Talk on my Book Khristian Rakovsky - Trotsky's Japanese Spy for the ICSS on March 15, 2026.

Grover Furr

Good morning! My talk to you today is based on my new book Khristian Rakovsky – Trotsky’s Japanese Spy. I will also examine some related issues: What does it mean to “know” something in history? What are the forces blocking our understanding of the history of the Soviet Union during the “Stalin period”? How important is it that we learn the lessons that an objective study of Soviet history can teach us?

But here’s a question you are probably asking yourself: “Why a book on Rakovsky? He’s a little-known figure. He played an insignificant role in the Party or in the Soviet state. Why spend your time or our attention on him?”

That’s a good question. My answer to it is this: the case of Khristian Rakovsky goes to the heart of the questions about Stalin and the Stalin government in the USSR, and therefore it goes to the heart of our understanding of the history of the international communist movement and, in fact, of world history.

Leon Trotsky is the main source of the demonization of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet state during Stalin’s time as leader. Nikita Khrushchev and, a quarter of a century later, Mikhail Gorbachev, basically agreed with, and in many cases repeated, Trotsky’s accusations against Stalin while inventing new lies of their own.

One of the most shocking accusations against Trotsky in the Moscow Trials of the 1930s is the charge that he conspired against the USSR with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan.

Until 2018, aside from Rakovsky’s testimony at the Third Moscow Trial of March 1938, we had no evidence to support the charge that Trotsky conspired and collaborated with the fascist Japanese regime.

In 2018 the transcript of the June 1937 trial of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and his seven co-defendants was published. The defendants explicitly testified that the Trotsky-led conspiracy was collaborating with fascist Japan as well as with Nazi Germany.

In that same year I discovered that most of Rakovsky’s confession statements plus his confrontations with Soviet diplomats whom he named as his co-conspirators, had been published in 2005 in a Bulgarian history journal. I obtained these documents, studied them, transcribed them into Russian, and then translated them into English. I have reproduced them in my book.

Then I studied once again some essays that Trotsky published in 1937, after Rakovsky’s arrest. In these essays Trotsky “predicted” exactly what Rakovsky would say in the March 1938 Third Moscow Trial. Trotsky even precisely identified by title the high-ranking officials in the Japanese government who recruited Rakovsky as a spy.

Trotsky knew this because Rakovsky had informed Trotsky of all these details in secret letters. So today we have primary-source evidence of Rakovsky’s, and Trotsky’s, conspiracy with the fascist Japanese regime against the Soviet Union and the international communist movement.

We must also consider the anticommunist and Trotskyite claim that all these confession statements were forced upon Rakovsky and upon the other Moscow Trials defendants by the NKVD investigators.

This is the “escape clause” that the overtly pro-capitalist writers and Trotskyites insist upon, in order to rescue their demonized view of Stalin and heroic view of Trotsky.

So the Rakovsky case is important. If Rakovsky’s confession statements are truthful it will add to the large body of evidence that the Moscow Trials were not frameups of innocent people but genuine and necessary actions to prevent a fascist coup d’état in the Soviet Union and the devastating consequences it would have had for European and indeed for world history.

But if Rakovsky’s confession statements were forced upon him, or perhaps even scripted, by the Soviet police, this would be strong evidence that the anticommunist and Trotskyite view of the Stalin-era Soviet leadership as sinister, even crypto-fascist, is correct.

I have been studying the allegations of crimes against Stalin and the Soviet leadership of his day for many years. I am not “apologizing” for Stalin. My aim has always been to discover the truth. If Stalin committed crimes I want to know what they were.

So far, in every case, I have found that the evidence shows that these allegations are false. We now have a great deal of primary-source evidence from former Soviet archives. This enables a dedicated, objective researcher to get at the truth in ways that were impossible before.

* * * * *

In 2008 I published my first book, Khrushchev Lied, in Russia, in the Russian language. It sold 13,000 copies and created a sensation because Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called “Secret Speech” attacking Stalin at the XX Party Congress of the CPSU on February 25, 1956, changed the course not only of Soviet and Russian history, but of world history.

In 2011 I published the English-language version of this book. This book has been translated and published in a dozen languages.

The fact that Khrushchev lied makes many demands of those of us on the Left. Among them: Why did Khrushchev lie? What was the impact of this speech on the international communist movement? How did it contribute to the abandonment of socialism in the Soviet Union and the collapse of the USSR as a state?

In short, the fact that Khrushchev lied demands a complete rethinking of the history of the Soviet Union.

After the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, documents from former Soviet archives – documents heretofore available only to Party leaders and archivists but not even to Soviet historians – began to appear in print. By about the year 2000 the release of documents had become a flood that continues to the present day.

In 2001 Aleksandr Yakovlev, Mikhail Gorbachev’s right-hand man, published an essay in which he attacked the whole idea of communism, socialism, and Leninism, as being just as evil as Nazism. Yakovlev also revealed that since the time of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” he had been a part of a conspiracy of Party members dedicated to destroying Soviet socialism from within. Yakovlev briefly described how the conspirators went about doing this, and boasted about their success. On September 15, 2025, I spoke to the ICSS about this conspiracy and put the transcript of my talk on my Home Page.

If Khrushchev lied, so did Gorbachev and his men. Today the documents from former Soviet archives enable us to prove that the books and articles attacking Stalin published during Gorbachev’s tenure, like those published during Khrushchev’s era, are all lies. They give a deliberately fraudulent version of the history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin period.

Leon Trotsky told many of the same falsehoods about Stalin that Khrushchev and his men, and then Gorbachev and Yakovlev and their men, told later.

* * * * *

Khristian Rakovsky joined the Bolshevik party shortly after the 1917 Revolution. He was given high posts in the new Soviet government.

Rakovsky was already a long-time friend of Leon Trotsky. He joined Trotsky’s faction within the Party. In 1929, the year that Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union, Rakovsky was exiled to a provincial city for his continual factional activity.

On April 18, 1934, in an essay published in both Pravda and Izvestiia, Rakovsky “capitulated” to Stalin’s line and denounced Trotskyism. Rakovsky called Trotskyism a reactionary failure and vowed to remain loyal to the Party as led by Stalin.

Here are a few passages from this very long article:

I hereby ask you to consider that no disagreements separate me from the party, that I fully and unconditionally share the general line, and that I have irrevocably broken with counter-revolutionary Trotskyism.

... Comrade Stalin was the embodiment of precisely this Bolshevik ideological irreconcilability, organizational discipline, unity of word and deed. It was against these principles that the opposition's attack was essentially directed when it attacked the person of Comrade Stalin.

In my person, one of the last representatives of the opposition declares today that precisely what we considered shortcomings in the leadership of Comrade Stalin are his virtues.

Together with the entire party and working classes, I repeat: only with a leader who possesses the ideological irreconcilability, political insight and firm will of Comrade Stalin, could the land of the Soviets cope with the most difficult task of socialist reconstruction.

Rakovsky closes by referring to his long-standing friendship with Trotsky, saying that their “paths have sharply diverged.” However, he said nothing about Trotsky’s conspiracy.

As I show in my book, the Soviet leadership already had good evidence that Rakovsky was still actively involved in Trotsky’s conspiracy. Nevertheless, on March 17, 1934, Stalin supported Rakovsky’s request to be permitted to return to Moscow and given a responsible job.

On December 1, 1934, Leningrad Party leader Sergei Mironovich Kirov was murdered outside his office in Party HQ. The murderer was caught on the spot and soon named his co-conspirators. Some of these persons then admitted that they were in touch with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, former top Party leaders expelled for factionalizing against the Stalin leadership but later readmitted to the Party and given responsible posts. Continuing investigation into the network of conspiracies eventually led to the public Moscow Trials of August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938.

During the 1936 and 1937 Moscow Trials Rakovsky went far beyond merely criticizing the defendants. He called for their executions before they had even testified. In my book I present the first reprinting of Rakovsky’s articles and the first complete translations of them.

On August 19, 1936, the public trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others in the “bloc” of conspirators that included Zinovievites, Trotskyites, and Rightists, began in Moscow. The verdict of death against the defendants was handed down on the evening of August 23. Yet on August 21, only two days into the trial, Rakovsky published an essay in Pravda titled “There must be no mercy.”

Rakovsky stated that the accused – Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky too – were guilty of murdering Kirov, and of organized the assassination attempts against Stalin and other party leaders.

Concerning Trotsky, Rakovsky wrote:

... there is one person whose name is repeated in all the testimonies, there is one person whose bloody hands hold the threads of the entire terrorist organization, a person who, to our great regret, is absent from the dock, but who should be nailed in the first place to the pillory.

I am speaking of Trotsky ...

Today the mask has finally been torn from Trotsky's face. It is now clear to everyone, including me, who for many years maintained a personal friendship with him and who, being in the ranks of the opposition, believed in his political honesty, that Trotsky was always an alien element in the Party. Trotsky is a political adventurer, a scoundrel and a bastard, whose methods of action are to sow political corruption in the party by means of duplicity and deception and to disorganize the Soviet power by organizing the vile murders of its leaders.

For the Trotskyite-Zinovievite murderers, for the organizers of the attempt on the life of our beloved leader, Comrade Stalin, for the Trotskyite agents of the German Gestapo, there must be no mercy – they must be shot!

In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet a character says “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” meaning that someone's excessive denial and over-the-top language suggests that they are hiding the truth and are actually guilty.

At the December 1936 Central Committee meeting Stalin related some examples of “protesting too much” by high-ranking Party members who had tried to conceal their guilt. I quote some of Stalin’s remarks because they suggest a motive for Rakovsky’s “premature” condemnation of his former opposition colleagues.

Stalin: When Kamenev and Zinoviev declared in 1932 that they had renounced their mistakes and declared that the Party’s position was correct, we believed them. We believed them because we supposed that a communist – former or current – is accustomed to ideological struggle, that this ideological communist, former or current, is struggling for his idea. If a person has openly said that he adheres to the Party’s line, then ... the Party considers that this means that person ... really has renounced his mistakes and now stands on the Party’s positions. We believed them. We were mistaken. We were mistaken, com. Bukharin.

Bukharin: Yes, yes.

Stalin. When Smirnov and Pyatakov declared that they were renouncing their views, openly declared this in the press, we believed them ...We believed them, gave them the Order of Lenin, moved forward and were mistaken. Right, Comrade Bukharin?

Bukharin. True, true, I said the same thing.

Stalin. When Sosnovsky made a declaration that he was renouncing his mistakes, he explained the reasons for this, and explained well from a Marxist point of view. We believed him and really did say to Bukharin: “You want to take him on at Izvestiia, good, he writes well, take him, we shall see what comes of it.” We were mistaken.

Believe in the sincerity of people after that! We have drawn a conclusion: Do not take former oppositionists at their word.

We must not be naïve, and Lenin taught us that to be naïve in politics is to commit a crime. We don’t want to be criminals. For this reason we have drawn a conclusion: Don’t believe the word of a single former oppositionist.

... When we arrested Pyatakov’s wife ... we gave him [Pyatakov] all the confessions to read. He said that Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Mrachkovsky were slandering him in their confessions. That’s what others also said, when they had just been arrested or taken to trial.

He came to us and said: “Well, ... how can I justify myself? They are lying, they want to ruin me.” We tried to talk to him: “All right, but you were the public prosecutor against the SRs. Agree to be the public prosecutor against them.”

– “Good, with pleasure.”

He started to prepare for this. But we thought about it further and decided that that would not be good. Still, this attempt started to convince us for a minute that maybe this man is right ...

Therefore we said to Pyatakov: “No, even though it was we who suggested that you be the public prosecutor, this won’t work.” He became sad: “Then how can I prove that I am right? Let me shoot with my own hand all those whom you sentence to death, all this filth, all these swine. What other proof do you need? Publish in the press both after the sentence and after the sentence has been carried out that it was com. Pyatakov who carried out the sentence.”

This also made us hesitate somewhat. But on the other hand we have never made public who carries out the sentences. And we decided that if we did that, no one would believe that we had not forced him to do it ...

– Then what am I to do? Give me a solution. Let me write an article against the Trotskyites.

– Good, write it. He wrote an article in which he really smashed Trotsky and the Trotskyites.

Stalin again:

But ... after that we questioned about 50 people, at least. They really turned Pyatakov inside out. It turns out that he’s a monster of a person!

So why did he agree to be the public prosecutor? Why did he agree to shoot his comrades himself? It turns out that they have a rule like this: If your fellow Trotskyite is arrested and has begun to give up the names of others, he must be destroyed. You can see what kind of hellish joke this comes to.

Believe after this in the sincerity of former oppositionists! We can’t take former oppositionists at their word even when they volunteer to shoot their friends with their own hands.

... you can’t just stand up and say that we don’t trust you, we don’t believe in my, Bukharin’s, sincerity. That’s old stuff now. And the events of the last two years had obviously proven this to us ...

And as for trusting in former oppositionists, we have shown them so much trust … We should be flogged for that maximum trust, that boundless trust that we have showed to them.

Moreover, former oppositionists have taken an even more serious step in order to retain even a little bit of trust on our part and demonstrate once more their sincerity – some people have begun to use suicide. In reality this is also a means of pressuring the Party.

Lominadze committed suicide. He wanted to tell us by this act that he was right, that we were interrogating him in vain, and subjecting him to suspicion in vain. And what happened? It turned out that he was in a bloc with these people. That’s why he killed himself, to cover up their tracks.

So that is a political killing – a means for former oppositionists, enemies of the Party, to strike at the Party, to destroy its vigilance, to deceive it one last time before their death by means of suicide and leave the Party in a stupid position.

Stalin concluded this speech with the following words.

... after all these facts that I’ve told you about, and there are a great many of them, we have to look carefully into things We have to look carefully, objectively, quietly. We do not want anything except the truth, we do not want, we will not permit anyone to be ruined by anybody. We want to seek out and find the whole truth objectively, honestly, with courage. So do not try to frighten us with weeping or with suicide.

However, despite Rakovsky’s over-the-top protestations, demanding the execution of persons against whom the evidence had not yet been presented and who had not even testified yet, Stalin and the Party leadership retained Rakovsky in his official position.

The second public Moscow trial of “the anti-Soviet Trotskyite center” took place between January 23 and January 30, 1937. On January 25 defendant Yakov Naumovich Drobnis identified Rakovsky as a member of Trotsky’s terrorist and sabotage group. On the same day, Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, wrote to Stalin with quotations from the confessions of many defendants who had named Rakovsky.

Once again, Rakovsky wrote an article to Pravda. Like his article of August 21, 1936, this bloodthirsty article by Rakovsky calls for the execution of the defendants even though the trial was only in its second day, most of the defendants had not yet had the opportunity to say anything, and most of the evidence against them had yet to be presented.

Once again, Rakovsky condemned his co-conspirators. But this time, with all the evidence against him, Rakovsky’s bloodthirsty draft article could not save him from arrest.

At first Rakovsky professed innocence. Then he confessed to participation in Trotsky’s clandestine conspiracy.

Then, in September 1937, Rakovsky began to confess to having been recruited by high-ranking members of the government of Japan, to be a spy for Japan at Trotsky’s urging.

Rakovsky identified several persons in the Soviet foreign service as Japanese agents on behalf of Trotsky’s conspiracy, as he himself was. The Soviet investigators did not know about them beforehand – they were not arrested until after Rakovsky had exposed them.

In return, at the March 1938 Moscow Trial, Rakovsky was not sentenced to death but to 20 years imprisonment.

When Leon Trotsky learned of Rakovsky’s arrest in late January 1937 he did something strange. I believe that I was first to discover that Trotsky himself revealed Rakovsky’s espionage for the Japanese even before Rakovsky himself had begun to confess about it. The details of Trotsky’s “outing” of Rakovsky are in my book.

* * * * *

Anticommunists and Trotskyites claim that Rakovsky was threatened or tortured into falsely claiming that the Japanese had recruited him.

Why would anyone think that the NKVD had forced Rakovsky to tell the story of how he was recruited by the Japanese and name the persons in the Japanese government who had recruited him, when these details were kept secret at the trial?

The reason is simple. Both pro-capitalist anticommunist “scholars” and Trotskyites are committed to demonizing Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union during the time he led it.

The overt, pro-capitalist anticommunists have always striven to make the communist movement appear to be morally monstrous, so that capitalism, no matter how horrible, will appear to be, if not positively good, at least the “lesser evil.”

As for the Trotskyites, since Trotsky’s own day the whole Trotskyite movement has been built around demonizing Stalin. Without the figure of the “evil Stalin” there would be no reason for Trotskyism to exist.

Still, the fact that these people are biased does not in itself prove that they are wrong. Therefore, in the remaining part of my talk, I will discuss Rakovsky and the problems of historical knowledge.

* * * * *

* How do we know that Rakovsky was not threatened or tortured into making false confessions?

* More broadly, What does it mean to “know” something in history? How can we gain knowledge about the past – specifically, THIS past, the history of the world’s first socialist state that was aiming for communism?

In my book I present two types of evidence of Rakovsky’s guilt. First, there are Rakovsky’s confessions. They are ignored in their Russian original and have never before been published in translation.

Second, there are some unguarded statements by Trotsky himself that reveal that Rakovsky was indeed carrying out his, Trotsky’s instructions and had informed him, Trotsky, of what he had done.

The evidence of Rakovsky’s guilt has been and will continue to be denied on erroneous or fraudulent grounds. Anticommunists will deny it because Rakovsky’s guilt dismantles the long-standing accusation that the Soviet government – “Stalin” – framed the defendants in the Moscow Trials. Trotskyites will continue to deny Rakovsky’s guilt because the cult of Trotsky, to which they adhere, requires denying that Trotsky conspired with Germany and Japan, among his other crimes.

Both overt anticommunists and Trotskyites reject as fraudulent the huge body of evidence of Trotsky’s guilt. They also want to convince others to reject this evidence. Ignorance of what evidence is and how to interpret it is their ally in this endeavor to fool themselves and to dupe others.

For this reason I thought it best to preface my book with a discussion of the issues concerning evidence. Because of time constraints today, I will be very brief. I refer you to the Introduction to my book for a fuller discussion.

* There is, in principle, no such thing as a “smoking gun.” All evidence can be explained in multiple ways.

* All the evidence of Trotsky’s collaboration with Germany and Japan is circumstantial.

* By “evidence” I mean primary-source evidence. The term “primary source” means evidence that is as close to the subject under study as possible.

* Unless objective criteria are established and then rigorously adhered to, the researcher will almost certainly “find” what his historical preconceptions, his historical paradigm, tells him to look for. In doing so he will either ignore or misconstrue anything that does not fit his preconceived ideas. This logical fallacy is known as “confirmation bias.”

* What a researcher agrees to accept as evidence, and to exclude as evidence, is too often a reflection of his historical paradigm. The problem of “acceptable evidence” is simply magnified in the case of a charge of a secret conspiracy such as Rakovsky confessed to.

There are serious problems with any kind of evidence.

* Confessions in or out of court might be fabricated.

* Documentary evidence can be forged.

In general, there is no kind of evidence that cannot be forged or faked. Neither is there any kind of evidence that can, by itself, provide conclusive proof of any act.

In all my research I assume that the larger the number of individual items of evidence that are all consistent with a single interpretation, the less is the chance that they, and that interpretation, are the result of some kind of “orchestration” or fabrication according to a preconceived plan.

When combined with evidence from documents that were never directly related to any prosecution, the likelihood of fabrication becomes very small indeed.

Concerning the charge that Leon Trotsky collaborated with the Germans and Japanese, there are two hypotheses:

Hypothesis #1. Trotsky did collaborate with Germany and Japan.

Hypothesis #2. The evidence of Trotsky’s collaboration has been fabricated, faked, “scripted,” or in some way produced so as to make it look like an innocent man, Trotsky, was collaborating with Germany and Japan.

We must decide which hypothesis is correct on the basis of evidence too. Then the question becomes: What is the evidence for each hypothesis?

As always, if and when evidence refuting Hypothesis #1 or corroborating Hypothesis #2 should come to light in the future, or if a better interpretation of the evidence we already have is presented, we must be prepared to revise and, if necessary, reverse our conclusion.

Suppose there were no evidence that Trotsky collaborated with Germany and Japan? Would that mean Trotsky did not collaborate? No, it wouldn’t. It would mean that, if this were a trial at law, Trotsky should be acquitted for lack of evidence.

However, we must remember that a verdict of innocent at trial does not mean the defendant actually is innocent – that is, did not commit the crime of which s/he is accused. It means that the prosecution was unable to prove the defendant guilty.

So even if there were no evidence that Trotsky collaborated with Germany and Japan, that would not mean that he didn’t do so. It would mean that either he did not collaborate, or he did collaborate but was careful enough to leave no evidence behind.

In Trotsky’s case, however,

(a) we have a great deal of evidence of collaboration;

(b) there is no evidence of any conspiracy to fabricate this evidence.

None! And Khrushchev-era, Gorbachev-era, Yeltsin-era, and now Putin-Medvedev-era anticommunist Russian researchers have been looking for such evidence for decades. And they have had all the Soviet archives at their disposal.

Therefore, Hypothesis #1 must stand. On the evidence now available, Trotsky did collaborate with Germany and Japan.

The Moscow Trials have never been “disproven”. No one has ever presented any evidence that the defendants’ testimony was compelled by torture or threats, or that the defendants were innocent of the crimes to which they confessed at trial. No one, ever.

In 1988 Rakovsky was “rehabilitated” by Gorbachev’s men. In my book I study the “rehabilitation” report and show that it is a fraud. In 2025 my Moscow-based colleague Vladimir Bobrov and I published an article about this in the online journal Cultural Logic. It is linked near the top of my Home Page.

A great deal of evidence establishes Trotsky’s and Rakovsky’s guilt. There is no evidence that refutes it. That evidence is presented here to the reader who is determined to be objective in their assessment of the evidence and to question their preconceived ideas. This is the most challenging task of all.

We should be concerned with the question of Rakovsky’s and Trotsky’s collaboration with fascist Japan because we need to know the truth about the history of the Soviet Union, the world’s first workers’ state.

Unless we know the truth about the successes, and also the failures, of the Soviet Union, we will never learn the lessons this history has to teach us. Academic researchers will never tell us because they are not asking the questions we need answered, and because academic research into communist history is designed to slander the communist project. Trotskyite writers will never tell us because they are committed to the cult of Leon Trotsky.

So we must do this important job ourselves. Otherwise, we will, at best, be doomed to repeat those errors. That is why I study Soviet history of the Stalin period.

Thank you for listening!