The Record Re-examined: Trotsky’s lessons of
October in Context
During the centennial
year of the October Revolution, this paper featured seven articles by Lars T.
Lih, and one by Jack Conrad, expanding upon their at least partly shared
interpretation of the events of 1917. These articles contain too many
assertions to take issue with in a single reply. But one text at which both
writers take aim is The lessons of October, written by Trotsky in
September of 1924 as an extended introduction to the third volume of his
collected works, containing his speeches and writings from 1917, then slated
for publication by the Soviet government. Both Lih and Conrad allege that this
essay is the original source of the so-called Trotskyist myths surrounding the
revolution, dutifully repeated by historians down the decades. In what follows,
I will evaluate the claims of Jack Conrad concerning the author’s motives, and
the political significance of this work at the time it was written. A future
article will assess Lih and Conrad’s claims concerning the
originality of Trotsky’s arguments concerning Lenin’s April Theses
and the Bolshevik seizure of power.
The lessons of
October argues that
Lenin, upon his return to Petrograd in April of 1917, created an
internal crisis in the Bolshevik Party, which he successfully
resolved by reorienting the party toward the conquest
of power seven months later. In recounting this history,
Trotsky implicitly contrasts his own role as the insurrection’s
principal leader with that of the reigning triumvirs of the Bolshevik
Party in 1924—Joseph Stalin, who played a negligible part, and Gregory Zinoviev
and Lev Kamenev, both of whom publicly denounced Bolshevik plans in a Menshevik
newspaper on the eve of the insurrection. The “October” of the title also
refers to the ‘German October’ of 1923, during which plans for a workers’
insurrection were aborted in what Trotsky considered a missed revolutionary
opportunity.
Jack Conrad (“Putting
the record straight”, Weekly Worker, 9 November, 2017) avers
that, in writing Lessons:
Trotsky had thrown down a political gauntlet
and other prominent members of the Communist Party-- not least those on the
politburo and the central committee—piled in against him: Gregory Zinoviev, Lev
Kamenev, Joseph Stalin, Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Bukharin, Nadezhda
Krupskaya, etc.
Though Trotsky fulsomely praised the dead Lenin
and spoke about “we Bolsheviks”, his aim was to attack, to demean Lenin’s
closest lieutenants. They were hardly going to take that lying down. And,
besides defending their own revolutionary records and sense of honour, they
feared that Trotsky might be contemplating staging a Bonapartist military coup.
He had certainly set his sights on replacing, or at the very least augmenting,
Leninism with Trotskyism.
The above passage is
breathtaking in its lack of historical context. It contains
no reference to the nearly two-year-long intra-party disputes that
set the scene for Lessons, and echoes the accusations levelled
at the time by the triumvirs—that Trotsky initiated an
unprovoked attack on their political reputations out of personal ambition.
Thus, before examining the contents of The lessons of
October, it will be necessary to recreate, in barest outline, the political
background against which it was written. For those readers acquainted with the
classics from which my narrative is drawn—the second volume of Isaac
Deutscher’s monumental Trotsky biography, The Prophet Unarmed (London,
1959); E.H. Carr’s A History of Soviet Russia,
The Interregnum (London, 1969); and Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s
Last Struggle (New York, 1968)—what follows will retread familiar
ground. This article is written mainly for the benefit of readers who may be
less than fully conversant with the details of this highly dramatic turning
point in Soviet history.
New Boy Shut Out
In December of 1922,
when a series of paralysing strokes forced Lenin to retire from active politics
with uncertain prospects for recovery, the question of succession loomed in the
collective mind of the ruling Communist Party, and especially of its top
leaders. The second most prominent Bolshevik in the eyes of the party
rank-and-file, the Soviet masses, and the world at large, was Leon Trotsky. It
was he who had headed the Military Revolutionary Committee that led the October
insurrection, and who had been the insurrection’s principal orator and public
face. As Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, Trotsky had appeared on the
global stage as leader of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany and
Austria-Hungary in 1918, introducing the Soviet regime to the world, and using
the negotiations as a platform from which to beam revolutionary propaganda to
the masses of the belligerent countries. It was Trotsky who had commanded the
Red Army to victory against the whites during the civil war. The Soviet
government was widely known internationally as the Lenin-Trotsky regime.
Trotsky was thus the most obvious candidate to become Lenin’s successor.
Many top-ranking
Bolsheviks were, however, determined to prevent such an outcome. Trotsky was a
latecomer to the party, having only officially joined in the summer of 1917. He
had sided with the Mensheviks at the famous Second Congress of the Russian
Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903. And, though he had separated himself
from the Menshevik faction the following year to act as an independent Social
Democrat, Trotsky had remained an at-times bitter factional opponent of the
Bolsheviks during the very years of European exile during
which Zinoviev and Kamenev had functioned as Lenin’s dutiful lieutenants.
Still harbouring memories of factional rancour, regarding Trotsky as less than
one of themselves, and perhaps feeling eclipsed by his meteoric rise, Zinoviev,
Kamenev and Stalin secretly agreed to act in concert. By deliberating together
and voting en bloc, the triumvirs could dominate the six-man
Politburo that presided over the party, and effectively exclude Trotsky from
decision-making.
The motives of the
triumvirs may have been more personal than political at first. But in politics,
especially in a country that was ruled by a single party through
which tensions in the larger society necessarily made
themselves felt, individuals and small groupings at the summits of power tended
to act as magnets for larger social forces.
To Rectify or Retrench?
The regime that emerged
at the end of the Civil War was a far cry from the proletarian
democracy envisioned by the Bolsheviks in 1917. The soviets, in whose name
Lenin’s party had taken power, were now little more than rubber-stamp bodies
for decisions taken by Bolshevik leaders; the working class base of
the soviets and the party had been decimated by battlefield deaths, transfers
of the most reliable cadres to the front and to administrative posts, and
virtual starvation in the major cities. The exigencies of war had necessitated
an extreme centralization of power. A systematic ‘red terror’ was launched
against counterrevolutionaries and those who abused their authority to commit
economic crimes. Not only had all non-Bolshevik parties been
outlawed, but factions were prohibited within the party itself by a ban
introduced by Lenin at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921. Lenin then feared that
the party, increasingly faction-ridden, might disintegrate in the face of
waning Bolshevik support, manifested most dramatically in the Kronstadt rising.
Having concentrated enormous power in their hands, a privileged stratum of
state and party apparatchiks were becoming more and more accustomed to ruling
by command.
Together with Lenin,
Trotsky had viewed this centralisation as necessary due to the extreme peril in
which the party regime—which had emerged as the sole defender of the
revolution’s gains-- found itself. But, beginning during the Civil War, and
widening afterwards, a division appeared in the party between those who
regarded the bureaucratic-commandist status quo as a situation to be corrected,
and those who viewed it as the norm, to be upheld and
consolidated. Despite occasional lip service to workers’ democracy,
the triumvirs leaned for support upon the apparatus. And despite his earlier
opposition to anti-bureaucratic groupings within the party—the Workers’
Opposition and Democratic Centralists--and with much initial reluctance and
hesitation, Trotsky was to place himself at the head of the currents
within Bolshevism that invoked the radical democratic hopes of the revolution
against the increasingly authoritarian drift of the 1920s Soviet republic.
Second Thoughts and
Thwarted Plans
The first leading
Bolshevik to sound the alarm about the dangers of bureaucratic degeneration was
not Trotsky, but the afflicted Lenin. His illness perhaps allowed him the
distance required for a more objective look at the Soviet regime and where it
was headed, and to reverse himself on many issues of state and party policy. And
in his efforts to rein in the apparatus, it was not to his “closest
lieutenants”, but increasingly to Trotsky, that he turned. One
factor in prompting the triumvirs to form a bloc were indications that Lenin
was moving closer to Trotsky on economic issues. Trotsky had for some time
advocated the strengthening of the central planning apparatus, Gosplan—albeit
within the framework of the New Economic Policy (NEP)--against the market
forces—the small peasant producers and profiteering middlemen--that the NEP had
unleashed, and who constituted an incipient threat to socialised industry.
Lenin, along with the triumvirs, had opposed him. But in late 1922, Lenin
became alarmed by a decision of the party Central Committee to relax
the monopoly on foreign trade, which protected the Soviet economy
from the invasion of cheap western goods. He prevailed upon Trotsky to have the
decision reversed in the Central Committee, which it promptly was. Lenin had
also come nearer to Trotsky’s point of view about the need to strengthen
central planning —also opposed by the triumvirs-- and wrote a letter to the
Politburo to this effect. In what was to become a familiar pattern, the
Politburo refused to publish Lenin’s letter.
In a private meeting in
December of 1922, Lenin, encouraged by their joint success in protecting the
trade monopoly, offered Trotsky ”an anti-bureaucratic bloc”. Trotsky
accepted, adding that bureaucratic methods had become entrenched not only in
the state machine, but in the party as well, including its highest echelons. It
hardly needs to be pointed out that neither man at this point perceived
bureaucracy, which was a new phenomenon, as the juggernaut it would become .
Lenin tended to view bureaucratic methods as a holdover from tsarist days, sill
potent due to the revolution’s isolation and Russia’s extreme economic distress
and cultural backwardness. Both thought the problem could be addressed within
the confines of the then-existing one-party dictatorship, by administrative
measures from the top.
There were two issues
that preoccupied Lenin in the last year and a half of his life. One was his
effort to restructure the party and state regimes to make them less cumbersome
and more competent. The other was the nationalities question, which concerned
the status of non-Russian republics, and especially Georgia, within the newly
created Soviet federation. On both these questions, Lenin’s initiatives ran
into delays and resistance from the ruling triumvirate.
Pushing at the outer
limits of the strict restrictions on political activity prescribed by his
doctors, Lenin conceived a scheme for enlarging the party central committee and
creating a Central Control Commission to act as a watchdog over the bureaucracy
in party and government. In furtherance of this project, he penned an
article, Better Fewer, but Better in February of 1923,
intended for immediate publication in Pravda, the official party
paper. It was to be his last article. It inveighed against bureaucratic haste
and high-handedness; it contained a criticism of an earlier control agency
until recently headed by Stalin, the Commissariat of Workers and Peasants’
Inspection (known by the Russian acronym of “Rabkrin”), which Lenin wrote,
“does not at present enjoy the slightest authority” and was worse organized
than any government institution. The jab at Stalin was unmistakable to anyone
acquainted with Kremlin politics. Despite insistent demands from
Lenin and Trotsky that the article be published, the triumvirs delayed printing
it for a month. At one point, one of Stalin’s closest collaborators, Kuibyshev,
suggested that a special single issue of Pravda containing the article be
printed for the sole purpose of showing Lenin as proof of publication.
An even more highly
charged issue was the status of the Soviet republic of Georgia. During the
civil war, the Red Army had ousted a Menshevik government in Tiflis (Tbilisi),
which had turned the province into a staging-ground for the anti-Soviet
operations of the Entente. In the aftermath, however, a dispute arose as to the
terms under which Georgia was to be incorporated in the new Soviet federation.
Stalin, as Commissar of Nationalities (and himself a Georgian), wished simply
to ratify the existing power of Moscow by incorporating the Georgian government
into that of the Russian federation, along with the other Caucasian republics
of Azerbaijan and Armenia . He also favored outlawing the
Georgian Mensheviks, as they had been banned in Russia. On both these issues,
Stalin encountered growing resistance from the Georgian Bolsheviks, who, while
agreeing on the necessity of close cooperation with Moscow, insisted on
greater local autonomy and questioned the wisdom of a Menshevik ban.
Stalin, initially supported by Lenin, accused the Georgian Bolsheviks of
‘nationalist deviation’.
Yet, in the isolation of
the small Kremlin room to which illness had confined him, Lenin became alarmed
by recent reports. He received news that Stalin had ordered the
entire Georgian Bolshevik central committee to leave their posts and report to
the Moscow, in effect decapitating the Georgian party by fiat; worse still he
heard that Stalin’s principal Georgian point man, Ordzhonikidze (also a
Georgian) had struck one of the leaders of the Georgian party in the course of
a heated argument. Lenin--one of whose signature contributions to Marxism was
his insistence on the right of nations to self-determination—began to conclude
that representatives of the central government were acting like arrogant
imperial proconsuls, and re-enacting, in the name of Soviet power, a role all
too familiar in the annals of tsarism—that of the Great Russian bully. Lenin
sent a note to the beleaguered Georgians, declaring his support, and his
intention to prepare notes and a speech on their behalf. Lenin, moreover,
became aware that certain documents in a Georgian dossier he had asked for
somehow went missing. He began to suspect that Stalin, entrusted with the
supervision of his medical care and convalescence, was deliberately controlling
his access to information for political purposes under the guise of restricting
his activity for health reasons.
But Lenin suffered
further strokes. Unable to fight for his positions himself, it was once again
to Trotsky that he entrusted his purpose. He sent Trotsky a note, asking him to
take up his defence of the Georgians at the upcoming 12th party
congress in April of 1923, and warning him to avoid any “rotten compromise”
that Stalin might propose. He dashed off another note to Stalin, threatening to
break off all personal relations if he failed to apologise for his abusive
verbal treatment of Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, when she had made inquiries on his
behalf.
Most significantly of
all, Lenin, in January of 1923, dictated an addendum to his “testament”. The
document was first dictated to his secretaries in December 1922 with a view to
guiding the party in the event of his death. It recognised Stalin and Trotsky
as the two leading members of the party, and anticipated the danger of a split
between them. It contained a balanced appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses
of each: Trotsky was the most able member of the Politburo, but too
self-confident and overly inclined to administrative solutions; Stalin, in his
role as General Secretary, had amassed a great deal of power, which he might
not know how to use. Then, in the later addendum, dictated the following month,
Lenin said that Stalin was too rude, and should be removed as General
Secretary. Moshe Lewin, in Lenin’s Last Struggle, concludes that
the addendum was principally a reaction to the Georgian affair, about which
Lenin suspected Stalin of playing him false. The implication, though, was only
too evident: of the two leading party members, Lenin was urging the removal of
one but not the other. Lenin’s testament remained unknown to both the triumvirs
and Trotsky at the time of writing.
Lulled by Empty Promises
Trotsky’s
performance at the 12th Party Congress in April of 1923
represented perhaps the greatest failure of his political career. Although the
triumvirs held a decisive majority of delegate votes, the congress was seething
with oppositional undercurrents in search of a leader: the aggrieved Georgians,
adherents of tendencies calling for greater internal democracy,
Nikolai Bukharin who, took the side of the Georgians and denounced the
dictatorship of the triumvirs. Yet Trotsky studiously avoided an adversarial
role. He gave not one word of encouragement to the malcontents, and limited
himself to a lengthy (and by all accounts masterful) speech on the economy and
the need to strengthen elements of state planning.
Trotsky had, in the
lead-up to the Congress, completely ignored Lenin’s advice to “brook no rotten
compromise”. When Kamenev, having learnt of Lenin’s threat to break personal
relations with Stalin, came to Trotsky begging forgiveness, Trotsky was the
soul of magnanimity; he assured Kamenev that an apology from Stalin for his
abuse of Krupskaya—which Stalin quickly delivered—would suffice to set things
right again. He agreed to turn over Lenin’s private notes to the Politburo, to
do with as it saw fit. And, most fatally, he agreed to a resolution reaffirming
the rights of national minorities—one which the triumvirs were quick to ignore
in practice—as all that was necessary to satisfy Lenin’s and his concerns over
the Georgian question and preserve a façade of party unity at the congress.
Trotsky’s abstention
calls to mind Hamlet, catching Claudius in a moment of weakness and repentance,
and failing to strike the fatal blow. No student of Trotsky’s career
will deny that there was about him a certain aloofness that made him reluctant,
in the words of Isaac Deutscher, to descend from the “high drama” of the
revolution to the “low farce” of the succession struggle. He also showed signs
of the “too far-reaching self-confidence” that Lenin noted in his testament. He
may have thought that Lenin’s support made him invulnerable, and, in his
autobiography, said he held out the hope that Lenin would yet recover. He was
also reluctant to feed the accusations of personal ambition being levelled
against him. But, whatever his thinking, most historians agree that Trotsky, at
the 12th congress, missed his main chance to mount a formidable
opposition against Stalin and the triumvirs.
The triumvirs, however,
missed no chances. They started a whispering campaign amongst the delegates,
unfounded in fact, to the effect that Trotsky, in his capacity as head of the
military, threatened to become a Soviet Bonaparte. They whispered too that, by
advocating the expansion of central planning, Trotsky was the enemy of the
peasant. The triumvirs also seized upon the occasion of the first
congress held without Lenin to foster a cult of the stricken leader,
and presented themselves as his faithful disciples and the guardians of party
unity. They upheld the ban on factions, and Zinoviev even went so far as to
assert that any criticism of the leadership was an instance of “objective
Menshevism”, whether or not the critics had any connection to actually existing
Mensheviks. Zinoviev emerged as the point man for the
triumvirs at the congress, taking the lead in chastising oppositional elements,
thus earning their enmity, while Stalin sat modestly in the background.
At Last, the Indictment
If the widening rift
between Trotsky and the triumvirs could up to this point have been construed as
personal rivalry, the sequel to the twelfth congress can leave no doubt as
to the political stakes involved. In the summer of 1923,
economic strikes took place in Moscow and Petrograd. Members of Workers Truth,
some of whom were oppositionists in the Communist Party, were suspected of
involvement; they were expelled from the party, and a few were briefly
detained. GPU (secret police) chief Felix Dzerzhinsky then demanded that the
Politburo pass a resolution requiring party members to report the
existence of “groupings” that were defying the faction ban to the GPU. Trotsky
wrote a letter of protest to the Politburo, saying that, while loyal party
members should report illegal activity, a special resolution demanding that
they do so was unnecessary. He pointed further to the unhealthy situation in the
party that made it necessary for internal criticism to go underground. He
decried the pervasive practice of choosing local party officers by secretarial
appointment from above --Stalin being the General Secretary who made the
appointments-- rather than by election from below. This method of selection, he
argued, had created an internal party apparatus loyal to the centre rather than
to the members, and which was stifling all internal criticism and debate in
favour of unthinking obedience.
A week later, the
Politburo received another letter. It was signed by 46 prominent old
Bolsheviks, some of whom were Trotsky’s close associates, and others who had
belonged the Workers’ Opposition and Democratic Centralists. They used language
similar to Trotsky’s in denouncing secretarial patronage in the selection of
local leaders, but went further by demanding an end to the 1921 ban on
factions. They also echoed Trotsky in advocating a strengthening of central
planning, which they claimed the party leadership was neglecting despite its
verbal commitment.
Isaac Deutscher points
out that the 46 immediately found themselves in a Catch 22. Coming
together to demand an end to the faction ban could itself be portrayed as
factional activity, which it promptly was by the triumvirs. But the latter were
themselves caught off balance. They soon found out that the signatories of the
letter—heroes of the revolution and holders of important government and party
posts—were simply too prominent to be suppressed by bureaucratic measures. When
condemnation by an enlarged session of the central committee called for that
purpose, and denunciation in party cells of the letter, which
members were initially forbidden to read, only aroused deep suspicion in the
ranks, the triumvirs decided upon a tactical retreat. They now threw
open the pages of Pravda for debate, and permitted the
circulation of the letter of the 46; party cells were also allowed
greater freedom of discussion, and the opposition granted a hearing there.
The triumvirs were
alarmed by the response. The opposition caught fire, especially in Moscow,
where the triumvirs were often received with derision and outvoted
in party cells and factories. One third of the Moscow garrison of the Red Army
declared for the opposition. The central committee of the Communist Youth, and
a majority of its cells, did likewise. The triumvirs were forced to retreat
further. Just as they had responded to Lenin’s pressure on the Georgian
question with a disingenuous resolution upholding the rights of national
minorities, they now pushed through the central committee the New Course
Resolution, for which they obtained Trotsky’s vote, lamenting the
rise of bureaucracy in the party and, without lifting the faction ban,
supposedly signaling a rebirth of party democracy. And just as they had no
intention of carrying out their earlier resolution on the nationalities
question, the triumvirs belied their anti-bureaucratic words by their deeds.
One of Trotsky’s closest allies, and second in command of the October
insurrection, Antonov-Ovseenko, was now removed as chief political commissar of
the Red Army, and the central committee of the Communist Youth was dissolved
and replaced by appointees of the secretariat.
Trotsky was, however,
able to publish a series of articles in Pravda, which, together
with a letter to party meetings written at the same time, were collected into a
pamphlet entitled The new course. Deutscher is justified in
his claim that The new course contains, “in a nutshell most of
the ideas which at once became the hallmark of ‘Trotskyism’”[1] , at least
in regard to the regime question.
Here, Trotsky first
clearly asserts that bureaucracy is more than “the aggregate of the bad habits
of officeholders”, but a “social phenomenon in that it is a definite system of
administration of people and things”[2] belonging to a particular stratum
of Soviet society, having its deepest roots in the state apparatus. He goes on
to identify the main supporters of bureaucratism in the party with those who
claimed authority in the name of ‘Old Bolshevism’, i.e. the triumvirs. He then
proceeds to reprove their characteristic traits and methods: the claims to
infallibility, the expectation of servility from the young and those beneath
them in the hierarchy, and fear of initiative from below; their tendency to
paint every internal difference of opinion as a fundamental divergence in class
outlook; their inclination to employ empty phrases and arid formulas in place
of creative thinking, and to turn Leninism into an exercise in scholastic,
decontextualised quotation-mongering rather a body of critical
thought:
Out
of the party with passive obedience, mechanical leveling by the authorities,
with suppression of personality, with servility, with careerism! A Bolshevik is
not merely a disciplined person; he is a person who in each case and on each
question forges a firm opinion of his own and defends it courageously and
independently, not only against his enemies, but inside his own party.[3]
The new
course gained for Trotsky the instant adhesion of anti-bureaucratic
currents. With it he had—belatedly but unmistakably—stepped into the
role of leader of the opposition, and exposed himself further to the
torrents of obloquy that were already beginning to descend upon him, and have
clung to his name like a lingering infection in the eyes of some detractors to
this day.
The Anathaema Pronounced
The triumvirs were
incapable of challenging Trotsky in open and honest debate. They rather
responded in the typical manner of oligarchs determined to preserve their power
in the face of damning, unanswerable truths: with innuendo, distortion and
outright calumny. They played upon the understandable bewilderment, even
indignation, of younger rank-and- file members at hearing the
leaders of their party taxed with bureaucratic abuse. They charged
Trotsky with being a petty-bourgeois individualist, attempting to undermine the
unity of the party and incite the youth against the old guard out of personal
ambition. They dredged up, in selective and truncated form, his past
differences with Lenin. They alleged that he underestimated the peasantry, and
had not fully absorbed the traditions of Bolshevism, remaining at heart a
semi-Menshevik.
This phase of the
anti-Trotsky campaign was in full flood in January of 1924, when Trotsky, en
route to Baku for a southern vacation his doctors had advised as a cure for
recurring fevers, received word of Lenin’s death. Inquiring of Stalin whether
or not to return to Moscow for the funeral, Stalin wired back that Trotsky
could not get back in time for the funeral, to be held the next day, and
advised him to continue on his southern journey. In fact, the funeral was held
several days later, and would have given Trotsky ample time to return. His
conspicuous absence at the elaborately staged obsequies fed the rumour mill and
allowed Stalin to give the main funeral oration, and the triumvirs once again
to present themselves as Lenin’s true disciples and heirs.
Loyal but Unrepentant
The 13th party
congress was held in May, 1924. In preparation, the central committee assembled
to hear for the first time Lenin’s testament, which they received in stunned
silence. Stalin, whose removal Lenin demanded from the grave, was saved by
Zinoviev and Kamenev, who assured the other members that Stalin had corrected
the defects that had turned Lenin against him, and implored him to remain as
General Secretary. Over the protest of Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, the central
committee decided against the release of the testament to the party membership
or to the assembled delegates at the coming congress; only the heads of
delegations were to be discretely informed. Trotsky, perhaps still sensitive to
accusations of personal ambition, remained silent during these deliberations.
The thirteenth congress,
unlike the 12th, presented no challenge to the triumvirs. Stalin had
used the very powers of appointment decried by Trotsky in The new
course to weed out oppositionists and secure the selection of
machine-loyal delegates. The congress was, in Deutscher’s words, “an orgy of
denunciation”.[4]
Trotsky, however, was
still restrained by unqualified party patriotism. It was, after all, the
Bolsheviks that had been the only party in the world to lead a successful
proletarian revolution. And it was the Bolsheviks who saw themselves as the
sole guardians of the revolution’s gains in a country with a non-socialist
peasant majority, a disintegrated working class and a shattered economy.
Trotsky did not regard the maintenance of party unity as unimportant, and
refused to go as far as the 46 in demanding an end to the ban on factions and
groupings. But rising to answer his accusers, he said:
….Comrades,
none of us wishes to or can be right against the party. In the last instance
the party is always right, because it is the only historic instrument which the
working class possesses for the solution of its fundamental tasks… The English
have a saying ‘my country right or wrong’. With much greater justification we
can say: My party right or wrong—wrong on certain partial, specific issues or
at certain moments…[5]
It was these partial
wrongs that Trotsky said he was seeking to rectify, completely within the
framework of a party discipline that now demanded that he cease all
oppositional activity. Yet Zinoviev was not satisfied with his declarations of
loyalty or his acceptance of these restrictions. For the first time in party
history, he demanded that Trotsky recant his criticisms before the congress.
Krupskaya, while not supporting Trotsky’s views, protested that such a demand
was psychologically and politically insupportable. For his part, Trotsky
refused to capitulate:
:
“...nothing
would be easier than to say before the party that all these criticisms and all
these declarations, warnings and protests were mistaken from beginning to end.
I cannot say so, however, because, comrades, I do not think so”[6]
Consolidating the
Victory
The next move of the
triumvirs was to carry the anti-Trotsky campaign into the Communist
International, headed by Gregory Zinoviev. Zinoviev demanded, and ultimately
obtained, a condemnation of Trotsky by the Comintern executive, over the
initial objections of the Polish and French parties. The docility in this
affair of the Comintern—once an equal association of courageous and
independent-minded revolutionaries—can only be explained by the failure of the
October Revolution to spread to the rest of Europe, and especially Germany, on
which the Bolsheviks had pinned their highest hopes. The debacle of the
carefully planned German insurrection of 1924 is beyond the scope of this
article. But its defeat, combined with earlier Finnish, Hungarian, and Italian
reversals, clearly sapped the self-assurance of foreign Communist
leaders, making them less confident in their own abilities, and more inclined
to follow Moscow’s lead. The ruling triumvirate took full advantage of this
situation, using it to expand its ability to promote and demote foreign leaders
much in the same way that Stalin, as General Secretary, used his
broad powers of appointment to select his own loyalists as local party chiefs
and conference delegates. The triumvirs were quick to blame the failure of the
German revolution on the head of that country’s party, Heinrich Brandler, who
was quickly deposed. Though by no means uncritical of Brandler, Trotsky
registered a protest against the Comintern executive acting as a “guillotine”
for foreign leaders.
Back in Russia, the
triumvirs announced the “Lenin Levy”, a mass recruitment of 240,000 new workers
to the party in honour of the departed leader. Trotsky, it is true, had urged
the expansion of working-class membership as a counterweight to the party’s
increasing preponderance of administrators and technicians. But, where Trotsky
had cautioned that new proletarian recruits be carefully screened for
leadership ability and political consciousness, the triumvirs threw open the
doors indiscriminately to inexperienced and untutored workers from the factory
bench, calculating—correctly—that these novices would prove pliable to
directions from on high. With this move, the triumvirs perfected a
well-rehearsed technique: appearing to address genuine
anti-bureaucratic grievances while in fact strengthening the grip of
the bureaucracy.
And to this stratagem a
new one was added. The triumvirs now introduced into the history of October
1917 a previously unheard of political body—absent from any contemporary
account—called the “revolutionary centre”, which supposedly directed the
insurrection, and which was headed by Stalin. Just as Stalin, encountering
frictions with Krupskaya, was to remark that the party leadership could “find
Lenin a new widow”, so he and his collaborators now contrived to find a
replacement for the body that actually directed the rising—the Military
Revolutionary Committee, headed by Leon Trotsky. What Trotsky was to call “the
Stalin school of falsification” had made its debut.
Lessons in Context
We finally arrive, by
way of a lengthy historical detour, at the starting point of this
article: Trotsky’s The lessons of October, written in
September of 1924. The detour was necessary to counter the
impression created by Jack Conrad that this essay was conceived by Trotsky for
the petty personal motive of inflating his reputation at the expense of
“Lenin’s loyal lieutenants”, instead of what it was: an episode in an unfolding
conflict over the nature and direction of the Soviet state and its governing
party. Far from initiating an attack on “old Bolsheviks” and their honour,
Trotsky rose to defend his own historical reputation against a swelling tide of
innuendo and outright falsehood. Muzzled by the faction ban and “party
discipline” from openly arguing his positions before the party or the people,
could he be faulted for turning to recent history—the only medium
left to him for expressing his views? Constantly cast under suspicion for his
Menshevik past and pre-1917 differences with Lenin, can he be accused of
self-promotion by pointing out that the ultimate test of a revolutionary is not
past organizational differences, but the revolution? Or that in the defining
moment, he, Trotsky, had demonstrated the audacity and clarity of
vision which his accusers notoriously lacked? Jack Conrad reverses
the roles of accuser and accused, only to disparage the accused for mounting a
forceful defence.
The
principal argument of The lessons of October is that the
triumvirs, for whom Trotsky remained an at best partially reconstructed
Menshevik, themselves pursued in October 1917 a quasi-Menshevik line of
pressuring the provisional government to the left, and that a sharp
intervention by Lenin was required to reposition the party for the seizure of
power. I shall consider in a future article the accuracy of Lars Lih’s and Jack
Conrad’s contention that The lessons of October is
the original and uncorroborated source of this account.
But I would also suggest
that a broader issue of historical verisimilitude is at stake—one that
counterposes the ability to penetrate beneath the surface of events to the
tendency to adapt to prevailing moods and circumstances. Trotsky’s principal
adversaries in 1924—Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin--- were leaders of a
revolutionary party. Yet their response to the February revolution was a
somewhat more left-slanted version of support for the then widely acclaimed
classless “revolutionary democracy” that had toppled the tsar. Exhibiting a
similar adaptive mentality seven years later, they embraced the prevailing
bureaucratic power configuration that had evolved as a result of the civil war
and the revolution’s isolation. To them, the existing methods were most
effective in “getting things
done”; the compatibility of such methods with the
proletarian democracy for which the revolution had been carried out, or the
prospects for world revolution on which it had staked its future, were, at
best, secondary considerations, and, and when invoked against
prevailing practices, willful obstruction.
This pragmatism also
found a reflection in image of themselves and their regime. If unquestioning
obedience is the most efficient way to produce results, those who issue the
orders rely not only upon coercion but also tend to legitimate their
authority by presenting their decisions as unfailingly correct, and themselves
as possessing a monopoly of revolutionary wisdom. Trotsky noted this tendency
in later official accounts of the Red Army during the Civil War:
…
you would think that there are only heroes in our ranks; that every soldier
burns with a desire to fight; that the enemy is always superior in numbers;
that all our orders are reasonable and appropriate to the occasion; that the
execution is always brilliant …[7]
It was only a projection
into the recent past of the triumvirs’ self-proclaimed infallibility in 1924 to
present the Bolsheviks of 1917 as a similarly unified party, led by an
all-knowing, quasi-deified Lenin, with themselves as his faithful apostles,
pursuing a straight and unerring course toward the conquest of power.
Unfortunately, Lars T. Lih’s and Jack Conrad’s talk of the ‘fully armed’
Bolsheviks of 1917 augments this salutary myth, instantly recognisable as
dubious to anyone with a genuine sense of what revolutions are like.
Revolutions are the volcanic eruptions of history, leaving no accustomed
routines or habits of thought undisturbed, including those of revolutionaries.
The Bolsheviks would have to have been a hermetically sealed vessel
of timeless Marxist truth to have greeted the maelstrom of October with the
undivided resolution that Lih and Conrad credit them with. Leaving to one side
the specific views of individual Bolsheviks, which account makes
more intuitive sense: the triumvirate- Lih-Conrad- narrative of Bolshevik
infallibility; or Trotsky’s portrayal of a party of human beings, with varying
shades of opinion and individual dispositions, organically connected to the
society around them, attempting to find their bearings amid events unfolding
with mercurial speed, and rising to the occasion only as the result of an
internal crisis? Elementary social realism is as important an antidote to
heroic legends as detailed factual knowledge. It too should weigh in
determining whether Lih and Conrad have “put the record straight” or
only succeeded in adding to historical fictions a little too close for comfort
to Stalinist hagiography.
Jim Creegan
New York,
October 27, 2018
[1] Deutscher, The prophet
unarmed, p.119
[2] Trotsky, The challenge of the left
opposition (1923-25), (New York, 1975), p. 91
[3] Ibid. p. 127
[4] Deutscher, p. 138
[5] Ibid, p. 139
[6] Ibid. p. 139
[7] Quoted in Deutscher, p. 120
