The Great Conspiracy

THE “great conspiracy” is a secret war waged for a quarter century by a terrifying combination of sinister people including Winston Churchill, the German General Staff, and Leon Trotsky ; object; overthrow of the Soviet Union; methods: terror and sabotage, international espionage, and astronomical use of capitalist gold. The plot provoked armed intervention in 1917, heinous betrayals in the twenties and thirties, and finally, in 1941. the open Nazi attack, stimulated by the appeasers.

There is a grain of truth to all this; a great many people did not, like and actively fought the Communists, inside and outside of Russia. But the idea of a “great conspiracy" arises from febrile imaginations, distorted evidence, and literal acceptance of partisan propaganda, only to dissolve at the first critical examination.

The authors work by innuendo, by partial quotations torn from sources, by unfair juxtaposition of irrelevancies — most of all, by simple suppression of critical contradictory evidence. The long diatribe against Trotsky, for instance, closes without mention of the fact that he, almost alone outside the party fold, defended the Soviet attack upon Finland in 1939. In the story of the Chinese revolution of 1927 there is no reference to the name Borodin, nor any hint of the prominent part played by Moscow. Only a footnote mentions the Comintern, as a body dissolved in 1943, and there is not a word about the role of Communist parties in the capitalist world.

The same technique — evasion of the possibility that causes other than the conspiracy might evoke opposition — runs through the two largest sections of the book. The account of the counter-revolution, 1917-1919, rests upon the assumption “that the Bolsheviks represented the masses of the Russian people”; foreigners and generals alone were hostile. Yet the rank and file of the White armies were not aristocrats, and the Social Revolutionaries at least had a broader popular base than the Communists.

Similarly, Sayers and Kahn close their eyes to the essential question of the great treason trials. Granting the truth of all the charges, one must believe either that the traitors betrayed their country for personal gain, a degree of corruption in high places unmatched in modern history (even the fascists did not sell each other out); or that some burning dissatisfaction with the society which had raised them to commissars, marshals, chiefs in the OGPU, drove them to attack the course of the revolution for which they had spent their lives.

OSCAR HANDLIN