Marv asks two questions that together settle most of this, so let me take them in order.
First, Furr's evidentiary base. Across his corpus it is substantially the same body of material: NKVD interrogation protocols, the transcripts of the three Moscow trials, and the documentary residue produced by the Vyshinsky-era prosecutions, supplemented by post-1991 publications of those same holdings. His argument for their reliability is that the confessions corroborate one another. That is the circularity. The protocols are not independent witnesses who happen to agree; they are serial outputs of a single interrogating apparatus, produced under conditions controlled by that apparatus and by an institution with a determinate interest in the content. Mutual consistency is what such a process manufactures. To treat it as confirmation is to assume precisely what is in dispute. Whatever else the archives opened after 1991 did, they did not turn confession into corroboration. Second — and this is the question I would press — no, the archival revisionists do not accept the treason charges, and it is worth being precise about why. Getty's thesis in Origins of the Great Purges is that the terror was improvised, decentralized, and driven by center-periphery conflict and bureaucratic self-defense rather than executed from a master plan. That argument requires the specific charges to be fabricated. If Trotsky, Bukharin, and Rakovsky really were running a Gestapo-Japanese wrecking conspiracy, the repression becomes a rational counterintelligence operation, and Getty's whole account of its chaotic character collapses. He was not making the case Charles wants; he was making one incompatible with it. The Road to Terror, with Naumov, documents the fabrication rather than the crime. Chase's work on the Comintern cadres department is the same: it reconstructs the machinery of denunciation, the circulation of suspicion, and the arrests of foreign communists. Documenting how the charges were produced is not endorsing their content. Hari calls Chase an avowed critic of Stalin in the same post that offers him as an authority here, which is a fair description and rather the point. Losurdo is the most accommodating of the three and still does not assert the espionage thesis as fact. Furr is not the far wing of this literature. He is outside it, and the historians being invoked as cover are the ones who decline to go where he goes. On the underlying distinction. A bloc is not treason, and conceding the first does not put one on a road to the second. Broué established through the closed section of the Harvard papers that Sedov and I.N. Smirnov assembled an oppositional bloc in 1932 with Zinovievites and the Lominadze-Sten group and that Trotsky knew of it. Fine—that is a factional alignment among communists, of the kind that was legal within living memory of everyone involved. The indictment was something else entirely: wrecking, terror, and liaison with German and Japanese intelligence for the restoration of capitalism. These are not two points on a continuum where an admission on the first shortens the distance to the second. The whole rhetorical work of the method under discussion consists in making the concession look like a down payment on the accusation. On Bland and Siqueiros, Marv's instinct is right, and I would put it harder. A thesis that routes the raid through the Cárdenas government and the Roosevelt administration needs something load-bearing under it, and what is under it is Isaac Don Levine—a Cold War popularizer who spent a career on exactly this beat. One hostile trade book from 1959 does not carry a conspiracy of that scope. As for Chase on the Dewey Commission, the SWP used the defense campaign to build influence among liberals and to recruit from the Socialist Party; that is true, was the announced intention, and Cannon wrote about it in print at the time. It is neither a revelation nor incriminating. Parties conduct defense campaigns to build their own. I will add that none of this obliges me to defend Trotsky's veracity, and I do not propose to. He denied the bloc before the Dewey Commission, and David is right about the conditions—anyone named alive inside the USSR in 1937 was thereby sentenced. One can call that a lie and lose nothing, because the case against the trials never rested on his personal candor. It rests on what kind of apparatus generates confessions at that scale and on what Mark and Steven have already put on the table, which remains the strongest thing in this thread. If every surviving Old Bolshevik turned out to be an agent of foreign powers, the question is what sort of regime that describes. And the Congress of Victors closes it: the purge went on to consume the majority of Stalin's own victorious faction, the people who had already won. No espionage thesis survives that arithmetic. What it describes is an apparatus that had made itself independent of the class in whose name it ruled and was liquidating anyone who could remember the alternative—which is also the answer to Mark's question about where the workers were. They had been demobilized long before, and the soviets they invented in 1905 had been hollowed out well before the first trial. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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