Trotsky greeted the news that the German uprising had failed with disappointment. Whether he had declined to take part because he sensed failure is impossible to say. Perhaps his work as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council was too pressing? Whatever the case, the fact is that when a concrete opportunity to practise ‘permanent revolution’ presented itself, he had been absent.
The Politburo started looking for culprits. The names of Brandler, Zinoviev, Radek, Pyatakov and Trotsky came up in the heated debate. Many thought that Trotsky had simply wanted to stay out of the fight. At Zinoviev’s insistence, the ECCI found its chief scapegoat in Brandler, who was defended rather weakly only by Trotsky, Radek and Pyatakov.
The failure in Germany served Trotsky as a reminder: the world revolution required prolonged and thorough preparation, but it was not a manual on civil war that was needed, and it was Stalin, not Trotsky, who would implement the idea of world revolution, albeit in a different form, after the Second World War, and without Comintern’s slogans. The anti-imperialist struggle aimed not only at the national and social emancipation of peoples, but also at the spread of socialism. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin saw that the idea of dividing the world along class lines by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat was doomed. After the October revolution it seemed natural that unlimited force could be used against some in order to achieve happiness for others, and the idea that world revolution was inevitable was equally accepted by the Bolsheviks as natural. If this was so, why were such non-proletarians as Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky necessary? Lenin did not live to see what would come of his ‘plans’. Until August 1940 Trotsky believed that the experiment had been started and aborted. Stalin succeeded in making the Gulag the symbol of the country where the first socialist revolution had occurred. Had the ‘World Soviet Federation’ ever been created, it would have conformed to the Stalinist model.
Terrorism and Communism
Terrorism and Communism was the tide of a book Trotsky published in 1920 in Petrograd in response to one Kautsky had brought out in Berlin in 1919 under the same name. Together, the two books provide an eloquent comparison of attitudes from opposite ends of the spectrum of European social democracy. Throughout the two hundred pages of his polemical argument, Trotsky employed language that had become characteristic of Russian political argument: Kautsky was a ‘hypocritical conciliator’, ‘unworthy falsifier’, ‘besmircher’ and ‘total zero’, among many other things. Trotsky’s counter-arguments, meanwhile, exposed just how wrongheaded were many of the notions he shared with the rest of the Bolshevik leadership and which they had enshrined in law.
Trotsky attacked Kautsky for complaining about Soviet practice, while failing to offer an alternative:
The Bolsheviks were not alone in the arena of the Russian revolution; we have seen and still see—whether in power or in opposition—SRs (no less than five groupings and tendencies), Mensheviks (no less than three tendencies), Plekhanovites, Maximalists, Anarchists … Absolutely all ‘shades of socialism’—to use Kautsky’s language—have tested their strength and shown what they want and what they are capable of … The political keyboard ought to be wide enough for Kautsky to find an appropriate Marxist tone for the Russian revolution. But he is silent. He cannot stand the Bolshevik melody which offends his ears, but he doesn’t look for another. The conclusion is obvious: the old ballroom pianist doesn’t want to play the instrument of revolution at all.49
In a sense, Trotsky was right: to a social democrat who believed in the constructive nature of social and economic reform, the revolution was an irrelevance.
When composing his reply to Kautsky, Trotsky asked Tomsky to provide him with some statistics to help him ‘smash Kautsky for good’.50 Kautsky, who had espoused the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat before the turn of the century, recoiled from its Russian manifestation as ‘coercion of the majority by the minority’. In support of Kautsky, Potresov wrote: ‘Only Kautsky has raised the issue of the incompatibility of the proletarian socialist revolution and violence … The dictatorship of the proletariat is totally obsolete, it is a tribute to the past.’51 Kautsky had written that only by achieving a majority in parliament could social democracy open a path to socialist change. To this Trotsky replied:
In order to write a pamphlet on the dictatorship [of the proletariat], one needs an inkwell and a batch of paper, and maybe a few ideas in one’s head. But in order to establish and consolidate a dictatorship [of the proletariat], one has to prevent the bourgeoisie from undermining the state power of the proletariat. Kautsky obviously thinks it can be done with some whining pamphlets … [Whoever] rejects terrorism in principle, i.e. pressurizing and intimidating methods against fierce and armed counter-revolution, must also reject the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. Whoever rejects the dictatorship of the proletariat, rejects the social revolution and abandons hope of socialism.52
In practice, this meant Trotsky’s issuing orders, such as one he sent to the military commander at Vologda on 4 August 1918: ‘Root out the counter-revolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps—this is a necessary condition of success … Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service …’53 The message was clear, whether it was for Kautsky or a Red Army commander at the front: there would be no socialism without violence and coercion.
Trotsky and the other leaders genuinely believed that they possessed the ‘revolutionary right’ to determine the lives of millions of people, though many doubted the existence of such a right. Even Boris Savinkov, himself a past advocate of coercion, could write: ‘The Russian people does not want Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky, not just because the Communists are mobilizing and shooting people, seizing their grain and ruining Russia. They don’t want them for the simple reason that … no one elected them.’54 Trotsky shared Lenin’s view that only the Communists could express the workers’ interests, and it was from this belief that all of Bolshevik privilege and self-importance sprang. Speaking at a conference of Communist military school cells on 10 December 1922, Trotsky declared: ‘We say, following Napoleon, that every Red Army man and every recruit has a marshal’s baton [in his knapsack], but we also say that the baton is given only to Communists.’55
Thus, a group of people who had not been elected or appointed by the people quickly learned how to manipulate the people’s interests and needs to their own advantage. They also soon learned how to exploit the privileges and benefits for which they had recently so harshly attacked the tsarist ruling élite. It was considered natural forevery leading figure to have his own country house—in Trotsky’s case the palace and great estate at Arkhangelskoe, a thirty-minute ride from Moscow, that had belonged to the Yusupovs—a personal physician, a large staff, good food, luxury automobiles, and so on. When Trotsky went to the Crimea in October 1922 on routine business, he was accompanied by a large security force and two automobiles for which two extra railcars had to be attached to the train.56
Kautsky, in his book, had identified democracy as the sole means to achieve the ideals of socialism. Trotsky’s response was mocking:
History has not turned the nation into a debating society where the transfer to socialist revolution is passed by a polite vote of the majority. On the contrary, violent revolution was necessary precisely because the urgent demands of history were powerless to cut a path for themselves through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy … When the Russian Soviet regime dispersed the Constituent Assembly, it seemed to the leaders of Western social democracy if not exactly the end of the world, then at least a crude and arbitrary break with the entire socialist past.57
In defence of Kautsky, Potresov had written: ‘By their demonstrative dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, by their universal destruction of liberty, by establishing an officially permitted way of thinking, the Bolsheviks since the very first days of their statehood injected into the public mind a spirit that is hostile to demo
cratic civil society.’58 Trotsky could declare unequivocally that ‘it is triply hopeless to try to come to power by way of parliamentary democracy.’
To Kautsky’s call for new elections to the Constituent Assembly, Trotsky replied that this would not happen ‘because we see no need for the Assembly. If the first Constituent Assembly could still play a momentary progressive role by sanctioning the Soviet regime convincingly for the petty bourgeois elements … the fact is the Soviet regime does not need the blessing of the Constituent Assembly’s tarnished authority.’59
Trotsky was even harsher in his response to Kautsky’s views on the use of terror, or the use of coercion. Lamenting the widespread idea that ‘terrorism is the essence of revolution’, Kautsky had written: ‘The revolution brings us terrorism practised by socialist governments. The Bolsheviks in Russia embarked first on this course and have therefore been roundly condemned by all socialists who do not take the Bolshevik point of view.’ He then attacked the system of hostage-taking. Trotsky replied: ‘The form of repression or its degree is of course not a question of principle. It is a pragmatic question … The widespread use of shootings in the civil war is explained by this simple, but decisive fact … Only someone who rejects in principle (in words) all and any violence, and therefore any war or any uprising, can condemn state terror by the revolutionary class on “moral” grounds. And to do so one simply has to be a hypocritical Quaker.’60 Red terror, he argued, was often provoked by White terror, but he failed to recognize that, by rejecting the social democratic path of reform, the Bolsheviks had, willingly or otherwise, limited their own choice of methods. For Trotsky, revolution was synonymous with violence, which, like Kautsky, he called terror.
Kautsky had also raised the question of the role of the Party and its attitude to the peasant issue, arguing that by substituting the dictatorship of the Party for the dictatorship of the Soviets and in ‘destroying or driving other parties underground’, the Bolsheviks had eliminated the possibility of political competition. Trotsky replied: ‘The Bolshevik-Left SR bloc, which lasted a few months, ended in a bloody rift. True, as far as the bloc was concerned, the rift cost our unreliable fellow-travellers more than it cost us.’ A regime of alliances, agreements, deals and concessions did not appeal to Bolsheviks in principle, Trotsky admitted.61 In relation to the peasants, he claimed, the monopoly of power had made possible a number of harsh lessons for the kulaks and middle peasants, as a result of which ‘the fundamental political goal has been achieved. The mighty kulak class, if it has not been completely destroyed, has been deeply shaken, its self-confidence undermined. The middle peasants, who lack political form, are starting to see the leading workers as their representatives.’62
Trotsky expressed himself most fully at the Third All-Russian Trade Union Congress of April 1920 when he addressed the question of the methods to be used in building the new society. A Menshevik delegation of thirty-three, headed by Dan, Abramovich and Martov, attended and vigorously opposed Trotsky’s report. Abramovich was especially irreconcilable, and roundly condemned Trotsky’s basic idea of forced labour. If socialism required the militarization of labour, he exclaimed, ‘how does it differ from Egyptian slavery? The pharaohs built the pyramids by forcing the masses to work.’ Universal compulsion, the social democrats perceived, represented a major threat to socialism in general. After emigrating to the West (first to Berlin in 1920, then to France and finally to the USA in 1940), Abramovich kept up the struggle against Bolshevism, but he also attempted to enter into a dialogue with them. At the beginning of 1926 the foreign department of OGPU reported that he had attempted to meet Soviet representatives to discuss the return of Mensheviks to the USSR to participate in the work of building socialism. According to the agency report, Abramovich himself did not expect that such negotiations would succeed.63 Other contacts were made. On the eve of the publication of Stalin’s 1936 Constitution, Dan and Abramovich wrote an open letter to the All-Union Congress of Soviets, stating that the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks had ‘common goals’ and differed only over methods. The path proposed by the Mensheviks, they claimed, had been more viable because ‘it would have protected the toiling masses from suffering and sacrifice, and maintained the chance to build democratic socialism’.64 The dwindling Menshevik party abroad was still trying to bring the Soviet Communists ‘back to democracy’. Despite their title—‘The Foreign Delegation of the RSDLP’—these were the last Mohicans of Russian social democracy. Trotsky never revised his negative view of them.
The speeches Trotsky made at the Trade Union Congress of 1920, and which had been approved by the Politburo, were interesting—however deeply flawed their reasoning—because their author was like no other leader, his arguments, style and content being original, inimitable and striking. Dressed in tight leather, his hair still abundant, calculating the effect of his gestures, his pauses and intonation, he was every inch the military commissar from the front. (As early as 1918, he had cabled Sklyansky to send him a new leather uniform and boots.65) He opened his speech in an original way by declaring that ‘as a rule, man tries to avoid work … You might say that he is a rather lazy animal,’ and from this he deduced that ‘the only way to attract the labour force needed for economic tasks is by introducing labour conscription’.66 The argument would have been unanswerable had it applied to a crisis, but in fact it was applied as a fundamental principle and for a long time to come: ‘[We] must make it clear to ourselves once and for all that the very principle of labour conscription has replaced the principle of free labour as radically and irreversibly as socialization of the means of production has replaced capitalist ownership.’67 Trotsky’s advocacy of forced labour evokes Abramovich’s question as to how such a form of socialism differed from Egyptian slavery.
Translating his thoughts on labour conscription into practical measures, Trotsky said: ‘The movement of mobilized labour must be effected over the shortest distance. The number of mobilized workers must correspond to the scale of the economic job in hand. Tools and food supplies must be secured for mobilized [workers] in good time … Mobilized [workers] must feel sure when they are at work that their labour is being used prudently … Wherever possible direct mobilization should be substituted by a labour task, that is, by imposing on a district the obligation to deliver, say, so many cubic [metres] of firewood by such and such a date, or to transport so many [kilograms] of pig-iron to such and such a station by cart and so on.’68 The armed forces, which were gradually being run down as the civil war approached its end, were used as the starting point for this process, and Trotsky oversaw the conversion of at least seven full armies into labour forces. Translated into Stalinist terms, such notions acquire a horrific meaning and remind us that Trotsky was one of those who initiated totalitarian coercion in theory and practice.
To Menshevik objections that forced labour was always unproductive, Trotsky retorted that the shift ‘from bourgeois anarchy to socialist economy without a revolutionary dictatorship and without coercive forms of economic organization’ was unthinkable. He described the Menshevik programme as ‘the Milky Way, without a grain monopoly, without eliminating the market, without a revolutionary dictatorship and without the militarization of labour’.69
Even allowing for the circumstances in which Trotsky read his report, it is plain that the Bolsheviks were not simply seeking a way out of the country’s profound crisis, but were also laying the foundations of the totalitarian system. It was precisely during those years—the New Economic Policy was merely an attempt to introduce a correction—that the new society was initiated. Trotsky was not solely responsible for what was done, but with Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership he was an interpreter of Marxism in Russian conditions. As early as 27 December 1919, with Lenin’s approval, the Sovnarkom accepted Trotsky’s proposal that a special commission under his, Trotsky’s, chairmanship be established to draw up a plan for the introduction of labour conscription.70 Within a few days Trotsky asked M.D. Bonch-Bruevich to est
imate the number of people and the amount of transport and technical support the army would need to mobilize people for labour service, and requested Bonch-Bruevich to take charge of the preparatory work of the project.71
As for wages, Trotsky told the Trade Union Congress, ‘for us they are above all not a way to secure the personal existence of the individual worker, but a way of valuing that which the individual worker gives the republic through his labour’. He spoke of the need to encourage those workers who ‘collaborate in the general interest’ more than others. But, he went on, ‘in rewarding some, the workers’ state cannot but punish others, that is, those who blatantly breach labour solidarity, undermine the general work, cause serious damage to the socialist rebirth of the country. Repression in the interests of achieving economic goals is a necessary weapon of the socialist dictatorship.’ Repression was thus needed not merely for political purposes, but also for economic goals. None of this, he continued, had been written down in any book: ‘We together with you are just beginning to write this book with the sweat and blood of the toilers.’72
But as Potresov wrote: ‘The Bolshevik regime will disappear in time, just as every other despotism has disappeared, just as the Romanov dynasty disappeared when its utter decay was exposed.’ But he warned that it was ‘easier for capitalism to be reformed as socialism than to force an oligarchy to give up its privileges and to embark on the path of democratic statehood’.73 Prophetic words, indeed.
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