Socialist Fight

In the final chapter of this book (http:// clogic.eserver.org/2009/Furr.pdf) Grover Furr attempts a character assassination of Trotskys son, Leon Sedov, based on the secret reports of Mark Zborowski to his NKVD (Stalinist secrete police) handlers. Why anyone should place any reliance on the uncorroborated testimony of a hired assassin whose material financial interests were to tell his paymasters what they wanted to hear is a complete mystery. Here is the accurate assessment of the career of Zborowski from the 1975 book Security and the Fourth International by the International Committee of the Fourth International (p. 43). the Fourth International, was responsible for inflicting terrible blows an the early Trotskyist movement. It was the hand of GPU agent Ramon Mercader, who drove an ice pick into Trotskys skull in Mexico in August 1940, but the operation was master-minded in Paris where Zborowski was the centre of the Stalinist intrigue. His sinister career covered: the theft of Trotskys Russian archives from the Nicolaevsky Institute in Paris in 1936; the murder of Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov, in February 1938; the execution of two of Trotskys secretaries, Rudolf Element and Erwin Wolf; and the gunning down of the defector from the Stalinist regime, Ignace Reiss. Despite mounting suspicion of him in Paris, plus a warning letter sent to Trotsky by the NKVD defector, General Alexander Orlov, Zborowski remained at the top of the Paris bureau. This is not to endorse the ICFI claim that leaders of the US SWP were agents of the CIA. That whole campaign of the late 1970s by the WRP and the International Committee of the Fourth International has yet to be reassessed to sort the wheat from the chaff. Of course there is ample public evidence of Stalin's own collaboration with the Nazis. On 31 Dec 1939, in compliance with one of the secrete protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Stalin handed over several hundred German and Austrian Communists to Hitler's Reich at Brest Litovsk, both Jews and nonJews, who had found refuge in the U.S.S.R. before World War II. We know their fate. The following refutation article is from Kalib writing in the blog Soviet-Empire.com. It is written from a Maoist standpoint as is evident in the concluding remarks. However it does the job of refuting the methodology employed by Furr very well. The methodology of Trotskyism vs. Maoism and/ or Marxism/Leninism (in all its varieties) is another task. Of central importance here is the Maoist theory of the qualitative difference between the nationalist and comprador bourgeoisie in the semi-colonial world. Kalibs piece is available here; http ://w ww.sov iet -emp ire.c o m/ussr/ viewtopic.php?f=110&t=51424

Refutation of Professor Grover Furrs Evidence of Leon Trotskys Collaboration with Germany and Japan
By Khlib 28 August 2011

he documents by Grover Furr I have been reading on Soviet history form another set of examples. Grover is a long time communist, English professor and amateur historian. He has undertaken a project to prove that the original Soviet explanations of the purges and purge trials are being factually substantiated by real evidence (including the materials in the Soviet Mark Zborowski, the Stalinist agent inside archives). Having a particular interest in Soviet history and being urged by a good friend to engage Grover, I have read his stuff. I have to say it is one of the most astonishing projects of pseudo-research I have seen (outside of creationist anti-evolution efforts). I am thinking in particular of one major document by Grover, Evidence of Leon Trotskys Collaboration with Germany and Japan. It appeared in Cultural Logic for 2009, and it appears on Grovers site with the simple claim:

On the evidence theres no doubt that Trotsky conspired with the Germans and Japanese as alleged during the second and third Moscow Trials of January 1937 and March 1938. then there is no other evidence of the core allegations. What follows (when you print and read his piece) is virtually every kind of logical fallacy Grovers writings do everything weve been we have listed above. There is in fact, no evi- discussing: dence that Trotsky conspired with the GerFor example they prove (in great detail) that mans and Japanese as alleged. And what is Trotsky and other formed a political group alleged is after all both major and very spewith a specific program, and alliances, and cific: That Trotsky was a paid agent of the sought to struggle for their line (and for the fascists, that he conspired to overthrow soreplacement of the party currents that were cialism, kill the communist leaders and help then in power). In other words, he proves that carve up the Soviet Union between the varithere was a political opposition (or rather ous Axis powers! several) within the CPSU(B) and its various I want to say, in passing, that Grover does levels. occasionally debunk the most extreme and But, that is obvious to everyone and does not deceitful anticommunist claims. There are lots need proving. And by proving the existence of of ridiculous charges (example: that Stalin a political opposition you have not proven deliberately unleashed famine in the Ukraine that Leon Trotsky worked for the Nazis. It is as a form of genocide against Ukrainian peo(as the fallacies document discusses) an ple). And Grover does help refute them in example of red herring, non sequitor, slippery some of his documents. But his other deluslope exaggeration. sional work discredits such refutations. That method appears over and over in much In his specific and most energetic claims (i.e. of Grovers work he documents and proves that the official Soviet allegations in the show all kinds of things with baroque flourishes of trials were credible and proven) Grover has to detail, but just not what he claims to have fall back on misdirection. The only evidence of proven. those old school purge-trial charges remains the evidence presented in those trials: the While Grover claims to have evidence, a lot of confessions of men in prison, men who facing his case revolves around a special pleading death penalties, fear for their families and about why there actually is no real evidence. possible torture. If one has a sceptical attitude He argues that the conspirators would not toward confessions under such conditions, have written anything down, and evidence

Unregenerate Stalinist Grover Furr of the English Department, Montclair State University. His works include The Sixty-One Untruths of Nikita Khrushchev. In interview in the Georgian Times on 2010.11.09 he claims, The (post WWII) Deportation of Nationalities was Excusable.

Leon Trotsky: I am confident of the victory of the Fourth International; Go Forward!

Socialist Fight would have been carefully destroyed, and so Further, those communists who defended on. the purges and show trials down the line were (for sixty years) totally disinterested in But in fact, it is not possible for a major condata and evidence and were rather milispiracy and spy network riddled the Soviet tant about proclaiming their beliefs without Union in service to the Axis government evidence. They didnt care about evidence. without some evidence (if only in Nazi reAnd for someone to claim now (suddenly) cords) conferences, reports, directives, that none of us (not one) has any right to an funding records as the news of this conopinion here without learning Russian (!) spiracy went up and down the Nazi chain of and spending years in Moscow archives command. because we (supposedly) just dont know The fact that six decades of historical re- the evidence search (including into German, Japanese and And at the same time, to claim that the Soviet government archives) has not promassive evidence against their own theoduced any evidence of a vast complex espiories must be permanently suspect (because nage operation (of the kind the Soviets alit comes from KGB controlled archives). leged) shows that there was no such operaWell, the switcheroos and double-think are tion. a bit much to bear. The Trotskyist opposition was a political line It is not as if the Russian archives are a new struggle within the ruling Soviet party. Their thing they have been open for literally political program may well have been disasdecades. Or as if no honest man (other than trous (and I believe it was), but the StalinGrover Furr) has gone there. If there was era assertion that oppositionists were secret really any new real evidence establishing the Nazis was wrong (politically, theoretically existence of a big world-circling Nazi-Trotsky and factually) even if Stalin himself may network of spies and assassins dont you have believed it and then demanded that think it would have leaked into public view? subordinates document it. It has even been mentioned in discussion Grover also makes a classic excluded midthat Grover Furr has gotten publicity for his dle argument: by saying that anyone opviews within the modern Russian press posing his arguments is therefore clearly where interviews with him are published. influenced by the anticommunist arguments So? That is an example of the logical fallacy as if these historical matters exist on a called the bandwagon effect and I have simple binary grid where you either agree to add that getting a theory promoted in the with Vyshinsky (channelled through Grover Russian media is hardly evidence of credibilFurr) or take your side with Robert Conity. Russian politics is notorious for its love quest. And so in Grovers work, other analyof crackpot and paranoid theories of many ses of these events (by scholars known for kinds (especially if they, unlike Grovers not being anticommunist) dont make much theories, have an anti-Semitic underbelly). of an appearance. It would take a month to dissect Grovers Grover also lavishly argues using weasel article on the Trotsky-Nazi connection, and words, proof by verbosity (seemingly unravel all the various levels of misdirection. endless verbosity) and appeal to authorBut the fact remains that there is not emity (both his own and Stalins). bedded in it any piece of evidence (at all!) Im particularly struck by the argument (that that documents his claims. has appeared in various places) that we I have asked him (several times) to simply have to accept Grovers scholarly authority email me a one or two sentence message because he has spent years on this mission, that mentions the single fact that he beread in the Soviet archives personally, and lieves best documents this alleged conspirbecause we dont ourselves speak Russian in acy. And Im still waiting. We dont actually order to dissect the primary material. This is need seventy pages of hemming and hawing all logically false. a one paragraph description of one real First, Grover is hardly the only person who documented fact would suffice to put had plumbed those archives and there Grovers theory on a different plane (a reare major works that provide many key port in a Nazi file, a pay stub, a memoir from documents in English so that we can all ex- one of the architects of the conspiracy, one plore key and revealing sections of the pri- eye witness account that isnt a prisonhouse mary material. Im thinking, in particular, of confession one simple real piece of eviJ. Arch Gettys The Road to Terror: Stalin and dence of any kind of the actual allegations the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932- that Grover says are confirmed.) 1939.

Grover Furr defends the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 as a pure Russian chauvinist totally innocent of any revolutionary aspirations Thus, all what the Soviet Government actually did, beginning from September 17 on, was in fact the reunification of the Western Belorussian and Western Ukrainian peoples with the majority of their brothers living in the U.S.S.R., and the retrieval of our lands which were wrested by Pilsudski's Poland in 1920 from our country.

Here too the issue really is line and avoidance of line: Stalin claimed that antagonist classes had disappeared in the 1930s Soviet Union and so the only material basis for widespread opposition was the actions of old class elements who had wormed their way into power in close alliance with paid agents of foreign enemies. It is a particular theory about the political oppositions within the Communist Party. Mao by contrast (based on an assessment of both Stalins theories and Soviet history) concluded that there was a material basis within socialism and within the Communist Party for capitalist roaders to emerge and contend for power. It is an opposing theory. By announcing that the official Soviet explanation for their purges were factually correct, Grover is making a statement on a crucial (dare I say world historic) question of where do the forces of capitalist restoration come from? And he does so in the guise of an objective scholarly exploration of historical evidence and so does not engage his own views of this theoretical question, and does not seriously engage the Maoist counter-position. It is a two-line struggle over a major question waged (among communists) using a method of bogus factual proof based on bogus claims of obscure evidence.

Leon Trotsky: I am confident of the victory of the Fourth International; Go Forward!