REPLY TO MAURICE DUVERGER
{The following is the full text of a letter which appeared in part in the February 15 issue of the Paris 3 daily Le Monde.] .
Editor:
In his article "Ends and Means," published in the January 14-15 issue of your paper, Maurice Duverger justly condemned the Ginzburg trial; and he correctly pointed out that such a trial could do more harm to the USSR than anything the CIA could do.
But in this article, he more or less explicitly accepted the notion that this trial, like the all too well-known Moscow trials of the thirties, had in mind "the future of an endangered revo-~lution." He considered that "the methods employed today against Ginzburg" were "understandable thirty years ago," because at that time these methods were "necessary to safeguard the conquests of October."
Since I have no other information on the Ginzburg trial than what has appeared in the press, I do not know whether or not the accused were linked to the anti-Soviet organization NTS [Natsional'no-Trudovoi Soyuz -- National Workers Alliance]. The scandalous form of this trial, however, tends very much to support the declarations in the Litvinov- Bogoraz appeal to world public opinion; i.e., that this trial was only a fabrication.
But on what basis does Duverger presume to write that the trials of the thirties were designed to "safeguard the conquests of October"? I never thought that it would be necessary to explain to a law professor the difference between a struggle to overthrow a social order and one to change a government or a form of government.
Those condemned in the trials of the thirties were, unlike the prosecutor, Vishinsky, among the chief leaders of the October revolution. There was no proof that they were agents of Hitler, the Mikado, exponents of capitalist restoration, etc., other than the "confessions"; and today everyone knows what must be thought of them. Since the twentieth party congress, moreover, official Soviet documents have not dared to repeat these infamous accusations.
Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Ka~ menev, Rakovsky, etc., did not endanger the "conquests of October"; they endan~ gered the privileges of the bureaucracy. The Ginzburg trial is accounted for today by this bureaucracy's resistance to anything that might challenge its hold over Soviet society. It attacks the nonconfornist writers, who express to one degree or another, Soviet society's aspirations for a "return to Lenin," for the restoration of Soviet democracy.
Soviet society is still suffering from the traumas of the thirties, in particular the Moscow trials. The Litvinov- Bogoraz appeal evokes this today as did Solzhenitsyn's letter to the writers congress not long ago.
You cannot condemn the Ginzburg trial while explaining the trials of the thirties as a historical necessity. There was no more historical necessity for those trials than for the Ginzburg trial today -- unless, of course, you confuse the interests of the Thermidorian bureaucracy with the conquests of October.
Sincerely yours,
Pierre Frank
Former Secretary to Leon Trotsky
Member of the United Secretariat
of the Fourth International
FRENCH AND