Scurrilous libel from the WSWS

On Feb 4, 2025 the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) published an article denouncing Alex Steiner and the permanent revolution website, claiming that we deliberately published lies that were sent to us by a provocateur who was attempting to sabotage the defense campaign of Ukrainian political prisoner Bogdan Syrotiuk. The article, prominently displayed on the top of the WSWS,  A provocation that failed: On Alex Steiner’s attempt to discredit the ICFI’s defense of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk,  is signed by the Editorial Board of the WSWS.  Judging from its style its primary if not sole author is David North, the longtime leader of the SEP and the Chair of the WSWS Editorial Board. The WSWS article is little more than an outpouring of malicious lies against Steiner and the Permanent Revolution website.  But to unravel this we must first provide a brief summary of recent events.

Ukrainian political prisoner Bogdan Syrotiuk

In December we received an unsolicited letter from a source who wished to remain anonymous claiming that the WSWS had compromised the safety of Ukrainian political prisoner Bogdan Syrotiuk by publishing his legal name instead of his pseudonym.  The letter claimed that Bogdan Syrotiuk, who is currently incarcerated by the Ukrainian authorities, was a pseudonym of a young member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists whose legal name was Ostap Rerikh.  If true, this would have been a serious violation of elementary security precautions. Having been presented with this material, we felt it was our responsibility to make it public if true.

Contrary to what the WSWS piece would have one believe, we did not simply seize upon this bit of information and rushed to publish it without making any attempt to confirm its validity because we were blinded by our “subjective hatred” of the ICFI.  We did in fact conduct an investigation into the allegations, the details of which I will shortly explain, and after much discussion concluded, mistakenly, that the allegations were true. But we also thought it prudent, and compliant with standard journalistic practice, to ask for a comment on the veracity of the allegations from the WSWS Editorial Boad.  We made the final decision to publish the letter only after waiting three to four days for a response from that quarter, a response that never came.  We published the letter on Jan 28 at approximately 3 PM Eastern Time.

Three days after publishing the letter we learned that the facts alleged in the letter were false.  It turns out that Bogdan Syrotiuk is in fact the legal name of this member of the YGBL and Ostap Rerikh was his pseudonym. It also turns out that the WSWS did, for the most part, publish articles using Bogdan’s pseudonym and only began using his legal name after his arrest. Upon learning of our mistake, we immediately took down the letter and the comments about the letter and issued an apology  in a new post titled, A correction and an apology. This happened on Feb. 1, at approximately 11:50 AM Eastern Time.

Falsification #1: We never sent an email to David North requesting confirmation

 

That is the bare bones chronology of what happened.  Let us now examine the WSWS allegations.  The first thing they claim is that Steiner lied about reaching out to the Chair of the WSWS Editorial Board for a comment prior to publication.  The WSWS article states that,

 

Attempting to justify himself, Steiner asserts that he “did reach out to the chair of the World Socialist Web Site twice for a comment” on the anonymous letter’s allegation. He claims that he “waited for 3 days for a response and, receiving none, we went ahead and published the letter.” The WSWS has conducted a search of all its email addresses, as well as those of David North. No such letter was received.

 

We cannot say if North read the letter Steiner sent or not, but we can definitely say that it was sent and received by the server the WSWS email account is using.  Here is the proof.

Exhibit #1: A screenshot taken straight from Steiner’s “Sent” folder.

 

The email addresses of Steiner and North have been anonymized in this copy.  We have also removed the body of the letter sent to us from the anonymous source.  But the timestamps are exactly as they appear in Steiner’s “Sent” folder as is the complete text Steiner wrote to North in both letters. A screenshot of the emails in the “Sent” folder showing the content unaltered will be made available to anyone from the WSWS Editorial Board upon request. If the email had bounced Steiner would have received notification.  We are therefore confident that it did indeed arrive at its destination on the WSWS email server.  As we could not find a generic email address we could use to write to the WSWS Editorial Board anywhere on the WSWS site we used an email that we knew had been valid for North not long before.  We had no reason to suspect the email was not received since we never received any notice of a bounced email. The WSWS article states: “The WSWS has conducted a search of all its email addresses, as well as those of David North.”  Perhaps the editors should search again.

In the first letter, sent on the afternoon of Jan 24, Steiner explains that we are in possession of information concerning “a serious security lapse on the part of the ICFI in relation to Ukrainian political prisoner Bogdan Syrotiuk” and that “We are looking for a response from you to the information we have gathered before we go ahead and publish it.”

We did not yet send the specific allegations from our anonymous source, later identified as Daniel Bukvasevic, because we wanted to make it possible for someone from the WSWS to receive the letter in encrypted form and asked them for a way to make that possible. After waiting for 3 days without any response, we sent a second letter on Jan 27 at 3:27 PM ET that included the full text of the letter we received from “Anonymous”.  We explained in that second letter that,

We will be publishing the below tomorrow.  If you wish to respond or correct any facts you believe are incorrect you may do so today.

After getting no response from the second letter to North we published the letter from Anonymous on the next day, Jan. 28, at around 3 PM ET.

Falsification #2: We never received an email from an Anonymous source.

The WSWS article goes on to castigate us for the “fundamental lie” we told.  They write,

However, the fundamental lie told by Steiner and his collaborator Tissot pertains to the origins of what they describe as an anonymous letter. In the introduction to the “letter” posted on January 28, Tissot wrote: “We have been able to establish the identity of the sender, however, we will not undermine their wish to remain anonymous.”

In fact, the source of the misinformation was not an anonymous letter. The fabricated claim that the ICFI, the WSWS and David North were responsible for exposing “Ostap Rerikh,” and that Bogdan Syrotiuk is a pseudonym, originally appeared in a series of tweets posted between December 30, 2024 and January 3, 2025 by an anti-communist provocateur using the handle Alexander Goldman@Bukvasevic. 

 

Later on the WSWS article is even more explicit in claiming we “lied” about the Anonymous letter,

The claim made by Steiner and Tissot that the source of the false information they posted on January 28 was a “letter” from a source who wished to remain anonymous is an out and out lie.

As it turns out it is the author of this article who is spreading lies.

Here is Exhibit #2:  Correspondence with Anonymous aka Daniel Bukvasevic.

Screenshot #1: Top of email from "Bukvasevic" to Steiner

Screenshot #2: Bottom of above email from "Bukvasevic", signed as "Anonymous"

All these emails are from Steiner’s email “inbox” and “sent” folders and screenshots of the originals are available upon request.

Screenshot #3: Steiner asks "Bukvasevic" to confirm  his allegations. 

Screenshot #4: "Bukvasevic" cuts of all communication.

As this email chain confirms, we did indeed receive a letter from someone who signed the letter “Anonymous”.  Of course, “Anonymous” did have an email address as the sender of the letter, in this case it was “danielbukvasevic@proton.me.”  We had no idea at the time who this person was, but it was clear that it was someone who had a great deal of knowledge of Bogdan Syrotiuk’s situation and that this person wished to remain anonymous.  Note that the first email we received containing the allegations of a security lapse on the part of the ICFI was dated Dec. 17.  The significance of that date will shortly become apparent.

Note also that Steiner did not simply accept the allegations in the initial letter but responded with a series of questions in an attempt to confirm those allegations. In the last of those letters, dated Dec. 18, Steiner wrote,

I would like to know more about you and get some confirmation of what you say.

It was immediately following that question that Anonymous/Bukvasevic indicated that he no longer wished to continue the correspondence and broke of all further communication.

Our immediate reaction to Anonymous/Bukvasevic breaking off contact with us was to consider the matter closed and at that point we had no intention of publishing the letter.  I will explain shortly why we changed our mind a month later.

But first we can refute another falsification about our role spread by the WSWS, namely, that we knowingly broadcast information from a provocateur going by the handle of “Alexander Goldman”.

Falsification #3: The source of our information about Bogdan Syrotiuk was a provocateur  named “Alexander Goldman”.

The WSWS asserts: 

The claim made by Steiner and Tissot that the source of the false information they posted on January 28 was a “letter” from a source who wished to remain anonymous is an out and out lie. All the allegations endorsed and posted by Steiner and Tissot were based on the public tweets of “Alexander Goldman.”

This is where the dates in the letters we received from Anonymous/Bukvasevic become important. The email chain we reproduced in Exhibit #2 shows that we first became aware of the allegations of a security lapse on Dec 17.  Yet the WSWS article indicates that the provocateur “Goldman" first began posting tweets on Dec. 30.  In fact, we were not aware of the tweets from “Goldman”.   Our only source of information was the letter we received from an Anonymous source with an email handle of “danielbukvasevic”. We had no way of knowing that “danielbukvasevic” and “Alexander Goldman” were the same person as we had never seen Goldman’s tweets and were not even aware of Goldman’s existence.

So when the “WSWS Editorial Board” writes that,

Steiner invented the story of an anonymous letter to conceal from readers of permanent-revolution.org the fact that he was making use of fraudulent material, for which there existed no corroborating evidence, provided by an agent provocateur and anti-communist enemy of Marxism and Trotskyism.

And further states that,

Steiner knew that the allegations posted by his blog site would have no credibility if their source were known. Therefore, he concocted the cover story of the “letter” from a sender who wished to remain anonymous.

But there is no escaping the fact that Steiner placed his blog site at the service of a provocateur intent on assisting the Ukrainian police and sabotaging the defense campaign mounted by the ICFI.

It is clear that they are going way beyond their usual mudslinging but are in fact making out and out libelous statements that are actionable and could result in serious litigation.

Why then did we change our mind and finally publish the letter?

Falsification #4: We were reckless and did not exercise any due diligence before publishing the letter.

In fact we exercised plenty of due diligence but in hindsight  it obviously was not enough. We decided to publish the letter in the end because after Bukvasevic/Anonymous broke off communication with us, we investigated the matter further, independently of Bukvasevic, and found new information that appeared to confirm the allegations contained in the letter.  We found convincing evidence that the  Anonymous letter writer known as Bukvasevic was in fact a well-known member or close supporter of the WSWS whose handle was Dan Reznik.  The evidence for this is contained in exhibit 3.

 Exhibit # 3: Screenshot of Reddit page of Dan Reznik aka Daniel Bukvasevich

 

This is a screenshot of a Reddit account for a ‘Dan Reznik’ associated with a userid of Daniel Bukvasevich.  The account was shut down as was the twitter account belonging to “Alexander Goldman” as well as the email account belonging to Daniel Bukvasevic, the person who initially contacted us.  You can find this old Reddit page through the WayBack machine at the following URL:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240825140145/https://www.reddit.com/user/daniel_bukvasevich/

It appears that Bukvasevic[h], Goldman and Reznik are the same person.   Note that the Reddit page identifies “Dan Reznik” as a “Member of the International Committee of the Fourth International”.  If you scroll down you will find a post referencing an article about Bogdan Syrotiuk from the WSWS. It was because we were able to identify the author of the letter as Dan Reznik that we concluded -mistakenly - that the allegations in the letter were true. 

Who was Dan Reznik and why were we so certain that he was the author of the letter?

For several years, Reznik – using the twitter handle @DanReznikWSWS has publicly identified himself as a member of the ICFI and a translator for the WSWS in Serbo-Croat on Twitter and Reddit. He was an active tweeter and redditor on behalf of the ICFI for a number of years. On December 6, 11 days before we received this letter, Reznik deleted all of his social media accounts.

Reznik was also known to Sam Tissot from his time in the ICFI and had been referred to as a “promising comrade in Eastern Europe” during internal discussions in the French leadership. Prominent international members of the ICFI regularly liked and promoted Dan Reznik’s twitter threads on Twitter/X. That we were able to verify Dan Reznik as the author of this letter was a major factor in our decision to publish it.

 

While we still accept this was a mistake and acknowledge Reznik/Bukvasevick’s information was at best confused, this evidence completely undercuts North’s claim that “The statement of Tissot in his introduction—“We have been able to establish the identity of the sender, however, we will not undermine their wish to remain anonymous”—was a cynical subterfuge.”

 

The letter was not penned by Steiner or Tissot, nor was there any “cynical subterfuge”.  It was in fact penned by someone identifiable as a former translator for the WSWS based in Eastern Europe and who had publicly identified as a member of the ICFI for years without challenge and even enjoyed social media endorsement from dozens of members of the ICFI.

Until we opened the WSWS article on February 4, we were under the impression that Reznik/Bukvasevich had left the political scene, demoralized like so many others have been over the years after falling foul of the ICFI leadership. Contrary to the fantastical claims of the WSWS, no one who took part in discussions that led to the publication of the piece had heard of Alexander Goldman before February 4 nor had any knowledge of his link to the letter.

Therefore, after having read the WSWS’s concocted narrative about the provenance of the letter, we were even more surprised when the materials collected by the WSWS indicated that Reznik/Bukvasevich also appears as the individual behind the Goldman twitter outbursts.

As the WSWS shows, the twitter user name for “Alexander Goldman” is @bukvasevich.  It appears that the person the WSWS describes as “an agent provocateur and anti-communist enemy of Marxism and Trotskyism” was associated with the party and WSWS as recently as December 6. How such a person was able to slip into anti-Marxist views so quickly after having supported the WSWS for years is a question that ought to trouble the leaders of a Trotskyist movement.

 

 The WSWS article of February 4 states that we

 

…must come clean and provide a detailed explanation of how the article posted on January 28 came to be written. What, precisely, is the nature of his relationship with Alexander Goldman? When did this collaboration begin? What did Steiner know about the politics and background of this individual? Did Steiner know of previous identities employed by Goldman before he set up an X account in December 2024? Did Steiner work with Goldman in the drafting of the article posted on January 28?

 

As the above evidence shows we demonstrated exactly how we came to publish the letter. It was written and submitted by Bukvasevic aka Dan Reznik nearly two weeks before Goldman’s attacks on Marxism commenced. No link to Goldman’s anti-communist diatribes were indicated in the letter. There was no relationship with Goldman, whose existence we were not aware of and whose tweets would not start for another 2 weeks. After receiving this letter, we were able to establish that the author was Dan Reznik, until recently openly associated with the ICFI and based in Eastern Europe. It was on the basis of having established the identity of the author of the letter and knowing something about his history with the ICFI that we determined – mistakenly – that the allegations made in the letter were credible.

 

We also tried to contact the Chair of the Editorial Board of the WSWS before publishing the letter although for reasons not yet known, we were unsuccessful.  As soon as we were informed that the allegations in the letter  were actually false, we immediately withdrew it and apologized to all of those impacted.

 

Contrast our approach to that of the WSWS.  They manufacture a conspiracy theory out of whole cloth claiming that we made up the story about receiving a letter from a source who wished to remain anonymous.  They accused us of collaborating with the anti-communist provocateur, Alexander Goldman, someone we never heard of until reading his name in the Feb 4 article. They accuse us of lying  about uncovering the identity of the author of the letter. At the same time as they try to connect us to Alexander Goldman,  they remain silent about Dan Reznik. We do not know at this point whether Reznik aka Bukvasevic aka Goldman was a WSWS supporter/member who became agitated and confused or whether there is a more sinister explanation for his behavior, but in either case the WSWS editorial board deliberately withheld any mention of Dan Reznik in their narrative of the events that transpired.

 

The WSWS failed to make even the slightest effort at due diligence in this sorry affair. They made no effort to contact us before rushing into print with a series of libelous statements.

 

The WSWS piece also throw in the charge that we never participated in the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk.  As a matter-of-fact Steiner signed their petition back in April of 2024 and asked others to do the same.  A simple check of the signatures on their petition would show that.  We would be happy to participate in any kind of joint action in support of Bogdan Syrotiuk.

 

As for the other brickbats tossed in our direction,  i.e. that we supported SYRIZA or that we are supporters of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism, etc., their purpose is clear: to take the focus off the fact that we conducted a serious investigation, that we honestly owned up to our error and that we behaved with integrity once we learned of it. On the other hand the eminent members of the WSWS editorial board reacted like spoiled adolescents. Their “investigation” was a joke, and they rushed into print with the most scurrilous accusations against us without making the slightest attempt to confirm anything in their narrative of the events that transpired. 

 

 

As a parting shot, the authors of this diatribe try to connect their libelous accusations against Steiner with David North’s earlier agent-baiting of Steiner.

They write,

 

This is the not the first time that Steiner has offered his services for a provocation against the Trotskyist movement. He was recently the principal American source for Aidan Beatty’s biographical hatchet job on Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy and the ICFI. Steiner made available to Beatty, whose slanderous hack work received funding from pro-Zionist institutions, whatever personal information he had about David North’s family background. As North noted, “The FBI will appreciate Steiner’s services as an informer.”

 

Steiner had previously responded to this slander: Agent-bating: A hysterical slander from David North. But for the record one more time: Steiner was not the source of the personal information about David North that Beatty published. As Steiner has stated previously,

 

Beatty nowhere says that I was his “main informant” for information about North’s private life and North gives no indication why he thinks that is the case.  In fact Beatty in a footnote cites his major sources as various publications, some from Trinity College which relied on information provided by North himself! [9]  In any case, I could not have been Beatty’s “main informant” for the information he reproduces since I never knew most of those details about North’s background in the first place.

    

The fact that the WSWS continues to be wedded to North’s agent-baiting speaks volumes about the journalistic integrity of the World Socialist Web Site.

 

Yet if anyone should know about how destructive the practice of agent-bating is it should be David North himself as he was the victim of this practice by none other than his one-time mentor Gerry Healy. Here is an excerpt from Clare Cowen’s memoir of Healy and the WRP.  She writes of,

 

…Gerry’s [Healy] unfounded accusations that Dave North of the American Workers League had involvement with the CIA. Inferring that someone might be an agent of the police or security services was an oft-used tactic in Gerry’s political rows, part of his arsenal to pull comrades into line if they raised disagreements. (Clare Cowen, My search for revolution and how we brought down an abusive leader, Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2019)

 

It appears that the lesson David North drew from this “oft-used tactic” of Healy, of which he was once a victim, was that it can come in handy against your political opponents when you can’t properly answer them.

 

We demand that the World Socialist Web Site publish a retraction of their false accusations against Alex Steiner, Sam Tissot and the Permanent Revolution website!

 

But we are not holding our breath.  Can anyone cite even one instance when the WSWS published a retraction and owned up to their culpability in spreading false information in the past 27 years? And the reason for this perfect record of never printing a retraction is not because the WSWS has been blessed with papal infallibility. It is because the Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site lacks any semblance of journalistic integrity.

Permanent Revolution Editorial Board

 

Also read: Marx's struggle against defamation

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