Disentangling another WSWS web of deception

by the Permanent Revolution Editorial Board 

We beg our readers’ indulgence concerning the lengthy polemical exchange that has erupted between Permanent Revolution and the World Socialist Web Site.  The ICFI (full name: International Committee for the Fourth International), which publishes the WSWS, is well known for both its bulldog tenacity and its loose approach to the facts, not to mention its paranoid worldview.  So it’s hard not to get dragged into the ICFI labyrinth.

 

Gerry Healy, who falsely accused David North of being a "CIA agent".

In the past couple of weeks we have been bombarded with several iterations of increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories in response to the fact that we mistakenly published a letter alleging a security lapse on the part of the ICFI.  When we learned that the information we published was false, we immediately took down the letter and issued an apology.  Ever since, the WSWS has been tossing accusations our way, escalating the level of slander with each iteration, while at the same time hiding some very significant facts from their readers.  

 

It’s worth pointing out that the website’s latest contribution, “Alex Steiner’s tangled web of political deceit,” contains an important admission with regard to Dan Reznik, the ex-ICFI associate who triggered the controversy by accusing the International Committee of a major security lapse concerning Bogdan Syrotiuk, the Trotskyist who is currently on trial on entirely spurious charges of “high treason” to the Ukrainian state.

 

The admission concerns the ICFI accuser’s political identity.  As we noted on Feb. 7 (“Scurrilous libel from the WSWS”), we now believe that Reznik was spreading false tales because he had been left “demoralized like so many others have been over the years after falling foul of the ICFI leadership” and was therefore taking revenge.  Since we know how the ICFI chews such people up and spits them out, we believe  that was the case in this instance as well.  It is still our best understanding of how this incident arose.

 

But now, after nearly two weeks of silence, WSWS has finally come up with its own explanation for Reznik’s behavior.  Rather than someone who was angry and upset, it now seems that he was “an agent-provocateur, who most likely was working on behalf of the Ukrainian state.” 

 

The WSWS elaborates:

 

Reznik is an agent provocateur, adopting and deleting identities in accordance with whatever operation he is engaged in.  In 2022 he wrote to the WSWS, declaring full support for the ICFI and offering to translate articles into Serbo-Croat.  There are many individuals who contact the WSWS and offer assistance for translations.  As is now evident, Reznik,’ aka Daniel Bukvasevic, was attempting to infiltrate the ICFI.  His activities serve as a warning of the need for vigilance against the activities of state agents.  Reznik was unsuccessful.  He was never a member of a section of the International Committee or any party organization.  Reznik never held a personal meeting with a single party member.  His association with the party was limited to occasional online discussions and the exchange of emails.

 

This account is a significant distortion.  As we noted on Feb. 7, Reznik, used the handle “@DanReznikWSWS,” published voluminously on Twitter/X and contributed regularly to the r/Trotskyism Reddit page.  We published a screenshot of his Reddit page in which he identifies himself as a “a member of the International Committee for the Fourth International” and lists more than 1,300 posts.  Yet not only did the ICFI make no attempt to correct what it now says is a misrepresentation, but prominent members regularly “liked” and re-tweeted his posts.  The ICFI gave every impression that he was an active and prominent member of the organization.

 

But now the long-time ICFI internet warrior turns out to be a Ukrainian agent.  The WSWS says it sensed something was amiss when Reznik tweeted in support of a Stalinist assassination of a Croat nationalist writer in 1978.  “The ICFI was attentive to signs of Reznik’s political instability,” its latest article declares.  Therefore, Alex Lantier, a leader of the ICFI’s French section, wrote to Reznik demanding that he take the tweet down.  According to the WSWS, Lantier wrote:

 

This tweet is not Trotskyist.  The Trotskyist perspective for the ‘extinction’ of the nation-state system is a world socialist revolution by the international working class.  It is not for the physical extermination of everyone who, at one or other point in time, supports the nation-state system or his or her nation-state.  Nor do Trotskyists outsource the political struggle against nationalism to the murderers in the Stalinist intelligence services, which were staffed by virulent nationalists.  If you have any question about this, you can read Stalin’s Gangsters by Trotsky.

 

Lantier added that he was “concerned about you tweeting what will be seen as an endorsement of the Stalinist assassination of a literary figure” and for that reason “insisted that Reznik delete his tweet.”

 

But that was in October.  While accusing him of a political blunder, Lantier said nothing about Reznik serving as an agent-provocateur on behalf of the Ukrainian state for the better part of two years.  There is nothing in the WSWS account indicating the slightest suspicion in this regard.

 

The ICFI allowed itself to be duped.  Unlike David North and his collaborators, we are not in the habit of tossing about charges of bourgeois intelligence activities without proper evidence.  But if the WSWS’s suspicions are correct, then, by its own standards, it is guilty of a significant security lapse.  From early 2022 until October 2024, it entered into an active relationship with a hostile agent.  It promoted his internet posts, supported his views, and allowed him to pass himself off as a bona fide member – even though they now say that  he was an enemy agent attempting to penetrate its ranks.

 

To be sure, Reznik misled us as well.  But where we have taken responsibility, the WSWS has not.  Rather than conducting a thorough inquiry into how it supposedly fell victim to a hostile intelligence operation, it has sought to minimize and conceal its role.   This is yet another example of the ICFI school of historical falsification that has made the ICFI a byword for mendacity in international socialist ranks.

 

The WSWS engages in other distortions that, while less serious, are still worthy of attention.

 

Alex Steiner, a member of the Permanent Revolution editorial board, stated in his original article that he emailed David North twice seeking a comment on Reznik’s allegations prior to publication.  On Feb. 4, the WSWS accused Steiner of lying on the grounds that no email was ever sent.  “The WSWS has conducted a search of all its email addresses, as well as those of David North,” it declared.  “No such letter was received.”

 

But now it says Steiner was merely guilty of using an email address that was out of date: “The email address used by North is not located on the WSWS server.  Due to technical problems, North ceased using it well over a year ago.”  So did the website conduct a search of all its email addresses as it originally stated or not?  After two weeks of saying that it did, it now appears that it did not.

 

The latest WSWS article - likely written by David North - further states that Steiner “received what he claims to have been an anonymous communication ... on December 17,” but then goes on to say that it was “not an anonymous communication” because “[i]t bears the name “danielbukvasevic” and the email address danielbukvasevic@proton.me.”  But all Steiner said was that he received an unsolicited letter from someone “who wished to remain anonymous.”  So what is the point?

 

Indeed, a WSWS contact form that North helpfully reproduces in his latest article assures individuals writing to the website that “[w]e will protect your anonymity.”  North seems to be confused about the difference between an anonymous letter and one written by someone wishing to have his or her name withheld.

 

The article goes on to make other bizarre accusations. It would be a fool’s errand to deal with all of them. But to cite one example,  the author of the article – likely David North himself – states that Steiner was lying when saying that he had no previous acquaintance with the author of the letter - that Steiner must have had a long-standing relationship of “familiarity” with the letter-writer because the person addressing Steiner wrote “Dear Alex” in the salutation portion of an email.  Needless to say even a six-year-old can unravel the stupidity of such an inference.

 

Elsewhere North says of Sam Tissot that he “was expelled from the French section of the ICFI last year for refusing to respect the confidentiality of internal party communications.”  But as Tissot made clear on this website last September,   in the official account provided by the ICFI at the time, he was expelled  for “denying the historical continuity of Trotskyism,”. In fact he was actually expelled for doing nothing more than raising questions within the leadership of the French section about policies and practices of the ICFI and asking for a discussion on those issues. So this claim from North is false as well.

 

The WSWS article   concludes with a 630-word disquisition on the “major investigation” that the ICFI has conducted since 1975 concerning,

…the death of its founder Leon Trotsky in 1940, the infiltration of his household by agents of the GPU, and the subsequent infiltration of the Trotskyist movement and in particular the American Socialist Workers Party, by agents of imperialism.

 

The investigation has already produced irrefutable evidence of such infiltration,

the article adds. 

 

Bravo! 

 

But then how come they could not discover that someone who was publicly representing them for over two years was in fact, according to them, “an agent-provocateur, who most likely was working on behalf of the Ukrainian state”?

And why did they hide this information for more than two weeks after we made public the identity of Dan Reznik? 

And why do they even now try to whitewash his past deep involvement with the ICFI?

 

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More unhinged slanders from the WSWS

In yet another unhinged attack on us that is featured prominently at the top of the World Socialist Web Site home page, an article titled, Oppose the Steiner-Tissot smear campaign! Defend Comrade Bogdan Syrotiuk!, claims that we launched a “provocation” that

… is a deliberate attempt to undermine the defense of Comrade Syrotiuk, the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, and the International Committee as a whole.

This adds another slander to the list that the WSWS has already issued.  To those who have not been following this saga, what the article calls a “provocation” was our initial publication of a letter that alleged that the ICFI committed a serious lapse in security in their reporting about Ukrainian political prisoner Bogdan Syrotiuk.  We learned shortly after we published the letter that the information was false and immediately took it down, issuing a retraction titled, A correction and an apology. Shortly afterwards, the WSWS published an article accusing us of deliberately forging the letter in question. Our response, A scurrilous libel from the WSWS,  demonstrated that the WSWS deliberately slandered us in at least three instances. 

1.    The website claimed that we never gave the WSWS editorial board an opportunity to comment before we published the letter.

2.    It claimed that we knew the author of the letter was a provocateur who went by the handle of “Alexander Goldman”.

3.    It further claimed that in fact we never received a letter from a source that wished to remain anonymous but that we actually fabricated the letter.

We conclusively refuted each one of these defamatory statements.  We provided evidence that anyone can check showing that:

1.    We sent two emails to David North asking for a comment prior to our publication of the letter.

2.    We presented conclusive evidence that we received a letter from Anonymous, aka “Daniel Bukvasevic” and that we did not fabricate the letter.

3.    We provided conclusive evidence that the letter we received was sent to us some two weeks before the provocateur “Alexander Goldman” started broadcasting his tweets.   This established that our source of information was not connected to “Alexander Goldman”, of whose existence we were not aware. 

We also provided evidence showing that the ostensible author of the letter, “Daniel Bukvasevic” was a long-time ICFI member or close supporter named Dan Reznik.  It was only when we discovered the identity of the letter writer - who in the meantime had ceased to communicate with us - that we felt the allegations had sufficient credibility to warrant publication.  While we were mistaken in that belief, it was not an “irrational” decision on our part since the letter actually came from a long-time collaborator of the WSWS.

A recap of the evidence:

Screenshot #1: Our emails to David North asking for a comment prior to publication

.

Screenshot #2: Letter from "Daniel Bukvasevic/Anonymous" received on Dec. 17, 2024, two weeks prior to the emergence of the provocateur "Alexander Goldman".

               

 

Screenshot #3: End of email from "Daniel Bukvasevic/Anonymous" signed "Anonymous" 

Screenshot #4: The Reddit account showing that "Bukvasevic" and "Dan Reznik" is the same person.

On the basis of the evidence we presented, we insisted that the WSWS correct the record and retract their slanderous accusations.

What was the reaction of the WSWS to our demand?

Not only has the WSWS failed to respond to our takedown of their slanders, but the site has also not even acknowledged that we did in fact respond to them.  Instead of retracting their libelous allegations or, for that matter, challenging our refutation,  WSWS has doubled down on its slanders by engaging further and more extreme slanders.

That is the significance of their latest attack on us.

Let us examine some of their statements in detail

They write:

In its initial publication, Sam Tissot claimed that they decided to “hide” the real name of the source. But why conceal the author of a fabricated letter? The only logical explanation is that the publisher knew the author well and understood his political physiognomy. If the audience were aware of the author’s identity, they could examine his past statements, exposing his broader political agenda.

This argument makes no sense.  We posted the letter and attributed it to an anonymous author because that is how he wanted to be identified.  This was the basis of what the WSWS article represents as a sinister action on our part of “hiding”  and “concealing” the identity of the author.  Is it possible that these people have never heard that it is standard journalistic practice to attribute information to an anonymous source if the person providing that information does not wish to be identified?

When we published the letter, we were unaware that the author provided us with false information. Once we became aware that the information was false, we took down the letter and published our apology.  Furthermore, when we learned several days later that the author of the letter was an anti-communist provocateur, we no longer felt obligated to maintain his anonymity and published everything we knew about him, including the fact that he was, until very recently, a member or close supporter of the ICFI named Dan Reznik.   We explained all this in our article, A scurrilous libel from the WSWS, but the WSWS makes no reference to our explanation.

The WSWS article also repeats again the slander that we “fabricated” the letter. There is no acknowledgement that we published screenshots showing beyond any doubt that we did in fact receive a letter signed “Anonymous” from which the content of what we later published was taken.

The statement continues,

In fact, this individual also contacted a comrade of the YGBL in a clear attempt to sow confusion and discord among Bogdan’s comrades. At the time, we recognized it as a transparent provocation and assumed that this person was acting in coordination with the Ukrainian secret service (SBU). This was the only rational conclusion for anyone committed to Bogdan’s defense and even remotely familiar with the politics and history of the ICFI. Yet Alex Steiner chose to publish this letter. Why?

This was NOT the only rational conclusion. Our conclusion, even if it was mistaken, was not irrational but was the product of an extended investigation on our part as we explained in our article. Although our investigation was flawed, we took full responsibility for our error and published an apology. That is also a standard journalistic practice, one, I might add, that you cannot find in the pages of the WSWS as they have never, even once, published a retraction. On the other hand, in the very same paragraph of the WSWS article, we find the admission that someone from the YGBL also received the same letter with the same allegations.  Doesn’t  that fact blow up the WSWS conspiracy theory that we “fabricated” the letter?

The statement then goes on to raise the stakes in the slander campaign against us by accusing us of attempting to sabotage the defense campaign of Bogdan Syrotiuk.

Even if the accusations against the International Committee had been true—which they were not—publishing such a letter could only serve to undermine Bogdan’s defense. He is being persecuted by the Ukrainian state and faces a potential life sentence. Such actions violate not only the most fundamental principles of defending the democratic rights of those persecuted by the state but also basic political decency.

While our publication of the letter was a mistake how would it undermine Bogdan's defense? There was nothing in that letter that the prosecution did not already know. 

The statement continues,

Goldman’s abrupt disappearance from X on February 3 made clear that he was attempting to cover his tracks as the source of the smear campaign. Fortunately, international comrades preserved screenshots of his posts, allowing them to reconstruct a profile of the author and his role in orchestrating this provocation. His posts made it evident that the primary objective was to discredit the ICFI, particularly in relation to the struggle for Comrade Bogdan’s liberation. Yet, even after the International Committee exposed this fabrication, Steiner continued to defend his reckless provocation.

This is yet another slander.  What the WSWS labels  “Steiner’s…reckless provocation”, i.e. the letter that we published, was not “defended” but was immediately taken down with an apology when we learned its contents were false. Several days later, when the WSWS published its slanderous accusations against us, we responded through a meticulous exposure of their lies backed up with solid evidence. By way of a dishonest journalistic sleight of hand, the WSWS article conflates these two actions to make the case that we “defended” our publication of the letter.

The WSWS then goes on to deliver their ultimate accusation,

Only the International Committee and the YGBL have waged this struggle, which is why they now face the full force of state repression. Through their reckless and despicable provocation, Alex Steiner and his allies have exposed their political alignment—with the enemies of the Trotskyist movement and the democratic rights of the international working class.

What is despicable is the baseless accusation that we are connected to the state repression of the Zelensky regime that has victimized Bogdan Syrotiuk. In engaging in such filth, the ICFI has crossed a line.  Its smear campaign against us, now going on two decades, graduated into outright agent-baiting recently with the publication of the book, The Party is Always Right. [1]  They have now elevated their slander campaign to another level by accusing us of being accomplices of the Ukrainian secret service.

These unhinged denunciations are being tossed around to cover over the inconvenient truth that the WSWS cannot respond to our proof that they made false and defamatory statements against us.  To repeat them once more:

1.    They lied in claiming that we never attempted to contact the WSWS prior to the publication of the letter.

2.    They lied in claiming that we “fabricated” the letter.

3.    They lied in claiming that we knew that the author of the letter was the provocateur “Alexander Goldman”.

Up till now there has been no response to our documentation of these slanders.

To this list can now be added two new slanders:

1.    The slander that we “deliberately” tried to undermine the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk.

2.    The slander that the letter contained information that could help the prosecution.

Finally, we have to ask, why is the WSWS remaining silent about our exposure that the author of the letter was actually a member or close supporter of the WSWS named Dan Reznik, an individual who was associated with the WSWS for a number of years?

What does it say about the ICFI that they harbored someone within their ranks for years who turned out to be a provocateur working, in their own words, “in coordination with the SBU”? 

 

---

[1] For a summary of North’s decades-long smear campaign against us see, The devil that never dies: Calumnies in the service of historical falsification, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2023/11/the-devil-that-never-dies-calumnies-in.html. For our response to North’s agent-baiting, see, Agent baiting: A hysterical slander from David North, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2024/09/agent-baiting-hysterical-slander-from.html.

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WSWS moderators spread slander and ban response to slander on r/Trotskyism subreddit

On Feb 15,  I posted an article responding to defamatory accusations against myself and Sam Tissot on the r/Trotskyism subreddit.  The slanderous material. reprinted from the WSWS,  A provocation that failed: On Alex Steiner’sattempt to discredit the ICFI’s defense of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk, had been lurking there for 10 days.  I posted a response to the slanders that had been published in the permanent revolution website, Scurrilous libel from the WSWS. 

When I checked a couple of hours later my post had disappeared.  I then found a message from the moderators of that subreddit informing me that I am permanently banned.  The message read,

Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/Trotskyism because your post violates this community's rules.

There was no explanation of what rule my post violated.  The rules posted for this subreddit state  “No slander, no death threats”.  But  my post was responding to a slander, whereas there seemed to be no problem posting the WSWS slanders against us as far as the moderators were concerned!

I tried to appeal this blatant act of censorship, writing to the moderators,

Please explain why you allowed an article to be published that contains defamatory and libelous statements against me, namely, "A provocation that failed: On Alex Steiner’s attempt to discredit the ICFI’s defense of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk."

When I posted an article responding to these slanderous accusations, namely, "A scurrilous libel from the WSWS", you deleted the article without any explanation. You then banned me from the r/Trotskyism subreddit and again provided no explanation. I am demanding that you reinstate me in the Trotskyism subreddit and cease censoring content that is critical of the World Socialist Web Site.

 Alex Steiner

The moderators never responded. 

Considering that the WSWS has published many articles against censorship on the Internet,  this act of censorship by moderators who are spokesmen for the WSWS reveals an incredible level of cynicism and hypocrisy.   Here are just a sample of the WSWS protestations against Internet censorship:

 

Meta maintains censorship regime in Canada a year after passage of Online News Act

WSWS writer Evan Blake banned from “Badass Teachers Association” Facebook group

Meet the Censored: Andre Damon

YouTube censors David North’s lecture on the death of Aaron Bushnell

Oppose Facebook’s shutdown of the WSWS in Portuguese page, an act of political censorship!

And finally, how about being banned from a Reddit subreddit?

Why is the World Socialist Web Site banned from the subreddit r/coronavirus?

 

In the inverted word of the WSWS and its mouthpiece on Reddit, the r/Trotskyism subreddit, up is down and down is up. Slander is legitimate news and a reply to slander is, … well, slander.

One final piece of irony is the slogan of the WSWS apparatchik who posted the  WSWS slander against us.  It is signed by someone with the moniker, “JohnWilsonWSWS”. The slogan he associates with that name is:

Organizing resistance against Internet censorship.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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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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