Earl Browder - Traitors in American History: Lessons of the Moscow Trials

By Earl Browder

The treason trial just finished in Moscow, in which Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, Rakovsky, and their seventeen co-defendants revealed at last the full scope and extent of the international fascist conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet government, are not to be considered the domestic affair of the land of socialism. The murderous conspiracy there revealed throws a bright light on current events all over the world; in Spain, 30,000 new Hitler Storm Troopers join Franco's new offensive, with a new army from Mussolini, and hundreds of airplanes and heavy guns, while simultaneously the "Fifth Column" of fascism, behind the loyalist lines, composed mainly of Trotskyites, tries to raise panic and demoralization; in Austria, Hitler consummates the obliteration of an independent nation, prepared by treachery and conspiracy from within; the Chinese people develop their heroic and history-making resistance to the Japanese invasion, but only at the price of systematic weeding out and shooting of the generals and other officials in the pay of the Japanese secret service. In the United States itself, the smallest tip of the tail of the espionage rats was caught, with the arrest of a half dozen Nazi agents engaged in military espionage against our own land, while the Japanese espionage still operates with relative freedom. There is no part of the world whose fate was not involved in the network of treason, murder, and war-provocation revealed in the Moscow trials.

After the first two Moscow treason trials, in August 1936, and January, 1937, the capitalist press and the papers of the Second International joined in a cry of "frame-up." They tried to convince the world that even the confessions of the accused were faked, and that the conspiracy was on the side of the Soviet government itself, and not of the accused, who were suddenly pictured as "saints of the revolution," "Old Bolsheviks," and so on, who, for their revolutionary virtues must now be defended by the capitalist press and the Second International. The Soviet government, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had betrayed the pure doctrines of Marx and Lenin, they said, which are now being jointly defended by Trotsky, the capitalist press, and the Labor and Socialist International Executive Committee. Even our own New York Herald Tribune came our as the defender of Leninism? And of course, William Randolph Hearst, Eugene Lyons, and Max Eastman were in the front lines!

Now with the last trial over, the evidence before us, the Court's verdict given and executed, now even the most hardened newspaper defenders of the traitors have been forced to drop the cry of frame-up, have been forced to admit the overwhelming proof of the guilt of the accused. The entire world is convinced that there actually was such a conspiracy, that it was accurately identified, that the accused were justly convicted. Even the most bitter-end opponents of the Soviet Union, including those without scruples or conscience, realize the old game is up, that it is useless and longer to repeat the old "frame-up" cry. The facts of the case are now established, once and for all, for the whole world.

Today the journalistic and political defenders of Trotsky and his executed collaborators take up a new line. Admitting the facts, they now cry out that either way, true or false as the charges may be, the Soviet Union is equally discredited and disgraced before the world. If it had been a "frame-up," as they originally charged, then the Soviet government was the arch-criminal of all history; now that the old cry is completely discredited, the facts established, the Soviet Union is to be made responsible for the appearance of such extreme criminals in its ranks. Ha, ha, they cry, look at what enormous criminality is produced by the Soviet system, and in its very highest ranks too! That is enough by itself to prove the Soviet system is unsound, because it produces rotten fruits! It is enough, they shout, to admit the existence of such treason in high places, automatically to condemn the whole Soviet government! Some of the most brazen of these journalistic harlots even write imaginative stories involving all Soviet officials as traitors, and demand complete distrust toward everything connected with the Soviet Union.

How shamefully un-American, how anti-American, this position is, is clear to everyone with any knowledge of American history. If such an argument could hold against the Soviet Union, then American democracy would have been condemned from its beginnings. If Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin must be made responsible for Trotsky, Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, as these defenders of wrecking demand, then George Washington must be made responsible for Benedict Arnold and Thomas Jefferson for Aaron Burr. It needs only to draw this parallel, completely to expose the falsity of the argument, at least to anyone whose Americanism is deeper than his anti-Soviet prejudices!

It will help all Americans to understand the historic significance of the trials, if we review our own history more at length, in the light of recent events.

The establishment of the United States as an independent nation was a vanguard event in the development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the whole world; it was the opening of a new stage in a world revolution. In this respect there is a valuable analogy between the position of the United States in world affairs at the close of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries, and the position of the Soviet Union today. And both countries, in the period of revolution, suffered from treason and wrecking from within, in low and high places. We can safely say, making allowance for enormous difference in historical epoch and social relations, that America suffered much more than has the Soviet Union from treason, relatively speaking. Let us recall some of the details.

First, there is Benedict Arnold, whose name takes it place alongside that of Judas for Americans as synonymous with the utmost depths of treachery. Arnold was a close intimate of George Washington; he was described as "brilliant" and "gallant." He was ordered to be tried by court-martial, by act of Congress, but was let off with a reprimand. Washington defended Arnold, disapproved of the court-martial, and afterward invited Arnold to resume a post of honor in the army, and on his request gave him command of the principal military post in the country, West Point. One and a half years before receiving this appointment Arnold was already in treasonable connections with the British. Within a few weeks after receiving this command, Arnold plotted to surrender West Point to the British at a date and hour when Washington, Lafayette, and others were to arrive at West Point. The plot failed only because the go-between, Major Andre, was caught returning through the lines with the documents of the plotTrotsky and his friends a century and a half later had learned to burn their documents! Arnold escaped, and openly joined the British, receiving a reward of $30,000 and a brigadier's commission.

A mayor of New York was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Washington, a plot which included a member of Washington's bodyguard, who was executed.

A widespread plot arose inside the Revolutionary Army similar to that headed by Tukhachevsky in the Soviet Union. Head by Thomas Conway, and called in history the "Conway Cabal," this plot included General Horatio Gates, Thomas Mifflin, Charles Lee, and others; at one time they controlled the Continental Congress; their scheme centered in the assassination of Washington and his closest comrades, just as the Trotsky-Bukharin plot centered on assassination of Stalin and his closest co-workers.