Vol. 79/No. 28      August 10, 2015

BY JOSEPH HANSEN  
The household was still in agony over the death of Leon Sedov when Stalin made another move. On February 23, the Mexican trade-union confederation, which was controlled by the Mexican Communist Party through Lombardo Toledano, passed a slanderous resolution against Trotsky. The aim of the resolution was to put pressure on the [Lázaro] Cárdenas government to cancel Trotsky’s asylum and deport him.

There was no alternative but to answer immediately. Trotsky did this the following day.

Unknown to us or the public in general, on precisely the same day that Laborde and Lombardo Toledano had their resolution passed by the CTM, Andrei Vyshinsky, the procurator of the USSR, signed an indictment against twenty-one members of a “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.” This was announced in Moscow on February 27. The trial was to open March 2.

Among the defendants were some internationally famous names, including Nikolai I. Bukharin and Alexei I. Rykov. As part of the “amalgam,” Stalin included one of his own faithful lieutenants, Yagoda, the former head of the secret political police and organizer of the first “great” show trial in 1936 that doomed Zinoviev and Kamenev and others. A poignant figure for L.D. [Trotsky] and Natalia [Sedova, his wife,] was Christian Rakovsky, a longtime friend of the family.

As in the previous trials, the main defendant, of course, was Trotsky, named by the prosecutor as the chief conspirator and archplotter.

Although Stalin had taken a year to prepare the script he had no intention whatever of prolonging the show. This was indicated by the suddenness of the announcement and the short time permitted the defendants before the trial opened. Stalin’s purpose in carrying the affair through at such a fast pace was to block efforts in other countries to mount pressure for a fair trial. It could be expected that the courtroom drama would be brief and that the defendants, or at least most of them, would be immediately executed. Perhaps Stalin counted on the whole thing being completed and the victims buried before Trotsky could expose the frame-up. Then as interest died, let the exiled revolutionary leader and his handful of followers try to overcome the weight of the worldwide propaganda machine of the Comintern backed by the mighty resources of the Soviet state. …

As the Moscow trial proceeded, L.D. followed the press closely. Each day he wrote a long statement which was then translated, typed up in a number of copies, taken to the wire services and daily papers in Mexico City, and airmailed to our cothinkers in various areas. We did not use a mimeograph, partly because it would have meant another step in a process where speed was at a premium.

Trotsky worked relentlessly — something like eighteen hours a day during the opening phase of the trial. Some of us who were younger worked still longer. We did not miss a single deadline.

Thus we functioned as a quite efficient and rather smooth, if small, team. This was in the tradition of Trotsky’s earlier staffs, a tradition handed down from one group of secretaries to another. In Russia, Trotsky’s secretariat was famed. Stalin had good reason to strike special blows at its members in hope of reducing and crippling Trotsky’s effectiveness. I never had the privilege of meeting the Russians. They perished in the concentration camps or from a shot in the head from a GPU pistol. But I know what they were like. They were the kind that enjoy work, do not mind working under high pressure, are independent minded, and not without skills in several fields. With such coworkers, Trotsky collaborated on an equal basis, all working together for the great common goal. And this inspired them to reach a bit beyond themselves.

The impact of Trotsky’s statements on the third “great” Moscow trial was devastating. The swift response to the indictment, exposing the frame-up before the show even opened, turned the trial against Stalin in the eyes of world opinion from the first day, and each day became worse. Trotsky, the chief defendant, succeeded in turning the tables on Stalin, becoming the chief accuser. From then on, among knowledgeable people, it was definitive. Stalin, already branded by the findings of the John Dewey Commission in 1937, which had shown Trotsky and Leon Sedov to be innocent of the charges leveled in the previous frame-up trials, was now burdened with a “credibility gap” from which he could never escape.

Working with Trotsky was a serious matter — he was no dabbler in politics and he found dabbling intolerable in others; but it was also an extraordinary school for the young comrades on his staff. The way he responded to the March, 1938, Moscow trial served as a model demonstration of the importance of timing in meeting a deadly challenge and converting it into an opportunity. It meant pushing everything else aside with the utmost decisiveness, rising above personal problems, concentrating on the work at hand with maximum energy and every resource available. It was a rare opportunity for those of us then in our twenties to see Trotsky in action as a political fighter in a very acute battle.  
 
 
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