The following are excerpts from a report made available by the Committee for the Study of Leon Trotsky’s Legacy. To order copies of the full original report (at 75¢ per copy), write the committee at P.O. Box 1890, New York, NY 10009. These excerpts have been edited in some places for consistency with our magazine’s editorial style.

On October 29–30, 1999, an international conference on Leon Trotsky was held in Moscow, the fifth Trotsky conference in Russia since 1994. It was attended by around 80 people and was one of the most successful.

The conference was sponsored by the Committee for the Study of Leon Trotsky’s Legacy. The first conference took place in November 1994 in Moscow, where the Committee was formed. The Committee has sponsored four conferences since then. The second took place in St. Petersburg in 1995; the third and fourth, both in Moscow, were in 1996 and 1997.

One purpose of the Committee is to unearth the contributions to Marxist political economy by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, whose writings were banned in the Soviet Union from 1927 until the glasnost era of the late 1980s. Trotsky’s work was buried beneath mountains of lies and falsifications by the Stalin and post-Stalin regimes in the USSR and by the Stalinized Communist parties internationally.

Many Committee supporters consider that Trotsky’s writings and work represent the most valuable application of the Marxist method in the 20th century. They rate his writings as indispensable for an understanding of the world today and for organizing to overthrow capitalist rule and build a socialist world.

Many also believe that the falsifications and slanders of Trotsky have gone a long way toward suppressing a Marxist understanding of Stalinism, revolution, and other key developments of our epoch. Studying, understanding, and learning to apply Trotsky’s ideas are said by many to be the key to finding a way forward for humanity. One precondition for this is the opportunity for calm, honest discussions of Trotsky’s ideas and works, which is the purpose of these conferences.

Fifteen presentations were made during the three sessions of this conference, whose theme was “Trotsky’s World — 120 Years of Struggle.” The sessions on “The History of the Left Opposition and Trotsky’s Biography” and “Trotsky and the National Question” took place on the first day at the Russian Academy of Sciences; and the session on the subject of “The Process of Restoration of Capitalism and Trotsky’s Relevance Today” took place on the second day in a meeting hall at the Hotel Soyuz near Moscow State University. Below are summarized some of the key points raised by the conference speakers.

Goloviznin on the Left Opposition

Mark Goloviznin, a Russian scholar and a protege of Vadim Rogovin, a historian of Trotsky and the Left Opposition who died in September 1998, opened the conference with a discussion entitled “Alternatives Offered by Trotsky and the Left Opposition.” Professor Goloviznin first noted that the atmosphere of intellectual openness which characterized the 1980s, when the alternative posed by the Left Opposition could be discussed, ended after 1991 when the reforms dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to be implemented. Today, the prevailing ideology in Russia, fostered by the new regime and oddly reviving the anti-Communism familiar in the West during the Cold War, condemns the Bolshevik Revolution as the cause of Stalinism.

Professor Goloviznin, surveying the revolutions of Europe, showed that all of them — from the revolutions of 1848 through the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s — failed to establish true democracy precisely because they did not become proletarian revolutions. Russia had no real choice in 1917: it was either a military dictatorship in the name of the property interests of imperialist investors, native capitalists, and landlords, who would have crushed the workers, peasants, and soldiers; or a proletarian dictatorship to advance the interests of the urban and rural oppressed. But the Russian revolution needed help from a proletarian revolution in a developed capitalist country, which never came. Stalinism promoted the isolation of the Soviet Union with its false idea that socialism could be built in one country. The suppression of political and economic alternatives during the Stalin era is being repeated today in a different form.

Stalinism and Bolshevism, Goloviznin reaffirmed, are not identical but opposites. This is ignored or denied by the prevailing ideology, as is the history of the struggle by the Left Communist Opposition against Stalin and Stalinism. In this context, the 8-volume series on the political opposition to Stalin by Vadim Rogovin is a unique and critical contribution to clarification of history and politics.

Voyeikov on Trotsky’s “Works” up to 1927

Professor Mikhail Voyeikov, Russian Coordinator of the Committee for the Study of Leon Trotsky’s Legacy, reported on his research in the archives in connection with the series of Trotsky’s works published in Moscow by Gosizdat, the state publishing house, during the 1920s. The project was suspended in 1927 after Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party. Although at least 23 volumes were slated for publication, only 12 volumes appeared before all of Trotsky’s works were suppressed and he was banished. Professor Voyeikov reported that six volumes lay in the archives, ready for publication, along with other volumes in various stages of preparation. These include: Volume 16 in two parts: “The Soviet Republic and the Capitalist World;” Volume 18: “On the Theme of the Party”; and Volume 19 “Culture of the Old World.” Professor Voyeikov proposed that as part of its work the Committee seek to expedite the publication of these remaining materials.

Serebryakova on the Russian Civil War, 80 Years Later

Professor Voyeikov was followed by Zoya Serebryakova, the daughter of Leonid Petrovich Serebryakov, a Bolshevik leader and Left Opposition supporter who was executed by the Stalin regime in 1937 and rehabilitated during the democratic openings of the late 1980s. She noted that October 29, the very day we were meeting, was the 80th anniversary of the defeat by the Red Army of the counterrevolutionary forces of General Denikin on the Southern Front. Her remarks focused on that historic event.

Serebryakova’s father, along with Stalin, was in charge of the Southern Front during that period, she said. She had only recently managed to locate in newly opened archives a long-suppressed letter Trotsky wrote to her father in 1927, which was confiscated at the time of her father’s arrest in the 1930s and kept personally by Stalin. The letter concerned a protest Trotsky had made at a 1927 party meeting where Stalin initiated his campaign to falsify Soviet military history to minimize (and ultimately eliminate) Trotsky’s role and elevate Stalin’s in the defeat of Denikin’s forces. Stalin later took full credit for the defeat of Denikin in the false histories of the party and the USSR published by the official Soviet government and party press in the 1930s and after. These false histories removed not only the role of Trotsky as organizer and leader of the Red Army — whose military plans, opposed by Stalin, actually led to Denikin’s defeat 80 years ago — but also the role of Serebryakov. In her report, Zoya very dramatically reviewed the history of this critical phase of the Civil War based on archival materials and her own experiences.

Budraitskis on the Transitional Program

Ilya Budraitskis, a young Trotskyist activist from Moscow, followed with a report on the relevance of “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (Mobilization of the Masses Around Transitional Demands As Preparation for the Conquest of Power),” or as it is usually called “The Transitional Program,” written by Trotsky in 1938, in collaboration with others. This document was adopted as the founding program of the Fourth International. Ilya began: “It is absolutely obvious that the task of revolutionary Marxists is the introduction into the workers movement of socialist consciousness. An immutable instrument in this cause is the Transitional Program of the Fourth International…which today has in no way lost its relevance.” He described the program as offering an organic transition between democratic and socialist demands, to systematically bring the masses closer to socialist revolution.

Such basic problems as unemployment and inflation continue to face workers under capitalism. The Transitional Program’s demands — like a sliding scale of wages to keep pace with inflation — offer a solution that can win mass support but tends to go beyond capitalism. Likewise, the demand for a sliding scale of working hours to spread the available work among all the workers and eliminate unemployment, with all earning a full day’s pay, would help solve the unemployment problem. The need for the working class to organize factory committees, “open the books,” and hire its own specialists, accountable to the workers, to assist in solving financial and technical problems, are means to prepare workers to take control of society and begin to elaborate an elemental economic plan for public works and workers’ control. Workers’ control of industry, thus, becomes a school for economic planning in general.

An important idea to accompany this is organization of worker militias to protect the enterprises and workers’ organizations. In conditions of suppression of the working class, the working class everywhere must be armed in militias prepared to defend themselves.

Ilya Budraitskis reiterated that the Transitional Program is relevant to organizing workers today in Russia and must serve as the basic program for a future revolutionary party of the working class which will inevitably be created on the basis of the Transitional Program of the Fourth International to fight for socialism.

Kozlov on the Ukrainian Peasant Leader Makhno

Alexei Kozlov from Voronezh, another young Trotskyist activist, like Ilya a member of the Russian section of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), spoke on “Bolshevism and Makhno.” He, like Serebryakova, discussed the critical situation the Soviet Republic faced on the southern front against the forces of Denikin in 1919–21.

Denikin’s forces were one of the counterrevolutionary, or “White,” armies organized with the backing of the previously warring imperialist powers to defeat the Red Army of the Soviet government and retake property and wealth for the foreign and domestic capitalists.

Kozlov explained that Nestor Mahkno, a leader of peasant guerrilla forces in eastern Ukraine, led a guerrilla army made up predominantly of relatively rich peasants. Makhno’s army was formally supposed to be part of the Red Army, but it refused to function under a central command. All efforts by Trotsky, leader of the Red Army, to improve relations failed. The situation worsened, Kozlov went on, after Kliment Voroshilov, a collaborator of Stalin, sought to extend his command in the region and began intriguing against Mahkno. Mahkno then turned against the Red Army, drove the Bolsheviks out of the territory he controlled, and ultimately formed an alliance with Denikin’s White forces, allowing them to use the regions occupied by Makhno’s guerrillas to launch attacks against the Red Army. Makhno declared war on the Bolsheviks and Soviet power. Once this happened, the Red Army had to no choice but to crush Makhno’s forces, and did so.

Kozlov argued that even though the Bolsheviks can be faulted for one or another mistake, when you look at the overall picture, Trotsky and the Red Army were trying to defend Soviet power in the interests of the workers and poor peasants. Mahkno and his forces, however, were interested only in defending their local territory for themselves. Surrounded on all fronts by imperialist-backed counterrevolutionary armies, the Red Army had no choice but to defeat the Makhno insurgents.

Discussion by Boris Slavin

During the discussion, many points were raised. For example, Boris Slavin, a former member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) who now supports the Trotsky Committee’s work, made some important observations. “We cannot go forward,” he said, “until we understand where we have come from.” Stalin declared Trotsky an accomplice of fascism. However, it is a fact that Trotsky spoke out actively against the fascist regimes and foresaw the war between Germany and the Soviet Union and came to the following conclusion: that in a war between Germany and the Soviet Union, he would support the Soviet Union against Hitler’s Germany. This led to a split in the Trotskyist movement, Slavin continued, because many considered Stalinism and Hitlerism the same thing.

Many today say the USSR was a totalitarian state, Slavin continued. Trotsky said the same thing. However, Trotsky’s method was to analyze the degeneration of the Soviet Union separately from his understanding of the totalitarian regime. He considered the Soviet Union a workers state, a degenerated workers state, but a workers state nonetheless. This analysis gives us a basis for understanding what happened in 1991, no matter how strange this may seem. No other commentators have contributed a better understanding to what happened to us than Trotsky did.

What we had was not socialism. Nevertheless, the 1917 revolution laid the foundations for a future socialist society. Before the end of the 1920s those foundations had suffered the cruelest deformations. Still, the deformations were not so deep as to eliminate the economic foundations laid down by the October 1917 revolution. What happened in 1991 was the annihilation of not only what was bad — the totalitarian regime; total domination of the party, government, and society by a privileged bureaucratic caste —but the annihilation of what was still good: the economic foundations established by the October 1917 revolution.

People understand this contradictory reality, he said. He recounted an anecdote currently circulating: The intellectual explains to the worker that what existed before 1991 was not socialism. The worker responds: “Then let us return to what wasn’t.”

Slavin concluded that workers want a return to what was good — the economic gains, jobs, social services, etc. — which the October revolution made possible despite the political degeneration represented by Stalinism.

Rogovina on Human Rights Activists

Galina Ivanovna Rogovina, Vadim Rogovin’s widow, commented at length on the work of the human rights activists, the Memorial Society, and others who commemorate the victims of Stalin. The problem is that they have a blind spot, she explained. They exclude the heroic Left Opposition to Stalinism of the 1920s and 1930s — Trotsky and all the outstanding Bolshevik leaders who gave their lives in the struggle for workers democracy and international socialism.

The Soviet dissidents of the 1960s and ’70s are often recalled. These earlier dissidents, however, were ten times above them in stature — state leaders, brilliant and outstanding intellectuals! Yet they are ignored. The crimes against history and humanity continue. We must take these conversations and discussions to society at large so people will understand.

Trotsky and the National Question

The afternoon topic “Trotsky and the National Question” sparked lively debates. I gave a report on the book entitled War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkans and the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 (translated by Brian Pierce; New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995). These conflicts cost half a million lives and left the Balkans “a plague-stricken graveyard” from which it would take decades to recover.

Trotsky reported from the Balkans as a journalist during those years, and his work showed the class forces at work as the ruling elites, egged on by the various European imperialist powers who sought to expand their hegemony in the region, perpetuated national conflicts and wars for their own narrow interests. For this the masses paid a terrible price.

Trotsky’s writings from the Balkans during those years show that nostalgic accounts of life there might be true only for the very thin layer of the ruling oligarchies and their hangers-on. The region was ruled by wretched autocrats, one more corrupt and venal than the next. On the other hand, Trotsky provides profiles of heroic worker and socialist organizations and rebel and revolutionary-minded leaders in the region of that time who opposed these regimes and mobilized peasants and workers under very difficult conditions. Two examples are Konstantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, a Romanian socialist; and Andranik Ozanian, a legendary Turkish-Armenian militant.

Trotsky showed how the Balkan wars of 1912–13, with their accompanying anti-Semitism and chauvinism, benefited only the oligarchies, who fostered the most reactionary ideologies to further their interests. In the same way, in the 1980s and ’90s, the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia fostered Greater Serbian chauvinism in our time to divide and conquer the workers who were resisting IMF-dictated market reforms.

Trotsky described the wholesale destruction and ethnic cleansing of those earlier Balkan wars: “To speak of the ‘liberation’ of Macedonia, laid waste, ravaged, infected with disease from end to end,” Trotsky wrote, “means either to mock reality or to mock oneself. Before our eyes a splendid peninsula, richly endowed by nature, which in the last few decades has made great cultural progress, is being hurled back with blood and iron into the dark age of famine and cruel barbarism. All the accumulations of culture are perishing, the work of fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers is being reduced to dust, cities are being laid waste, villages are going up in flames, and no end can yet be seen to this frenzy of destruction.” This could be describing the devastation of Kosovo by the Serbian forces, or of Serbia by U.S./NATO bombing, or of Chechnya by the Russian forces of capitalist restoration today.

Trotsky called for an independent democratic federation of the Balkans under the leadership of the small but strategically central industrial working class, Marilyn continued. The working-class revolutionary forces were weak, beleaguered, and overpowered. Trotsky examined the class forces at work and concluded: “European intervention [into the region] seems inevitable — intervention which, so as not to make of Asiatic Turkey a standing threat to European peace, will be exploited at the first favorable opportunity to carry out a partition of Turkey’s dominions in Asia,” foreseeing on the horizon what was to become World War I.

I would conclude that an important ingredient toward building the working-class leadership necessary today would be the publication and distribution of this collection in all the Balkan languages — and in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Dzarasov on the National Question in the Caucasus

The next speaker, Professor Solton Dzarasov, a political economist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, referred to the correspondence between Lenin and Trotsky in the early 1920s on the national question. Lenin had called upon Trotsky to join him in the fight against the resurgence of Great Russian chauvinism being fostered by Stalin and his clique. After Lenin’s death, Professor Dzarasov asserted, “for some reason, Trotsky did not take up the fight, or there is no evidence that he did.” Meanwhile, Stalin’s chauvinist retreat very much distorted the nationality policy and national relations. Despite these retreats and distortions, however, “the experience of the resolution of the national problem in the USSR was,” in his view, “the greatest achievement of world civilization.” Proof of that, he said, was the “conflagration of international conflicts once the USSR collapsed.” Yes, there were crude violations of rights and anti-Semitism was reborn, but the” enormous achievements are rarely discussed.”

He turned to the problems in the Caucasus. A dozen small populations were deported by Stalin from their Caucacus homelands during World War II. He was there when they began to return after their “rehabilitation” during the Khrushchev era in the late 1950s. There was no bloodshed then, Professor Dzarasov maintained, because time was taken to help the people who lived there understand that these deported peoples had a right to return to their homes and their land and that new homes would be built to insure that all had the housing they needed. And they were provided with new housing, he said. Today, he went on, instead of reconciliation, the “democratic” regime in Moscow is setting one national population against the other. Yelstin told the Chechens to take as much sovereignty as they wanted. So they did. But the Russian government then waged war against them!

Professor Dzarasov maintains that it is the responsibility of the larger nationality to bend over backwards to insure the rights of the smaller peoples. “I want to say that the current powers are incapable of finding a genuine solution to the national problem. Because to unite the people the way they were in the Soviet Union requires a supernational idea which could unite them. But privatization has created a class of a kind that is interested only in possessing the wealth of these territories. Therefore, the ruling class of every nation insists that “my nation is best.” He is Ossetian and has had much experience dealing with people of the Ingush nationality who returned to occupy land on which Ossetians lived after the Ingush were deported by Stalin; he has also dealt with Georgians who refuse to respect Ossetian national rights. “A resolution of the national question is only possible on the basis of internationalism, where we all recognize ourselves as the same and equal,” he concluded.

Denisyuk on the National Question in Ukraine

Professor Dzarasov was followed by Sergei Denisyuk from Kiev in Ukraine, who summarized the history of the Bolshevik position on the national question in Ukraine. Even within the Bolshevik party Lenin faced enormous obstacles in his defense of Ukrainian national rights. Outstanding Bolshevik leaders like Yuri Pyatakov and Khristian Rakovsky, who from June 1919 to July 1923 was head of Soviet Ukraine, disagreed with Lenin’s defense of Ukrainian national rights. Part of the problem, Denisyuk maintained, lay in the deep prejudices and great power chauvinist sentiments even inside the Bolshevik party ranks. Pyatakov, in April 1917, stated even before the Bolsheviks took power that he felt the national question was outmoded as an issue in world revolution. Rakovsky felt the Russian and Ukrainian languages should have equal status in Ukraine. Part of the problem also had to do with the fact that most industrial workers and urban dwellers were Russian or Russified while it was the peasantry which spoke Ukrainian.

Some Russian Bolsheviks argued against Lenin’s insistence on the fostering of Ukrainian language and culture as an obligation of the Russian Communists. To them, domination of the Ukrainian language and culture would mean the domination of the peasantry and petty-bourgeois intellectuals over the Russified proletariat. Nevertheless, Denisyuk continued, Lenin’s line won at the Russian Communist Party Congress in 1919, in the resolution on Ukrainization of the culture, government, and economic apparatus.

Lenin’s position on the national question was an important tool in the hands of the proletariat in building the necessary social base for Soviet power, but there was significant opposition to it in Bolshevik party ranks. Stalin took advantage of that. His autonomization plan was defeated in 1922–23, and Lenin’s position on the right of nations to self-determination and secession won. But after Lenin’s death, Stalin relied on the Russian chauvinist, anti-Bolshevik, anti-Leninist forces in the party and Russian society as his base. Nationalists Lenin had encouraged and those who continued to support Lenin’s position were called “national deviationists” and repressed. Denisyuk disagreed with Professor Dzarasov’s view that the viability of the Soviet Union was proven by the fact that it was only after the Soviet Union collapsed that the national problems developed. “As Marxists,” he explained, “we recognize that conflicts don’t just suddenly erupt but develop as a result of a long history. The conflicts that erupted at the end of the 1980s had been smoldering for a very long period; and what was responsible for this was the Stalin national policy, which reigned in the Soviet Union from the beginning of the 1930s and continued with small changes until the end of the 1980s.”

Further Disagreements with Dzarasov

During the discussion that followed this segment, Andrei Kuryonyshev— a Trotskyist activist from Moscow — also disagreed with Professor Dzarasov. Trotsky in 1923 posed the question of the maximum concessions to non-Russians in areas of language and culture and the maximum independence the material basis allowed on economic questions as long as this did not contradict the overall socialistic and central planning goals or orientation. A strongly centralized regime which served to ignore local needs would be perceived by the population on the periphery as a continuation of the old Russification policy of the tsarist period. Trotsky counseled at the party conference in 1923 that the Soviet government, as Lenin said, had to bend over backwards to respect economically underdeveloped populations, relating to them as helpers and not as teachers.

Professor Dzarasov responded by reiterating his view that the achievements of the Bolshevik revolution and the 1920s on the national question were unparalleled in history. The revolution helped small peoples develop a written language, gave people a possibility to translate into their language a wealth of world literature previously inaccessible, and allowed the emergence of national intelligentsia of all the peoples, bringing them into the mainstream of world civilization and culture. He insisted that Trotsky did not resist Stalin’s Russification as Lenin had done. His assertion was repeatedly contradicted by other speakers who pointed to Trotsky’s writings and speeches of 1923 and in the 1930s and to the fact that those who upheld Lenin’s position on the national question supported the Left Opposition.

Relevance of Trotsky’s Ideas Today

The third session, on day two, “The Process of Restoration of Capitalism and the Relevance of Trotsky Today” featured wide-ranging discussions of current political, economic, and social issues.

Rob Jones, organizer of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) in the former Soviet Union and one of the key organizers of the conference, spoke on the process of capitalist restoration in Russia. He argued that capitalism had been restored in Russia. Whereas in Soviet times, the economy had depended 60–70% on the production of the nationalized industries, today, the bulk of production takes place in the extractive export industries for foreign markets—oil, gas, and natural resources.

The labor market is not developed, but that is because many nonproductive workers are retained on the books so they won’t lose benefits. But the law of value does operate, Rob Jones maintained. It also did in Soviet times. It was used to measure the value of a product, if not the price, and was felt with distortions. But now prices in Russia are really close to world prices and the law of value has lost its distortion. Even where factories operate on the basis of barter, the basis of barter is the relative and equivalent values of the commodities being directly exchanged, he maintained.

In the discussion period, Savas Michael-Matsas of Greece disputed Rob Jones’s assertion that capitalism had been restored in Russia. First, of course, deciding the social nature of a mode of production is not best done by relying on figures concerning the legal forms of property. For example, 56% of the enterprises in Greece are state-owned; but this does not make Greece a workers’ state. Second, if capitalism has been restored in Russia—and there certainly is a process of capitalist restoration going on, which began in August 1991 — if what we have here is already a viable form of capitalism, two interlinked questions are posed: Is there any capital market. Is there any labor market? Savas said “no.” How can the law of value be said to determine the law of motion of post-Soviet society? Savas said it cannot.

[Editors’ Note — Omitting other sections on “The Process of Capitalist Restoration and the Relevance of Trotsky’s Ideas Today,” we proceed to the concluding parts of the report.]

Locating Trotsky’s Birthplace — Not an Easy Task Today

One of the most exciting presentations of the conference was made by a young Ukrainian Trotskyist named Oleh Vernik He reported on research he and his comrades have been conducting to locate Trotsky’s birthplace, Yanovka. Oleh is a member of Workers’ Resistance, the Ukrainian section of the CWI. Locating Trotsky’s birthplace was no easy task because the name of the place had been changed a number of times during the Stalin period. However, as a result of laborious research, an expeditionary team was able to ascertain that the 19th century village of Yanovka coincides with the present-day village of Berislavka. Venturing a trip to that village, the team made some interesting discoveries. (See attached report by Oleh Vernik on their discoveries.)

The Ukrainian Trotskyists are also investigating what relations existed between the left Marxist currents in the Ukrainian diaspora and organizations associated with the Fourth International in Canada and the United States. They hope that Trotsky Committee members from the United States will help them learn more about the relations between the Ukrainian national liberation movement, the Communist movement, and the Left Opposition in Ukraine. They have begun collecting much information on this. So far their investigations “have established with certainty that there existed a Trotskyist underground in Ukraine…a definite network of Trotskyist groups, splits from the Left Opposition.” They are conducting these investigations not out of abstract interest, Vernik explained, but because “we think it is a necessary thing to do in order to develop the correct political program and tactics for our work in Ukraine today. Their political work has been successful, and they already have supporters in 13 regions in Ukraine.

Future Plans of the Committee

Committee organizers, meeting during the conference, assessed the progress of the translation of The Case of Leon Trotsky into Russian. The bulk of the translating work is completed. All that will remain is to proofread the text and prepare it for a publisher, which should be done within a year.

In addition, the Committee plans to publish Trotsky’s writings on the Balkans, which are available on CD ROM and can be relatively easily prepared for publication. A subcommittee volunteered to seek a publisher and write a preface for this volume. In addition, Professor Voyeikov has organized a Trotsky Institute in Moscow, which meets regularly to discuss various aspects of Trotsky’s work and ideas. They plan to print twice a year a collection of the papers that result from the Institute meetings.

The Committee decided to hold the next conference in Ukraine, in the city of Kirovograd in October 2001. The event will feature a day trip to Trotsky’s birthplace near Berislavka, where the Ukrainian Trotsky Committee supporters and Trotskyists plan to establish a museum dedicated to Trotsky’s life and work.