May 2019
Under the banners of the Fourth International!
Recent discovery of the Bolshevik-Leninists documents and newspapers in the Stalin's Prisons and Political isolators in the early 1930s
Within the framework of May Day, a presentation of the Bolshevik-Leninists of the ‘30s manuscripts documents and newspapers was carried out in Argentina. The documents were found recently in the former Stalin political isolator in Verkhneuralsk, Russia.
In this meeting 3 notebooks were presented. Their titles are: “The fascist coup in Germany”, “Tactics and tasks of the Leninist Opposition” and “The situation of the country and the tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninists”. The Chelyabinsk University gave us access to these notebooks. We have already received the fourth manuscript titled “The revolutionary crisis and the tasks of the proletariat”, which will be published soon.
In this issue of the “International Worker Organizer" we reproduce the presentation by Carlos Munzer giving an account of this enormous discovery and a deep historical and political insight on the enormous struggle given by the Bolshevik-Leninists in the ‘30s, in the USSR and at international level. Along with it, we published the intervention of Alejandro Villarruel -leader of the group Avanzada Obrera "Lista Negra", of the Río Santiago Shipyard in Argentina- on that meeting, about the path followed to arrive at the presentation of these notebooks.
We also reproduce excerpts from different articles published in the Russian newspaper Kommersant, with the opinion of the researchers and professors of the Moscow and Chelyabinsk Universities on the finding of the notebooks. We also include writings by Leon Sedov on the struggle of the Left Opposition in the USSR.
The preview of these notebooks was published in the pamphlet "Preview of the presentation of the Soviet Left Opposition found manuscripts". In addition to the articles mentioned above, it includes excerpts from the work "The Trotskyists in the USSR (1929-1938)" by Pierre Broué and fragments of the book "In The Country of The Disconcerting Lie" by Ante Ciliga, who managed to escape from that Stalinist prison in Verkhneuralsk, where he was imprisoned in the 1930s. These works will be published in a forthcoming book, by the Socialist Publishing House Rudolph Klement and "International Worker Organizer".
The notebooks found were newspapers and documents of the Bolsheviks in the resistance. It was Trotsky and Lenin’s party resisting from prison. They were the real revolutionaries who had taken power in 1917, those who were not broken by Stalin's blackmail, purges, tortures and murders.
From the prison these comrades raised that the first Soviet workers’ obligations were with the German working class, which was about to be crushed by Hitler. The reader can see this in the notebook "The Fascist Coup in Germany". There they affirmed that the fundamental thing for the Soviet Union not to be crushed was that the German working class took power. That is why they called on the workers and Red Army soldiers to revolt against Stalin, to regroup their forces and reach the borders of Germany, so that the German working class would know that they had the Soviet workers forces to crush Hitler.
Today it is clear why Stalin accused the Trotskyists of wanting the USSR to declare war on Germany, whereas actually, the internationalist strategy of the Left Opposition was to put the Red Army weapons at the service of socialist and communist workers' militias of Germany to crush fascism, as part of a single task of the Soviet, European and world working class. These are notebooks expressing the real internationalist combat strategy of the world revolutionary movement, that every revolutionary fighter of the 21st century cannot stop reading and investigating.
Trotskyism was and is a living force of the working class struggle. In the USSR, the Bolshevik-Leninists were the left-wing fraction of the Soviets, the sector of workers who did not resign to sellout the victory of the socialist revolution and who wanted to continue fighting for the European revolution. They were a real, objective fraction of the masses.
We insist, Trotskyism is a living force because it lives in the real revolutionary workers movement. Their forces are in the indomitable revolutionary masses. In China, the youth begin to fight trying to recover socialism. In 2014 civil war broke out in Ukraine, the war cry of "The return of the USSR" sounded like a strong call to the world working class.
The Yellow Vests of France belong to these forces, which neither the bureaucracy of the CGT, nor Mélenchon, nor the "New Left" of Europe can lead.
Our forces are in the thousands of young people who reject the ANC in South Africa to the war cry of "Enough of black millionaires, partners of yesterday’s Apartheid!"
When these papers that show so much sacrifice to take the fight to victory appear, the apparatus of the renegades of Trotskyism gathered in La Havana, on their knees and paying homage to the new rich of the Cuban CP. They are the collaborators of the ragged waste of Stalinism. On the other hand, those of us who fight under the banner of the Fourth International collect the program of revolutionary Marxism, which is the only one that will give way out to the capitalist barbarism that is already here.
In '89, all the renegades of Trotskyism’s forces were tied to the apron-strings of Stalinism in the West and supporting Gorbachev -with his Perestroika and Glasnost- that restored capitalism in the USSR. More and more the Stalinist scourge sold out the workers' state and more and more the Fourth International’s renegades concealed and legitimized it by the left. That happens in La Havana today. Summoned by the Cuban Ministry of Culture, in a closed room, no more than 40 delegates from former Trotskyist parties came together to conceal by left the new Cuban bourgeoisie that is openly restoring capitalism. They went to a "Lecture on Trotsky" and ended up prostrate before Stalinism.
One of the Castroist academic who called to this "cultural day" apologized for the terrible persecution suffered by the Trotskyists in Cuba... Scoundrel! Castroism persecuted Cuban Trotskyists and received Mercader with honors in La Havana. Its party in Moscow, under Stalin’s leadership, massacred hundreds of thousands of workers who confronted the CP's betrayal of the world revolution and murdered 99% of the old Bolshevik Party guard, including Comrade Trotsky... And this scoundrel comes to ask for "apologies"! Former Trotskyists accepted them.
There will be neither forgetting nor forgiveness for the Stalinist scourge, murderous of revolutionaries and traitors of the world proletariat. Trotskyism did not go to La Havana; there they were the traitors who sold out the program and the banners of the Fourth International a long time ago. |
INTRODUCTION
On May Day 2019, as a tribute to yesterday’s Martyrs of Chicago and to all the martyrs of the world working class, the International Trotskyist Leninist Fraction anticipates the presentation of two of the documents and notebooks of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition in the USSR that were found in February 2018.
When repairig the facilities of the old prison and insulator Verkhneuralsk, in the city of Chelyabinsk (where the opposition to Stalinism was imprisoned during the 1930s), approximately 30 documents were found, consisting of independent texts, notebooks, brochures, speeches and even letters of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition. Many of these notebooks are currently in the process of translation and even restoration, which are being carried out by the University of Chelyabinsk. Of these documents, only 3 have been published so far.
It is not the purpose of this advance to provide our whole historical view of the significance of this finding and the programmatic consequences and historical lessons it has.
We seek to present all the existing materials so far (in this bulletin and in future ones), which account for the struggled waged by more than 130 Bolshevik-Leninists –who claimed to be Trotskyist fighters- in Verkhneuralsk prison from 1930 to 1933.
We are before invaluable documents that are a link of the chain of hundreds and thousands of letters, documents, pamphlets, samizdat and other works written while underground and in the West, which were material of struggle and combat of the forces of Bolshevism in the resistance against Stalinism. That was Trotskyism in the 1930s: Bolshevism in the resistance.
Trotsky and the leaders of the Fourth International (which was founded in 1938) synthesized and politically and programmatically expressed that battle, which was later transformed into program of struggle for the political revolution to defeat the Stalinist scum and put the USSR back as a stronghold of the world revolution.
It is significant to study these documents. It means to enter the world of political, theoretical and programmatic struggle developed as part of the fight for the Fourth International in the '30s, of its Soviet section, whose leaders and most important cadres were underground or in prisons, insulators and concentration camps of Stalinism.
Under these terrible conditions for fighting, the relationship of the Soviet oppositionists with the forces of the Trotskyists in the West remained intact, during the life of Comrade Trotsky until the year 1940 and in particular, until the assassination of Leon Sedov in 1938, during the era of the Stalinist terror that decimated physically the forces of the Left Opposition in the concentration camps, shooting hundreds of its militants, since 1936.
In the West, a Bolshevik revolutionary general staff led by Comrade Trotsky took up the historical responsibility of carrying out the struggle for political revolution in the USSR, which was a decisive part of the struggle for the international socialist revolution in the imperialist countries and in the semi-colonial world.
Our goal is that the new generations of Trotskyists can get an idea of this work through different views that will allow them to understand the character of this enormous political conquest that has been found.
The comrades will see that this advance begins with an introduction to these works made by Kommersant, a Russian newspaper of the city of Chelyabinsk. In this note, we can see that the finding of these manuscripts surprises the academic bourgeoisie of Moscow University. As Yury Zhukov says "the dead have finally spoken". Really? So the Trotskyists finally speak? In any case, it is now, the moment in which Trotskyism is not a present hazard over their heads, when the Stalinists –now turned into new bourgeoisie- show Trotskyism in the academic society as something run-of-the-mill and as an object of historiographical research. But they are wrong: what they have discovered is the dynamite that will explode in their hands, at a time when more than 75% of the Russian proletariat wants and demands to return to the USSR... And it will return, but this time by the hand of the Trotskyists and not of "dead people who are speaking just now".
On an anniversary of Marx's death, Trotsky denounced that the bourgeoisie had reviled him, persecuted and slandered him in life, and then devoted itself to castrating Marx’s revolutionary content and showing him as an inoffensive icon. This is what they want to do now with the Trotskyists... For our honor, we will not allow this to happen.
We hereby reproduce excerpts from this article of Kommersant newspaper of June 16, 2018 and Zhukov's comments on the matter.
Among other things, it draws attention when he states that they used the Trotskyists to "scare the little children", as if Trotskyism was what we now call "the boogeyman" ... Or maybe a ghost? In any case, it was the phantom of communism that haunted the Stalinist culture and ideology every day.
The assessment made in this same instruction by Alexey Gusev, history professor at the University of Moscow, is very suggestive and at the same time interesting, as well as his view of the political insulators until 1933. For Stalinism, it was key to separate the Trotskyists from the masses. That's why they were held in insulators. In that moment, the Soviet bureaucracy did not have the strength to crush and murder the Trotskyists, as it did later. Before that, it had to betray the working class of the West (as it did in France, Germany and Spain) to be able to impose its regime of terror inside the USSR.
For these reasons, we present, in the first place, to the revolutionary workers, to the Trotskyists, the introduction of the Russian newspaper Kommersant and how the bourgeois academy sees this finding.
Also, in this first part of this presentation, we publish the list of the notebooks that were found, with excerpts from the introduction made by Alexander Fokin, professor at the University of Chelyabinsk, who is in charge of carrying out the historiographic research of these documents. Today the former political insulator of Verkhneuralsk is a museum. The Federal Penitentiary Service granted the manuscripts found to the University. In this introduction, Professor Fokin accounts the discovery of the notebooks and the views of those who found them.
***
In the second part of this work, we present notes of Leon Sedov, leader of the Trotskyist Opposition, and then of the IV International, who was in charge of the edition of the Soviet Left Opposition Bulletin.
Leon Sedov, the son of Comrade Trotsky, who was murdered by the GPU in 1938, while in Germany and then in France, was the one who organized the relationship of the Soviet Bolshevik-Leninists with Trotsky's staff in the West. This leadership was responsible for making all the political elaborations and struggles carried out by the Trotskyists internationally reach the political insulators, in this case Verkhneuralsk. In addition, the Trotskyist program for the recovery of the USSR and the defeat of the Stalinist bureaucracy was conquered together with the Soviet oppositionists, debating with them, as a team.
Trotsky's works on the struggle against the NEP and the pseudo-theory of "socialism in one country", on the German question and the rise of Hitler due to the capitulation of the CP and Stalin, about the Anglo-Russian Committee, the Chinese question, the beginning of the Spanish revolution and even the tactic of a "French Turn" in 1934, were debates and political struggles of Trotskyism that reached to the Bolshevik-Leninists in Stalin’s prisons and the Russian section that was underground.
The Left Opposition was daily updated of the struggle of the Soviet section. In 1931 Leon Sedov wrote a tribute to the huge strike that the Trotskyists were performing in Verkhneuralsk insulator at that time.
We hereby publish three works of Leon Sedov: "The Persecution of the Russian Bolshevik Opposition", August 1930, "The Life of the Prisoners and Exiles of the Russian Left Opposition", December 1930 and "Oppositionists on a Hunger Strike!" November, 1931.
***
In the third place, we publish excerpts from the work "The Trotskyists in the USSR (1929-1938)" by Pierre Broué, which accounts for the situation of the opposition in 1930, the life of the Bolshevik-Leninists and the resistance against Stalinism during those years and the political action and hunger strikes in Verkhneuralsk insulator (to which Leon Sedov also refers).
The struggle of the Bolshevik-Leninist revolutionaries inside Verkhneuralsk insulator was not unknown to the whole Left Opposition, nor to the historians who investigated on this subject, as Pierre Broué. He provides valuable information in this regard that must be studied with attention by the revolutionary Marxists of the 21st century.
***
In fourth place we reproduce some chapters of the book Au Pays du Mensonge Desconcertant (In The Country of The Disconcerting Lie), by Ante Ciliga, one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, survivor of the Verkhneuralsk insulator.
In 1926, Ciliga had traveled to the USSR to get in touch with the revolutionary experience of the first workers' state in History. There, against the policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy, he formed an opposition group among the Yugoslav communists that were living in Russia and established contact with the Left Opposition led by Trotsky. In 1930 he was arrested by the GPU, being imprisoned first in Leningrad and Chelyabinsk, and then in Verkhneuralsk Political Insulator. After 3 years in prison, he was ostracized to Siberia and in 1935 he was able to leave the USSR for having Italian citizenship and due to a huge campaign for his freedom. Between 1936 and 1937 he wrote this work, Au Pays du Mensonge Desconcertant, providing his view of what the political life was like in the prisons of Stalinism and particularly in Verkhneuralsk insulator.
In the chapters that we reproduce, Ciliga demonstrates that Verkhneuralsk Political Insulator was one of the key centers in which the leadership of the Bolshevik-Leninists operated in the USSR. Several of his documents on what happened in Stalin's prisons were published in the Bulletin of the Left Opposition internationally.
In addition, Ciliga provides his particular view of the different fractions and tendencies that existed within the Left Opposition inside Stalin’s very prisons.
He later joined an "ultra-leftist" fraction that in the 1930s claimed that the USSR had ceased to be a workers' state. That led him to break away from the Left Opposition. After that, he affirmed the need of making a common block for the freedom of the prisoners in the USSR, including the counterrevolutionary forces of the Mensheviks. Before this Trotsky affirmed: "Comrade Ciliga considers it is possible to collaborate with the Mensheviks. The history of the revolutionary movement is full of examples of ultra-leftists who approached opportunism... from the other end of the spectrum. It goes without saying that our Bulletin cannot have any political collaborators in common with the Menshevik publications. Therefore, we are obliged to suspend the publication of Comrade Ciliga's articles." ("On the articles of Comrade Ciliga"- June 3, 1936).
This does not detract from the value of Ciliga's writings about his experience in Stalin's prisons while he fought alongside the Bolshevik-Leninists. As Trotsky continued: "the political vacillations of this comrade do not diminish at all the importance of the reports that, thanks to him, are today the heritage of the world working class."
***
Finally, in the main part we publish one of the documents of the Bolshevik-Leninists that were found, entitled "Fascist coup in Germany". It was published by Prof. Alexander Fokin.
The German question concentrated the attention of the world wrokers movement. In Germany, Stalinism had a tactical ultra-left policy in its "3rd period", in fact handing over the German proletariat to Hitler’s massacre, an issue that was not ignored in Stalin’s concentration camps, under conditions of total isolation for the Trotskyists, as in Verkhneuralsk.
We anticipate this document on the German question in the '30s that in itself unmasks all those who say that Russian and Eastern European Marxism failed to understand the conditions of the imperialist Europe -as Gramsci said as well as his followers today, open renegades of Trotskyism- as to articulate a program and a strategy for the victory of the revolution. This is a true fallacy.
The document "Fascist Coup in Germany", published in the notebook No. 2 of the Bolshevik-Leninists in 1933, accounts that Bolshevism and the communists of the USSR were the most "European" and "Westernist" Marxists in the world within the international proletariat.
This is important to specify at a time when Russian Marxism is accused of being "backward" and "brutal". This accusation comes from even pseudo-Trotskyist groups that broke with the Fourth International, as is the case of the PTS of Argentina.
The Bolsheviks never saw the Russian revolution separated from the German revolution, let alone the European and world revolution. Moreover, they did not imagine that the USSR could survive without the victory of the revolution in the rest of Europe. For that reason they founded the III International that according to Trotsky and Lenin turned out to be a school of revolutionary strategy.
The Trotskyist movement was so “westernist” that the first battle that it fought against Stalin and the bureaucratic scum that was in process of consolidation inside the USSR, since the defeat of the German revolution in 1923-24, was a fight to recover the leadership of the III International to regenerate the workers' state, which was decomposing and degenerating more and more due to isolation. Hence the fight against the nefarious pseudo-theory of "socialism in one country", against the NEP, etc.
A neo-Stalinism has arisen. It takes as a banner the totally reformist Stalinist policy of Gramsci, namely of "staged revolution", defender of "socialism in one country" and of the Stalinist party that liquidated politically and physically every opposition. They claim that because of its "Easternist character", Bolshevism "did not understand at all the conditions for socialist revolution in the West"... As if the Stalinists had perfectly understood the conditions in the West! As if that had been the case of Gramsci and the leaders of the Italian CP -not to mention the leaders of the German, French, Spanish Communist Parties... They sold out and betrayed all the European revolutions of the West in the '30s, from Berlin to Madrid to Paris to Lisbon to Athens to Rome. The most "Westernist" communists proved to be the traitors of the leaders of the European sections of the Third International, who left the Bolshevik-Leninists isolated and massacred in Stalin's concentration camps.
This work of the Trotskyists in the prisons on the German question which has an internationalist position from the Soviet oppositionists that define their international obligations with the German working class, is a hard blow on the nose to those who try to attack from Stalinist positions, although camouflaging themselves with the banners of the Fourth International.
This policy on the German question of the Trotskyists in the USSR takes up the best traditions of the Bolshevik Party and of all the revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxembourg, Liebknecht, French revolutionary syndicalism, etc. that converged at the Kienthal and Zimmerwald conferences, where the "Eastern" Marxists provided the more precise program and policy for the capitalist Europe, when in 1914 the First Inter-imperialist World War began: "to turn the guns around" and transform the war into the first step of the socialist revolution. This anti-defense program on the imperialist war was key to the victory of the Russian Revolution in 1917. In case today’s nationalists, heirs of the old Stalinism, have not heard, the general staff that led the October revolution and the Bolshevik Party itself was that of Kienthal and Zimmerwald, with the programmatic lessons and the course of action that were shown there to the European proletariat. That was "Lenin’s return" to the 1917 revolutionary Russia.
The cadres were forged and formed in that school that affirmed that the USSR was only a link in the European and international socialist revolution. Those cadres then heroically resisted Stalinism and they made the greatest contributions to crush fascism in Germany in the '30s from prison.
Reading carefully this work of the Soviet oppositionists in the Ural prison amounts to finding an enormous contribution to the extensive theoretical and programmatic struggle that the Trotskyists in the West waged to defeat Hitler in Germany. As this manuscript says, they, as true internationalists, argued that the immediate task in the USSR to crush German fascism and prevent the catastrophe for the entire European working class that was approaching with the victory of Hitler, was to make the Red Army rise and march with all its forces to the border with Germany to put the weapons of the Soviet workers state at the service of crushing fascism, or fascism would crush the proletariat of Europe and the USSR. And they wrote this from the prisons of Stalin himself.
The revolutionary Marxism of the 21st century will settle accounts against so much falsification of Bolshevism and Trotskyism, the revolutionary Marxism of our days.
With this finding the forces of Trotskyism have acquired a huge political and programmatic arsenal extracted from the prison pipes, where the revolutionaries hid those manuscripts so that they would not be stolen by the Stalinist jail guards. This way they would be read by all the militants who were there and also taken to the oppositionists who were outside the insulators and to the West.
We have new tools and heavy ammunition to defeat revisionism and the counterfeiters of the struggle of the revolutionaries of the Third International during the lifetime of Lenin and Trotsky and their follower, the Fourth International.
The politics of Trotskyism then was to fight to recover the Third International so that it was possible to defeat from there the Soviet bureaucracy that was based on the conditions of isolation the USSR had remained into after the defeat of the German revolution of 1923-24 and the wear and tear suffered by the Soviet proletariat after 4 years of civil war and with the economy devastated.
Trotskyism concentrated its forces for this combat. It also did it from the prisons of Stalin. In another of the manuscripts found, the document "Tactics and Tasks of the Leninist Opposition", the Bolshevik-Leninists, continuing with the internationalist tradition of the Soviet revolutionaries, affirmed: "The B/L [Bolshevik-Leninist, NdT] Opposition always considered its struggle for the reform of the party to be an international task. The Opposition undertook and led the struggle against the Stalinist leadership in close relation to the general struggle of the left wing of the Comintern against the domination of centrism. Without a change in the centrist leadership of the Comintern, it is impossible to prepare the subjective factor of the international revolution, since 'the history of the Stalinist leadership is a history of continuous errors and the defeat of the international proletariat caused by them' (Trotsky) "
But in the vast majority of the Third International there was no reaction to such betrayal of Stalinism. The Gramscis, the Thaelmanns, the Togliattis, etc., proved to be nothing more than benevolent satellites of the Moscow lighthouse.
Therefore, in the central part of this advance, we also present the work "Tactics and Tasks of the Leninist Opposition", which was published by the Russian newspaper Kommersant.
***
We finish this advance by paying tribute to the Bolshevik-Leninists of the Urals prison, in quoting the words of Victor Serge:
"Remarkable fact: never in this campaign of extermination of the revolutionaries of '17 and of the civil war, the name of the real Trotskyists, left-wing opponents, Leninist Bolsheviks -to use the designations they used- did not even appear in the newspapers nor in the versions of the processes. They were a few hundred irreducible, imprisoned or deported for ten years (1928). Under the cruelest persecution to which they were subjected, they nonetheless maintained their courageous conscience. We knew the atrocities committed in prison; but none of those men tempered in the fight lent themselves to the machinations of the GPU. What has become of them? Very unlikely is that some have survived. Their names appear in the Bulletin of the Opposition and in two books of exiles." ("Life and death of Leon Trotsky")
The Trotskyists know utterly well who the Bolshevik-Leninists are who were imprisoned in Verkhneuralsk Political Insulator and also their names.
