Aaron Burr = Agent of Trotsky?

"Traitors in American History: Lessons of the Moscow Trials" is a pamphlet published in 1938 by the U.S. Communist Party. It contains a speech by party leader Earl Browder, delivered at the Hippodrome in New York City to an audience of "Communist Party functionaries". Browder was associated with the party's turn towards building broad anti-fascist coalitions (the strategy of the People's Front), including support for the New Deal and President Roosevelt. As part of the campaign to cast the Communist Party as somehow "patriotic", the Browderite leadership came up with the hard-to-beat slogan "Communism is 20th century Americanism". Browder was expelled from the party in 1946, accused of "Browderism" (well, what else), after a showdown with William Foster (an old adversary in the party leadership) and, I presume, Moscow.

In 1938, Browder was still the darling of the party, which makes this particular pamphlet all the more revealing. It's a sickening and bizarre defense of the Moscow show trials, in which Stalin and his regime framed Bukharin, Zinoviev, Radek and other defrocked Communist leaders for supposedly being Nazi German or Japanese spies. Most were condemned to death and executed. The real "main defendant" was Trotsky, Stalin's chief opponent within the Communist movement, who lived in exile in Mexico. Of course, Browder's only "proof" of Trotsky's guilt is that the accused in the Moscow trials confessed all their crimes! Well, comrade Earl, that's what "show trial" means. Torture followed by false confessions, you know...

The real point of Browder's speech is to make analogies between the treacherous "Bloc of Trotskyites and Rightists" and various real or perceived traitors in U.S. history. This is in line with the claim that Communism is a form of American patriotism. At one point, the speaker intones: "Aaron Burr furnished the classical American analogy to Trotsky in the Soviet Union". Benedict Arnold, the Federalists and the Confederacy are other vile traitors to the United States. Says Browder: "The establishment of the United States as an independent nation was a vanguard event in the development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the whole world; it was the opening of a new stage in a world revolution. In this respect there is a valuable analogy between the position of the United States in world affairs at the close of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries, and the position of the Soviet Union today."

Later in the speech, the Communist leader mentions a number of supposed similarities between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both nations were born of armed revolutions, both disenfranchised or drove away enemies of the revolution, both had a one party system (George Washington was elected almost unanimously, after all)... In a bizarre sleight of hand, Browder compares the Civil War and its attendant abolition of slavery with the Soviet Union's collectivization of the peasantry! The "slander campaigns" against Stalin are compared with ditto campaigns impugning Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, or even Franklin Roosevelt. And wasn't Lincoln assassinated, just like Soviet Communist leader Kirov?

"Traitors in American History" is interesting, in a sense, since it gives us a glimpse of how Communist or "Stalinist" propaganda actually looked like circa 1938. I assumed it looked rather different just one year later, when the Soviets entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Who was "Aaron Burr" then, I wonder? However, I just can't give a pro-purge defense of murder more than one star...