'a foul conspiracy'

I picked up this pamphlet on Charing Cross Road for a fiver this weekend. A good find. But not a publication of which the CPGB should be proud.

It was rushed out on 16th February 1937 to seek to allay the widely expressed concerns about the Moscow show trial. On 30th January, thirteen leading Soviet Communists had been sentenced to death, and four more given long jail sentences. They were purported to be part of a counter-revolutionary Trotskyist clique intent on sabotaging (quite literally) the Soviet state.

In this over hasty publication, Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain asserted:

  We support with all our strength Comrade Stalin and his comrades in the gigantic task to which they have put their hand and in which they have such magnificent achievements.
  Trotskyism is terrorism. Trotskyism is anti-working class. Trotskyism is a foul conspiracy against the interests of all who want to ensure the preservation of democracy, peace and Socialism.
  The Moscow trial will serve to strengthen a world-wide fight against Trotskyism. In its handling of this cancer within the Labour Movement the Soviet Union has justly earned the support of the best people in the world.

Not to be outdone, the party ideologue, Rajani Palme Dutt, declared: Trotskyism represents the spearhead of Fascism in the Labour movement.

Oh dear!