In response to these objections, Trotsky advanced as an argument Russia’s peculiar development which enabled her to skip over a number of ‘non-obligatory’ stages and to stand in the vanguard of the revolutionary process. The contradictions in the world had long prepared the need for a revolutionary explosion, he claimed, and what was needed was the detonator. Russia could supply this need, precisely because she was able to skip certain stages. ‘Just as France skipped the Reformation,’ he wrote, ‘so Russia skipped the stage of formal democracy.’25
Later, when he was in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, Trotsky roundly criticized Stalin for failing to grasp these arguments: ‘The “theorizing” Stalin made a great song and dance about the “law of uneven development” and “not skipping over these stages”. Stalin to this day does not understand that uneven development is precisely the skipping over of stages (or remaining for too long at the same stage) … Such foresight requires an understanding of historical unevenness in all its dynamic reality, and not simply chewing the permanent cud of quotations from Lenin.’26
While maintaining some caution in his conversations with the other leaders and in the Politburo, Trotsky nonetheless made frequent proposals for initiating the world revolution. It was, for instance, on his initiative that large amounts of money were sent to Germany in 1918 for revolutionary propaganda and speeding up the ‘ripening’ of the masses. He it was who suggested that two or three cavalry corps be formed in the southern Urals for despatch to India and China, although this proposal was not taken up. In August 1919 Trotsky sent a telegram to Zinoviev and Rozengolts, insisting that special brigades be left on the Estonian front ‘to collaborate in the imminent eruption of the Estonian revolution’.27 There are cables in the archives from Trotsky to the Hungarian revolutionary government with offers to come and help them. The Warsaw campaign of 1920 was undertaken not only to crush Pilsudski’s intervention, but also ‘to give aid to the Polish workers struggling for their freedom’. In Trotsky’s view, ‘in order to sovietize Poland’ the Polish workers and peasants should be seen ‘as future Polish Red Army men’, and everything should be done ‘to popularize the biographies of the most prominent Polish Communists, such as Dzerzhinsky, Marchlewski, Radek and Unshlikht’.28 These ideas reveal not only Trotsky’s lack of understanding of the national mood in Poland, but also an apparent failure of imagination: Dzerzhinsky, although a Pole, was head of the Cheka and deeply hostile to Polish nationalism, while Radek and Unshlikht were of Jewish origin and therefore unlikely heroes of the Polish working class. At the same Party plenum of 3 April 1922 which appointed Stalin General Secretary, Trotsky proposed ‘organizing a counter-propaganda campaign abroad’. The Central Committee recruited Suvarin and Krestinsky for the job under Trotsky’s general guidance.29
Even when he was fully occupied by the civil war, Trotsky retained a constant interest in the international revolutionary movement, took an active part in the work of the ECCI and often went abroad with Communist and worker delegations. On 19 April 1921 Sermuks gave Radek, who was responsible for German affairs at the time, Trotsky’s analysis of the situation there: the German Social Democratic and trade union organizations were opposing radical action and were thus ‘a most important cause of the passivity and conservatism among the working masses … We must systematically shake the working masses with the aim of undermining the unstable equilibrium.’ The workers must be made to understand that the general strike of March 1921 (which had developed into an armed uprising by the Mansfeld miners and which had been crushed) ‘once again revealed the blatant treachery of the Social Democrats’.30
Trotsky was disappointed by the failures of the revolutionary movement, especially in Germany. They represented not merely the collapse of hope for the revolution, but a deep personal hurt. Above all he blamed the Communist Party of Germany. When a new revolutionary upheaval in 1923 did not culminate, as he had predicted, in the assumption of power, he expressed his bitterness:
The main reason why the German Communist Party surrendered its exceptional historic positions without a fight is that the party has not managed to shake off the inertia of yesterday’s policies, which were meant to last for years, and to put the question of seizing power into its agitation, its actions, organization, propaganda and resources. Time is an important element in politics, especially at a revolutionary moment. Lost months can take years, even decades, to make up for.31
For Trotsky, Comintern was an instrument by which to achieve the Communists’ main idea, the victory of the world socialist revolution. Speaking at its Third Congress on 2 July 1921, he called the hiatus in the revolutionary process ‘a temporary hitch, a slowing-down’. But he was convinced that capitalist development, despite its momentary rises, was on a downward curve, ‘while the curve of revolution, despite all its setbacks, is rising all the time’.
During the organization of this congress, Trotsky had had to make extraordinary efforts to ensure that it did not end in disaster. Yenukidze, who had been charged with organizing the domestic arrangements, had been unable to provide the delegates with decent living conditions. Complaints poured in, as well as imprecations that the Russian Communist Party was not even capable of dealing with such a simple matter. When he heard about this, Trotsky at once sent a ‘top secret’ note to Lenin and other members of the organizing committee:
I have just been informed by comrades, whose objectivity and reliability I trust unconditionally, that a state of utter desperation rules in the organization of the Congress. Arriving delegates are plunged into a desperate position. Despite the fact that we were expecting one thousand people and only three hundred have turned up, delegates are being housed eight to ten in a room. They lack the minimum facilities. It’s the same with the dining-room and so on. The worst thing is the rude lack of concern being shown to arriving delegates. They have no mattresses or pillows on their beds, no wash-basins …
Lenin was reluctant to become involved in such a routine matter, but quickly proposed setting up a ‘commission with extraordinary powers’, as ‘I am out of town. I’ve taken a few days off because of ill health.’32 Zinoviev, meanwhile, suggested moving the congress to Petrograd, ‘where proper arrangements for every delegate are guaranteed’.33 With some scepticism, Trotsky rejected Zinoviev’s proposal but went along with Lenin’s, ensuring that his own deputy, Sklyansky, was appointed the commission’s chairman. Sklyansky in turn recruited Trotsky’s entire staff, as well as the catering services of the Moscow garrison, and a degree of normality was quickly restored.34
Trotsky even insisted on seeing what food was being given to delegates, who were housed at the Hotel Lux, a house on Novinsky Boulevard, and the Continental Hotel. Breakfast consisted of bread, butter, tea and sugar, plus sausage at the Continental; lunch provided soup, meat—usually lamb—with mashed potatoes, bread, tea and sugar; and for supper soup, sausage, bread, tea and sugar.35 Even with the intervention of the top leadership and the mobilization of all available resources, the ruined country could barely feed the three hundred revolutionaries whose task it was to ignite revolution throughout the world. No doubt it was this more than anything that motivated Trotsky’s concern for the well-being of the delegates.
Trotsky’s fanaticism had been well noted in the West, where the press depicted him as an anarchist insurrectionary, an extreme Communist radical, or an agent of Jewish finance capital. At the height of the civil war the White press agency in Yekaterinburg published a pamphlet entitled ‘Sad Recollections (about the Bolsheviks)’. Its author, Sergei Auslender, provided sketches of the Bolshevik leaders, above all of Trotsky: ‘This international speculator has subdued Russia, he is shooting old army generals, lives in the Kremlin Palace and commands the Russian army … He knows how to bring out the worst and most foul in his slaves.’36 In November 1921 a pamphlet entitled ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was published in Munich with an extended preface by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue. The burden of this work was to show that the Russian revol
ution in its content, ideas and leadership was thoroughly Jewish: ‘From the day of its inception, Bolshevism was a Jewish enterprise.’ By manipulating the number of Jewish People’s Commissars, Rosenberg tried to show that ‘the proletarian dictatorship over the dazed, ruined, half-starved people is a plan that was devised in the Jewish lodges of London, New York and Berlin’. Its leading executors were also Jews, chief among them being Trotsky-Bronstein, and their aim was world revolution.37 This sort of slanderous publication was aimed not only at discrediting the revolution, but also its leaders.
In February 1925 the Foreign Department of OGPU acquired a top secret report by a British envoy entitled ‘Trotsky and the Russian Revolution’. Describing Trotsky’s defeat in the Party debates, the diplomat nonetheless asserted that he was still the most powerful political figure in Russian Bolshevism and that he was capable of undertaking ‘international revolutionary affairs’, adding that the stabilization of the regime meant it would gain time ‘for its great universal historic experiment, greater than the overthrow of tsarism and the destruction of the bourgeoisie in the October revolution’. After the death of Lenin, the report continued, Trotsky was ‘the most significant personality in socialist revolutionary Europe’.38 OGPU circulated copies of this report to Stalin and chiefs of the various security agencies.
Trotsky’s fanatical belief in the imminence of world revolution sometimes defied reason. Ignoring the historical facts, in his 1924 article ‘Five Years of Comintern’ he asserted:
From the historical point of view, European capitalism has run its course. It has not developed significantly productive forces. It has no further progressive role to play. It cannot open any new horizons. If this were not so, then any thought of the proletarian revolution in our age would be tilting at windmills … [The] bourgeois order will not fall of its own accord. It has to be overthrown and only the working class can overthrow it by revolutionary means … History is challenging the workers, as it were saying to them: you must know that if you do not overthrow the bourgeoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civilization.
Trotsky often lamented the fact that the world revolution had not begun in the advanced countries like the USA, England or Germany; had it done so, it would have stood a better chance. In ‘Five Years of Comintern’ he declares bitterly: ‘History evidently spins its thread from the other end.’ He nevertheless remained an optimist, although not perhaps such a zealous one. Speaking at the Fourth Comintern Congress of 5 November-5 December 1922, he declared that the decline of revolutionary activity was ‘a temporary process’. Future success required ‘winning the confidence of the majority of the working class’, for then, ‘convinced by experience of the rightness, firmness and reliability of the Communist leadership, the working class will shake off its disappointment, its passivity and temporizing, and then the new era of the last assault will open. How near is the hour? We cannot predict.’39
Willing to wait for years for the new upsurge, Trotsky never doubted that it would come. Such tenacity is capable of blinding even the most talented intellectual, but even he had to admit, when analysing the world situation, that the hour of world revolution had receded. Gazing above the heads of the delegates, as it were into the future, he declared:
It would be wrong to treat the entire world revolutionary movement alike … The revolutionary movement in America … is receding decades into the distance. Does this mean that revolution in Europe must be compared to America? Of course not. If backward Russia did not (and could not) wait for revolution in Europe, still less will or can Europe wait for revolution in America … [We] can state with confidence that victory of the revolution in Europe in the course of a few years will rock the mighty American bourgeoisie.40
Trotsky had no doubt as to what sort of Europe would emerge from the proletarian revolution. Marxist projections, mostly empty of real content, emerged as semi-utopias. Even half-ruined, bloodstained, debilitated Soviet Russia served for Trotsky as a model of future post-revolutionary state structure. In an article on the idea of the ‘United States of Europe’, intended for Pravda, he wrote: ‘We shall not try here to predict the pace at which the unification of the European republics will take place, nor what economic and constitutional forms will emerge, nor the degree of centralization reached by the European economy in the first stage of the workers’ and peasants’ regime. We can safely leave all that to the future, bearing in mind the experience already gained by the Soviet Union.’41
Any future federation of states, in Trotsky’s view, could only be on the basis of the socialist revolution: ‘We are of course talking about a European socialist federation as a component part of a future world federation, and such a regime can only be brought in by the dictatorship of the proletariat … [It] will not stop at the European phase. Through our Soviet Union it will open up for itself a way into Asia and thus open for Asia a way into Europe. We are talking, in other words, of a stage.’42
Convinced as he was that the Red Army would bring to other peoples freedom and the opportunity to unite with Russia in the ‘World Soviet Federation’, Trotsky’s orders included the demand that national self-awareness be respected. On 30 November 1919, for instance, he circulated an address to be read to all units of Red forces entering Ukrainian territory: ‘You are crossing Ukraine’s borders. As you destroy Denikin’s bands, you are cleansing a fraternal country of violators … Woe betide anyone who uses armed force against the toilers of a Ukrainian town or village. Let the workers and peasants of Ukraine feel secure under the protection of your bayonets. Don’t forget: your job is not to conquer Ukraine, but to liberate it.’43 He expressed the same idea to the troops as they entered Poland: ‘[The] land you are entering belongs to the Polish people. We have thrown back the Polish [middle class] and we will break its back … You are approaching Warsaw. Enter it not as a conquered city, but as the capital of independent Poland.’44
The tone, however, became harsh whenever there were signs of disagreement with the Soviet regime. For instance, on 27 January 1921, when the Menshevik government of independent Georgia ignored demands from the Bolsheviks in Moscow, Trotsky sent a telegram to the Revolutionary Military Council of the Caucasian front: ‘If the Soviet Republic were forced against its will to give an armed rebuff to the provocative policy of Georgia, do you think you have sufficient forces and supplies for the purpose, bearing in mind the occupation of the territory and so on … What demands would you have to make for food supplies to maintain an army and Soviet institutions in Azerbaidzhan, Armenia and Georgia in the event of having to occupy them?’45 Once 11th Army had entered several regions of Georgia, however, Lenin warned the Red Army ‘to treat the sovereign organs of Georgia with special respect and pay particular attention and care towards the Georgian population … Report any breach or any friction or misunderstanding with the local population, however trivial.’46 The goal had been achieved and therefore the aim now was to mollify the national mood: the ultimate objective was to bring the ‘World Soviet Federation’ closer.
Thus, Trotsky’s views on world revolution were not restricted to theory. He initiated many practical proposals. On 29 July 1924, at a meeting of the board of the Military Science Society, he stressed the need to compose a ‘Manual of Civil War’ which leaders of socialist revolutions could use as a handbook, pointing out that if the leaders were not prepared, any uprising was doomed to failure. At the critical moment of a revolutionary event, he said, ‘the circumstances are characterized by an extremely unstable equilibrium: the ball is at the point of the pyramid. Depending on the hit, it can go in either direction. Thanks to the firmness and determination of our leadership, our ball went in the direction of victory. In Germany, policy sent the ball towards defeat.’47 A ‘Manual on Civil War’, he was convinced, ‘would become a necessary element in higher-level military-revolutionary training.’48 The euphoria of the post-October days had passed, and now was the time to prepare for the world revolution.
In September 1921 the l
eader of the German Communist Party, Heinrich Brandler, had come to Moscow and asked for Trotsky to be sent to Germany to organize an uprising. In the face of Trotsky’s apparent reluctance to go, the Politburo decided to send Pyatakov and Radek instead, while making it plain that the strategy of the German uprising would be planned in the Kremlin. Zinoviev, as Chairman of Comintern, was very keen to encourage an uprising. It is difficult to establish exactly what role Trotsky played, although he met Brandler on several occasions. He was in favour of an uprising, but thought it should be postponed in view of the lack of preparation. Brandler, however, was not in a position to hold back, especially as a weak flame of rebellion was already alight in Hamburg. The workers’ enthusiasm and resistance lasted only a few days, however. The soil lacked the proper revolutionary fertilizer.
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