What did he mean by taking ‘responsibility for leadership of the Party’? Was he implying the possibility of his personally heading the Party? Lenin, after all, had declared that he would leave the government if he were in a minority on peace. Or did Trotsky have collective leadership in mind? It is impossible to answer this question unequivocally, but it is clear that had Lenin resigned, Trotsky would have been the chief candidate to succeed him. In the circumstances, Trotsky behaved wisely in abstaining while occupying a different position from Lenin’s, as did his supporters Ioffe, Dzerzhinsky and Krestinsky, thus allowing Lenin to obtain a majority. Trotsky also showed far-sightedness in taking a step that would prevent a split, even if meant letting through the policy of ‘peace at any price’.
Instead, Trotsky did his best to preserve his dignity and his revolutionary honour. When the Seventh Party Congress finally approved Lenin’s proposal, Trotsky made a brief statement: ‘The Party Congress, being the highest institution of the Party, has indirectly rejected the policy I and others pursued as members of our delegation at Brest-Litovsk … Whether the Party Congress wanted this or not, its last vote has accomplished just that, and I therefore resign from whatever responsible posts our Party may have placed upon me.’100 He had already resigned as Foreign Commissar on 22 February.
Judging by his speeches of the period and what he wrote later, in February-March 1918 Trotsky genuinely believed that the ‘indecent peace with Germany’ was not a moral defeat for the revolution so much as an act of capitulation. The Party, he felt, had crossed a line beyond which the chances for the survival of the revolution had been sharply diminished. In this, he was closer in spirit to the Left Communists, especially once the Germans had intensified their demands. There was a moment when he felt the complete defeat of the revolution was a real possibility. As he said at the Seventh Party Congress:
we are retreating not just topographically, but also politically … If we allow this retreat in the name of an open-ended breathing-space to develop, then … the proletariat of Russia will be in no condition to preserve class power in its own hands … The present breathing-space can be reckoned to last no more than two or three months at best, and most likely only weeks and days. In this time the question will be made clear of whether events are going to come to our assistance, or we will declare that we appeared too soon and are going into retirement, going back into the underground … But I think that, if it comes to leaving, we should do it like a revolutionary party, fighting to the last drop of blood for every position.101
Having miscalculated Germany’s intentions and power, Trotsky was turned in one day from the hero of the talks into a historical failure. This would become a dominant theme in all subsequent Soviet writing, most notoriously in Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course: ‘Despite the fact that in the name of the Central Committee Lenin and Stalin insisted on signing the peace, Trotsky as chairman of the Soviet delegation treacherously disregarded the direct orders of the Bolshevik Party … It was monstrous. The German imperialists could not have asked for more from this traitor to the interests of the land of the Soviets.’102 But history has a way of putting things in their proper place. Trotsky’s miscalculation was a matter of timing. The revolutionary rise did indeed come in Europe, after all. A revolution in Germany in November 1918 disposed of the Hohenzollern dynasty and caused the annulment of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Trotsky’s mistake had been to expect the revolution to follow a programme, rather than to erupt spontaneously. He had shown strength of will in the name of the revolution to overcome his own ego, as he said at the Seventh Congress: ‘We, who abstained, demonstrated an act of great self-restraint in sacrificing our egos for the sake of Party unity … You have to tell the other side that the path they have taken has a real chance of success. But it is a dangerous path that could lead to the saving of lives, while depriving them of meaning.’103
At Brest-Litovsk Trotsky had wanted too much. He had wanted to get Russia out of the war, to raise the German working class and preserve the prestige of revolutionary Russia. It was his misfortune, rather than his fault, that these aims could not be accomplished all at once. He had shown that a revolutionary cannot be a mere executive. Above all, he had been terrified at the thought that the revolutionary flame in Russia would be stamped out by the German jackboot. For him, the Russian revolution was the great prologue to the world conflagration which he spent his life advocating. He was that rare individual who can be sustained by a single idea until his dying breath. For that particular idea to be realized, however, it needed violence, violence and still more violence.
On the Bloody Divide
All revolutions are bloody. The October revolution was bloodless, but it was only the beginning. The transfer of power in Moscow, for instance, was quite different. Political upheavals often provoke civil wars, and class hatred draws a bloody divide between compatriots. The Russian intelligentsia was especially afraid of civil war and was desperate to avoid it. Several years before 1917, in his book Free Russia, Merezhkovsky wrote: ‘The decisive moment arrives in every revolution when someone has to shoot someone else and to do so with a light heart, the way a hunter will shoot a partridge … The question of violence, metaphysical, moral, personal, social, arises in every revolution.’ Discussing the fate of Russia’s revolutions—that of 1905 which had just passed and, as he sensed, the coming one—he predicted: ‘Who knows, maybe the grandeur of Russia’s emancipation resides in the fact that it has never succeeded, just as the excessive rarely succeeds; but the excessive of today may be tomorrow’s norm in all things.’104 Merezhkovsky was concerned about the premature nature of the coming revolution. Was this the irrational fear of the intellectual before a social cataclysm, or a gloomy prediction? He was not alone in fearing the approaching upheavals, bringing with them, in his words, ‘state-revolutionary murder’.
Even Plekhanov feared the spectre of violence that lurked behind the revolution. This was one of his reasons for rejecting outright the October coup. As a Marxist, he believed that socialist revolution would be justified in Russia only when the proletariat made up the majority of the population, thus effectively postponing it to the distant future. Not long before he died, tormented by the fact that he was being denigrated as a ‘bourgeois degenerate’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ in many Petrograd newspapers, he resolved to remain true to his beliefs and to state plainly his views on what had transpired. In an ‘Open Letter to the Petrograd Workers’ he asserted: ‘Having seized political power prematurely, the Russian proletariat will not accomplish the social revolution, but will only provoke a civil war which in the end will force the proletariat to retreat far back from the positions conquered in February and March of [1917].’ Plekhanov had lived for many years in Western Europe as a typical social democrat, and was thus utterly incapable of accepting or reconciling himself to the course of events. ‘Their consequences,’ he went on, ‘are already extremely unfortunate. They will be incomparably more unfortunate, if the conscious elements of the working class do not speak out loud and clear against the seizure of power by one class or, still worse, one party. Power should rest on a coalition of all the vital forces of the country, that is, on all those classes and elements that do not want to restore the old order … The conscious elements of our proletariat must protect it from the huge misfortune that can befall it.’105
Among the misfortunes threatening Russia, Plekhanov, like Martov and other leading Mensheviks, regarded civil war as one of the worst. Their attitude to civil war was what divided the Bolsheviks and their allies from the Menshevik groups which above all valued democracy, even if it was of a manifestly bourgeois kind. Lenin’s view, that civil wars ‘represent a natural and in certain circumstances inevitable continuation, development and intensification of class struggle’,106 was fully shared by Trotsky, who did not expect the old owners and masters to give way easily. Indeed, Lenin and Trotsky were almost invariably linked as the main target of anti-Bolshev
ik criticism. For example, in an article entitled ‘For the Workers’ Attention’, Maxim Gorky wrote: ‘Vladimir Lenin is establishing the socialist order in Russia the Nechaev way, or “across the swamp at full steam ahead”. Having compelled the proletariat to agree to the abolition of freedom of the press, Lenin and his stooges have thus made it legitimate for the enemies of democracy to shut people’s mouths by threatening anyone who does not agree with the despotism of Lenin and Trotsky with starvation and violence.’107
In Russia the civil war started in October 1917, although it did not gather real momentum until the summer of 1918, and was virtually over by the beginning of 1921. Lenin might claim that it was provoked by international imperialism, but the generals who organized the White movement were not under the orders of foreign capitalists. They acted independently. Writing of the period from 24 October to 1 November (Old Style) 1917, Kerensky recalled: ‘In fact, the days of our campaign on Petrograd were the days when the civil war flared up and overran the whole country and the front. The heroic stand of the officer cadets in Petersburg on the twenty-ninth, the street battles in Moscow, Saratov, Kharkov and elsewhere, the fighting between those true to the [February] revolution and the rebellious units at the front—all this showed that we were far from being alone.’108
After the Seventh Party Congress in March 1918, Trotsky was without a job until Lenin raised the question of who should run the military administration. Who was capable of creating a new military organization that would be able to resist the enemy’s regular army? Who could breathe life into the old army? The German offensive of the previous month had shown that the triumvirate governing the Commissariat for Military Affairs—N. Krylenko, N. Podvoisky and P. Dybenko—were not up to handling the difficult task of creating a regular Red Army. Furthermore, they held leftist views on military organization which Lenin did not approve, although he was not prepared to put a military expert of the old school in charge either, as it would have been unacceptable to both the army and the people. After long deliberation and consultation with Sverdlov, Lenin chose Trotsky, a man who was as remote from the problems of military organization, tactics and strategy, as it was possible to be.
We shall deal in a later chapter with Lenin’s reasons for choosing Trotsky. For the moment, suffice it to say that on 14 March 1918, the day he resigned as Foreign Commissar, Trotsky replaced Krylenko as Commissar for Military Affairs, the order appointing him being signed by Lenin, as Chairman of Sovnarkom, Karelin, as Commissar for State Property, and Stalin, as Commissar for Nationalities.
Trotsky’s change of appointment coincided with the transfer of the Soviet government to Moscow because of the threat posed to Petrograd by renewed German military activity in the Baltic. He arrived in the new capital a week after Lenin, and on his first evening there he held a meeting of the military collegium of the Commissariat at which he attempted to define the chief guidelines of military construction. Next day he issued his first order, requesting the army’s accommodation department urgently to refurbish the former Alexander Military School for use as the Commissariat for War.109
The revolution, however, was more than plans, ideas and plots. It was also boundlessly chaotic, a time of arbitrary violence, licensed aggression and unwarranted demands from the masses. The Bolshevik leaders soon became aware of this, as the Central Committee began to receive a flood of complaints about ‘requisitions’, ‘expropriations’, unsanctioned ‘revolutionary punishment’. Often these actions took the form of grabbing for oneself. For instance, in May 1918 Trotsky received a telegram from a commissar called Pozern to the effect that ‘the second Petrograd conference of the Red Army voted for a resolution on the need to fix their wages at 300 roubles’. Realizing that to concede to such a demand would be to open the floodgates, Trotsky replied: ‘I refuse to take responsibility for your breaking of Soviet government decrees.’ On the reverse of the message he wrote a further explanation to be given to the troops: ‘The wages of the Red Army are not fixed by the Petrograd Red Army men but by the Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ and Red Army Deputies of the whole of Russia ⁄ Wages have been fixed at 150 roubles. I regard Red Army men who make demands to raise pay at a difficult time for the republic as bad soldiers of the revolution.’110
Unbridled violence would soon become the order of the day in the Russian civil war. As a rule prisoners were not taken. Kolchak’s troops would raise injured Red Army men on their bayonets, and the savagery practised by the Reds was no less widespread or cruel. Trotsky issued orders to shoot Red Army men found guilty of cowardice, or who ran from the field of battle or were caught looting. Top of his list for execution were commanders and commissars who abandoned their positions. The front would be ravaged by typhus. Both Reds and Whites would execute hostages. Life would become cheap. Blind class appeal would become stronger than human sympathy, pity, wisdom or good judgement. Russia would be drenched in her own blood.
Trotsky formulated his political views on the eve of the civil war most graphically in a report to the Moscow City Bolshevik Party Conference in the spring of 1918, and in two speeches at workers’ meetings on ‘Our Friends and Our Enemies’ and ‘On the Soviet Government’s Domestic Tasks’. He included these pieces in a separate section of volume seventeen of his collected works under the tide ‘The Basic Tasks of the Soviet Regime in the Spring of 1918’. It was a period he described as ‘an internal hitch’, when the October revolution was being seen by some ‘as either an adventure or a mistake’. He justified the ‘hitch’ as the heritage of tsarism, the crimes of the autocratic system, the mistakes committed by Milyukov and Kerensky. ‘The tsarist bureaucrats and diplomats were even guilty of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty because it was they who had got us into the appalling war, wasting the people’s property, robbing the people whom they kept in ignorance and slavery … This treaty is a tsarist promissory note, a promissory note of Kerensky and Co. It is a cruel crime that has burdened the working class with the huge responsibility for the sins of the international imperialists and their servants.’111
Trotsky outlined his views on power thus: ‘In the political and directly militant sense, the October revolution took place with unexpected and incomparable success.’112 He declared that there could be no reconciliation between the classes: ‘either the dictatorship of capital and the landowners, or the dictatorship of the working class and the poorest peasantry’, while the Constituent Assembly would have been ‘a great conciliation chamber, a great compromising institution of the Russian revolution’.113 Further, he says of the Constituent Assembly that it was good only for ‘a general roll-call’, showing who was for whom. As for ‘revolutionary creative work, it was of no use. We are not about to share power with anyone. If we were to stop halfway,’ he went on, ‘then it wouldn’t be a revolution, it would be an abortion, if you’ll excuse the expression. A false historical delivery.’114 Trotsky did not want an abortion of democracy, but a successful birth of the Bolshevik dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks had no room in their concept of power for any other parties, including those, like the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who had swum with them in the revolutionary stream for decades. Single-mindedness, a monopoly on revolutionary truth and the conviction that no one else could be right, united the Bolsheviks, and with them, Trotsky. As early as April 1918 he voiced a thesis that is painfully similar to the ominous formula advanced by Stalin in the 1930s: ‘The further and the more the revolutionary movement develops, here and abroad, the more tightly the bourgeoisie of all lands will close ranks.’115 Stalin would reshape the thesis as the sharpening of the class war, but in one country.
In the spring of 1918 Trotsky declared: ‘Yes, we are weak, and that is our greatest historical crime, because one cannot be weak in history. The weak become the prey of the strong.’116 In the preface to his 1918 pamphlet ‘The October Revolution’, he stressed: ‘The facts alone of the way the October revolution took place are a ruthless contradiction of seminarist metaphysics. You can r
epeat as often as you like that it would have been better to obtain power for the working class by means of the universal franchise … but history is not written according to a recipe in a cookbook, even if the book is in kitchen Latin … The proletariat gets power by the right of revolutionary force. And if some confused Marxist theorist starts getting under their feet, then the working class will step over that theorist, as over much else.’117
A significant aspect of Trotsky’s speeches in the spring of 1918 concerned the labour organization of society, underlining the need for revolutionary order and discipline. He published his speech to a conference of the Moscow City Party Organization under the tide ‘Labour, Discipline and Order will Save the Soviet Republic’. The disorder of society during the revolution he explained as the result of the upsurge of freedom in the downtrodden individuals which ‘like the roach, lived and died the way a swarm of locusts lives and dies’. Yesterday, such an individual was ‘a man of the masses, he was nothing, a slave for the tsar, the gentry, the bureaucracy, a component in the factory-owner’s machine’, and then suddenly he felt himself to be a person. ‘That is what caused the flood of disorganizing impulses, the individualistic, anarchistic, destructive tendencies which we have observed especially among broad sections of the declassed elements, in the old army, and also among certain sections of the working class.’118
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