Trotsky's "Amalgams": Trotsky's Lies, the Moscow Trials As Evidence, the Dewey Commission - Trotsky's Conspiracies of the 1930s, Volume One

Trotsky's Conspiracies of the 1930s #1

by Grover Furr

The Harvard Trotsky Archive was opened to researchers in 1980. In it, researchers found evidence that Leon Trotsky deliberately lied many times and about many people and events. Other evidence of Trotsky's lies comes from his own writings and in documents from former Soviet archives.

Drawing upon primary sources from the Harvard Trotsky Archive and from former Soviet archives Grover Furr subjects the testimony of Moscow Trials defendants to a source-critical check and verification. His conclusion: their testimony is genuine, reflecting what the defendants chose to say.

The same primary sources, plus Trotsky's own writings, demonstrate that Trotsky lied about virtually everything concerning the Soviet Union in his writings about the three Moscow Trials of 1936, 1937 and 1938, his writings on the assassination of Sergei Kirov, and in his testimony to the Dewey Commission in 1937.

This book will revolutionize the understanding of the Moscow Trials. Trotsky’s writings and activities during the 1930s must be seen in an entirely new light.

The results of this research reveal much about Trotsky’s conspiracies in the 1930s.

Genres: History, Soviet History, Soviet Union, Russia, Politics

538 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Grover Furr (Dr. Grover Carr Furr III) is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University who is best known for his revisionist views regarding the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin.

He has researched and published extensive material on Soviet history (with an emphasis on the Stalin period) and on academic Sovietology from a critical perspective, for over four decades. Furr is a critic of anglophone and Western historiography of the USSR and of what he calls "the anti-Stalin paradigm" (a critique to which much of his bibliography attends).

Reviews

[Hatuxka · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece, Trotsky’s Amalgams, by Grover Furr, constitutes an indictment of the near entirety of the body of western history of the Soviet Union (as represented by Stalin) as fabrications essentially composed of repeating rumor as fact, purposeful omissions, distortions and flagrant lying by disregard for the full truth or context (collectively these multiple means of lying are the definition of the term “amalgam”, by the way). The subject of Trotsky’s Amalgams is the conspiracy of a bloc of “Rightists”, Trotskyites and “Left opposition” members who intended to use terror (assassination of the Soviet leadership) and to collude with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to dismantle the USSR, a conspiracy directed from abroad by Trotsky and his son. And how Trotsky went about lying about it. The exposure of the falsehoods of anti-Soviet myth-making paradigm in this latest work by Grover Furr is yet another reason (along with his previous books Khrushchev Lied and Blood Lies) for me to conclude that the literature of Soviet history based on western historical “scholarship” would better be subject to “purges” of every library of these books and grinding of the mass of them to pulp for recycled paper. Furr leaves no escape routes for those who would try to engage in obfuscation and distortion of his delineation of the evidence and thereby the truth of what the USSR faced and how it actually dealt with attempts to destroy the Soviet Union. One way is by examining the “gold standard” for the biased: non-Soviet evidence, for how it may or may not support the voluminous confessions from the Moscow Trials. Furr also applies a method adopted in his previous book Blood Lies in which he eviscerated the credibility of the work of an atrocious nadir of historical fabrication, Blood Lands by Timothy Snyder. By citing the passages of text of evidence material in the original languages and their translation, a defense against any charges of misquoting or misinterpretation is effected. All with impeccable sourcing. The near-uniform predilection of those in the west to dismiss out of hand the massive Soviet evidence of the existence of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy facing the Soviet Union from within is dealt with by showing that in every case in which there is independent, non-Soviet evidence available on the conspiracy, the validity of the Soviet, supposedly fabricated, evidence is supported. Collectively, Furr’s findings demolish the foundations of the US/Anglo/European narrative of the Soviet Union as an evil empire that “we all just know” committed an endless number of crimes. It is a tribute to the integrity, resourcefulness and perspicacity of the Soviet security forces that the complex web of anti-Soviet conspiracies called the "klubok" (tangle) was eventually revealed and eliminated. Their efforts resulted in a recovery and revitalization of their system, despite much damage, to the such an extent that the USSR was able to defeat Nazi Germany and save millions of lives in the west in the years that followed. Furr begins by citing the several logical fallacies that are invariably employed in western scholarship on Russia and Stalin such as “assuming that which must be proven” or that evidence can be dismissed as invalid merely by describing it as “absurd” or “unpersuasive”. (It would be interesting to apply this battery of “smell tests” to the western cannon of Soviet history to see how many of the several fallacies Furr describes are employed in each work. I am sure that Stephen Cohen’s writings would be found replete with this kind of shoddiness.) Such logical fallacies and others have formed the basis of rejecting the Moscow trial testimony out of hand. Additionally, in the few cases the testimony HAS been examined by a western writer, serious distortions or misinterpretations, are evident. Finally, the Trotsky "lack if material evidence" logic concerning the charges against those who were tried in the series of Moscow Trials is uniformly followed by western writers of Soviet history - as if seasoned revolutionaries as those involved in the conspiracy were, would ever leave a trail of such evidence! To paraphrase or quote Furr ‘Any police force that could compel confessions in open court could forge incriminating documents and force defendants to swear them authenticity!’ Thus, the presence of material evidence, not the lack of, is more suspicious.

Reflecting the Moscow trial evidence against the later "rehabilitations” (dismissal of evidence and declaration of innocence) by Khrushchev and Gorbachev indicate without fail that the validity of the confessions by the anti-Soviet conspirators were not effectively refuted or seriously challenged. Trotsky was the first ever to be “rehabilitated”. No evidence in support of Trotsky's rehabilitation has ever been released. However, currently, enough evidence is available to allow cross-checking of Moscow Trial testimony and several lines of non-Soviet evidence (which would be perceived to be of more value to those who assume the evidence is fabricated) support the trial evidence of confessions and the centrality of the guilt of Leon Trotsky as conspirator with internal traitors and foreign enemies of the Soviet Union.

Did an opposition bloc exist? Trotsky categorically denied the existence of an opposition bloc-- of primary necessity for him to characterize the charges against him and his fellow traitors as outrageous and absurd. Furr tackles the Trotsky and western Soviet history denials by presenting the non-Soviet evidence on this question and others that stem from it. A major non-Soviet source, the Trotsky Archives, confirm that an opposition bloc did exist. This evidence was found by the pro-Trotsky biographer Broué. Trotsky went to great lengths to conceal or render the notion as absurd. One major example was to repeatedly state in every forum he had that the major initial element of the conspiracy bloc he formed, the Zinoviev/Kamenev faction, after being arrested in 1933 was charged by the Soviet authorities with attempting to restore capitalism and invoke foreign armed intervention. In reality no such charge was made against this faction. Trotsky himself had this in his plans. Other means of deception are described in the book such as how invested Trotsky was in “getting ahead of the story” Read the book and I see what I mean. Non-Soviet evidence in this case--the Trotsky Archives--show that an opposition conspiracy bloc existed. In all three Moscow Trials, defendants confessed to the formation of an opposition bloc that intended to employ terror against the leadership of the Soviet Union. The non-Soviet evidence: papers in the Trotsky Archive discovered in 1980. The evidence was discovered even though it was also evident letters by Trotsky to opposition members had been purged from the archive, but the corresponding certified mail receipts had not been. Soviet Khrushchev and Gorbachev - era “rehabilitation” documents deny the existence of an opposition bloc. Thus, such reports are simple white-washes. Trotsky had denied any communication with any such bloc. This other keystone lie is picked apart methodically by Furr connecting the dots between the the testimony of multiple confessions and this and other non-Soviet evidence. The Moscow Trials are based on the existence of a conspiracy led by Trotsky from abroad. The existence of Trotsky opposition bloc has been said to be an invention of Stalin. Broué admitted to having found many lies by Trotsky, but deemed them as being to protect the Trotsky (presumably benign and inactive!) underground in The Soviet Union. Broué did not examine these lies for evaluating the Moscow Trials evidence. The Trotsky Archives corroborate evidence given at the Moscow Trials. That they buttress those cases / verdicts has uniformly been left unexamined by US/Anglo/European writers of history books despite the link being so obvious.

The instances described above are only a portion of the masterful presentation by Furr of the threads of the failed Trotsky bloc conspiracies and how Trotsky sought to conceal it with an amalgam of methods of misrepresentations and outright lying. His objective was to present the Soviet system as one of unreasoned brutality, cruelty and arbitrariness, driven by the tyranny of one man, Stalin and with himself as an innocent victim among many others while planning to use terror to destroy the revolution with the help of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The western academic Soviet history community continued to do his work for him long after he was assassinated. Furr has already exposed the methods of the latter in earlier works. A fascinating read.