Marks Total Failure of Communist Experiment, ‘Jewish Forward’ Says
The exile of Leon Trotzky is viewed as the exile of the Communist “world revolution,” for which no Socialist and friend of liberty will shed a tear, by the “Jewish Daily Forward,” Socialist organ.
In commenting upon the event, the paper observes: “Only Kameneff and Zinovieff, who at the last moment betrayed their comrades of the opposition, fell on their knees before Stalin and begged his pardon and promised to behave in the future. For this they were given smaller punishments. They were exiled to Central Russia. Trotzky, however, was exiled to Vierny in the semi-wild Turkestan, near the Chinese frontier.
In the eleventh year of Bolshevism, the Soviet dictatorship has reached a stage that it has declared the chief heroes of the Bolshevik revolution, those who with Lenin accomplished the upheaval, those who organized and established the Soviet power and the Communist International, as traitors and contra-revolutionaries, who are to be exiled as political transgressors. Whatever one’s opinion might be of Trotzky, and the other exiled oppositionals or of their program, one must admit that they all represent the true, not falsified, Communism in the name of which the Bolshevik revolution was brought about. Trotzky, Zinovieff and their comrades were those who, in the name of the Communist world revolution, together with Lenin, created that terrible machine of suppression which has overthrown them. Trotzky and Zinovieff now fall into the grave which they dug with their own hands for others and therefore no Socialist and no friend of liberty and democracy will shed a tear at their fate.
“This is not only the personal tragedy of Trotzky but the tragedy of Bolshevism as a whole. The Communist experiment in Russia has failed completely. Stalin and his adherents know it as well as we. They insist, however, on continuing to hold their dictatorship over the Russian people. It is for this reason that they must on one hand make increasingly greater compromises with the peasants and with the bourgeoisie and on the other hand maintain the bluff that in Russia Socialism is supposedly being realized and that Communism is increasingly victorious in other countries as well. Simultaneously they are also compelled to increase the terror against those who think differently than they do. While in the first years of the Bolshevist rule the Soviet government still permitted a semi-legal existence to the Menshevik party, now, even the oldest and most prominent laders of the Bolshevik party are being exiled to Siberia because they do not agree with Stalin’s policy.
“Trotzky and his comrades represent the conscience of the Communist party. With their exile into distant corners, the rulers of Russia have now shown that all that remained in Russia of the former Bolshevism is the Nep and the naked political dictatorship. The Communist ‘world revolution’, however, has been exiled to Siberia,” The Forward writes.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
