Leon
Trotsky: Memorandum on a Forgery in Spain
December
19, 1932
[Writing
of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 13. Supplement (1929-1933), New York 1979, p.
181-183]
1.
I do not doubt that the Spanish falsification, the alleged Life
of Lenin,
never appeared in Russian. If there existed three copies in the
entire world, one would have reached me. The Russian emigre press
would certainly have written about such a scandal. In reality,
outside of Spain no one knows anything about this book. It doesn’t
exist anywhere in the world. Never and nowhere has it been published.
The falsifiers counterfeited only the title page [in Russian].
2.
This single page, taken by itself, is deadly evidence against the
falsifiers.
a.
In the small text of the title page there are two very crude
violations of Russian spelling, against the old style as much as the
new. The first word, “Zhizn’,” is printed as “Zhizn,”
without the “soft sign.” The falsifiers heard, evidently, that
the Soviet power abolished the “hard sign” and decided on this
occasion to abolish the “soft sign.” This is ungrammatical: the
soft sign plays a large role in pronunciation. The very same mistake
is made also in the final word, “Konstantinopol [Constantinople].”
If
the book were published in Russian, any typesetter of any Russian
printing office would certainly point out the illiteracy of the
heading.
b.
I have never put my patronymic on my books. In general no one does
this. It violates all the literary customs, especially revolutionary
ones.
c.
I have never placed my civil name, “Bronstein,” on a single one
of my books or articles. For the past 30 years I have not signed them
otherwise than as Trotsky.
In
order to show, evidently, how well informed they were, the falsifiers
heaped up on the title page all their knowledge: my patronymic, my
civil, and my literary names. By so doing they only underlined the
crude character of the forgery.
d.
A brief biography of Lenin was written by me only once, in 1926, for
the Encyclopedia Britannica. Anyone who is interested may read this
article in the most recent edition of that encyclopedia. It defines
my actual attitude toward Lenin. Perhaps it would follow to offer
this article for the attention of the court?
4.
My bond with Lenin was sealed by the October Revolution, the
construction of Soviet society and the Red Army, the years of the
civil war, the work on the creation of the Communist International,
etc. A series of my books, which defines my attitude toward Lenin
with exhaustive completeness, is translated into Spanish. The
publisher of Dedalo
or its editor cannot help but know these facts. With the slightest
attention to his responsibility, with the slightest honesty, even in
the absence of any literary insight, the publisher could not have
helped doubting, at the very least, the authenticity of the
manuscript, and he was obligated to apply to me for information about
it. Actually the publisher of Dedalo,
in the interests of sensation and sales, obviously tried to cover up
the falsification.
The
court, I hope, will declare that the social function of publisher
cannot coincide with the role of poisoner of the wells of public
opinion.
5.
I offer in my books and articles a definite theoretical and political
course. Whether my ideas are good or bad, they are my own, and I have
fought for them in the course of the more than three decades of my
political life.
The
book published by Dedalo
under my name is not a simple literary falsification, capable only of
causing the author a certain material loss. No, the case is
incomparably worse. This book does not counterfeit my views, as
happens in ordinary forgeries, but ascribes to me views and estimates
directly opposite to those I defend. Commercial
forgery
becomes complicated here by political
slander,
by calumny of my past and present, by slander that is the more
detestable in that the slanderers force me to cover a slander against
myself with my own name.
The
moral and political damage of the forgery is beyond measure. It will
not, however, be exaggerated to say that this is the most poisonous,
the most dishonorable form of literary slander of all those that
generally are possible.
6.
I notified the publisher by a letter on October 24,1932, of the fact
that he was deluding Spanish public opinion, dealing in slander. And
what did the publisher do? He converted my warning into an
advertisement for his poisonous wares. In order to heighten the
interest of his readers and customers, he suggests to them the
thought that I am forced by some kind of unworthy motives to deny my
own work. The criminal violation of the moral and material interests
of a writer and political figure acquires here an especially
ill-intentioned character.
I
hope that the court of the Spanish republic, irrespective of its
attitude toward my views and aims, will bring down a fitting verdict
on the heads of those who introduce into the field of literature and
publishing the methods of Chicago gangsters.