Letter From the RCP to the Editor of the ‘Daily Worker’¶
Core Argument¶
In this open letter to the editor of the Daily Worker, dated 23 December 1945, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) delivers a direct polemical challenge to the Communist Party of Great Britain over its historical defence of the Moscow Trials. The core argument is that the Nuremberg Tribunal, then in session, had exposed the Moscow Trials as judicial frame-ups by failing to produce any documentary evidence linking Leon Trotsky or the Old Bolsheviks to a conspiracy with Nazi Germany—the central allegation made by prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky in 1936–38.
The letter draws on a precise historical and political context. It recalls that the Moscow Trials accused Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky, and others of conspiring with the Nazis to destroy the Soviet Union. These charges were widely condemned internationally as fabrications. The Daily Worker, however, endorsed them and, during the war, argued that the Red Army’s successes were partly due to the pre-war execution of these “Old Bolsheviks,” who would otherwise have acted as Quislings. The RCP seizes on the contradiction: the Daily Worker gave extensive coverage to the Nuremberg proceedings but never produced a shred of evidence for the Moscow accusations.
The letter’s polemical force lies in its forensic use of the Nuremberg forum. It notes that the entire world press was present, Nazi archives were opened, and the full preparation for war was laid bare—yet no document emerged showing any connection between Trotsky and Hitler. The RCP poses three specific challenges to be put to the prosecutors, including Vyshinsky himself, who was present at Nuremberg as a Soviet representative: Is there any evidence for the charges? Any proof of the alleged Trotsky–Hess meeting in Copenhagen in 1934? Any Nazi archive material showing Trotskyists as Hitler’s agents, or rather confirming they were his most bitter opponents?
The letter is thus a targeted intervention in a live political moment, using the war’s end and the exposure of Nazi records to demand that the Stalinist press answer for its role in legitimising the purges. It accuses the Daily Worker of slander and demands either proof or admission of a frame-up.