Leon
Trotsky: Help the Imprisoned Bolshevik-Leninists
March
20, 1929
[Writings
of Leon Trotsky. Vol 13, Supplement 1929-1933, New York 1979, p.
15-17]
We
must start a systematic and unremitting campaign of struggle to
improve the conditions of the deported and arrested
Bolshevik-Leninists. Their number now exceeds two thousand. They are
confined in prison under foul conditions: no light (the shields on
the windows are almost shut tight), damp rooms in which they crowd
the prisoners to the extreme limit, bad food, extraordinary brutal
treatment. It is even worse in the Tobolsk hard labor prison
(Political-Solitary). It is the same as it was in Dostoyevsky’s
House
of the Dead.
In this prison there are only Bolshevik-Leninists. They have released
the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. They
have introduced military sentries. The
cells are locked. No interviews are allowed. The Mensheviks had a
common dining table, a common kitchen, free interviews, etc. Our
comrades are deprived of all this. Unquestionably the authorities
have adopted a policy of physical extermination of the
Bolshevik-Leninists. Relations have grown very tense. Any moment you
can expect not only physical conflicts, hunger strikes (which have no
end) but also — yes, the firing squad. Fifteen men from the prison
personnel of the Tobolsk Political Solitary refused to apply
repressive measures against Bolsheviks; they were replaced by guards
specially sent from Moscow. The need among the families of the
arrested is enormous, simply appalling. The families of prisoners and
deportees who remain at liberty are literally starving. We haven’t
our own labor defense organization. We must collect money abroad. We
must fight for the right to have our own legal defense organization.
Against these shocking practices, as against all such things, we must
raise a mighty outcry. We must publicly expose the current officials
of the Soviet government and the party leaders who are responsible
for these crimes. Correspondence from Tomsk and Sverdlovsk tells of
whole crowds
driven into the hard labor prison, Narym, where they are sending
Oppositionists taken from various places of deportation. Among the
deported and imprisoned there are heroes of the October Revolution
and the civil war
decorated
with the Order of the Red Flag (Greitser, Gaevsky, Kavtaradze,
Yenukidze, and many others). Among those imprisoned in a hard labor
prison is Budu Mdivani, fifty-three years old, the Old Bolshevik who
served time under the czar, was president of the Soviet of People’s
Commissars of Georgia under Lenin, and head of the Soviet trade
delegation in Paris.
|