* The Czech Legion consisted of former prisoners-of-war from the Austro-Hungarian Army who were trying to make their way home by a circuitous route eastwards through Russia. They became a significant military factor in the civil war in Siberia.
* Mikhail Frunze, a Red Army commander who succeeded Trotsky as Military Commissar in 1925 and died the same year while undergoing surgery.
* Volodarsky, the Petrograd Commissar for Press Propaganda and Agitation, was assassinated in July 1918.
4
The Hypnosis of Revolution
Less than four months before his death, in an open letter to the Soviet workers entitled ‘You are Being Deceived’, Trotsky wrote: ‘The aim of the Fourth International is to spread the October revolution throughout the world,’ and ended with the call that had given meaning to his life: ‘Long live the world socialist revolution!’1 Such fanatical faith in an idea—and one which turned out to be so ephemeral—is rare indeed. He would die with his faith intact and with profound conviction in the triumph of Communist ideals.
Speaking in May 1924 at the Fifth All-Union Congress of the Construction Workers Union, he expressed his belief in the imminence of world revolution, declaring: ‘We have just received news that the German Communist Party appears to have got 3,600,000 votes … There is as yet no Communist government in Germany. But the workers’ regime is coming!’2
In 1924 Trotsky still had no inkling that the sparks of the October revolution were incapable of igniting a worldwide conflagration. He held a starkly simple view of the coming collapse of the old order. The fossilized structures which perpetuated the coexistence of rich and poor, truth and lies, tyranny and slavery, were intolerable to him. He devoted his entire life to the task of maintaining the revolutionary temperature at which the exploitative features of the state would melt, and melt forever. The anomalous nature of such a personality today is one which nevertheless fits into twentieth-century history.
Permanent Revolution
The name of Trotsky has always been associated with the enigmatic term ‘permanent revolution’. Shortly before his deportation from the Soviet Union, in an article entitled ‘The Permanent Revolution and the Lenin Line’, he wrote: ‘As soon as I am free of more important and pressing affairs, I shall complete my work on permanent revolution and distribute it to the comrades. The French say, “as long as the bottle has been opened, the wine must be finished”.’3 The credit for having opened the bottle, however, belonged not to Trotsky, but to Alexander Helphand, also known as Parvus.
Little has appeared in Soviet historiography about this intriguing personality. A member first of the Russian and then of the German Social Democrat Party, he was born in Odessa in 1869 and emigrated to Western Europe where he became a well-known journalist and theorist. During the 1905 revolution, like Trotsky, he returned to Russia and took an active part in the events, notably starting up a newspaper, Nachalo (The Beginning). In a series of articles written in the last years of the previous century, Parvus had formulated his idea of permanent revolution, although the idea itself in fact originated with Marx and Engels, who had written: ‘While the democratic petty bourgeoisie want to end the revolution as soon as possible … our interests and our tasks require the revolution to continue uninterrupted until all the more or less possessing classes have been removed from predominance and the proletariat has gained power.’4 With this proposition in mind, Parvus saw permanency of revolution as the sequential replacement of one revolutionary stage by the next. Trotsky was familiar with these ideas and discussed them in his meetings with Parvus, but he was always vague about their origins, perhaps because he did not want to put his own authorship in doubt. He first expounded the concept of permanent revolution in a 1906 article entitled ‘Results and Perspectives’, defining it as ‘the elimination of the boundary between the minimum and maximum programmes of social democracy … locating a direct and spontaneous base in the European West.’5 Trotsky’s reticence about Parvus may also be connected with more complicated political considerations.
After the defeat of the 1905 revolution, Parvus was exiled to Siberia, but soon escaped, resurfacing in Germany. In fact, he was not greatly interested in social democratic ideas, but was very keen to become rich. When the First World War broke out he saw his opportunity and established a trading enterprise in surgical instruments, pharmaceuticals, contraceptives and other medical products, shipping them from Scandinavia through the Baltic to Germany and other countries in the region and soon becoming a millionaire. He is known to have given substantial financial support to the Bolsheviks, and he played the role of intermediary between the German High Command and the Bolsheviks, with whose help the German government hoped to weaken the Russian war effort, thus freeing the German army to concentrate on the western front, where the imminent arrival of American troops threatened to boost the Allies.6
The idea of transporting Lenin through Germany to Russia in a ‘sealed train’ was Parvus’s. The German Chief of Staff, General Erich von Ludendorff, wrote unequivocally in his memoirs: ‘In sending Lenin to Russia, our government took upon itself a special responsibility. His journey through Germany was justified from the military point of view; Russia had to be made to fall.’7 While Ludendorff did not mention Parvus in his memoirs, the fact is that Lenin’s most trusted agents, Ganetsky and Kozlovsky, received large sums of money from Parvus. The Bolshevik denial of this fact was as vigorous as it was unconvincing: the fact alone that they could maintain seventeen daily newspapers with a circulation of more than 300,000, while complaining of empty Party coffers, was proof enough that funds were coming from somewhere, and that it was a source they preferred to keep secret. Former tsarist police General A.I. Spiridovich, using documents from the St Petersburg prosecutor’s office, established that the Bolshevik Central Committee received money from abroad via Parvus, Ganetsky, Kozlovsky and Sumenson, a female relative of Ganetsky’s. In the course of 1916, for instance, Madame Sumenson withdrew from her current account 750,000 roubles which had been deposited there by various individuals.8
In 1905 Lenin wrote in the newspaper Proletarii: ‘To the extent of our strength and that of the conscious and organized proletariat, we will start at once to go over from the democratic revolution to the socialist revolution. We are for uninterrupted revolution. We will not stop halfway.’9 Such notions would later be condemned as ‘Trotskyist renegadism’.
The essence of Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution was contained in a number of articles written during the 1905 revolution, in which he reiterated the belief that
this odd name of ‘permanent revolution’ expresses the notion that the Russian revolution, which is confronting bourgeois aims, cannot stop at that … The revolution cannot settle the immediate bourgeois tasks except by putting the proletariat in power. And the latter, having taken power, will not restrict themselves to the bourgeois framework of revolution … In breaking out of the limited bourgeois democratic framework of revolution, by force of historical necessity, the triumphant proletariat will be compelled also to break out of the nation-state framework, that is, they will have to strive consciously to make the Russian revolution the prologue to world revolution.10
The idea of permanent revolution is an entirely Marxist one, as we have seen, and its critics always omitted to note one of its most important features, namely the stress on the totality of the revolutionary process, in time, scale, aims and means. This totality, however, ignored the objective conditions: whether the shift was necessary, whether the masses were ready for more activity and so on. At its basis was the idea of revolution as the highest good. It represented the primacy of the subjective over the objective, revolution for the sake of revolution. Mankind, the individual, the nation and the masses remained somewhere on the sidelines, or were at best a means for achieving this total revolution. And it was here that the idea embodied a tendency to resort to coercion.
It is apparent today that it is indeed possible to ‘give history a shove’, but only
at a great price to be exacted later. Trotsky himself wrote in 1905 that ‘while the anti-revolutionary aspects of Menshevism are already being expressed, the anti-revolutionary aspects of Bolshevism threaten an enormous danger only in the event of a revolutionary victory.’11 What he then meant by the anti-revolutionary aspects of Bolshevism was its tendency to commit ‘excess’. Permanent revolution could thus be defined as the historical expression of excess.
In the preface to his book The Permanent Revolution Trotsky wrote that, while idling the time away in Alma-Ata, he had looked over his old works on the subject, ‘pencil in hand’,12 and noted that the first Russian revolution had occurred a little over half a century after a period of bourgeois revolutions in Europe and nearly thirty-five years after ‘the episodic uprising of the Paris Commune’. Europe had already lost the habit of revolution, while Russia still had no experience of one. Permanent revolution, he argued—citing Marx—meant that the revolution went on to socialist undertakings and ended with the liquidation of class society. What today seems a naive notion was shared by many at the time. Indeed, in the early years after the October coup, the Bolsheviks practised the postulates of this doctrine in all but name, and not only in the early years: throughout the Soviet period the regime gave assistance to countries and peoples where revolutionary conditions were ‘ripening’. It was enough to recognize the ‘anti-imperialist character’ of this or that regime for the Soviet government to discuss supplying major material, financial, economic and military aid. This policy made ‘Trotskyists’ of all the Soviet leaders.
With the end of the civil war the Bolshevik leadership came to the bitter realization that the longed-for world revolution had not occurred. They had to come to terms with their own, Russian, revolution. Was it capable of surviving? Could socialism be built in one country? What future would socialism have within national limits? Trotsky answered these questions in the firm negative: ‘The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable … it will not be accomplished until the final triumph of the new society throughout the planet.’13 Here lay the main reason for the savage attacks on his theory: he could not believe in the possibility of socialism in one country. In fact he had asserted that ‘the socialist revolution begins on the national level, develops on the international and is completed on the world level.’14 Thus he did not deny the viability of socialism in the first country where it appeared, but saw its completion in purely global terms.
Soon after Lenin’s death and a brief lull in the internecine war among the leaders, the struggle re-emerged with renewed vigour. Trotsky was frequently ill during this period and spent much time in the south of the country, where he was working on the first drafts of his reminiscences of Lenin. In Kislovodsk he wrote his ‘Lessons of October’—the preface to the third volume of his collected works—in which he put all the leaders in ‘their historic places’, and also demonstrated that his ideas on the shift from the bourgeois democratic revolution to the socialist revolution were correct and irrefutably proven by Russian history itself.
This was something the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev could not stomach. Meeting at Kamenev’s apartment on 16 October 1924, they devised a detailed plan for their first mass attack on Trotsky, one of their main weapons being to expose the flaws in his theory of permanent revolution. The order was issued, and dozens of articles were published, meetings held and speeches given by the triumvirate themselves and other Party leaders, all aimed at compromising Trotsky, reducing his role in the revolution and civil war and creating a new public image of him as a hollow ideologist. Trotsky was shaken and all the more hurt because he knew the campaign was inspired by the Party leaders. Now virtually isolated among the leadership, he tried to explain his silence as a desire not to incite an internal Party conflict. The draft of a letter to Pravda, entitled ‘A reply to numerous enquiries’, has survived in the archives. In it Trotsky wrote: ‘I am not replying to certain specific articles that have appeared recently in Pravda, guided as I am by considerations of protecting the Party’s interests, as I understand them.’15
After publication of his ‘Lessons of October’, Trotsky continually faced questions about his theory of permanent revolution. In May 1924, speaking to newspaper workers, he said: ‘The comrades are asking what is the relationship of the theory of permanent revolution to Leninism? Personally, it has never entered my head to treat the question as one of practical relevance. The idea was merely the theoretical anticipation of the future course of events. The events which the theory anticipated took place: the October revolution was achieved. Now the question of permanent revolution is one of theoretical-historical interest, not current interest.’ In order to stress the fact that Lenin had been in agreement with him, he continued: ‘Did I have any differences with Comrade Lenin over the seizure of power in October or in peasant policy, in October or after?’ He gave the firm answer: ‘I did not.’ He went on: ‘The comrades who have “recoiled” from October are now, after the event, all too clever about “errors” in the theory of permanent revolution. If there were errors in it, it did not prevent me from going right through the October revolution side by side with Lenin. The attempt after the event to create Trotskyism in opposition to Leninism is nothing less than a falsification.’16
The attacks continued, however. At the beginning of 1925 Trotsky received through the post a pamphlet, just published, entitled ‘The Theory of Permanent Revolution of Comrade Trotsky’, with a preface by I. Vardin, one of the Party’s ‘official’ theorists.17 The chapter tides alone told much: ‘Rebellion on One’s Knees’, ‘Comrade Trotsky’s Tale of How Comrade Lenin became a … Trotskyist’, ‘The Superficiality and Flippancy of Comrade Trotsky’s Statements’. Vardin’s preface set the tone for the rest of the pamphlet by dismissing the theory of permanent revolution as ‘having nothing in common with Bolshevism’.18 The theory had been dragged into the open on Stalin’s orders, and Trotsky’s early writings dredged up, in order to puncture his image as a hero of October and the civil war, and to parade him before the Party as a sceptic with a Menshevik attitude. As we have seen, by the mid-1920s Trotsky had written hundreds of political and theoretical articles, books and pamphlets, many of them wrong-headed, written in the heat of the moment and not claiming to be holy writ, but Stalin and his accomplices had to rake over his prerevolutionary writings in order to find evidence of his ‘Menshevism’ and ‘anti-Marxism’.
Everything connected with the theory of permanent revolution reveals Trotsky not only as a theorist but above all as a personality. His convictions were integrated and politically consistent; he never ceased to advocate revolution. He was accused of scepticism and capitulationism because he linked the building of socialism in Russia with the victory of the international revolution. Lenin had made precisely the same point many times. And Stalin, too, once he had unseated Trotsky, declared that the final victory of socialism was possible only when socialist principles were proclaimed in most of the world, although in his case the theory, as always, was dictated by pragmatic need and above all personal interest. For Trotsky, Russia could be ‘towed into socialism by the advanced countries’, since in the final analysis permanent revolution for Russia outside the context of world revolution was a hopeless cause.
‘The World Soviet Federation’
In the Manifesto of the Second Congress of the Communist International of 1920, composed by Trotsky and signed by all the leaders of international Communism including Lenin, Zinoviev and Bukharin for the Russians, under the heading ‘Soviet Russia’ appear the following words: ‘The Communist International has proclaimed the cause of Soviet Russia as its own. The international proletariat will not sheathe its sword until Soviet Russia has been made a link in the federation of Soviet republics of the whole world.’19 In both content and style, the manifesto was purely Trotsky’s.
During the civil war he had kept himself informed of the world situation through the radio on his train, and he firmly believed
that revolution was about to break out in many other countries. At the beginning of January 1919, on behalf of the Central Committee, he sent the following message to the Spartacists in Germany and the Communist Party of Austria: ‘The demise of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. Your victory is inevitable, comrades!’20 Since in style and conviction he was so in tune with the cause of international Communism, Trotsky was asked by the Executive Committee of Comintern (ECCI) to compose many of its documents, especially its manifestos and appeals. In April 1919, for instance, he penned the May Day greetings to the workers of the world: ‘Another year has passed and still we have not cast off the yoke … A year has passed and the helm is still in the hands of the bourgeoisie.’ As a result, ‘we must not moderate our attacks, and our offensive must be on a wider front with wider columns—that’s the slogan for this May Day … The chance may occur any day when a bold move by the Communist vanguard can bring the working masses behind it and when the conquest of power becomes the order of the day.’21
The entire Bolshevik leadership then believed in the world revolution and a ‘World Soviet Federation’. In July 1921 Lenin asserted: ‘Before the revolution and indeed after it, we thought that either immediately or at least very soon the revolution would occur in countries which were most developed in capitalist terms.’22 None perhaps was as firmly convinced of this as Trotsky, and the question arises: what were the origins of such conviction?
Trotsky held not only the materialist views of Marxism, inextricably bound up with Hegel’s dialectics; he also harboured a tendency to turn subjective elements into absolutes, such as consciousness, willpower, the determination of leaders, organizations, groups and classes. The inevitability of world revolution, he believed, derived from the peculiarity of the historical process, which he formulated in the following way: ‘Under the lash of external necessity, backwardness has to make leaps. From the universal law of inequality another law emerges which for the lack of a better name we can call the law of combined development, in the sense that several stages of the process merge … and archaic forms amalgamate with more modern ones.’23 He disagreed with M.N. Pokrovsky, L.B. Kamenev and N.A. Rozhkov who asserted that the historical process did not allow for the skipping over of stages. ‘Their point of view,’ Trotsky wrote, ‘was essentially that the political supremacy of the bourgeoisie must precede the political supremacy of the proletariat; the bourgeois democratic republic must be an extended political school for the proletariat; the attempt to skip this stage is, [they say], adventurist; if the working class has not gained power in the West, then how can the Russian proletariat set itself the same task?’24
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