“Men like Adolf Joffe couldn’t remain silent and submit to Stalinist policies and practices-and he criticised Trotsky for doing so,” the strap line states. In this instance, Ali’s false purpose is betrayed by the headline, “A Suicide Note to Trotsky that Displayed Political Passions We Should Not Forget.”

And he can rely on his friends at the Guardian and elsewhere to keep them in the dark, while publishing whatever serves his and their ends at any given time. So persistent has been Ali’s infatuation with Stalinism that in 1988 he went so far as to dedicate a book to future-President Boris Yeltsin, who he proclaimed to be leading the political revolution in Russia.Īli counts on the fact that many people will know nothing of his history. Suffice it to say that he is a man devoid of any principles, except his own advancement.įor many years, he was the leader of the International Marxist Group, the British section of the Pabloite United Secretariat, whose fundamental opposition to Trotskyism centred on its rejection of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism and the need for a political revolution in the Soviet Union, instead attributing to the bureaucracy a progressive political potential. There is not the space here to go into Ali’s long and disreputable career. Its purpose was to slander the co-leader of the Russian revolution in a particularly dishonest and cynical manner. In fact, although unacknowledged, the article was timed to coincide with the 73rd anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination by the GPU agent Ramon Mercader. He refers to a pamphlet he read “over four decades ago” containing Joffe’s suicide letter, which was addressed to “Dear Lev Davidovich. Little more than a decade later he was to take his own life, on November 16, 1927.Īli gives the impression that he decided, out of the blue, to write on a subject he had read about some 40 years before.

Joffe is a significant figure-one of the five members of the Military Revolutionary Committee that organised the establishment of Soviet rule in October 1917 and part of the subsequent Soviet delegation to peace negotiations at Brest Litovsk in 1918. On August 21, a comment appeared in the Guardian newspaper by Tariq Ali on the suicide of the Russian revolutionary Adolf Abramovich Joffe in 1927.

Trotsky for Beginners by Tariq Ali