Starting on December 1, 1934, when Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov was assassinated, leading to capture,trial and execution of a Party member Leonid Nikolaev, a number of conspiracies shook the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. As revealed in the three Moscow trials, although Trotsky’s followers hotly contest it to this day, the 1929 exiled former Party member and once the Commissar of War, Leon Trotsky; was at the center of these conspiracies, Furr and Bobrov’s research is based on newly released files from the archives after the fall of the USSR. In his new book, Furr & Bobrov examine the conspiracy within the Comintern by studying the investigation file of Osip Aronovich Pyatnitsky, head (secretary) of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) from 1923 to 1935. Pyatnitsky’s investigative file contains a great deal of evidence, allowing the reader to see for the first time the vast extent of this combination of interconnected conspiracies.
Grover Furr is a professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University and a widely-published author focusing on Stalin and the USSR.
