Leon
Trotsky: Letter to Valentin
Olberg
January
30, 1930
[Writing
of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 2, 1930, New York 1975, p. 210 f., title: “Six
Letters to Olberg”]
Dear
Comrade Olberg,
In
your letter you raise a number of fundamental questions that would
take entire treatises to answer. But the fact of the matter is that
the Opposition has already written a great deal on these questions in
the past. I have no idea whether or not you have read all of this. It
would be very good if you would jot down something about yourself,
even if only a little bit: whether you have been in the movement a
long time, where you have been in recent years, what Opposition
literature you have read.
I
must say that I am particularly surprised by what you say about the
Anglo-Russian Committee: it is impossible to imagine reasoning which
is more contrary to the principles of revolutionary class tactics and
the entire history of Bolshevism. As you would have it,
revolutionaries do not have the right to break with strikebreakers as
long as the masses have not rebelled against them. This is the
classic philosophy of "tail-endism." You refer to August 4.
But you are defeating your own argument with this. Immediately after
August 4 we proclaimed the necessity of breaking with the
social-patriots and forming the Third International. Moreover, you
should take note, in the former case it was a matter of an
international party to which we had belonged for ten years; but in
the latter case, that of the Anglo-Russian Committee, it was a matter
of a temporary bloc with the British participants in the Amsterdam
conference whom we proclaimed as the best of the Amsterdam group but
who betrayed the general strike. If only several thousand workers had
been involved in a rebellion, we should have been with those several
thousand. But you are misrepresenting the situation: millions were
dissatisfied; hundreds of thousands were in revolt The Minority
Movement at that time involved several hundred thousand workers. The
Anglo-Russian Committee destroyed this movement, just as it destroyed
the Communist Party for a number of years. We "expressed
criticisms." Yes, in Russian newspapers; but in Britain —
before the eyes of the masses — we arranged joint banquets, passed
foul, hypocritical, pacifist resolutions, supported the
strikebreakers, and strengthened them against ourselves. How else do
you explain that as a result of the mighty revolutionary movement of
1926 not only the Minority Movement in the trade unions but also the
Communist Party were reduced to virtually nothing?
However,
instead of repeating old ideas, it is better to send you a copy of
one of my old articles written as long ago as September 23, 1927. In
view of the enormous importance of this question for the entire
policy of the Comintern, I ask you to familiarize those comrades who
show an interest in the question with the contents of this article.
After you are finished with it, please return it to me.
Just
one comment: "We need not bear the odium of a split." What
kind of a term is this? Revolutionaries must always take upon
themselves, in the eyes of the masses, the honorable initiative, the
revolutionary duty — not at all the "odium" — of a
split with strikebreakers and traitors. The entire history of
Bolshevism proceeded to the accompaniment of constant charges of
splitting.
Do
you read the Russian Biulleten
Oppozitsii?
Answers to some of the questions you have posed have been given
there.
In
any case, for a successful continuation of our correspondence, I
await from you information of, so to speak, an autobiographical
nature.