The Crime That Shaped the Century

The killing of Leon Trotsky on August 20, 1940, stands as one of the most pivotal political events of the 20th century. It was not just the death of an individual or the elimination of a political rival, but the result of a deliberate, decade-long counter-revolutionary campaign orchestrated by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Their explicit goal was to erase the living legacy of Marxism. As the last remaining leader of the October Revolution, architect of the Red Army, proponent of permanent revolution, and founder of the Fourth International, Trotsky symbolised the international working class’s revolutionary leadership. His assassination effectively represented the decapitation of this revolutionary vanguard.

For over eighty years, bourgeois historiography has portrayed Trotsky’s assassination as either a melodramatic thriller, a psychological drama, or a minor tragic episode in Stalinist history. The political significance, including its links to Stalinism’s counter-revolutionary role, its impact on the socialist movement, and its connection to the GPU’s infiltration of the Fourth International, has been persistently hidden, belittled, or denied.

Within this context, H. Keith Melton and Nigel West’s book, ‘The Assassination of Leon Trotsky: Espionage, Scandal, and the Crime of the Century,’ must be understood. Their work marks a notable departure from the mainstream bourgeois narrative, offering the first detailed, fact-based account from mainstream intelligence historians that supports the core findings of the International Committee of the Fourth International’s investigation, ‘Security and the Fourth International.’ While Melton and West’s approach is neither Marxist nor focused on political interpretation of the assassination, it uniquely recognises Trotsky’s global historical importance. It considers the GPU’s infiltration of the Fourth International a key element of the assassination scheme.

This review analyses Melton and West’s book alongside three other key works: Josh Ireland’s The Traitor of Trotsky (2026), Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, and the ICFI’s Security and the Fourth International. Each book represents a different historiographical approach ranging from intelligence history and bourgeois melodrama to Stalinist-sympathetic biography and Marxist political analysis. Only the latter offers a clear interpretation of the assassination’s significance. The review aims not just to evaluate these texts but to place them within the larger fight over historical truth, which is deeply connected to the ongoing struggle for Marxism.

Melton & West: Intelligence Historians Who Accidentally Validate Marxism

Melton and West’s book is the most factually precise bourgeois account of Trotsky’s assassination, largely due to their backgrounds in intelligence historiography. Their expertise influences both the strengths and limitations of their approach. H. Keith Melton, more than an academic, is a top collector and analyst of espionage artefacts, specialising in the tools, tradecraft, and paraphernalia of clandestine operations. Nigel West is a prolific historian of British intelligence, with extensive work on MI5, MI6, the KGB, and Cold War spying. Together, they apply a forensic approach, reconstructing the GPU’s decade-long pursuit of Trotsky with rare precision.

This professional overview highlights the book’s key strengths. Melton and West view the assassination not as a work of melodrama or psychological tragedy but as a state-led intelligence operation. They examine surveillance tactics, infiltration methods, forged identities, safehouses, and the bureaucratic structure of Stalin’s security services. Their account of Ramón Mercader’s recruitment, training, and deployment is based on tradecraft, not guesswork. Most importantly, they rely on verified findings from the International Committee of the Fourth International’s Security and the Fourth International, including the GPU’s infiltration of the organisation through figures like Mark Zborowski, Sylvia Callen, and Joseph Hansen. This represents a clear departure from years of academic denial and trivialization.

However, the same intelligence-historical framework also has its limits. Melton and West can describe how the GPU functioned but cannot explain why Stalinism invested so heavily in eliminating Trotskyism. They are unable to interpret the assassination as a political move tied to the bureaucracy’s counter-revolutionary role. As a result, their book is detailed and factually impressive but lacks theoretical depth, offering a careful account of the crime without exploring its broader historical importance.

Melton and West set themselves apart from typical bourgeois historians by first acknowledging Leon Trotsky’s world-historic significance. This is more than a stylistic choice; it marks a fundamental departure from the mainstream academic approach, which often reduces Trotsky to a psychological profile, a tragic exile, or a foil to Stalin. Instead, they accurately portray him as Lenin’s “most brilliant lieutenant,” the Red Army’s organiser, and the leading thinker of the October Revolution. This restores the political dimension that mainstream historiography has spent decades ignoring.

Recognising that the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin was fundamentally political represents a significant departure. Trotsky fought to defend proletarian internationalism, promote global revolution in advanced capitalist nations, and oppose the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic decline. In contrast, Stalin’s stance reflected the interests of a growing bureaucratic elite aiming for stability, privileges, and national unity through the policy of “socialism in one country.” Melton and West understand this crucial point: the conflict was not about personalities but about different programmatic visions.

This framing distinguishes their work from the superficial psychological approaches common in bourgeois analyses, which often attribute the Stalin–Trotsky conflict to personality traits, ambition, or personal disputes. By reemphasising the struggle’s political dimension, Melton and West inadvertently align with the era’s Marxist interpretation. Although they do not endorse Trotsky’s viewpoint, they acknowledge that a purely political analysis, rather than biographical speculation, is essential to understand why Stalin devoted such substantial effort to eliminating his main rival.

Melton and West’s most notable and truly unique contribution is their direct reliance on the findings of Security and the Fourth International, the International Committee of the Fourth International’s research into GPU infiltration of the Trotskyist movement. For over fifty years, mainstream historians either overlooked this evidence or dismissed it outright, often without even examining it. Academic accounts often portrayed the ICFI’s investigation as sectarian, conspiratorial, or politically motivated, while accepting weaker claims from Soviet archives or Cold War memoirs. Melton and West challenge this tradition by viewing the ICFI’s research not as an oddity but as a credible, authoritative source.

Their acceptance of the investigation’s main findings is notable. They acknowledge Joseph Hansen’s secret meetings with GPU agent Gregory Rabinovich and the FBI- a fact the Socialist Workers Party has long denied, and mainstream historians have overlooked. They recognise Sylvia Callen’s role as a GPU agent within the SWP, a conclusion supported by documentary evidence and later confirmed through independent archives. They admit Robert Sheldon Harte’s involvement in the May 24 attack on Trotsky’s compound, dismissing the long-standing myth of Harte as a naive victim. They see Mark Zborowski as a primary GPU assassin, not just a minor figure, whose infiltration caused severe damage to the Trotskyist movement. They also point to Sylvia Ageloff’s political naivety as a crucial factor that allowed Ramón Mercader to access Trotsky.

This level of acceptance is unmatched in bourgeois scholarship, marking the first time that intelligence historians have openly confirmed the factual basis of the ICFI’s investigation. While Melton and West do not endorse the Marxist political implications drawn from these facts, their acknowledgement marks a major break in the historiography. They show that the ICFI’s work, historically sidelined for political reasons, holds up under analysis even by experts in espionage and intelligence fields.

Melton and West’s approach, grounded in intelligence historiography, inherently limits what their book can explain. While intelligence history is adept at documenting operations, reconstructing tradecraft, and analysing the organisational structures of clandestine agencies- such as tracking agent movements, identifying forged passports, mapping surveillance networks, and detailing the bureaucratic workings of the GPU- it cannot fundamentally address the political motives, class interests, or ideological conflicts behind these operations. This discipline is primarily descriptive and not designed to explain.

This limitation becomes especially clear when examining Trotsky’s assassination. Melton and West detail the GPU’s infiltration of the Fourth International thoroughly, but they fail to explain why the GPU was so relentless in targeting Trotskyism. They overlook that Trotsky symbolised the direct continuation of Marxism and was the sole coherent alternative to Stalinism, making him the most significant political threat to the bureaucratic elite that seized power in the Soviet Union. Without understanding Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, the assassination might be seen as a mere intelligence success rather than a necessary act by a regime desperate for survival.

Their approach also avoids addressing Western intelligence agencies’ involvement. The FBI’s efforts to cultivate Joseph Hansen, MI5’s silence on GPU activities, and the broader geopolitical factors influencing the handling of Soviet espionage are seen as minor details rather than crucial parts of the cover-up. While intelligence history can document these interactions, it cannot explain why Western agencies showed little interest in exposing the GPU’s infiltration of the Trotskyist movement. This question requires a deeper look at imperialism, class strategies, and the mutual hostility between Stalinist and bourgeois states toward revolutionary Marxism. For these reasons, Melton and West’s book is factually strong but politically hollow. It documents the crime with admirable precision, yet it cannot explain it. The assassination of Trotsky was not merely an intelligence operation; it was a world‑historic political act. Without Marxism, its meaning remains inaccessible.

Melton and West’s work reveals a significant contradiction, exposing both the strengths and limitations of bourgeois historical analysis. They unequivocally accept the factual findings of the International Committee of the Fourth International’s investigation into GPU infiltration, marking a major break with mainstream scholarship, which often ignored or labelled Security and the Fourth International as sectarian polemic. They acknowledge that the GPU infiltrated the Fourth International at the highest levels, with agents like Zborowski and Callen operating inside Trotskyist groups for years, and that Joseph Hansen’s private meetings with Rabinovich and the FBI raise questions that the SWP leadership concealed for decades.

However, after accepting these facts, they avoid exploring their larger implications. They fail to ask why Stalin invested such vast resources in crushing Trotskyism or to recognise the betrayal in the SWP leadership’s defence of Hansen as a political capitulation that undermined the party’s revolutionary role. While they acknowledge Trotsky’s importance, they do not see his assassination as a major strike against the revolutionary leadership of the working class, carried out by a bureaucracy defending its own survival.

This refusal is not accidental. It flows from the limitations of their method. Intelligence historians can reconstruct operations, but they cannot analyse class forces. They can describe how the GPU acted, but not why Stalinism, as a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, viewed Trotskyism as an existential threat. They can catalogue the SWP’s evasions, but not grasp their political meaning. They can trace the assassin’s path to Coyoacán, but not understand the world‑historic stakes of the crime.

Their book is therefore valuable precisely because it unintentionally confirms the Marxist explanation. By accepting the factual record established by the ICFI, Melton and West validate the core of the Marxist analysis while leaving its political conclusions untouched. The contradiction is theirs, but the advantage is ours: their work demonstrates that even the most rigorous bourgeois scholarship cannot escape the truth uncovered by revolutionary Marxism.

Josh Ireland: The Petty‑Bourgeois Trivialisation of Trotskyism

While Melton and West exemplify the strengths of bourgeois historiography- namely empirical rigour, archival diligence, and confronting difficult truths- Josh Ireland embodies its darker aspects: sensationalism, depoliticisation, and turning major historical events into melodrama. ‘The Traitor of Trotsky’ is more than a flawed book; it shows how petty-bourgeois imagination diminishes revolutionary politics by reimagining it as psychological drama. Ireland’s narrative aims not to shed light on Trotsky’s assassination but to entertain a readership accustomed to viewing history as a sequence of dramatic episodes rather than a conflict among social forces.

Ireland’s book uses typical elements of bourgeois melodrama. Rather than exploring the assassination’s political implications, it focuses on psychological speculation, romanticised depictions of Ramón Mercader, and dramatic storytelling techniques that heighten suspense rather than offer deeper insight. Mercader is portrayed as a conflicted anti-hero caught between loyalty, ideology, and personal feelings. Trotsky is depicted as a tragic prophet, a doomed visionary driven by his own brilliance. The GPU is shown as a group of vibrant villains, each with unique quirks and motives, rather than a disciplined tool of a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy.

This approach turns the assassination into a thriller, a tale of intrigue, seduction, betrayal, and murder instead of a political event based on the Marxist-Stalinist conflict. Ireland’s narrative choices are deliberate, reflecting a wider bourgeois tendency to dismiss revolutionary politics as unserious, irrational, and historically unnecessary. By focusing on the characters’ psychology, Ireland strips their actions of political significance.

Ireland’s method exemplifies the standard bourgeois approach to revolutionary history: reducing ideology to psychology, class struggle to personal drama, and political conflict to narrative tension. In this framework, Trotsky’s assassination becomes the climax of a tragic story rather than the culmination of a decade‑long counter‑revolutionary operation. The GPU’s systematic infiltration of the Fourth International, documented extensively by the ICFI and now confirmed by Melton and West, is ignored entirely. Ireland does not mention Sylvia Callen, Mark Zborowski, or Joseph Hansen. He erases the SWP leadership’s cover‑up, treating the movement as a backdrop rather than a political actor.

In Ireland’s context, Stalinism transforms into a dramatic backdrop rather than a counter-revolutionary force. The bureaucracy’s political motives fade, giving way to personal rivalries, emotional conflicts, and narrative needs. The assassination loses its global revolutionary importance, becoming a story about individuals rather than classes, emphasising psychology over politics and tragedy over counter-revolution.

This erasure is more than a methodological oversight; it is an ideological act. By excluding political context, Ireland prevents readers from understanding the reasons behind Trotsky’s murder and its significance. The book functions reactionarily by downplaying Trotskyism, turning the assassination into melodrama and supporting the bourgeois view that revolutionary Marxism is either insignificant or perilous. Trotsky appears as a tragic, admirable yet impractical figure. Mercader is portrayed as a tragic, admirable yet impractical figure. Stalinism serves merely as a dramatic setting, and the film omits the Fourth International entirely.

This trivialization aims to neutralise revolutionary politics by turning a historic crime- the intentional killing of the working class’s revolutionary leaders- into mere entertainment. It prompts readers to see Trotskyism not as a vibrant movement but as a historical oddity, hiding the assassination’s political significance behind emotional appeal and storytelling flair. In this way, Ireland’s book is not just insufficient; it is ultimately reactionary. It supports the bourgeois effort to depoliticise Trotsky, erase the Fourth International, and sanitise Stalinism. It functions as the cultural equivalent of Deutscher’s academic distortions and the SWP’s political evasions. While Melton and West unintentionally back the Marxist explanation, Ireland deliberately obscures it.

Isaac Deutscher: The Stalinist‑Sympathetic Historian Who Prepared the Ground for Later Falsification

While Melton and West offer the most serious bourgeois interpretations of the assassination and Josh Ireland presents a more trivial view, Isaac Deutscher holds a unique and pivotal position in history. His Trotsky trilogy,* The Prophet Armed*, *The Prophet Unarmed*, and *The Prophet Outcast*, remains the most popular and widely read biography of Trotsky. It is beautifully written, narratively detailed, and often the first introduction many readers have to Trotsky. However, Deutscher’s perspective is heavily influenced by his semi-Stalinist, anti-Trotskyist stance, which distorts the true meaning of Trotsky’s struggle and the importance of his assassination.

Deutscher’s work should be seen not just as biography, but as political action. He wrote during a period when Stalinism still held sway over the global workers’ movement, and when the Fourth International was a small, beleaguered group constantly under attack. He did not intend to defend Trotskyism but to cast Stalinism as a tragic yet necessary phase in socialism’s evolution. In Deutscher’s perspective, Trotsky is portrayed as a heroic but doomed prophet- intelligent and brave, yet ultimately insignificant for the future of socialism. This viewpoint strongly shapes how he approaches the assassination.

Deutscher’s depiction of Trotsky reflects a literary tendency that emphasises tragedy over political complexity. Trotsky is shown as a man cut off from his former movement, drifting through various countries in search of safety. The Fourth International, established in 1938 as an extension of Marxism against Stalinist bureaucracy, is portrayed as a fringe group with little impact on global affairs. This portrayal is not merely mistaken; it carries political bias. By downplaying the Fourth International’s importance, Deutscher also diminishes Marxism’s ongoing relevance.

Trotsky is portrayed more as a tragic figure than as a leader of a vibrant revolutionary movement. Deutscher depicts his final years as the gradual decline of a once-great personality, rather than a resolute political effort to uphold the core principles of proletarian internationalism. According to Deutscher, Trotsky’s writings in exile on fascism, the Moscow Trials, the Spanish Revolution, and Stalinism are brilliant yet ultimately futile endeavours, representing the dying flickers of a fading flame.

This distortion prevents Deutscher from fully understanding the assassination. If Trotsky was politically insignificant, why did Stalin allocate so many resources to eliminate him? Why did the GPU penetrate the Fourth International so thoroughly? Why did Stalin see Trotskyism as a deadly threat? Deutscher cannot answer these questions because his political approach prevents him from recognising Trotskyism as a genuine alternative to Stalinism. In his view, the assassination becomes a tragic farewell to a great individual rather than the result of a counter-revolutionary plan.

Deutscher’s trilogy hardly addresses the GPU’s involvement with the Fourth International. He briefly mentions Mark Zborowski as a minor figure among the Paris émigrés and completely overlooks Sylvia Callen, despite her key role in passing information from the SWP to the GPU. The May 24 attack on Trotsky’s compound is depicted as a dramatic event rather than a carefully coordinated operation involving GPU agents within Trotsky’s household. He also uncritically accepts the SWP’s defence of Joseph Hansen, ignoring that Hansen held secret meetings with GPU agent Rabinovich and the FBI.

This silence is deliberate. Acknowledging GPU infiltration would force Deutscher to see the Fourth International as a significant political entity, a notion he cannot accept. If the Fourth International indeed mattered, Stalin’s attempts to eliminate it would carry political implications. If GPU agents had infiltrated Trotsky’s movement, then his assassination isn’t just a tragic end but a political purge of a revolutionary leader. Deutscher’s perspective cannot account for this, so he dismisses it. Consequently, the narrative presents the assassination as sudden, almost random, disconnected from the years of infiltration, surveillance, and sabotage by the GPU. Trotsky’s murder is framed as a dramatic climax rather than the culmination of Stalinism’s counter-revolutionary tactics.

Deutscher’s biggest political mistake is depicting Stalinism as a movement that advanced history. He claims that, despite its crimes, the bureaucracy industrialised the Soviet Union and set the stage for socialism. However, this view contradicts Marxism, as it turns the bureaucracy from a parasitic elite into an essential driver of historical change. It also justifies the purges, the Moscow Trials, and the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks as unfortunate but essential parts of progress.

Once Stalinism is seen as progressive, Trotsky’s assassination becomes a tragic but understandable act, a crime committed in the name of historical necessity. The GPU becomes a brutal but rational instrument of progress. Trotsky becomes a noble but outdated figure, admirable but politically obsolete. His murder becomes the final act in a historical drama in which the bureaucracy, not the working class, is the protagonist.

This forms the ideological basis for all later bourgeois distortions. Deutscher portrays Stalinism as progressive, offering the intellectual reason to overlook the Fourth International, dismiss GPU infiltration, and downplay Trotsky’s murder. He depicts a counter-revolutionary act as a tragic moment in socialism’s evolution. Deutscher’s influence on later historians cannot be overstated. His portrayal of Trotsky as a tragic outsider and Stalinism as a progressive force shaped post-war Soviet historiography. It provided the intellectual justification for ignoring the Fourth International, dismissing GPU penetration, and trivialising Trotsky’s assassination. Josh Ireland’s melodramatic trivialisation is simply a vulgarised version of Deutscher’s framework. Even Melton and West, despite their seriousness, remain trapped within the Deutscherian assumption that the Fourth International was politically marginal.

Deutscher’s work therefore represents not merely a flawed biography but a major ideological obstacle to understanding Trotsky’s assassination. It is a monument to the political confusion of an era in which Stalinism dominated the workers’ movement and bourgeois historians mistook bureaucracy for progress. To understand Trotsky’s assassination, one must first break with Deutscher’s framework and return to the Marxist analysis he rejected.

The ICFI’s Security and the Fourth International: The Marxist Explanation of a World‑Historic Crime

Against the distortions of bourgeois historiography and the political evasions of Stalinist‑sympathetic writers, the International Committee of the Fourth International’s Security and the Fourth International stands as the only coherent, politically grounded explanation of Trotsky’s assassination. It is not simply an investigation; it is a Marxist analysis of Stalinism’s counter-revolutionary role and the political significance of Trotskyism. Where Melton and West provide factual detail, and Ireland and Deutscher offer narrative or ideological distortion, the ICFI provides the political logic that makes the assassination intelligible. It restores the assassination to its proper place: a decisive battle in the struggle between Marxism and Stalinism.

The ICFI’s investigation demonstrates that the GPU’s infiltration of the Fourth International was not incidental but central to Stalin’s strategy. The bureaucracy understood that Trotskyism represented the continuity of Marxism, the only political force capable of mobilising the working class against Stalinism. Trotsky’s assassination was therefore a political act aimed at destroying the revolutionary vanguard.

This analysis explains why Stalin devoted such enormous resources to the operation. The GPU did not merely monitor Trotsky; it built an entire apparatus dedicated to penetrating his movement, isolating him politically, and preparing the conditions for murder. The bureaucracy recognised that Trotsky’s theoretical clarity, his defence of workers’ democracy, and his exposure of Stalinism’s counter‑revolutionary role posed a mortal threat to its existence. Trotsky had to be eliminated not because he was a symbolic figure, but because he represented the future, the possibility of a renewed revolutionary movement capable of overthrowing the bureaucracy.

This is why Trotsky was murdered in Mexico rather than allowed to die in exile. The bureaucracy feared not Trotsky’s physical presence but his political influence. His writings, his leadership, and his movement had to be destroyed. The ICFI investigation revealed a network of GPU agents crucial to planning the assassination, including Joseph Hansen’s covert meetings with GPU agent Rabinovich, Sylvia Callen’s role as a GPU infiltration agent within the SWP, Robert Sheldon Harte’s participation in the May 24 attack, Mark Zborowski’s extensive history as a GPU assassin and infiltrator, and the longstanding cover-up by the SWP leadership.

These findings were not speculative. They were based on documentary evidence, eyewitness testimony, and forensic analysis. Later archival releases and independent researchers, including Melton and West, confirmed them. The ICFI demonstrated that the GPU’s infiltration was systematic, long‑term, and politically motivated. It was not the work of isolated individuals but part of a coordinated strategy to destroy the Fourth International.

Exposing these agents was not merely an organisational matter; it was a political necessity. The GPU’s success depended on collaborators inside the movement. Without Hansen, Callen, Zborowski, and Harte, they could not have carried out the assassination. Their activities were not personal betrayals but political acts that facilitated the destruction of revolutionary leadership.

The ICFI demonstrated that the SWP leadership’s defence of Hansen was not an organisational error but a political betrayal. By covering up GPU penetration, the SWP destroyed itself as a revolutionary organisation. It abandoned Trotskyism and embraced petty‑bourgeois opportunism. The SWP leadership’s refusal to confront the evidence, its attacks on the ICFI, and its suppression of internal dissent were not accidental. They reflected a political orientation hostile to Marxism and aligned with bureaucratic interests.

This betrayal is inseparable from the assassination itself. The GPU could not have succeeded without collaborators inside the movement. The SWP’s cover‑up ensured that the lessons of the assassination were obscured, that the movement was disoriented, and that the continuity of Marxism was threatened. The ICFI’s investigation was therefore not merely an exposure of agents but a defence of Trotskyism’s revolutionary heritage.

The ICFI’s analysis reveals the assassination as a decisive event in the struggle between Marxism and Stalinism. Trotsky was murdered because he represented the future: the possibility of a renewed revolutionary movement capable of overthrowing the bureaucracy and restoring workers’ democracy. His assassination was not a tragic accident but a political act aimed at destroying the revolutionary leadership of the working class.

The assassination demonstrated the counter‑revolutionary nature of Stalinism. It exposed the bureaucracy’s willingness to use murder, infiltration, and falsification to defend its privileges. It revealed the political stakes of the struggle between Marxism and Stalinism. It also underscored the need to defend revolutionary leadership against infiltration, betrayal, and falsification.

Four Historiographical Traditions Confront a Single Crime

The assassination of Leon Trotsky is not simply an episode in the history of espionage, nor a dramatic moment in the biography of a revolutionary. It is a world-historic political event. How historians interpret it reveals their political orientation, class standpoint, and relationship to Marxism. Melton & West, Josh Ireland, Isaac Deutscher, and the International Committee of the Fourth International represent four distinct historiographical traditions. Their differences are not merely methodological; they reflect fundamentally different conceptions of history, politics, and the role of revolutionary leadership.

Melton and West provide the most factually serious bourgeois account. Their intelligence‑historical method allows them to reconstruct the GPU’s operations with precision, but it prevents them from understanding the political meaning of the assassination. Josh Ireland represents the petty‑bourgeois trivialisation of revolutionary politics. His melodramatic narrative erases the assassination’s political content and turns it into entertainment. Isaac Deutscher represents the Stalinist‑sympathetic distortion of Trotsky’s struggle. His portrayal of Stalinism as progressive and the Fourth International as irrelevant makes it impossible to understand the assassination. Only the ICFI provides a coherent explanation. It situates the assassination within the global counter‑revolutionary role of Stalinism and demonstrates that Trotsky was murdered because he represented the continuity of Marxism.

The Crime of the Century and the Struggle for Historical Truth

Melton and West’s The Assassination of Leon Trotsky is a significant contribution to the factual record. It breaks with decades of academic falsification and acknowledges the GPU’s penetration of the Fourth International. In doing so, it marks a rare moment when bourgeois scholarship, constrained by its own methodological limits, is forced to confront the uncomfortable reality that the Stalinist bureaucracy waged a systematic, decade‑long campaign to destroy the revolutionary leadership of the working class. Their book stands as the most serious attempt within mainstream historiography to reconstruct the operational mechanics of the assassination. Yet it cannot explain its political meaning. The authors document the crime with admirable precision, but they cannot grasp why the crime was committed.

Josh Ireland trivialises the assassination, reducing it to melodrama and psychological theatre. Isaac Deutscher distorts it, embedding Trotsky’s struggle within a Stalinist‑sympathetic narrative that treats the bureaucracy as historically progressive and the Fourth International as irrelevant. Both approaches obscure the assassination’s political stakes. Both transform a world‑historic event into either entertainment or tragedy. Both erase the revolutionary content of Trotsky’s final struggle.

Only the International Committee of the Fourth International provides a coherent explanation. Security and the Fourth International remains the single indispensable work for understanding Trotsky’s assassination because it situates the crime within the global counter‑revolutionary role of Stalinism. It demonstrates that the GPU’s infiltration of the Fourth International was not incidental but central to Stalin’s strategy. It exposes the SWP leadership’s betrayal. It reveals the political logic behind the murder. Trotsky was not killed because he was a symbolic figure, a romantic exile, or a psychological curiosity. He was murdered because he represented the future, the possibility of a renewed revolutionary movement capable of overthrowing the Stalinist bureaucracy and restoring workers’ democracy.

Trotsky’s assassination was therefore a world‑historic defeat for the working class. It removed the most brilliant representative of Marxism at a moment when the international proletariat faced fascism, imperialist war, and the consolidation of bureaucratic dictatorship in the Soviet Union. The murder of Trotsky was not simply the liquidation of an individual; it was the destruction of the revolutionary leadership that had guided the working class through the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century. The consequences were catastrophic. Without Trotsky’s leadership, the Fourth International was thrown into crisis. Without Trotsky’s theoretical clarity, the working class lost the one figure capable of articulating a coherent alternative to Stalinism and social democracy. Without Trotsky’s organisational authority, the revolutionary movement was left vulnerable to infiltration, betrayal, and political disorientation.

The struggle to understand Trotsky’s assassination is inseparable from the struggle to rebuild the revolutionary movement. Historical truth is not an academic exercise; it is a political weapon. The falsification of Trotsky’s legacy, whether through melodrama, Stalinist apologetics, or bourgeois indifference, serves the ruling class’s interests. It obscures the continuity of Marxism. It erases the working class’s revolutionary heritage. It transforms the assassination into a personal tragedy rather than a political crime. To reclaim the truth is to reclaim the revolutionary tradition.

The task today is not merely to expose the crime but to continue the work Trotsky began: the fight for the international socialist revolution. The conditions that produced Stalinism bureaucratic privilege, nationalist isolation, and the suppression of workers’ democracy remain present in new forms within global capitalism. The crisis of the world system, the rise of authoritarianism, and the intensification of imperialist conflict underscore the necessity of revolutionary leadership. Trotsky’s analysis of bureaucracy, his defence of workers’ democracy, and his insistence on the primacy of internationalism remain indispensable.

The assassination of Trotsky is not a closed chapter. It is a warning. It demonstrates the lengths to which counter‑revolutionary forces will go to destroy revolutionary leadership. It reveals the necessity of political vigilance, theoretical clarity, and organisational discipline. It underscores the importance of defending Marxism against all forms of falsification, infiltration, and betrayal. The struggle for historical truth is inseparable from the struggle for revolutionary leadership.

Melton and West’s book, despite its limitations, contributes to this struggle by exposing the factual record. Ireland’s and Deutscher’s works, despite their distortions, reveal the ideological obstacles that must be overcome. The ICFI’s analysis provides the political foundation upon which the revolutionary movement must be rebuilt. Trotsky’s assassination was a world‑historic defeat, but it did not extinguish the revolutionary tradition. That tradition survives in the fight for historical truth, in the defence of Marxism, and in the struggle to build the working class’s revolutionary leadership.

The task remains what Trotsky defined in the final months of his life: to prepare the working class for the coming battles, to defend the continuity of Marxism, and to fight for the international socialist revolution. Trotsky’s assassination was intended to destroy that possibility. Revolutionaries today must ensure it is realised.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Trotsky, Leon. The Diary in Exile, 1935–1940. Cambridge University Press, 1958.
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Marxist and ICFI Sources

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Intelligence History & Espionage Studies

• Melton, H. Keith, and Nigel West. The Assassination of Leon Trotsky: Espionage, Scandal, and the Crime of the Century. Osprey Publishing, 2024.
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Bourgeois Historiography & Biographical Works

• Ireland, Josh. The Traitor of Trotsky. John Murray, 2026.
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Soviet & Stalinist Studies

• Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford University Press, 1990.
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Memoirs, Testimonies & Archival Material

• Mercader, Ramón (under alias Jacques Mornard). Interrogation transcripts, Mexico City Police Archives, 1940.
• Ageloff, Sylvia. Statements to Mexican authorities, 1940.
• Hansen, Joseph. Letters and Internal Correspondence, Socialist Workers Party Archives, 1938–1940.
• Callen, Sylvia (Sylvia Caldwell). Testimony before the SWP Control Commission, 1947.
• Zborowski, Mark. Testimony before the Subversive Activities Control Board, U.S. Congress, 1956.

General Works on Marxism, Revolution & Counter‑Revolution

• Lenin, V. I. State and Revolution. Penguin Classics, 1993.
• Lenin, V. I. What Is To Be Done? Penguin Classics, 1988.
• Luxemburg, Rosa. The Russian Revolution. Dover Publications, 2004.
• Cliff, Tony. Trotsky: Towards October 1879–1917. Bookmarks, 1989.
• Hallas, Duncan. Trotsky’s Marxism. Bookmarks, 1979.

August 19, 2026

Exactly ninety years ago today, on August 19, 1936, the USSR’s Supreme Court Military Collegium initiated the “Trial of the Sixteen,” the first Moscow Trial. This event marked the Stalinist regime’s effort to eliminate the generation of Bolsheviks responsible for the October Revolution physically. Over five days, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and fourteen others confessed to an elaborate plot, supposedly led by Leon Trotsky, to assassinate Stalin and the Soviet leadership. Within a day of sentencing, all sixteen defendants were executed.

This was not a genuine judicial proceeding but the initial phase of the Great Terror: a political setup aimed not at uncovering crimes but at bloodily destroying the program and leaders of the October Revolution. Nine decades later, the Moscow Trials remain a pivotal moment of the twentieth century. Revisiting them isn’t just historical curiosity; it directly relates to a key political issue of our time: which social forces caused the first workers’ state to decline and collapse, and what lessons should the international working class learn from this experience?

A Trial Without a Crime

The charges from 1936–1938 were fabricated without any material evidence. Confessions, which were the only basis for convictions, were obtained through well-documented techniques: extended sleep deprivation, threats to family members held hostage, and psychological torment aimed at men who had previously endured Tsarist prisons and underground activities, but could not withstand the GPU’s brutal tactics employed by former comrades.

Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky turned the courtroom into a political spectacle. His accusations were more like propaganda than legal arguments, aimed at justifying the defendants’ physical elimination and intimidating the Soviet people. Foreign observers who took the trials at face value— including many Western liberals, socialists, and some Trotsky sympathisers— unknowingly or not, played a role in one of the most effective frame-ups in recent history.

The 1937 Coyoacán-based Commission of Inquiry, led by American philosopher John Dewey, examined the charges with the scrutiny that Soviet courts denied. Trotsky testified under oath for an entire week. The Dewey Commission concluded that the Moscow Trials were fabricated from start to finish, a finding confirmed by later Soviet archival releases, including the posthumous rehabilitation of nearly all defendants during Khrushchev and Gorbachev’s eras.

The Political Logic of the Terror

Viewing the Moscow Trials simply as the result of one man’s paranoia or a solely Russian illness misses the core issue they present. The purging of the Bolshevik Old Guard—the entire Political Bureau that took power in 1917, except Stalin, most of the Central Committee elected at the last Leninist Party Congress, and the Red Army’s top commanders—was not a mere side effect of building “socialism in one country.” Rather, it was a deliberate and essential strategy employed to achieve that goal.

By the mid-1930s, Stalin’s faction had shifted from the original internationalist goal of 1917. They forsook global revolution in favour of accommodating imperialist powers and establishing a privileged bureaucratic class that ran a planned economy they neither founded nor fully controlled. The presence of a cadre still recalling the revolutionary ideals of October was intolerable. Trotsky and the Left Opposition consistently highlighted this contradiction. The Moscow Trials served as the bureaucracy’s response—not as a defence, but as a means of eliminating opposition.

This explains why the Terror extended beyond the destruction of known political opponents. It also targeted hundreds of thousands of ordinary Communists, trade unionists, and, starting with Marshal Tukhachevsky in June 1937, a large part of the Red Army officer corps. This destructive purge would cost the Soviets dearly in blood when the Wehrmacht invaded four years afterwards.

Trotsky’s Answer

From exile—initially in Norway and later in Mexico—Trotsky conducted a nearly solo effort to fight against the Kremlin’s setup of false charges. He recognised, accurately, that the true stakes extended beyond his personal reputation to the political destiny of the international working class. His insights, notably in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) and during his testimony before the Dewey Commission, framed the Terror as a result of Soviet bureaucratic decline from a Marxist perspective: a privileged class derived from nationalised property established by October, but gradually seizing political power from the working class and defending its rule against either capitalist restoration or proletarian revolution.

History has confirmed this analysis. The bureaucracy Trotsky described did not defend the property forms it administered. Four decades after the last of the Moscow defendants were shot, that same bureaucracy — or its direct heirs — presided over the dissolution of the USSR and the seizure of its nationalised industry as private capital. The class that emerged in 1991 did not spring from nowhere; its formation is unintelligible without the physical extermination, beginning in 1936–1938, of the political forces within the Soviet state that opposed bureaucratic consolidation.

The Moscow Trials and Current Academic Historiography

The Moscow Trials are among the most well-documented political frame-ups of the twentieth century. Investigations ranging from the Dewey Commission to recent Soviet archival releases have confirmed that the charges were fabricated, confessions coerced, and the trials designed to eliminate the Bolsheviks responsible for the October Revolution. Despite this, modern academic history still shows a notable ambivalence towards this political crime.

The facts are recognised, but their significance is stripped away. The trials are portrayed as results of Stalin’s paranoia, characteristics of “totalitarianism,” or customs of Soviet political culture. While these explanations use different words, they share a common purpose: to disconnect the Terror from the class struggles that caused it. The killing of the Bolshevik Old Guard is seen as a psychological event, a cultural act, or an unavoidable consequence of revolutionary beliefs — anything except a deliberate political move by a bureaucratic class tightening its grip over the first workers’ state.

This methodological evasion is deliberate. Addressing the political logic of the Terror means confronting the historical divide between Bolshevism and Stalinism. The bureaucracy’s destruction of the revolutionary cadre was not the conclusion of October but its negation. It became the method by which a privileged layer—based on nationalised property but opposed to workers’ political power—reinforced its dominance. The subsequent collapse of the USSR and the privatisation of state assets were not unforeseen; they resulted from the long-term counter-revolution that started with the 1936–1938 trials.

Current historiography tends to merge Bolshevism and Stalinism into one indistinct phenomenon, serving a political purpose similar to the Kremlin’s distortions. This approach makes the revolutionary experience difficult for new generations to understand and blocks meaningful engagement with the Marxist critique of bureaucratic decline. The Moscow Trials are often seen merely as warnings about ideology, extremism, or authoritarian mindsets, rather than lessons on the risks posed by a privileged class that seizes political power from the working class.

A thorough evaluation of the Moscow Trials demands more than just verifying archival records. It also involves reestablishing the political significance that academic historiography has removed: that the Terror was the bureaucracy’s fight against the October Revolution’s ideals. Recognising this history is crucial for any modern effort to reconnect with the internationalist and socialist vision for which Zinoviev, Kamenev, and countless others were killed.

Ninety Years On

Ninety years after the first Moscow Trial, an honest reckoning with Stalinism’s crime of the century remains inseparable from the fight to reclaim the internationalist and revolutionary program in whose name Zinoviev, Kamenev, and thousands of others were murdered. The lessons of 1936–1938 are not historical curiosities. They are strategic questions for the working class today.

Sources and Bibliography on the Moscow Trials and Current Academic Historiography

Primary Sources

• The Moscow Trial Transcripts (1936–1938): Official Soviet publications of the Trial of the Sixteen (1936), Trial of the Seventeen (1937), and Trial of the Twenty-One (1938). Note: These were staged documents, but remain essential primary material.
• The Red Book on the Moscow Trials, Leon Sedov: A contemporary Trotskyist analysis documenting the frame-up from exile.
• The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, Alexander Orlov Memoir by a former NKVD officer who defected; provides insider testimony on the fabrication of charges.
• The Dewey Commission Report (1937) Not Guilty: Findings of the Commission of Inquiry chaired by John Dewey, which concluded the trials were frame-ups.

Classic Scholarly Analyses (1950s–1970s)

These works established the foundational critique of the trials and remain central to historiography.

• Ritual of Liquidation: The Case of the Moscow Trials, Nathan Leites & Elsa Bernaut (RAND, 1954). A psychological and political analysis of the trials as staged political ritual.
• The Great Purge Trial, eds. Robert C. Tucker & Stephen F. Cohen (1965) A documentary collection with commentary by two major scholars of Soviet history.
• Power and the Soviet Elite, Boris Nicolaevsky (1965). Examines the political logic of elite purges and bureaucratic consolidation.
• Ritual of Liquidation, Nathan Leites & Elsa Bernaut (Free Press, 1954) A seminal psychological-political interpretation of the trials.
• From Purge to Coexistence, David J. Dallin (1964). A Cold War-era analysis of the political mechanisms of the Terror.

Historiography and Rehabilitation Studies

These works examine how Soviet and post-Soviet historiography has treated the trials.

• “Soviet Historiography and the Moscow Trials: After Thirty Years,” Jane P. Shapiro (JSTOR). A detailed study of how Soviet historians handled (and suppressed) the memory of purge victims, including the process of rehabilitation under Khrushchev.
• “Rehabilitation — and Perdition,” Leopold Labedz (Problems of Communism, 1963). A key analysis of the political and historiographical meaning of Khrushchev-era rehabilitation.

Contemporary Academic Historiography

These works represent the dominant trends in current scholarship — culturalist, totalitarian, and revisionist approaches.

• Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism; Tear Off the Masks! Culturalist interpretations that treat the trials as political performance and social ritual.
• J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: Revisionist scholarship emphasising institutional dynamics and downplaying intentionality.
• Oleg Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle. Uses post-Soviet archives to reconstruct Stalin’s decision-making and the bureaucratic mechanisms of the Terror.
• Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler: A monumental biography that integrates political, cultural, and geopolitical factors.
• Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Places the Terror within a broader regional history of mass violence (though not focused on the trials specifically).

Trotskyist and Marxist Analyses

These works provide the essential class-based interpretation absent from most academic historiography.

• Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936): The foundational Marxist analysis of bureaucratic degeneration and the political logic of the Terror.
• Trotsky’s Testimony Before the Dewey Commission (1937): A systematic refutation of the charges and a theoretical explanation of Stalinism.
• Vadim Rogovin, Was There an Alternative? (7-volume series) The most comprehensive post-Soviet Marxist history of the Left Opposition and the political context of the Terror.

Online Scholarly Resources

• UMKC School of Law: “The Moscow Purge Trials (1936–38): Bibliography and Selected Links” A curated bibliography with primary documents and commentary.

Summary of What the Search Reveals

The search results highlight three key clusters of scholarship:

1. Classic Cold War analyses (Dallin, Nicolaevsky, Leites & Bernaut) that treat the trials as political repression and psychological theatre.
2. Soviet and post-Soviet historiography (Shapiro, Labedz) focusing on rehabilitation and the politics of memory.
3. Contemporary academic approaches that often depoliticise the trials through culturalist or institutional frameworks.

These sources collectively demonstrate the historiographical tension and the overwhelming factual evidence of a political frame-up versus the persistent academic tendency to obscure its class logic.

Alexander Rabinowitch, who passed away on June 16, 2026, at age 91, was the foremost American historian of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Over more than sixty years, his extensive research created a body of scholarship that critically challenged both Stalinist distortions and Cold War anti-communist myths. His work revived the vibrant, democratic, mass nature of Bolshevism and highlighted the revolutionary role of the Russian working class in history.

Rabinowitch’s notable achievement is even more impressive given the political and intellectual climate in which he grew up. Born in London to Russian-Jewish émigrés who fled Petrograd after the revolution, he was raised among Mensheviks and liberal critics of Bolshevism. He remembered that in his family’s circle, the October Revolution was seen as “a cold-blooded coup… by a small group of Lenin’s fanatic followers.” During his time in the United States amid the McCarthy era, he was taught in ROTC to see the Soviet Union as the personification of evil.

Rabinowitch’s research challenged the biases of his upbringing. A pivotal 1963–64 trip to the Soviet Union led him to dispute the Western view of 1917. His 1968 dissertation, Prelude to Revolution, argued that the July Days were a popular uprising, not a Bolshevik coup attempt, and that the Bolsheviks initially tried to control it. This conclusion set him apart from both Cold War orthodoxy and Stalinist doctrine.

His second book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976), marked a significant milestone in the historiography of revolution. Despite lacking access to Soviet archives, Rabinowitch carefully reconstructed Petrograd’s political landscape by analysing newspapers, minutes, and memoirs. He demonstrated that in 1917, the Bolshevik Party was not a secretive, conspiratorial group, but rather a large workers’ party with deep connections to factories, barracks, and local districts. Its internal dynamics featured lively debate, factional fights, and broad democratic involvement. Lenin’s April Theses and Trotsky’s leadership of the Military Revolutionary Committee were not top-down commands but reflected the revolutionary hopes and demands of the working class.

This work significantly challenged the anti-communist view of October as a coup and questioned the Stalinist myth of a united party that followed Lenin without deviation. Rabinowitch’s conclusions largely aligned with Trotsky’s analysis in Lessons of October, a point that Soviet authorities quickly recognised, condemning him as a “bourgeois falsifier.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union granted Rabinowitch access to archives that had long been unavailable to him. Instead of succumbing to cynicism, as many scholars did after 1991, he deepened his research. This led to the publication of The Bolsheviks in Power (2007), a comprehensive analysis of the first year of Soviet governance in Petrograd. Utilising newly accessible party, government, and Cheka records, he depicted the enormous difficulties faced by the revolutionary administration: economic collapse, famine, sabotage, foreign intervention, and the breakdown of the previous state structure.

Rabinowitch’s account uncovers a political process far more intricate and democratic than the simplified portrayals in anti-communist and Stalinist histories. He highlights the intense debates within the Bolshevik Party regarding the formation of the Soviet government, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and the Red Terror. Additionally, he restores the contributions of many Bolshevik leaders—such as Smilga, Uritsky, and Volodarsky—who were later killed during Stalin’s purges and subsequently erased from official history.

His final book, The Bolsheviks Survive: Petrograd 1919 (2026), completed just before his death, explored the remarkable endurance of the revolution during the civil war. It represents the culmination of his lifelong efforts to uncover the truth of one of the most significant events in world history.

Rabinowitch’s research put him at odds with the reactionary intellectual climate of the post-Soviet period. In Germany, where the ruling elites have tried to downplay Nazi crimes and restore imperialist militarism, right-wing historians like Jörg Baberowski have attempted to prevent his lectures. Their opposition was more than academic: Rabinowitch’s work revealed the distortions that underpin modern historical revisionism. His lectures in Berlin and Vienna, organised by the International Students for Social Equality and attended by hundreds, became notable political events.

During these struggles, Rabinowitch formed close intellectual ties with members of the Trotskyist movement. He worked with Mehring Verlag on the German editions of his books and gave interviews to the World Socialist Web Site. This was driven not by political allegiance but by a shared dedication to uncovering historical truth. As the WSWS obituary pointed out, he was part of a rare generation of historians who saw history as a science aimed at enhancing human understanding.

When Empiricism Becomes a Political Blind Spot

Rabinowitch’s work has some limitations. His empirical approach, though highly valuable, occasionally caused him to underestimate the broader international context of the revolution or to misread the political reasoning behind certain decisions.

Alexander Rabinowitch’s extensive four-volume series on the Russian Revolution represents a significant scholarly milestone. However, even meticulous empirical research struggles with complex political issues that cannot be fully understood through archives alone. The most notable flaw in Rabinowitch’s analysis is his handling of the Shchastny affair—Trotsky’s decision to prosecute and execute Admiral Aleksei Shchastny in June 1918. This mistake is more than a simple misinterpretation; it signifies a fundamental category error that exposes the limitations of relying solely on empirical data without incorporating the Marxist theoretical framework.

Rabinowitch labels the trial a “sham” and claims Trotsky organised it alone, possibly making it the first Soviet show trial. Yet, this characterisation is both inaccurate and historically unsound. It conflates revolutionary coercion with bureaucratic terror and confuses the defence of a workers’ state with Stalinist attempts to dismantle the revolution. Rabinowitch’s analysis of the Shchastny affair is not only flawed but also a theoretical oversight that contradicts the very evidence he presents.

The Historical Context Rabinowitch Underestimates

By spring 1918, the Baltic Fleet faced near-insurrection as German forces advanced following the collapse of the Brest-Litovsk talks. Mutinous mine-layer crews and factory workers at Obukhov were on the verge of revolt. British agents—Cromie, Lockhart, O’Reilly—were actively encouraging counterrevolution, circulating forged documents alleging Bolshevik plans to surrender Kronstadt and the fleet to Germany. Rabinowitch describes this tense situation in detail but does not incorporate it into his analysis of the Shchastny case.

Shchastny was not just a neutral military officer. He circulated false documents accusing Bolsheviks of treason, promoted distrust toward the Soviet government, defied orders to relocate or scuttle the fleet, and positioned himself as a potential Bonapartist leader within the navy. In a revolutionary context, these actions go beyond mere administrative errors—they are political acts that could lead to severe consequences.

Rabinowitch’s assertion that the Shchastny trial was “possibly the first Soviet show trial” is historically unfounded. A show trial, in the Stalinist context, involves fabricated charges, forced confessions, predetermined verdicts, and the political suppression of the Old Bolsheviks. The Shchastny trial does not fit this description. Trotsky’s charges were public and political, aligned with the revolutionary government’s need to control the armed forces during a civil war. Comparing Trotsky’s 1918 actions to Stalin’s purges of 1936–38 ignores the critical difference between defending a workers’ state and establishing a bureaucratic dictatorship. This distinction is not merely semantic but is central to 20th-century revolutionary history.

Rabinowitch’s mistake arises from a methodological flaw: he views political events as isolated administrative incidents rather than as parts of a larger class struggle of historical importance. He notices a trial, a formidable commissar, and an officer being condemned. However, he overlooks the German advance, the mutinying fleet, British agents, and the fragile state of the revolution. Absent the dialectical approach, the deeper political significance of these events is lost.

Trotsky openly admitted his involvement, sharing his testimony in ‘How the Revolution Armed’ and later in his 1926 Works edition. This is not indicative of someone orchestrating a “sham trial,’ but rather of a revolutionary leader defending a political decision to the working class. Trotsky understood that the fleet was a vital military resource; its fall could result in German forces occupying Petrograd, and Shchastny’s actions threatened the revolution’s survival. In such a context, revolutionary justice is concrete, representing the dictatorship of the proletariat as it safeguards its existence.

Rabinowitch’s key point is that his own archival evidence contradicts his conclusion. He presents records of the mine-layers’ mutiny, the Obukhov uprising, forged German documents, British intelligence efforts, the Left SR assassination of Mirbach, and Petrograd’s near-collapse. However, he treats the Shchastny trial as if it happened in isolation. This isn’t just an oversight but stems from a theoretical bias: a failure to differentiate between revolutionary coercion and bureaucratic repression.

By suggesting a link between Trotsky’s actions and Stalin’s purges, Rabinowitch unintentionally supports the flawed idea that Stalinism was an unavoidable result of Bolshevism. This contradicts what his research actually shows. However, these limitations do not undermine his overall contribution. His work offers the essential empirical basis for developing a Marxist interpretation of the revolution.

He is survived by his wife of more than six decades, Janet Rabinowitch, an accomplished editor who supported his work at every stage. His death is a profound loss to the historical profession and to all those committed to the defence of historical truth. Yet his legacy endures. As new generations confront the crises of global capitalism, the appeal and significance of his work will only grow.

Alexander Rabinowitch’s scholarship epitomises intellectual honesty. Amidst an era of misinformation, he emphasised the importance of evidence. During times of reaction, he championed the revolutionary role of the working class. And in a world increasingly at risk of war and authoritarian regimes, he highlighted the crucial period when humanity nearly escaped exploitation. His work will continue to be essential for anyone studying the Russian Revolution and for those advocating for a socialist future.

Anna Reid’s A Nasty Little War isn’t a traditional history book. Instead, it’s a political tool—a meticulously constructed lie aimed at benefiting the same imperialist forces that caused bloodshed in Russia in 1918 and are now involved in a destructive proxy war in Eastern Europe. Its goal is to numb the working class, hide the class-driven nature of imperialist violence, and restore the ideological basis for a new global conflict.

The main argument of the book—that the Allied intervention in Soviet Russia was a “nasty little” misadventure—is a grotesque misrepresentation. It serves as a falsehood fabricated by a ruling class planning new atrocities.

I. The Historical Crime Reid Cannot Admit

The Allied intervention was a major attempt by global capitalism to suppress the workers’ state. Fourteen imperialist countries—Britain, France, the US, Japan, and their allies—launched a multi-front invasion to overturn the October Revolution and restore capitalist control. Winston Churchill, the main planner of the intervention, openly stated that the Bolshevik Revolution needed to be “strangled in its cradle.” Reid mentions this line but only as a vivid detail, ignoring its grave significance: the ruling class recognised that the October Revolution posed a direct threat to their worldwide dominance.

Reid’s narrative centres on concealing this truth. She depicts the intervention as a tragic confusion, a geopolitical mistake, a “nasty little war” that spiralled out of control. This is not just inadequate; it is a political lie.

II. The Erasure of the Working Class: The Central Falsification

The most striking aspect of Reid’s book is how it almost completely omits the international working class—the key group that opposed the intervention. This omission is intentional, not accidental, serving a strategic political purpose.

Britain

The “Hands Off Russia” movement mobilised hundreds of thousands of workers, with dockers refusing to load munitions and railway workers refusing to transport them. The Labour leadership, fearing the rank and file, pressured the government to withdraw. Reid, however, dismisses this as a minor aside.

France

The Black Sea mutinies, in which French sailors refused to fire on Bolshevik positions, were essentially political revolts that deeply unsettled the French ruling class. Reid views them primarily as a morale issue.

Canada

The Victoria mutiny, where conscripts refused to go to Vladivostok, was a clear sign of anti-war and pro-Bolshevik feelings. Reid hardly mentions it.

Why this matters

The defeat of the Allied intervention was due not only to the Red Army but also to the global working class. This fact challenges bourgeois historians because it shows that workers, when acting consciously and internationally, have the power to halt imperialist wars. Reid’s silence is deliberate; it forms the core falsehood that underpins her entire story.

III. The Political Function of Reid’s Book in the Present War Drive

Reid is part of the same ideological circle as Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, and the broader group of academics and journalists who support NATO’s geopolitical goals. Her earlier book, Borderland, helped spread the nationalist mythology that now forms the basis of Western policy in Ukraine. A Nasty Little War serves a similar purpose.

By portraying the 1918–20 intervention as a tragic miscalculation rather than a counter‑revolutionary crusade, Reid accomplishes three political tasks:

1. She sanitises imperialism. The great powers appear misguided, not murderous.
2. She erases the working class. The decisive force in history disappears, replaced by diplomats and generals.
3. She legitimises contemporary aggression. If past interventions were merely “nasty little” mistakes, then today’s intervention in Ukraine can be framed as a noble defence of democracy.

Reid’s book is thus not a contribution to historical understanding but a weapon in the ideological arsenal of the ruling class.

IV. The Real History: A Global Class War

The Allied intervention was a worldwide counter-revolutionary campaign that covered regions such as the Arctic, Siberia, the Caucasus, the Baltic, and the Black Sea. It involved widespread atrocities committed by the White armies, including pogroms, torture, and mass executions. Reid notes these brutal acts diligently but avoids explaining them, unwilling to acknowledge that these atrocities were not isolated incidents but manifestations of the social forces that the imperialist powers aimed to reinstate.

The Bolsheviks’ success was not due to ruthlessness, as Reid suggests, but rather because they embodied the only social force capable of mobilising the masses: the working class and the poor peasantry. Their victory was part of the revolutionary surge across Europe from 1918 to 1923. Reid misses this point because it highlights the working class’s revolutionary potential today.

V. The Continuity of Imperialist Violence

Reid’s book comes at a time when the same imperialist powers that invaded Russia in 1918 are once again engaged in conflict in Eastern Europe. This ongoing pattern is no coincidence but reflects a structural continuity. In 1918, the goal was to dismantle the workers’ state. In 2023–26, the objective shifts to subordinating Russia to Western financial interests and encircling China.

Reid’s downplaying of history obscures this continuity. By describing the earlier intervention as a “nasty little war,” she normalises the belief that the West has the right to intervene anywhere, anytime, for any reason. This serves as ideological groundwork for a much larger conflict.

VI. The Marxist Lesson: Only the Working Class Can Stop Imperialist War

The defeat of the Allied intervention was not a miracle; it resulted from the Bolshevik Party’s revolutionary leadership, the international solidarity of the working class, and the clarity of Marxist politics. Later, Stalinism undermined this leadership with its nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country,” which disconnected the revolution from its international roots. This led to the Soviet state’s bureaucratic decline and the eventual return of capitalism. Today, as the Fourth International has argued since 1938, rebuilding this revolutionary leadership on an international scale is crucial. The working class remains the only force capable of preventing a new world war. Reid’s book aims to stop the working class from having to learn this lesson the hard way.

VII. Conclusion: Against Historical Falsification, For Revolutionary Clarity

A Nasty Little War is more than just a popular history; it serves as a political tool supporting imperialism. It distorts the past to justify current actions, dismisses the working class to weaken it, and turns a global class struggle into a tragic misunderstanding. Marxists must reject this account outright. The genuine history of the Allied intervention highlights: the relentless hostility of imperialism toward any challenge from below, the power of a conscious, international working class, and the crucial importance of revolutionary leadership. These lessons are not just theoretical—they are urgent. With the world teetering on the edge of a new imperialist crisis, the working class must arm itself with the unvarnished truth of history, not the sanitized myths peddled by bourgeois historians.

 I. Introduction: The Enigma of Ignazio Silone

Ignazio Silone occupies a distinctive place in 20th-century political and cultural history. His novels, Fontamara and Bread and Wine, are acclaimed for their strong critique of fascist brutality and rural struggles. He is recognized among prominent “dissident” writers whose moral stance was influential among Cold War liberals. Nonetheless, evidence from the 1990s and 2000s suggests a need for a more cautious and realistic assessment.

Silone was not a fascist ideologically, but from a Marxist point of view, his political path is still very concerning. The problem isn’t that he embraced fascism as a belief system, but that, under conditions of repression, confusion, and political decline, he seems to have secretly informed for Mussolini’s OVRA and later became a prominent anti-communist intellectual aligned with Western interests.

Silone’s life reflects more than personal experience; it embodies the broader pressures faced by militants due to the Stalinist decline of the Communist International, the failure of revolutionary strategy in the 1920s–30s, and the ideological shifts during the Cold War. His story highlights the human toll of bureaucratic betrayal, the political void left by the suppression of Trotskyism, and how easily disillusioned revolutionaries could be absorbed into bourgeois liberalism.

This article traces Silone’s political development within the wider crisis of the workers’ movement. It asserts that Silone’s tragedy is closely linked to the tragedy of Stalinism: the dismantling of revolutionary cadres, the rejection of internationalism, and the transformation of the Comintern into a tool for Soviet state interests. Silone’s personal downfall—his act of informing, exile, and later anti-communist stance—must be understood within this broader framework.

II. The Making of a Communist: Silone and the Early PCI

Born Secondino Tranquilli in 1900, Silone came from the poor rural areas of Abruzzi. His initial political development occurred during the rapid expansion of the Italian socialist movement around and after World War I. The Biennio Rosso (1919–20) radicalized many workers and intellectuals, and Silone joined those who leaned toward the PSI’s revolutionary faction.

In 1921, he helped establish the Italian Communist Party (PCI), aligning with the Bolshevik-inspired faction that aimed to firmly reject reformism. The early period of the PCI was characterized by severe repression, internal conflicts, and the swift emergence of Mussolini’s fascist movement. Silone stood out as an organizer and journalist, working on the party’s secret presses and involved in its underground networks.

Even in this early stage, signs of subsequent disillusionment were evident. The PCI emerged in a world already influenced by bureaucratic power within the Soviet Union. The Comintern’s tightening discipline, its dependence on Moscow’s factional conflicts, and its inconsistent tactics caused confusion and discouragement among activists. Silone, like many others, was torn between revolutionary hopes and the oppressive structure of Stalinist communism.

III. Repression, Isolation, and the OVRA Connection

The most shocking revelations about Silone involve his connections to the OVRA, Mussolini’s secret police. Historian Dario Biocca uncovered evidence that Silone acted as a paid informant for the fascist regime during the 1920s, reporting on fellow Communist Party members, including his own brother, Romolo. This constitutes the core of the political scandal. Silone’s supporters have tried to downplay or dismiss the evidence, citing coercion, manipulation, or the ambiguous nature of police archives. However, the documentation is compelling. The OVRA files show regular contact, payments, and actionable intelligence. Romolo Tranquilli’s death in a fascist prison only heightens the tragedy.

How should Marxists interpret this? The provided document gives the essential starting point: Stalinism’s “bureaucratic, conspiratorial organisational methods” fostered an environment where militants became isolated, unsupported, and vulnerable. The PCI leadership, increasingly subordinate to Moscow, failed to offer political clarity or material solidarity. Arrested militants were often left to fend for themselves. The internal purges and factional paranoia within the Comintern further damaged trust. Under these harsh conditions, some individuals broke down—some gave in politically, while others, like Silone, succumbed morally.

This does not exempt Silone from blame, but it contextualizes his betrayal as part of a broader systemic crisis. The decline of the Comintern not only warped revolutionary strategy but also eroded the psychological and organizational resilience of its members. Silone’s act of informing reflects a deeper political sickness.

IV. Exile, Literature, and the Anti‑Stalinist Turn

Silone escaped Italy in the late 1920s and moved to Switzerland. His works from this era—Fontamara (1933) and Bread and Wine (1936)—are considered strong critiques of fascist repression. They vividly and compassionately portray the poverty of Italian peasants and the cruelty of the regime. However, these works also show Silone’s increasing distance from Marxism. The revolutionary characters are portrayed as isolated, morally centred figures, with no ties to a clear political movement. The working class is shown as passive victims rather than active agents in history. While these novels reflect genuine humanism, their political stance remains somewhat vague.

This literary shift reflected Silone’s evolving political views. By 1930, he parted ways with the PCI, mainly due to Stalinist control of the Comintern. Unlike Trotskyists, Silone did not have a theoretical understanding of Stalinism as a bureaucratic decline of the workers’ state. While he rejected Stalinism, his opposition was rooted in an ethical, Christian-influenced humanism rather than revolutionary Marxism, leaving him without a solid ideological stance. Later, this gap would be filled by Cold War liberalism.

V. The Cold War and the Uses of Silone

Silone’s contribution to *The God That Failed* (1949) signified his full acceptance into the anti-communist intellectual circle. The collection of essays by former Communists became a key work of Cold War ideology, portraying Stalinism not as a result of historical decline but as an inevitable consequence of Marxism itself. As the document highlights, Silone’s critique “collapsed into the bourgeois narrative that communism itself was the problem.” This failure was deliberate, reflecting the lack of a revolutionary alternative in Silone’s political outlook. Having rejected Stalinism but not supporting Trotskyism, he was carried along by the dominant ideological currents of his era.

The CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom championed Silone’s work. His novels were translated, circulated, and praised as symbols of “democratic” dissent. The West regarded Silone as a morally impactful witness whose personal tragedy could be used as a weapon against socialism. This marked the end of Silone’s political evolution: shifting from a Communist militant to an OVRA informant, and from an anti-Stalinist exile to a Cold War liberal icon.

VI. The Marxist Assessment: Tragedy, Betrayal, and Historical Lessons

How should Marxists today evaluate Silone? “Silone was not an ideologically fascist. He was probably a secret police informant who later gained prominence as a Cold War anti-communist.” This contradiction—being non-fascist yet involved, anti-Stalinist yet anti-communist—encapsulates the tragedy of his life.

Three lessons emerge:

1. Stalinism created the conditions for collapse.

The Comintern’s bureaucratic degeneration destroyed the political and moral foundations of revolutionary militancy. Silone’s betrayal is inseparable from this context.

2. Anti‑Stalinism without Marxism leads to liberalism.

Silone’s failure to grasp the Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism left him ideologically adrift. His later anti‑communism was the predictable outcome.

3. The Fourth International alone preserved revolutionary continuity.

The Trotskyist movement was the only one to uphold the political clarity and international solidarity needed to resist repression. Silone’s tragedy highlights the importance of such an organization.

VII. Conclusion: Silone and the Crisis of the Twentieth Century Left

Ignazio Silone’s life exemplifies the broader crisis of the 20th-century workers’ movement. His initial revolutionary zeal, his breakdown under repression, his literary humanism, and his Cold War liberal views mirror the collapse of the Comintern and the resulting ideological void. While Silone was not a fascist, he was a man wounded by the combined pressures of fascist terror and Stalinist betrayal. His act of informing was a moral tragedy; his subsequent anti-communism was political. His tragedy is not only personal but also historical. Marxists should aim not to label Silone as a villain or justify him as a victim, but to understand the forces that influenced his life—and to learn lessons to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one’s personal fate. ‘… I know no personal tragedy…In prison, with a book or a pen in hand, I experienced the same sense of deep satisfaction that I did at the mass meetings of the revolution.’

Leon Trotsky

Allan Todd wrote Trotsky: The Passionate Revolutionary (2022) to provide a more comprehensive, humanised, and nuanced portrait of Leon Trotsky, moving beyond the one-dimensional, often heavily biased, or overly academic portrayals in existing literature. Todd aimed to capture the intense, multi-faceted “passions” that drove Trotsky, including his revolutionary, intellectual, and romantic sides.

Alan Todd’s epithet “the passionate revolutionary” points to an honest and inspiring aspect of Trotsky. But passion must be understood dialectically as passion informed by scientific Marxism: programmatic rigour, historical analysis, and an international perspective. For workers studying revolutionary Marxism today, Trotsky’s life offers both an example of moral and intellectual courage and a method. His writings are responses to material realities. He sought to measure leaders and programs by their relation to class interests.

Todd rejects an overtly political or academic examination of Leon Trotsky’s life as a professional revolutionary. Instead, he explores Trotsky as a complete human being, covering not only his political and military roles (the 1905/1917 revolutions, the Red Army) but also his love of literature, personal life, and his relationships with his family and companions.

The book examines Trotsky’s intellectual and literary side and his “passionate” personal relationships—including his relationship with Frida Kahlo and his long-term partner, Natalya Sedova—which are often overlooked in standard, purely political biographies. The book documents his “Passionate” Activism and how it fueled his revolutionary work, his ability to organise the Red Army, and his role as a leading opponent of Stalin.

As a teacher rather than a historian, Todd tends not to evaluate Trotsky from a political perspective. I have always believed that as a historian, you should orient research toward questions that matter politically, especially when you write a biography of such a political man as Trotsky. Since Trotsky remains politically contentious, many recent books are overtly polemical. There has been a massive revival of anti‑Trotsky falsifications in the post‑Soviet period. Todd’s book offers little more than a superficial or unsystematic rebuttal. While he does not recycle all the political slanders aimed at Trotsky, the author does not engage deeply with Trotsky’s primary texts, and it would appear that no archives have been consulted.

Having said that, Alan Todd’s portrait of Leon Trotsky as “the passionate revolutionary” does capture a truth, but that truth must be grasped in scientific, historical terms. Trotsky was not merely an energetic personality but a theorist and strategist whose ideas arose from concrete social struggles and the objective crises of early 20th-century capitalism. To understand Todd’s emphasis on passion correctly requires placing Trotsky’s life and ideas within the materialist conception of history, the dialectical method, and the programmatic legacy of the Fourth International.

Trotsky’s “passion” was inseparable from his commitment to revolutionary Marxism: the theory of permanent revolution, the insistence on the international character of socialist transformation, and the principled critique of bureaucratic degeneration. Trotsky’s writings and interventions on the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, on the organisation and strategy of the Red Army, and on the tasks of the working class under conditions of isolation, are not romantic gestures but scientific responses to concrete class relations and world-historical contradictions. His method treated political programs as the working out of objective social contradictions, not as personal rhetoric.

Trotsky lived through the decisive turning points of the capitalist and imperialist crisis: World War I, revolution, civil war, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state, and the rise of fascism. His theory of permanent revolution emerged from an analysis of how capitalist development and the world market shaped class alliances in backward countries; it insisted that the fate of socialist gains could not be separated from the international movement of the proletariat.

Equally important was Trotsky’s struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. He understood Stalinism not as an aberrant personality cult but as the political expression of objective isolation and the defeat of working-class movements internationally.

This scientific content is often obscured by bourgeois or post‑Soviet revisionism that reduces Trotsky to caricature. Todd’s uncritical use of the historian Robert Service, who is one of the leading attack dogs of the Post-Soviet School of falsification, is problematic, to say the least.

Robert Service is a contemporary British historian best known for biographies of Soviet leaders, most notably his works on Stalin and Trotsky, and for a widely read history of world communism. For anyone committed to a scientific, materialist study of history, Service’s work must be examined critically: it is essential to understand both what he contributes (archival work and narrative synthesis for a broad audience) and where he fails, both methodologically and politically.

Historiography shapes political consciousness. Service’s approach illustrates how ostensibly scholarly writing can function as ideological weaponry either to rehabilitate bureaucratic regimes, as in his treatment of Stalin, or to discredit revolutionary leadership, as in his treatment of Trotsky.

David North writes: Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history but rather an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favourite devices is to refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumour’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.

Trotsky once declared, as he defended himself against the slanders of Stalin’s regime: “There is not a stain on my revolutionary honour.” Service, however, portrays Trotsky as an individual without any honour. He attempts to discredit Trotsky not only as a revolutionary politician, but also as a man. Service’s Trotsky is a heartless and vain individual who used associates for his own egotistical purposes, a faithless husband who callously abandoned his wife, and a father who was coldly indifferent to his children and even responsible for their deaths. “People did not have to wait long before discovering how vain and self-centred he was,” Service writes of Trotsky in a typical passage. Service’s biography is loaded with such petty insults. Trotsky was “volatile and untrustworthy.” “He was an arrogant individual” who “egocentrically assumed that his opinions, if expressed in vivid language, would win him victory.” “His self-absorption was extreme. As a husband, he treated his first wife shabbily. He ignored the needs of his children, especially when his political interests intervened.”[1]

Although Todd does not go as far as Service in his hatred of Trotsky, the book contains numerous lies, misunderstandings, and outright political opposition to Trotsky’s politics and behaviour. The first thing that strikes you about Todd is that he has never been in or around a revolutionary party or movement. Otherwise, he would not have dared to print that Trotsky suffered from “Intellectual Overconfidence”. Despite recognising “the power of the written word”, he spends some time arguing that this was his primary political weakness. He suggests that Trotsky overestimated the extent to which “clarity of ideas” would prevail within the Bolshevik Party.

As noted at the beginning of this article, Todd fails to situate Trotsky and his struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy within its broader social and political context. As I said, it is vitally important to study Trotsky’s writings as responses to material realities, measure leaders and programs by their relation to class interests, and organise political independence rooted in the international unity of the working class. Otherwise, you understand nothing about the political conflicts inside and outside of the Bolshevik Party during and after its rise to power. Certainly, he understands nothing of the objective basis that played a crucial role in Trotsky’s fall from power. If Todd believes that words are not as important as actions, why did Stalin have Trotsky murdered?

The assertion that Trotsky failed to identify Stalin as a serious threat early on is not only laughable but a lie. Trotsky did not simply “fail to see” Stalin as a threat in the sense of being blind to the danger. Rather, he identified early the growth of bureaucracy and the risks to the revolution. Still, he misjudged how quickly and effectively that social layer could consolidate power through control of the Party apparatus. That combination of correct diagnosis and political miscalculation shaped the tragic outcome.

Todd’s lack of political insight and historical knowledge leads him to assert that Trotsky’s so-called inability to build alliances was merely personal. While Trotsky’s difficulties in building long-lasting political alliances were real and consequential, they stemmed from objective class and institutional conditions within the Soviet state, from the social rise of a bureaucracy, and from the international isolation of the revolution, not from any perceived personal failings.

To sum up, it would appear that the central thesis of Todd’s work is that Trotsky was a “literary” figure and that had the revolution not intervened, he would have remained so. Todd’s attempt at counterfactuals falls flat on its arse. Leon Trotsky was far more than a “literary figure.” While his gifts as a writer and polemicist were extraordinary, his historical role flowed from objective class struggles and particular material conditions. The October Revolution both revealed and required Trotsky’s capacities as organiser, military leader, strategist and theorist. Reducing him to an aesthetic talent divorced from politics misunderstands how theory, leadership, and social forces interpenetrate under capitalism and revolution.

AUTHOR: Allan Todd was a teacher, exam workshop leader, and senior examiner in 20th-century/Modern World History for over 25 years. He also lectured in Modern European and World History for the Extra-Mural Boards of Cambridge University and the University of East Anglia, and has written numerous GCSE, A Level, and IB History textbooks and revision guides, including Revolutions, 1789-1917.

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[1] In The Service of Historical Falsification A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky: A Biography Socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewTrotskyABiography.html

It is with profound sadness that I hear about the death of Alan Gelfand, who truly was a fighter for socialism. I never met Alan, and I regretfully cannot call him my friend, but his struggle had a profound bearing on my own political development.

The conclusion of his struggle against the Socialist Workers Party (US) in 1983 coincided with the year I became involved in the Trotskyist movement. After a year as a supporter, I finally joined the WRP before the split, which was, in itself, a seminal moment for me. Although, as a teenager, I spent well over a thousand pounds on Marxist literature from the then Militant Tendency, they had nothing on the history of American Trotskyism. After the split, the then minority held classes on American Trotskyism.

I read James Cannon’s “The Struggle for a Proletarian Party” and many other works. I still have the books in my Library. Again, it was during the Split that I became familiar with the history of recent American Trotskyism, as embodied in the struggles of the Workers League. One thing that always struck me was the high level of camaraderie among the American comrades. They were on a different political and intellectual level and somewhat inspiring. Meeting Jean and Bill Brust was a thrill of a lifetime.

The first time I heard about the Security and the Fourth International (I had purchased a copy of How the GPU Murdered Trotsky but never read it, a bad habit that continues to this day) was when I read David North’s articles on the Death of Tom Henehan. Leon Trotsky and the development of Marxism, 1982, was published in the Young Socialists paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party. These articles were reprinted in the pages of the Young Socialist in 1984. I always read the YS paper as it contained far more interesting articles than the Newsline, which seemed more of a comic to me at the time. I learnt nothing about Trotskyism from it.

It was during the split that I learnt not only about the Security and the Fourth International investigation, but it was my first introduction to Gelfand’s struggle. During the division, a large number of internal documents were circulated by the minority. A large number of these documents pertained to security and the Fourth International. But it was only with the release in 1985  of the two books The Gelfand Case: A Legal History of the Exposure of U.S. Government Agents in the Leadership of the Socialist Workers Party – Volumes One and Two (1 and 2/ I and II), Paperback that I really began to fully understand the havoc caused by the murderous agents of the GPU.

Gelfand will always have a special place in my political heart. It is inspiring that he faced death with the same approach he had to life, as the great poet Dylan Thomas wrote.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Finally, as David North wrote, “In his final words to a comrade and close friend, Alan said: ‘It’s hard to say goodbye. But I have joy in my heart and a smile on my face, and confidence in the movement and in my comrades.” Alan Gelfand will never be forgotten. His place in this history of the Fourth International and the hearts of his comrades is secure.”[1]

Notes

Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html

Harold Robbins Archive-https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/wag_175/

Register of the Socialist Workers Party records-https://oac.cdlib.org/static_findaids/ark:/13030/tf1k40019v.html

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[1] Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html

Horatio, I am dead,

Thou livest, report me and my cause aright

To the unsatisfied.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2

“But who then, at that time [during the Stalinist repression], protested? Who stood up to shout his disgust? The Trotskyists can claim this honour. Following the example of their leader, who paid for his stubbornness by receiving the blow of an axe, they fought Stalinism totally, and they were the only ones. At the time of the great purges, they could no longer shout out their revolt except in the frozen vastness to which they were dragged to be more easily exterminated.”

Leopold Trepper: The Great Game

One of my favourite bookshops is the Amnesty International in Hammersmith, London. It is neither pretentious nor ostentatious, just a straightforward second-hand bookshop. I like it because you occasionally find a gem of a book. One such book was Peter Weiss’s Trotsky in Exile. I usually steer well clear of books on Trotsky’s life because they are inadvertently written by writers who are politically hostile to Trotsky and generally not worth reading, let alone reviewing. However, this play or book is different.

“Trotsky in Exile” is a play by German playwright and artist Peter Weiss, first performed in 1968. The play is a fictionalised account of the last years of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s life. Trotsky was residing in exile in Mexico and under constant threat from Stalin’s assassins.

The play is structured as a series of dialogues between Trotsky and various figures from his past and present, mostly revolutionaries, including his wife, Natalia Sedova, his son, Lev Sedov, and his former comrades in the Bolshevik Party. Through these conversations, Weiss explores Trotsky’s revolutionary ideology and his views on the Soviet Union under Stalin. The more Weiss read, the more he became a strong opponent of Stalinism. In 1967, this led him to meet one of Trotsky’s most important biographers, Isaac Deutscher.

Weiss’s portrayal of Trotsky as a complex and conflicted figure is an honest one. Outside of Trotsky’s writings on the impact of exile and political isolation on his family, this is one of the few books that examines his personal life in detail. While being faithful to Trotsky’s politics, Weiss employs Brechtian theatre devices, such as music and dance, to create a sense of distance and alienation. This style serves to underscore the play’s political and ideological themes, highlighting how history and ideology shape individual lives and experiences.

Peter Weiss (1916-1982 is arguably one of Germany’s most important artistic figures. He was an extraordinarily talented artist. He worked as a painter, novelist, filmmaker, and dramatist throughout his life. Weiss was comfortable in German literary and artistic circles. He was fond of Bertolt Brecht, seeing The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1930.

In the 1960s, Weiss had a friendship with the German-born, Swiss writer Hermann Hesse. In a letter to his long-time friend Hesse in 1961, Weiss writes, “I am very preoccupied with the art which first comes about when reason, rational thinking is switched off. I have been unable myself to resolve this conflict: sometimes it seems to me that the most essential lies in the dark and the subconscious, then however it occurs to me that one can only work today in an extremely conscious way, as if the spirit of the times demands that the writer does not lose his way in regions of half-darkness.”

Unlike most of his generation of artists, Weiss was deeply interested in the seminal experiences of the twentieth century – the crimes of fascism, the October Revolution, and its subsequent betrayal by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

It is hardly surprising, given the political hostility to Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement in general, that a play that is broadly sympathetic to Trotsky and his revolutionary life has hardly been performed, let alone written about. With 2016 marking the 100th anniversary of Weiss’s birth, no attempt was made to stage “Trotsky in Exile”.

As Stefan Steinberg writes, “To my knowledge, the play is unique in its attempt to portray Trotsky’s life and political struggle on stage. The work has its flaws and, on occasion, reveals the influence of Weiss’s discussions with Ernest Mandel, the leader of the Pabloite Unified Secretariat. What is striking about the play, however, is Weiss’s valiant effort to correct all manner of Stalinist falsifications, to restore Trotsky to his rightful place in history as a leader of the Russian Revolution alongside Lenin and as the principal Marxist opponent of the Stalinist degeneration in the Soviet Union.

Of great interest also in Trotsky in Exile is Weiss’s recognition of the central role of culture in assessing the October Revolution and Trotsky’s historical significance. Weiss had studied Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and devotes a scene of his play to a discussion among Lenin, Trotsky and leaders of the Dadaist art movement. In Zurich in 1916, Lenin is known to have met political co-thinkers in the same café frequented by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and other leading lights of the Dada movement. With legitimate poetic licence, Weiss brings the remarkable figures together in a discussion about the prospects for art in a post-revolutionary Soviet Union. A later scene features Weiss’s old mentor Breton in discussion with Trotsky and Diego Rivera in Mexico.”[1]

In the 1960s, Weiss became increasingly politically radical. One form this radicalisation took was, as mentioned by Steinberg, was Weiss’s conversation with Ernest Mandel.[2] Weiss had no fundamental understanding of Mandel’s politics. Mandel broke from orthodox Trotskyism. As Max Brody points out

“Mandel sought to provide the economic justification for the rejection by Pabloism of the revolutionary role of the working class. He claimed capitalism had reached a new stage, in which the imperialist powers had resolved the inner contradictions that resulted in the barbarity of the early 20th century. He initially referred to this new period as “neo-capitalism. “To make the central point from the outset, Mandel’s embrace of Pabloism did not flow from an incorrect economic theory, but the reverse. His economic analysis was based on his rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as the harbinger of capitalism’s demise.[3]

Weiss’s inability to understand the differences between orthodox Trotskyism and the Pabloism of Ernest Mandel was behind his decision to include Joseph Hansen in his book. However, Weiss did not know that Hansen was heavily involved in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. However, once Hansen’s treachery was in the public domain, Weiss should have at least told his readership of Hansen’s role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

According to a document entitled  The Role of Joseph Hansen “The initial stages of the (Security and the Fourth International)investigation uncovered recently declassified documents, which revealed the conspiracy that prepared Trotsky’s assassination and the fatal role played by agents who had managed to infiltrate all the major political centres of the Fourth International. The ICFI uncovered documents relating to the activities of agents such as Mark Zborowski, who became the principal assistant of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. Zborowski played a key role in the murder of Sedov and other leading members of the Fourth International in Europe.

Another important Stalinist agent, who supplied the Kremlin with valuable information on Trotsky’s activities, was Sylvia Caldwell (née Callen), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon; however, the most significant information uncovered by the ICFI related to the activities of Joseph Hansen. Documents discovered in the US National Archives and others obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Hansen, immediately after the assassination of Trotsky, sought out and established a covert relationship with high-level US government agents. One such document, a letter from the American Consul in Mexico City to an official in the State Department, dated September 25, 1940, reported that Hansen “wishes to be put in touch with someone in your confidence located in New York to whom confidential information could be imparted with impunity.”[4]

Weiss’s radicalism and defence of Leon Trotsky against the slander of the Stalinists led to his investigation by the East German Stalinist police, following the publication and production of Trotsky in Exile. Weiss, in the eyes of the Stasi, had become a traitor.

The Stasi’s “Operational Information No. 551/69” of September 5, 1969, reported “that the enemy side is making massive efforts to win over and misuse famous authors for deliberate and destructive ideological purposes,” and “it should be recognised that the enemy has succeeded in turning the author Peter Weiss, who has been successfully featured in our theatres. The Stasi report described Trotsky in Exile as a “clear commitment to anti-Soviet positions” and made clear it favoured a total ban on the work and its author in the GDR.

To conclude, as Weiss writes, “ Every word that I write down and submit for publication is political. It is intended to reach a large audience and achieve a specific effect. I submit my writings to one of the communication media, and then they are consumed by the audience. The way in which my words are received depends to a great extent on the social system under which they are distributed. Since my words are but a small and ever-diminishing fraction of available opinions, I have to achieve the greatest possible precision if my views are to make their way”[5]

Notes

1.   The Heritage We Defend David North, 1988. The Heritage We Defend was first published in book form in 1988. Its origins lie in the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party of the United States, from 1982 to 1986, to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former British section, the Workers Revolutionary Party.

2.   Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work points of an author in this divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968

3.   Hanjo Kesting-The Writer’s Resistance (Peter Weiss) NLR I/139•May/June 1983

4.   The mechanism of revolution in the documentary theatre- Gideon Tsunami, The German Quarterly, November 1971, Vol 44 No 4

1

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[1] The false friends of Peter Weiss, German dramatist, filmmaker and novelist-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/20/pete-o20.html

[2] See Mandel’s review of Weiss’s Book http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1971/xx/exile.htm

[3] The ICFI’s exposure of Ernest Mandel’s “neo-capitalism” and the analysis of the global economic crisis: 1967–1971-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/09/rvtn-s09.html

[4] www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/48.html

[5] 2.Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work points of an author in this divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968

‘If the Vietnamese peasants can do it, why can’t we?’

Tariq Ali

He embodies the French expression, “Before 30 a revolutionary, after 30, a swine!”—except, in his case, the swinishness developed early on and just grew.

David Walsh

The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them; by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the Nepmen, the upstarts, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution. He knows how to meet them on their ground, he speaks their language, and he knows how to lead them. He has the deserved reputation of an old revolutionist, which makes him invaluable to them as a blinder on the eyes of the country. He has will and daring. He will not hesitate to utilise them and to move them against the Party. Right now, he is organising himself around the sneaks of the party, the artful dodgers.

Leon Trotsky

Statement of 1924 on Joseph Stalin’s growing power base, in Stalin, An Appraisal Of The Man And His Influence (1966); also in Stalin’s Russia 1924-53 by Michael Lynch, p. 18

All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist revolution…

Leon Trotsky

Their morals and ours: and, The moralists and sycophants against Marxism (ed. 1968)

Street Fighting Years is the first part of a two-part biography.[1] By Tariq Ali, one of the best-known and one of the worst political opportunists and scoundrels ever to disgrace the workers’ movement. This new edition from Verso covers Ali’s litany of betrayals throughout the sixties and beyond. This edition includes a new introduction, as well as the famous interview conducted by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971.

After Street Fighting Years was written, Ali was already looking for “greener pastures,”. He became a darling of the bourgeois media, a novelist and a political pundit. He told the Guardian in May 2010: “It’s a problem people have had to come to terms with at different times in history: what do you do in a period of defeat?”

Ali came from a high-class family in Lahore. His uncle was the chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence. Ali went to England to study at Oxford. In 1968, he joined the International Marxist Group 1968. The IMG was the British section of the Pabloite movement. This was a retched organisation that, according to David Walsh, specialised in “political provocation, with more than its share of ‘naughty schoolboys.’ Dressed in Mao caps and the latest gear, they would occasionally show up at picket lines or in working-class neighbourhoods. Mostly, they stayed on the university campuses. Their supporters helped produce journals such as the Black Dwarf and the Red Mole.”[2]

Ali’s book covers the decade of the 1960s and into the 1970s, which were years of political, social and economic upheaval both in Europe and around the world. That the Capitalist system was able to survive during this period was thanks to the Stalinist and social democratic parties, and the trade unions, which used their mass influence to control the struggles and lead them to defeat. Ali, in his book, provides a left cover for these organisations.

Ali dedicates his book to another fellow political scoundrel, Ernest Mandel. According to a statement by the Socialist Equality Party, Ali was Mandel’s disciple. The leader of the Pabloite organisation in Britain could not contain his enthusiasm for perestroika and its initiators. He dedicated his book, Revolution From Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going?, published in 1988, to Boris Yeltsin. His moving tribute declared that Yeltsin’s “political courage has made him an important symbol throughout the country. Ali, describing his visits to the Soviet Union, informed his readers that “I felt really at home.” The policies of Gorbachev had initiated the revolutionary transformation of Russian society from above, Ali asserted. There were those, he noted cynically, who “would have preferred (me too!) if the changes in the Soviet Union had been brought about by a gigantic movement of the Soviet working class and revived the old organs of political power—the soviets—with new blood. That would have been very nice, but it didn’t happen that way.” Ali then offered a succinct summary of the Pabloite perspective, which combined in equal measures political impressionism, naiveté, and personal stupidity.”[3]

Ali’s treachery and outright stupidity were welcomed by other pseudo-left groups. Paul Foot, writing for the UK Socialist Workers Party, wrote in the Literary Review, “He may be a rotten Marxist, but he’s the best raconteur the British Left has seen since the war. So spoke a sectarian friend of mine some fifteen years ago about Tariq Ali. I agree with both propositions. I will join sectarian battle with Tariq before this is over (where better than in the Literary Review, none of whose readers agree with either of us) but it is worth saying right away that there is no time of the day or night when any sane person would be sorry to see Tariq Ali and to talk with him. He laughs most of the time, especially at himself and his comrades. He is the most marvellous and melodious public speaker, with a deep love and care for the English language. What he is like speaking in his first language is beyond imagining.”[4]

Ali’s book catalogues all the major revolutions and political upheavals, but in a very cursory and superficial manner and without examining the major defeats and reasons behind several high-profile defeats.  Take France 1968, Ali writes, “In France, there was the largest General Strike in capitalism’s history and when the trade union bureaucrats went up to the workers and said ‘the bosses want to share a bit more of the cake with you’, the response from rank-and-file workers was ‘No! We want the whole bakery.” Ali played a not small part in the defeat of the French working class in the events of May-June 1968.[5]

Another revolution mentioned by Ali is the Portuguese Revolution. He writes, “In 1975, the Portuguese workers, peasants, students, soldiers and young officers brought society to the brink of revolution. They created a feeling that a fundamental change to society was possible and was within our grasp. And we felt that revolutionary change in Portugal would feedback, deepen and revive our movement across the rest of Europe.” Despite occasional setbacks and defeats, the period as a whole bred confidence in ordinary people and a deepening radicalisation that lasted up until about 1975.

These “occasional setbacks” are the bloody defeats of revolutions that swept throughout Europe and beyond. None more so than the terrible defeat that the Portuguese working class suffered and is still dealing with the aftermath even today.

On April 25 1974, a coup by lower-ranked army officers overthrew Portugal’s fascist Estado Novo government. The coup opened the way for a massive mobilisation of the working class, which had not been seen in Portugal before. It was one of the most important revolutions since the Second World War and caught the international bourgeoisie completely by surprise. It would take nearly two years to defeat the revolution. With relatively little violence or bloodshed, the Portuguese bourgeoisie could take back power at the expense of a few limited reforms. The popular front government established by the revolution, which contained a significant Communist Party presence under the leadership of Álvaro Cunhal, handed over power without a murmur from the numerous pseudo-left groups.

Despite his catalogue of betrayals, Ali is still lionised in the bourgeois press. When asked What do you think are the prospects for the left today? He writes

“Starmer is dreadful. I’m in no doubt that his policies will create a space that, at the moment, the far right will try to fill. We need to respond. But we can’t simply do what we did in the past, in the same ways. In the 1970s, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were vital, but the world has changed, the situation is different, and we need appropriate responses. It won’t be easy, but you know it wasn’t always easy in the 1960s and 1970s. It took time to build the anti-Vietnam War movement. We were constantly under surveillance and harassment from the state.

Over the last few decades, we have witnessed the growth of dynamic movements, like Stop the War. Today, the struggle around Palestine has brought large numbers into action. The horrors of Gaza, the complicity of the Western governments in the slaughter, and the scale of the resistance movement on the streets will shape a generation. But we need to think about organisational outcomes, establishing networks and rebuilding a progressive political alternative. For the left, the Labour Party is finished. We should encourage the small number of left Labour MPS (especially those who had the whip removed) to work with the Independent MPS and together to try to offer an alternative vision and voice for the future. We need some type of home, not necessarily a formal political party, for the 200,000 who left Labour when Corbyn was marginalised and kicked out; a home to those from the Palestine and anti-imperialist movements; a home for the old and new left. I think we face a long period of rebuilding, there is no quick fix. But if we sit back and do nothing, things will only get worse.”[6]

As this answer shows, Ali has no qualms about ditching his radical past for a financially comfortable existence as a bourgeois commentator. There is no trace of his “brief spurt of leftism, which fizzled out by the late 1970s.

As David Walsh points out “Ali has never explained, anywhere, for any of his political peregrinations: Why he supposedly adopted Trotskyism in the late 1960s, or why he abandoned it some years later; why he wanted to disrupt Labour Party activities at one moment and later tried to install himself as a member. He embodies the French expression, “Before 30 a revolutionary, after 30, a swine!”—except, in his case, the swinishness developed early on and just grew.”

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[1] You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024

[2] The presence of Tariq Ali at the “Socialism 2010” conference- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/tari-j18.html

[3] Perestroika and Glasnost in the USSR- http://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/56.html

[4] Paul Foot-Rotten Marxist, Nice Bloke Street Fighting Years

By Tariq Ali Collins 208pp £12.95

[5] www.counterfire.org/article/tariq-ali-memories-of-the-struggle-reloaded/

[6] www.counterfire.org/article/tariq-ali-memories-of-the-struggle-reloaded/