New Evidence of Trotsky's Conspiracy - Grover Furr
Extracts from the introduction section of the book that analyzes new evidence of Leon Trotsky’s conspiracies with Nazi Germany, and with his followers in the USSR during the 1930s. EAhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/0578649764
New Evidence of Trotsky's Conspiracy
Grover Furr
Introduction
This book is a study of Soviet-era documents, recently declassified, that bear on Leon Trotsky and his conspiracies against the Soviet government and Party during the 1930s. These documents are: Yuri Piatakov's statement to Nikolai Ezhov, chief of the NKVD, of December 19-20, 1936; the transcript of the trial of Marshal Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky and seven accomplices of June 11, 1937; and a collection of invest igative materials from the former NKVD archive concerning the First and Second Moscow Trials of August, 1936, and January, 1937.
I obtained Piatakov's statement to Ezhov some years ago from my Moscow colleague and skilled historian Vladimir L. Bobrov, from the FSB (formerly NKVD) archive in Moscow. It has since been declassified and published online from the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (RGASPI), also in Moscow. The texts are the same, though they were typed at different times and have different pagination.
The 172-page text of the trial of the "Tukhachevsky Affair" defendants was silently declassified from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in May, 2018, and posted on the Russian historical site istmat.info. It is in printed form, perhaps to be circulated in a limited manner .
The third set of documents are from the two-volume work Politbiuro i Lev Trotskii (sbornik dokumentov), 1923-1 940 2, edited by Oleg V. Mozokhin and published in 2013 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, by Sociosfera-CZ. This two-volume work is essentially unobtainable. As of November, 2019, the Worldcat meta-database of world research libraries contains an entry of this work which states that "no libraries with the specified item were found."
In 2017 a one-volume version of this work was published Russia. But this volume omits some of the most interesting documents from the two-volume work. My colleague Vladim Bobrov obtained a copy of the two-volume, 2013 work at the FSB archive. I have used this copy for the present book.
Mozokhin is a historian employed by the FSB, the successor to the KGB and NKVD, and author of many books and articles on the "special services." The two-volume 2013 work is cited on the personal page. But there is no information about why it was published in Czechoslovakia rather than in Russia, or why it is unobtainable.
In the present book we will consider only the documents volume 2 of the two-volume 2013 work (hereafter referred to PiLT2). The first document in volume 2 dates from November 1932. The latest is from August 24, 1940, and is an announcement of, and copy of the Pravda article on, Trotsky's assassination August 20, 1940.
Our study of the documents published in PiLT2 yields so important results concerning Trotsky's conspiracies during the 1930s. The documents in this volume also touch on many other important issues with which we are not concerned here.
B. Evidence and Denial
The "Anti-Stalin Paradigm"
"The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. It is part of its being, of its condition for existence, to falsify all goods: it falsified the writing of history. And the best - paid historiography is that which is best falsified for the purposes of the bourgeoisie." Friedrich Engels, "Notes for the 'History of Ireland."' (1870)
According to the only acceptable model of Soviet history of the Stalin period - we call it, for convenience, the Anti-Stalin Paradigm-- Stalin was guilty of many horrific crimes, principally mass murder, and the fabrication of false charges against innocent persons followed by their punishment (often death). In mainstream historiography of the Soviet Union it is considered illegitimate to challenge any charge of a serious crime against Stalin. It is a fortiori considered taboo to conclude that Stalin did not commit any crime that he has been accused of.
Researchers of Soviet history of the Stalin period are constrained to adhere to the Anti-Stalin Paradigm regardless of the evidence. The ASP, therefore, is not a way of learning what really happened. Rather, it is a way of not learning what really happened. It is a way of telling historians: "Your task is to come to acceptable, anti Stalin, anticommunist conclusions, and, where necessary, to back those conclusions up with phony evidence and fallacious reasoning." Or, at best, "your job is to confine yourself to drawing conclusions that do not challenge or threaten to disprove the ASP."
The Trotskyist Paradigm
A similar paradigm controls Trotskyist writing, which must conclude that "Trotsky was right" and "Stalin was wrong," regardless of the evidence.
Today we have a great deal of evidence that corroborates the charges leveled against Trotsky in the Moscow Trials of conspiring to murder Soviet leaders, sabotage Soviet industry, undermine the Soviet military, and collude with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan for the defeat of the USSR in war. But no Trotskyist historian can deal objectively with this evidence, or they will no longer be welcome in the ranks of Trotskyists.
Likewise, no academic historian of the Soviet Union can approach the evidence objectively and conclude that Stalin was not guilty of this or that crime of which he has been charges, or they will not be published, with serious consequences for their academic careers.
The Anti-Stalin Paradigm and the Issue of Denial
Whatever the subject of research, it is always appropriate, and in fact essential, to discuss questions of evidence. In this larger sense, there is nothing special about the need for such discussion in the field of Soviet history of the Stalin period.
However, the role of bias - anticommunist, and specifically anti Stalin bias - is so great that it poisons the entire field of Soviet history, and so it must be confronted. Likewise, the issue of denial and evasion - the refusal to objectively consider evidence that sharply contradicts the prevailing Anti-Stalin Paradigm, is so pervasive that we must say something about it.
The Role of Denial and Evasion
President rump and many congressional Republicans now treat anything other than partisan hackery for their own side as partisan hackery for the other side.
- David Leonhardt, New York Times, November 18, 2019
We predict that the result of this research will be ignored by mainstream Soviet historians, and of course by Trotskyists . The reader should understand the reasons for this denial and evasion.
The fact is that the academic field of Soviet history of the Stalin period exists primarily to promote falsehoods about that history . The truth about Stalin and the history of the Soviet Union during Stalin's time, and about Trotsky and his conspiracies, including with the Nazis, is simply too threatening to be honestly confronted. The evidence supporting these conclusions is too strong, and there is too much of it, for it to be mentioned, much less discussed. The only way to "save" the Anti-Stalin and Trotskyist paradigms of Soviet history is to ignore the evidence and to continue to repeat fact-claims that we can now prove false.
It would be excellent if some mainstream historians of Soviet history would subject the evidence in this book, and in my other books and articles, to scholarly critique. I would expect to learn that I had made some errors - after all, some degree of error is inevitable in all human endeavor. I would also hope to learn that I had overlooked some evidence and/or counter-evidence. That would be beneficial to me in my research. It would also contribute to the project of learning the truth about Soviet history of this Stalin era and about what Leon Trotsky was really up to, as opposed to what his acolytes claim he was doing.
I do not expect this to happen. Willful ignorance, and personal attacks on me for daring to contradict the prevailing "wisdom" - that is, falsehoods - about Stalin and Soviet history of this period. have been the only response to my research. I expect that "mainstream" historiography will continue to deny and evade the truth.
My goal is to discover the truth. I do not "defend" or "apologize for" Stalin. If Stalin committed crimes, I want to know what they were.The only way to know this is to do honest research. However, persons who perpetuate falsehoods in the service of a political agenda assume that everyone does as they are doing - that everyone, like they themselves, is bending, ignoring, or inventing evidence in the service of their own biases. Dishonest persons justify their own dishonesty by assuming that everyone else is also dishonest. This is why I am called a "defender of' or "apologist for" Stalin.
Examples|
(..)
(..)
Example B: Stephen Cohen
Stephen Cohen, a senior scholar of the Stalin period and defender of the Anti-Stalin Paradigm, has called me "a Stalin terror denier or apologist;" "a pseudo-scholar who disregards or falsifies overwhelmingly evidence - plain facts, to put the matter plainly," and "who has no standing ... among serious scholars here or in Russia."
Personal communication dated July 2, 2019 from a colleague with an email from Stephen Cohen dated May 25, 2019.
Cohen is "blowing smoke." Neither he nor any of the "serious scholars" of Soviet history of the Stalin period have any evidence, much less "plain facts", that Stalin planned the "terror." On the contrary: all the evidence supports the opposite conclusion. Cohen simply asserts that there is "evidence" that I am "disregarding" or "falsifying." But he cites no examples. No wonder: he can't do so, because no such evidence exists.
Appeal to Authority
When Cohen refers to "standing ... among serious scholars" he is committing the logical fallacy of "appeal to authority." The fact that others disagree with me is not evidence that I am wrong. Any more than the fact that they do not agree with me evidence that they are wrong!
Only primary source evidence counts, not the "authority" of scholars who, instead of pursuing the truth "and letting the chips fall where they may," choose to uphold the Anti-Stalin Paradigm out of whatever motive - careerism, anticommunism or loyalty to Trotsky.
Cohen is loyal to Nikolai Bukharin. In 1973 Cohen published a biography, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution , that was to become famous. In the tenth chapter - the chapter that takes Bukharin's life from 1930 to his trial and execution in 1938 - Cohen relies heavily on Khrushchev-era materials about Stalin. In 2010 my colleague Vladimir L. Bobrov and I published an article in which we demonstrate that every anti-Stalin statement Cohen writes in that tenth chapter is provably, demonstrably false.
We also prove that Cohen deliberately lied . In his book Cohen quotes the memoir of Jules Humbert-Droz, a former communist and friend of Bukharin's. Humbert-Droz reveals that Bukharin told him in 1927 or 1928 that he and his followers were already conspiring to murder Stalin. This was before collectivization, the first Five-Year Plan, the famine of 1932-33, possibly even before Trotsky had been expelled from the Party (November 12, 1927 and, as far as we know today, before Trotsky himself was plotting to kill Stalin.
But Cohen withholds this information. He does not tell his reader that Humbert-Droz, whose memoir
he cites in his Bukharin too stated this . To do so would have undermined those who uphold the Anti-Stalin and Trotskyist paradigms do so in defiance of all the evidence we now have. What are they afraid of? We should be clear: they fear the overthrow of the Anti-Stalin Paradigm and the complete dismantling of the "Trotsky Paradigm," the Trotskyist cult which is structured around Leon Trotsky's lies and deceptions.
(...)
C. Objectivity - The sine qua non of discovering the truth
But how can we learn the truth? How can we avoid being blinded by our own biases and preconceived ideas? It is a basic tenet of materialism that one's conclusions about reality, including historical reality, must be firmly based on evidence. This is the only way to discover the truth in history. The primary source evidence must be identified, located, collected, studied, and conclusions drawn from it that are based on the evidence alone, not on preconceived ideas, biases, prejudices, without faults in logic and reasoning.
The materialist researcher must work hard to be thoroughly objective. She must be aware and suspicious of her own biases and preconceived ideas. Everyone possesses biases, prejudices, and preconceived ideas. So the materialist researcher must adopt a method that is closely similar to that used in the "hard" sciences like physics or chemistry.
The objective historian must be self-aware. It is her own preconceived ideas and biases, not those of anyone else, which are most likely to mislead her and to poison her research.
* She must take special pains to look with increased suspicion at any evidence or argument that tends to confirm her own preconceived ideas. This is the threat of Confirmation Bias." (Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall Information in a way that affirms one's prior beliefs or hypotheses.")
* She must also force herself to look with an additional dose of sympathy and interest at any evidence or argument that tends to disconfirm her own preconceived biases.
This is the only way to operationalize - to put into practical use - the ideal of objectivity. If a researcher fails to be objective, she will never discover the truth, or even recognize it if she sees it.
