Trotsky

by Dmitri Volkogonov

  Stalin then recalled Trotsky’s 1904 pamphlet ‘Our Political Tasks’, and declared: ‘This pamphlet is interesting, by the way, because Trotsky dedicated it to the Menshevik P. Axelrod. It says there: “To my dear teacher, Pavel Borisovich Axelrod”. Well, good riddance to this “dear teacher Pavel Borisovich Axelrod”! Good riddance! But you’d better get a move on, esteemed Trotsky, because the decrepit “Pavel Borisovich” may suddenly die and you might be too late to see your “teacher”.’111

  The applause was long and, let it be said, genuine. Not all the delegates had paid particular attention to Stalin’s words ‘Good riddance’, but I believe their utterance was not accidental. In 1927 Stalin was already wondering how he would get rid of Trotsky. He was not yet ready to deal with him physically, and exile to the east would only partially isolate this dangerous individual. He had more than once thought of deporting Trotsky abroad, as the Politburo five years earlier, under Lenin, had done with a large group of intellectuals. But at the October 1927 plenum Stalin was not yet ready to express any further thoughts on the matter.

  Khristian Rakovsky had wanted to speak up in Trotsky’s defence, but was not given the floor. He then tried in vain to publish his speech as a discussion paper for distribution in the Party. One excerpt from it will suffice to show the flimsiness of Stalin’s argument:

  Stalin’s reasons for expulsion, for instance Comrade Trotsky’s 1904 pamphlet which he dedicated to his ‘dear teacher P.B. Axelrod’, are not good enough. I don’t know if Comrade Stalin has forgotten or if he ever knew that a little earlier than Trotsky, Lenin had also called Axelrod his ‘dear teacher’. Nor should we consider as arguments all the rubbish, all the anti-biographical and biographical facts that have been cited in abundance here, but which are more than outweighed by the reasoned criticism that we hear from the opposition.112

  But even if the plenum had listened to Rakovsky, they would not have heard him. The conflict had made both sides politically deaf to each other.

  Trotsky had been expelled from the Central Committee, his second major defeat in the fateful year of 1927. He collected up his papers and stuffed them into his old briefcase, glanced expressionlessly at the platform and left the hall to the catcalls, hisses and insults of his former colleagues on the Central Committee. They had cast him out forever. Stalin and Trotsky saw each other for the last time that day, 23 October 1927.

  Grey-faced, Trotsky got into the car that had not yet been taken away from him and went home to the Kremlin where, in the residence of the new rulers of the new empire, he had already begun to feel like an alien. His wife and his secretary, Grinberg, did their best to calm him. He had not expected a different outcome from the meeting, but the character and form of the proceedings had been oppressive. Now at last he felt himself to be a rejected revolutionary. ‘But,’ he protested to his family, ‘they cannot tear me away from history!’

  Next morning, having read the official transcript of the meeting, he dictated a letter to the Central Committee Secretariat:

  The minutes do not show … that the platform systematically prevented me from speaking. They do not show that … a glass was thrown at me from the platform (I understand by Comrade Kubyak). They do not show that one of the participants tried to drag me off the podium by my arm, and so and so on … While I was speaking, Comrade Yaroslavsky threw a book of statistics at me … employing methods that cannot be called anything but those of Fascist hooligans. While Comrade Bukharin was speaking, in reply to a riposte from me, Comrade Shvernik, a former Central Committee secretary and now head of the Urals Party organization, also threw a book at me. I hope his exploit will be recorded in the proceedings.113

  Despite the plain fact that Stalin had won, Trotsky would not yield. He continued attending meetings of the opposition, he wrote statements and protests, and sent instructions to his support groups. He had little choice but to try to set up some kind of organized resistance, but it was too late. Mass arrests and expulsions from the Party were going on, and people were losing their jobs. The opposition was melting away. But he was determined to fight to the finish. As the tenth anniversary of the October revolution approached, he consulted with Kamenev, Zinoviev, Smilga and Muralov, and suggested that their supporters take part in the demonstrations, but marching separately. Circulars were sent to Leningrad and elsewhere declaring that the opposition would proclaim its viability by taking part in the demonstrations under its own banners.

  Trotsky’s columns, when they turned out in Moscow and Leningrad, were not numerous. They carried portraits of Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev, and banners bearing ambiguous slogans, understandable only to the initiated: ‘Down with the Kulak, the Nepman and the Bureaucrat!’, ‘Down with Opportunism!’, ‘Carry out Lenin’s Testament!’, ‘Preserve Bolshevik Unity!’. Stalin had already issued the inevitable orders, however, and the columns were cordoned off by the militia and students of OGPU and the military academies. Trotsky in Moscow, and Zinoviev in Leningrad, toured the streets in their cars, trying to salute their supporters and the crowds that had come to celebrate. Many people called out greetings to the leaders of the opposition, voicing their solidarity and waving their arms. From the balcony of the former Hotel Paris, Smilga, Preobrazhensky and Alsky tried to address short speeches to the approaching columns, but the OGPU took rapid action. Smilga and Preobrazhensky were unceremoniously hustled from the balcony, the columns of sympathizers were scattered, and Trotsky’s car was bombarded with stones, breaking its windows. The OGPU threatened to use weapons and fired some warning shots into the air.

  It was all over. The attempt to address the people and the Party had come too late. In the eyes of rank and file Party members, Trotsky was already an enemy, a dissident, a disorganizer and a counterrevolutionary. He and his supporters tried to lodge a protest. Muralov, Smilga and Kamenev on the same day, 7 November, sent a note to the Politburo and the presidium of the Central Control Commission, which said, among other things:

  In sight of Budenny, Tsikhon and others, militiamen and soldiers fired on us as we left (evidently in the air). We stopped our car. A group of Fascists, five in number, rushed at the car, using foul language, and broke the horn and smashed a headlight. The militiamen did not even approach the car. After the journey, we arrived at the apartment of Central Committee member Comrade Smilga. Since the morning, a banner saying ‘Carry out Lenin’s Testament’ had been hanging above the windows of the apartment as well as a red banner with portraits of Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev … The affair ended with 15-20 commanders of the Central Committee school and students from a military academy breaking down Comrade Smilga’s door, smashing it to bits, and forcing their way into the rooms … The ‘criminal’ banner mentioning Lenin’s Testament was also torn up. The soldiers who broke in took away the banner with the torn portrait of Lenin as a trophy. Desks, splinters, broken glass, a broken telephone and so on were left all over the floor, as testimony to these heroic acts in honour of the October revolution.

  The note ended: ‘The fate of the Party is at stake, the fate of the revolution, the fate of the workers’ state. The Party will judge. The working class will judge. We have no doubt about the judgment.’114

  Smilga later noted that the destruction of his apartment had been led by the head of the Political Section of the Red Army, one Bulin, and that he had been accompanied by the secretary of the Krasnaya Presnya District Party Committee, the Soviet chairman of the same district, one of Kalinin’s assistants, and other officials. Preobrazhensky, Mdivani, Ginzburg, Maltsev and other supporters of Trotsky were beaten up in the attack. Smilga remarked that it had been a real pogrom.

  Trotsky also wrote to the Politburo to protest against the scattering of the opposition’s columns and ‘the accompanying beatings’. The attacks, he wrote, had been accompanied by ‘unbridled shouts of a Black Hundreds and partly antisemitic kind’.115 He demanded an investigation, publication of the results and punishment for the guilty. None of these demands, of course, was met. Inst
ead, on 14 November, at Stalin’s behest, the Central Control Commission expelled Trotsky and several other oppositionists from the Party. This was the third arranged defeat for the leader of the opposition in 1927. He called it ‘the downward slide of the revolution’ which carried him down with it. The last, thin thread connecting him with official circles had been broken. The day after his expulsion from the Party, Trotsky wrote to the Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, that is, the head of government:

  I hereby give notice that in connection with the decision taken yesterday, 14 November, concerning myself, I have been put out of the apartment in the Kremlin that I have been inhabiting. Until I find permanent accommodation, I shall be living temporarily at the apartment of Comrade Beloborodov (3, Granovsky Street, Apt. 62). As my son is ill, my wife and son will remain in the Kremlin for the next few days. I hope to free the apartment finally not later than 20 November.116

  Arrests took place and opposition meetings were banned, often resulting in clashes. The press put out the view that the Trotskyists intended forming a counter-revolutionary party to oppose the Communist Party. In these circumstances, Trotsky wrote a ‘Statement of the Opposition and the Position in the Party’, which was not, of course, published, but was duplicated and passed from hand to hand. The tone of the statement was calm and conciliatory. It said, for instance: ‘The idea of the Stalinist faction is that, by expelling many hundreds of the best Party members, culminating in the expulsion of Comrades Zinoviev and Trotsky, the opposition will be forced to take the position of a second party “The opposition will not let itself be torn from the Communist Party and it will not undertake to organize a second party.’117 Alas, little enough time would elapse before Trotsky was indeed torn away not merely from the Communist Party, but also from Moscow, his homeland and everything for which he had ceaselessly exerted himself all those years.

  Exile and Deportation

  In order to avoid the humiliation of forced eviction from the Kremlin, the day after the plenum friends helped Trotsky’s family to move (temporarily, they believed) to the home of one his supporters, A.G. Beloborodov. This was the self-same Beloborodov who in July 1918 had transmitted the Centre’s order, known to and approved by Lenin, to execute the tsar and his wife and children.

  Trotsky spent his time writing articles, composing instructions for supporters, sending telegrams and meeting friends who were being sent into exile. His wife gently urged him to leave Moscow for a month or so and live in a nearby village. He had so much writing to do, and sooner or later the leadership was bound to see that he was right and call him back … She knew this was not so, but she feared for his health. He had lost a lot of weight, and had become hollowcheeked and sallow. Ioffe’s suicide that month affected him badly. The shot in the Kremlin, where Ioffe was still living—exile had already been decided for him—had rung out like a protest at the violence against the opposition, against the great idea and revolutionary ideals. Trotsky attended his friend’s funeral on 17 November 1927, and despite the fact that it took place during a working day, a large crowd turned up at the Novodevichy Cemetery. After friends and comrades had given their eulogies, Trotsky made a short speech, which ended: ‘The struggle continues. Everyone is still at his post. No one will abandon it.’ The crowd accompanied him to his car, greetings were called out, but there were also many hostile looks. Squinting myopically, Trotsky waved his hand to the assembled crowd. It was his last public appearance in Russia.

  That evening a registered official letter was delivered to him. Signed by Rykov, Chairman of the Sovnarkom, it was an order relieving Trotsky of his post as Chairman of the Chief Concessions Committee, to be replaced by V.N. Kosandrov.118 This had been Trotsky’s last official post, and although he was technically still a member of the Central Executive Committee, that too was terminated a few days later.

  With this final and complete severance of his links to the system, he had to start thinking seriously about making a living. Writing would hardly achieve this, since all the publishers were slamming their doors in his face. The state publishing house informed him that they were terminating the publication of his collected works. Undeterred, he wrote to his old friend David Ryazanov, director of the Marx-Engels Institute, and offered to translate the works of the founders of scientific socialism. Permission was granted and an agreement made, and Trotsky began spending his evenings reading Marx’s Mr Fogt in the original. He would put aside the book and pace his small room in rapid strides, five paces to one corner, five back. Wearing an old sweater, felt boots, his hands folded behind him, he looked like a prisoner in a cell. In effect, that is precisely what he was, since OGPU sentries stood guard at the door of the apartment and the entrance to the building. Stalin was keeping an eye on his defeated rival.

  What Trotsky thought about during those long winter evenings of 1927 is not known. Perhaps he still hoped for some good to emerge from the forthcoming Fifteenth Party Congress; perhaps he thought about all the mistakes he had made over Stalin. During the civil war, he had on several occasions tried to have him removed from the operational side of decision-making, but had never succeeded in getting Lenin to bring matters to a head. He had once called Stalin ‘a most dangerous plague, worse than any treachery or betrayal by the military specialists’, but on that occasion he stopped short of demanding his removal.119 One of his most serious errors of omission was to have agreed to Stalin’s appointment as General Secretary, even though he had a better notion than most of the harm Stalin could do. He could have done more to halt Stalin’s rise when he still had the time and the power.

  As he was to recognize later, he had waited too long to make an alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev, and he had always been hostile to Bukharin, whom he had seen as the personification of rightist elements in the Party. And he had considered the rightists as potentially more dangerous than Stalin, who generally showed centrist tendencies. As Radek would write to him in Alma Ata, ‘centrism is the ideological poverty of our Party’, and Stalin was its carrier. Trotsky took the same view, and had even been prepared to form a bloc with Stalin against Bukharin, who, he believed, wanted to ‘restore capitalism’. Trotsky and his supporters had attributed to Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky the chief roles in the formation of policy, and his memoirs suggest he never changed his assessment of the rightists. He had accepted as logical that either the left or the right could make an alliance with the centre, but a bloc of the left—the genuine revolutionaries—and the right—the restorers of capitalism—would be going too far.

  Trotsky could not understand Bukharin’s moderate line. For him, the left represented the natural expression of revolutionary purity. At the beginning of 1927, his commitment to forced industrialization at the cost of the peasant was undiminished, as he called for the resolute socialist reconstruction of the village on the basis of harsh pressure on the kulak, and argued to replace annual planning with five-year plans. ‘loss of tempo,’ he noted, ‘would mean the transfer of a certain quantity of resources from the socialist channel to the capitalist channel.’120 If only Trotsky had had more foresight, he would have realized that Stalin was about to commandeer the entire programme of the left and use it to smash the right. What Trotsky regarded as impossible would come to pass: Stalin would move from the centre to the left, liquidating both wings in the process.

  Pacing his room and rehearsing his mistakes, Trotsky must also have realized that the defeat of the opposition had caused his allies to waver. Zinoviev and Kamenev had told him that it was time to have the courage to surrender. Trotsky had replied that ‘if it takes courage to surrender, and that’s all we have to do, then by now the revolution ought to have triumphed throughout the world.’121 One evening, they brought the drafts of two declarations for the Fifteenth Party Congress. Both contained expressions of readiness to capitulate. Trotsky agreed to sign one of the variants only after the insertion of a phrase on the right of every oppositionist to defend his views. And he added: ‘… it is self-evident
that the freeing of comrades arrested in connection with their oppositional activities is absolutely essential.’122

  Stalin’s response to the declaration came in his four-hour speech to the Fifteenth Congress on 3 December 1927. Noting that the opposition had undertaken to abide by all the Party’s decisions, he pronounced to stormy applause: ‘Comrades, I think nothing will come of this trick.’ After a pause, he added: ‘They say they’re also raising the question of reinstating expellees in the Party. Comrades, I don’t think this will happen, either.’ When the second wave of applause died down, he summed up his view on the opposition: ‘They must renounce their anti-Bolshevik views openly and honestly, before the whole world. They must openly and honestly, before the whole world, brand the mistakes they committed, mistakes which became crimes against the Party. Either that, or they can leave the Party. And if they don’t leave, we’ll kick them out!’123

  Returning to the question of the opposition in his concluding speech on 7 December, Stalin said: ‘I have nothing of substance to say about the speeches of Yevdokimov and Muralov, as there was nothing of substance in them. The only thing to say about them is, Allah forgive them, for they know not what they are talking about … Everyone knows that Rakovsky made a fool of himself at the Moscow conference on the question of war. He came here and spoke, no doubt to correct his foolishness. But he ended up looking more foolish than ever.’ The delegates laughed and applauded the leader’s wit. ‘I now come to Kamenev’s speech. This was the most mendacious, most hypocritical, most crooked and fraudulent of all the oppositionist speeches given from this podium.’124 The speech Kamenev had made at the previous congress, when he had declared that Stalin was not fit to serve as a unifier of the Bolshevik headquarters, was no doubt in Stalin’s mind. Reading Stalin’s speeches in Pravda, Trotsky must by now have fully realized that Stalin would forgive nothing and forget nothing.