Trotsky on the Moscow Trials
To celebrate Histomat reaching the 250,000 hit mark (or thereabouts), I have decided to put up a video of Trotsky defending himself in the Moscow Trials. If I have got the version I hope I have, there is a bit where Trotsky looks up straight at the camera for a moment, and you just know he is thinking, 'Yes, I am indeed Trotsky and, yes, I do always look this good'...
posted by Snowball @ 3:48 pm
3 Comments:
Not the right version, I think.
Amazing that this is the only video clip ...well with sound... of Leon Trotsky. Or any time we've heard him speak English.
I've never heard this all the way through tis cool!
I don't think I agree though the most horrible crime in history was not the trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev, et all.
Surely the holocaust and the rise of Stalin were worse?
I think Trotsky was being both polemical and also underscoring how damaging Stalinism was and continues to be to the workers' movement. The reason he doesn't refer to the Holocaust is because although the Nazis had implemented "race laws" and sent people (starting with political opponents and Jews) to camps and had Kristallnacht, they had "only" killed around 100,000 Jews by 1940 and most of the attempted extermination of the Jews occurred from 1940 to 1945. This speech of Trotsky occurs in 1937, right?
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