The Early Days of a Better Nation

Posted 2:52 pm by Ken

The famous Café Bristol

The Moscow Trials of the late 1930s, during which leading Soviet and Communist officials (among others) confessed to (among other things) plotting to murder Stalin, seize power, and restore capitalism, all with the direct aid of hostile foreign powers including Nazi Germany, were among the defining events of the Twentieth Century.

Anyone who has looked at the controversy over the Trials in any detail, if they know anything at all, knows this:

'Investigation of the few tangible “facts” alleged in the [first] trial proved fatal to the frame-up. For example, one of the defendants, Holtzman, testified that in November 1932 he had met [Trotsky's son] Sedov in the: “lounge” of the “Hotel Bristol” in Copenhagen and went with him to meet Trotsky and receive terrorist instructions. It was proved conclusively that Holtzman was not among the people who called on Trotsky and his wife, their friends and guards during the short time Trotsky visited Copenhagen to lecture in defense of the Soviet Union. Still more devastating, it was discovered that the Hotel Bristol had been torn down in 1917 and not rebuilt until 1936!'

Shortly after the non-existence of the Hotel Bristol in 1932 was established, the Stalinists countered as follows:

'Holtzman testified that when he arrived at the station he crossed over to the Bristol Hotel. Now opposite the station there is no Bristol Hotel. There is, however, the Grand Central Hotel, and in the same building there is a Bristol Café. Further, at the date mentioned, it was possible to obtain entrance to the hotel through the café. It may be that Holtzman, seeing the sign above the café, was confused as to the name of the hotel.'

(Soviet Policy and its Critics, J. R. Campbell, Left Book Club (Gollancz) 1939, page 264.)

To which Trotsky's defenders, in turn, countered thus:

Harking back to one of the mysteries of the first trial, the DW [Daily Worker] gave a sizable bit of its valuable space in the issue of February 26 [1937] to a plan of the Grand Hotel, Copenhagen, allegedly showing that one could enter a café said to be called the Café Bristol through this hotel – though how Holtzman could have proposed to ‘put up’ at this café still remained unexplained!

(Holtzman's exact words had been: 'I arranged with Sedov to be in Copenhagen within two or three days, to put up at the Hotel Bristol and meet him there. I went to the hotel straight from the station and in the lounge met Sedov.')

Furthermore, the only photograph of 'the famous Café Bristol' that the Stalinist press produced showed an establishment with the conspicuous sign 'KONDITORI BRISTOL' above its entire frontage, and with an entrance apparently several doors away from the nearby (also clearly signed) entrance to a hotel. Two witnesses to the Dewey Commission testified:

Directly next to the entrance to the hotel, and what appears as a big black splotch in the photo, is actually the location of the Café next to the Grand Hotel; and it is not the Konditori Bristol! The Konditori Bristol is not next door, but actually several doors away, at quite a distance from the hotel, and was not a part of it in any way, and there was no door connecting the Konditori (“candy store” it would be called here) and the Grand Hotel! Although there was such an entrance to the café which is blackened out in the photo, and which was not the Bristol.

In other words, between the Grand Hotel and the Konditori Bristol there was a café and between the hotel and the café there was an entrance, but there was no entrance at all connecting the hotel and the Bristol Konditori. B.J. Field and Esther Field were actually in that café and they were also in the hotel, so they are speaking from personal knowledge. They say further.

As a matter of fact, we bought some candy once at the Konditori Bristol, and we can state definitely that it had no vestibule, lobby, or lounge in common with the Grand Hotel or any hotel, and it could not have been mistaken for a hotel in any way, and entrance to the hotel could not be obtained through it.

And there, for nearly seventy years, the matter rested.

Then a Swedish-resident researcher, Sven-Eric Holmström, did what no one (it seems) had done in all those decades. He went to Copenhagen, where the very same Grand Hotel stands to this day, and investigated for himself. The result has now been published (PDF) by the American online Marxist journal Cultural Logic. I must admit that I would never have thought of tackling the problem the way he did. I would have assumed that any investigation at this late date would have to involve memoirs, or the testimonies of very old people - which would, of course, have left the question still open. I would have been wrong. Whatever one thinks of Holmström's wider argument in the article, he has settled the specific question of the connection between the Café Bristol and the hotel beyond a reasonable doubt, and in a way that does not rely on testimony. What it does rely on is so obvious that one can only wonder why no one thought of doing so before. It appears to be conclusive.

But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, chapter 7 (Penguin Modern Classics, 1970, p66)

Some readers may - as I did - have this same uncanny sensation when they look at the photographs in Figures 7 and 8 of Holmström's remarkable piece of historical sleuthing. They may also appreciate the grim irony, in this and its own context, of the above Orwell quote.

Labels: far left, history, Marxism

24 Comments:

Wait, so Trotsky actually did want to violently overthrow the Stalinists? And was coordinating with supporters inside the Soviet Union attempting to do so? Unpossible! The Commission of Inquiry said so.

Obviously, the Moscow Trials were not conducted according to Marquis of Queensbury rules. But such outrage from Trotsky himself and other quarters at even the assertion that an anti-Stalinist Bolshevik revolutionary and his followers were plotting to kill Stalin and regain power? As if this particular set of trials and executions were the only available example of Stalin's perfidy. Fire your PR firm, Leon.

This Bristol business once again brings Asimov to mind. In the first Foundation novel, the intellectual decline of the Empire is displayed by means of a "scientist" interested in determining the lost homeworld of humanity. He reads the arguments already made by various ancient sources, and judges between them. When someone suggests actually visiting some of the worlds in question, the notion is dismissed out of hand. Indeed, why examine primary evidence?

By mds, at Friday, April 09, 2010 1:56:00 pm

The essay is certainly persuasive on the narrow question of the "Hotel Bristol", but once it moves past that point it quickly begins making totally unjustified leaps.

* For example, the Fields' erroneous statement is quickly taken as evidence of Trotsky's dishonesty - as if, even if the Fields were deliberately lying, they wouldn't have wanted to protect Trotsky from knowledge of that fact.

* The "unpublished memoirs of the police officer Askvig" who praised Trotsky's Norwegian are said to refute Trotsky's testimony that he did not speak enough Norwegian to travel alone, even though the next sentence notes that "Trotsky’s host Konrad Knudsen" also spoke with him mostly in German and that Askvig's claim came as a "big surprise" to Knudsen. We are apparently supposed to believe that Trotsky hid his knowledge of Norwegian from his host, while revealing it to a group of cops - is it not more likely that some cop may have been surprised or flattered to hear the famous foreign revolutionary speak any Norwegian at all, and exaggerated the event?

* The fact that a few letters from Trotsky to Russian oppositionists are represented in the Harvard archives only by postal receipts is taken as sufficient evidence that Jean Van Heijenoort or Isaac Deutscher (!) must have "purged" the archives. The only additional evidence adduced for this charge, besides the fact that they were among the few access, is some omissions from Deutscher's book of things that he "must" have known and considered important, and the dubious assertion that his biography is "uncritical" of Trotsky.

Despite the quote with which Holstrom ends his article - "It is not easy to accept . . . that the opponent that you hate with all your guts sometimes may be right" - one has to suspect that he is politically closer to Stalinism than he lets on.

But at least he's not Grover Furr. This is a worthwhile piece of scholarship. On the other hand, I've started reading a Grover Furr historical article more than once, including the one in the same issue of Cultural Logic, but I'm always unable to make it to the substance, because he spends so much time beforehand talking up his bold truthseeking and the implications of his conclusions that I lose patience.

By Kal, at Sunday, April 11, 2010 1:05:00 pm

It's all tremendous fun, but at the same time, tremendous nonsense, as if the veracity of the Moscow Trials came down to the location of a door in Copenhagen. (I'm reminded of the way certain websites will obsess over this or that photo of an event in the invasion of Gaza and make the detail of the photo the real story, obscuring the enormous reality of the invasion itself.)

Incidentally, if I were running a hotel and an adjoining confectionery, the confusion of names would (contra the piece) be a considerable inconvenience to me, as people would forever be going in to one and asking if it were the other.

I did find myself wondering though....

(a) on figure 8, is that not possibly an entrance to the hotel on the left, by where the car is parked? Where that awning is? It's got some writing on it but I can't read it (and if it's mentioned in the text, I missed it). It would seem strange not to have a hotel entrance on the same side as the hotel's enormous sign, though not unheard of - I've stayed in enough hotels myself recently to know this. But if the main entrance weren't on the same side, you'd think that the proprietor would make a little more effort to help (big sign saying "entrance on other side", actual entrance having big sign above it saying "Hotel entrance", that sort of thing.)

(b) street directories aren't necessarily totally reliable, unless you think the compilers actually walk down all the streets making notes and check them with the proprietors. There's often confusion about locations, especially where the business address and the premises are not quite the same (when I ran a shop, I had all sorts of fun with deliveries going to the business address, i.e. our flat, rather than the shop as such). And where businesses move, directories do not always keep perfectly up to date with them.

By ejh, at Sunday, April 18, 2010 5:38:00 am

There's no evidence of another entrance to the hotel on the other side

What's the awning then? (I'm not saying it is an entrance, I'm saying "what is it?")

the only address given for the hotel today is 9 Vesterbrogade. The entrance shown on the hotel's site is presumably at that address.

No,, not necessarily. (I'm in a position to know that this isn't necessarily the case, having run a shop on the corner of two streets and having seen different addresses given for it.)

I think the author answers the point about the two adjacent entrances not being an inconvenience for anybody

But not, to my mind, persuasively.

Still, as I say, it's all a sideshow. Let's suppose that the author is right about the Hotel, which would mean that both sides were actually mistaken about it.....except that for him, it doesn't, since one side of the case (whether it be anybody associated with Trotsky, or anybody associated with the Dewey Commission) is declared to be lying at every turn, no other explanation being acceptable, and the other is not, despite being the NKVD. Regarding whom, if we're doing Orwell quotes, you know the one at 4 here? I think that remains the point, and not an exercise in fisking as regards the Bristol seventy years after the facts.

By ejh, at Sunday, April 18, 2010 1:47:00 pm

Kal: the first point is reasonable. The speculation that they were once there and were removed was first raised by Getty: 'It seems likely that they have been
removed from the Papers at some time. Only the certified mail receipts remain.' As far as I know, this assumption hasn't been challenged, including by Broue, who spotted the same receipts.

It's possible that they were removed by Trotsky himself, before he opened his archives to the Dewey Commission. He flatly denied, to the commission, that he'd had any contact at all with any of the defendants, and we know that this wasn't true in at least three cases: Holtzman, Sokolnikov and Radek. These three had already been tried and sentenced (Holtzman/Gol'tsman to be shot, Sokolnikov and Radek to ten years imprisonment), so there was very little remaining to protect them from by denying that he had been in contact with them. Admitting it wouldn't have been 'ratting them out'. So why did he deny it?

Furr has suggested that references to contact with Nazis such as Hess were a diplomatic way of avoiding public reference to officials of the German state. So the contacts Furr argues there is evidence for are with elements in the German army and diplomatic and intelligence services. I don't think it's nutty to consider that possibility worth investigating.

By Ken, at Tuesday, April 20, 2010 10:15:00 am

Furr is an unabashed Stalinist and thus a profoundly tainted source.

His objective - and AFAICS that of the journal he's published in and whatever weird Maoist, Hoxhaite or Kim-Il-Sungist microsect it represents - is clearly to argue that every single one of the victims of the Great Purge were guilty of the crimes they were accused of (after all they they confessed!).

This is so deranged and - given what we know about NKVD interrogation techniques - downright evil that the Hotel Bristol and suspicious gaps in Trotsky's archive apart, no sane and decent leftist should give these people a moment's consideration.

Also consider the Nazi and Japanese angle:

We have a huge amount of data concerning the activities of these countries secret services in the 1930s - and rather than evidence of actual links with real oppositionists you actually find complex intrigues involving White Russian double and triple agents aimed at convincing the NKVD that the best generals of the Red Army were indeed Nazi agents - as the last thing the Fascists actually wanted was the overthrow of what they saw as an institutionally incompetent and unpopular dictatorship with a potentially much more efficient and aggressive military junta.

(read up on the Miller-Skoblin-Plevitskaya case for details of these murky intrigues)

And it is impossible to exaggerate how difficult creating such an imaginary fifth column was in a society where only a tiny number of citizens were allowed to travel abroad, where international mail was minutely monitored and where foreign visitors and diplomats were routinely accompanied by NKVD minders every time they stepped outside of their embassy or hotel room.

If unlike your Stalinist apologists you had the slightest interest in actually establishing what really happened rather than confirming an article of faith by whatever means necessary, you'd forget all about the Hotel Bristol and the Dewey Commission and would consult the small mountain of books that have been published on the Nazi secret services.

If you did this you'd find that while the German Abwehr did have some success in creating local networks of agents, this was only possible in those territories that Stalin occupied in 1939-40 and where pre-existing nationalist organisations were in place which even the NKVD could not fully eradicate in the time they had available.

And barring Vlasov and a tiny handful of other medium-level collaborators where were the remnants of this mighty millions strong network of Troskyite-Bukharinite Spies and Wreckers that had so endangered the Soviet State when their Nazi paymasters finally arrived?

Of course to your new Stalinist friends this would presumably just be evidence of the Stakhanovite efforts of the heroic NKVD who had somehow caught almost every single spy and wrecker and properly and legally punished them...

As for the Japanese having intelligence resources at the highest levels of Soviet government this is simply preposterous - it's possible to imagine a disillusioned Communist converting to National Socialism (as per General Vlasov and his collaborators although there is some debate about how sincere that conversion actually was) - but to convert to Emperor-worship and the code of Bushido?

Sure men can be bribed - but what do you offer a Soviet general or apparatchik other than power - money was literally worthless to them unless they magically escaped to the West taking their entire families with them - and even then the NKVD's foreign section were hardly likely to let them enjoy it for long.

It's all palpable nonsense and I am deeply perturbed that someone whose writing I hugely admire could write such a post.

By Roger, at Thursday, May 06, 2010 12:13:00 pm

Furr is an unabashed Stalinist and thus a profoundly tainted source.

Furr has a high regard for Stalin as a revolutionary, but he isn't precisely a Stalinist. Now, you may call him a 'tainted source' but who is using him as a source? He is citing sources which are in principle checkable by anyone.

His objective - and AFAICS that of the journal he's published in and whatever weird Maoist, Hoxhaite or Kim-Il-Sungist microsect it represents - is clearly to argue that every single one of the victims of the Great Purge were guilty of the crimes they were accused of (after all they they confessed!).

That is most certainly not Furr's view. He has something like that view of the defendants of the three public Moscow Trials and of the in-camera trial of the alleged military conspirators. He also argues that many of not most of the victims of the Yezhovschina were innocent of what they were charged with.

His article (not incidentally the subject of the above post) is published in a respected US academic Marxist journal. In that particular issue the only reference I can see to Kim Il-Sung is in an article by a Trotskyist, and there's also a critical but warmly appreciative and comradely article about the late Pete Gowan, a leading Trotskyist.

Pete Gowan, incidentally, was the organiser of the trip I made to Prague in 1977. Maybe my account will give you something to think about.

I'll get back to your other points later.

By Ken, at Thursday, May 06, 2010 8:58:00 pm