Table Of ContentNOT GUILTY
NOT GUILTY:
Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges
Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials
First published in English in 1938
by the Commission of Inquiry headed by John Dewey
This edition January 2005
New preface by Pierre Broue
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NOT GUILTY
REPORT OF THE COMMISSION OF INQUIRY
INTO THE CHARGES MADE AGAINST
LEON TROTSKY IN THE MOSCOW TRIALS
JOHN DEWWY, Chairman
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
ALFRED ROSMER
EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS
OTTO RUEHLE
BENJAMIN STOLBERG
WENDELIN THOMAS
CARLO TRESCA
FRANCISCO ZAMORA
SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE, Secretary
JOHN F. FINERTY, Counsel
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(cid:127)
LONDON
WELLRED PUBLICATIONS
2005
1938 PREFACE
The Commission of Inquiry, at its session of September 2 1 ,
1937, drew up and signed the findings which appear as the
Introduction to this volume. It appointed an editorial committee
- John Dewey, Suzanne La Follette, and Benjamin Stolberg - to
write its final Report in accordance with these findings. The
Report which forms the present volume of its publications has
been approved by all the ten members of the Commission.
The actual writing of this Report, and most of the painstak-
ing research required in verifying the wealth of documentary
material and other evidence submitted to the Commission and
in weighing these against the charges and testimony in the trial
records, has been done by Suzanne La Follette.
We, as the other members of the editorial committee, wish to
express our deep sense of indebtedness to Miss La Follette. And
we do so the more gladly because we believe that in acknowl-
edging our own obligation to her we speak for all those who
want to know the truth and are not afraid of it.
The importance of this task, it seems to us, can hardly be
exaggerated. And to its performance Miss La Follette has
brought unwearied industry and rare intellectual integrity.
JOHN DEWEY
BENJAMIN STOLBERG
NEW PREFACE
by Pierre Broue
Under the title of Not Guilty, the report of the Commission of
Inquiry into the accusations launched during the Moscow trials against
Trotsky was published in 1938. The Commission completed its task in
New York on 21 September 1937, when it appointed a commission of
three members (John Dewey, President, Suzanne La Follette, Secretary,
and also Benjamin Stolberg) to write the unanimously approved final
report.
The conclusion of the report is very brief:
22. We therefore find the Moscow trials to be frame-ups.
We therefore find Trotsky and Sedov not guilty.
In reality, between the time that Trotsky fought to persuade his com-
rades to struggle for the formation and then for the activation of the
Commission of Inquiry and the moment when the commissioners
signed their definitive report, the situation was changing. The Popular
Front continued to peddle the debilitating illusion of a so-called strug-
gle between the “democracies” and “fascism”. Many people still see the
Spanish Civil War through these spectacles. In reality, however, this
was a genuine revolution, which Stalin did not want and which was
therefore derailed by the Stalinists. The defeat of the Spanish
Revolution was the prelude to the Second World War which broke out
just one year later.
Nobody yet knew, or even suspected, that war would break out
shortly after the conclusion of the treaty of alliance between Hitler and
Stalin in 1939. The real Soviet accomplices of Hitler’s Germany were
not those unfortunate people who were accused of treason, tortured and
persecuted, and finally executed in Moscow. The real accomplices of
Hitler were the leaders of the country that they had loyally served and
who repaid them by murdering them in the crudest possible manner,
having first charged their victims with the very acts of treason of which
they themselves were guilty!
Only in the course of the last few years has light finally been shed
on some of the murky circumstances of these trials, such as the non-
appearance before the Soviet tribunal of men accused of being links in
the chain of traitors supposedly preparing crimes against the Soviet
Union. A careful examination of the declarations of the witnesses and
of those of the accused who were supposed to have accused others,
and a comparison of the charges made against the accused enable us to
clarify a number of hitherto unresolved questions.
I have used some of the results of this research in my recent book
Communistes contre Staline to clarify the fate of those unfortunates
who were executed during the interrogation for having refused to col-
laborate with their tormentors. These include the historian Prigozhin
and the veteran Communist Yuri Gaven. The latter had written to
Trotsky from Berlin, where he was receiving medical treatment. It was
there that he met Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. For this he was shot ... on
a stretcher.
The reader will follow with passionate interest the way in which,
brick by brick, the entire edifice of false accusations is demolished. The
alleged “confessions” of just one man would send many others to their
death. But the Commission of Inquiry completely destroys the entire
basis of the charges.
To cite just one instance: the Commission of Inquiry proved that
Piatakov’s alleged journey to Oslo in December 1935 was a material
impossibility. Therefore, all of the accusations made by him fall of their
own accord, as do the statements of the witness Boukhartsev, the “con-
fessions” of I.N. Smirnov, of Karl B. Radek, of Chestov, of Muralov, of
Vladmir Romm and others. Today, practically nothing remains of all
these lies, except, perhaps, a sense of shame on the part of a few former
disciples and enthusiasts of the Stalinist school.
We now know that there were a large number of prisoners who were
held “in reserve”, only to be shot when they refused to confess. Some
traces of them remain, despite all the odds. On the other hand, both the
prosecution and the accused quoted from letters, for whose existence no
one can produce the slightest evidence and which probably never did
exist! As a matter of fact, it would have been sheer madness to have sent
letters from abroad to the USSR giving details of terrorist plots, and
moreover through the normal postal services. Yet this is what Trotsky
was accused of doing!
Two years ago I took part in a debate in the Trotsky Museum (now
called the Museum of Exile) in Mexico City. The subject was the impor-
tance of the Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky and the
Commission of Inquiry in contemporary history. It was quite interest-
ing. One of the participants, Thomas R. Poole, the author of a very
good work about the “Counter-Trial” drew pessimistic conclusions. In
his opinion, “the totalitarian apparatus triumphed over those who
upheld the truth and were completely isolated.”
At the end of his work he writes: “It was Stalin who won, even if
Trotsky had right on his side.” How curiously short sighted are those
who cannot see the wood for the trees! Thomas Poole typical of the kind
of investigator who has been so immersed in the detail that he is not
capable of grasping its meaning or else reading into it things that are not
there.
For the 100th anniversary of the birth of Trotsky, which took place
exactly thirty-eight years to the day before the October Revolution, the
Leon Trotsky Institute published a special issue entitled “The Moscow
Trials around the World” which is concerned to large extent to what we
have called “The Missing Trials” — in other words, to the murders of
people such as Juliet Stuart Poyntz, Andres Nin, Grylewicz, who were
liquidated without even the pretence of a trial — and the attempts to
imitate the Moscow Trials which were made in other countries. Our
summary ended in the following terms:
“It is the fighting spirit of Trotsky which led and inspired the organ-
ised resistance to this terrifying and powerful machine. We dedicate this
issue to him, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, and suggest the fol-
lowing phrase of Trotsky, pronounced at the time of the struggle, as a
fitting epitaph: ‘The highest degree of human happiness is not to be
found in the present, but in the preparation of the future.’ There is no
doubt that Trotsky’s struggle against the Moscow Trails was an essen-
tial part of that struggle for the future of mankind.”
THE COMMISSIONERS
John Dewey: Educator and author. Professor Emeritus of Phi-
losophy, Columbia University. Founder of Progressive
Education in the United States. Leader of American
Pragmatism. Member of Sacco-Vanzetti and Tom Mooney
Defense Committees. Author of numerous books on phi-
losophy, psychology, education and social problems.
John R. Chamberlain: Author and journalist. Former literary
critic, New York Times. Former lecturer, School of Jour-
nalism, Columbia University, and associate editor, Satur-
day Review of Literature.
Alfred Rosmer: Author and labor journalist. Member of
Executive Committee of the Communist International,
1920-21; member of Praesidium, Second Congress of the
C.L, 1920. Editor-in-chief of I’Humanite, 1923-1924.
Edward Alsworth Ross: Educator and author. Professor
Emeritus of Sociology, University of Wisconsin. Author
of numerous volumes on economics, sociology and politics,
including “The Russian Bolshevik Revolution” and “The
Russian Soviet Republic.”
Otto Ruehle: Author, biographer of Karl Marx. Former Social
Democratic member of the German Reichstag. Leader of
the Saxon revolution, November, 1918.
Benjamin Stolberg: Author and journalist. Former editor of
labor and literary journals. Writer for many years on
American Labor.
Wendelin Thomas: Leader of the Wilhelmshaven revolt, No-
vember 7, 1918. Independent Socialist and later Communist
member of the German Reichstag, 1920-24. Editor, daily
