Exonerate Trotsky, Soviet Historian Says

Leon Trotsky, the revolutionary reviled for more than half a century as a Soviet traitor and enemy of socialism, should be exonerated of criminal charges and his works reprinted, a historian said today.

The call for a new look at Trotsky by Yuri N. Afanasyev, rector of the State Institute on Historical Archives, runs counter to a central tenet of Soviet orthodoxy that has stood unchallenged for more than 50 years.

It was one of the boldest suggestions to date under Communist Party chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign for glasnost, or openness.

The Soviets already are taking an increasingly negative view of the 29-year rule of dictator Josef Stalin. The Soviets also are exonerating Communists who were branded traitors under Stalin and killed, imprisoned or exiled.

By acknowledging that Trotsky was falsely accused of treason, the Kremlin would further discredit Stalin, whom Gorbachev has blamed for brutal and bloody political terror and choking the development of socialist democracy.

Afanasyev noted that cleansing Trotsky’s judicial record did not mean an endorsement of his ideas, but even putting Trotsky on an equal legal footing with other Stalin foes would be a startling novelty.

Born Lev D. Bronstein, the son of a prosperous Jewish farmer, Trotsky was a central figure in the 1917 Russian Revolution and architect of the Red Army’s victory over counterrevolutionaries in the Russian Civil War

He served successively as commissar for foreign affairs and for war, but was bested by Stalin in Kremlin infighting following the death of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin in 1924, and was forced out of the Communist Party in 1927.

Two years later, Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union and later accused of heading an anti-Soviet plot. He was murdered in Mexico City in 1940, reportedly by a Soviet agent.