Trotsky recalled what he had thought of Lenin’s behaviour in the autobiography he wrote in 1929, after his deportation from the USSR: ‘His behaviour seemed unpardonable to me, both horrible and outrageous … My break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered “moral” or even personal grounds. But this was merely on the surface. At bottom, the separation was of a political nature and merely expressed in the realm of organization methods.’ He concluded: ‘Whatever I may say about it … the second congress was a landmark in my life, if only because it separated me from Lenin for several years.’43 Neither Trotsky nor his many biographers seem to have noticed the profoundly paradoxical nature of the young revolutionary’s own behaviour. Before addressing this issue, however, we should look at another question of great significance for understanding both the Russian and the Soviet philosophy of history, and Trotsky’s political character.
For many years, scholars have interpreted the Second Party Congress, and especially the split over the membership issue, primarily as a question of organization, of what kind of party this was to be, a fortress or an association. This was not the main issue, however. The origin of the conflict lay deeper. Since the introduction of Marxism into Russia, its basic concept was interpreted and understood by the intelligentsia in different ways. Some accepted only its most radical features, those associated with the idea of smashing the old state apparatus, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat and liquidating the exploiting classes.
Another section of the new Marxists emphasized the social democratic principles in the doctrine, principles which could be secured and consolidated not only by revolutionary, but also by reformist methods. (Indeed, the first party programme advocated democracy, secret suffrage, inviolability of the person, freedom of thought, speech, press, movement, assembly, strikes and trade unions, the right to education in one’s native tongue and so on.) This division of approach gave rise, on the one hand, to those who thought terror, coercion and expropriation were permissible, and on the other to those who wanted to compel the capitalists to make concessions through compromise. It is thus correct to assert that the split at the Second Congress occurred not over the organizational question, but over a difference in the theory and practice of revolutionary methodology. The congress formalized the coexistence of two parallel tendencies: one radical, revolutionary and uncompromising, which would characterize the Bolsheviks; the other reformist, evolutionary and parliamentary, which was to become the hallmark of those henceforth known as Mensheviks. As Martov was to write in 1919, in his posthumously published work Mirovoi bol’shevizm (World Bolshevism): from the outset, ‘Lenin was sceptical about the democratic resolution of social-political problems, trusting instead in economic vandalism and military force.’44
The paradox of Trotsky lay in the fact that while by his very nature he was a radical, or leftist, he supported the reformists and the moderates. The future, and lifelong, advocate of world, permanent socialist revolution was giving his support to Martov, of whom he would later write: ‘Hilferding, Bauer, Renner and even Bernstein himself, all of them better educated than Martov, are by comparison clumsy apprentices when it comes to the political falsification of Marxism.’45 Yet the paradox is illusory. Despite his intellectual brilliance and elegance, and the skill with which he was able to express complex ideas, in many respects Trotsky was at that time still relatively superficial about many things. What appeared to be encyclopaedic knowledge was often unsupported by serious analysis. It did not occur to him that by siding with Martov, he was in opposition to himself. He would understand this in due course, but the momentum of the conflict kept him in opposition to Lenin for many years.
He soon tried to correct or mitigate his situation by adopting centrist positions. Of this he himself wrote: ‘I was not formally a member of either of the two factions. I continued to work with Krasin [a Bolshevik] … At the same time, I kept in touch with the local Menshevik group, which was following a very revolutionary policy.’46 However, he felt compelled by the logic of the ideological conflict to continue his opposition to Lenin. Shortly after the congress, in his ‘Report of the Siberian Delegation’, he wrote that ‘the congress thought it was doing constructive work; it was only destructive … Who could suppose that this assembly, convened by Iskra, would mercilessly trample over Iskra’s editorial board? Which political crystal-gazer could forecast that Martov and Lenin would step forth … as the hostile leaders of hostile factions? All this has come like a bolt from the blue … this man [Lenin], with the energy and talent peculiar to him, assumed the rôle of the party’s disorganizer.’47
In his account of the congress, Trotsky accused Lenin of wanting to ‘seize power’ and ruling with ‘an iron fist’. The democratic ‘Westernizing’ principle was dominant in Trotsky at that time. His criticism reached a temporary peak in his article ’Our Political Tasks’, published in Geneva in 1904 and dedicated to ‘My dear teacher, Pavel Borisovich Axelrod’. That dedication alone would provide ammunition for Stalin when he attacked Trotsky at the Central Committee Plenum of October 1927.48 In his article, Trotsky accused Lenin of three sins: alienating the revolutionary forefathers from the revolutionary movement, ‘impermissible devastation’ of the Economists (i.e. the gradualists in the movement), and usurping power in the party. Giving the Central Committee special powers, he rightly perceived, would open the path to one-man dictatorship. Identifying him with Robespierre, he referred to ‘Maximilien Lenin’ as ‘an adroit statistician’, ‘a slovenly lawyer’, ‘a rabble-rouser’, ‘a malicious man’, and much more. It was a wholesale condemnation. According to Trotsky, Lenin had ‘submerged the question of tactics in “philosophy”’ and confused party practice with the party programme. Lenin was so obsessed with keeping the organization ‘pure’, so obsessed with spies, that he lost sight of ‘the need to struggle against absolutism and of that far greater struggle, the emancipation of the working class.’49
In attacking his former mentor, and in fiercer terms perhaps than any other Marxist revolutionary hitherto, Trotsky paid little attention to argument—there were few to which he might have resorted—and relied instead on youthful ardour. He plainly underestimated Lenin’s political potential. Perhaps he thought that ultimately Lenin would lose his dominant position. Despite possessing immeasurably greater prophetic power than, say, Stalin or even Lenin, this was not to be either the first or last time that he would be mistaken.
Trotsky would often have to justify his ‘non-Bolshevism’ to those who chose to remind him of it. When during his last exile one of his supporters informed him that Tolheimer, another former supporter, was accusing him of ‘anti-Leninism’, he responded that he had not been a Bolshevik until 1917:
But I believe that even when I was in disagreement with the Bolsheviks, I was closer to Lenin than Tolheimer is now. If I came to Lenin later than some other Bolsheviks, that doesn’t mean I understood him less than they did. Franz Mehring came to Marxism a lot later than Kautsky and Bernstein, who had come under Marx and Engels’s direct influence in their youth. That didn’t prevent Franz Mehring from being a revolutionary Marxist to the end of his days, and Bernstein and Kautsky from ending their days as pathetic opportunists. It is absolutely true that Lenin was against me on a number of key issues, but why should it follow that Tolheimer is right against me? I cannot understand that.50
As a ‘Jacobin’ himself, at the beginning of the century Trotsky was accusing Lenin of radicalism; as a ‘centrist’, he accused Lenin of wanting to concentrate power in the party’s central bodies; as an admirer of Robespierre, he repudiated Lenin as a potential dictator. This paradox was linked, on the one hand, with Trotsky’s substitution of ideas by people: he saw the exit of Axelrod and Zasulich from Iskra’s editorial board as a tragedy and Lenin, the architect of the drama, as a usurper. On the other hand, many of the arguments he advanced at that period were intuitive and emotional, rather than rational. His sharp mind had not yet matured for deep intellectual thinking.
/> It irked Trotsky greatly that his sarcasm and trenchant observations went mostly unanswered by Lenin, who in one of his letters to his mistress Inessa Armand commented: ‘That’s Trotsky for you!!! Always the same, evasive, underhand, posing as a leftist, but helping the right while he still can.’51 Trotsky’s most savage comment on Lenin came in a private letter to the Menshevik member of the Duma Nikolai Chkheidze in March 1913, in which he called Lenin a master in the art of stoking up quarrels, ‘a professional exploiter of any backwardness in the Russian labour movement … The entire structure of Leninism is at present based on lies and falsification and carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own destruction …’52 This was probably the worst criticism Trotsky ever wrote about Lenin, and characterizes their extremely strained relations before 1917. In that tumultuous year, however, Trotsky witnessed what convinced him was Lenin’s primacy in intellectual power, but also his harsh actions on the political and social plane. To the end of his life, he was to admire Lenin as a real leader.
From 1917 to Lenin’s death, their collaboration was close and constructive. Trotsky became not only the second man of the revolution, but closer to Lenin than any other in his radicalism and determination. Together, they were the joint architects of the Soviet system. In his Diary in Exile, Trotsky wrote on 10 April 1935:
Lenin and I had several sharp clashes because, when I disagreed with him on serious questions, I always fought an all-out battle. Such cases, naturally, were memorable for everyone, and later on much was said and written about them by the epigones. But the instances when Lenin and I understood each other at a glance were a hundred times more numerous, and our solidarity always guaranteed the passage of a question in the Politburo without disputes. This solidarity meant a great deal to Lenin.53
It should be stressed that Trotsky’s early criticism of Lenin was very close to the truth, especially in his attacks on Lenin’s harshness, intolerance and peremptoriness. Leaving Lenin’s politics aside, his attitude to theory embodied a destructively nihilistic approach to bourgeois social thought in general. ‘Not a single word of the philosophy or political economy of any of these philosophers should be believed,’ he wrote in 1908 in his study ‘Empiricism and Historical Materialism’.54 This negativity was noted by Nikolai Valentinov, a former Bolshevik and former Menshevik who, as an émigré in Paris, wrote informative memoirs of his meetings with Lenin. Marxism, Valentinov remarked, was objective truth as far as Lenin was concerned, whereas everything else was either feeble-mindedness or charlatanism.55
Following the Second Congress, but especially between the 1905 revolution and February 1917, Trotsky expended the greater part of his prodigious energy on the factional struggle. He was very good at making enemies of his friends, and this often placed him in the crossfire between both sides. Losing allies before making new alliances was not a failing unique to Trotsky, however, but was rather a feature of Russian revolutionary life.
Ensign Arbuzov
In February 1905 Trotsky arrived in Kiev bearing a passport issued in the name of an Ensign Arbuzov. Changing his name was nothing new—Lvov, Yanovsky, Vikentiev, Petr Petrovich, Yanov, and of course Trotsky, had been used so far. Only a month before, he had been immersed in the normal business of a Russian revolutionary abroad—making speeches, writing articles, arguing and debating, and meeting interesting people. The news of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in St Petersburg, however, when troops had fired on a peaceful procession of workers and their families on 22 January 1905, had shaken the entire émigré colony. Even the unceasing polemics between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks became slightly more muted. Iskra, now in the hands of the Mensheviks, battled with Lenin’s Vpered (Forward), while Plekhanov was writing venomous articles against Lenin with the aim of isolating him as a ‘Russian Jacobin’. Bloody Sunday and the ensuing public mood now augured the possible chance of proving one faction or another correct.
The political temperature inside Russia, especially in factories and universities, was rising rapidly, but while all the exiles’ eyes were turned towards the east, not everyone was inclined to return to take part in the events. Life abroad had come to suit many of them, and observing and analyzing Russian politics from outside had become a habit they were unwilling to break. Trotsky, though, was incapable by nature of staying away from the action. He was no spectator, but a participant in and maker of history, and his illegal return to Russia was inevitable.
The events of the 1905 revolution have been sufficiently described and analyzed for there to be no need to go over them again in detail here. Instead, certain facets of Trotsky’s activities deserve our attention, especially as they have either been ignored or distorted in the Soviet version. The ‘retired ensign’ arrived in Kiev in the guise of a respectable and successful entrepreneur. His second wife,*Natalya Sedova, had arrived ahead of him, found them an apartment and established contact with the local revolutionaries, notably a young engineer called Leonid Krasin, a Bolshevik who was closely associated with Lenin and who helped Trotsky acquire a rapid understanding of the situation in the country at large and among the social democrats in particular. Like many other social democrats of both camps, Krasin was committed to bringing the two warring factions together.
Soon Trotsky was turning out articles on a wide range of subjects. The liberals, especially those who had recently abandoned Marxism, came in for his special attention. In an article published in Iskra under the pseudonym ‘Neophyte’ and entitled ‘A Word About Qualified Democrats’, he wrote:
The worst kind of democrats are the ex-Marxists. Their main feature is a constant hatred, gnawing and aching like a bad tooth, towards the social democrats. They are punishing our party for their own past, or maybe for their present. Marxism ‘spoiled’ them, some for life. If they ever had a link with the proletariat and its party, it has been severed completely now. These qualified democratic gentlemen should recognize the political moral: one can fool oneself, but not history.56
Trotsky particularly had in mind Peter Struve and similar former social democrats who were now seeking—and failing—to find a compromise with the tsarist regime.
With Krasin’s assistance, Trotsky reached St Petersburg, where he at once plunged into the revolutionary maelstrom, sitting on strike committees, writing proclamations for posting all over the capital and distribution in the factories. When Sedova was arrested in May, however, Trotsky, who had been living illegally in the apartment of a Colonel A.A. Litkens, went into hiding in nearby Finland. Although it was an integral part of the Russian Empire, Finland, with its substantial Swedish élite minority, was ruled somewhat differently from the other borderlands and also, thanks to its burgeoning nationalist movement, was generally friendly towards the Russian left. Indeed, the Finnish Social Democratic Party, founded in 1899, was a legal body, unlike any other political party in the empire at the time. Russian revolutionaries on the run from the authorities therefore regarded Finland as the nearest safe haven.
While hiding out for three months in an isolated guest-house, Trotsky wrote dozens of articles and pamphlets which were sent to the capital. In a May Day address to the workers, aimed at raising their flagging morale, he wrote:
Listen, Comrades. You are afraid of the tsarist soldiers. But you are not afraid to go day in and day out to the factories and mills where the machines drain your blood and cripple your bodies. You are afraid of the tsarist soldiers. But you are not afraid to hand over your brothers to the tsarist army where they perish in the great unlamented cemetery of Manchuria.* You are afraid of the tsarist soldiers. But you are not afraid of living day in and day out under the authority of the bandit police, the barracks hangmen, for whom the life of a working proletarian is cheaper than the life of domestic cattle.57
With equal vigour, he addressed the soldiers and sailors:
For a long time you have not understood the demands of the people. Your superiors and your priests lied to you and slandered the people. They kept you in ignorance. They stirred you up agai
nst the people. They forced you to stain your hands with the blood of the workers. They turned you into hangmen of the Russian people. They brought upon your heads the terrible curse of mothers and children, wives and old men … Soldiers! Our state is like a vast battleship on which the tsarist authorities run riot, while the tormented people moan. We have only one way out: we should follow the example of the Potemkin and throw the whole gang which rules us overboard and take the governance of the state into our own hands.† We will determine the course of this battleship called Russia! Soldiers! When you come face to face with the people, raise your rifles! The first bullet should be for the officer who gives you the order to fire. Let the hangman fall at the hand of an honest soldier.58
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