Telegram
from Lithuania about work being done to liquidate Trotskyism.
9
February 1937
To:
Angaretis,
Dimitrov,
Manuilsky
The
struggle against Trotskyists, especially after the trials started, has been
especially accentuated in the press and in general during the whole six-month
period. Yet, the issue of the Trotskyists has not been discussed in all the
organizations. The explanatory work has also been weak among the non-party
members. Our comrades in the factories frequently lacked courage to repulse the
Trotskyists’ slander. [The effort to draw] concrete lessons is even worse.
In
Kovno, only Geraite has been expelled, and that was done on the sly. Although
there is an understanding among party members that the Trotskyists and rotten
liberals can not be party members, one notes doubts [among comrades] about how
the Trotskyists managed to sink to fascism, and why they confessed at the trial
the way they did.
It
looks like not everyone has understood clearly enough that the Trotskyists
qualify as agents provocateurs and as the agents of the fascist okhranka. We
are also emphasizing [the need] to review dubious elements and to unmask the
Trotskyist elements which, no doubt, exist among them.
In
Shantsy (Kovno workers’ suburb), two party members had earlier defected to the
Trotskyists. Wherever we maintain our connections, there is no
sympathy toward Trotskyists, although in some places one can sense a lack of
firmness toward them. We think that the Kovno [party] organization is not
exposing all those places where the Trotskyists are active.
Those
expelled from the party are being driven out of the non-party organizations.
In
the circles of the Jewish and Lithuanian intelligentsia, there is serious
disbelief that the Trotskyists were able to do [what they were accused of] in
the Soviet Union, and that they have confessed.
We
are pressuring the local [party] organizations to consider the struggle against
the Trotskyists not as a short campaign, but as systematic work.
M[anuilsky]
Angaretis
M. M[oskvin]
RGASPI, f. 495, op. 184, d. 8. Incoming
telegrams for 1937 from Lithuania.
Original in Russian. Typewritten on telegram letterhead. Initialled by Manuilsky, Angaretis and Moskvin.
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