I Stake My Life!

August 20, 2013 

Today is the 73rd anniversary of the brutal assassination of Leon Trotsky by a Stalinist agent. We commemorate this event by publishing the transcription of his address to the N.Y. Hippodrome Meeting. The speech “I Stake My Life!” was delivered by telephone from Mexico City for the opening event of the Dewey Commission on the Moscow Trials.

Dear Listeners, Comrades and Friends:

My first word is one of apology for my impossible English. My second word is one of thanks to the Committee which has made it possible for me to address your meeting. The theme of my address is the Moscow trial. I do not intend for an instant to overstep the limits of this theme, which even in itself is much too vast. I will appeal not to the passions, not to your nerves, but to reason. I do not doubt that reason will be found on the side of truth.

Leon Trotsky

The Zinoviev-Kamenev trial has provoked in public opinion terror, agitation, indignation, distrust, or at least, perplexity. The trial of Piatakov-Radek has once more enhanced these sentiments. Such is the incontestable fact. A doubt of justice signifies, in this case, a suspicion of frame-up. Can one find a more humiliating suspicion against a government which appears under the banner of socialism? Where do the interests of the soviet government itself lie? In dispelling these suspicions. What is the duty of the true friends of the Soviet Union? To say firmly to the soviet government: it is necessary at all costs to dispel the distrust of the Western world for soviet justice.

To answer to this demand: “We have our justice the rest does not concern us much,” is to occupy oneself, not with the socialist enlightment of the masses, but with the policies of inflated prestige, in the style of Hitler or Mussolini.                                   Read More