Maurice Spector (March 19, 1898 – August 1, 1968) was a Canadian politician who served as the chairman of the Communist Party of Canada and the editor of its newspaper, The Worker,[1] for much of the 1920s.
[citation needed] In 1928, Spector, while attending the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, accidentally got hold of a copy of Trotsky's Critique of the Draft Programme of the Communist International, which criticized the position of Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin and especially the theory of "socialism in one country".
The Stalinist regime had not yet been consolidated, and the Communist International still had to observe certain norms of democratic centralism, which permitted the circulation of minority opinions.
Although Trotsky had been expelled from the Russian party a year earlier, he took advantage of the Congress to appeal to the Communist International.
Through a blunder in the apparatus, it circulated Trotsky's document to the heads of the delegations, including members of the programme commission.
"Through some slip-up in the apparatus in Moscow," recalls Cannon, "which was supposed to be airtight, this document of Trotsky came into the translating room of the Comintern.
So, lo and behold, it was laid in my lap, translated into English by Maurice Spector, a delegate from the Canadian party, and in somewhat the same frame of mind as myself, was also on the programme commission and he got a copy.
[1] Spector was employed for part of his post-Trotskyist career by the American Council for Judaism and was director of the New York trade union division of the National Committee for Labor Israel in his later years.