Trotsky

by Dmitri Volkogonov

  The story had first been concocted by Stalin in 1924, claiming falsely that the Central Committee had passed a resolution prohibiting Trotsky from visiting the southern front, and it had been repeated by Voroshilov in an article called ‘Stalin and the Red Army’. But it was impossible publicly to repudiate the assertions of the General Secretary, whose utterances were circulated on a massive scale by Pravda, Bolshevik and many other organs, while only a narrow circle heard what Trotsky had to say. Stalin fought the battle on a broad front, leaving no room for the opposition either to defend itself or even to save face.

  Since Trotsky had chosen to criticize the leadership with special vigour over its policy on the Chinese revolution, it was decided that the first surprise attack against him should be made at a joint session of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of Comintern and the International Control Commission. Stalin met the members of ECCI before the meeting to coordinate tactics. It was agreed that Trotsky should be thrown out of ECCI. It was also agreed that the conduct of the Yugoslav delegate Voislav Vujovic’, who supported Trotsky onthe executive Committee, be discussed. Since ECCI was funded entirely by the Kremlin, it had become the international arm of the Soviet leadership, and therefore no one objected to expelling Trotsky.

  The meeting took place on 27 September 1927, and a few excerpts from its proceedings will suffice to give an impression of the character of this international ‘court’. In the chair was Otto Kuusinen, the leader of the failed Communist revolution in Finland in 1918. He opened the meeting by declaring that the issue before them was the factional activity carried on by Trotsky and Vujovic’. He pointed out that on 30 May 1927 ECCI had categorically forbidden these two members from engaging in factional activity, yet within ten days the opposition, led by Trotsky, had organized an ‘anti-Party demonstration at Yaroslavsky Station to mark the departure of Comrade Smilga … Illegal groups are being set up, with underground presses, and they are conducting a remorseless factional struggle. They call themselves “Bolshevik Leninists”, but what does their behaviour have in common with Bolshevism and Leninism?’

  TROTSKY (interrupting): The hero of the Finnish revolution is teaching me Bolshevism and Leninism …

  KUUSINEN: When you have the floor, you can tell your tales. Personal insinuations have always been your way. You use them even against the best Russian revolutionary leaders, so I regard it as an honour to be slandered by you … The leadership of Comintern must intervene and expel the Trotskyists from their midst.

  When he was given the floor, Trotsky listed twenty-five points, ranging from the Chinese revolution and the struggle against war to discipline and Party rules. Among his remarks he made the following observations:

  TROTSKY: You accuse me of transgressing Party discipline. I’m quite sure you have your sentence prepared … Stalin, who is rude and disloyal, had the audacity to speak of a united front from Chamberlain to Trotsky … The Party is under orders to keep silent because Stalin’s policy is a policy of bankruptcy. In your view, it is entirely in order to deny a crust of bread to Leninists who don’t want to become Stalinists. For transcribing and distributing the opposition platform, [a group of] excellent Party members were expelled yesterday … Stalin is telling you what you must do: expel Trotsky and Vujovic’ from ECCI. I think you’ll do this. Stalin’s regime is stupefying the Party with its one-sided discussions, expulsions and arrests … Stalin’s personal misfortune, which is fast becoming the Party’s misfortune, is the colossal disparity between his intellectual resources and the power that the state and Party machine has concentrated in his hands … The bureaucratic regime will lead irreversibly to one-man rule.

  It was of course this ‘colossal disparity’ in favour of Stalin’s machine that explains the further course of the meeting.

  MURPHY [of the British Communist party]: We have just witnessed an extremely sad spectacle. Comrade Trotsky has come here this evening as the emissary of another party, not as a member of ECCI.

  THOREZ [the French representative]: It’s time to put a stop to the factional struggle of the opposition. When I was in the Donbass, the miners told me they were not inclined to go over to the Trotskyist opposition …

  PEPPER [USA]: Trotsky has always combined leftist phraseology and rightist actions with the methods of indecent personal slander. In the name of the American party I demand Trotsky’s expulsion.

  KATAYAMA [Japan]: We have heard you and we condemn you.

  VUJOVIĆ [Yugoslavia]: I agree with what Trotsky has said. You are striking a blow against the Russian revolution.

  BUKHARIN: If we examine Trotsky’s speech, we see it is a platform of wild lies and slander against our Party and Comintern. We must ask Trotsky why he does not stand to attention before the Party, like a soldier?

  TROTSKY: You have the Party by the throat …

  Kuusinen then summed up and formally proposed the expulsion of Trotsky as a member, and Vujovic’ as a candidate member. Trotsky took the floor again. He declared that only recently Kuusinen would not have dared to make the false assertion that the last ten years had been a decade of Trotsky’s struggle against Leninism. He cited Lenin at a meeting of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee of 14 November 1917 when he had called Trotsky ‘the best Bolshevik’. It was monstrous now to have to repudiate the slander of such people as Kuusinen and Pepper and their ilk.

  KUUSINEN: Lenin called Trotsky a non-Bolshevik …

  TROTSKY: Everyone knows that Lenin would never have tolerated a non-Bolshevik in the Politburo …

  BUKHARIN: If you don’t come to your senses soon, you will inevitably meet your political death …

  KREIBICH [Czechoslovakia]: Trotsky and Vujovic’ have expelled themselves from ECCI …

  STALIN: The speakers here today have spoken so well, especially Comrade Bukharin, that there’s little for me to add. What is it the Trotskyists are struggling against? Against the Leninist regime in the Party.

  TROTSKY: You’re lying …

  STALIN: Keep your strong words for yourself. You are discrediting yourself with this abuse. You’re a Menshevik!

  ROI [India]: I’m for Trotsky’s expulsion from ECCI.

  KABAKCHIEV [Bulgaria]: I’m also for his expulsion.

  ANGARETI [Italy]: There’s no place for them on ECCI.

  SZAMUELY [Hungary]: It’s time to put an end to the opposition.

  A single proposal was put to the vote, and Trotsky and Vujovic’ were unanimously expelled.105 It was Trotsky’s first official defeat of 1927. In 1925 he had lost his posts as Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council and War Commissar, in 1926 he had been removed from the Politburo, and now he was thrown out of Comintern. More defeats were to come.

  The Stalin—Trotsky conflict was closely observed abroad, and with particular acuity by the Mensheviks abroad. On 27 August 1927, in Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, the newspaper they still described as an organ of the RSDLP, they wrote that the conflict promised Russia new adventures and new misfortunes.

  But it is all going on within the narrow circle of the Communist Party, causing concern outside it only among social democratic workers and those intellectuals who have not lost the habit of thinking politically. Beyond those boundaries, the masses, even in the cities, are curious but not passionately involved. Trotsky’s fight against Stalin says little to the heart of the ordinary worker … the opposition is afraid of the working masses and is hesitant about taking the quarrel to them. This is why the opposition in its present form is doomed. Their quarrel with the Stalinists will be settled unilaterally by their adversary.106

  The Menshevik view was conveyed to the Politburo in July 1927 in a report by Menzhinsky’s Foreign Section of the OGPU, which stated:

  In the opinion of the Mensheviks, the authority of the Communist Party is leading to the Party’s downfall, thanks to Stalin’s methods. The atmosphere is becoming increasingly charged with electricity and any spark could cause an explosion. In the Mensheviks’ opinion, the only man who can save the situat
ion is Trotsky, as he enjoys the greatest authority. He is already looked upon as a leader, and keeping him a prisoner does not diminish his authority.107

  As we see, the special services’ reports were quite unlike the analytical material published in Sotsialisticheskii vestnik.

  Trotsky was unusually active in the autumn of 1927. Almost every day he met the leaders of his support groups either at home or in Leningrad, made speeches at various institutes, while also writing numerous declarations to the Central Committee, meeting foreign correspondents, and cursing newspaper and magazine editors who refused to accept his work. He felt the chances of remaining on the political scene dwindling. He knew that if he did not succeed in keeping his foothold, the affair would not end in political rout alone. He had frequent opportunity to lament the fact that back in 1923 and 1924 he had conceded so much ground without a fight by being absent so often on holiday or on trips to Berlin for treatment. True, his doctor, F.A. Guetier, whether independently or on someone else’s orders, had dissuaded Trotsky and his wife from travelling to Paris in the summer of 1927 for treatment. He wrote to Natalya Sedova on 4 May:

  To tell you the truth, I am not happy about your plans to go to the Paris environment for a malaria cure. I’m not happy, first because I don’t know how healthy the place you intend to stay is, secondly, because I don’t know in whose medical hands you will be. I saw Lev Davydovich yesterday (3 May). He looked quite well, much fresher and more robust than before the [recent] trip.

  Yours ever, F. Guetier.108

  In October a session of the Leningrad Soviet took place, and a large demonstration was staged in its honour. Standing on the central podium, Trotsky and Zinoviev drew special attention to themselves and many of the marchers cheered them as they passed. Ordinary citizens saw Trotsky not as the leader of the opposition, but as the hero of the civil war and creator of the Red Army. Such occasions, however, gave him no joy. He recognized that the cheers and applause were for his past. In the present, the opposition was losing ground fast.

  At the end of October Trotsky was invited to yet another, and for him the last, joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission. He would never again attend the Bolshevik headquarters. He harboured no illusions about the outcome of the forthcoming discussion of his oppositional activity. The meeting took place in an exceptionally stormy atmosphere. As soon as Trotsky was given the floor, shouts and insults were flung at him. His speech was passionate, but muddled. Adjusting his pince-nez and with one arm half outstretched, he read his text hurriedly, barely looking at his audience. The outstretched arm served a useful purpose, for apart from the insults, books, inkwells, tumblers and other objects were thrown at him. It was a degrading scene: the top echelon of the Party were crucifying one of their own leaders who had dared to swim against the tide. His voice—hurried and with an unfamiliar note—carried above the din: ‘First, a word or two about so-called “Trotskyism”,’ he began. ‘Every opportunist is trying to use this word to cover his own nakedness. The falsification factory is working at full steam and around the clock to construct “Trotskyism” … In our July declaration last year we predicted with complete accuracy all the stages of the destruction of the Leninist leadership of the Party and its temporary replacement by the Stalinist leadership. I say “temporary replacement” because the more “victories” the leading group sustains, the weaker it becomes.’

  After pausing for the shouts and insults to subside, he glanced at the hostile assembly and continued:

  You want to expel us from the Central Committee. We agree that this measure emerges fully from the present course at the given stage of the Central Committee’s development, or rather its ruin … The rudeness and disloyalty of which Lenin wrote are no longer simply personal qualities; they have become the hallmark of the leading faction, they have become its policy and its regime … Lenin was worried about Stalin as General Secretary from the very beginning: ‘This cook can only make peppery dishes.’ Lenin said this to a small group at the time of the Eleventh Congress …

  As Trotsky spoke, Stalin sat calmly, gazing around the hall, correcting the text of the long speech he was about to make and to which he now added the title ‘The Trotskyist Opposition Before and Now’. Casting occasional glances at the speaker, he busied himself by sketching a pack of wolves in the margin of his text, then took a red pencil and filled in a crimson background. Trotsky, meanwhile, was hurrying through his speech and counting the minutes as the end of his membership of the Party’s élite approached.

  It’s easy for Bukharin today to say ‘Enrich yourselves’ and tomorrow ‘Get rid of the kulaks’. A few scratches of the pen is enough … You’ll get nothing out of him. Behind the extreme organization-men there is a resurgent internal bourgeoisie … [And] behind that is the world bourgeoisie. Stalin’s immediate task is to split the Party, isolate the opposition and teach the Party the methods of physical destruction. Fascist whisdes, fisticuffs, throwing books or stones, prison gates—that’s as far as Stalin’s policy has gone, for the moment and until it moves further … Why should the Yaroslavskys and Shverniks, the Goloshchekins and the rest bother to argue about statistics, if they can throw a heavy book of statistics at an oppositionist’s head? … Voices can already be heard saying ‘We’ll expel a thousand, shoot a hundred, and things will quieten down in the Party.’ That is indeed the voice of the Thermidore.

  Trotsky’s closing remarks indicate how wrong he was to think that his position had a broad following: a few thousand intellectuals and some workers supported his ideas (though no peasants): ‘The slander, expulsions and arrests are making our platform the most popular, most intimate and precious document of the international labour movement. You can expel us, but you won’t prevent the victory of the opposition, that is, the victory of the revolutionary unity of our Party and Comintern!’109

  Following a chorus of condemnation and violent demands for Trotsky’s expulsion from the Central Committee and the Party, the man who had scripted, stage-managed and directed the entire spectacle took the stand. Stalin spoke softly for an hour and a half, looking at his text occasionally, vigorously gesticulating with his good right arm from time to time, as if cutting off the heads of the accused. ‘The main attacks have been aimed against Stalin,’ he explained, ‘because Stalin knows all the tricks of the opposition, better perhaps than some of our comrades; it won’t be easy to bamboozle him, [they say], so that’s why they aim their blows above all at Stalin. Well, let them curse to their heart’s content. Stalin is just Stalin, a little man. Try taking on Lenin.’ Here he began to enumerate a long and precise list of Trotsky’s sins, his ‘hooligan slander of Lenin’. Once again he cited Trotsky’s letter of 1913 to the Menshevik Chkheidze, in which he called Lenin a ‘professional exploiter of any backwardness in the Russian revolutionary movement’. He then glared at the audience that was hungrily hanging on his every word: ‘Quite a turn of phrase, you’ll agree, Comrades, quite a turn of phrase. Trotsky wrote that. And he was writing about Lenin. Can you wonder that Trotsky, who could so unceremoniously dismiss Lenin, whose boot he is not worth, can now abuse one of Lenin’s many pupils, Comrade Stalin, for no rhyme or reason?’110

  Stalin had used the device of presenting himself as a pupil of Lenin’s before, with the result that taking him on was like taking on the master himself. He then accused Trotsky of an inconsistent attitude to Lenin’s ‘Testament’. As early as 1925, he said, Trotsky had declared that even the conversations about Lenin’s last wishes had been ‘a malicious invention’. So ‘on what basis can Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev now run off at the mouth and claim that the Party and its Central Committee “are concealing” Lenin’s “Testament”?’ Stalin’s carefully organized text took the opposition apart in eight points:

  In 1921 Lenin proposed expelling Shlyapnikov from the Central Committee and the Party not because he had set up an anti-Party press, nor for his union with bourgeois intellectuals, but just because Shlyapnikov dared to make a sp
eech inside a Party cell criticizing decisions of the Supreme National Economic Council (Vesenkha). Now compare what Lenin did with what the Party is doing in relation to the opposition and you’ll see how far we’ve gone in allowing disorganizes and dissenters … They mention the arrest of disorganizes who have been expelled for their anti-Soviet activities. Yes, we are making arrests and will continue to do so, if they don’t stop undermining the Party and the Soviet regime.

  At the last plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission in August this year, I was attacked by some members for my gentle approach to Trotsky and Zinoviev, for having dissuaded the plenum from immediately expelling [them] from the Central Committee … Perhaps I was too kind and made a mistake. It’s time now for us to stand in the front rank with those comrades who are demanding their expulsion.

  The meeting burst into tumultuous applause at these words. Within an order such as the Party had now become, the effect of psychological affinity with the leader is to suppress rational thinking and enhance feelings of fanatical solidarity, the herd-instinct, mindlessness.