Letter From the RCP to Attlee¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 23 December 1945, the Revolutionary Communist Party, through General Secretary Jock Haston, directly challenges Prime Minister Clement Attlee to use the Nuremberg Trials to expose the Moscow Trials of 1936-37 as a Stalinist frame-up. The core argument is that the Nuremberg proceedings, which were publicly airing Nazi war preparations, offered a unique historical opportunity to test the central allegation of the Moscow Trials: that Leon Trotsky and other Old Bolsheviks had conspired with the German General Staff and Hitler’s government to act as Quislings in a war against the Soviet Union. The RCP contends that if the prosecution at Nuremberg genuinely possessed documentary evidence of secret Nazi planning, then documents must exist either proving or disproving the conspiracy alleged by the Soviet prosecutor Vyshinsky — who was himself attending the Nuremberg Trial.
The letter draws on the earlier verdict of the independent Commission of Inquiry headed by John Dewey in the United States, which had investigated the evidence over many months and concluded the Moscow Trials were frame-ups. It also notes that during the war, the Stalin regime and its British agents, through the Daily Worker, had propagated the story that there were no Quislings in Russia because they had all been exterminated in those trials — a line that had gained wider currency. The RCP argues that the British government, as the representative of the labour movement, has a moral duty to pursue the matter in the interests of truth, history, and the struggle of the working class for socialism.
The polemical thrust is directed against the Stalinist slander campaign that had vilified Trotsky and the Fourth International for years on the basis of the Moscow Trials’ ‘evidence’. The letter does not ask Attlee to endorse Trotsky’s political ideas, but appeals to his recognition that Trotsky was a distinguished socialist revolutionist who dedicated his life to working-class emancipation. The RCP makes two specific demands: that the British representative at Nuremberg raise the issue of the Moscow Trials and call on the Soviet representative to produce the alleged evidence linking Trotsky to the Nazis; and that the RCP be granted legal representation at Nuremberg with a watching brief and the right to intervene and question witnesses and accused Nazis who had been directly linked to Trotsky by Vyshinsky. The letter is a direct attempt to force a public, juridical reckoning with the Stalinist frame-up, using the machinery of the Allied war crimes tribunal.