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Today few U. S. citizens are louder in praise of Joseph Stalin than that emotional but influential lecturer and journalist, Dr. Anna Louise Strong. Yet on Sunday, May 24, 1925, she wrote in the New York Times: "Now that Lenin is dead, Leon Trotsky remains the most popular man in the Soviet Republic. . . . Russia's best organizer . . . Trotsky is more popular throughout Russia not only than any other man but than the whole of the Central Committee" of the Communist Party whose General Secretary was then, as now, Joseph Stalin.
Describing the Revolution of 1917, Dr. Strong continued, and she only mirrored what she was hearing in Moscow in 1925: "When the hour for action arrived, many of the Old Bolsheviks who had been Lenin's adherents for years wished to postpone the decisive blow. Trotsky, the new recruit, stepped into the breach and made the Revolution with Lenin. . . . Trotsky built an army out of worse than nothing; out of demoralized deserters who had determined never to fight again. . . . Trotsky is still today [1925] after endless attacks, the most popular and significant figure in the land."
These are fair samples of what the Russian historian of 1937 is up against in the way of awkward facts dating from the Revolution. The able correspondent Arno Dosch-Fleurot, who long served the New York World, was on the spot in Russia during the Revolution and has written: "While the faces of many individuals in the rush of events remain in my memory, I cannot remember even having seen Kamenev, Zinoviev or Stalin then. Later they and lots of people blossomed out, but in the days of 'do or die' there was just one big figure—TROTSKY." Lenin in the hottest days for Reds had skipped out of Petrograd (now Leningrad) to the safety of Finland.
Today when Soviet newsorgans mention Trotsky they never do so except in hysterically abusive terms which flatly contradict the facts of 1917. It is now Stalin who in those days of do or die largely made the Revolution, though the Dictator with becoming modesty calls himself "only the disciple of Lenin."
A whole Soviet generation is growing up to idolize Stalin—and dead Old Bolsheviks tell no tales. It is a fact that of the 1917 Communist Quintet (Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin) who won the Revolution and later became the undisputed masters of Russia, only Stalin and Trotsky have escaped death.
The last two of these Old Bolsheviks to fall, Kamenev (brother-in-law of Trotsky) and Zinoviev, were executed by a Stalin firing squad after trial proceedings of such a nature (TIME, Aug. 31) that today they are a festering scandal in Communist circles throughout the world. The supreme Trotskyist who, according to the Moscow verdict, was the instigator of Communists who sought to kill Stalin, is significantly alive.
"Trotsky Must Die!" Stalin in 1929 decreed the expulsion of Trotsky from Russia to Turkey, where Trotsky arrived loudly protesting. Declared Volkswille, the official organ of the German Communist Party then: "Trotsky must die, but Stalin does not dare to get rid of him in Russia. . . . Therefore Trotsky is to be taken to Turkey, where it will be easy to murder him."