Trotsky

by Dmitri Volkogonov

Culture and Revolution

  Trotsky’s chief idol was the revolution, but there was another sphere of his activities that occupied an enormous place in his life, and that was literature and art. His dedication to a range of cultural values raised him above all his comrades-in-arms and the other revolutionaries, and he exerted his influence on the development of culture, while trying to employ it in the service of the revolution and to introduce the masses to the rudiments of European civilization.

  The majority of Russia’s scientists, poets, writers and painters were hostile to the October revolution, but many were not. Some vacillated and agonized, moving from outright rejection to wholehearted support, from ecstatic sympathy to disillusionment, from cautious circumspection to collaboration, from neutrality to enthusiastic collaboration in what they came to perceive as the good of the new society. Trotsky wanted to make culture an ally of the new order, but his approach was purely pragmatic and he envisaged only an auxiliary role for intellectuals and their institutions. In 1922 he began his book Literature and the Revolution, and when Lenin asked him in the middle of the year to take over as his deputy in the Sovnarkom, he declined, giving ‘overload’ of Party work as his reason. He took leave, settled down outside Moscow and forced himself to complete the book. While the Politburo was expressing its disapproval of his aloofness, he was surrounded by books and immersed in his writing.

  Why did Trotsky decline to become Lenin’s deputy, an event which for decades has remained without satisfactory explanation? On 14 January 1923 he wrote to the Politburo about a letter from Stalin on Gosplan and the Council of Labour and Defence, in which he mentioned ‘personal appointments’. He wrote that ‘a few weeks after I returned to work [from having been ill], Comrade Lenin asked me to be his deputy. I replied that if the Central Committee appoints me, then of course as always I would submit to its instructions, but that I would regard such a decision as profoundly irrational and in total conflict with all my views on organizational matters and the administration of the economy, my plans and intentions.’ The ‘very existence of [more than two] collegia of deputies’, he went on, ‘was harmful’, but the reason he had refused was that the ‘policy of the Central Committee Secretariat, Orgburo and Politburo was wrong on [the role of] the Soviets’.74 Thus, the negative view he had of what was essentially Stalin’s area of operations allowed him to rationalize the time he wanted to spend pursuing a more congenial occupation, writing.

  It was only when he was later in exile that Trotsky realized that the order he had helped to introduce was unable to provide the spiritual space for genuine creativity. In his 1936 book What is the USSR and Where is it Going?, he would write:

  The Russian people have not known a great religious Reformation, like the Germans, nor a great bourgeois revolution, like the French. Leaving aside the Reformationist revolution of seventeenth-century Britain, it was from these two crucibles that bourgeois individuality emerged, playing a very important part in the development of human personality in general: the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 signalled the first awakening of individuality in the masses … that is to say, in truncated form and at an accelerated pace, these two revolutions carried out the educational work of the bourgeois reformations and revolutions of the West. Long before this work was even roughly finished, however, the Russian revolution was shunted onto socialist rails by the course of the class war … Spiritual creativity requires liberty.

  Lamenting conditions in the mid-1930s, he concluded that ‘Great Russian culture, suffering as it is from the watchtower regime … is living chiefly at the expense of the older generation that was formed before the revolution … The youth are somehow being pressed down by a cast-iron slab.’75

  When he wrote these words he did not know that the prerevolutionary older generation was about to be virtually exterminated and that the cast-iron slab would crush the entire population. To the extent that he himself was involved in creating the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that it was responsible for wounding the soul of creativity from the outset, and of rejecting universal human values, he too shared the blame for this eventuality. Yet he did try to Europeanize the Russian way of life and to introduce the people to the rudiments of culture.

  We have seen that Trotsky was in most senses a European in his outlook, and that he generally underrated the culture, history and the unique values of Russia. Before the revolution in Kievskaya mysl he wrote a scandalous article called ‘On the Intelligentsia’, which belittled many aspects of Russian achievement. To be sure, when he published this piece in his collected works in 1922, he tried to soften its effect on Soviet readers by adding in a note: ‘The tone of this article was calculated to challenge the nationalist-circle messianism of the intellectual coffee-houses.’76 Commenting on the fact that the invasions from the East and the pressure from a richer West had prompted the excessive growth of the Russian state, Trotsky claimed that this had not only impoverished the Russian labouring masses, but had also deprived the ruling classes of nourishment. As a result, the cultural veneer that had been laid over the virgin soil of social barbarism was barely perceptible.

  How pathetic is the Russian nobility that history has given us! Where are its castles? Where were its tournaments, its crusades, its arms-bearers, minstrels and pages? Where is its chivalrous love? There is nothing, nothing whatever … Where are the great strengths and the great names? … Russia is a poor country, ours is a poor history … The slavophiles wanted to perpetuate its social anonymity and slavish spirit—[of a people] that has never risen above the herd instinct—as ‘meekness’ and ‘humility’, the finest flower of the Slavic soul.77

  After the revolution, Trotsky was more circumspect about Russia’s past and her culture. Nevertheless, in rightly pointing out the backwardness of the Russian way of life and her urban civilization, as well as the absence of other attributes of the coming machine-age, he put his finger on the unique and original quality of Russian history and culture which was indeed unlike anything to be found in Europe.

  Trotsky’s insulting views on Russia stemmed, it would seem, from the feeling of intellectual superiority that he felt towards his surroundings and which he could not hide. It may be one of the reasons he lacked close friends: it was easy to admire him when listening to his speeches or reading his pamphlets, but it was not so easy to like him—he spoke, debated and wrote as if he were standing on a pedestal of his own making. Only towards the end of his life, when he was cornered by Stalin’s hunters, did he change and express nostalgia for his homeland, frequently referring to its history or recalling great Russian writers and poets, thinkers and artists.

  In order to write about culture, to share the literary interests of the intelligentsia and follow what was being published, Trotsky had to read a phenomenal amount, which he was able to do thanks to his ability to ‘speed-read’. Apart from the library which he maintained on his armoured train, at the beginning of 1921 he ordered another one to be set up for him in Moscow. His aide, Butov, instructed Moscow District Military Commissar Dobroklonsky: ‘A library on military, political and economic questions has been organized at[Trotsky’s] Secretariat. The number of books has reached 20,000 and is constantly growing … Referring to telephone conversations with you, I request you immediately appoint not less than three people who are suitable in all respects for work in this library …’78 At Trotsky’s request, A. Solts, the chief of libraries and literary supplies for the agitational department of the Central Committee, regularly sent him all the new books he could obtain at home or from abroad. In addition, Trotsky’s office received a wide range of Soviet technical, political, economic, literary and artistic journals, as well as Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, which the Mensheviks were then publishing in Berlin.79

  Trotsky was genuinely committed to exploiting the fruits of Russian culture for the good of the revolution—‘culture-mongering’, he called it—and for this reason he wanted to carry out a revolution in the way of life, in rituals and speech. In his book Q
uestions of Lifestyle (1923), he wrote: ‘We must learn to work well: accurately, cleanly, efficiently. We need culture at work, culture in our lives, culture in our way of life. After long preparation we used the lever of armed uprising to throw off the supremacy of the exploiters. But there is no lever with which to raise culture overnight. For that a long process of self-education of the working class is needed, with the peasants alongside and in train.’80 After dismissing the mockery of intellectual sceptics as empty chatter, he declared: ‘Socialist construction is planned construction on the greatest scale. And through all the ebbs and flows, the mistakes and turns and all the contortions of NEP, the Party is following its great plan, it is educating the youth in the spirit of the plan, teaching everyone to connect his personal function to the general task which today commands him to sew on a Soviet button carefully, and tomorrow to die fearlessly under the banner of Communism.’81 These views were an accurate reflection of ideas expressed by Lenin at the Third Congress of Soviet Youth.

  Trotsky went beyond formulating the programme, however. He also proposed slogans and explained precisely how to carry them out, underlining as the chief links in the process of ‘culture-mongering’ the struggle against alcoholism, foul language, bad habits and loutish behaviour. In the early summer of 1923, while on holiday, he wrote to the Central Committee about a resolution that had been passed at a plenum in his absence:

  It seems that once again the question was raised about allowing the unrestricted sale of [alcoholic] drinks for fiscal purposes, a question I have termed explosive. In view of the enormous importance of this matter and the exceptional responsibility those who have raised it have taken upon themselves, I think it essential I put my views in writing. It is entirely clear to me that our budget can be sustained only by success in agriculture, industry and export trade (export of grain, wood and so on). The attempt to shift the budget onto an alcohol basis is an attempt to deceive history, by freeing the state budget from dependence on our own successes in economic construction … The working class generally feels in an uplifted mood. If alcohol gets into the picture, everything will go backwards and downwards.82

  The letter had no effect. Trotsky, who was not a drinker, published an article in Pravda entitled ‘Vodka, the Church and the Cinema’, in which he wrote: ‘The revolution inherited the abolition of the vodka monopoly as a fact and it adopted this fact, but for reasons of a deeply principled kind … Abolition of [a system in which] the state turns the people into drunkards entered the iron safe of the revolution’s conquests … Our economic and cultural successes will be in inverse proportion to [alcoholic consumption]. There can be no concession on this.’83

  Perceptively pointing out that ‘culture-mongering’ also focused attention on ‘the oppressed position of housewives, mothers and wives’, Trotsky remarked, in an article entitled ‘To Build Socialism Means Liberating the Woman and Protecting the Mother’: ‘There is probably no hard labour that can compare to the life of drudgery and unrelieved misery of the peasant woman today, and not only those from poor families, but also from middle-peasant families. She has no rest, no holidays, no ray of hope!’84 Without a general rise in cultural levels, he realized, there could be no socialism: ‘Tuberculosis, nervous disorders, syphilis, alcoholism, all these diseases and many others are widespread in the population. We have to cure the nation. Without it, socialism is unthinkable. We have to get at the root and the source. And where is the source of the nation, if not in the mother? The struggle for homeless mothers must be first on the agenda.’85

  When the workers at a shoe factory voted ‘to abolish swearing’, and ‘to shame and educate’ those who would not conform by fining them and publishing their names in the press, Trotsky at once responded with an article in Pravda entitled ‘The Struggle for Cultured Speech’. Analysing Russian foul language as stemming from the class system—hunger, desperation, coarseness and hopeless slavery for the lower classes; superiority, lordliness, slave-owning and the security of their base for the upper classes—Trotsky noted that cursing had sickeningly coloured the whole of Russian life.86 Going beyond the initiative of the shoe workers, he called for the language to be cleaned up, made clearer and more beautiful.

  Trotsky was plainly over-optimistic about the ‘civilizing’ effects of the revolution on the denseness, ignorance, lack of culture and atavism of the people. Frequently he advocated ‘new Soviet rituals’: ‘The revolutionary symbolism born of the workers’ state is new, clear and powerful: the red banner, the hammer and sickle, the red star, worker and peasant, comrade, the Internationale.’ He urged that everything that was created anew in everyday life be encouraged:

  There is a movement among the workers to celebrate their birthdays, rather than saints’ days, and to name new-borns not with saints’ names, but with new names that symbolize things, events or ideas that are close to us today. It was at a meeting of Moscow agitators that I heard for the first time that the new female name of Oktyabrina [derived from October] has already acquired a degree of civil right. There is the name Ninel (Lenin backwards). Rem has been used (from Revolution, Electrification and Mir [Peace, also sometimes Mechanization]). The link with the revolution is also expressed by giving babies the name Vladimir, as well as Ilyich, and even Lenin as a first name, Rosa, in honour of Rosa Luxemburg, and so on. Some births have been marked by a semi-serious ritual of ‘inspecting’ the baby in the presence of the factory committee and a special resolution registering the infant as a citizen of the RSFSR. Then the banquet would begin.

  Not all new ideas would be successful, he conceded: ‘Where’s the harm? Natural selection will take its own course. The new life will establish the forms that suit it best…’87

  Most of Trotsky’s ideas in this area were doomed to failure: customs and rituals, no less than morals, take centuries to form and cannot be changed by a simple ‘initiative’. On the other hand, it should be noted that the lack of culture against which he railed so passionately served as one of the fundamental props of Stalinist absolutism.

  The struggle to raise the culture could not succeed without the support of the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia was basically hostile to the new order. Many joined the Whites and in due course shared their fate, as hundreds of thousands drank the bitter cup of emigration. Those who remained were not trusted and were mockingly known as ‘specialists’ and relegated for the most part to carrying out the will of Party functionaries, who were often ignorant and militantly intolerant. While Lenin’s entourage included many highly intelligent individuals, the lower levels of the bureaucracy were populated by workers elevated to administrative jobs, poorly educated revolutionaries ‘from the people’ whose political, moral and general culture was as a rule rather low. In the first decade of Soviet rule, at least, the very words ‘intelligent’ and ‘intelligentsia’—usually qualified by ‘rotten’—were used disparagingly. The pre-revolutionary intelligentsia suffered hostility and distrust for many years, culminating in the monstrous purges of the late 1930s, but an ominous signal was sounded while Lenin was still alive: the deportation in 1922 of a large group of the most prominent figures in Russian culture, among them such philosophers and writers as Berdyaev and Bunin.

  Despite its victory in the civil war, the Bolshevik state was not stable. There were internal disorders, riots and uprisings, and the Bolsheviks expected treachery to come from among the creative intelligentsia. Lenin gave the Justice Commissar, Krylenko, sinister advice when he recommended that legal form be given to the deportation abroad of intellectuals ‘who have still not disarmed themselves’ and who were suspected of anti-Soviet agitation. On the basis of a Politburo decision of 8 July 1922, reinforced by a VTsIK instruction of 10 August, ‘hostile intellectual groupings’ were to be exiled beyond the Soviet border. Although the complete lists have not been found, it is thought that some two hundred people were so despatched.

  Among them was the eminent philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who, when later reflecting on his fate and t
he regime that had decided it, recalled that the GPU had granted him an exit visa on pain of execution should he ever appear on Soviet soil again: ‘I was exiled from my country not on political grounds, but for ideological reasons. I became depressed when they told me I was to be deported.’ The Russian revolution, he gloomily concluded, ‘spelled the end of the Russian intelligentsia … In Russian Communism the will for power is stronger than the will for liberty.’88

  Trotsky explained the Soviet decision for these deportations in an interview with foreign correspondents: ‘Given the new military difficulties … all these irreconcilable and incorrigible elements are a military-political agency of our enemies, and we prefer to deport them during a lull and in good time, and I express the hope that you will not refuse to acknowledge [this] prudent humanitarian [act].’89 Bolshevik ‘humanitarianism’ was of a harsh kind. For Trotsky, ‘to be outside the revolution means to be in emigration’.90

  In the spring of 1918, Maxim Gorky, together with a number of other cultural figures, met the Commissar for Public Enlightenment [Education], Lunacharsky, and asked for permission to set up their own unions and societies and to run them ‘without political interference’. Lunacharsky responded by citing the Party line: ‘We were against the political Constituent Assembly and are no less against a Constituent Assembly in the sphere of culture.’91 There would be no cultural assemblies unless they were approved by the Party and were strictly monitored by the Central Committee’s Agitprop Department. As for the deported intellectuals, they would, of course, become vigorously anti-Bolshevik in their pronouncements, and for years the most active of them would be kept under surveillance by Soviet intelligence and punitive agencies abroad. Their pronouncements and publications were regularly and promptly delivered to the Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky, for their information and reflection.