Solution Leon Trotsky Speaks Moscow (1 results)

An interesting copy of a rare broadside, advertising a live event in New York City discussing Stalin's infamous "Moscow Trials," including a one-hour phone address from the exiled Leon Trotsky. The event, organized by the "American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky," was held at the New York Hippodrome, and tickets were offered for $1. Interestingly, in addition to the theater's box office, tickets could be purchased at a handful of local left-wing bookstores and at the Columbia University bookstore. The reader is informed that "LEON TROTSKY SPEAKS on the Moscow Trials in a One-Hour Exclusive Telephone Address Direct from Mexico, 45 minutes in English 15 minutes in Russian (There will be no radio broadcast)." The event was widely publicized in The New York Times and elsewhere, and several other authors and leaders of the Socialist and Communist parties gave speeches. More than six thousand people gathered in the Hippodrome to hear Trotsky's speech, but sadly the technology was not up to the taskapparently, the assembled crowd struggled to hear Trotsky's voice over the international phone line, and in the end one of the other speakers, Max Schachtman, was forced to read out Trotsky's speech himself. One of the founders and most prominent leaders of the Soviet Union, Trotsky was an outspoken opponent of Stalin from his early political ascendancy, for which he was exiled in 1928. Trotsky eventually landed in Mexico in 1937, where he evaded his nemesis for only three years before being assassinated in 1940. This was supposedly justice after he was sentenced to death in absentia multiple times in the "Moscow Trials" of 193638. Despite exiling Trotsky years before, Stalin instigated the trials to single out and eliminate "Trotskyists;" the trials claimed that Trotsky, in exile, had formed conspiracies against the lives of Stalin and his supporters, and against the Soviet government. The "evidence" of these trials was comprised of bald-faced lies, defendants were tortured and abused in captivity, and the prosecution was vicious and openly hostile. Interestingly, the verso of this broadside has been used to type out and edit a draft of an article by Arthur Young. This is most likely Arthur "Art" Henry Young, the popular and prolific cartoonist and writer for socialist magazine The Masses, who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for his anti-war contributions. He remained an active artist and contributor to various papers and periodicals for the rest of his lifeas a New Yorker and longtime Socialist, he almost certainly would have attended the Trotsky Committee's event. He has used the back of this broadside to sketch out a fiery article ("I believe the Y.P.S.L. and the Socialist Party cannot be reformedour organization must be completely destroyed"), with extensive manuscript edits, insertions, and deletions. A unique copy of a very rare piece of left-wing political ephemera. We locate a single other surviving copy, held by the New-York Historical Society. OCLC 61068217. Old folds, creasing. Minor splitting at most folds, chipping and small closed tears to edges. Good.