ANOTHER STEP IN DE-STALINIZATION
The October 27 issue of Izvestia published an article by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London under Stalin, paying tribute to & person liquidated at the height of the monstrous Moscow frame-up trials of the thirties,
Maisky's article is entitled "A Diplomat of the Leninist School" and the person to whom this posthumous praise is offered is Nikolai Krestinsky, one of the main victims of the last great trial in March 1938.
Maisky traces Krestinsky's career from the time he became a Bolshevik in 1903 until he last saw him toward the end of 1936,a year before he © became a victim of "Stalin's personality cult."
‘A well-known figure when the October Revolution broke out, Krestinskg
became a member of the party's Central Committee, was Commissar for Finance and between 1919 and 1921 was one of three party secretaries. Later he was assigned to the diplomatic field.
Krestinsky is best known to historians of the Soviet scene, however, as a prominent opponent of Stalinism and one of the leaders of the Left Opposition founded by Leon Trotsky. Under the terrible pressures mounted by Stalin against all political opponents, Krestinsky eventually capitulated.
This did not save him from the wide mass purges instituted by Stalin, In 1938 he appeared among the victims in the prisoners dock in a frame-up trial that set a precedent for all time by its excesses of paranoiac’ imagination. On the same bench, Stalin had also placed Bukharin, the out- Standing leader of the Right Opposition, am Yagoda, the head of the political police who had savagely persecuted the Trotskyists for ten years under Stalin's guidance and organized the previous frame-up trials in which Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov, both of whom were in exile, were the main targets, . "Confessions" were wrung from the victims, including Krestinsky, that Trotsky had been in touch with the British, German, Japanese and Polish spy services not to mention "White Guarda" Russians and "Mensheviks," Krestinsky "admitted" his om "involvement," saying under Prosecutor Vyshinsky's prodding that he had received some 2,000,000 gold marks from “the German spy service which he had turned over to Trotsky to keep the “Protskyites" going abroad, In return he claimed that "regular! reports had been furnished the Germans, .
Under the heading of "sabotage" the "spies" allegedly caused ND5, 000 horses to perish" and, in Siberia, innoculated hogs with "swine fever and the plague.’ In the same trial Stalin's political police had defendants "confess" about poison plots involving the personal physician of Lenin and Stalin in which such figures as the novelist Maxim Gorky allegedly fell victim,
The trial was punctured by Trotsky from his exile in Mexico as a fantastic tissue of self-contradictory fabrications based on "evidence" produced in previous frame-up trials that had already been proved to be false. An example was an "airplane trip" to Oslo which Piatakov, one of the defendants had "confessed" taking to see Trotsky (then in Norway) after visiting Hitler's lieutenant Rudolf Hess, It was proved that no .such plane nor any other foreign plane had landed at Oslo, neither at the specified time nor in the months before and after,
Trotsky!s exposure of the frame-up, however, did not stay Stalints hand. Among those marked for summary execution was Krestinsky,
What is the meaning of the article in Izvestia that speaks well of _Krestinsky although it skips over his being a leader of the Trotskyist Left Opposition?
In the rehabilitations previously undertaken of Stalints victims, the beneficiaries have been mostly loyal followers of Stalin whose Liquidation was often not easily comprehensible at the time, (Stalin feared them as. persons capable of leading an eventual political opposition.) Krestinsky is somewhat different. He was a well«known Trotskyist for quite a period before he wag finally broken.
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. Khrushchev, of course, knows exactly who Krestinsky was, Having taken the step of letting Maisky speak well of him, why should not similar treatment be given to others like him? To do this, however, would mean moving closer to the main thread of all the frame-up trials; that is, the monstrous false accusations levelled against the Trotskyists, beginning with Trotsky himself,
Is Khrushchev ready to give a tug on this thread? The recent attacks against the followers of Trotsky, organized in the Fourth International, give an opposite impression,
Nevertheless even this partial new step is to be hailed, To speak favorably of Krestinsky constitutes. another damning indictment of the frame-up trials which brought such infamy to the Soviet government during the dark days of Stalin's unhappy rule. May it help inspire the Soviet people to demand a bit more from Stalints heirs,
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