[Following is the text of a message sent by Pierre Frank, a veteran leader of the Fourth International, to the commemorative meeting held in Mexico City last November 5-7 to mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Leon Trotsky (see Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor, December 3, 1979, page 1180).
[Pierre Frank became a supporter of the International Left Opposition in 1927 and was expelled from the French Communist Party in 1929 for "Trotskyism." During 1932 and 1933 he served as secretary to Trotsky, who was living in forced exile on the island of Prinkipo in Turkey.]
Dear friends and comrades,
I greatly regret that I am unable to attend the ceremonies and meetings you are organizing for the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Leon Trotsky, and that I can only participate in them by sending this message.
There is no need to remind all those who will answer your call that Leon Trotsky was the kind of genius of whom only three or four are born in a century, or that he devoted his entire life to the service of the working class and its struggle for socialism.
But it should be recalled that among the great revolutionaries of history, Trotsky has been one of the most, if not the most, vilified. It is true that the foulest of these slanders, which were used to instigate his assassination, are no longer generally heard. But the historical truth about his life and work is still a long way from having triumphed.
One example will suffice to prove this. The 250 million Soviet citizens do not yet have the opportunity to know the real history of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions in their country, because to make known the outstanding role that Leon Trotsky played in those revolutions would be dangerous for the heirs of Stalin who now rule the Kremlin.
That is why the ceremonies marking the hundredth anniversary, in Mexico City and many cities around the world, are not pious tributes to the memory of a great man, but are an episode in a continuing struggle to see historical truth triumph and to move forward the march of all of humanity toward socialism.
In this message I would like to confine myself to stressing, as succinctly as possible, the continuity and continual growth that marked Leon Trotsky's political thought and action. At the beginning of the century, he was the youngest member of the editorial board of Iskra; he was barely more than twenty years old when he was involved alongside Plekhanov and Lenin in the work of introducing Marxism to the young Russian proletariat and organizing it.
It was in the course of the 1905 revolution that he gave the first measure of his personal qualities, in the sphere of action as well as theory. He chaired the sessions of history's first soviet, the Petrograd Soviet.
Once the revolution was crushed, although he maintained his reservations about Lenin in regard to party organization-reservations that did not disappear until fifteen years later-Trotsky was in fact the only one besides Lenin to enrich Marxism through drawing the lessons of the revolution.
But regarding the prospects for the next revolution in the Tsarist Empire, Trotsky drew the lessons of 1905 with much more audacity than Lenin. He was only twentyseven years old when he formulated the theory of permanent revolution, which postulated that the coming Russian revolution would be led by the proletariat, drawing the peasantry behind it, and would give rise to a workers state that would abolish capitalist exploitation.
This perspective was confirmed in October 1917, and in that revolution Trotsky was found at Lenin's side in the most responsible positions. He played a particularly essential role in the creation of the Red Army, practically from scratch, an army he led to victory against the coalition of White armies and expeditionary forces of the capitalist powers, which included both World War I allies and enemies.
Moreover, in August 1914, he had been among the handful of militants who did not let themselves be drawn into the abandonment of proletarian internationalism by the parties of the Second International. Trotsky participated in the first gathering held at Zimmerwald in 1915, writing its call to the workers.
In 1919, he took part in the founding of the Communist International. In those years, although he was very busy with the problems of the young workers state, he devoted a large part of his time to the work of the International, to aid in the education of young Communist parties and develop answers to the new problems of strategy and tactics that confronted these parties and the workers movement.
He seemed at that time to be at the height of his glory and his powers and unable to rise any higher. But history, taking an unexpected course, would enable him to provide, under exceptionally adverse conditions, the most striking examples of his genius and character. Roughly five years after the October 1917 victory one of the most tragic events in history began. This was the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union, in the course of which the Bolshevik Pary and the Communist International would unfortunately be destroyed.
At the beginning, the majority of the Political Bureau did not understand the danger that threatened. Lenin and Trotsky were preparing to fight it as a minority. But Lenin died and Trotsky remained alone to launch the fight.
Trotsky then showed that the years of power had in no way softened either his revolutionary convictions, his capacities for political analysis and orientation, or his combative power. While men like Zinoviev and Bukharin involuntarily acted as stepping-stones for Stalin, Trotsky explained the conditions that favored the growth of the bureaucracy, outlined the new tasks resulting from the situation, and helped institute the planning and industrialization of the Soviet Union. He prepared for an event that was to be farther off than he expected-the anti-bureaucratic political revolution destined to restore workers democracy in the Soviet Union, which is the precondition for going from "existing socialism," with its still rampant gulag, to real socialism.
At the same time, he waged a struggle against the consequences of the bureaucracy's policy outside the borders of the Soviet Union, a policy that was to lead to very heavy defeats for the masses. In battling against the policy of alliance-in reality, of subordination-to Chiang Kai-
Kuomintang, he generalized the shek's theory of permanent revolution, extending it to China, and, by extension, to the colonial and semicolonial countries.
In this way, Trotsky formulated the biggest acquisition of revolutionary Marxism since Marx, by showing that in the twentieth century socialism was the goal of the struggle not only in the economically developed capitalist countries, but also for the very big majority of the human race that is exploited and oppressed by imperialism.
This theory of permanent revolution became the axis of the struggle against the bureaucracy's "socialism in one country." He also sounded the alarm against the rising Hitlerite danger in Germany, appealing-unfortunately in vain-for unity in action, for a united front of the mass workers parties, and, with an incomparable lucidity, assessing the biggest defeat that the working class has ever experienced in its history, and the new world war that would result from it.
Finally, in that period of frenzied reaction, remaining faithful to proletarian internationalism, Trotsky undertook to found a new international, the Fourth International, in the face of the disintegration of the workers internationals, and despite the very minimal forces gathered around him. For five years, until the day he died, he devoted the bulk of his energies to this work, which he said was "the most important" work of his life, "more important than 1917, more important than the civil war period."
Whereas he waged a battle of ideas, with his pen, through books, pamphlets, and articles, he ran up against not other ideas, but slanders and monstrous repression that, in the Moscow Trials, struck down all those who led the October revolution and that exterminated his children.
Trotsky knew that Stalin was preparing his assassination. This assassination would be carried out at a time that was both the apex of Stalin's crimes and when, with the European continent crushed by the Nazi terror, Hitler was getting ready to make war on the Soviet Union. During that whole time, Trotsky remained firm, unshakable, not wasting a single minute, pursuing his activity without faltering in the slightest.
Allow me, in conclusion, to say a few words of a more personal nature. First of all, to Trotsky's name I would like to join the name Natalia, his companion. I was at her bedside in Paris at the end of her life. She also showed to the end an unparalleled strength of character that certainly contributed greatly to that shown by Trotsky in the dark years of his exile.
I am sure she would have wanted me to repeat here what she told me-namely, how grateful Trotsky and she were to your former president, Lázaro Cárdenas, for having granted them during those years the right to asylum that was denied them everywhere, especially by those rich capitalist countries that proclaimed themselves the supposed champions of democracy. What would have been a mere gesture in the euphoric periods of flourishing capitalism had become an act of courage, an act of courage that is even rarer today.