Leon Trotsky: Circular letter

May 26, 1928

[Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-1929), New York 1981, p. 104-108, title: “Portrait of a Capitulator”]

Dear Comrade Yudin:

I received your letter of May 11 yesterday, May 25: this is a very short time [for mail to take], really exceptional. Today I answered you with a telegram in which I promised to write. I am fulfilling that promise with this letter.

I read your letter with great interest, because it filled in the portrait of Safarov for me with the freshest possible strokes, still wet from the paintbrush, so to speak. Safarov is now ranting and raving against the foreign left, in the ranks of which there is now and will continue to be a great deal of confusion, exaggeration, deviation, and generally all sorts of small-group or study-circle nonsense: there are really not so many people there who can swim against the stream without being deflected from the fundamental course. But curiously, it was precisely Safarov who, when he was abroad last November, gave the foreign comrades a violent shove toward ultraleftism. Safarov arrived in Berlin from Constantinople during the period when our group was being crushed in Moscow. In his Berlin meetings Safarov proclaimed the coming of Thermidor. His formula was: "It is five minutes till twelve," that is, there were five minutes left before a full-scale coup d'etat, and those five minutes had to be used to wage a frenzied campaign. A comrade arriving from Berlin told me how our closest friends there were astounded by the ultra-left, super-Detsist way in which Safarov presented matters. But since he was the most authoritative of the Russians there, the foreigners took the ultra-left charge from him. The two documents – instructions sent abroad – that were published in Pravda on January 15 were designed to correct the line dislocated by Safarov.

Safarov arrived in Moscow from Berlin and immediately caught a train to our conference with Zinoviev and friends. After hearing the cautiously capitulatory speech of Zinoviev, Safarov pounced upon him in a rage. There was everything in Safarov's speech, not only "It is five minutes till twelve" (he repeated this formula after every five words) but also the direct accusation against Zinoviev that by his guarded raising of the question of the "regurgitations of Trotskyism" Zinoviev wanted to get back his party card. "I wouldn't want a party card on such terms," Safarov shouted desperately. On that point Naumov supported Safarov. Our crowd was quite pleased with Safarov's speech. But since I personally had had more than one chance to size him up, I warned the comrades: "Wait, he hasn't been worked over yet …" And sure enough, the next day you couldn't recognize him … [In Lenin's time,] whenever someone nominated Safarov for some kind of responsible assignment, Vladimir Ilyich would say: "Safarchik will go too far left, Safarchik will make a fool of himself." This was a kind of facetious saying of his. But with people who always like to go to the left, when they reach a certain age a change comes over them and they start going to the right just as blindly and one-sidedly as they formerly went to the left.

Safarov is a caricatured sub-type of the Bukharin type, which is enough of a caricature to begin with.

As to Safarov's political philosophy, as you yourself correctly point out, it isn't worth a damn. Essentially his whole orientation is to play on the economic and international difficulties, that is, the very kind of speculation which that crowd [i.e., the Zinovievists] has so falsely accused us of since 1923 ("defeatism"). The opposition of the Stalinist center to the right wing was not invented by Safarov. We predicted that divisions could occur along this line to the extent that behind the centrist head there would be formed – not only in the party, and not so much in the party as outside of it – an Ustryalovist tail. We said that this tail would strike at the head and that this would give rise to major realignments in the party.

Without the preceding work of criticism and warnings, which have now been tested against the facts, the blow of the tail to the head – the grain collections, etc. – would have produced an inevitable shift to the right. We averted this at very great cost. For long? That is entirely unclear. The main difficulties, both foreign and domestic, are ahead. But here Safarov proposes that all hopes be placed in the "revolutionary character of our working class." That is a very serene view, it can't be denied. The revolutionary working class will exist by itself and the grain collections and much else will be managed by those who "do not see any classes" – by themselves. And Safarov will console himself with the revolutionary character of the working class and will see the main danger in the fact that Trotsky, while condemning the mistakes of Souvarine, does not consider him finally lost for communism. It is simply that he must somehow push himself away from his past. He is even willing to push away a straw [which a drowning man would normally be expected to grasp at]. But this willingness will in no way prevent him from drowning. Whether that will be a comfort to him or not is hard to say; probably not.

The present "new course," which we must follow very attentively, tries to solve the most important problems – problems we brought up much earlier and in a far more principled way – by using the old techniques and methods, which are quite obviously unsound. In order to carry out the new tasks it is first necessary to formulate them clearly and distinctly, ruthlessly condemning the old approach. Second, it is necessary to assure the selection of people who understand these new tasks and want to resolve them, not out of fear, but out of conviction. In Pravda of May 16 there is a very striking article by A. Yakovlev, "The Lessons of Smolensk." From this article I quote only one conclusion, printed in heavy type, which Yakovlev, one of the leaders of the CCC, has reached: "We must decisively change our attitude toward those party members and class-conscious workers who are aware of the abuses and keep quiet. …" You know, this one phrase is worth ten of the ultra-left and most radical platforms. To change – "to change" – to change – our attitude to those who know about the abuses and keep quiet. That is: until now they were praised and encouraged, but now they will be stigmatized. But who praised and encouraged them? And is it possible to believe that those who encouraged silence about scandalous practices, and encouraged it not accidentally but who obviously had an interest in it, will suddenly after Yakovlev's essay stop encouraging those who keep silent and begin to stigmatize and hound them? This is a serious answer to Safarov's fatalistic Menshevik reference to the immanent revolutionary character of the working class, given the existence of which it makes absolutely no difference whether silence about scandalous practices is encouraged or vilified.

Nevertheless, the new course will produce the most important consequences. Regardless of the wishes of the authors of the new course, it once again poses all the fundamental questions point-blank before the party ranks. Of course it is impossible to hope that the study of all these questions will go forward rapidly, but it will go forward.

We always thought, and said more than once (for example at the February plenum of 1927), that the process of backsliding cannot by any means be represented as an unbroken, descending line. After all, the backsliding process does not occur in a vacuum but in a class society with deep internal frictions. The basic party mass is not at all monolithic. To a large degree it simply represents political raw material. Processes of internal stratification and differentiation inevitably occur in it under the pressure of class impulses, both from the right and from the left. We are now entering a deeply critical period of the party's development. The critical events that have occurred recently and their consequences, which you and I are bearing, are only the overture to events to come. Just as an operatic overture prefigures the musical themes of the entire opera and gives them a sharp and compressed expression, so our political overture has only anticipated these melodies which will be developed fully in the future, that is, with the participation of the brasses, double basses, drums, and other instruments of serious class music. The course of events will confirm beyond all question that we are and remain correct, not only against the waverers and weather vanes – that is, the Zinovievs, Kamenevs, Pyatakovs, Antonov-Ovseenkos, and all the Smerdyakovs like Antonov-Ovseenko – but also against our dear friends to the "left," that is, the Democratic Centralists. Insofar, that is, as they were inclined to take the overture for the opera, to think that all the basic processes in the party and state were already concluded …

No, the party will still have need of us, and very great need at that. Don't be nervous that "everything will be done without us"; don't tear at yourself and others for nothing; study, wait, watch closely, and don't let your political line get covered with the rust of personal irritation at the slanderers and tricksters. This is how we must conduct ourselves. From your letter it is quite clear that you don't really need this advice.