Leon
Trotsky: Toward the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU
May
31, 1930
[Writing
of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 2, 1930, New York 1975, p. 253-261]
The
publication of the current issue of our Biulleten
coincides roughly with the Sixteenth Party Congress. It is not too
difficult to predict what the character of the congress will be. To
do this it is enough to know who
is convening it and how
they
are going about it It is a matter of the Stalinist faction — with
the support of the GPU and the army, by means of the party apparatus
and with the help of the state apparatus-convening a carefully
selected and sufficiently intimidated legislative body whose
decisions on every fundamental issue have been prescribed beforehand,
while the implementation of these decisions will cease to be binding
as far as the Stalinist faction is concerned the morning after the
congress adjourns. Not a single member of the party who is capable of
observing and reflecting will find the slightest exaggeration in what
we have said. On the contrary, it is the most objective and accurate
diagnosis of what really exists.
The
congress is assembling after an exceptionally grave crisis in the
country's internal life, which has confronted the Soviet regime with
new tasks and new, acute dangers. It would seem that if the party
congress were to have any sort of significance, it would be precisely
as the forum in which the party passes judgment on the policies of
its Central Committee, i.e., on its supreme governing body between
congresses. Between congresses, in this instance, means for a period
of two and a half years. And what years they were! Years in which all
the warnings and predictions of the routed and slandered Opposition
were, to the party's surprise, confirmed with a forcefulness and
cogency that were staggering. They were years in which it was
discovered, according to assertions in the official press, that
Rykov, head of the Soviet government, "tried to profit from the
economic difficulties of Soviet power"; that the leader of the
Comintern, Bukharin, was found to be a "transmitter of
liberal-bourgeois influences"; that their co-conspirator had
been the chairman of the central council of the trade unions, Tomsky,
head of the organization that embraces the entire ruling class of the
country.
The
three persons just named did not emerge out of the blue. They were
members of the Central Committee under Lenin, holding highly
responsible positions at that time too. Each of them has behind him
two to three decades of party membership. They made mistakes and were
corrected by the party more than once. How is it that their
"bourgeois-liberal” views have so very suddenly appeared —
and at a time when the strength of the dictatorship and of socialism
has increased so much that the leadership can pose point-blank the
question of the elimination of classes in "the shortest possible
time”?
It
is not the personal side of the matter that interests us, of course.
But in the form of things that seem "personal," the entire
party regime, as it has taken shape in the thirteen years since the
proletarian conquest of power, is laid bare before our eyes.
The
system of bureaucratism has become a system of uninterrupted
palace coups,
which are now the only means by which it can maintain itself. A week
before the split in the Central Committee burst to the surface and
yesterday's irreproachable "Leninists" were proclaimed to
be bourgeois liberals, renegades, traitors, etc. — to the
accompaniment of the hooting of an unruly gang of young rogues, who
had among them, however, more than a few venerable old men — a week
before this happened the rumor that there were disagreements in the
Central Committee was declared to be criminal slander invented by the
Trotskyist Opposition. Such is the regime! Or rather, such is one of
its most blatant features.
Right
now the party is coming into the stretch in its preparations for the
congress or, more precisely, the semblance of preparations for the
semblance of a congress. One would expect that precisely the question
of the Central Committee's policies — its "general line,"
its internal mode of rule, which is to say, the series of palace
coups, coming as rude surprises that hit the party over the head and
catch it unawares, not to mention other rude surprises like the
"elimination of classes" within the framework of the
five-year plan — would have been at the center of the pre-congress
discussions. But it is just such a discussion that has been
forbidden. Yes, completely forbidden!
Of
course, there has not been, and cannot be, the slightest doubt that
the apparatus is very attentively following the discussion or,
rather, the semblance of discussion, and that behind the scenes it
has put every possible measure into operation so as to preserve the
domination of Stalin's militarized faction — or, more precisely, so
as not to be compelled to use open and general repressive measures in
relation to the party. This has been done before, but there was no
mention of it. Now, in contrast, coercive measures against the party
are being elevated to the level of principle and openly proclaimed
from the most authoritative of the party's rostrums. This is
unquestionably the latest word, the most recent achievement, of the
party apparatus. Such a situation did not exist at the time of the
Fifteenth Party Congress.
S.
Kosior, secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee — not to be
confused with Comrade V. Kosior, the Oppositionist who is now in
exile
— set the tone, of course, but not on his own initiative. The
Kharkov Stalinist group has been playing the role of shock troops in
the system of party Bonapartism for some time now. Whenever the party
needs to be stunned with the latest word, which other local party
secretaries have not yet made up their minds to say or are ashamed to
say, the assignment is given to Kharkov. Manuilsky came from there;
Kaganovich worked there; that is where the trusty Skrypnik is; there,
more than a few baby Moseses have exploded onto the scene like so
many rotten eggs; there, at this time, with the Moscow telegraph wire
tied to his neck vertebrae as he plays the part of "leader,"
is the already mentioned
S.
Kosior, who from an oppositional poacher under Lenin became a
bureaucratic gendarme under Stalin. In a report published by the
entire press, Kosior stated that there are elements in the party so
criminal as to dare to speak, in closed sessions of party cells,
during discussions of party politics, of mistakes by the Central
Committee in the implementation of collective farm policy. "We
must really let them have it," Kosior declares, and his words
are published throughout the party press. "Let them have it” —
this coyly worded but vile formula takes in all forms of physical
repression: expulsion from the party, dismissal from work,
deprivation of a family's living quarters, penal exile, and finally,
defamation of character as a result of slander purveyed by one of the
local Yaroslavskys. Another member of the Central Committee,
Postyshev, also a Ukrainian, has published an indictment in Pravda
in the guise of an article — an indictment pieced together out of
bits of speeches by certain individual party members who, again, in
closed sessions of party cells, "dared" — they dared!
— to
speak of the Central Committee's mistakes. His conclusion is the same
as Kosior's: cut
them off.
And all this on the eve of a congress ostensibly convened for the
precise purpose of evaluating the Central Committee.
The
bureaucratic regime is well on its way to establishing the principle
of the infallibility
of the leadership,
which is the necessary complement to its actual
non-accountability
Such is the situation at the present time.
These
facts did not fall out of the blue. They sum up the second,
post-Lenin chapter of the revolution, the chapter of its gradual
decline and degeneration. The first palace coup, the result of a
systematically organized conspiracy, was carried off in 1923-24,
after being carefully prepared during the months when Lenin was
struggling against death. Behind the party's back six members of the
Politburo organized a conspiracy against the seventh. They bound
themselves by a pledge of mutual discipline; they communicated by
means of coded telegrams with their agents and reliable groups in all
parts of the country. The official pseudonym collectively used by the
organizers of the conspiracy was the term "Leninist old guard."
It was announced that this group, and it alone, was the continuator
of the correct revolutionary line. It is appropriate to recall at
this time the people who constituted this infallible "Leninist
old guard" of 1923-24: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Rykov,
Bukharin, and Tomsky. Of these six living embodiments of Leninism,
two main ideologists of the old guard — Zinoviev and Kamenev —
two years later ended up being exposed for "Trotskyism"
and, two years later still, were expelled from the party. Three
others — Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky — turned out to be
"bourgeois liberals" and have in fact been barred from all
activity. Undoubtedly, after the congress they will be removed
formally as well. No confessions can help them at this point. The
cracks in the bureaucratic apparatus will never be closed up; they
can only get wider. Thus, of those who composed the "Leninist
old guard,” Stalin alone has not fallen under the wheel of the
apparatus. And it is no wonder: he is the one who is turning it.
At
first, i.e., the day after the first coup (Lenin's illness and
Trotsky's exclusion), the principle of "infallibility" of
the leadership in a certain sense had a philosophical character in
relation to the party: the "old guard," linked with Lenin
by its entire past, and now bound by the ties of unshakable
ideological solidarity, was allegedly able through its collective
effort to guarantee irreproachable leadership. Such was the doctrine
of the apparatus regime at that stage. By the time of the Fifteenth
Congress, infallibility had changed from a "historical and
philosophical” principle into a backstage practical guide that was
not yet being acknowledged openly. But by the Sixteenth Congress it
has already been converted into an openly professed dogma. Although
out of habit the infallibility of the Central Committee is still
referred to, it would not occur to anyone to think of it as being any
sort of stable collective, since no one takes the present members of
the Politburo very seriously; they don't even do so themselves. What
is really meant here is Stalin. This is not being camouflaged at all.
On the contrary, it is being emphasized in every possible way. The
year of his official coronation as the infallible leader accountable
to no one was 1929. One of the capitulators gave a general formula
for this new stage: It
is impossible to be loyal to the party without being loyal to the
Central Committee: it is impossible to be loyal to the Central
Committee without being loyal to Stalin.
This is the dogma of the Bonapartist party. The fact that Pyatakov
who considered it possible in Lenin's time to be for the party while
being a persistent opponent of Lenin, now construes the concept of
the party to mean a plebiscitic
grouping around Stalin
(those who are for him are in the party and those who are against
him are not) — this fact by itself adequately characterizes the
course that has been taken by the official party over the past seven
years. And not without reason was it said of this same Pyatakov, when
he was still in the Opposition, languidly chewing over the scraps of
old ideas: "Bonaparte sometimes made his prefects out of such
'has-beens.'"
All
of history shows how difficult it is for people to arrive at a
general conception of the events in which they themselves
participate, especially if those events do not fit in easily with the
old, accustomed, "automatic" ways of thinking. Because of
this it often happens that honest and sensible people will become
sincerely overwrought if someone simply refers out loud to what they
are doing, or to what is occurring with their cooperation, and calls
it by its right name. And what is occurring is an automatic process,
one largely outside of conscious awareness, but no less real for
that, in which the party is preparing the way for Bonapartism. Behind
the fiction of preparations for the Sixteenth Congress — which is
being convened according to Pyatakov's plebiscitary principle
(whoever is for Stalin gets to go to the congress) — it is
precisely this reality
that stands out so threateningly: the
unthinking, mindless, automatic laying of the groundwork for
Bonapartism.
No
indignant cries and hypocritical howls about how the liberals and
Mensheviks are saying "the same thing" will stop us from
stating what is true, since only in this way is it possible to find
the bases of support and the forces for counteracting and repelling
the danger. The party has been stifled. It has only one right: to
agree with Stalin. But this right is at the same time its duty..
Moreover, the party has been called upon to exercise its dubious
right after an interval of two and a half years. And how long will
the next interval be? Today who can tell?
Not
only every thoughtful Communist worker but also every party
functionary who has not been completely Yaroslavskyized
and Manuilskyized cannot help but ask: Why is it that as a result of
the economic and cultural growth and the strengthening of the
dictatorship and of socialism, the party regime is becoming more and
more heavy-handed and unbearable? The apparatus people themselves
will admit this in private conversation without a moment's
hesitation; and how could they deny it? The overwhelming majority of
them are not only the conveyors of the Stalinist regime but also its
victims.
One
of two things is true. Either the system of proletarian dictatorship
has come into irreconcilable contradiction with the economic needs of
the country, and the Bonapartist degeneration of the party regime is
only a by-product of this fundamental contradiction — this is what
the class enemies, with the Mensheviks in the forefront, believe,
say, and trust their hopes to; or the party regime, which has its own
logic and momentum, has entered into a state of acute contradiction
with the revolutionary dictatorship, despite the fact that the latter
retains its full vitality and is the only regime at all capable of
protecting Russia from colonial servitude, guaranteeing the
development of its productive forces, and opening before it broad
socialist perspectives. This is what we, the Communist Left
Opposition, believe. You
must accept one of these two explanations.
No one has proposed a third. And in the meantime, the progressive
degeneration of the party regime demands to be explained.
The
regime of the ruling party does not have definitive significance for
the fate of the revolutionary dictatorship. Of course, the party is a
"superstructural" factor. The processes that take place
within it reduce themselves in the last analysis to class relations
that change under pressure from the productive forces. But the
interrelations between superstructural elements of different kinds,
and their relation to the class base, have an extremely complex
dialectical character. The party regime is not in and of itself an
automatic barometer of the processes taking place outside the party
and independently of it.
There
is no need to repeat that we have never been inclined to deny or
belittle the significance of the objective factors that bring
pressure to bear from without on the internal regime of the party. On
the contrary, we have pointed them out repeatedly. What they all come
down to, in the last analysis, is the isolation of the Soviet
republic.
On
the political level, there are two reasons for this prolonged
isolation: the counterrevolutionary role of the social democracy,
which came to the rescue of capitalist Europe after the war and is
now shoring up its imperialist domination (the role of the MacDonald
government with respect to India); and the opportunist and
adventurist policies of the Comintern, which served as the immediate
cause of a number of colossal defeats for the proletariat (Germany,
Bulgaria, Estonia, China, Britain). The results of the Comintern's
mistakes have each time become the source of further difficulties
and, consequently, of the regime's further deterioration. But the
very betrayals by the social democracy — notoriously an "objective
factor” from the Communist point of view — pass by with relative
impunity only because they are covered up by the parallel mistakes of
the Communist leadership. Thus the "objective factors"
themselves, in the sense of the pressure of hostile class forces upon
the party, represent to a very great extent — one that cannot of
course be measured mathematically — the present-day results of the
centrist bureaucracy's erroneous policies of yesterday.
If
the explanation for the systematic deterioration of the regime over
the past seven years were simply that there had been an automatic
rise in pressure from hostile class forces, that would imply a death
sentence for the revolution. In fact, that is not the case. In
addition to the pressure of hostile forces from without, which,
moreover, have found support in the erroneous policies within the
party, the regime is under direct and heavy pressure from an internal
factor of immense and continually growing strength: namely the party
and state bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy has been transformed into a "self-sufficient"
force; it has its own material interests, and develops its outlook,
corresponding to its own privileged position. Making use of the means
and methods with which the dictatorship has armed it, the bureaucracy
more and more subordinates the party regime, not to the interests of
this dictatorship, but to its own interests, i.e., guaranteeing its
privileged position, its power, and its lack of accountability. Of
course, this phenomenon grew out of the dictatorship. But it is a
derivative which is opposed by other derivatives within the
dictatorship itself. It is not that the dictatorship has come into
contradiction with the needs of the country's economic and cultural
development; on the contrary, the Soviet regime, despite all the
mistakes of the leadership, has shown in the most difficult
circumstances and continues to show even now what inexhaustible
sources of creativity are built into it. But there is no doubt that
the bureaucratic degeneration of the dictatorship's apparatus is
undermining the dictatorship itself; and as the economic zigzags of
recent years have shown, this degeneration can actually bring the
Soviet regime into contradiction with the economic development of the
country.
Will
the bureaucrat devour the dictatorship or will the dictatorship of
the revolutionary class get the better of the bureaucrat?
This is the problem which confronts us now — and on its resolution
the fate of the revolution depends.
Four
years ago it was said of Stalin that he had made himself a candidate
for gravedigger of the party and the revolution. Much water has
flowed under the bridge since that time. The deadlines have drawn
nearer. The dangers have multiplied. Nevertheless, we are now further
than at any time in recent years from being pessimistic in our
forecast. Profound processes are taking place within the party,
outside the realm of its formal procedures and demonstrations put on
for show. The economic turns and the zigzags of the leadership, the
unprecedented convulsions of the country's entire economic organism,
the uninterrupted chain of palace coups, and finally the very
blatancy of the transition to Bonapartist plebiscitary methods of
running the party — all this gives rise to a deepgoing process of
differentiation in the party's very foundation, in the working-class
vanguard, and in the proletariat as a whole It
is no accident that now more than ever the entire official press is
filled with howls against "Trotskyism." Editorials, feature
stories, economic reviews, prose and poetry, the correspondents'
reports, and official resolutions – all these again condemn the
already condemned, crush the already crushed, and bury the already
buried "Trotskyism." And at the
same time, by way of preparing for the congress, four hundred and
fifty Oppositionists were recently arrested in Moscow alone. This
shows that the ideas of the Opposition live on. Ideas have tremendous
power when they correspond to the real course of unfolding events.
This is attested to by the entire history of Bolshevism, which the
Opposition is continuing under new conditions. "You cannot seal
up our ideas in a bottle," we told the Stalinist bureaucracy
dozens of times. Now it is forced to the same conclusions.
The
Sixteenth Congress will not decide anything. The problem will be
decided by other factors: what the inexhaustible revolutionary
resources of the proletariat are and what the potential is for
activity by its vanguard — which is drawing ever closer to a great
test. The Opposition is the vanguard of this vanguard. It accepted a
series of organizational defeats as the price of making a number of
appeals to the proletarian vanguard. History will say this price was
not too high. The more clearly, distinctly, and loudly the Opposition
presented its criticisms, forecasts, and proposals, the better it
carried out its role. Ideological irreconcilability has been
inscribed on our banner. At the same time the Opposition has never,
not for even an instant, either in its theoretical criticism or in
its practical activities, shifted from the policy line of winning
over the party ideologically to a line of winning power against the
party. When the Bonapartists tried to attribute plans for a civil war
to us, we invariably fired these provocations back in their faces.
Both of these guiding principles of the Opposition's activity remain
in effect even now. Today, as in the past, we stand on the line of
reform.
We seek to aid the proletarian nucleus of the party to reform the
regime in a struggle against the plebiscitary Bonapartist
bureaucracy. Our aim: the consolidation of the proletarian
dictatorship in the USSR as the most important factor for the
international socialist revolution.
The
Opposition has been tested in events of exceptional importance and on
questions of unprecedented complexity. The Opposition has become an
international factor and as such it is continually growing. That is
why we are less pessimistic than ever before. The Sixteenth Congress
will work at solving various problems, but it will not resolve the
problem. We will listen attentively to the speeches of the delegates
at the congress and carefully read its decisions. But even now we are
looking ahead, beyond the Sixteenth Congress. Our politics continues
to be the politics of the long view.