The Case Of Leon Trotsky

Was the regime of Joseph Stalin and his heirs a continuation of the Bolshevik-led workers and peasants government established by the October 1917 Revolution? No! says Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in testimony before a 1937 international commission of inquiry into Stalin's Moscow frame-up trials. Reviewing forty years of working-class struggle in which Trotsky was a participant and leader, he discusses the fight to restore V.I. Lenin's revolutionary internationalist course and why the Stalin regime organized the Moscow Trials. He explains working people's stake in the unfolding Spanish Revolution, the fight against fascism in Germany, efforts to build a world revolutionary party, and much more.

Verbatim transcripts of hearings conducted in Coyoacan, Mexico in April 1937, under the chairmanship of John Dewey, to investigate charges made against Trotsky at the Moscow purge trails of 1936-37.

"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 U.S. 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

A biography of Leon Trotsky by two of his close friends and collaborators