Leon
Trotsky et al: Letter to the CC of the Metal Workers Union
Excerpts,
July
1, 1927
[Leon
Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926-1927), New York
1980, p. 249-251, title: “Resolution
of the All-Russia Metal Workers Union”]
To
the Central Committee of the Metal Workers Union:
Dear
Comrades:
At
the seventh plenum of your Central Committee you adopted a resolution
on the present situation based on the report by Comrade Lepse. This
resolution contains such false and rudely slanderous assertions about
the Opposition that we find it impossible — if for no other reason
than respect for the Metal Workers Union — to pass over it in
silence.
1.
First of all, the fact should be noted that you brought questions
that are in dispute within the party before the plenum of the CC,
which is a non-party institution. There are no precedents for such an
action in the past work of your union or in the work of any of our
unions in general. By appealing to non-party people against the
Opposition you apparently wish to force us to explain, not only to
party members but to non-party people as well, that our position has
nothing in common with the slanderous assertions in your resolution.
2.
Your resolution asserts that the Opposition is carrying on
"destructive propaganda activity in favor of its defeatist
ideology.’’ What is meant by the term defeatism?
In the whole past history of the party, defeatism
was understood to mean desiring
the defeat
of one’s own government in a war with an external enemy and
contributing
to such a defeat
by methods of internal revolutionary struggle. This referred of
course to the attitude of the proletariat toward the capitalist
state. But you carry the term defeatist
over and apply it to the politics of the Opposition, i.e., an
ideological tendency within the AUCP. By this you are saying that the
Opposition wishes the defeat of the Soviet state in its struggle
against external, i.e., capitalist, enemies, and that it wishes to
contribute to such a defeat.
It
is enough to simply define the term defeatism
to make clear the vile absurdity of this imputation of a defeatist
attitude on the part of the Opposition toward the Soviet state — in
whose founding and preservation Oppositionists have played no less a
role than anyone else in the party, both now and in the past.
3.
By telling the masses of the people that hundreds of veteran party
members, former underground revolutionaries, Lenin’s closest
collaborators, organizers of and participants in the October
Revolution, the civil war, and socialist construction, have at
present become defeatists — by so doing you introduce the greatest
confusion into the minds of the masses, which will have absolutely
unfathomable consequences. All informed and honest readers among the
workers or peasants are bound to think to themselves that either you
are lying in making such a monstrous assertion, or the Soviet state
has changed so fundamentally that even the people most closely
involved in building that state have become its mortal enemies. You
are driving the masses toward such conclusions, starting with their
vanguard section, the metal workers.
4.
Your words about defeatism are bound to seem more monstrous than ever
to our workers and to workers internationally in view of the fact
that the most important diplomatic posts, i.e., positions where the
interests of the workers’ state are directly defended against the
capitalist enemy, are held at the present almost entirely by
Oppositionists: in Berlin, Krestinsky; in Paris, Rakovsky, Pyatakov,
Preobrazhensky, and Vladimir Kosior; in Rome, Kamenev and
Glebov-Avilov; in Prague, Antonov-Ovseenko and Kanatchikov; in
Vienna, Ufimtsev and Semashko; in Stockholm, Kopp; in Persia,
Mdivani; in Mexico, Kollontai; in Argentina, Kraevsky; and so on. All
these comrades belong to the Opposition and the majority of them have
already endorsed the so-called letter of the eighty-four, in which
the Opposition defined its attitude toward the fundamental political
questions. If the Oppositionists are “defeatists,” how could the
CC of our party entrust to such “defeatists” the protection of
the most vital interests of the workers’ state under the enemy’s
direct blows? Your assertion is slander not only of the Opposition
but also of the CC, which would be criminally guilty before the party
and the workers’ state if it assigned diplomatic posts to
“defeatists,” i.e., to advocates of “defeat” rather than
victory for our state against the bourgeois world.
5.
The problem is of course not limited to Oppositionist diplomats. By
now more than three hundred comrades with records in the party from
before October, including many with long experience in the
underground, have signed the declaration of the Opposition. …
All
these comrades, like the majority of other Old Bolsheviks who signed
the declaration, are doing responsible work on assignment by the
party. “Defeatists” — we repeat — are people who undermine
the military power of the state or its economic might. Can defeatists
be permitted in any serious work whatsoever? The direct
responsibility for the defeatists in the eyes of the party and the
workers’ state would fall on the CC of the party in such a case.
6.
You of course know that the CC is not guilty of the crime you ascribe
to it. You would not dare to assert that the Oppositionists carry out
the military, diplomatic, economic, or other work assigned to them
more poorly than supporters of the majority. You yourselves know very
well that the phrase about the “defeatism” of the Opposition is a
poisonous lie and nothing more. You have put this lie into
circulation for the purposes of factional struggle against an
ideological tendency in the party to which we belong in common. In
doing this you have stooped to compromising the party in a terrible
way and are doing great harm to the workers’ state. By attributing
such monstrous views to the Opposition and circulating such views,
you establish and legitimize a banner for genuine enemies of the
Soviet state. In genera] it is hard to imagine any more disruptive or
divisive action than that represented by your resolution.
7.
We will not go into the other assertions made about the Opposition in
your resolution. They are all on roughly the same level. Our
elementary revolutionary duty to the party and the workers’ state
commands us to take all measures within our power to refute your
malicious and slanderous assertions before the eyes of the party and
non-party masses.
CC
members Yevdokimov, Zinoviev, and Trotsky