A new edition of the Trotsky’s last work, his unfinished biography of Stalin, is being introduced today at the Trotsky Museum in Coyoacan, Mexico. Although we have political differences with the editor of this new edition, Alan Woods, we recognize that his work over a number of years in bringing this edition of the Stalin biography to publication represents an important contribution to Trotsky’s legacy. We are reprinting below the announcement of the book launching. It is indeed fitting that the 76th anniversary of Trotsky's assassination sees the completion of the book he was working on at the time of his death. |
Habent sua fata libelli - “Books have their own fate”, a Roman author once wrote. And of no book in history is this more the case than Trotsky’s biography of Joseph Stalin, the newly completed edition of which will be launched next Saturday, 20 August, at the Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky, Mexico City.
This new
version of Stalin, which was left unfinished at the time of the
author’s death at the hands of a Stalinist agent, includes extensive
unpublished material from the Harvard archives. The result is as close as
possible to Trotsky’s original intentions for the work, providing a unique
perspective on the Russian Revolution, its subsequent isolation and the rise of
a bureaucracy expressed in the person of Stalin.
This
book will contain 100,000 words of original, never-before-published material by
Trotsky – a 30% increase on the 1946 edition. What is more, the previous editor
Charles Malamuth’s own additions to Trotsky’s notes have been removed.
This
highly anticipated publication will be introduced by its editor Alan Woods, the
world-renowned Marxist and Russian linguist. His efforts in producing this
version included translating some of Trotsky’s writing from Russian into
English for the first time. After almost three years of constant, painstaking
work alongside a raft of assistants, he is able to present the book in its
final form.
“The new
edition of Stalin has added to and enriched the vast arsenal
of Marxist theory left behind by Leon Trotsky,” explains Esteban Volkov,
Trotsky’s grandson and Director of the Trotsky House Museum. Volkov has spent
most of his life fighting for this work to be restored, against the publication
of previous editions, which omitted a considerable amount of Trotsky’s writing
contained within this new version.
The
venue chosen for this launch event reflects the significance of the work it
celebrates. This biography of Stalin will be returning to the place where its
author worked on it in the final years of his life. In fact, in the study where
his brilliant mind was smashed with an ice pick, Trotsky had left the galley
proofs of Stalin on his desk.
Tracing
Stalin’s progression from obscurity in rural Georgia to the leading bodies of
the Bolshevik Party, and then to the head of a monstrous regime, Trotsky
explores the interplay between great historical events and the individuals they
shape to a degree rarely found in Marxist literature.
“In
making available for the first time the writing that was arbitrarily excluded
from Stalin and hidden in dusty boxes for three quarters of a
century,” as Woods remarks in his editor’s note, “we are providing a wealth of
valuable material to the new generation that is striving to find the ideas to
change the world.”
La
Jornada reports
The
publication of this book has aroused considerable interest in circles far
beyond those of revolutionary militants. In its issue of Monday 8th August La
Jornada, the most important Mexican daily paper wrote a lengthy article on this
meeting. In it we read the following:
“On the
76th anniversary of his murder, a biography of Joseph Stalin written by Trotsky
will be presented as part of the activities to commemorate the controversial
Russian revolutionary who lived out his last years in exile in Mexico,
announced his grandson Esteban Volkov, director of the house museum dedicated
to the communist leader.
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Esteban Volkov |
'The
book of a thousand pages, which is for now only available in English, is the
work of British Marxist historian Alan Woods”, he said. 'Woods, an expert on
the ideas of Trotsky, was able to create a genuine version of the last book
that Trotsky wrote - the biography of Stalin,' Volkov explained.
“This
book has a lot of history. Contrary to what many think, Trotsky did not write
it in order to express his fury and resentment against Stalin, nothing could be
further from the truth. He had no interest in writing this biography. His most
passionate desire was to finish the second part of a book on the life of Lenin
that he had already started.
“But he
was obliged to change his plan for economic reasons. Volkov points out that we
'lived in conditions of extreme hardship, so when an American publisher came up
with a pretty attractive offer to commission a biography of Stalin, he threw
himself into this work, gathering a lot of material, reports and data.'
“'He began a serious and detailed work, but unfortunately was murdered before
he could finish it. Being more moved by commercial interests than ideological
considerations, the American publishers handed the task of publication of the
book to the translator Professor Charles Malamuth the translator. He
practically destroyed the work, filling it with annotations of his own
invention, while leaving out 30 or 40 percent of very interesting material
written by Trotsky.'
“Volkov
explained how a group of followers of Leon Trotsky and the historian Alan Woods
took on the task of complementing the work. The first thing they did was to get
rid of Malamuth’s annotations. Then, Woods ordered and classified the book in a
logical and ideological sense, in accordance with the ideas of Trotsky,
including all those documents and manuscripts that had not been published.
“Thus
you arrive to this corrected and enlarged edition, containing 40 percent more
of the text of Stalin, which will be presented by Woods himself on
August 20 at 7 p.m in the house-museum named after the Communist leader .
“In
Woods’ opinion, Volkov said, this work may be considered as one of the most
important that Trotsky wrote. And in a way it hastened his assassination,
because Stalin was determined to stop it being published.”
In these
words there is no hint of exaggeration. It is known that Stalin had on his desk
every morning the latest writings of Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition. He
was informed of the fact that his enemy was writing a biography that would
contain a great deal of compromising information about the life and role of the
dictator in the Kremlin. Like every criminal, Stalin was determined to
eliminate all the witnesses to his crimes – especially the most important one
in faraway Coyoacan.
Planet
without a Visa
Expelled
from the USSR by Stalin, for the man who created the Red Army and whose role in
the victory of the October Revolution was second only to that of Lenin there
was no refuge and no safe resting place on earth. One after another the door
was slammed firmly shut. Those states that called themselves democracies and
liked to compare themselves favourably with the Bolshevik “dictators” showed no
more tolerance than all the others.
Britain,
which had earlier given refuge to Marx, Lenin and Trotsky himself, now under a
Labour government, refused him entry. France and Norway behaved, in essence, no
differently, placing such restrictions on Trotsky’s movements and activities
that “sanctuary” became indistinguishable from imprisonment. Finally, Trotsky
and his faithful companion Natalia Sedova found refuge in Mexico under the
government of the progressive bourgeois Lazar Cardenas.
Even in
Mexico, Trotsky was not safe. The arm of the GPU was long. By raising his voice
against the Kremlin clique, Trotsky remained a mortal danger to Stalin, who, it
has now been demonstrated, ordered all Trotsky’s writings to be placed on his
desk each morning. He extracted a terrible revenge on his opponent. As long ago
as the 1920s, Zinoviev and Kamenev had warned Trotsky: “You think Stalin will
answer your ideas. But Stalin will strike at your head!”
In the
years prior to his assassination, Trotsky had witnessed the assassination of
one of his sons and the disappearance of the other; the suicide of his
daughter, the massacre of his friends and collaborators inside and outside the
USSR, and the destruction of the political gains of the October revolution.
Trotsky’s daughter Zinaida committed suicide as a result of Stalin’s
persecution.
After
the suicide of his daughter, his first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, an
extraordinary woman who perished in Stalin’s camps, wrote a despairing letter
to Trotsky: “Our children were doomed. I do not believe in life any more. I do
not believe that they will grow up. All the time I am expecting some new
disaster.’ And she concludes: “It has been difficult for me to write and mail
this letter. Excuse my cruelty towards you, but you should know everything
about our kith and kin.” (Quoted by Deutscher, op. cit. p. 198.)
Leon
Sedov, Trotsky’s eldest son, who played a key role in the International Left
Opposition, was murdered while recovering from an operation in a Paris clinic
in February 1938. Two of his European secretaries, Rudolf Klement and Erwin
Wolff, were also killed. Ignace Reiss, an officer of the GPU who publicly broke
with Stalin and declared in favour of Trotsky, was yet another victim of
Stalin’s murder machine, gunned down by a GPU agent in Switzerland.
The most
painful blow came with the arrest of Trotsky’s younger son Sergei, who had
stayed behind in Russia, believing that, as he was not politically active, he
would be safe. Vain hope! Unable to take his revenge on the father, Stalin
resorted to that most refined torture—applying pressure on parents through
their children. No-one can imagine what torments were suffered at this time by
Trotsky and Nataliya Sedova. Only in recent years did it emerge that Trotsky
even contemplated suicide, as a possible way of saving his son. But he realised
that such an act would not save Sergei and would give Stalin just what he
wanted. Trotsky was not wrong. Sergei was already dead, shot it seems in secret
in 1938, having steadfastly refused to denounce his father.
One by
one, Trotsky’s old collaborators had fallen victim to Stalin’s Terror. Those
who refused to recant were physically liquidated. But even capitulation did not
save the lives of those who surrendered. They were executed anyway. The last of
the leading figures of the Opposition inside the USSR who had held out was the
great Balkan Marxist and veteran revolutionary Christian Rakovsky. When Trotsky
heard of Rakovsky’s capitulations he wrote the following passage in his diary:
“Rakovsky
was virtually my last contact with the old revolutionary generation. After his
capitulation there is nobody left. Even though my correspondence with Rakovsky
stopped, for reasons of censorship, at the time of my deportation, nevertheless
the image of Rakovsky has remained a symbolic link with my old
comrades-in-arms. Now nobody remains. For a long time now I have not been able
to satisfy my need to exchange ideas and discuss problems with someone else. I
am reduced to carrying on a dialogue with the newspapers, or rather through the
newspapers with facts and opinions.
“And
still I think that the work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely
insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life—more
important than 1917, more important than the period of the Civil War or any
other.
“For the
sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in
Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place—on the
condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had
been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the
leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring—of
this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I
doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik
leaders. The struggle with ‘Trotskyism’ (i.e., with the proletarian revolution)
would have commenced in May, 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have
been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin the October
Revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be
said of the Civil War, although in its first period, especially at the time of
the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this
was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to anyone
but me.
“Thus I
cannot speak of the ‘indispensability’ of my work, even about the period from
1917 to 1921. But now my work is ‘indispensable’ in the full sense of the word.
There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two
Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these
Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal
fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important
experience in dealing with it. There is now no one except me to carry out the
mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads
of the leaders of the Second and Third International. And I am in a complete
agreement with Lenin (or rather Turgenev) that the worst vice is to be more
than 55 years old! I need at least about five more years of uninterrupted work
to ensure the succession.” (Trotsky, Diary In Exile, pp.
53-4.)
But
Trotsky was not to be granted his wish. After various attempts, the GPU finally
managed to put an end to Trotsky’s life on 20th August 1940.
The
revenge of history
When the
Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader brought his pickaxe crashing down on the skull
of his defenseless victim, Stalin’s wish appeared to have been granted. It is
in fact a very easy thing to terminate the life of an individual. The human
animal is a frail and fragile thing. It can be easily killed by a knife, a
bullet or an ice pick. But it is not possible to murder an idea whose time has
come.
The
fight for the ideas of Leon Trotsky – the ideas of Leninism, of Bolshevism and
of the October Revolution – did not end on 20 August 1940. On the contrary,
that struggle continues unabated to the present day. The memory of Leon Trotsky
continues to be celebrated by class conscious workers and revolutionary youth
all over the world. That of Stalin, the gravedigger of the October Revolution,
is reviled as that of Cain who murdered his brother in order to usurp his
inheritance.
In spite
of everything, right up to the end, Trotsky remained absolutely firm in his
revolutionary ideas. His testament reveals enormous optimism in the socialist
future of humanity. But his real testament is to be found in his books and
other writings, which continue to be a treasure-house of Marxist ideas for the
new generation of revolutionaries. The fact that nowadays, the spectre of
“Trotskyism” continues to haunt the bourgeois, reformist and Stalinist leaders
is sufficient proof of the resilience of the ideas of Bolshevism-Leninism. For
that, essentially, is what “Trotskyism” signifies.
After
the delay of almost eight decades, Trotsky’s biography of Stalin has been
reborn. In its pages the revolutionary workers and youth of today will find a
treasure trove of Marxist theory and ideas, a mine of information about the
history of Bolshevism and the Russian revolution and an answer to the question
of how the greatest revolution in history degenerated into a monstrous
totalitarian and bureaucratic regime.
The very
fact that the launching of the book, which at the moment is only available in
English (a Spanish translation is in preparation) is taking place in Mexico, in
the house where Trotsky lived, worked and died the death of a revolutionary
martyr, is a fitting monument to that great revolutionary internationalist. It
is the final revenge of history against Stalin and Stalinism and a living
confirmation of the vitality of the ideas of Marxism.
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6 comments:
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, I hadn't been aware Woods was preparing this.
Can you provide a brief summary of your disagreements with Woods? I'm not overly familiar with him, other than I know he supported Corbyn when he was elected Labour leader.
Regards,
Adam
The International Marxist Tendency (IMT), the group of which Alan Woods is a leading spokesperson, traces its history back to the UK based group that was led for many years by Ted Grant. Grant, along with Gerry Healy and Jock Haston were among the early leaders of the Trotskyist movement in the UK in the 1930s and 1940s. They went their separate ways after a number of splits. Grant led his followers into the Labour Party where they remained as a kind of clandestine faction for decades. The Woods group comes out of a split in the original Grant group after the death of Grant.
The IMT has a record of uncritical support for the late Hugo Chavez. We commented on this briefly quite a while ago on page 6 of this document:
Opportunism and Empiricism
More important however is Woods' mistaken conception of how class consciousness develops. We commented on that in some detail in Marxism Without its Head or its Heart.
It can be found on page 193-194 of this document:
MWHH Chapter 7
I will quote a section of this discussion:
"Before we leave this point, a digression into revisionist literature is useful here, since
in those circles it is not hard to find an unabashed defense of the virtues of spontaneous
consciousness that demonstrates, more directly than North’s guarded phrases, the
implications of backing Plekhanov’s side in this dispute. A good example is offered by
Alan Woods, Ted Grant’s successor as the leader of the Militant Tendency, in a 1999
book he penned on the history of the Bolshevik Party called Bolshevism: The Road to
Revolution. Though the work as a whole is an orthodox defense of Bolshevism, Woods
singles out What is to be done? for criticism, claiming it is “seriously flawed by a most
unfortunate theoretical lapse” on Lenin’s part – precisely the core idea that the
spontaneous consciousness of the working class is bourgeois consciousness. Woods cites
several examples (including the Paris Commune and the Spanish civil war) where the
spontaneous movement of the working class went beyond trade unionism and he argues
that this disproves Lenin’s thesis. Woods declares emphatically: “The class struggle itself
inevitably creates not only a class consciousness, but a socialist consciousness”
(emphasis in the original).
This is identical to Plekhanov’s assertion about workers
coming to socialism “even if left to themselves”.
...
The question of the building of the revolutionary party and the movement of the
class, however, are not the same thing. The two processes can be represented by two
parallel lines that for a long time do not intersect.
This nicely captures the undialectical nature of Woods’s – and North’s – conception. The
party and the class are not two parallel lines; they are a unity of opposites. That is why
Marxists since Lenin’s time have conceived of the party as a vanguard of the class, which
evokes the dialectical tension between them. True, the building of the party is not the
same thing as the movement of the class, but party-building is the struggle for socialist
consciousness in the working class. That is why it is nonsense to conceive of it as
happening apart from the working class: being a vanguard means being in the lead, not
off on a ‘parallel’ track. For Trotsky, party-building was about constructing bridges to
socialist consciousness – i.e. bridges between Woods’s two ‘parallels’ – but this sort of
revolutionary geometry doesn’t have any place in Woods’s conception nor, one might
add, in the abstentionist ‘parallelism’ favored by North."
***party-building is the struggle for socialist
consciousness in the working class. ***
This was an axiom of Healyite thought, but it obviously isn't true. Presumably, you're advancing socialist consciousness by publishing this blog. But you're not engaging in party building. Socialist consciousness, moreover, can be advanced by opportunist parties. (In fact, _you_ apparently think that socialist consciousness can be advanced by Senator Sanders; although I draw the line at capitalist parties.)
So essentially, Woods is a Pabloite. Good to know. Thank you for your reply.
Regards,
Adam
Reply to Stephen Diamond:
You said,
"you_ apparently think that socialist consciousness can be advanced by Senator Sanders"
Well apparently you cannot read since we never said anything of the kind.
Ascribing to others positions they do not support is a sure sign of arguing in bad faith. There is not much more to be said.
Through Alex Steiner's emphasis on the importance of dialectics, I recently went so far as to open up Reason in Revolt by Ted Grant and Alan Woods.
Above all, I was impressed by the erudition shown by the authors, even though their opinions, political or scientific, have been incorrect or inadequate according to their critics.
I have a plan to read more thoroughly details of the book memtioned above, since I am not content with browsing through the book.
Sincerely,
Lysistrata
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