Trotsky’s transformation into a Bolshevik was thus complete. The conflict in him between loyalty to the political culture of Western social democracy and left radicalism was resolved. He emerged as a committed left revolutionary and radical Bolshevik.
The Power of Myths
Until the end of his days, Trotsky, who was vilified by Stalin as a spy, scum of the earth, double-dealer, murderer, falsifier and imperialist agent, fought against the big lie that Soviet history had become, even though he had taken part in inventing it. In 1932 he wrote:
The revolution explodes the social lie. The revolution is true. It begins by calling things and the relations between things by their proper names … But the revolution itself is not an integral and harmonious process. It is full of contradictions … The revolution itself produces a new ruling stratum which seeks to consolidate its privileged position and is prone to see itself not as a transitional historical instrument, but as the completion and crowning of history.18
Thus was created the lie against him, he concluded. And it was a lie against history. Trotsky, however, never admitted, even to himself, that he had been among the creators of the conditions which accommodated the lie so comfortably.
One of the most persistent myths of the revolution is that Trotsky, among other Bolshevik leaders, wanted to delay the armed uprising to coincide with the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets. This notion was persistent in Soviet sources until well into the late 1980s.19 In reality he did not oppose the armed uprising, which for Lenin had become, in Melgunov’s words, an obsession.20 On the contrary, he fought hardest to realize the dream—so rapidly had he become an orthodox Leninist—but his preferred scenario was that the uprising should take place under the aegis and leadership of the Bolshevik Central Committee, but also as the expressed will of the Congress of Soviets. The Bolshevik slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’ implied that the uprising would have a much broader social base than one carried out in the name of the Bolsheviks alone. All the revolutionary forces in Russia would be involved, world opinion would see for itself that the revolt was not the consequence of a narrow conspiracy by one radical party—which of course it was—but as the will of ‘broad progressive circles’ of Russian society.
The threat of a strong anti-Bolshevik move was a real one. From Staff HQ, General Dukhonin sent a message to the Petrograd Soviet, as well as to the press and the government, declaring: ‘In the name of the army at the front we demand the immediate cessation of Bolshevik violence and complete subordination to the Provisional Government, which is empowered by the total agreement of the organs of democracy and is the only government capable of bringing the country to the Constituent Assembly—the master of the Russian Land. The active army supports this demand by force.’21 The threat was real, but Dukhonin’s confidence was exaggerated, for he did not take account of the demoralization and erosion of the army’s internal bonds, which were rapidly draining its strength. The army wanted only one thing, and that was peace, and the only way to achieve it seemed to be by a revolutionary exit from the war. The socialists who supported Kerensky were not prepared to go that far, and he continued to rely on them. The revolution appeared to be the only way out of the impasse.
Trotsky made this the leitmotiv of all his speeches. On 21 October he transported an audience of soldiers and workers by declaring: ‘The Soviet government will destroy the misery of the trenches. It will give the land and it will heal the internal disorder. The Soviet government will give away everything in the country to the poor and to the troops in the trenches. If you, bourgeois, have two fur coats, give one to a soldier … Have you got a warm pair of boots? Stay at home. A worker needs them.’ His audience was in ecstasy and, as Sukhanov recorded, it seemed they might suddenly burst into singing a revolutionary hymn without further ado. ‘A resolution was proposed that they stand up for the workers’ and peasants’ cause to their last drop of blood … Who’s in favour? As one, the thousand-man audience shot their hands up.’22
It is difficult to understand why Lenin, still in hiding, should, in a letter written on the evening of 24 October to the Central Committee, ‘urge the comrades with all my strength that everything is now hanging by a thread. Whatever the cost, this evening, this night, we must arrest the government, first disarming the cadets etc. (and fighting them if they resist). We mustn’t wait!! We could lose everything.’ He went on: ‘The government is wavering. We must beat it, whatever the cost.’23 It may be, as has been suggested, that Lenin was consciously raising the tension, having taken as accurate some of the press reports about the danger of a renewed threat from the military, à la Kornilov. The old ideas about democracy were falling like dead leaves from the trees. The more familiar notion of the conspirator, committed to an obsessive single goal, took stronger hold.
The very word ‘beat’ signalled the shift from the peaceful path to that of violence, and this soon came to dominate the Bolshevik mentality. The weak attempts undertaken by the Mensheviks to apply liberal methods to change this course only brought the wrath of the radical Bolsheviks down on their heads. Soon, on 19 December 1917, Trotsky would call on the ‘iron steamroller of the proletarian revolution to crush the spinal column of Menshevism’.24
Was Trotsky wrong to link the beginning of the uprising with the opening of the Congress of Soviets, and to expect the Soviets to pass a resolution liquidating the Provisional Government and ratifying revolutionary power? He was not in favour of delaying the uprising, as Soviet historians repeatedly asserted. Instead he wished to ‘legitimize’ the uprising by establishing it on a broader popular base. He believed that only the Congress would bring the hesitant elements onto the side of the revolution, that it would create a favourable attitude abroad towards it, and help to imbue the minds of the masses with revolutionary ideals.
The Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet was the body which headed the preparation and conduct of the October armed uprising, and Trotsky’s part in its creation and functioning is beyond dispute. Since this body was brought into being as an adjunct of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky, as the chairman of the Soviet, naturally took the leading rôle in it. In what is arguably his best book, The History of the Russian Revolution, he wrote:
The decision to create a Military Revolutionary Committee, first raised on the ninth [of October], was passed at a plenary session of the Soviet only a week later. The Soviet is not a party; its machinery is heavy … [The] Conference of Regimental Committees had demonstrated its viability, the arming of the workers was going forward. And thus the Military Revolutionary Committee, although it went to work only on the twentieth, five days before the insurrection, found ready to its hands a sufficiently well organized dominion. Being boycotted by the Compromisers, the staff of the Committee contained only Bolshevik and Left Social[ist] Revolutionaries; that eased and simplified the task. Of the Social[ist] Revolutionaries only Lazimir did any work, and he was even placed at the head of the bureau in order to emphasize the fact that the Committee was a Soviet and not a party institution. In essence, however, the Committee, whose president was Trotsky … relied exclusively on Bolsheviks. The Committee hardly met once in plenary session with delegates present from all the institutions listed in its regulations … [It] was the general staff of the insurrection.25
After Lenin died, and the history of the revolution began to be hastily rewritten, the party’s Military Revolutionary Centre emerged as having played the leading part. This was a purely symbolic body that had been created as part of the Military Revolutionary Committee. No record exists of its activity, nor would one expect to find any, since its alleged work was in fact performed by the Committee. Its membership, however, included Stalin, who embarked in the middle of the 1920s on the task of enhancing his own position in 1917 at the expense of Trotsky’s. This was initially difficult to do, since Trotsky’s role in 1917 was well known to have been endorsed on numerous occasions by Lenin himself.26
After the death of Lenin, Stalin p
roduced his own, somewhat different view of Trotsky in 1917: ‘I have to say that Trotsky played no special rôle in the October uprising, nor could he have done, since, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he had to carry out the wishes of the relevant party bodies which monitored his every step … Trotsky could play no special part either in the party or in the October uprising as a relative newcomer to our party in the October period.’27 It was after this assertion by Stalin that Trotsky was dropped into what George Orwell called the ‘memory hole’, and remained there until very recently.
Russian attitudes to the revolution itself are another matter. As our minds have freed themselves of dogma and mystification, it has become clear that what happened in 1917 was the most tragic mistake. Before waiting for the aims of the February revolution to be accomplished, the Bolsheviks proclaimed the transition to its socialist phase. In these circumstances it seemed that the revolution could go further only by bringing forward the dictatorship of the proletariat in ugly and terrible forms.
On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the October revolution, Istpart, the special commission on the history of the party and the revolution, sent a questionnaire to all participants in the events of 1917. After some hesitation a questionnaire was also sent to Trotsky, who was by then being slandered and attacked in increasingly harsh terms. Dispirited, but neither yielding nor broken, Trotsky decided to reply to the questions in detail. He attached a letter and sent it back to Istpart on 21 October 1927. He knew that even if at best his answers would be shelved indefinitely in the party archives, one thing in history was sure: that in the end the truth would come out. Until the end of his life, he hoped for historical rehabilitation and believed in the invincibility of the human mind. He had never doubted the timeliness of the socialist revolution. Nor did he doubt that in due course the veil would be torn from Stalin—‘the second Lenin’—and show him to be an emperor with no clothes.
Everything Trotsky wrote in his reply to Istpart was either true or, in some cases, a subjective judgement that did not quite correspond with what actually happened. He included his letter in his book The Stalinist School of Falsification, which he published in exile in 1932, a book which throws a good deal of light on the way Stalin created the myth of the ‘two leaders’ of October, while condemning so many other Bolsheviks to oblivion. Under the heading ‘The Falsification of the History of the October Uprising, the History of the Revolution and the History of the Party’, Trotsky wrote to Istpart:
What is the sense in asking me to describe my part in the October rising, when the entire official apparatus, including yours, is working to hide and destroy or at least distort all traces of my participation? I have repeatedly been asked by dozens and hundreds of comrades why I remain silent and why I say nothing about the glaring falsification of the history of the October revolution and of our party, aimed against me. I have no intention here of settling the question of these falsifications: one would need to write several volumes to do it. But allow me in response to your questionnaire to point to a dozen or so examples of the conscious and malicious distortion of recent events which is now being perpetrated on a mass scale, and which is sanctioned by the authority of all kinds of institutions and is even going into the textbooks.28
Trotsky wrote bitterly of the way some Bolsheviks had rapidly altered their view of him under the new political conditions. He cited what F. Raskolnikov had written in 1923: ‘Trotsky regarded Vladimir Ilyich with enormous respect. He placed him above all other contemporaries whom he had met in Russia or abroad. One could detect the tone of the devoted pupil in the way Trotsky spoke about Lenin … Any trace of their pre-war differences was utterly obliterated. There were no differences between their tactical positions. This rapprochement, which had been discernible already during the war, became complete from the moment of Lev Davidovich’s return to Russia; after his very first speeches, all of us old Leninists felt that he was one of us.’29 Trotsky then quoted Raskolnikov’s 1927 review of the third volume of his collected works, published in 1924 and 1925: ‘So, what was Trotsky’s own position in 1917? He still saw himself as belonging to a general party, together with the Mensheviks … He had not yet clarified his attitude towards Bolshevism and Menshevism. He still occupied a wavering, undefined position, neither one thing nor the other.’30 Trotsky exposed the poverty of the Stalinist falsifications with consummate ease. He compared what Stalin was now saying about his part as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet with what he had said on the same subject on 6 November 1918: ‘All the practical work of organizing the uprising was done under the direct leadership of Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet Trotsky. One can say with certainty that the party is obligated for the rapid move of the garrison onto the side of the Soviet and the capable handling of the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee first and foremost to Comrade Trotsky.’31 Stalin had written this in an article in which, paradoxically, he had warned against exaggerating Trotsky’s rôle. Trotsky commented on this that ‘an honest man, even if he has a poor memory, will not contradict himself, while a disloyal, unscrupulous, mendacious man always has to remember what he has said in the past in order to avoid disgracing himself’.32
It should be remembered that Trotsky wrote this letter in 1927, at a time when he was cornered and the object of constant political vilification, while Stalin was rising rapidly to the peak of power. It took great courage on his part to attempt to restore the picture of events as they were in 1917, especially his view of Stalin’s rôle at the time:
However unpleasant it may be to rummage in the garbage-can, allow me, as a fairly close participant and witness of the events of the time, and now as a spectator, to state the following. Lenin’s rôle requires no elaboration. I was meeting Sverdlov very frequently at the time, I would ask him for advice and for support from others. Comrade Kamenev who, as is well known, occupied a special position which he himself long ago acknowledged as incorrect, nevertheless took a most active part in the uprising. Kamenev and I spent the decisive night of the twenty-fifth at the offices of the Military Revolutionary Committee, answering enquiries on the telephone and sending out instructions. But, despite my most strenuous efforts, I simply cannot answer the question of what precisely was Stalin’s rôle in those decisive days. Not once did I ask him for advice or assistance. He showed no initiative whatsoever.33
Trotsky then sheds light on the question of the Military Revolutionary Centre, which Stalinist apologists were promoting only because Stalin had been a member of it. Here he caught them red-handed:
In an obvious oversight by the Stalinist historians, Pravda of 2 November 1927 published a precise extract from the minutes of the Central Committee of 16 (29) October 1917, which states that ‘the Central Committee is organizing the Military Revolutionary Centre with the following membership: Sverdlov, Stalin, Bubnov, Uritsky and Dzerzhinsky. This Centre is part of the revolutionary Soviet committee.’ In other words, the Centre merely supplemented the Military Revolutionary Committee, which was headed by Trotsky, who, as he himself sarcastically concluded, need hardly have belonged to the same body twice. How hard it is to correct history after the event.34
Two final passages from Trotsky’s book will suffice to show how he exposed and ridiculed the efforts of the falsifiers. He singled out for special mention Yaroslavsky and Lunacharsky. After the revolution and civil war, Yaroslavsky had written of Trotsky:
Comrade Trotsky’s brilliant literary and publicizing activity has earned him the universal tide of ‘king of the pamphleteers’ … We see before us the most profound giftedness … we see a man most profoundly dedicated to the revolution, a man who has grown up to be a tribune, with a tongue as finely honed and flexible as steel, a tongue that can cut his enemies down, and a pen which scatters a wealth of ideas like handfuls of artistic pearls.35
As for Lunacharsky, he had written:
When Lenin was lying wounded [after being shot in August 1918], fatally, as we thought, no one could express our feelings towards him as
well as Trotsky. In the appalling storms of international events, Trotsky, the other leader of the revolution, who was utterly disinclined to sentimentalize, said: ‘When one thinks that Comrade Lenin might die, it seems one’s whole life has been useless, and one feels one doesn’t want to go on living.’36
Ninety per cent of Yaroslavsky’s falsification, Trotsky claimed, was devoted to rewriting his part in the revolution, while Lunacharsky would write whatever he was ordered to, like an obedient secretary. They and the countless others who came after them were creating new myths by which in time the whole country would be made to bend before Stalin and his entourage. Trotsky’s finest hours occurred in the revolution and civil war, and it was precisely these that were the main object of camouflage and distortion and that were ultimately erased from the popular memory.
The Oracle of the Revolution
Every revolution creates the hope that it is possible to destroy the old way of life overnight and to open the door to a new one. Excessive expectations soon give way to great disappointment. Usually, counterrevolutionary interests will exploit the disillusionment. History has no examples of the villain being magically cast into the gutter and a free rein given to the hero. It has long been observed, however, that the peak of a revolutionary crisis, when passions are at their highest and ready to explode, is generated not only by social, economic and political processes, but also by individuals who help to create that pressure.
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