On the 20th August 1940 at Coyocan in Mexico, a man called Jackson, alias Jacques Mornar, alias Ramon Mercader, with a blow from an ice-pick to the skull, assassinated Lev Davidovich Trotsky-...
former President of the Petrograd Soviet, former People's Commissar of the Soviet Republic, creator of the Red Army and the founder of the Fourth International.
His mission accomplished, Jackson-this small-time assassin hired by big-time political gangsters-was condemned by the Mexican police und later found a safe hiding place with his nasters in the Kremlin. Nothing more was heard of his name until a few years ago when he asked for permission to pass through Cuba on his way to Czechoslovakia (then under the Novotny regime). It is to the credit of the revolutionary Cuban government that they refused to allow Trotsky's assassin to soil the territory of the first free country of America. However Jackson did get back to Czechoslovakia, where after shitting with fear during the Prague Spring when revolutionary students were assailing the bureaucracy for harbouring this Stalinist criminal, he now leads a quiet life in the discreet retirement provided by his friends Husak, Bilak and Indra.
THE LAST OF THE LIST For Stalin the death of Trotsky was-to have marked the end of an Tierce struggle begun 15 years errlier belwee years earlier between the bureaucratic clique and the living forces of the Revolution.
From 1925 the bureaucracy represented by Stalin, which had usurped political power from the Russian working class, had been carefully blocking every development of the world revolution and gradually imposing on the Soviet people a regime of unprecedented terror. The principal obstacles between Stalin and his dreams of absolutism were the instruments of the Bolshevik Revolution the Bolshevik Party and the Third International. Lenin's wife used to say to friends during the thirties: " If Ilyich were alive today he would be in prison." From 1934 and the first Moscow trials until the death of Trotsky in 1940, Stalin worked conscientiously to exterminate all those who might maintain links with the world revolution. Thousands of Bolshevik cadres were crowded into the cattle trucks that left for the hell of the Stalinist concentration camps. All the political leaders of the October Revolution, who had devoted their entire lives to the socialist struggle, were dragged through the mud of the Moscow trials. Trotsky, still too popular to be killed, was first exiled, then deprived of his Russian citizenship. The witch-hunt was even extended to the members of the Stalinist machine: in 1938 Marshal Tukachevsky and four-fifths of the senior officers of the Soviet Army were shot at the orders of Stalin, leaving the defensive system of the Soviet Union in disarray; all those Communists returning from abroad especially from the Spanish front- -were liquidated in the same way. The GPU (the political police) extended its network overseas, infiltrated the different Communist Parties and committed crime after crime; Sedov, Trotsky's son, killed; Klement, Trotsky's secretary, shot down; Ignatio Reiss, who had broken with the Stalinists, shot; Trotsky assassinated... The list goes This historic struggle between the forces of Stalinist reaction (endowed with all the power of the State apparatus) and the world's revolutionaries isolated, hunted and destroyed-has been misrepresented by official histories either as the settling of personal grudges or as the normal consequence of Bolshevism. The truth is quite the contrary. The very character of those who lived through it can leave us in no doubt about this.
The Stalinist bureaucracy, a parasitic caste living by a reign of terror, recruiting its cadres principally from among the former Mensheviks and collaborators of the sarist regime such as Vyshinski, the prosecutor in the trials of '36, 137, '38-and finding its strong-arm men among the backward sections of the peasantry, broke with every notion of communism or internatio'nalism. Stalin elaborates the doctrine of "Socialism in One Country". . And the logic of the Moscow trials is very clear; apart from Lenin (who has the good fortune to be dead) and Stalin, all the leaders of the October Revolution are traitors, spies, renegades-have sold themselves simultaneously to the Tsar, the Mikado, England and Hitler. From there it is but a question of nuance to let it be understood that October was nothing but a masterly police provocation mounted by the deadly enemies of the working class, and that Lenin was duped by this; these are the nuances that the hysterical Vyshinski does not always respect... And yet the defendants at Moscow confessed! Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek. Rakovski, Preobav revolutionaries-were they not charged with the most vile crimes?
The reply is two-fold. In the first place the confessions are such that no thinking personand especially no one in the USSR-could take them completely seriously. Prey to the Stalinist blackmail of "saving the Soviet Union at all costs", lacking any political perspective, those who in 1917 had changed the course of history by creating the first Workers State confessed themselves to be no more than dogs and gutless snakes. We may reproach them for this weakness-or rather this lack of political understanding as well as for other faults, for no person, not even Lenin or Trotsky, was ever infallible. Nevertheless those who were shot at Moscow were and have remained authentic revolutionaries; only the World Socialist Revolution will one day be able to render them the honour that is due to them.
But there are others-thousands of them who never confessed to anything and refused to join in any Stalinist masquerade. Their silence was no use to Stalin; they were shot without trial and their names have never seen the light of dav. These, following Trotsky, had under stood the real nature of the bureaucracy. Their resistance does not stem from courage alone; rather their courage comes from political under standing; no compromise with the machine nor with Stalin, but a fierce and decisive struggle to overthrow the usurpers with a new political revolution.
To the "father of the people" these were the most dangerous, and Leon Trotsky in creating the Fourth International was the greatest of all. Stalin when he massacred the survivors of October 17 had nevertheless not forgotten its lesson: from the imperialist war is born the civil war and the social revolution. And from the second war begun in 1940 by Hitler could emerge the revolution which would sweep away the Stalinist caste. Trotsky, the sole survivor, must die.
The assassination in 1940 by Jackson was intended to decapitate the Fourth International. Three vears later, in '43, seeing the beginning of the end of the war, Stalin completed his task by hastily dissolving what was left of the Third International, thus cutting the last link between himself and the Red October, believing he could thereby win his ultimate victory The Defeat of Stalin By his imbecile ultra-leftist sectarian policy o 1933. he had delivered the heroic Germar proletariat to the Nazis, then he had tied down the working class of France and Spain in the strait-jacket of the Popular Fronts before delivering them to Petain and Franco. Trusting he abandoned the Soviet Union, practically defenceless, to the plunderers of the Third Reich.
He then had to bring back from Siberia the Russian and Spanish political detainees to organise the defence of Moscow and halt the German advance. It was the Soviet people who, in one year, saved the situation. The victories of those days were won by the partisans in France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Indochina and China. They called in question, not merely the power of the Axis forces that they crushed, but the very balance of power in the world. The Revolution was waiting on the threshold. All that was needed was a Communist International which could seize the opportunity and carry it through to victory. Instead of that, Moscow did all it could to stem the flood. The Chinese revolution vas carried through against the expectations o the bureaucracy. 'he Yugoslav partisans seize power against the orders of Stalin. But these successes, with their incalculable consequences, were the only ones.
The Greek revolution was strangled by Stalin and abandoned to the British bayonets. The Communist Parties transformed themselves into lackeys of the national bourgeoisies, reconstruc ing the machinery of state destroyed by the war and sparing them the nasty taste of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The countries of Eastern Europe passed without any social revolution-to the state of "People's Democracies" and order was re-established.
But once more the price that had to be paid was too heavy. In the West it was the witch hunt, proscription, slander. In the East, torture and the firing squad. The result, throughout the world, was the same: generations of revolutionaries are driven from the stage. History seems to have stopped and the lead curtain of imperialism and bureaucracy shrouds the world.
In reality there is a genuine revolutionary ее a many pom on tie globe. 11 rictory of Mao Tse-Tung has been an example and an important factor in this mobilisation. And if the working class leadership, loyal to Moscow, continues to organise defeats, in Russia itself the strains become greater: the objective conditions for dictatorship have almost disappeared, the USSR is no longer isolated, the standard of living and the culture of the masses has improved, the working classformerly fragmented slowly recreates itself before the pressures of modernisation. Stalin, symbol of a lost revolution, becomes a threat to the bureaucracy itself, which feels the need to discharge a little ballast so they will not have to give up more. His acolytes in the Politburo are not displeased when the awkward old man dies.
Some months later comes the workers' uprising in East Berlin. In 56 the Polish Spring and the Hungarian October. Stalin is dead but the bureaucracy survives him, despite the sops given to the masses by the 20th Party Congress. une victory of trotsky The Stalinist empire has collapsed, p coexistence marks time. There are to as many "communisms" or "socialist there are communist parties in the w into a corner by the development of revolution whose hot points are in C China and Palestine and the whole of America, the bureaucracy nostalgica the passing of Stalin, when class war follow the orders of the Kremlin. Un regain control of this difficult situati vinced that the liberalisation which f the tyrant's death served no purpose, Moscow leadership has turned again t the "great man": the cult of Stalin r along with the barbarie methods of r he used. But history does not repeat "Tell my friends that I am sure of of the Fourth International." The las Trotsky, spoken at the darkest hour century, now take on their full meani dered and hunted down by the Stalin machine, the Fourth International sti fights. The only coherent tendency in national politics, because it is the onl world party, the Fourth Internationa by the rising tide of the revolutionary ment, takes up again and develops the of the Left Opposition, of the Bolshe 1917, the struggle against world react for the victory of the Socialist Revolu Today its militants are fighting in Lat America, in the USA, in the Far Eas Europe. In the face of the decay of th communisms, the development of an nal strategy of struggle is the greates comrade Trotsky The ice-pick of Stalin's agent destr brain of Lev Davidovich. But no ice-p mercenary, no secret policeman, no re neasure can prevent our epoch from RA OF THE PERMANENT REVO It is in that sense that we say:
TROTSKY LIVES!
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