Natalia Sedova Trotsky
Natalia Sedova Trotsky
Written: 26 February 1948.
First published: New York Times, 10 March 1948.
Source: Labor Action, Vol. 12 No. 12, 22 March 1948, p. 3.
Also published: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 11, 15 March 1948, p. 2. [1]
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
In the February 14 issue of the New York Times there appeared a dispatch from France under the by-line of Cyrus L. Sulzberger which tended to give the impression that the well-known author, Andre Malraux, former Stalinist and now a de Gaullist, was sympathetic to Trotsky’s political ideas. As evidence, Sulzberger referred to a letter which was presumably sent to Malraux by Victor Serge, and identified Serge as a Trotskyist. Labor Action has at hand an article by Jack Weber which exposes the Sulzberger-Malraux fraud, as well as several documentary statements by Leon Trotsky oh Malraux. If space permits in future issues, we will publish this material. In the meantime we reprint below a letter by Natalia Sedova Trotsky (published in the Times letter column, March 10) which effectively answers the canard:
To the Editor of the New York Times:
My attention has been drawn to a dispatch from your foreign correspondent, Cyrus L. Sulzberger, in the Times of Feb. 14. The implications in the statements attributed to Andre Malraux are so palpably false that, unavoidably late as is this rejoinder, I urgently request that you publish it.
It is with profound indignation that one finds Malraux, after all the years of consort with Stalinism, casting himself in the role of sympathizer with Leon Trotsky at a time when Malraux allies himself with the center of French reaction. Malraux was at no time a Trotskyist sympathizer. On the contrary, he was always an enemy, one who lent himself to diverting public attention from the real issues in the Moscow trials by speaking of them as merely a personal quarrel between Trotsky and Stalin. The act of Malraux as de Gaulle’s Minister of Information in a coalition with the Stalinists, in suppressing the French Trotskyist press, is itself the fitting commentary on Malraux’s statement. Once more one sees the miserable attempt to form an amalgam between Trotskyism and fascism.
The name of Victor Serge is used to lend credence to the supposed Trotskyist support of de Gaulle’s movement. The break between Serge and Trotsky was complete and can be attested by numerous quotations from published literature.
Try as Malraux and others will, they cannot succeed in besmirching Trotsky and the movement he founded.
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Natalia Sedova Trotsky |
1. The introduction in The Militant is as follows:
We are reprinting the following letter of Natalia Sedova-Trotsky, widow of Leon Trotsky, which appeared in the N.Y. Times of March 10. The Militant refuted Malraux’s slanderous accusations against Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement in a special article in the March 1 issue.
Last updated on: 3 November 2022