Trotsky - The Revolution Betrayed.pdf - Mehring Books

Introduction
xxxix
victorious revolutionary uprising of the oppressed masses,"
and the task "of leading the Soviet masses to insurrection"
fell to the Fourth International.
Little more than one year after the founding of the Fourth
International, the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the
eruption of the Second World War, and the Soviet invasion
of Finland led to a sharp conflict within the Trotskyist
movement over the validity of the analysis presented in The
Revolution Betrayed. Prior to August 1939 the attitude of the
liberal intelligentsia to the Stalinist regime was decidedly
sympathetic. Even in the United States, the influence of the
Stalinists was so great that the decision of the aged and
celebrated philosopher John Dewey in the spring of 1937 to
chair a committee created to investigate the Moscow Trial
allegations against Leon Trotsky was an act of considerable
physical, intellectual and moral courage. 9
Trotsky had justly,
if somewhat sardonically, defined popular frontism as the
alliance between bourgeois democracy and the GPU. The
Stalinists supported Roosevelt and endorsed the democratic
pretensions of American imperialism; in return, the liberal
bourgeoisie and the middle class democrats looked the other
way as the GPU slaughtered Old Bolsheviks in Moscow,
tortured and murdered revolutionists in Spain, and kidnapped
and decapitated Trotskyists in Paris. However, when
Stalin, as Trotsky had predicted, suddenly signed his
"nonaggression" pact with Hitler and later invaded Finland,
liberal sentiment turned sharply against the Soviet Union.
It was not the fresh betrayal of the working class that
offended liberal and democratic public opinion; rather, it was
that the Soviet Union had deserted the camp of democratic
imperialism and, therefore, placed itself in opposition to the
foreign policy of the United States.
The shift in public opinion produced a political echo inside
the American section of the Fourth International, which was
then known as the Socialist Workers Party. A faction formed
9. The Dewey Commission travelled to Coyoacan to question Leon
Trotsky, who made all his files available for inspection and submitted to
exhaustive examination that spanned more than a week. In December 1937
the Dewey Commission issued its report It found Trotsky not guilty and
condemned the Moscow Trials as a frame-up,