The Heart of a Stranger

by André Naffis-Sahely

  “We want you to do all manner of foolish things. Instead of screws we’ll have belts, we’ll use belts to screw in nuts. And levers instead of wheels. And a wheel will do the job of a belt. Impossible? Outdated prejudice! At the sharp end of a bayonet, nothing is impossible. A theology professor can bake gingerbread and a porter give lectures on aesthetics. A surgeon can sweep the street and a laundress preside over the courtroom.”

  “We’re afraid! We can’t do it, we don’t know how. A porter lecturing on aesthetics may believe in the value of what he is doing, but a professor baking gingerbread knows only too well that his gingerbread may be anything under the sun — but it certainly isn’t gingerbread.”

  Take to your heels! Run!

  Somewhere over there… in Kiev… in Yekaterinburg… in Odessa… some place where children are studying and people are working, it’ll still be possible to live a little… For the time being.

  And so on they run.

  But they are few and they are becoming fewer still. They’re growing weak, falling by the wayside. They’re running after a way of life that is itself on the run.

  And now that the motley herd has wandered onto the Gadarene cliff for its final leap, we can see how very small it is. It could be gathered up into some little ark and sent out to sea. But there the seven unclean pairs would devour the seven clean pairs and then die of overeating.8

  And the souls of the clean would weep over the dead ark:

  “It grieves us to have suffered the same fate as the unclean, to have died together with them on the ark.”

  Yes, my dears. There’s not much you can do about it. You’ll all die together. Some from eating, some from being eaten. But “impartial history” will make no distinction. You will all be numbered together.

  “And the entire herd plunged from the cliff and drowned.”

  Translated from Russian by Anne Marie Jackson

  8 A slightly inaccurate reference to a passage in Genesis, where God tells Noah, “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and the female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and the female.”

  JOSÉ CARLOS MARIÁTEGUI

  The Exile of Trotsky

  Trotsky exiled from Soviet Russia: here is an event to which international revolutionary opinion cannot become easily accustomed. Revolutionary optimism never admitted the possibility that this revolution would end, like the French, condemning its heroes. But what in good sense should not have been expected is that the task of organizing the first great socialist state would be fulfilled with unanimous agreement, without debate or violent conflicts, by a party of more than a million impassioned militants. Trotskyist opinion has a useful role in Soviet politics. It represents, if one wishes to define it in two words, Marxist orthodoxy, confronting the overflowing and unruly current of Russian reality. It exemplifies the working-class, urban, industrial sense of the socialist revolution. The Russian revolution owes its international, ecumenical value, its character as a precursor of the rise of a new civilization, to the ideas that Trotsky and his comrades insist upon in their full strength and import. Without vigilant criticism, which is the best proof of the vitality of the Bolshevik Party, the Soviet government would probably run the risk of falling into a formalist, mechanical bureaucratism.

  But, to this point, events have not proven Trotskyism correct from the point of view of its ability to replace Stalin in power with a greater objective capacity to realize the Marxist programme. The essential part of the Trotskyist opposition’s platform is its critical part. But in the estimation of those elements who might plot against Soviet policies, neither Stalin nor Bukharin is very far from subscribing to most of the fundamental concepts of Trotsky and his adepts. The Trotskyist proposals and solutions, on the other hand, do not have the same solidity. In most of what relates to agrarian and industrial policies and the struggle against bureaucratism and the NEP spirit, Trotskyism tastes of a theoretical radicalism that has not been condensed into concrete and precise formulas. On this terrain, Stalin and the majority, along with having the responsibility for administration, have a more real sense of the possibilities.

  The Russian revolution, which, like any great revolution, advances along a difficult path that it clears with its own impetus, has not yet known easy or idle days. It is the work of heroic and exceptional men, and for this very reason has only been possible through the greatest and most tremendous creative tension. The Bolshevik Party, therefore, neither is nor can be a peaceful and unanimous school. Lenin imposed his creative leadership until shortly before his death, but not even with this extraordinary leader’s immense and unique authority were violent debates unusual inside the party. Lenin gained his authority with his own strength; he later maintained it through the superiority and perspicacity of his thought. His points of view always prevailed because they best corresponded to reality. Many times, though, they had to defeat the resistance of his own lieutenants of the Bolshevik old guard.

  Lenin’s death, which left vacant the post of creative leader with immense personal authority, would have been followed by a period of profound disequilibrium in any party less disciplined and organic than the Russian Communist Party. Trotsky stood out from all his comrades because of the brilliant distinctiveness of his personality. But he not only lacked a solid and long-standing connection with the Leninist team. His relationship with the majority of its members had been quite uncordial before the revolution. Trotsky, as is well known, had an almost individual position among Russian revolutionaries until 1917. He did not belong to the Bolshevik Party, whose leaders, even Lenin himself, polemicized bitterly with him more than once. Lenin intelligently and generously appreciated the value of collaborating with Trotsky, who himself — as the volume of his writings on the revolution’s leader attests — unreservedly and unjealously respected an authority consecrated by the most inspiring and enthralling work of revolutionary consciousness. But if almost all the distance between Lenin and Trotsky could be erased, the identification between Trotsky and the party itself could not be equally complete. Trotsky could not count on the full confidence of the party, as much as his performance as people’s commissar merited unanimous admiration. The party machinery was in the hands of members of the old Leninist guard, who always felt themselves a bit distant from and alien to Trotsky, who, for his part, was not able to fully join them in a single bloc. Moreover, Trotsky, it seems, does not possess the special talents of a politician as Lenin did to the greatest degree. He does not know how to gather men; he is not acquainted with the secrets of managing a party. His singular position — equidistant from Bolshevism and Menshevism — during the years between 1905 and 1917, besides disconnecting him from the revolutionary team that prepared and realized the revolution with Lenin, must have disaccustomed him to the concrete practice of a party leader.

  As long as the mobilization of all revolutionary energies against the threats of reaction continued, Bolshevik unity was ensured by the pathos of war. But once the work of stabilization and normalization began, the discrepancies between individuals and tendencies had to manifest themselves. The lack of an exceptional personality like Trotsky would have reduced the opposition to more modest terms. In this case, it would not have come to a violent schism. But with Trotsky at the command post, the opposition quickly took an insurrectionary and combative tone to which the majority and the government could not be indifferent.

  Trotsky, moreover, is a man of the cosmopolis. Zinoviev, at another moment during a Communist congress, accused him of ignoring and neglecting the peasant. He has, in any case, an international sense of the socialist revolution. His notable writings on the transitory stabilization of capitalism are among the most alert and sagacious criticisms of the era. But this very international sense of the revolution, which gives him such prestige on the world scene, momentarily robs him of his power in the practice of Russian politics. The Russian revolution is in a period of national organization. It is not a matter, at the moment, of es
tablishing socialism internationally, but of realizing it in a nation that, while being a territory populated by 130 million inhabitants that overflows onto two continents, does not yet constitute a geographical and historical unit. It is logical that, in this stage, the Russian revolution is represented by men who more deeply sense its national character and problems. Stalin, a pure Slav, is one of these men. He belongs to a phalanx of revolutionaries who always remained rooted in the Russian soil, while Trotsky, Radek and Rakovsky belong to a phalanx that passed the larger part of their lives in exile. They were apprenticed as international revolutionaries in exile, an apprenticeship that has given the Russian revolution its universalist language and its ecumenical vision. For now, alone with its problems, Russia prefers more simply and purely Russian men.

  Translated from Spanish by Michael Pearlman

  LEON TROTSKY

  Letter to the Workers of the USSR

  Greetings to the Soviet workers, collective farmers, soldiers of the Red Army and sailors of the Red Navy! Greetings from distant Mexico where I found refuge after the Stalinist clique had exiled me to Turkey and after the bourgeoisie had hounded me from country to country! Dear Comrades! The lying Stalinist press has been maliciously deceiving you for a long time on all questions, including those which relate to myself and my political co-thinkers. You possess no workers’ press; you read only the press of the bureaucracy, which lies systematically so as to keep you in darkness and thus render secure the rule of a privileged parasitic caste. Those who dare raise their voices against the universally hated bureaucracy are called “Trotskyists”, agents of a foreign power; branded as spies — yesterday it was spies of Germany, today it is spies of England and France — and then sent to face the firing squad. Tens of thousands of revolutionary fighters have fallen before the muzzles of GPU Mausers in the USSR and in countries abroad, especially in Spain. All of them were depicted as agents of Fascism. Do not believe this abominable slander! Their crime consisted of defending workers and peasants against the brutality and rapacity of the bureaucracy. The entire Old Guard of Bolshevism, all the collaborators and assistants of Lenin, all the fighters of the October revolution, all the heroes of the Civil War, have been murdered by Stalin. In the annals of history Stalin’s name will for ever be recorded with the infamous brand of Cain!

  The October revolution was accomplished for the sake of the toilers and not for the sake of new parasites. But due to the lag of the world revolution, due to the fatigue and, to a large measure, the backwardness of the Russian workers and especially the Russian peasants, there raised itself over the Soviet Republic and against its peoples a new oppressive and parasitic caste, whose leader is Stalin. The former Bolshevik Party was turned into an apparatus of the caste. The world organization which the Communist International once was is today a pliant tool of the Moscow oligarchy. Soviets of Workers and Peasants have long perished. They have been replaced by degenerate Commissars, Secretaries and GPU agents. But, fortunately, among the surviving conquests of the October revolution are the nationalized industry and the collectivized Soviet economy. Upon this foundation Workers’ Soviets can build a new and happier society. This foundation cannot be surrendered by us to the world bourgeoisie under any conditions. It is the duty of revolutionists to defend tooth and nail every position gained by the working class, whether it involves democratic rights, wage scales, or so colossal a conquest of mankind as the nationalization of the means of production and planned economy. Those who are incapable of defending conquests already gained can never fight for new cries. Against the imperialist foe we will defend the USSR with all our might. However, the conquests of the October revolution will serve the people only if they prove themselves capable of dealing with the Stalinist bureaucracy, as in their day they dealt with the Tsarist bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie.

  If Soviet economic life had been conducted in the interests of the people; if the bureaucracy had not devoured and vainly wasted the major portion of the national income; if the bureaucracy had not trampled underfoot the vital interests of the population, then the USSR would have been a great magnetic pole of attraction for the toilers of the world and the inviolability of the Soviet Union would have been assured. But the infamous oppressive regime of Stalin has deprived the USSR of its attractive power. During the war with Finland, not only the majority of the Finnish peasants but also the majority of the Finnish workers, proved to be on the side of their bourgeoisie. This is hardly surprising since they know of the unprecedented oppression to which the Stalinist bureaucracy subjects the workers of near-by Leningrad and the whole of the USSR. The Stalinist bureaucracy, so bloodthirsty and ruthless at home and so cowardly before the imperialist enemies, has thus become the main source of war danger to the Soviet Union. The old Bolshevik Party and the Third International have disintegrated and decomposed. The honest and advanced revolutionists have organized abroad the Fourth International, which has sections already established in most of the countries of the world. I am a member of this new International. In participating in this work I remain under the very same banner that I served together with you or your fathers and your older brothers in 1917 and throughout the years of the Civil War, the very same banner under which, together with Lenin, we built the Soviet state and the Red Army.

  The goal of the Fourth International is to extend the October revolution to the whole world and at the same time to regenerate the USSR by purging it of the parasitic bureaucracy. This can be achieved only in one way: By the workers, peasants, Red Army soldiers and Red Navy sailors, rising against the new caste of oppressors and parasites. To prepare this uprising, a new party is needed — a bold and honest revolutionary organization of the advanced workers. The Fourth International sets as its task the building of such a party in the USSR. Advance, workers! Be the first to rally to the banner of Marx and Lenin which is now the banner of the Fourth International! Learn how to create, in the conditions of Stalinist illegality, tightly fused, reliable revolutionary circles! Establish contacts between these circles! Learn how to establish contacts through loyal and reliable people, especially the sailors, with your revolutionary co-thinkers in bourgeois lands! It is difficult, but it can be done. The present war will spread more and more, piling ruins on ruins, breeding more and more sorrow, despair and protest, driving the whole world towards new revolutionary explosions. The world revolution shall reinvigorate the Soviet working masses with new courage and resoluteness and shall undermine the bureaucratic props of Stalin’s caste. It is necessary to prepare for this hour by stubborn systematic revolutionary work. The fate of our country, the future of our people, the destiny of our children and grandchildren are at stake.

  Down With Cain Stalin and his Camarilla!

  Down With the Rapacious Bureaucracy!

  Long Live the Soviet Union, the Fortress of the Toilers!

  Long Live the World Socialist Revolution!

  Fraternally,

  LEON TROTSKY

  May, 1940

  Translated from Russian by the Fourth International

  VICTOR SERGE

  from Mexican Notebooks

  4th April 1942

  Stefan Zweig committed suicide in Rio at the end of March. I was in Veracruz, waiting for the Nyassa, about whose fate grim rumours were circulating which I didn’t take seriously (and yet it seemed inconceivable that Laurette was arriving). I read about it in a newspaper. Aged sixty; with his wife, some thirty years younger. Barbiturates. A magazine photo shows them lying in bed, asleep beside each other. On the bedside table, a glass, a bottle of mineral water, a box of matches; life’s last trifling objects, practical, of no interest, of the kind we no longer see. His latest book has just been published: Brazil, Land of the Future […] I have no doubt he is sincere. Not the same future, a land, a man, a couple. His suicide note says he can no longer live like this, amidst the collapse of a culture and a world, in reality a foreigner, as he must have felt in the Americas. Vaguely thought, more felt, Zweig was never a fighter, nothin
g but a great, refined intellectual, an artist — and ultimately feeble, feeble through being accustomed to comfort, through his idea of culture as something definitively acquired and of unique value, through being accustomed to literary success and the good life. I remember his home; it was the home of a hugely privileged patrician, on one of Salzburg’s hills, in a most serene, romantic place, most beautiful to look at, one of the most civilized in the world […] I understood a lot about the nature of the man in admiring his house; he felt he was read in the name of Art. At the time fairly good on the psychology of emotions in the novel, easy success, but of good quality all the same. It all lacked fundamental vigour, humanism that was only skin-deep and intellectually shallow, based on a superficial vision of the tragedy of today’s world. Repression in the face of this tragedy; let me live with my noble thoughts, the psychologist and poet is entitled to this delightful house on the peaceful hillside, entitled to music, entitled to a privileged life, for his nobility enriches the world. That intelligentsia is being torn up and crushed by the hurricane, it will only be able to rediscover its purpose in life by understanding the hurricane and flinging itself into it heart and soul. True, for a social category, impossible for most of those who comprise it. His end seems logical and courageous. Nothing more natural than the dignified refusal to live in conditions that are unacceptable. Being uprooted, the void, age too with its declining faculties, the fear that one is not sufficiently alive to attain moments that are worth living for, the fear of physical deterioration. Above all the torpor of a mind that has lost its source of sustenance, the exchanges that stimulated it. Under the harsh Rio sun, it must have been particularly palpable: unbearable.