Trotsky - The Revolution Betrayed.pdf - Mehring Books

Introduction xxix
The turn by the USSR toward direct collaboration with the
international bourgeoisie was complemented by the intensification
of state repression within the borders of the degenerated
workers' state. The inner connection between these
parallel processes is generally ignored by bourgeois historians
who find it politically inconvenient to examine why the
heyday of popular frontism — when Stalinism was being feted
in the salons of the intellectual trend-setters — coincided
with the wholesale extermination within the USSR of
virtually all those who had played a leading role in the
October Revolution and the civil war. The blood purges which
were launched with the opening of the first round of the
Moscow Trials in August 1936 were intended not only to
eradicate all those who might become the focus of revolutionary
opposition to the bureaucracy, but also to demonstrate
to the world bourgeoisie that the Stalinist regime had broken
irrevocably with the heritage of 1917. A river of blood now
divided Stalinism from Bolshevism.
Trotsky, living in Norway, completed the introduction of
The Revolution Betrayed and sent the final portions of the
manuscript to the publishers barely two weeks before the
beginning of the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev in Moscow.
The timing was fortuitous: One day after the trial's conclusion
and the execution of the 16 defendants, the Norwegian Social
Democratic government, submitting to pressure from the
Kremlin, demanded that Trotsky renounce the right to
publicly comment on contemporary political events, i.e., on
the Moscow frame-up trial. When Trotsky indignantly
refused, the Norwegian Social Democrats issued orders for
his arrest and internment. The police denied Trotsky direct
contact with his political associates, stopped his correspondence,
confiscated his manuscripts and even limited the hours
he was permitted to exercise outdoors. These restrictions had
their intended effect: for four crucial months, Trotsky was
blocked from publicly answering the monstrous charges made
against him by the Stalinist regime. 8
8. With Trotsky interned and unable to reply to his accusers, the
responsibility for exposing the Moscow Trials fell to his son, Leon Sedov.
Within a few weeks, he succeeded in publishing The Red Book on the Moscow
Trials, which tore the indictment to shreds Later, after Sedov's death in