WE DEMAND MERCILESS RETRIBUTION AGAINST THE VILE TRAITORS OF OUR GREAT MOTHERLAND

Scientific workers of the Soviet Union learned with a feeling of indignation and great wrath of the monstrous crimes of the contemptible Trotskyites—the vile traitors to the Motherland, whose treacherous activity is now being exposed by the Soviet court.

Having sold themselves to the fascists, having conspired with the diplomats and general staffs of certain aggressive imperialist states, a contemptible gang of human degenerates, accomplices of the fascist cannibals, led by the Gestapo agent—the bandit Trotsky—sold our socialist Motherland and its wealth to the most vicious enemies of human progress.

The vile traitors organized attempts on the lives of the best people of the modern epoch, the leaders of the world’s first socialist state; they organized monstrous acts of wrecking at socialist factories, mines, and railway transport; they murdered our Stakhanovite heroes, our glorious valiant Red Army men; they robbed the Soviet state in order to maintain the pack of Trotskyites and finance their criminal work.

Striving to undermine the military and economic might of the great land of socialism, the contemptible gang of restorers of capitalism tried to make it easier for the fascists to carry out their designs for seizing the territory of the USSR and restoring capitalism. They dreamed of returning power in our country to the capitalists, of liquidating the collective farms and state farms, of enslaving the Soviet people, of imposing unemployment, poverty, and hunger; they wanted to deprive the Soviet people of the great gains recorded in the Stalin Constitution.

We demand from our Soviet court merciless retribution against the vile traitors! We demand the destruction of the contemptible degenerates!

We also demand that the participation of the rightist renegades—Bukharin, Rykov, Uglanov—in the criminal activity of the Trotskyites be investigated to the end, and that they be brought to the most severe accountability.

Scientific workers will devote all their knowledge and strength to the further, still more rapid growth and flourishing of our great socialist Motherland, to the further strengthening of the might of the Red Army—the faithful guardian of the Soviet borders.

Scientific workers, together with the entire Soviet people, will close their ranks still more tightly around the Communist Party, its Central Committee, and our beloved leader and friend, Comrade Stalin!

President of the Academy of Sciences—Academician V. Komarov

Chairman of the Central Bureau of VARNITSO—Academician A. Bakh

Chairman of the Central Committee of the Union of Workers of Higher Schools and Scientific Institutions—Prof. P. Valeskaln

Chairman of the Central Council of the Section of Scientific Workers—Academician B. Keller

Academicians: A. Arkhangelsky, N. Vavilov, N. Gorbunov, I. Gubkin, G. Krzhizhanovsky, A. Termigorev

Honored Workers of Science: Prof. N. Obraztsov, Prof. Order-Bearer E. Pavlovsky, Prof. A. Speransky.

Professors: V. Vezer, V. Vysotsky, P. Zdradovsky, B. Lavrentiev, I. Razenkov, G. Fedorov.

Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR
No. 24 (6186), January 27, 1937.