USSR "Trotsky stands equally with all the victims of Stalin" Martin Walker, The Guardian (weekly edition), June 26, 1988: THE first public call in the Soviet Union for the rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky, and the publication of his writings, has come from a delegate to this month's extraordinary party conference, the radical anti-Stalinist historian, Dr Yuri Afanasyev.
"We must not stop the process of rehabilitation and judicial review at any level, or with any person. We have to rehabilitate all who were oppressed or wrongly accused and, as a matter of justice, Leon Trotsky stands equally with all the victims of Stalin, " Dr Afanasyev told a Moscow press conference.
"On the question of Trotsky's political rehabilitation, I think there will be a breakthrough in this direction. But It will depend on the deepening of perestroika in our historical sciences, and on the internal political struggle that is now under way in our party," he added
The rehabilitation of Nikolal Bukharin earlier this year, and of Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev last week, leaves only Trotsky as the outstanding figure of the 1917 revolution who is still dubbed a criminal and an enemy of the Soviet people.
"I believe the works of Trotsky, and indeed of Stalin and of Khruschev, should be published and made accessible to all, to teachers and students and citzens, " Dr Afanasyev sald.
"it is very strange that professors and teachers try to criticize Trotsky when they have never read a word that he wrote. The same is still true of Bukharin and Kamenev and Zinoviev.
*We have to envisage a situation in the near future when their works will sit in the bookshops and libraries alongside contemporary archive material, available for all to read," he told journalists.
Dr Afanasyev was restored to the list of delegates to the party conference at the final meeting of the Moscow city party committee, after top-level intervention that is said to have been authorized by Mikhall Gorbachev.
One of the best known and most outspoken radical supporters of perestroika, Dr Afanasyev is director of the Institute for State Archivists, which over the past 18 months has become a centre for investigations into Stalin's terror. * ries. Therefore, all enemies of Stalin were Trotskyists and enemies of the people.
Trotsky, who was in Norway at the time, could not believe his ears. A Jew and an anti-fascist, he and his previous supporters were accused of having plotted with the Gestapo! The Hitlerite press thought that Stalin was throwing a smoke-screen over Trotsky's subversive activities and it appeared to them that Trotsky had been sent abroad to stir up the world revolution....
Some people think that the whole world believed in the Moscow Trials. That is wrong. Yes, the American ambassador, Davis, believed in them, [the writer]
Feuchtwanger half believed in them. They probably thought, like other anti-fascists, that the absence of any logic and the violations of democracy were unimportant, given that the Soviet Union was the sole important anti-fascist force, and because of this it could not be questioned. But an important section of foreign public opinion, including progressive opinion, received the Moscow Trials - like the mania for sabotage — with horror and disgust.
Sharing this attitude, André Malraux and André Gide became estranged from us. At the same time Arthur Koestler, who was proposing to come to the USSR and become a tractor driver, wrote his famous novel on the trials, Darkness at noon, still never seen by the Soviet people. The accusation of complacency towards fascism thrown by Moscow at the leaders of the Second International, for the sole reason that they demanded that the accused should not be executed, did not fail to leave a depressing taste in the mouth.
Appeasing his blood lust (Fazil Iskander was right to describe him as a vampire), Stalin himself undermined the basis of the international anti-fascist front that was being formed and increased the distrust of the democratic West towards the Sovict Union. The 1930s trials are the main reasons for our defeat in 1941 and for victims of the war being counted in their millions. The truth about these trials debunks the myth of Stalin that has poisoned more than one gen- 19 eration. * July 11, 1988 • #145 International Viewpoint
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