Those Caught Up in “Trotskyist” Cases

The Trotskyist movement in the USSR formed around the ideas and figure of Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), one of the key Bolshevik leaders of the October Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War.

After Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, a fierce struggle for leadership began within the Bolshevik Party. The main rivals were Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Trotsky defended the theory of “permanent revolution,” which called for the revolutionary movement to spread on a global scale. Stalin, by contrast, promoted the concept of “socialism in one country.”

By 1927, Stalin had significantly strengthened his position in the party hierarchy, while Trotsky and his supporters had been expelled from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). In 1929, Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union; in 1940, he was assassinated in Mexico by NKVD agent Ramón Mercader.

The 1930s in the USSR were marked by mass political repression, later known as the Great Terror. Among its main targets were both real and alleged followers of Trotsky.

Archival KGB materials available in the J-Doc digital archive show how Jews whom the security services considered Trotskyists were persecuted. The “List of Selected Operational Files and Initial Materials Considered Most Worthy of Attention and Currently Being Handled by the 1st Section of the 5th Department of the MGB Directorate for Kharkiv Oblast,” dated 24 December 1952, contains information on several revealing cases.

One of them concerns Mark Moiseevich Kiselevsky, born in 1908. The case was opened in 1943. He was accused of having participated, while working as technical director of Leningrad’s Pechatnyi Dvor printing house in 1932–1937, in the counter-revolutionary organisation of the “Rightists,” allegedly led by Mikhail Tomsky, a candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). According to the case materials, Kiselevsky supposedly carried out sabotage in the printing industry on Tomsky’s instructions.

In 1942, the Special Council under the NKVD of the USSR sentenced him to ten years in forced-labour camps. He was later sent to the front.

Another characteristic example is that of Iosif Efremovich Imerman, born in 1900. The documents noted that in 1929 he had received from America an article by Trotsky published in a Jewish newspaper. They also referred to his correspondence with relatives in the United States, where two of his mother’s sisters and two brothers had emigrated in 1902–1903.

Also revealing is the case of Lev Evseevich Kelman, born in 1903: a Jew with higher education who worked as a self-employed artisan at a municipal market. In 1933, a surveillance file marked “Trotskyists” was opened on him on the basis of information that, in 1927, Kelman had belonged to a Trotskyist group and had signed the “Platform of the 15” — mistakenly referred to in the document as the “Platform of the 13.”

This document, also known as the “Declaration of the Fifteen,” was drafted in 1927 by the United Opposition and criticised the political course of Stalin and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Kelman was also accused of attending Trotskyist meetings at which Rakovsky, a representative of the Trotskyist centre, spoke. In 1937, Kelman was arrested. By the time the document was compiled in 1952, according to the agent “Leonidov,” Kelman was allegedly conducting anti-Soviet nationalist agitation among those around him.

These cases show how broadly the concept of “Trotskyism” was interpreted in the Soviet Union. An accusation could be based on receiving a publication from abroad, knowing convicted “professional Trotskyists,” or making a careless remark — a tendency that became especially pronounced in the final years of Stalin’s rule.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, and especially after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, at which Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality, many victims of repression were rehabilitated. Nevertheless, Trotskyism continued to be regarded as a hostile ideological current within the Soviet system until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Freddy Rotman