Entire Press Silent on Nuremberg – Stalinist Frame-ups Exposed¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter from Socialist Appeal (No. 22) advances a single, devastating polemical argument: the complete silence of the Nuremberg Trial proceedings on the alleged collaboration between Leon Trotsky, the Old Bolsheviks, and the Nazis proves conclusively that the Moscow Trials were monstrous frame-ups. The prosecution at Nuremberg, the text notes, concluded its case without uttering a single syllable that would remotely connect Trotsky or the Bolsheviks with the Nazi regime. The author seizes on this absence as the most damning evidence imaginable against the Stalinist bureaucracy. If any genuine proof of such collusion had existed, the argument runs, Stalin’s prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky would have deployed it at Nuremberg; the entire GPU and Kremlin propaganda apparatus would have magnified and blazoned it forth. Instead, there was only silence.
The chapter draws on the immediate historical context of the post-war period, when the full scope of Nazi criminality was being exposed at Nuremberg, and contrasts this with the fabricated ‘evidence’ produced in the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. It highlights a significant detail: Stalin, in a speech attacking Trotskyists, accused them of opposing Soviet industrialisation—a charge the text refutes by noting that Trotsky had proposed the Five-Year Plan in 1924—but conspicuously omitted any mention of the Nazi collaboration charge that had been pushed ad nauseam before the war. The Daily Worker’s decision to excise the reference to Trotskyism from its report on Stalin’s speech is presented as a telling act of editorial evasion.
The polemic is directed squarely against the Stalinist bureaucracy and its international apparatus. The chapter names the signatories of a public statement—including H.G. Wells, Professor C.E.M. Joad, and several Labour MPs—whose defence of the Trotskyists was met with a conspiracy of silence from the entire press. This refusal to publish, the author argues, will have great historical consequences. The text invokes the independent Commission of Inquiry’s finding that the trials were frame-ups and that Trotsky and his followers were “Not Guilty.” It concludes by asserting that Nuremberg will be a name the Stalinists will want to forget, and that the trial serves as a milestone in the struggle to expose Stalinism’s foul deeds against Bolshevism.