Trotsky had an interest in making Lenin’s secret letter known; the other leaders did not. This much is clear from a top secret document which reveals how the Politburo and Presidium of the Central Control Commission felt about publishing the ‘Testament’. The notes read:
TROTSKY: I believe the article should be published, unless there are formal reasons against it. [e.g. If] there were any differences in the way this article and others (about cooperatives, about Sukhanov) were transmitted.
KAMENEV: It should not be published: it is a speech that was not given at the Politburo. It is nothing more. The personal opinions are the basis and content of an article.
ZINOVIEV: N.K. [Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife] was also of the opinion that it should only be given to the Central Committee. I didn’t ask about publication as I thought (and still think) it is excluded. The question could be put. There were no differences in the conditions of transmission. Only the note (about Gosplan) was conveyed to me later, a few days ago.
STALIN: I suggest there is no reason to publish, especially as Ilyich gave no instructions to do so.
TOMSKY: I am in favour of Comrade Zinoviev’s proposal that only members of the Central Committee should be shown it. It should not be published, as the general public will understand nothing in it.
SOLTS: V.I.’s note is not intended for the general public, which is why so much of it is given over to personal remarks. There is nothing of this in the article on cooperatives. It should not be published.
SLAVATINSKAYA: Comrades Bukharin, Rudzutak, Molotov and Kuybyshev are in favour of Comrade Zinoviev’s proposal.5
The Stalinist triumvirate plainly wanted to suppress the ‘Testament’ because its publication would enhance Trotsky’s chances and spoil their own. They were ambitious, especially Stalin and Zinoviev, and they actively sought support among the other members of the Politburo. They were reluctant, however, to come out openly against the victor of the revolution and civil war: the name of Trotsky still ranked alongside that of Lenin. On 14 October 1922, Radek wrote in Pravda: ‘[If] Lenin can be called the mind of the revolution, ruling by transmitting his will, then Trotsky can be seen as steel willpower restrained by reason. Like the voice of a bell summoning to work, Trotsky’s speech rang out …’ The triumvirate was well aware that, in order to unseat Trotsky, he first had to be distanced from Lenin, and then compromised in the eyes of the Party by greatly exaggerating his weaknesses and shortcomings.
Analysing this period later, when he was on Prinkipo, Trotsky noted that although the workers would have listened to Zinoviev and Kamenev, the pair’s moral authority was weakened by the widespread knowledge of their flawed behaviour in 1917. Stalin, Trotsky declared, had been almost unknown beyond the narrow circle of old Bolsheviks. Against his own supporters’ assurances that he was protected by his close association with Lenin in the public mind, Trotsky had argued that a hero during the rising tide of revolution can quickly be turned into an enemy by the slander of his opponents when the revolution is on the ebb.6
At Politburo meetings Trotsky felt ambushed, but the flames of the factional struggle were still prevented from spreading to the outside. In the autumn of 1923, when Lenin was already beyond being able to intervene, an important Party debate was planned with Trotsky as the target. It was to be described as a ‘literary’ debate. Trotsky, however, would be prevented from taking a direct part in it by illness: he had caught a chill when duck-shooting in the marsh country of Tver province earlier in the month, and he spent the entire winter confined on doctor’s orders.7
In the absence of the chief antagonist and his potential ally, Stalin could now act with a free hand and measures were taken steadily to reduce Trotsky’s authority and influence, beginning in a small way, and escalating into a major onslaught. Where at previous Party meetings an honorary presidium of Lenin and Trotsky had become customary, now the entire Politburo was so elected. Where in reports on Party gatherings Trotsky’s name would normally have been listed after Lenin’s, now all names—except Lenin’s—were in alphabetical order. Pravda, Izvestiya and Krasnaya zvezda began omitting the epithet ‘Trotsky, leader of the Red Army’, while they mentioned Stalin more and more often. Stalin’s secretariat, that is the Central Committee organization, began replacing Trotsky’s supporters with new men who were loyal to the ‘ring’. The political biographies of the leaders and their contribution to the victory of the revolution gradually started to come under review, and the steady, if barely noticed, reduction of Trotsky was under way, as Stalin proved himself to be a master of behind-the-scenes intrigue.
Trotsky recalled that a only few years later, when they were themselves struggling against Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev revealed the secrets of the plot to him. An inner Politburo of seven had been created, comprising all the other members except Trotsky, plus Kuybyshev who was head of the Supreme Economic Council. This centre settled all questions in advance and its members were bound by vows of secrecy. There were similar centres in the provinces which were subordinated to the Moscow centre’s strict discipline and which communicated with it in code.8 And, as he also learnt later, Party organizers were being selected on the single criterion that they must be ‘against Trotsky’. The death of Lenin in January 1924 freed the conspirators to bring their campaign out into the open.9
Trotsky’s personal authority was nevertheless still high enough for the Politburo to meet at his apartment, at Kamenev’s suggestion and with Trotsky’s agreement, if he were unable to attend the usual venue. These meetings were conducted with such heat and passion that, as Trotsky’s wife recalled, he would run a high temperature after them: ‘he came out of his study soaked through, and undressed and went to bed. His linen and clothes had to be dried as if he had been drenched in a rainstorm.’10
The chief cause of the heat generated at these meetings was Trotsky’s letter to the Politburo of 8 October 1923. Addressed to all members of the Central Committee and Central Commission, the fifteen-page letter—it had taken a week for him to complete—contained eighteen theses on a wide range of topics. The ‘ring’ seized on it to show that Trotsky was engaging in factionalism and attacking the Party leadership. This letter, like a later one signed by forty-six of Trotsky’s supporters, was in fact a response to the economic crisis of the summer and autumn of 1923, known as the ‘scissors crisis’. In Trotsky’s view the situation had been caused by serious errors of economic and political management on the part of the leadership and by the process of bureaucratization that had overwhelmed the Party. The ‘extreme worsening of internal Party conditions’ was due, he claimed, to the unhealthy internal Party system itself and also to the discontent of the workers and peasants caused by the harsh economic conditions imposed on them by the wrong policy.11
The letter, dictated while he was ill and in a state of nervous agitation, was not typical of Trotsky’s usual style, but was awkwardly written and repetitious. It was nevertheless a prophetic warning about the future of a number of fundamental issues. He expressed concern about the work of the country’s chief political organ: ‘More than was the case before the Twelfth Congress, highly important economic issues are being settled by the Politburo in haste, without due consideration and outside their proper context.’ The implication was that while Lenin was still on the job—even though he had been absent from the Twelfth Congress of April 1923—the work had been done on a more solid basis and more democratically. He went on: ‘The leaders of the country’s economy describe Politburo policy as a policy of haphazard, unsystematic decisions … There is no direction of the economy, the chaos comes from above.’12
The accusation of incompetence and lack of planning was justified, but he went further, accusing the Politburo of abuses in personnel policy:
The appointment [instead of election] of provincial Party committee secretaries is now the rule. This means the secretary is virtually independent of the local organization … The secretary in turn is the source of further appointments and replacements within the
province. The secretarial organization created thus from above becomes more and more self-sufficient and draws all the threads to itself. Participation by the Party rank and file in the real formation of the Party organization is becoming more and more illusory.13
With uncanny perception, just as if he were able to see decades ahead, he went on:
In the last year and a half or so, a specific secretarial mentality has been created and its chief feature is that the secretary is capable of solving all and every question, without any knowledge of the essence of the issue at hand. All around us we see comrades, who showed no organizational, administrative or any other skills when they were running Soviet bodies, now imperiously settling economic, military and other issues as soon as they become secretaries. The practice is all the more dangerous because it dissipates and kills off any sense of responsibility.14
The system of selecting secretaries, Trotsky noted, and the ‘secretarial hierarchy’, made the frank exchange of opinion impossible, and a picture of ‘automatic uniformity’ in the organizations was the result.15
In his letter Trotsky also objected, albeit mutedly, to the pressure that was constantly being applied on him by the ‘ring’. Once again he protested against the creation by a Party plenum in September 1923 of a new executive body alongside himself as Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, a measure he saw as another attempt to reduce his power. His suspicions had been further aroused when the plenum had proposed making Stalin and Voroshilov, and some others with whom Trotsky was not on good terms, members of the Revolutionary Military Council.16 He had vehemently protested at the plenum, and when his words fell on deaf ears he had left the meeting, an act condemned as ‘a challenge to the Party summit’. In his letter he described the decision of the plenum as the ‘announcement of a new Revolutionary Military Council’ and ‘a shift to a new, i.e. aggressive, policy’.17
He ended his letter with the unequivocal conclusion that the internal Party ‘regime cannot continue for long. It must be changed.’ The Central Committee, he wrote, was pursuing a ‘false policy’. The efforts he had been making ‘for the last eighteen months’—i.e. since Stalin had been made General Secretary—had ‘produced no result’.18 Despite his complete isolation in the Politburo, Trotsky had had the courage to warn the Central Committee and the Politburo itself of the dangers of ‘secretarial bureaucratism’, but even though he had supporters in the Central Committee no one took serious notice of what he was saying.
While he was writing his letter Trotsky conferred with Ioffe, Sapronov, Muralov and other like-minded senior Bolsheviks, and having sent it he then composed a similar document to which he obtained the signatures of forty-six supporters. Dubbed by the Thirteenth Party Conference ‘the Trotskyist Manifesto’, the ‘Statement of the 46’ went further than Trotsky’s letter. It stated categorically that ‘the secretarial hierarchy, [i.e.] the Party hierarchy, increasingly selects the membership of conferences and congresses which in turn are more and more becoming executive meetings of this hierarchy … The factional regime must be stopped and this must be done above all by those who installed it, it must be replaced by a regime of comradely unity and internal Party democracy.’19
This proved too much. On 16 October, when the letter was read at the Politburo, the triumvirate ordered an immediate emergency meeting of the Presidium of the Party Control Commission. This body found that ‘the differences enumerated by Comrade Trotsky’ were ‘largely artificial and fabricated’, and warned that such utterances could be fatal. The Control Commission effectively dismissed Trotsky’s warnings and was only concerned that his letter not be circulated among the Party organizations.20 For the triumvirate, however, this was not enough, and therefore, at Stalin’s insistence, a joint plenary meeting of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission was held on 23-25 October 1923 to which were invited specially selected workers from ten of the biggest Party organizations.
A majority of this gathering condemned Trotsky’s letter and the ‘Statement of the 46’ as a crude political mistake and as attacks on the Central Committee and Politburo. The Orgburo and Central Committee Secretariat—both of them in Stalin’s pocket—proposed that the plenum condemn the declaration by Trotsky and his supporters as plainly ‘factional’. It was then agreed that neither Trotsky’s letter nor the ‘Statement of the 46’ be made known to the wider public. The Politburo did not want these documents to serve as the basis of the debate which it saw was inevitable, and it therefore authorized a critical article by Zinoviev to appear in Pravda as a signal for the debate to begin.
The barely perceptible split in the Politburo, which in early 1923 Lenin had so feared, was now obvious and out in the open. The old accusations of ‘Menshevism’ were again levelled at Trotsky. The Moscow Party bureau lamented that ‘the disarray in the ranks of the Russian Communist Party will be the greatest possible blow to the German Communist Party and German proletariat that is preparing to seize power.’21 The leadership did not want to hear sober voices urging caution. At the Thirteenth Party Conference held a few days before Lenin’s death in mid-January 1924, using the resolution on Party unity passed by the Tenth Congress in 1921, the de facto leaders condemned Trotsky and his supporters’ position as ‘a Menshevik revision of Bolshevism’.
The issue flared up again at the combined plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission, which took place two weeks after the Politburo had received Trotsky’s letter. Trotsky wrote another long letter, defending the views he had expressed in early October22 and adding that, in order to place him in opposition to Lenin, he was being accused of underestimating the peasantry, and noting in particular the personal attacks being made on him: ‘The utterly incomprehensible accusation is being made that I have not paid enough attention to the army in recent years,’ and hints were being made that he spent too much time on literary matters. Rejecting these charges, he reiterated the need ‘to remove artificial walls within the Party’.23
On the last day of the plenum Stalin and Trotsky, for the first time in an open forum, exchanged mutual accusations, albeit in restrained form. Stalin was decidedly the more aggressive and demanded ‘condemnation of Trotsky’. Regrettably, before Lenin’s death, speeches at such meetings were not recorded verbatim and the hasty notes made by Stalin’s assistant, B. Bazhanov, do not include all the arguments deployed by his rivals.24 The plenum ‘proposed to Comrade Trotsky that in future he participate more closely and directly in practical work’.25 In other words, he was being told that if he had been doing his job, he would not have had time to engage in opposition.
The atmosphere at the plenum was extremely unpleasant for Trotsky, thanks to the campaign waged by the triumvirate. While we do not have a complete record of the speeches, there is a letter from Krupskaya to Zinoviev, which surfaced only recently, in which she objects to the attempts by the triumvirate to blame Trotsky for the split in the Party and to make him responsible for Lenin’s illness. ‘I ought to have shouted that this was a lie,’ she wrote. ‘It wasn’t Trotsky who worried Vladimir Ilyich most, it was the national question and the morals that had taken over at the summit.’ She expressed her concern and indignation that in their campaign Stalin and his supporters had crudely trampled on the principles and norms of Party life.26
Trotsky realized that his voice was going unheard. The ‘ring’ was closing more tightly around him, and although after the Thirteenth Conference he went for a rest to the Georgian Black Sea coast, the grip of the apparatus was almost tangible. A creator of the Bolshevik system himself, he did not understand that any attempt to improve it would be fruitless, for the fundamental tenets of Leninism, based on the monopoly of a single party, made reform impossible.
By the icy days of January, when Lenin was already dead, Trotsky was profoundly isolated. Pacing alone along the shore of the Black Sea, he agonized about what to do. The characteristic response of the Russian intellectual when faced with such a challenge was to fight, and Trotsky could no
t have acted otherwise.
‘The New Course’
Reflecting on his life later in exile, Trotsky recognized that 1923-24 had been the turning point. Even while Lenin was still alive, he wrote, the top echelon of the Party was developing the features of a caste, with unwritten rules and regulations governing behaviour within ‘one’s own circle’. During the civil war, he mused, everyone had lived according to the ‘Party’s tuning fork’. Once the tension of war had subsided, ‘and the nomads of the revolution went over to a settled way of life, the philistine characteristics, sympathies and tastes of self-satisfied functionaries were aroused, awakened and developed’. It became the custom among the ruling élite, he recalled, to visit each other’s homes, to attend the ballet assiduously, to hold drinking parties at which absentees would be pulled apart.27 By remaining aloof from this semi-bourgeois way of life, Trotsky only accelerated the already rapid process of his exclusion from the caste of leaders.
The Bolshevik system itself was also at a turning point. The country faced the need for major decisions. Besides a New Economic Policy, a New Political Policy was also needed. Democracy in economic life ought to have been accompanied by democracy in politics and achange of course by the Party. But the single-party system already dictated its own laws on ideology, culture, the state and society as a whole. Despite recognizing the danger of bureaucratization, Trotsky did not link it with the one-party system. His, the subtlest of minds, was in the grip of the most erroneous Marxist dogmas about the defining role of the Party. In an article entitled ‘Groupings and the Formation of Factions’ he wrote: ‘We are the only party in the country, and in the era of dictatorship there can be no other way.’28 He believed, moreover, that the oppositionist views of various Communist groups were dangerous. He was in favour of like-mindedness, but it must be ‘correct’ like-mindedness, foreshadowing the way the regime would operate on this matter for the next seventy years. In his first letter to the Central Committee in early October 1923, he had gone further and asserted, while discussing informants, that ‘informing on a Party organization that it is being used by elements that are hostile to the Party, is an elementary duty of every party member.’29 He was somehow convinced that genuine people’s power could develop within an environment where one party had a monopoly of power. The rest of the Party, and indeed most of the country for many long decades, felt much the same.
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