Trotsky

by Dmitri Volkogonov

  As for the Russian Church, here action took the place of reflection. Like all the other leaders, Trotsky regarded religion as a rabid enemy of the Soviet state and the new culture. Speaking on 17 July 1924 at a meeting of workers’ club organizers, he justified intensified antireligious propaganda and added that the liquidation of religion by other means was also acceptable: ‘In the anti-religious struggle, periods of open frontal attack alternate with periods of blockade, sapping, encirclement. In general terms we have now entered this phase, but it doesn’t mean we won’t go over once more to frontal attack. We just have to prepare for it.’ Asserting that the Bolshevik attack on religion was a lawful one, he concluded: ‘And has it produced results? Yes, it has.’92

  The assault on religion had indeed been a mass frontal attack, its most appalling feature being the ‘hunt’ for priests. This began after Lenin dictated a six-page letter to Molotov by telephone on 19 March 1922, prefaced with a warning that it was not to be copied, but was to be circulated to all members of the Politburo with instructions to write their comments on the original. A month earlier, an order of the VTsIK dated 23 February had unleashed a campaign of confiscation of Church valuables for famine relief. In the town of Shuya the inhabitants had resisted. Troops were called out and there were casualties. Lenin’s response, as shown in the letter to Molotov, was harsh in the extreme:

  Concerning the events in Shuya, which is already under discussion at the Politburo, I think a firm decision should be taken at once in accordance with the general direction of the present plan. As I doubt if I’ll be able to attend the Politburo meeting of 20 March, I shall outline my views in writing … It is precisely now and only now, when the starving are eating people and corpses are lying in their hundreds, if not thousands, along the roads, that we can (and therefore we must) confiscate church valuables with the most furious and pitiless energy and not stop before any sort of resistance.

  Therefore I come to the inescapable conclusion that we must now launch the most decisive and merciless battle against the Black Hundreds clergy and crush their resistance with such ferocity that they will not forget it for several decades … Only Comrade Kalinin [the official head of state] can officially announce some sort of measures—Comrade Trotsky must never under any circumstances write anything in the press or in print or say anything to the public in any form … Confiscation of valuables, especially of the richest monasteries and churches, must be carried out with the most merciless determination, stopping at nothing and in the shortest possible time. The bigger the number of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeois we manage to shoot in the process, the better.93

  Molotov’s written comment on this letter was: ‘Agreed. But I suggest the campaign not be extended to all provinces and towns, only to those where there really are major treasures, concentrating our forces and the attention of the Party accordingly.’94 Next day, at a meeting of the Politburo attended by only four people—Kamenev, Stalin, Molotov and Trotsky—Trotsky submitted a draft instruction on confiscating Church valuables which was passed and circulated to all provincial Party secretaries. Trotsky attempted to give the campaign, already under way, an organized character. The seventeen points of his directive did not include any explicit instructions about executions, but he did call for the struggle against ‘the princes of the Church’ to be carried out with determination and in the shortest possible time.95 Tribunals were set up. In Moscow eleven people—priests, deans and citizens—were sentenced to death and other forms of punishment. On Trotsky’s intervention, six of the death sentences were commuted to prison terms.96 Lenin had ordered that ‘we must now teach these people so that for several decades they will not dare even to think about any kind of resistance.’97 And now his orders were being carried out.

  Trotsky headed the commission on the collection of valuables and was one of the most energetic executors of Lenin’s desire to curb the Church’s influence and drain it of its resources, although he was less aggressive than some other members of the Politburo. For instance, on 15 May 1922 he wrote to Lenin and the rest of the Politburo, as well as to Pravda and Izvestiya, suggesting broader and more active support for the clergy, led by Bishop Antonin (A.A. Granovsky), who were loyal to the Soviet regime under the slogan ‘Changing Landmarks’ (Smena vekh), and he noted that their appeal had appeared only as a small notice in Pravda. Meanwhile, he wrote, ‘the utterly trivial Genoa [peace conference] nonsense occupies entire pages, whereas this the most profound of spiritual revolutions in the Russian people (or rather the preparation of this the most profound of revolutions), is relegated to the back pages’. On 15 May Lenin made a marginal note on this: ‘Right! 1000 times right! Down with the nonsense!’98 Despite their support for Bishop Antonin and others of his persuasion, the Bolsheviks based their relations with religion on force and coercion, and counted on speeding up the ‘most profound of spiritual revolutions in the people’.

  Trotsky was at the heart of the criminal campaign. Its ostensible aim of saving the starving was meant to be achieved by killing others. In addressing urgent social and economic problems, the Bolsheviks, as it were en passant, also settled the cultural issue of freeing the people’s minds of religious dogma. This was a grave error, first, because religion was allied to morality, and secondly, because to struggle against ideas and convictions with weapons of violence was not merely criminal, it was ineffectual. For all his intelligence, Trotsky could not or would not see this. At the beginning of March 1922 he wrote to the Politburo and Central Committee Secretariat:

  The work of confiscating the valuables of the Moscow churches has become hopelessly confused because alongside the already existing commissions, the VTsIK has created its own commissions, using representatives of Famine Aid, provincial Party committees and provincial Party financial departments. Yesterday, my commission … came to the unanimous decision that a secret shock commission should be formed in Moscow, consisting of Comrades Sapronov, Unshlikht, Samoilova-Zemlyachka and Galkin. This commission will secretly handle the political and organizational side of the work. The real confiscation will start [this month] and be finished in the shortest possible time. I repeat, this commission must be entirely secret. Confiscation in Moscow will formally be the business of the central committee of Famine Aid, where Comrade Sapronov will have office hours.99

  The ‘shock commission’ acted in the spirit of the times. Valuables were confiscated wherever they could be found: in churches, museums, from the middle classes, speculators and black marketeers. The treasures, some of them of immense cultural value, were converted into cash which was then distributed to various departments for various purposes, almost none of it for providing relief to the starving millions. Several major Party committees requested allocations of specific amounts of these so-called ‘luxury items’. A Politburo minute of 12 January 1922, signed by Molotov, shows that a decision was taken to issue ‘luxury items for the purpose of creating local funds in Moscow and Petrograd, and also an export fund. A commission, consisting of Comrades Zinoviev … Kamenev, Trotsky and Lezhava should be formed to determine the amounts and so on.’100

  In striving to give a revolutionary twist to cultural activity, Trotsky was pursuing the belief that this would help to prepare the world revolution. In the talks he gave in various societies and clubs, he linked culture with international issues: ‘From all the pulleys of trivial private matters drive-belts must be connected to the fly-wheel of the world revolution.’101 Like Lenin, however, he did not want to recognize that there was such a thing as ‘pure’ proletarian culture. This was a complex issue. Vulgar educators, half-ignorant ‘culture-mongers’ of socialism were proclaiming a ‘proletarian culture’ based on class instincts and revolutionary values.

  While attempting not to contradict the class approach, Trotsky wanted to convert ‘proletarian culture’ into ‘culture of the transitional period’. This he identified as ‘the remnants, still very active, of the culture of the gentry period—not all of it is useless: we will no
t throw out Pushkin and Tolstoy, we need them—and of the elements of bourgeois culture which we still need … we are still living to a considerable extent on bourgeois specialists, we still haven’t built our own factories and are working in those that we received from the hands of the bourgeoisie.’102 To reinforce his argument he mentioned that Lenin had used the term ‘proletarian culture’ only in his polemics with a former rival, Alexander Bogdanov, before the First World War. Trotsky in effect was the first to argue against the wholesale nihilism of the Proletcult (the proletarian culture movement), and against deifying ignorance and praising class as a virtue in literature and art. At the same time, he firmly believed that exponents of the arts must be ‘fighters for the Party’. In a letter to Kamenev and A.K. Voronsky, he wrote that an ‘ideological union of writer-Communists was a good thing’.103

  The ideas promulgated by Proletcult also penetrated the army. The victorious proletariat, it argued, must also create a purely proletarian military science which would sweep away the bourgeois military heritage. M.V. Frunze devoted an article to these notions entitled ‘On a Unified Military Doctrine’. In a broad debate that took place in 1922 the views of Trotsky and Frunze clashed. Trotsky did not believe a special proletarian military science was possible, or that the proletariat would manage without the military experience of the past. Frunze later admitted that he had been wrong, and he recalled a conversation with Lenin, who had criticized the harmful ideas of Proletcult in military matters.

  Although he was still War Commissar, Trotsky was also responsible to the Politburo for cultural affairs. In the second half of July 1924 he wrote to a group of literature specialists:

  On the initiative of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, I propose to convene a preliminary meeting of comrades who are involved in creative literature and literary criticism, for the purpose of establishing a more precise attitude of the Party towards literature. Some or other views and proposals (if they emerge after an exchange of opinion) may be submitted to the Politburo. The meeting is scheduled for Wednesday 26 July at 11 a.m. at the Revolutionary Military Council building (23, Znamenka).104

  A list of Party representatives followed, including Bukharin, Kamenev and Trotsky himself from among the top leadership.

  The effort to bring cultural figures under Party control succeeded after censorship was introduced. In June 1922 the Chief Directorate for Literature and Art (Glavlit) was created, quickly followed by the building of a network which would prevent the penetration of any free thought. When a year later the writer Yevgeni Trifonov tried to reply to Trotsky’s slashing review of his work in the journal Knigonosha, his letter was rejected. The indignant Trifonov wrote to Trotsky: ‘In your review in Pravda you subjected me to savage, annihilating criticism, both as a personality and as the author of an article that you did not like. I wanted to reply to you in the same newspaper … but Pravda refused to print my reply … A man of your stature has no need to resort to such methods to strike at an enemy whom someone else has obligingly grabbed by the hands and throat …’105105

  The delegation of social tasks to literature dates from this period. In September 1921 Trotsky wrote to the ‘proletarian poet’ Demyan Bedny (‘Demyan the Poor’): ‘Noulens is not only the representative of France on the International Commission, but, as the radio has announced, he is also chairman of the international commission for relief to Russia … In my opinion, we should strike at him pitilessly and every day. Your couplets on Giraud seem to me to be a good beginning of the campaign, but only a beginning.’106 Thus began a campaign against the former French ambassador to the tsar as ‘a sworn enemy of the Soviet regime’, who was at the same time head of the international commission dedicated to bringing relief to the starving of Russia. Demyan Bedny duly performed as he was expected to and submitted some doggerel that was meant to expose the two-faced and subversive purpose of the foreign aid-workers under Noulens’s sponsorship.107 As the civil war was approaching its end, however, Demyan Bedny wrote to Trotsky: ‘I am now ready to salute you and return to my usual work. If you don’t think I’m being premature, please tell the Central Committee that a need for my drum is no longer felt.’108

  On a number of occasions, Trotsky’s sense of intellectual solidarity overcame his radicalism, and he interceded for writers, gave them some cautious support or managed to deflect impending punishment. When Boris Pilnyak’s book Smertel’noe manit (Fatal Attraction) was withdrawn in August 1922 and the clouds gathered over him, Trotsky wrote to Kalinin, Rykov, Kamenev, Molotov and Stalin:

  I’d like to raise the question of Pilnyak’s book again. It was confiscated because of the story ‘Ivan-Moskva’. Certainly Pilnyak does not give a very attractive picture of everyday life … In his later works, ‘The Blizzard’ and ‘The Third Capital’ for the journal Krasnaya nov’ [Red Virgin Soil], Pilnyak expresses a positive attitude to the revolution in his own way, admittedly with as much confusion and ambiguity as you like, and it is hard to know where he will end up. But in these circumstance it is a manifest error to confiscate his book … I ask all members of the Politburo to give close attention to this question, to read the story, as far as possible, and to rescind the GPU’s incorrect decision.109

  Already the GPU could on its own authority withdraw a book if in its opinion it contained too many lice, black marketeers or foul language, all of which were an obvious ‘insult to the revolution’, and to ban an author’s future output. Trotsky’s efforts at limiting the worst effects of this censorship would later be used as evidence of his support for the class enemy.

  In late September 1920, the well-known writer Fedor Sologub wrote to Trotsky in terms which graphically depict the circumstances to which the revolution had reduced the intelligentsia, although it should be noted that the entire country was in a dire condition at the time:

  I have come to Moscow for a few days and I earnestly request your help in obtaining permission to travel to Revel [Tallin], even for one month. I absolutely must organize my literary affairs, sell my new novel and acquire some of the things and clothes that I and [my wife] need badly—we are in rags and tatters, and to have to beg for every piece of bread, every log of firewood, a pair of galoshes or stockings is, you must agree, too humiliating and is not proper either for my age or my literary position. With all due respect, I ask you to show us justice and check the sincerity of our intentions, which exclude any kind of politics …110

  In a postscript, Sologub asked for a reply ‘by Friday’. Two days later, on 30 September (the Saturday), Trotsky replied:

  I will not enter into discussion of your observations about the ‘humiliation’ of having to bother about finding galoshes and stockings in this exhausted and ruined country, and that this ‘humiliation’ is only made worse by your ‘literary position’. As for your business trip to Revel, following my enquiries I have been informed that no obstacles to it have been found. Taking the words from your letter, I have reported that you have no intention of pursuing aims of a political character. I need hardly add that any collaboration by you during the journey with world exploiters against the toilers’ republic will make it extremely difficult for many other citizens to leave the country.111

  A decade later, Trotsky might have felt that it had been a mistake to put revolution invariably before culture. In his book What is the USSR and Where is it Going?, he wrote prophetically: ‘The dictatorship reflects the barbarism of the past, not the culture of the future. Of necessity it imposes strict limitations on all forms of activity, spiritual creativity included. From the outset the programme of the revolution envisaged such limitations as a temporary evil and was obligated, as the new regime became more secure, to abolish all restrictions on liberty, one after the other.’ What he had in mind, however, was not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but that of Stalin. He went on: ‘With his rather “conservative” personal artistic tastes, Lenin was always extremely politically cautious about art and readily admitted his incompetence. He was occasionally upset by … Lunachars
ky’s support for any form of modernism, but he contented himself with ironic remarks in private conversation and remained extremely far from the idea of turning his personal taste into law. In 1924, Trotsky had formulated the relations of the state to various artistic groupings and tendencies as follows: ‘While imposing on them the categorical criterion, for the revolution or against the revolution, in the sphere of artistic self-determination they should be given full freedom.’112

  Of course, in practice there was to be no self-determination for artists, and Trotsky shares the blame for that. Those practitioners who served the revolution selflessly, though, could count on his support. His relations with the poet Alexander Bezymensky are instructive in this respect. In a letter to Lunacharsky, Trotsky voiced high praise of Bezymensky’s work: ‘Bezymensky is a poet and one of us, a real October man to the marrow of his bones. He doesn’t have to “accept” the revolution, for the revolution accepted him on the day of his spiritual birth.’113 A poet who had dedicated himself to the revolution, in Trotsky’s view, was worth supporting, but as an intelligent man, he was aware that in opening the sluice-gates of culture, the revolution had also impoverished it by alienating and destroying so many of its exponents.

  Personality and Revolution

  In the years since Stalin finally got rid of Trotsky, it has become increasingly clear that one of the greatest delusions of the twentieth century was the notion that it is possible to improve people’s lives by bloody revolution. Among the biggest fanatics were the makers of the Russian revolution who believed it possible not merely to change economic relations, but also people’s spiritual values, national self-awareness and even human nature itself. It was perhaps above all the Marxist idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat was an inevitability that pushed the revolution towards violence and led in turn to the emergence of a powerful authoritarian tendency in Bolshevism. For Lenin, the ‘concept of a dictatorship means nothing other than unrestrained power based on the absence of any limits, laws and absolutely no rules’.114 But this abstract formulation was quickly converted into practice by Lenin. In August 1918 he wrote to the Soviet in Nizhni Novgorod: ‘A White Guards uprising is being organized in Nizhni. All forces must be harnessed, a troika of dictators must be appointed … mass terror must be introduced at once, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, former officers … Not a minute’s delay … You must act with full force: mass searches, execution for concealing a weapon, mass deportation of Mensheviks and unreliables …’115