SOURCE: "Stalin, Trotsky, and Willi Schlamm," in From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson, Ohio University Press, 1995, pp. 217-27.

In the following essay, which was originally published in the Nation in 1937, Wilson provides a critical examination of the report of the Trotsky Commission.

The report of the Trotsky Commission is a remarkably interesting document, which makes one realize the inadequacy, if not frivolity, of the newspaper accounts of the Mexican hearings.

In regard to the question of Trotsky's guilt on the charges brought against him at the Moscow trials, these hearings made public a great deal of material which helps to establish his innocence. As is already well known, the Oslo airdrome reported that no foreign planes had arrived at the time of Pyatakov's supposed visit to Trotsky; and the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen, where Torosky's son was alleged to have met Holtzman, no longer existed at that time. The...