Just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and later the Soviet Union,
Ted Grant delivered this speech on the crisis in the USSR. To deflect
any blame, Gorbachev and co. heaped blame on Stalin and Brezhnev, even
going so far as to rehabilitate some of the victims of the purge trials
– including those accused of "Trotskyism". But Trotsky was not
rehabilitated: he was still hated by the bureaucracy because they
feared the ideas he represented.

Leon Trotsky’s murder was no accident or spontaneous action by the dictator Stalin, but
a monstrous preconceived act that was the culmination of a murder campaign against
the whole of the old Bolshevik leadership of the revolution and those who stood
by the genuine ideas of Marxism. We republish this article published in Militant in 1985.

Today is the 67th anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky. Together
with Lenin, Trotsky was one of the great Marxist theoreticians of the
20th century, who dedicated his life to the emancipation of the working
class. Not only did he work for the overthrow of capitalism, but also
for the overthrow of Stalinism, a monstrous totalitarian regime which
held the Russian working class in submission. As a consequence, Stalin
sought during the Purge Trials to murder the entire leadership of the
Bolshevik party, and ordered the assassination of Leon Trotsky. After
the failed attempt in May 1940, Stalins assassin eventually succeeded
in murdering Trotsky on the 20th of August in Mexico city. Today we
publish Natalya Sedov Trotskys original account of the assasination.