Press Silent on Moscow Nuremberg Link-up

Wellred

Core Argument

Here the chapter seizes upon the glaring contradiction between the Western and Soviet press’s treatment of Andrei Vyshinsky at the Nuremberg trials and their earlier, eager propagation of his role in the Moscow Trials. Vyshinsky, the leading Soviet spokesman at the United Nations, is identified as the very prosecutor who secured the conviction and execution of Lenin’s old Bolshevik comrades in the infamous frame-up trials of 1936-38. The capitalist press, the chapter notes, recalls Vyshinsky only in connection with the 1933 Metro-Vickers trial, maintaining a “conspiracy of silence” about his central part in the Moscow Trials. Even the anti-Bolshevik journalist A.J. Cummings, who had previously written extensively on the Moscow Trials, suffers a convenient amnesia. The reason, the chapter argues, is obvious: the Moscow Trials’ central allegation was that Trotsky and the Old Bolsheviks had conspired with Hitler and the Nazis against the Soviet Union. Nuremberg, where all Nazi conspiracies were supposedly being exposed, provided the perfect opportunity to test that “evidence.” The chapter reports that the Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Jock Haston, wrote to Prime Minister Attlee, British prosecutor Hartley Shawcross, and the Soviet prosecutor, demanding that the confessions extracted in Moscow be verified or refuted against the intelligence now available at Nuremberg. These letters were met with silence. The chapter directly challenges Vyshinsky to complete his work by proving at Nuremberg the slander that Trotsky was allied to Hitler, asserting that the “fake ‘evidence’” would not survive independent investigation. It then turns on the Daily Worker, the British Communist Party paper, demanding to know why it will not join the Trotskyists in calling for a public working-class committee to investigate the alleged Trotsky-Hess link it had previously promoted. The polemic is twofold: against the bourgeois press for its selective memory, and against the Stalinist press for its complicity in the Moscow frame-ups and its refusal to allow the central slander of those trials to be tested against the documentary record at Nuremberg.