] Seventy-eight years since...

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Seventy-eight years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky
21 August 2018

Seventy-eight years ago, on August 21, 1940, Leon Trotsky died in Mexico
City of wounds inflicted the previous day by Ramon Mercader del Rio, an
agent of the Soviet Stalinist secret police, the GPU.

The assassination of Trotsky—the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian
Revolution, commander of the Red Army and founder of the Fourth
International—was a monstrous political crime. It was the pinnacle of a
wave of violent counterrevolution that included the coming to power of
fascism in Germany in 1933, the defeat of the Spanish Revolution of
1936-39, and the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

Within the Soviet Union, a campaign of political genocide was carried
out by the Stalinist regime against workers and intellectuals trained in
the Marxist tradition, including nearly all the principal leaders of the
Russian Revolution. Over 800,000 people were murdered in the Great
Terror of 1936-39. As Trotsky wrote in the 1937 essay “Stalinism and
Bolshevism”: “The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism
not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood.”

Trotsky led the political movement that opposed the bureaucratic and
nationalist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s struggle against
Stalin was not, as countless historians have falsely argued, motivated
by subjective ambition for personal power. Rather, the struggle
reflected two diametrically opposed political perspectives.

Stalin’s consolidation of power in the Soviet Union, facilitated by the
death of Lenin in 1924, was a usurpation of power by a nationalist and
conservative bureaucratic caste that emerged within the framework of an
economically backward and internationally isolated workers’ state. The
Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country,” first proposed in 1924,
repudiated the internationalist perspective of the Russian Revolution
and justified the subordination of the world revolution to the interests
of the bureaucratic apparatus in the Soviet Union.

The Left Opposition, which Trotsky initiated in 1923, and the Fourth
International, which he founded in 1938, were guided by the theory of
permanent revolution, which was the theoretical basis of the Russian
Revolution itself. The establishment of a genuinely socialist society,
Trotsky insisted, was not possible in one country. The overthrow of a
national capitalist government could only begin the process of the
transition to socialism. This historical law was all the more
inescapable in an economically backward country. The realization of
socialism in the Soviet Union required the overthrow of capitalism by
the working class in the advanced countries of Western Europe and North
America.

Living in exile in Mexico City, Trotsky understood that his life was
under continuous threat. His refuge in the North American country
followed his expulsion from the Russian Communist Party in November
1927, his exile to Alma Ata in January 1928, his expulsion from the
Soviet Union in 1929 and his flight from Turkey to France and Norway,
and then to his final home in Mexico in 1937.

By 1940, Stalin had murdered many leading representatives of the Fourth
International, including Trotsky’s political secretary Erwin Wolf in
July 1937, the GPU defector and supporter of the Fourth International
Ignace Reiss in September 1937, Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov in February
1938, and secretary of the Fourth International Rudolf Klement in July
1938, on the eve of the founding congress.

On May 24, 1940, an assassination squad headed by the arch-Stalinist
painter David Siqueiros launched an attack on Trotsky’s home, using
machine guns to spray bullets into the bedroom where Trotsky and his
wife, Natalia Sedova, were sleeping. While both escaped with their
lives, Trotsky knew it would not be the last attempt. Following the
attack, he wrote, “I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule
but as an exception to the rule. In a reactionary epoch such as ours, a
revolutionist is compelled to swim against the stream.”

Then, on August 20, as the attention of the world was focused on the
Second World War, Stalin’s assassin dealt the final blow that felled the
greatest living Marxist and strategist of world revolution.

Despite the tragic and far-reaching consequences of Trotsky’s
assassination, the crime was not seriously investigated until the
International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) launched the
Security and the Fourth International investigation in 1975.

The Security and the Fourth International investigation produced a
series of revelations proving that the assassination of Trotsky and his
supporters was orchestrated through a global network of spies and
assassins who infiltrated the Trotskyist movement. These included Mark
Zborowski, Robert Sheldon Harte, Floyd Cleveland Miller, Sylvia Callen
and Joseph Hansen.

Callen was the personal secretary of Socialist Workers Party leader
James P. Cannon, a position she used to provide crucial information to
the GPU on Trotsky’s activities (see: “An ‘Exemplary Comrade’: The
Socialist Workers Party’s 40-year-long cover-up of Stalinist spy Sylvia
Callen”). Hansen was one of Trotsky’s secretaries in Mexico City, a
position that allowed him to make critical decisions that facilitated
the plot against Trotsky’s life.

The failure to investigate this crime had the impact of not only
covering up for those who were involved in its commission, but also of
undermining an understanding of the nature of the Stalinist
counterrevolution. This cover-up was motivated above all by political
interests. In 1953, the Fourth International was split by a
pro-Stalinist faction led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. While still
attempting to present themselves as Trotskyists, the Pabloites promoted
the revisionist theory that the Stalinist bureaucracy could be pressured
to carry out revolutionary policies.

This political orientation to Stalinism was accompanied by rabid
hostility to any effort to expose its crimes. As the ICFI’s
investigation exposed the network of GPU agents who had penetrated the
Fourth International and uncovered evidence of previously unknown
relations maintained by Hansen with both the GPU and the FBI, the
Pabloites responded with an international campaign of slander. They
rejected out of hand the call by the ICFI for the formation of a parity
commission—consisting of an equal number of representatives from the
ICFI and the international Pabloite organization—to examine the evidence
discovered by the International Committee.

On January 14, 1977, the Pabloite United Secretariat organized a public
rally to denounce Security and the Fourth International and Gerry Healy,
who was then the leader of the British section of the International
Committee. For two hours, leading Pabloites and their allies—including
Ernest Mandel, George Novack, Pierre Lambert and Tariq Ali—screamed
insults and invectives from the speaker’s podium. But not one of them
referred to the evidence that had been published by the International
Committee.

When Gerry Healy, the principal target of the tirades, rose from the
audience to answer the denunciations and repeat the ICFI’s call for a
parity committee, Tariq Ali, the chairperson of the proceedings, ruled
him out of order and refused to allow him to speak. It should be noted
that Ali was to become a fervent admirer of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris
Yeltsin, and he repudiated any association with Trotskyism decades ago.

The evidence uncovered by the Security and the Fourth International
investigation has been completely substantiated. But to this day, the
remnants of the Pabloite parties and their leaders have never
acknowledged that the attack on the International Committee was slanderous.

For the ICFI, the Security and the Fourth International investigation
was not only a question of exposing state agents. It was essential to
clarifying fundamental political questions related to the
counterrevolutionary character of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the
capitalist state. It was inextricably connected to the fight against
Pabloite revisionism and all efforts to cover over the crimes of Stalinism.

Its great achievement was to uncover previously unknown facts about the
mechanisms and extent of the Stalinist conspiracy and to educate the
Trotskyist cadre in the historical experiences of the movement, the
character of Stalinism and the role of Pabloite revisionism.

To a new generation of workers and youth politicized in an era of mass
state surveillance and police repression, protecting the independence of
the workers movement in both physical and political terms is a matter of
life or death. They will find in the Security and the Fourth
International investigation crucial political lessons for the defense of
the workers’ and socialist movement against the agencies of the
capitalist state.

The Security and the Fourth International investigation is a critical
part of the revolutionary heritage of the International Committee. It
was the only organization prepared to wage a struggle to expose the
crimes of the GPU at a time when the Stalinist regimes still held state
power and exercised immense political influence. It proved in practice
that the ICFI adhered to the principles of Trotskyism and was
uncompromising in its struggle against imperialism and all of its
political agencies.

On this day, the seventy-eighth anniversary of Trotsky’s death, the
International Committee pays tribute to the memory of this extraordinary
revolutionist as it carries forward the fight for the principles and
program of world socialism to which Trotsky dedicated his life.

Eric London and David North