Leon
Trotsky: Is Stalin Weakening or the Soviets?
January
1932
[Writing
of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 4, 1932, New York 1973, p. 32-43]
The
writer of this article is being plied on all sides with the question
— now gleefully ironical, now genuinely perplexed: Why is the
ruling group in the Soviet Union at this time wholly engrossed in
historical research? While Japan masters Manchuria and Hitler makes
ready to master Germany, Stalin is composing extensive dissertations
on the policies of Trotsky in the year 1905 and other questions
equally up-to-date. Three years have passed since Stalin and Molotov
announced that "Trotskyism" was dead and buried, and now a
new campaign — a fifth or sixth campaign — against this same
"Trotskyism" has sprung up in the pages of the Soviet
press. The unexpectedness of this — for what is the sense of
fighting corpses? — and the unusual viciousness of the attack have
caused something of a sensation in the European press. Both English
and French papers have published disclosures of a mighty conspiracy
of "Trotskyists" in the USSR. They are receiving 60,000
rubles monthly from abroad; they have captured the most important
positions in the industrial, administrative, and educational fields,
etc., etc. Most captivating is the accuracy with which the amount of
the foreign subsidy is reported.
With
all its absurdity this report rests upon an authority sufficiently
precise in its own way — the authority of Stalin himself. Stalin
quite recently announced that "Trotskyism" is not a
movement within the Communist Party, as the party members in spite of
everything still continue to believe, but is "the vanguard of
the bourgeois counterrevolution." If this statement be taken
seriously, a number of inferences follow. The goal of the
counterrevolution is to reestablish capitalism in the Soviet Union, a
goal which can be achieved only by overthrowing the Bolshevik power.
If the "Trotskyists" are the vanguard of the
counterrevolution, that can only mean that they are preparing the
destruction of the Soviet regime. From this it is but a step to the
conclusion that the interested capitalist circles of Europe must be
generously financing their work. To speak plainly, it is just this
interpretation of his words that Stalin is counting on. Just as in
1917 Miliukov and Kerensky felt obliged to assert that Lenin and
Trotsky were agents of German militarism, so now Stalin is trying to
get it on record that Trotsky and the Opposition are agents of
counterrevolution.
Some
months ago a widely circulated Polish newspaper printed over my
signature a forged article — not the first of its kind — about
the complete breakdown of the five-year plan and the inevitable fall
of the Soviets. Although the crudeness of the forgery was obvious
even to an inexperienced eye, Yaroslavsky, die official
historiographer of the Stalin faction, published a facsimile of the
article in the Moscow Pravda,
giving it out as an authentic document and drawing the corresponding
inferences in regard to "Trotskyism." A formal declaration
from me that the article was a falsification from beginning to end
was refused publication in Pravda,
The Stalin faction considered it more expedient to support the tale
that a powerful group among the Bolsheviks, a group led by the
closest associates of Lenin, considers inevitable the downfall of the
Soviet power and is working to that end.
The
same game has been played before. Government circles must have been
surprised four years ago when they read that Rakovsky, who so
forcefully and brilliantly defended the interests of the Soviet Union
during the Franco-Soviet negotiations, is in reality a most vicious
enemy of the Soviet power. They doubtless said to themselves at that
time: "Things must be going badly with the Soviet republic, if
even Rakovsky has turned up among the counterrevolutionaries."
If the French government has hesitated of late years to develop
economic relations with the Soviets, or, on the other hand, to break
off diplomatic relations, the banishment of Rakovsky has contributed
to this hesitation.
The
present campaign against the Opposition, arming itself with cruder
exaggeration even than the preceding ones, is again placing a weapon
in the hands of the most implacable enemies of the Soviet Union in
all countries. "Evidently," they are saying, "the
situation in the country is getting extremely bad if the inner
struggle has again become so bitter." It is this fact that the
struggle against "Trotskyism" is being waged with methods
deeply injuring the interests of the Soviet Union which impels me to
take up a subject which otherwise I would prefer to let alone.
If
the "Trotskyists" are in reality "the vanguard of the
bourgeois counterrevolution" — so the man in the street must
reason — then how explain the fact that the European governments,
including even the government of the brand-new Spanish republic, have
one after the other refused asylum to Trotsky? Such an inhospitable
attitude toward one's own "vanguard" is difficult to
explain. The European bourgeoisie has had enough experience to be
able by this time to distinguish its friends from its enemies.
The
so-called "Trotskyists," the older generation at least,
took part in the revolutionary struggle against czarism, in the
October Revolution of 1917, in the building of the Soviet republic,
in the creation of the Red Army, in the defense of the land of the
Soviets against innumerable enemies during three years of civil war,
and they played an intimate and frequently a leading part in the
economic revival of the country. During these recent years, under the
blows of the repression, they have remained completely loyal to those
tasks which they set themselves long before 1917. It is needless to
say that at a moment of danger to the Soviets the "Trotskyists"
would be found in the first line of defense, a position familiar to
them in the experience of the past years.
The
Stalin faction knows and understands this better than anybody else.
If it puts into circulation accusations which are obviously damaging
to the Soviet Union, and thus at the same time compromising to
itself, the explanation lies in the political situation in which the
course of events and its own preceding policies have placed the
Stalin faction.
Stalinism,
the Policy of a Conservative Bureaucracy
The
first campaign against "Trotskyism" was opened in 1923,
while Lenin was on his deathbed and during a protracted illness of
Trotsky. The second and more violent attack developed in 1924,
shortly after the death of Lenin. These dates speak for themselves.
The members of the old Politburo, the body which actually governed
the Soviet republic, were: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin,
Rykov, and Tomsky (or Bukharin). In the present Politburo only Stalin
is left of the old staff, although all its members, except Lenin, are
living. The selection of leaders of a great historic party is no
accidental process. How can it happen that the leaders of the party
during the heavy years preceding the revolution, and during the years
when the foundations of the Soviets were laid and the building in
construction was being defended with the sword, have suddenly turned
out to be "inner enemies," at a time when the daily Soviet
work has become to a certain degree a matter of bureaucratic routine?
These
shifts and replacements which stand out at a glance in the Politburo
or the Council of People's Commissars have also been taking place
during the recent period in all levels of the party building, right
down to the village councils. The present staff of the Central
Executive Committee of the Soviets, the personnel of the provincial
party secretariats, of the industrial, military, and diplomatic
bodies — all of them with but few exceptions are men of the new
crowd. A majority of them took no part in the October Revolution. A
very considerable number were in the camp of its open enemies. To be
sure, a small minority of the new ruling layer did belong to the
Bolshevik Party before October; but these were all revolutionary
figures of second or third magnitude. Such a combination is wholly
according to the laws of history. A new bureaucratic stratum requires
an "authoritative" covering. This covering has been created
by those among the Old Bolsheviks who in the period of storm and
assault were pushed to one side, those who felt a little out of
place, who found themselves in silent semi-opposition to the actual
leaders of the insurrection, and became able to enjoy their authority
as "Old Bolsheviks" only in the second stage of the
revolution.
It
has never yet happened in history that a stratum which achieved a
revolution and guided and defended it in the most difficult
circumstances, suddenly, when the work of its hands was assured,
turned out to be a "counterrevolutionary" stratum, and that
a few years after the revolution a new genuinely revolutionary
stratum arrived to take its place. Indeed, the opposite fact is to be
observed in the history of all great revolutions: when the victory is
assured and has brought forth a new ruling stratum with its own
interests and pretensions, and when this more moderate stratum,
reflecting the demand for "law and order," has pushed aside
the revolutionists of the first draft, it always accuses its
predecessors of a lack of revolutionary spirit. The most conservative
bureaucracy which might issue from a revolution could not otherwise
defend its right to power except by declaring its opponents moderate,
halfhearted, and even counterrevolutionary. The methods of Stalin
present nothing new whatever. We must not think, however, that Stalin
is consciously plagiarizing anybody. He does not know enough history
for that. He is simply obeying the logic of his own situation.
Economic
Disagreements
In
order to get the sense of Stalin's present political difficulties, it
is necessary to recall briefly the essence of those disagreements
which lay at the bottom of the dispute between us and the Stalin
faction. The Opposition demonstrated that the bureaucracy was
underestimating the possibilities of industrialization and
collectivization, that the economic work was being carried on
empirically in a hand-to-mouth manner, that it was necessary to adopt
a broader scale and a faster tempo. The Opposition demanded the
abandonment of the one-year for the five-year plan, and asserted that
a yearly 20 percent growth of industrial production presented nothing
unattainable with a centralized leadership. The Stalin bureaucracy
accused the Opposition at that time of super-industrialization and
utopianism. Kowtowing to the individual peasant proprietor,
preparation to abandon the nationalization of the land, defense of a
tortoise tempo in industry, and mockery of the planning principle —
such was the platform of the Stalin faction from 1923 to 1928. All
the present members of the Politburo without a single exception
answered our demand for an increased tempo of industrialization with
the stereotyped question: Where shall we get the means? The first
draft of the five-year plan, upon which the government institutions
got to work in 1927 under pressure from the persecuted "Trotskyists,"
was constructed on the principle of the descending curve: the growth
of production was charted to fall from 9 to 4 percent. This draft was
subjected to a withering criticism by the Opposition. The second
variant of the five-year plan, the one officially ratified by that
Fifteenth Party Congress which condemned the industrial "romanticism"
of the Opposition, called for an average growth of 9 percent.
How
far Stalin himself fell short of the scale of the present five-year
plan before its ratification may be seen in the mere fact that in
April 1926, answering Trotsky — who was then president of the
Dnieprostroi Commission — he declared at a meeting of the Central
Executive Committee: "For us to build the Dnieprostroi [the
mighty electrical power plant on the Dnieper] would be just the same
as to buy the peasant a phonograph instead of a cow." In the
stenographic report of the Central Committee those words are
inscribed as the most authentic opinion of Stalin. Subsequent
attempts to explain his struggle against industrialization with
references to the "prematureness" of the proposals of the
Opposition are meaningless, since it was not a question of a
particular task of the moment but of the general prospects of
industry and the five-year program. The trial of the
engineer-conspirators, publicly staged a year or so ago, showed that
the actual leadership was in the hands of the irreconcilable enemies
of the socialist economy. In defending his plans for a "tortoise
tempo" Stalin employed methods of repression against the
Opposition.
With
its usual shortsighted empiricism the Stalin bureaucracy, under the
influence of successes, began in 1928 to increase uncritically the
tempo of industrialization and collectivization. Here the roles were
exchanged. The Left Opposition came out with a warning: with a too
swift pace, not tested out by previous experience, disproportions may
arise between the cities and the country, and between the different
branches of industry, creating dangerous crises. Moreover — and
this was the chief argument of the Opposition — a too rapid
investment of capital in industry will cut off excessively the share
allotted to current consumption, and fail to guarantee the necessary
rise of the standard of living of the people. Although cut off from
the whole world in his exile in Barnaul, Christian G. Rakovsky
sounded the alarm. It is necessary, he said, even at the cost of a
lowered tempo, to better the material condition of the laboring
masses. Here too the Stalin bureaucracy has been ultimately compelled
to listen to the voice of the Opposition. Quite recently a separate
Commissariat of Manufacturing Industries was formed out of the staff
of the Supreme Council of National Economy. Its task is to take care
of the current needs of the population. At the present stage this
reform has a purely bureaucratic character, but its goal is clear: to
create in the government mechanism certain guarantees that the daily
needs of the masses will not be too much sacrificed to the interest
of the heavy industries. Here too the Stalin faction, lacking
perspective and creative force, is compelled to bless today what it
was cursing yesterday.
"Peppery
Dishes”
Early
in 1928 mass raids against the Opposition were carried out —
expulsions, arrests, banishments. During that same year a new
five-year plan was put into force, following upon all essential
questions the platform of the Left Opposition. This about-face was so
sharp that the bureaucracy directly contradicted everything that it
had defended during the first four years after Lenin's death. The
accusation of super-industrialization lost all meaning, and active
repressions against the Left Opposition still more so.
But
here the interest of the new ruling stratum in its own
self-preservation stepped to the front. If the Opposition was right
in its judgments and proposals, so much the worse for the Opposition.
If yesterday's arguments against it are worthless, we must have new
ones — and in order to justify repressions we must have
extraordinarily bitter ones. It is just in this sphere, however, that
Stalin is especially gifted. In 1922, when Stalin was first elected
general secretary of the party, Lenin remarked warningly to a small
circle: "This cook will give us only peppery dishes." In
his deathbed letter to the party, commonly called his "testament,"
where he insisted on the removal of Stalin from his position as
general secretary, Lenin pointed to the crudeness of his methods, his
disloyalty and inclination to misuse of power. All these personal
traits of Stalin, subsequently developed to a high degree, have been
especially well manifested in his struggle against the Opposition.
It
was not enough, however, to bring forward fantastic accusations; it
was necessary that people should believe them, or at least be afraid
to object In its struggle for self-preservation, the Stalin
bureaucracy was, therefore, compelled to begin by suppressing all
criticism. Along this line, accordingly, the Opposition opened its
most fervent struggle — a struggle for a democratic regime in the
party, in the trade unions, in the Soviets. We were defending one of
the basic traditions of Bolshevism.
In
the very heaviest years of the past — in the period of the
underground struggle under czarism, in 1917 when the country passed
through two revolutions, during the following three years when twenty
armies were fighting on a front seven thousand miles long — the
party lived a seething inner life. All questions were freely
discussed from the top of the party to the bottom; the freedom of
judgment within the party was unqualified. The Stalin apparatus
directed its chief efforts to the destruction of this embarrassing
party democracy. Tens of thousands of so-called "Trotskyists"
were excluded from the party. More than ten thousand were subjected
to various forms of criminal repression. Several were shot. Many tens
of thousands of fighting revolutionists of the first draft were
retained in the party only because they turned away and kept their
mouths shut. Thus, in the course of these years, not only the
membership of the ruling stratum has completely changed, but also the
inner regime of the Bolshevik Party.
Whereas
Lenin, to say nothing of his closest comrades-in-arms, was subjected
hundreds of times to the most furious blows of inner-party criticism,
at the present time any Communist who ventures to doubt the absolute
correctness of Stalin upon every question whatever, and, moreover,
who does not express a conviction as to his innate sinlessness, is
expelled from the party and suffers all the consequences which flow
from that. The shattering of the Opposition has become at the same
time a shattering of the party of Lenin.
This
shattering has been promoted by deep, although transitory, causes.
The years of the revolutionary earthquake and the civil war left the
masses in a desperate need of rest. The workers, oppressed with need
and hunger, wanted a revival of economic life at any price. In the
presence of considerable unemployment the removal of a worker from a
factory for Oppositional views was a fearful weapon in the hands of
the Stalin faction. Political interests fell away. The workers were
ready to give the bureaucracy the broadest powers, if only it would
restore order, offer an opportunity to revive the factories, and
furnish provisions and raw material from the country. In this
reaction of weariness, quite inevitable after every great
revolutionary tension, lies the chief cause of the consolidation of
the bureaucratic regime and the growth of that personal power of
Stalin, in whom the new bureaucracy has found its personification.
Trotskyist
Contraband
When
living voices had been finally suppressed it turned out that in the
libraries, in the clubs, in the Soviet bookstores, on the shelves of
students and workers, old books were standing which continued to talk
the same language they had talked in the days when the names of Lenin
and Trotsky were inseparable. It is this barricade of hostile books
that the Stalin bureaucracy has now come up against.
After
nine years of uninterrupted struggle against the Opposition, the
leaders have suddenly discovered that the fundamental scientific
works and textbooks on questions of economics, sociology, history —
and above all the history of the October Revolution and the Communist
International — are chock-full of "Trotskyist contraband,"
and that the most important chairs of social science in many
institutions of learning are occupied by "Trotskyists" or
"semi-Trotskyists." Worst of all, those have been found
guilty of Trotskyism who up to now had been its chief prosecutors.
In
order to show how far this thing has gone it is sufficient to adduce
an example touching the history of Bolshevism. Immediately after the
death of Lenin a history of the party hastily written by Zinoviev was
put into circulation, its sole purpose being to portray the whole
past as a struggle between two principles, the good and the evil, in
the persons of Lenin and Trotsky. But since this history accorded to
Zinoviev himself a place in the camp of the good and, what is still
more horrible, said nothing whatever about the providential role of
Stalin, Zinoviev's history was placed on the index as early as 1926,
the date of the open conflict between Zinoviev and Stalin.
The
man designated to write an authentic history of the party was now
Yaroslavsky. In the order of the party hierarchy it fell to
Yaroslavsky, a member of the presidium of the Central Control
Commission, to captain the whole struggle against the Left
Opposition. All the indictments leading to arrests and expulsions,
and also a majority of the articles lighting up the repressions
against "Trotskyists" in the Soviet press, came from the
pen of Yaroslavsky. It was he, indeed, who reprinted in Pravda
the forged article from a Polish newspaper. To be sure, the
scientific-literary standing of Yaroslavsky was not wholly adequate,
but he made up for this with his complete willingness to rewrite all
history, including that of ancient Egypt, according to the demands of
the bureaucratic stratum led by Stalin. A more reliable
historiographer the Stalin bureaucracy could not possibly desire.
The
result, however, was a completely unexpected one. In November of last
year Stalin found himself compelled to come down on the fourth volume
of Yaroslavsky history with a severe article. This too, it seems, was
filled with "Trotskyist contraband." If Stanley Baldwin in
one of his speeches should accuse Winston Churchill of a sympathy for
Bolshevism, this would hardly cause a greater sensation in England
than did Stalin's accusing Yaroslavsky of abetting "Trotskyism"
in the Soviet Union. That accusatory article of Stalin served as an
introduction to this last campaign. Obeying the signal, hundreds and
thousands of functionaries, professors, journalists, distinguished in
nothing but their zeal, rushed out to rummage through all the Soviet
publications. Horrors! "Trotskyism" at every step! There is
no escape from "contraband"!
But,
after all, how could such a thing happen? Every new stratum as it
rises to power shows an inclination to embellish its own past Since
the Stalin bureaucracy cannot, like other ruling classes, find
reinforcement among the high places of religion, it is compelled to
create its own historic mythology. It paints in dark colors the past
of all those who resisted it, while brushing up its own past with the
brightest tints of the spectrum. The biographies of the leading
actors of the revolution are made over from year to year in
accordance with the changes in the staff of the ruling stratum and
the growth of its pretensions. But the historical material puts up
some resistance. No matter how great is the zeal of the official
historians, they are held in leash by the archives, the periodical
press of past years, and by the old articles — among them the
articles of Stalin himself. That is the root of the evil!
Under
the leadership of Yaroslavsky a number of young historians have been
working over the history of the party. They have done all they could.
But running into certain unsubmissive facts and documents, they found
themselves unable, in spite of their zeal, either to crowd Trotsky
out of the October Revolution or provide Stalin with a sufficiently
imposing role in it. It was just along this line that Yaroslavsky
fell under indictment for circulating "Trotskyist contraband":
he did not carry the remaking of history clear through to the end.
Woe to him who leaves his job half-done!
In
many cases the accusation of harboring contraband has another source
Thousands of the less resolute partisans of the Opposition formally
renounced their views during the last years, and were returned to the
party and set to work. It soon became evident, however, that the
Opposition school had been for them an invaluable school for
scientific thinking. Former "Trotskyists" have occupied
prominent positions in the sphere of economics, science, literature,
and educational activities. They are submissive, as frightened
functionaries know how to be, but they also know the facts. In their
brain convolutions a number of critical habits have got stuck. The
agents of Stalin, spying upon them from all sides, have had no
difficulty in discovering in their books and lectures the poison of
"Trotskyist contraband."
There
is also a third source of this poison, no less dangerous. Serious
young investigators, not at all bound up in the past with the
Opposition, to a considerable extent nonpolitical but also free from
careerist motives, frequently become victims of the scientific
material they are working on and their own conscientiousness. Upon a
whole series of questions, without ever suspecting it, they fall into
the tracks laid down by the Left Opposition. The system of opinions
which the Stalin bureaucracy imposes has come into more and more
serious conflict, not only with the traditions of the party, but also
with any somewhat serious independent investigations in the various
spheres of historical and social science, thus giving rise to
Opposition moods. As a result it has suddenly been discovered that
highly important branches of the social work in the Soviet Union are
in the hands of the "vanguard of the bourgeois
counterrevolution"!
The
Strengthening of the Soviet Economy Weakens Stalin
The
bitter character of the present campaign against "Trotskyists"
has inspired the Russian emigrant press to new prophecies of the
coming downfall of the Soviet power. And these voices, in spite of
the discouraging experience of the last fourteen years, have found an
echo even in the great European and American newspapers. This is not,
after all, surprising: not only does the Stalin bureaucracy
stubbornly identify itself with the Soviet regime, but its enemies
also, in search for comforting illusions, become victims of the same
political aberration.
As
a matter of fact, there is not the slightest foundation for this talk
of the approaching long-awaited "end." The development of
the productive forces of the Soviet Union is the most colossal
phenomenon of contemporary history. The gigantic advantage of a
planned leadership has been demonstrated with a force which nothing
can ever refute. The nearsightedness and zigzagging of the Stalin
bureaucracy only the more clearly emphasize the power of the methods
themselves. Only the maniacs of the restoration can imagine that the
toiling masses of Russia want to turn back to the conditions of
backward Russian capitalism.
But
it is no less an error to imagine that the economic successes in
strengthening the new industrial regime have also automatically
reinforced the political position of Stalin and his faction. Up to a
certain moment it was so. But at present a process of exactly the
opposite kind is developing. A people who have achieved a mighty
revolution may temporarily, in difficult circumstances, hand over the
guidance of their destinies to a bureaucracy. But they are not able
to renounce politics for long. It would be blindness not to see that
the very strengthening of the economic situation of the country sets
the toiling masses in more and more hostile opposition to the
omnipotence of a bureaucracy. The workers, not without justification,
attribute to themselves the achieved successes, and follow the
bureaucracy with more and more critical eyes. For the masses see from
below not only the successes and the possibilities flowing from them,
but also the crude mistakes of the leaders and their continuous
tendency to shift the responsibility for these mistakes from
themselves to their agents. In raising the pride of the workers, the
successes have also raised their political demands.
The
lessons of the economic zigzags, especially the astounding exposures
of the trials of the saboteurs, have taken deep root in the
consciousness of the population and greatly undermined even the
prestige of Stalin. The inference comes of itself: "It seems as
though the Opposition was right!" The ideas of the Opposition,
although not showing themselves on the surface, have long been laying
down hidden roots. A critical period is now opening. The workers
desire not only to obey but to decide. They intend to change many
things. It is more than ever demanded of them, however, that they
merely ratify decisions adopted without them. The workers are
discontented — not with the Soviet regime but with the fact that
a bureaucracy is replacing the Soviets. In various workers' councils
the "Trotskyists" are lifting their heads, sometimes very
courageously. They are being expelled. This has opened a new chapter
in the life of the ruling party. Critical voices can no longer be
silenced.
Whereas
the former party crises reflected directly the difficulties and
contradictions of the development of the Soviet republic under
bureaucratic leadership, what comes to view in the present period is
the contradiction in the position of the Stalin faction and, above
all, of Stalin himself.
When
these lines see the light the Seventeenth Party Conference will
already be ending in Moscow, a conference which is nothing but a
meeting of the apparatus, that is, the centralized Stalinist faction.
Without a doubt the conference will pass off sufficiently well for
the present leadership. But no matter how strong the Stalin faction
is, it will not decide. The decision will be made in the last
analysis by industrial processes on the one side, and, on the other,
by deep political processes taking place in the consciousness of the
masses.
The
campaign against "Trotskyism" now developing signalizes the
twilight of the omnipotence of the Stalin bureaucracy. But therewith
it foretells, not the fall of the Bolshevik power, but on the
contrary a new rise of the Soviet regime — not only its industry,
but its politics and culture. That movement to which the author
belongs is firmly confident of finding its place in the gigantic work
to come.