Background
The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky had been set up following the first of the Moscow "Show Trials" in 1936. It comprised Franz Boas, John Chamberlain, John Dos Passos, Louis Hacker, Sidney Hook, Suzanne La Follette, Reinhold Niebuhr, George Novack, Norman Thomas and Edmund Wilson. Dewey, then seventy-eight years old, agreed to head its Commission of Inquiry.
Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they claimed to bring to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.
The Dewey Commission published its findings in the form of a 422-page book titled Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary the commission wrote: "Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:
- That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.
- That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.
- That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR."
The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."
Trotsky remarked at the start of the Commission that:
| “ | The Moscow trials are perpetrated under the banner of socialism. We will not concede this banner to the masters of falsehood! If our generation happens to be too weak to establish Socialism over the earth, we will hand the spotless banner down to our children. The struggle which is in the offing transcends by far the importance of individuals, factions and parties. It is the struggle for the future of all mankind. It will be severe, it will be lengthy. Whoever seeks physical comfort and spiritual calm let him step aside. In time of reaction it is more convenient to lean on the bureaucracy than on the truth. But all those for whom the word ‘Socialism’ is not a hollow sound but the content of their moral life - forward! Neither threats nor persecutions nor violations can stop us! Be it even over our bleaching bones the truth will triumph! We will blaze the trail for it. It will conquer! Under all the severe blows of fate, I shall be happy as in the best days of my youth! Because, my friends, the highest human happiness is not the exploitation of the present but the preparation of the future. | ” |
| — Leon Trotsky, 'I Stake My Life', opening address to the Dewey Commission, February 9, 1937 |
Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué noted that Trotsky had misinformed the Commission, claiming to have had no contacts with oppositionists inside the USSR to form a bloc (one of the charges of the Moscow Trials) despite being reminded during the Commission by his secretary, Jean van Heijenoort, of the opposite being the case. American historian J. Arch Getty also noted this, pointing out that "Trotsky and Sedov were reminded of the bloc at the time of the 1937 Dewey Commission but withheld the matter from the inquiry."
Read more about this topic: Dewey Commission
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