The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification -- Introduction
of the fate that still awaits Sokolnikov. Imprisoned are: Preobrazhensky, once a prominent official of the
government's financial administration; Arkus, once the assistant director of the State Bank; Tumanov,
manager of the powerful Industrial Bank. Remember that they were imprisoned by Yagoda, who is
himself now charged with embezzlement!
One leader in agriculture after another -- either in the Right wing or the Left -- has fallen under the blows
of the blind, frightened or vindictive bureaucracy. Shot last year was I. I. Reingold, once assistant
Commissar of Agriculture, in the department of cotton raising; shot less than half a year later was Nikolai
Muralov, once Deputy Commissar of Agriculture, himself an agronomist, one of the few old Bolsheviks
who, like Rykov and Shliapnikov, participated directly and actively in the 1905 revolution. Imprisoned
as scapegoats or for insufficient sycophancy to Stalin are: A. P. Smirnov, Commissar of Agriculture
since July 1923; his successor, Teodorovich, who once headed the Peasants' International; and Eismont,
vice-Commissar of Agriculture for Food Sup plies in Russia in 1932 when he was arrested together with
Tolmachev and scores of other high officials.
Even worse is the devastation in the military field, where so many tried revolutionists have been replaced
by braided Marshals and lesser martinets. Gone is Trotsky, organizer and leader of the most remarkable
army the world has ever seen, first chairman of the Supreme War Council. Gone is the Deputy
Commissar of War and acting president of the Revolutionary Military Council in 1918, Efraim
Sklyansky, Trotsky's right-hand man, a revolutionist with exceptional military talents, who was driven
out of office by intrigues and machinations when Trotsky was forced to surrender his post as Commissar
of War, and who undoubtedly escaped prison or the firing squad as an "agent of Hitler "only because he
died in an accident in New York in 1925. Imprisoned now is Shtykhold, secretary to Sklyansky, and one
of the earliest organizers of the Red Army. Imprisoned are the distinguished military men Gayevsky and
Vladimir Smirnov-the latter dying, his sight gone, confined in Suzdal penitentiary. In prison, for the third
time, is Gruenstein, Red Army organizer in the early days, divisional commander, a hard labor prisoner
under the Czar, with countless years of Bolshevik party membership behind him. In prison are General
Vitovt Putna, once military representative of the Soviets in Berlin, where he was the Red Army's link
with the Reichswehr, and late military attache of the embassy in London; General Dmitri Schmidt, who
was mentioned before; the military commanders Kuzmichev and Esterman. Shot in the January trial was
N. I. Muralov, former high official of the Military Inspection and for years the commandant of the
Moscow Military District. Shot in the August trial was Sergei Mrachkovsky, who won the Urals from the
Whites, and who was commandant of the Urals Military District until 1924. Held in prison is
Klias-Klavin, Commissar of Defense of Petrograd during the Civil War, whom the government saved
from death in December, 1922 when he was exchanged, with ninety other communists, for Latvian
hostages held in Moscow. In prison now is Sokolnikov, once commander of the Eighth Army at the
southern front. Shot in August as a "traitor "was I. N. Smirnov, commander of the famous Fifth Army
which took Kazan. Another of the leaders of the Fifth Army in the struggle against Kochak was
Man-Nevelson, now completing his ninth year in Stalinist prison exile; among his "counter revolutionary
crimes "is the fact that he is Trotsky's son in-law. In prison, without a trial (virtually all the Trotskyists
were imprisoned without even a semblance of a trial), is I. T. Smilga, who, together with Tukhachevsky,
led the Seventh Army against Pilsudski in 1921.
Finally, in the field of foreign affairs, the change has been striking. Revolutionary Russia's first
Commissar of Foreign Affairs was Trotsky. He was succeeded by Chicherin, who was finally replaced
by Litvinov after a wretched intrigue which drove Chicherin to morose, brooding exile in the West. In
addition to these two, virtually all of Russia's ablest revolutionary diplomats and foreign trade
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