Not Guilty: Findings of the 1937 Commission Chaired by John Dewey Investigating the Charges Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials - Softcover

Leon Trotsky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0873488474 ISBN 13: 9780873488471

Publisher: Pathfinder Press, 2008

Synopsis

“We find the Moscow trials to be frame-ups. We find Leon Trotsky not guilty.”

These were the findings of a 1937 commission of inquiry headed by US philosopher John Dewey into the charges against communist leader Leon Trotsky leveled in the Moscow trials.

Trotsky was the chief defendant in Joseph Stalin’s kangaroo courts, in which the central leaders of the Bolshevik Party under V.I. Lenin were framed up and most were executed.

Stalin’s regime needed the trials to consolidate its counterrevolution against Lenin’s revolutionary internationalist course. The aim was to close the minds of workers, farmers, and national liberation fighters to the communist movement led by Trotsky, which was continuing along the road opened by the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

In Trotsky’s testimony before the Dewey Commission—published by Pathfinder as The Case of Leon Trotsky—he defends this Marxist perspective and rebuts Stalin’s lies. Not Guilty contains the commission’s findings, which helped unmask the frame-ups.

“A seminal treatise depicting philosophical ideals on a landscape dominated by major players…. A meaningful snapshot into a capsule of time.” —Jon Bradley, editor, Insights: A publication of The John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture

About this title

About the Author

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was part of the central leadership forged by Bolshevik party leader V.I. Lenin that organized the revolutionary conquest of power by workers and peasants in Russia in October 1917. Trotsky commanded the Red Army, was a founding leader of the Communist International, and of communists in the Soviet Union and worldwide who fought to continue Lenin’s proletarian internationalist course. He continued that struggle from exile after being deported in 1929. Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940 by Stalin’s secret police.

Since the early 1930s Pathfinder and its predecessors have translated, published, and kept in print Trotsky’s principal works. These include:

The Third International after Lenin (1996)
In Defense of Marxism (1995)
History of the Russian Revolution (1980)
The Revolution Betrayed (1972)
The First Five Years of the Communist International (two volumes, 1972)
Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1929–40 (14 volumes, 1972–79)

Edition details

• Publisher: Pathfinder Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0873488474
• ISBN 13: 9780873488471
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 536