Letter From the RCP to the Russian Prosecutor at Nuremberg¶
Core Argument¶
In this open letter dated 4 January 1946, the Revolutionary Communist Party directly challenges the Russian Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials to produce the evidence that was allegedly used to convict Leon Trotsky and the Old Bolsheviks during the Moscow Trials of 1936–38. The core argument is that the Nuremberg proceedings, with Nazi archives now in Allied hands and the world press present, offer the Stalinist government an unprecedented opportunity to substantiate the central accusation of the Moscow Trials: that Trotsky and his son, along with Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and others, conspired with the Nazis to overthrow the Soviet government. The letter asserts that outside the Comintern-aligned Communist Parties, the Moscow Trials were universally regarded as juridical frame-ups motivated by reactionary political aims, not objective truth.
The RCP recalls that during the Moscow Trials, Trotsky publicly challenged Prosecutor Vyshinsky with a series of questions, including one concerning alleged evidence that Rudolf Hess had met Trotsky in Copenhagen in 1934. Vyshinsky never put these questions to the accused, a failure the letter characterises as a violation of Soviet legal standards. The independent Commission of Enquiry chaired by John Dewey, the American liberal educationalist, had already concluded that the prosecution’s evidence could not withstand independent investigation.
The letter quotes directly from the indictment of the 1938 trial of the ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’, which claimed that Trotsky had been connected to the German intelligence service since 1921 and the British intelligence service since 1926. The RCP now demands that the Russian Prosecutor produce this so-called evidence at Nuremberg. The polemical thrust is unmistakable: if the Russian government fails to do so, it will be established that the Stalinist regime was guilty of a monstrous frame-up against Trotsky and the Old Bolsheviks, who were executed on the basis of fabricated charges. The letter is signed by Jock Haston, General Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and represents a direct intervention into the politics of the post-war trials, seeking to expose the continuity of Stalinist falsification on an international stage.