Talk on Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy

My talk today is about my latest book, Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy. Soviet and Non-Soviet Evidence with the Complete Transcript of the ‘Tukhachevsky Affair’ Trial. It is jointly written by me and my colleagues, Vladimir L. Bobrov of Moscow and Sven-Eric Holmström of Sweden.

The main document is, of course, the transcript. You should read that first, preferably more than once. It is in the Appendix.

In chapters 1, 3, and 4 we examine Khrushchev-era falsifications of the trial, Soviet and Russian falsifications, and Western books that lie about the Tukhachevsky Affair.

Then we present six chapters of Soviet evidence, and three chapters of non-Soviet evidence, that corroborate the Tukhachevsky conspiracy.

Two final chapters concern the military men who were judges at the trial and who themselves were members of the conspiracy but whose role was not discovered until later. The last chapter is a study of Leon Trotsky’s role in the conspiracy, as described by the defendants.

Of course, in this brief talk I cannot summarize all this evidence, and I’m not going to try. I urge all of you to study the evidence carefully, if you are interested in the truth about the military conspiracy, about Leon Trotsky’s collaboration with the Nazis and Japanese, and in the dishonesty of virtually all historical accounts, from Khrushchev’s day on, concerning Stalin and the Stalin-era Soviet Union.

In the second part of my talk I will discuss the incompetence and dishonesty of mainstream Soviet historians. I’ll indicate the main errors in interpreting evidence – errors shared by most non-historians – that prevent honest readers from understanding the evidence that exists and keeps them in thrall to dishonest "experts" whether anticommunist or Trotskyist.

An important episode in the trial occurs when Tukhachevsky addresses the judge, Vassilii Ul’rikh, with a request to give additional details to his confession about sabotage. Ul’rikh agreed, but shortly thereafter interrupted Tukhachevsky with a leading question.

Tukhachevsky followed with a lengthy summary of his prior testimony. Ulrich lost patience with these theoretical remarks, but Tukhachevsky continued in the same manner. Ul’rikh interrupted him again, saying: "Stick closer to the subject." However, Tukhachevsky continued to ramble on. At last, Ul’rikh lost patience: "You are not giving a lecture or a report. You are making a confession."

This and many similar passages in the transcript constitute strong evidence that the trial was not staged. Disagreements among the defendants about who became a participant in the conspiracy and when they did are clear evidence of an absence of any scenario prepared by the investigators and/or by preliminary collusion between the defendants. The judges listen to the parties in order to clarify and correct discrepancies in the testimony.

The contradictions in the testimony of the trial defendants are good evidence that they did not tailor their testimony according to a prepared scenario. Judge Ul’rikh’s purpose was to find out more about the conspiracy. The investigation into the conspiracy, the arrests, interrogations, and trials of more suspects would follow. And, as the trial transcript shows, the disagreements are never cleared up.

It is clear that the prosecution did not falsify the record of the trial – the transcript – in order to eliminate inconsistencies. Moreover, for whom could it have been staged? The trial took place behind closed doors. What's more, the transcript was in secret storage from 1937 until 2018 - 81 years!

Not all of the military men named by these defendants would be sentenced either to death or to imprisonment. Some would only be cashiered from the service, while others were cleared of all wrongdoing. This is further evidence that, far from being a frame-up of innocent men, the investigation was a serious attempt to uncover a dangerous plot and to save the Red Army and, by doing so, save the Soviet Union.

The testimony of the Tukhachevsky Affair defendants is consistent with a great deal of other evidence which we now possess that Leon Trotsky did indeed conspire with Hitler’s Germany and fascist Japan to encompass his return to power in the USSR through assassination, sabotage, a coup d’état against the Stalin leadership, and/or the organized defeat of the Red Army in a war against invading fascist powers coupled with an armed insurrection, evidently in Leningrad. I devote a whole chapter to the defendants’ statements about Trotsky’s leading role in their conspiracy.

Trotsky denied the accusations that he had collaborated with fascist German and Japanese leaders. However, Trotsky would have denied the accusations whether he were guilty of them or not. Therefore, his denials mean nothing.

In addition, we know that Trotsky lied. Unquestionably, he did so in order to conceal his conspiracies. Trotsky denied that a "bloc" of Rights and Trotskyites existed. Yet in 1980 Pierre Broué, the most famous Trotskyite historian of his day, discovered documents in the Harvard Trotsky Archive that prove that such a bloc existed and that Trotsky had approved it.

Trotsky swore that he had cut off all ties to those who "capitulated" to Stalin. But American historian Arch Getty discovered evidence in the same archive that Trotsky did in fact contact some of these men. Getty also discovered that the Harvard Trotsky Archive had been "purged," undoubtedly of incriminating materials. I have studied these issues in detail in Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’ and Trotsky’s Lies.

We now possess a great deal of evidence that Tukhachevsky and the other defendants were guilty. Likewise, we now have voluminous evidence that Trotsky was indeed conspiring with Germany and Japan. In addition, in the trial transcript, we have the testimony that Tukhachevsky and the other military men were collaborating with Trotsky and with Germany and Japan.

There is no plausible scenario that could account for all this evidence except that Trotsky, along with the Soviet military commanders, was indeed collaborating with Hitler’s government and the Japanese militarists.

In my books Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’ and Trotsky’s Lies I examine some interesting and bold lies by Trotsky that I have discovered, and consider the implications of those lies. Together with other evidence, Trotsky’s Lies reveal much about his clandestine conspiratorial activities. Moreover, what they reveal is consistent both with Moscow Trials testimony – testimony whose validity we can now accept, having tested and proven it in Part One of Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’ and in The Moscow Trials as Evidence – and with other primary-source evidence.

Trotsky’s Lies – those discovered first by others like Broué, Getty, and Holmström, and some that I have discovered – are central to understanding Trotsky himself, the Opposition conspiracies, the Moscow Trials, the Tukhachevsky Affair, or Military Purges – in short, all the high politics of the Soviet Union during the 1930s. My book Trotsky’s Lies can be read as a commentary on some very interesting falsehoods that Trotsky chose to propagate, and which he was successful at getting others to believe. Indeed, they are still widely believed today.

Results

My research concerning Leon Trotsky has produced significant results:

* In The Moscow Trials as Evidence I determined that the defendants in the Moscow Trials were not innocent persons compelled to falsely testify by the investigation (NKVD) or prosecution. They said what they intended to say.

I have determined this by verifying, with independent primary-source evidence, a number of the statements made in testimony by Moscow Trials defendants. In the few cases where we can prove a defendant lied, he did so to further the conspiracy of which he was a part and/or in an attempt to protect himself, not to incriminate himself or to placate the prosecution.

* I have demonstrated that Leon Trotsky lied a great deal during the 1930s. It is fair – accurate -- to say that, concerning the Soviet Union and the Stalin leadership, Trotsky wrote little else except lies. Many of those lies are directly related to the accusations made against him by the defendants and the prosecution at the three Moscow Trials.

I showed that Trotsky lied so frequently and about so many things that nothing he wrote about the Soviet Union after the end of 1934 – the date of his first essays on the Kirov murder – represents what he himself really thought.

We have long had a great deal of testimonial evidence in the confessions of the Moscow Trials defendants. Having verified many details of the Moscow Trials confessions from independent sources, we can now accept the Moscow Trials testimony concerning Trotsky’s conspiracies with a high degree of confidence.

But this brings us to a central problem. Most "critics" of my research haven’t read it.

Most people do not know how to deal competently with evidence. Most people commit common logical fallacies and do not recognize these logical fallacies when they encounter them. This inability to deal with evidence leaves many readers prey to anticommunist and Trotskyist dogmatists, who themselves are usually incompetent to evaluate evidence because they have never done so.

Soviet history is so politicized, and opinions about Soviet history so impassioned, that many readers will reject the results of my research not out of rational evaluation and criticism of the evidence, but out of simple denial, thinly disguised by faulty reasoning.

For anticommunists and Trotskyists it is unthinkable that the Moscow Trials testimony should have turned out to be reliable. This fact invalidates what I have called the "Anti-Stalin paradigm" of Soviet and world history. In the service of anticommunism, and of the irrational cult around the figure of Leon Trotsky, anticommunists and Trotskyists will continue to deny the truth as demonstrated by primary-source evidence and sound analysis.

In 2017, I published Volume 2 of my Trotsky studies: Leon Trotsky's Collaboration with Germany and Japan, and in 2020, I published New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy. In these books I examine some of the large body of primary-source evidence now available, mainly from formerly closed Soviet-era archives, that bears on Trotsky’s conspiracies, including: important confirmation of Trotsky’s conspiracies with Japan; further details of Trotsky’s promotion of "terror" (assassination) and sabotage within the Soviet Union; some details about Yuri Piatakov’s secret flight to Norway in December, 1935, to consult with Trotsky; and much else.

Recognition of the fact that Trotsky was indeed guilty of the serious charges made against him at the Moscow Trials necessitates a radical reinterpretation of the high politics in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. I have begun to reexamine this history in a number of recent books, including Khrushchev Lied, The Murder of Sergei Kirov, Yezhov vs Stalin, and Stalin Waiting For … The Truth.

According to the only acceptable model of Soviet history of the Stalin period – I call it, for convenience, the Anti-Stalin Paradigm -- Stalin was guilty of many horrific crimes, principally mass murder, and the fabrication of false charges against innocent persons followed by their punishment.

In mainstream historiography of the Soviet Union it is considered illegitimate to challenge any charge of a serious crime against Stalin. It is also considered taboo to conclude that Stalin did not commit any crime that he has been accused of. Researchers of Soviet history of the Stalin period are constrained to adhere to the Anti-Stalin Paradigm regardless of the evidence.

The Anti-Stalin Paradigm, therefore, is not a way of learning what really happened. Rather, it is a way of not learning what really happened – a way of denying the truth. It is a way of telling historians: "Your task is to reach acceptable, Anti-Stalin, anticommunist conclusions, and, where necessary, to back those conclusions up with phony evidence and fallacious reasoning." Or, at best, "your job is to confine yourself to drawing conclusions that do not challenge or threaten to disprove the Anti-Stalin Paradigm."

A similar paradigm controls Trotskyist writing, which must conclude that "Trotsky was right" and "Stalin was wrong," regardless of the evidence.

Today we have a great deal of evidence that corroborates the charges leveled against Trotsky in the Moscow Trials of conspiring to murder Soviet leaders, sabotage Soviet industry, undermine the Soviet military, and collude with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan for the defeat of the USSR in war. But no Trotskyist historian can deal objectively with this evidence, or they will no longer be welcome in the ranks of Trotskyists.

The Role of Denial and Evasion

It would be excellent if some mainstream historians of Soviet history would subject the evidence in this book, and in my other books and articles, to scholarly critique. I would expect to learn that I had made some errors – after all, some degree of error is inevitable in all human endeavor. I would also hope to learn that I had overlooked some evidence and/or counter-evidence.

That would be beneficial to me in my research. More important, it would also contribute to the project of learning the truth about Soviet history of this Stalin era and about what Leon Trotsky was really up to, as opposed to what his acolytes claim he was doing.

But I do not expect this to happen. Willful ignorance, and personal attacks on me for daring to contradict the prevailing "wisdom" – that is, falsehoods – about Stalin and Soviet history of this period, have been the only response to my research. I expect that "mainstream" historiography will continue to deny and evade the truth.

My goal is to discover the truth. I do not "defend" or "apologize for" Stalin. If Stalin committed crimes, I want to know what they were. The only way to know this is to do honest research.

However, persons who perpetuate falsehoods in the service of a political agenda tend to assume that everyone does as they are doing – that everyone, like they themselves, is bending, ignoring, or inventing evidence in the service of their own biases. Dishonest persons justify their own dishonesty by assuming that everyone else is also dishonest. This is why I am called a "defender of" or "apologist for" Stalin.

Alan Wald, a prominent American Trotskyist, has called me a "conspiracy theorist." Readers should recognize this as a logical fallacy, the ad hominem argument – an attack on the person making an argument rather than on the matter at hand.

Wald did not explain what he means by this remark. This is "name-calling" – another logical fallacy. In itself, it is without substance and requires no refutation. But it is nonetheless telling in the present context.

Wikipedia has a useful definition of Conspiracy theory:

According to this definition, Trotsky himself was a conspiracy theorist! Trotsky claimed that Stalin was plotting to wipe out personal enemies and any potential threat to his own power. There was not then, nor is there now, any evidence at all to support this notion of Trotsky’s.

We now know that the Soviet investigators did not base their conclusions on "prejudice or insufficient evidence." They had a great deal of evidence! More and more such evidence continues to be made public

The late Stephen Cohen, a senior scholar of the Stalin period and defender of the Anti-Stalin Paradigm, has called me "a Stalin terror denier or apologist;" "a pseudo-scholar who disregards or falsifies overwhelmingly evidence — plain facts, to put the matter plainly," and "who has no standing … among serious scholars here or in Russia."

But Cohen was "blowing smoke." Neither he nor any of the "serious scholars" of Soviet history of the Stalin period have any evidence, much less "plain facts", that Stalin planned the "terror." On the contrary: ALL the evidence supports the opposite conclusion. Cohen simply asserts that there is "evidence" that I am "disregarding" or "falsifying." But he cites no examples. No wonder: he can’t do so, because no such evidence exists.

When Cohen refers to "standing … among serious scholars" he is committing the logical fallacy of "appeal to authority." The fact that so-called "authorities" disagree with me is not evidence that I am wrong, any more than the fact that I disagree with them is evidence that they are wrong!

In 1973, Cohen published Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. In the tenth chapter – the chapter that takes Bukharin’s life from 1930 to his trial and execution in 1938 -- Cohen relies heavily on Khrushchev-era materials about Stalin. In 2010, my colleague Vladimir L. Bobrov and I published an article in which I demonstrate that every single anti-Stalin statement Cohen put into that tenth chapter is provably, demonstrably false.

We also prove that Cohen deliberately lied. Cohen quotes the memoir of Jules Humbert-Droz, a former communist and friend of Bukharin’s. In his memoir Humbert-Droz reveals that Bukharin told him in 1927 or 1928 that he and his followers were already conspiring to murder Stalin. This was before collectivization, the first Five-Year Plan, the famine of 1932-33, possibly even before Trotsky had been expelled from the Party (November 12, 1927) and, as far as we know today, before Trotsky himself was plotting to kill Stalin.

But Cohen withheld this information. He did not tell his readers that Humbert-Droz, whose memoir he cites in his Bukharin book, stated this. To do so would have undermined Cohen’s desire to portray Bukharin as an innocent "victim of Stalin."

Those who uphold the Anti-Stalin and Trotskyist paradigms do so in defiance of all the evidence we now have. What are they afraid of? We should be clear: they fear the overthrow of the Anti-Stalin Paradigm and the complete dismantling of the "Trotsky Paradigm," the Trotskyist cult that is structured around Leon Trotsky’s Lies and deceptions.

The problems of logical fallacies and preconceived bias persist even among Marxists. Here is an example of fallacious thinking by the editors of Science & Society, a scholarly Marxist journal of worldwide reputation for eighty years.

The Science & Society editors stated:

This is an example of the fallacy of personal incredulity. On what basis do the editors say this? Not from studying the evidence, let alone studying it in a strictly objective manner. They just "do not accept" – that is, do not believe it.

In reality, the Science & Society editors have no basis either to agree or to disagree with me. The "great majority" of the board is basing their "non-acceptance" of my "position" – by which they mean the results of my research – on bias and preconceived notions, no doubt bolstered by the "authority" of some person or persons unnamed.

This stance is not compatible with a materialist, scientific approach to history. Materialists decide questions of truth or falsehood on the basis of primary-source evidence and solid, objective reasoning. Once again, this demonstrates the power of the Anti-Stalin Paradigm. Yet S&S is one of the foremost Marxist journals in the world today. How sad!

How can we learn the truth? How can we avoid being blinded by our own biases and preconceived ideas? It is a basic tenet of materialism that one’s conclusions about reality, including historical reality, must be firmly based on evidence. This is the only way to discover the truth in history. The primary-source evidence must be identified, located, collected, studied, and conclusions drawn from it that are based on the evidence alone, not on preconceived ideas, biases, and prejudices, and without faults in logic and reasoning.

The materialist researcher must work hard to be thoroughly objective. She must be aware and suspicious of her own biases and preconceived ideas. Therefore, the materialist researcher must adopt a method that is closely similar to that used in the "hard" sciences like physics or chemistry.

The objective historian must be self-aware. It is her own preconceived ideas and biases, not those of anyone else, which are most likely to mislead her and to poison her research.

* She must take special pains to look with increased suspicion at any evidence or argument that tends to confirm her own preconceived ideas. This is the threat of Confirmation Bias.

* She must also force herself to look with an additional dose of sympathy and interest at any evidence or argument that tends to disconfirm her own preconceived biases.

This is the only way to operationalize – to put into practical use – the ideal of objectivity. If a researcher fails to be objective, she will never discover the truth, or even recognize it if she sees it.

As I show over and over again in my published research: In Soviet research, whether anticommunist or Trotskyist, objectivity is ignored in service to the Anti-Stalin Paradigm.

Gerald Posner, researcher of the Kennedy assassination, has written:

A 1932 article in the journal Communist International stated:

We now have a large amount of mutually corroborative evidence of Trotsky’s German-Japanese collaboration from the Soviet side. But no evidence of German or Japanese collaboration with Trotsky has been discovered outside the former USSR. There are a number of possible explanations for this fact:

1. Trotsky never collaborated with the Germans or Japanese. All the Soviet evidence is fabricated.

If Trotsky did collaborate, the following possibilities exist:

2. Some of these archives were destroyed during the war.

3. Nobody has looked for it. At least, I am not aware anybody has done so.

4. These archives too might have been "purged," as the Harvard Trotsky Archive has certainly been.

But the most likely explanation is this: conspiratorial information of this kind is never written down. No one should expect a conspiracy like this to be documented anywhere, ever, much less in archives. The demands of secrecy and security require that such information be exchanged only by word of mouth.

In 2000 Russian historian Irri N. Zhukov published the only serious study devoted to the Kremlin Affair of 1935 that has yet appeared. His conclusion is that, on the evidence, the "Kremlin Affair" was not a fabrication, but the uncovering of a real conspiracy.

Zhukov cites powerful evidence in support of his hypothesis. He also has some important things to say about evidence generally that is relevant to our purposes.

We can be certain of the existence of one such conspiracy in Soviet history – that among members of the Presidium to get rid of Lavrentii Beria – because it succeeded on June 26, 1953. Yet no prior written record of that conspiracy has ever come to light, and no single, reliable account of it exists even now. The few accounts by those who claimed to have been involved do not agree, and they were all published after the fact.

Therefore, all those who claim that Trotsky, or Tukhachevsky et al., must be innocent because there is no record of these conspiracies in German or Japanese archives are either ignorant, blinded by bias, or dishonest.

It is often assumed that, if a person convicted of a crime during the Stalin period has been "rehabilitated," his or her innocence can be assumed to be established. But this is false.

In my book Khrushchev Lied I studied all the "rehabilitation" reports available in 2000, when a major collection of documents was published. None of them provide any evidence of any convicted person’s innocence. They are simply declared to be innocent.

In succeeding years I studied other "rehabilitation" reports. For example, in the case of the 1988 report on the defendants of the Third Moscow Trial of March 1938, the "Bukharin-Rykov" trial, my colleagues Vladimir L. Bobrov and I show that the rehabilitation report lied about an important document that was published in 2006.

This 1988 report remains unpublished. To demonstrate that the Soviet Prosecutor and the Supreme Court were deliberately lying would cast doubt upon the thousands of "rehabilitations’ issued during the Gorbachev years. The so-called "revelations" of these years played, and continue to play, a huge ideological and legal role in the attacks on Stalin and on the Soviet government and Party during the Stalin years, and have been used dishonestly by three generations of scholars of Soviet history since that time. There is a great deal at stake in perpetuating the falsehood that the Khrushchev-era and Gorbachev-era "rehabilitations" were honest and prove that the "rehabilitated" persons were innocent.

Only primary-source evidence is acceptable evidence. Secondary sources – normally, studies by scholars who themselves use primary-sources – are not evidence, though they can be very useful for other purposes: for example, in identifying primary-source evidence and in providing interpretations of primary-source evidence that can help in one’s own interpretation of them.

No primary-source evidence is "proof positive" or "a smoking gun." All primary-sources are created by human beings. Human beings have biases, prejudices, and memories that change over time. All primary-source evidence must be carefully examined in the context of other primary-source evidence. This essential practice is called source criticism.

Cold-war anticommunists and Trotskyists sometimes claim that evidence originating from Soviet police, investigation, prosecution, or judicial sources should not be used because it may be false – obtained by threats to the arrestee, to his family or friends, or by promises, perhaps false ones, of lenient treatment.

However, all academic and Trotskyist researchers into Soviet history of this period use Stalin-era sources all the time. It is in principle invalid to use Stalin-era Soviet sources when they appear to prove what the researcher wants to find but to reject them when they tend to dismantle the Anti-Stalin Paradigm by providing evidence that Stalin did not commit some crime of which he has been accused.

Trotskyists often recommend the many volumes on Soviet history of the Stalin period by the late Vadim Rogovin, a committed Trotskyist historian who made no attempt to be objective. But Rogovin made heavy use of Soviet documents from the Stalin period.

Many people mistakenly believe that any statement or confession obtained while a suspect is in police custody is useless as evidence. Marxist historian Roger Keeran has written:

In 2019 French Marxist economist Frédéric Boccara said to me:

These statements by Keeran and Boccara show that even Marxist scholars have NO CLUE how to use confession evidence.

Likewise, British historian Geoffrey Roberts has written that "one should be skeptical of Yezhov’s confessions."

Why is this an ignorant statement? Because it implies that other evidence need not be approached with skepticism -- and that is false. ALL evidence should be approached with appropriate skepticism. I do so in all my research.

Many people are confused by, or even agree with, statements like these. It is important to examine such statements in order to point out how and why they are incorrect.

Anyone, at any time, may be telling the truth; may be attempting to tell the truth but be mistaken; or may be lying. This is the case whether or not a person is under arrest.

* No evidence, whether confessions or any other kind of evidence, should ever be "believed." "I don’t believe it" is not a category of scholarly analysis. Rather, it is an admission that one does not have any idea how to evaluate historical evidence.

* It is essential to discard the false notion that persons under arrest are "more likely to be lying" than persons not under arrest. All statements, made under any circumstances, by all persons, must be critically studied and compared with other statements.

* The fact that a person claims to be telling the truth at one time, and then at some later date claims that their first statement was false and that they are telling the truth now, is not evidence that either statement is true (or false). It is an elementary error to accept the last statement a person made as true and all his previous statements as false, or vice versa.

According to a report to the Politburo dated January 20, 1933 by Genrikh Iagoda, Assistant Chairman of the OGPU, A.A. Konstantinov, a member of Smirnov’s underground Trotskyist group, opposed forming a bloc with the Rights because he and others felt that the Rights could not be trusted.

Thanks to a letter from Sedov to Trotsky that Pierre Broué discovered in 1980 in the Harvard Trotsky Archive, we know that Trotsky approved of such a group at exactly this time, 1932. The OGPU would have no reason to invent a lack of willingness by Trotskyists to bloc with the Rights. This confession, therefore, reflected what Konstantinov wanted to say. It was not forced on him nor fabricated.

Towards the end of 1932, Sedov and Trotsky discussed the slogan "remove Stalin." Broué discusses this in his 1980 article, in the subsection titled "Trotsky et le mot d’ordre ‘Chasser Staline.’" Broué identified the relevant documents in the Trotsky Archive. Broué’s convenient summary notes that Trotsky rejected this demand at that time.

In the same report to Stalin dated January 20, 1933 OGPU chief Genrikh Iagoda reported, inter alia, that a new letter from Trotsky had been received by Smirnov’s group in mid-October. 1932. In it -- unexpectedly for Iagoda -- Trotsky said "The slogan "ubrat’ Stalina" is not our slogan. ‘Down with the personal regime’ – that is not right."

This statement in Iagoda’s report agrees completely with the documents found by Broué in the Harvard Trotsky Archive. The OGPU had no reason to "invent" a denial by Trotsky that he intended to remove Stalin.

We find yet more striking confirmation of the truthfulness of the interrogations about Trotsky’s conspiracies in an interrogation of clandestine Trotskyist Aleksandr Il’ich Birkengof of May 23-25, 1936. Birkengof testified that he had been in direct touch with Yuri Gaven, who had himself met with Trotsky personally. Birkengof testified that in December 1932 Gaven communicated the following to him:

This corresponds exactly to what Sedov reported about Smirnov and his group to Trotsky in his "bloc" letter discovered in 1980 by Broué in the Harvard Trotsky Archive. Sedov referred to Gaven with a pseudonym. Broué also discovered that Trotsky had lied when he denied any contact with Gaven.

The NKVD interrogator tried to get Birkengof to admit that by "removal" Birkengof meant "terror," i.e. assassination. But Birkengof refused to admit this. His refusal is recorded in the interrogation transcript. This is good evidence that Birkengof was not forced to confess. Nor did the NKVD forge or fabricate a false interrogation.

Conclusion: Not a "Political Line" but a Search for the Truth

Anticommunists and Trotskyists reject my research, but not because of any fault in that research. They reject it because they cannot honestly confront the evidence, and the conclusions that follow from it.

Some of them are simply dishonest – in plain language, they are liars. But I think that most of them have never studied how to use historical evidence and so they could not use it competently even if they wanted to do so.

However, none of them are interested in the truth. Rather, they are promoting a political "line" – the Anti-Stalin Paradigm and/or the Trotsky Paradigm.

People like these, who push a political "line" instead of the truth, assume that everyone is acting in the same dishonest manner and is promoting their own political "line." So they call me and my research "pro-Stalin," "Stalinist," etc., as though I too were pushing some political "line."

But they are not just dishonest and/or incompetent -- they are wrong. I am not promoting any political line or position. I am interested in the truth. I strive for objectivity as much as any scientist. I try hard to question my own biases and prejudices. I give an especially generous reading to any evidence that tends to cast doubt on those prejudices or that tends to disprove the hypotheses I have chosen to test in my research.

For many years I have been diligently searching for evidence of crimes that Stalin committed. I have searched for them in the only legitimate way – by identifying, locating, obtaining, and studying primary-source evidence, and then by drawing logical conclusions from that evidence.

No one asks what Sherlock Holmes’ politics are. We just want him to solve the mystery! In the same way, my own political proclivities are irrelevant. Nevertheless, the results of my research in this book, as in my other works, will be rejected by those who are unable or unwilling to consider the possibility that their own preconceived ideas are mistaken.

To all other readers – the vast majority – I submit this research, and the conclusions based upon it. I welcome your comments and your criticisms.