After defeating Kerensky’s attempt on 6-14 November to move troops under General Krasnov to Petrograd, the Bolsheviks held a memorable meeting of the Petrograd Party Committee. The ‘heretics’, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had opposed the armed uprising, now proposed the creation of a so-called ‘homogenous socialist government’, which would include SRs and Mensheviks. Nogin and Lunacharsky suggested that what was needed was a socialist coalition. Lenin calculated that such a government would have a majority of Mensheviks and Right SRs, and was adamantly opposed. Trotsky supported him with equal vigour, a fact Lenin much appreciated. Neither side was willing to compromise, yet again ignoring the possible chance of establishing a more moderate system. The ‘infallible’ Lenin and his closest ally, Trotsky, committed a fatal mistake. Governing alone from the middle of 1918, the Bolsheviks condemned themselves to permanent isolation, and were able henceforth to maintain themselves in power only by the use of force and coercion.
Trotsky’s book The Stalinist School of Falsification includes a photocopy of the minutes of this meeting of the Petrograd Party Committee. When the issue of inviting Mensheviks and SRs to enter the new government was raised, Lenin declared: ‘I can’t even talk about this seriously. Trotsky said such a union was impossible a long time ago. Trotsky understood this and since then there hasn’t been a better Bolshevik than he.’57 These words were not included in either the 1929 or 1958 edition of the minutes. Trotsky referred to them frequently in his writings to show that he had taken a correct position on the issue of ‘homogenous government’, i.e. that of Lenin. In the book, moreover, he admitted that when he had been in disagreement with Bolshevik positions in the past he had been in the wrong,58 thus refuting the oft-repeated accusation of the Stalinists that ‘Trotsky and his few close friends entered the party not in order to work for it, but to shatter and blow it up from within.’59
Not everyone accepted Trotsky as a major leader. Among the Bolsheviks there were those who would not forgive him his non-Bolshevik past, while for the population at large it was his Jewish origins that got in the way. The charge was made frequently enough that Lenin was ‘surrounded by Jews’. Among the communications Lenin received on this subject was a telegram from an old member of the People’s Will, a Bolshevik sympathizer called Makari Vasiliev: ‘To save Bolshevism, you should forgo a number of extremely respected and popular Bolsheviks: the Soviet government would be defended and supported by the immediate resignation of Zinoviev, Trotsky and Kamenev, whose presence in the highest and most influential positions does not reflect the principle of national self-determination.’ Vasiliev also demanded the ‘self-removal of Sverdlov, Ioffe, Steklov and their replacement by people of Russian origin’.60 Neither Lenin nor the other leaders took any notice of such exhortations, dismissing them as an expression of low consciousness at a time when the international principle underlying the revolution was genuine and powerful. But anti-Semitism was very much in evidence. As Boris Savinkov, then in Warsaw, wrote: ‘There are peasants who hate the Jewish people because some Jewish commissars requisition their livestock and grain. There are Red Army men who hate the Jewish people because some Jewish political commissars send them to the slaughter. There are [White officer] volunteers who hate the entire Jewish people because Jewish members of the Cheka are executing their families … But anti-Semitism will only disappear when Russia is a genuinely democratic state. As a Russian, I am hurt by Jewish suffering.’61
Trotsky had striven for nothing in his life as zealously as he strove for the revolution, as if only the revolution could give him the opportunity he needed for full self-expression. He had succeeded also in convincing Lenin of his dedication to the Bolshevik cause. When the Bolsheviks were drawing up their list of candidates for elections to the Constituent Assembly, Lenin wrote: ‘Such a large number of inexperienced people (such as Larin) who only recently joined our party is quite impermissible. There must be special scrutiny and correction of the list … It goes without saying that … no one would dispute, for instance, the candidacy of Trotsky, first of all because as soon as he arrived he took up an internationalist position; secondly, he strove to bring the Mezhrayonka into the party; thirdly, in the difficult days of July he was on top of the situation and a dedicated supporter of the party of the revolutionary proletariat.’62
The day after the coup, Pravda proclaimed: ‘Comrades, with your blood you have guaranteed that the master of the Russian land, the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, shall convene on time.’ In the elections that took place in November, however, the Bolsheviks received only a quarter of the seats, and Lenin declared: ‘The republic of Soviets is a higher form of democracy than the bourgeois republic with the Constituent Assembly.’63 On 23 November the Bolshevik Central Committee ordered the arrest of the commission in charge of the elections and convocation of the Constituent Assembly. When the commission protested, Stalin, who had been deputed to handle the affair, stated peremptorily that ‘the Bolsheviks are not interested in what these people think of the Council of People’s Commissars. The Commission had committed forgeries …’64
After many delays, the Constituent Assembly finally opened on 5 (18) January 1918. It was a sad spectacle in which the assembled deputies from different parties and factions had no common political language. There was whooping and shouting. Chernov, elected Chairman, tried to shout above the din: ‘The simple fact of the opening of the first session of the Constituent Assembly proclaims an end to the civil war between the peoples of Russia.’65 It was clear to everyone that the Bolsheviks had no intention of allowing the Assembly to continue, since they could not control it. The debates were still going on, however, at five in the morning, when a sailor—one Anatoly Zheleznyakov—mounted the stage, tugged at Chernov’s sleeve and loudly announced to the hushed assembly: ‘Comrade Dybenko [the Navy Commissar and effectively the head of the Red Guards] wants those present to leave the hall.’ Attempting to preserve his dignity, Chernov replied: ‘That is for the Constituent Assembly to decide, if you don’t mind.’ Armed Red Army men and sailors appeared in the doorways. Zheleznyakov said: ‘I suggest you leave the hall, as it’s late and the guards are tired.’
The Left SRs supported the Bolsheviks, and Russian parliamentarism was laid to rest for decades to come. The newspapers at first wrote that the elections to the Assembly had been based on the old, unjust law passed by Kerensky, which gave an advantage to the greater part of the population, namely the peasantry. Of course the Bolsheviks, who now had a majority in the Soviets, had no intention of sharing power with the Assembly, where they were in a minority. It was a choice between the Soviets and the Assembly, and it was one that had been made long before. Without hesitation, Trotsky was with Lenin. The sympathy of the masses was outwardly with the Soviets, but power there was in fact in Bolshevik hands. The idea of the Assembly had already dimmed, which explains why its dispersal provoked no mass demonstrations. It was only later that the people realized that the Bolshevik ship of state was on a straight course towards totalitarian dictatorship.
With a quarter of the seats in the Assembly, and a further quarter held by the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks might have created a powerful coalition, but by early 1918 they were in no mood to share power. Lenin explained the SR election victory as a consequence of the fact that between 17 October, when the electoral registers were published, and 12 November, when the elections took place, peasants ‘could not yet know the truth about the land and peace, could not distinguish between their friends and their enemies, the wolves in sheep’s clothing’.66 Some responsibility for this lost opportunity to follow a pluralist path must also be laid on the Socialist Revolutionaries, who did not want to remain in the position of the Bolsheviks’ junior partners for a long time.
The October coup transformed Trotsky’s relationship with Lenin from that of comrade to that of friend. Trotsky recalled the scene as they awaited the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets:
Late that evening … Lenin and I were resting in a room ad
joining the meeting-hall, a room entirely empty except for chairs. Someone had spread a blanket on the floor for us; someone else, I think it was Lenin’s sister, had brought us pillows. We were lying side by side; body and soul were relaxing like overtaut strings. It was a well-earned rest. We could not sleep, so we talked in low voices. Only now did Lenin become reconciled to the postponement of the uprising. His fears had been dispelled. There was a rare sincerity in his voice. He was interested in knowing all about the mixed pickets of the Red Guards, sailors and soldiers that had been stationed everywhere. ‘What a wonderful sight: a worker with a rifle, side by side with a soldier, standing before a street fire!’ he repeated with deep feeling. At last the soldier and the worker had been brought together! Then he started suddenly. ‘And what about the Winter Palace? It has not been taken yet. Isn’t there a danger in that?’ I got up to ask, on the telephone, about the progress of the operations there, but he tried to stop me. ‘Lie still, I will send someone to find out.’ But we could not rest for long. The session of the Congress of Soviets was opening in the next hall.67
For as long as it was still functioning, Novaya zhizn’ continued to issue ominous warnings about the consequences of the Bolshevik coup. Its main target was the new regime’s resort to the use of force. Unsigned articles bore the unmistakable mark of Martov and his fellow Mensheviks Dan and Abramovich. On 29 October an article entitled ‘The Bolsheviks in Power’ argued that
the coup of 25 October had Lenin and Trotsky as its chief actors, but the true initiators were Kerensky and Tsereteli … It is the front-men who are now in ‘power’. But only the most superficial observer might think that they are going to play this comic opera through to the end. In fact we are witnessing the greatest of tragedies which threatens the country with endless miseries and the destruction of our revolutionary gains … We reject root and branch the very method of the seizure of power which was carried out by the isolated forces of the Bolsheviks with the assistance of military ‘operations’. The greatest convulsions in accordance with the Bolshevik programme are now inevitable.68
With the possible sole exception of the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, on all questions of major substance faced by the Bolsheviks in both the October coup and the civil war Lenin and Trotsky were at one. In his magnum opus on the revolution, and in many other works, Trotsky invariably defended Lenin, who was for him ‘an outstanding leader’, and with whom, whether alive or dead, he took no issue. The question is, why? There are several explanations. First and above all, Trotsky realized that if he were to change his political direction yet again, it would mean his intellectual death. Political life allows only one substantial revision, otherwise one loses credibility with one’s past comrades as well as one’s new friends. Further, Trotsky had seen during October that Lenin’s views were extraordinarily close to his own. Finally, he did not want to quarrel with the memory of the leader of the Russian revolution because he was determined to explode the myth that Stalin was ‘the Lenin of today’. Throughout his theoretical and political writing, he tried to show that he alone had always understood Lenin, and that he alone had since October 1917 remained true to Lenin’s ideas.
Even when he was discussing steps and decisions Lenin had taken that for some reason had not been supported by the Central Committee, Trotsky did not condemn him. In 1932, for example, he wrote:
Lenin insisted on the uprising taking place during the Democratic Conference: not a single member of the Central Committee was in favour. A week later Lenin suggested that Smilga organize an uprising headquarters in Finland and from there strike a blow at the government, using the sailors … At the end of September Lenin regarded postponing the rising for three weeks, until the Congress of Soviets, as disastrous. In fact, the uprising, which was delayed until the eve of the Congress, was completed while it was still in session. Lenin proposed that the struggle be launched in Moscow on the assumption that it could succeed there without a battle. In fact, the uprising in Moscow, despite the previous victory in Petrograd, lasted eight days and cost many lives.
Scrupulously enumerating Lenin’s failed proposals, Trotsky resisted any further temptation to blame him. On the contrary, ‘Lenin was not a machine for turning out infallible decisions. He was “merely” a genius, and nothing human was alien to him, including the capacity to make mistakes.’69
Trotsky’s attitude to Lenin was in this respect enviable, since he could recognize Lenin’s genius while attacking the deification that was to bedevil Soviet intellectual life for decades to come. The iconization of Lenin led both to the impoverishment of his ideas and the growth of dogmatists who, in alliance with the bureaucrats, were responsible for much that he might not have approved of. Trotsky saw him, in other words, as a man and not as a god. Even in 1927, when he was in disgrace and at Stalin’s mercy, he had the courage to defend Lenin from iconization, from the mortification of dogmatic reverence and his transformation into yet another Marxist saint. In an unpublished article entitled ‘On Unctuousness’ he wrote:
the dead Lenin seems to have been reborn: there you have the solution of the riddle of the risen Christ. He has been resurrected for us yet again … The real danger begins when the bureaucracy makes attitudes towards Lenin and his teaching a subject of automatic reverence. Speaking, as always, in simple terms, [Lenin’s widow] N.K. Krupskaya has warned against this as well as another danger. She said there shouldn’t be too many monuments to Lenin and that unnecessary and useless institutions shouldn’t be created in his name.70
At an evening of reminiscences held on Lenin’s birthday, three months after his death, Trotsky gave a long speech which demonstrated his ability to fathom the depths of another personality, to perceive the philosophy of another’s existence, and to detect qualities that others might fail to notice. He remarked that already artists and writers were talking about Lenin—for example, Maxim Gorky: ‘But he did not understand Ilyich, approaching him as he did with the petty bourgeois sugariness of the intellectual that became so characteristic of Gorky in his later years.’ Lenin, according to Trotsky, ‘had a mighty inner seething revolutionary impatience which he tamed with will power and mind … He was permeated with faith in mankind; in the moral sense he was the highest kind of idealist, he believed in man’s ability to reach heights of which we can only dream.’ Trotksy also saw that Lenin had an ominous side, his faith in the strength of dictatorship: ‘Vladimir Ilyich said that the greatest danger was that the Russians are good men … When General Krasnov was released on his word of honour, it seems that only Ilyich was against it, and then he gave in to the others and threw up his hands … When the dictatorship of the proletariat was discussed in his presence, he would always say—exaggerating to make the point clearer—“What sort of dictatorship do we have! What we have is a mess, just bunglers” … Generally speaking, he maintained an even temper; his emotional state was uneven, but thanks to his unusual emotional restraint he always appeared in control to the highest degree.’ Trotsky perceptively noted that ‘the study of the psychology of our leaders will help people in the future to understand our epoch’. From his own exalted position, it was possible for Trotsky, given his extraordinary powers of observation, to penetrate Lenin’s internal world, to see the demon in him, rather than the god, the Robespierre of the Russian revolution.
For all his vanity, Trotsky recognized that Lenin was intellectually more powerful and enjoyed greater authority than he. He was very proud of the fact that it was his own name that invariably figured next to that of Lenin in the revolutionary, counter-revolutionary and liberal press. Sukhanov, the chronicler of the revolution, more than once blamed Trotsky no less than Lenin for the ‘collapse’ of Russia, for the ‘great troubles’ and for the ‘destruction of democratic hopes’. In November 1917, for example, Novaya zhizn’ published an article by him entitled ‘The Dictatorship of Citizen Lenin’, in which he wrote with the bitterness of the defeated: ‘Who cannot see that what we have is not a “Soviet” regime, but a dictat
orship of the respected citizens Lenin and Trotsky, and that their dictatorship rests on the bayonets of the soldiers and workers they deceived and who were given unpaid bills in place of fabulous, but non-existent riches?’71
Having assumed the role of ‘second man’, Trotsky often—especially in the later period—placed himself next to Lenin, while making it plain that this was no accident. In a piece entitled ‘Petrograd’ he wrote: ‘In the Smolny, with Comrade Lenin and myself present (I don’t remember the precise date), a meeting of the garrison was convened.’72 Other Bolshevik leaders were also present, but Trotsky singled out only two names. Similarly: ‘When Lenin and I held a meeting of officers of the Petersburg garrison, where the officers against Kerensky had gathered …’73 In his memoirs, Trotsky very often mentions the personal meetings, conversations and relations of trust that he had with Lenin, presuming with good reason that by emphasizing the intimacy of his relationship with the leader of the revolution he would better secure his own image: ‘On the twenty-fifth the Second Congress of Soviets opened. And then Dan and Skobelev came to the Smolny and just happened to pass right through the room where Vladimir Ilyich and I were sitting. He was wrapped up in a bandage, as if he had toothache, wearing enormous spectacles and a cheap cap and looking very odd. But Dan, who had a sharp and practised eye, nudged Skobelev, winked and went out. Vladimir Ilyich also nudged me: “They recognized me, the scoundrels.”’74
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