After checking the archival scholarship more closely, I would divide Furr’s case this way. He has a significant point about Trotsky’s clandestine political activity and deception, but the evidence gets dramatically weaker when Furr moves from clandestine opposition to terrorism, assassination, and collaboration with Germany and Japan.
* *The 1932 opposition bloc—ESTABLISHED.* This is the strongest part of Furr’s case. Broué found correspondence in the Harvard Trotsky archive demonstrating that a clandestine bloc existed and that Trotsky approved participation in it. The groups actually documented were principally the Smirnov/ex-Trotskyist group, Zinovievists, and the Sten-Lominadze group, with discussions involving others. Trotsky explicitly treated it as a bloc rather than a fusion , whose immediate function was largely the exchange of political information. There is an important catch for Furr: the bloc ** is not automatically the Moscow Trials’ later “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.” Broué found no evidence that Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky as the Right Opposition leadership were members of this 1932 bloc. Indeed, Broué says the “rightists” were essentially a separate current with which contacts existed. He also concluded that the bloc had effectively been broken up by arrests by the end of 1932. So: Furr wins this round, but not on the scale he claims. * *Trotsky secretly corresponded with Radek and other former oppositionists—ESTABLISHED; contents largely UNKNOWN.* Getty found evidence that Trotsky sent secret letters in early 1932 to Radek, Sokolnikov, Preobrazhensky, and others despite later public claims suggesting those contacts had ceased. Copies of the letters were missing from the Harvard archive, while postal receipts survived. Getty considered it likely that material had been removed. Crucially, however, Getty explicitly noted that the contents were unknown. Radek later claimed that a letter contained terrorist instructions, but Getty could not establish that the surviving receipt corresponded to that alleged letter. That means Furr can reasonably say Trotsky concealed contacts. He cannot turn the existence of an envelope into proof of what was inside it. Historical research is annoying that way. * *Trotsky ordered terrorism or assassinations—UNPROVEN, and the archival discovery does not establish it.* Broué could hardly have been clearer on this point. His discovery showed that the political bloc was real, but he said it did *not* substantiate the Stalinist claim that it was a terrorist organization. When discussing the Moscow indictment, Broué characterized the terrorist allegations as resting on confessions obtained through coercion and distinguished those allegations from the genuine political contacts of 1932 Getty’s subsequent archival work with Oleg Naumov does not rescue the prosecution either. The Road to Terror , based heavily on previously secret Soviet documents, describes the August 1936 proceeding as a carefully scripted show trial and documents Yezhov’s efforts to obtain incriminating “evidence” against additional former oppositionists. So the evidence supports *illegal/clandestine political opposition*. It does not bridge the evidentiary gap to *terrorism*. * *Trotsky or the opposition organized Kirov’s assassination—CONTRADICTED BY THE STRONGER ARCHIVAL CASE.* The Kirov question itself has generated a genuine scholarly controversy over whether Stalin had prior involvement. Getty questioned Stalin's involvement; Amy Knight argued for a circumstantial case against Stalin; and Matthew Lenoe's enormous archival study found the lone-assassin interpretation substantially stronger. What is conspicuously absent from that modern archival debate is convincing evidence that *Trotsky directed Nikolaev to murder Kirov*. Getty and Naumov describe what happened afterward differently from the Moscow-Trial narrative: Stalin's leadership *used the Kirov murder as evidence for an increasingly expansive conspiracy narrative* that eventually justified the Terror. Broué reached essentially the same distinction from the Trotsky archive: real opposition existed in 1932, but the leap from that political opposition to responsibility for Kirov’s 1934 assassination was not demonstrated. * *Trotsky collaborated with Nazi Germany and militarist Japan—UNPROVEN / HIGHLY SPECULATIVE.* This is where Furr's method becomes much more problematic. His 2009 study openly acknowledges that there is no documentary “smoking gun.” His case rests heavily on Moscow Trial testimony, pretrial interrogation material, later Soviet investigative records, and circumstantial corroboration. That evidence cannot simply be discarded because it is Soviet; that would be bad history. But neither can an interrogation statement be treated as independent corroboration when the political-police apparatus producing it was simultaneously constructing the prosecution. Getty and Naumov's archival research portrays precisely such a process: Yezhov interrogated former oppositionists to obtain evidence against additional targets, while trial texts themselves were carefully controlled. More importantly, the discovery of Trotsky's secret 1932 contacts provides *no independent German or Japanese documentation establishing a political-military agreement with Trotsky*. Furr's proposition therefore remains possible in the abstract but *not demonstrated to normal historical standards*. His own published case depends substantially upon treating mutually reinforcing Soviet accusations as independent confirmation. * *Broué/Getty “completely invalidate” the Dewey Commission—PARTLY TRUE AT THE MARGINS, FALSE AS A GENERAL CONCLUSION.* This deserves more credit than Trotskyists sometimes give it. The Dewey Commission made an extremely broad finding that Trotsky and Sedov had not conspired with the Moscow defendants *“for any purpose whatever.”* We now know that this formulation was too categorical: Trotsky had clandestine political contacts, approved the 1932 opposition bloc, and concealed that fact. Therefore, *the archival discoveries do damage a portion of Trotsky’s defense and one of the Dewey Commission’s sweeping conclusions.* They also mean historians shouldn't treat Trotsky's testimony as automatically truthful merely because the Stalinist prosecution was dishonest. But the Commission's central criminal conclusions concerned assassination, sabotage, wrecking, and agreements with foreign powers. Those propositions require evidence of those crimes. Discovering that Trotsky lied about a political bloc does not logically prove anything. The Commission specifically rejected the terrorism, sabotage, and foreign-power charges; Broué's later archival discovery did not produce evidence establishing those charges. The important conclusion ------------------------ The strongest historically defensible revision of the old Trotskyist story is, therefore: *Trotsky was running a more extensive clandestine political operation inside the USSR than he publicly admitted, maintained secret contacts with former oppositionists, participated through Sedov in creating a multi-tendency opposition bloc in 1932, and subsequently lied about some of those activities.* That is significant. It changes the history. But Furr then makes a second move: *secret political bloc → continuing conspiracy → terrorism → Kirov → sabotage → Nazi/Japanese collaboration → Moscow Trials substantially truthful.* The evidence does *not* establish that chain. Broué explicitly stops after the first proposition. Getty likewise used the archives to substantially revise our picture of underground opposition while subsequently describing Stalin's trials as staged instruments of repression. So I'd revise my earlier assessment slightly in Furr's favor: *Furr has uncovered or emphasized a genuine weakness in the traditional defense of Trotsky. Trotsky was not completely candid, and the Dewey Commission's blanket exoneration of all clandestine conspiracy is too broad. But Furr has not demonstrated that the central criminal allegations of the Moscow Trials were true.* And that distinction is the whole ballgame. *“Trotsky lied” is now demonstrable. "Therefore, Vyshinsky was telling the truth” is not.* -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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