Leon Trotsky: Reply to an Ultimatum

December 16, 1928

[Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-1929), New York 1981, p. 361-366]

To the Central Committee of the AUCP:

To the Executive Committee of the Communist International:

Today, December 16, the representative of the Collegium of the GPU, Volinsky, transmitted the following ultimatum to me orally: "The work of your cothinkers throughout the country" – he declared almost literally – "has lately assumed an open counterrevolutionary character. The conditions under which you live in Alma-Ata give you full opportunity to direct this work. On this ground the Collegium of the GPU has decided to demand from you a categorical promise to discontinue this work, or else the Collegium will be obliged to change the conditions of your existence to the extent of completely isolating you from political life. In this connection the question of changing your place of residence is also raised."

I informed the representative of the GPU that I would give him a written reply only if I received a written statement of the GPU's ultimatum. My refusal to give an oral reply to the GPU was called forth by previous experiences convincing me that my words would be maliciously distorted in order to mislead the working masses of the USSR and the whole world.

Nevertheless, irrespective of the further steps to be undertaken by the GPU – which after all plays no independent role in this matter but only technically carries out the old decision of Stalin's narrow faction which I have known for some time – I consider it necessary to submit the following to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Executive Committee of the Comintern:

To demand that I renounce my political activity is to demand that I renounce the struggle for the interests of the international proletariat, a struggle I have been conducting without interruption for thirty-two years, that is, throughout my whole conscious life. The attempt to represent this activity as "counterrevolutionary" comes from those whom I accuse before the international proletariat of trampling underfoot the basic teachings of Marx and Lenin, of infringing upon the historical interests of the world revolution, of breaking with the traditions and the heritage of October, and of unconsciously – but therefore the more dangerously – preparing the way for Thermidor.

To renounce political activity would mean to give up the struggle against the blindness of the present leadership, which heaps upon the objective difficulties of socialist construction ever greater political difficulties that arise out of its opportunist inability to conduct a proletarian policy on a large historical scale.

It would mean renouncing the struggle against the stifling party regime, which reflects the growing pressure of the enemy classes upon the proletarian vanguard.

It would mean passively acquiescing in the economic policy of opportunism, a policy which is undermining and destroying the foundations of the proletarian dictatorship, hampering the material and cultural growth of this dictatorship, and at the same time dealing heavy blows to the alliance of workers and working peasants, the basis of Soviet power.

To renounce political activity would mean to cover up with silence for the disastrous policy of the Comintern leadership, which in Germany in 1923 led to the surrender of tremendously favorable revolutionary positions without a fight; a policy which attempted to cover up for its opportunist mistakes with adventures in Estonia and Bulgaria; which falsely estimated the international situation at the Fifth Congress and gave the parties directives that only weakened and split them; a policy which, through the Anglo-Russian Committee, supported the British General Council, the bulwark of imperialist reaction, in the most difficult months for the reformist traitors; which in Poland, at the height of an abrupt turn in the country's domestic politics, transformed the proletarian vanguard into a rearguard for Pilsudski; which in China carried to its ultimate conclusions the historical line of Menshevism and thereby helped the bourgeoisie to demolish, to bleed, and to behead the revolutionary proletariat; which weakened the Comintern everywhere and squandered its ideological capital.

To cease political activity would mean to submit passively to the blunting and the direct falsification of our most important tool: the Marxist method, and the strategic lessons we have acquired, using this method, in the struggle led by Lenin.

It would mean to acquiesce passively – by accepting the responsibility for them – to the theory of the kulak's growing into socialism; to the myth about the revolutionary mission of the colonial bourgeoisie; to the slogan of the "combined workers' and peasants' parties" for the East – a slogan which breaks with the foundations of class theory; and finally to the crowning point of all these reactionary fables and many others, the theory of socialism in one country, the greatest crime against revolutionary internationalism.

The Leninist wing of the party has endured blows since 1923, that is, since the shocking defeat of the German revolution. The force of these blows has increased with every successive defeat of the international and the Soviet proletariat as a result of opportunist leadership.

Theoretical understanding and political experience teach us that a period of retreat, of retrogression, that is, of reaction, can take place not only after bourgeois revolutions, but also after proletarian revolutions. For six years we have lived in the USSR under conditions of a growing reaction against October, and with it a clearing of the way for Thermidor. The most open and consummate expression of this reaction within the party is the savage persecution and the organized smashing of the left wing.

In its latest attempts to resist the open Thermidorians, the Stalin faction had to borrow fragments and "remnants" of the ideas of the Opposition. Creatively, it is impotent. The struggle against the left deprives it of all stability. Its practical policy is unbalanced, false, contradictory, and unreliable.

The campaign against the right danger, undertaken with such clamor, remains three-quarters sham and serves above all to conceal from the masses the real war of annihilation against the Bolshevik-Leninists. The world bourgeoisie and international Menshevism have both blessed this war: these judges have long ago awarded "historical rightness" to Stalin.

If this blind, cowardly, incompetent policy of adaptation to the bureaucracy and the petty bourgeoisie had not been followed, the situation of the working masses in the twelfth year of the dictatorship would be far more favorable; our military defense would be far stronger and more reliable; the Comintern would be in quite a different position, and would not have to retreat step by step before the treacherous and venal Social Democracy.

The incurable weakness of the reaction headed by the party apparatus, despite all its apparent power, lies in the fact that it does not know what it is doing. It is carrying out the command of the enemy classes. There can be no greater historical curse on a faction that arose out of the revolution and is now undermining it.

The great historical strength of the Opposition, despite its apparent weakness, lies in the fact that it keeps its fingers on the pulse of the world historical process, that it clearly perceives the dynamics of class forces, that it foresees the future and consciously prepares for it. To renounce political activity would be to renounce the preparations for tomorrow.

The threat to change the conditions of my existence and to isolate me from political activity sounds as though I were not already separated from Moscow by 2,500 miles and from the nearest railroad by 150 miles, and by approximately the same distance from the border of the desolate western provinces of China, as though I were not confined to a place where the fiercest malaria shares its dominion with leprosy and plague. As though the Stalin faction, whose direct instrument the GPU is, had not done everything in its power to isolate me not only from political life, but from any other form of life as well. The Moscow newspapers arrive here only after a delay of ten days to a month, sometimes more. Letters get to me only in exceptional cases, after they have lain around for two or three months in the files of the GPU and the Secretariat of the Central Committee.

Two of my closest co-workers from the time of the civil war, Comrades Sermuks and Poznansky, who accompanied me voluntarily to my place of exile, were arrested immediately upon their arrival, thrown into a cellar with common criminals, and then sent away to the remotest corners of the North. A letter from my hopelessly ill daughter, whom you expelled from the party and kept from all work, took seventy-three days to get to me from the hospital, so that my answer found her no longer alive. Another letter, about the serious illness of my other daughter, whom you also expelled from the party and drove from all work, I received a month ago from Moscow, forty-three days after it was mailed. Telegraphic inquiries about health hardly ever reach their destination. Thousands of the best Bolshevik-Leninists, whose services to the October Revolution and to the international proletariat are infinitely greater than the services of those who exiled or imprisoned them, are in a similar or far worse position.

In preparing still more cruel repression against the Opposition, the narrow faction of Stalin – whom Lenin characterized in his Testament as rude and disloyal (at a time when these characteristics had not yet reached one hundredth of their present development) – is attempting with the help of the GPU to lay at the door of the Opposition some kind of "connection" with the enemies of the dictatorship. Among themselves the present leaders say: "We have to do this for the masses." And very often even more cynically: "That is for the simpletons." My close co-worker, Georgy Vasilevich Butov, secretary of the Revolutionary Military Council during all the years of the civil war, was arrested and detained under unheard-of conditions. From this upright, modest, and irreproachable party comrade they tried to extort confirmation of their deliberately concocted and false accusations in the Thermidorian spirit. Butov answered with a heroic hunger strike, which lasted fifty days and brought his death in prison in September of this year. Violence, blows, torture – both physical and moral – are applied to the best worker-Bolsheviks for their loyalty to the principles of October.

These are the general conditions which, according to the Collegium of the GPU, "offer no obstacle at all" to the political activity of the Opposition in general and myself in particular.

The miserable threat to change these conditions in the direction of a stricter isolation simply means that the Stalin faction has decided to replace exile by imprisonment. This decision, as I have already said above, is nothing new to me. Adopted as a perspective as early as 1924, this decision has been gradually carried out in a series of stages, in order to gradually accustom the oppressed and deceived party to the methods of Stalin, whose rudeness and disloyalty have now matured into the most venomous bureaucratic dishonesty.

In the declaration we submitted to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, where we refuted the slanders which besmirch only their authors, we made known our unshakable readiness to fight – within the framework of the party, with all the methods of party democracy – for the ideas of Marx and Lenin, without which the party suffocates, ossifies, and crumbles. Once more we made known our unflinching readiness to help the proletarian core of the party in both word and deed to change its political course, to restore the health of the party and the Soviet state with united forces – without convulsions or catastrophes. We will stand firmly by these words. We answered the accusation of factional work with the statement that it could be ended only if Article 58, treacherously directed at us, were revoked and if we ourselves were reinstated in the party, not as repentant sinners but as revolutionary fighters who do not betray their banner. And as if in foreknowledge of the ultimatum handed me today, we wrote the following, word for word: "Only completely corrupted bureaucrats could demand such a renunciation from revolutionaries" (renunciation of political activity, i.e., of serving the party and the international proletariat). "Only contemptible renegades could give such a promise."

There is nothing I can change in those words. I submit them again to the Central Committee of the AUCP, which bears full responsibility for the work of the GPU.

To each his own. You wish to continue to conduct affairs under the prompting of class forces hostile to the proletariat. We know our duty and will do it to the end.