Even after having been publicly labelled a factionalist who wanted to revise Bolshevism in a Menshevik direction, Trotsky still wanted to change the ‘distressing internal Party regime’,30 and plainly intended to do so by intellectual and political means. He believed that by his speeches at the Politburo and other Party bodies, and with the support of his relatively few followers, he could bring about a radical correction of the course, while the changes under NEP were still in train. His main forum, however, would be the press. On 11 December 1923 Pravda published his ‘Letter to Party Meetings’, which he entitled ‘The New Course’, at the end of the year he published ‘Groupings and the Formation of Factions’, ‘The Question of Party Generations’, ‘The Social Composition of the Party’ and ‘Tradition and Revolutionary Polities’, and on 29 December Pravda published two further pieces. All these articles came out as a collection, called ‘The New Course’,31 during the Thirteenth Party Conference of 16-18 January 1924.
These publications did not represent a ‘special’ new course, distinct from that of Lenin’s, as Soviet historiography always depicted them. The fact is, on 5 December 1923 the Politburo and the Party Control Commission jointly adopted a ruling on Party structure—which recognized the presence of bureaucratism—in which a number of measures were proposed to give the grassroots organizations greater democracy in internal Party life. Trotsky dared to hope that this might mean he had won the argument. Many Party members sincerely believed that a change towards democracy, freedom of opinion, openness on personnel matters, and an end to ‘secretarial’ bureaucratism were now all possible. Trotsky naturally did what he could through his writing to push the process forward. He would tell his assistant Sermuks that all was not lost, that the Party could be cured and that perhaps it was his medicine that would do the trick.
He was convinced that the resolution on ‘the new course’ would shift the centre of gravity towards ‘a critically independent, self-governing Party, as the organized vanguard of the proletariat … The Party must subordinate the organization to its authority, while remaining at all times a centralized body.’32 None of this suggested that Trotsky was questioning the basic principle of the Party’s governance by ‘democratic centralism’: the problem, as he saw it, was the excessive authority that had been invested in the apparat, or Party organization, especially since Stalin had taken over as its General Secretary. The omnipotence of the organization, he remarked, had induced a feeling of ‘indisposition’ in Party members. ‘By killing independent initiative, bureaucratism inhibits a rise in the general level of the Party.’
By this time the Party was managed by orders and directives. Trotsky had himself been partly responsible for the formation of a strong and coherent organization, and now saw the importance of reversing the roles, so that it was the Party that controlled the organization, and not vice versa. At the same time, his articles create the impression that he did not know how to eliminate the problem. He saw Stalin and his group as the chief danger, but had no precise idea how to liberate the Party from the way secretaries were selected, especially the General Secretary.33 He tried to address the entire Party, but he was neither heard nor understood. Most of the rank and file membership were of relatively low intellectual calibre, and in any case did not read his articles.
As a comrade-in-arms of Lenin, Trotsky could not openly come out against the ban on factions, adopted at the Tenth Congress, and indeed he frequently declared factions an evil to be avoided. Yet his arguments amounted to a disavowal of Lenin’s resolution on Party unity. ‘The ban,’ he wrote, ‘did not in itself represent an absolute or even partial guarantee of protecting the Party from new ideological and organizational groupings. The only guarantee is proper leadership, timely attention to all the needs of development … flexibility in Party organization that did not paralyse but organized Party initiative, that was not afraid of critical voices and did not intimidate [members] with the charge of factionalism.’ Cautiously approaching his main point, he concluded: ‘The resolution of the Tenth Congress, banning factions, can only have an auxiliary character, and in itself it does not provide the key to all and every internal difficulty.’34
In ‘The New Course’, Trotsky developed another idea which he hoped would not only breathe new life into the leadership, but also help him gain the new supporters he needed. He raised the question of generations in the Party. The underlying cause of present frictions, he wrote, ‘is not that some secretaries have gone too far and must be slightly curbed, but that the Party itself is about to shift into a higher class’.35 He related this shift to the active inclusion of the young—‘the surest Party barometer’ that was also reacting sharply against bureaucratism—in the revolutionary process. ‘Only the constant interaction of the older generation with the younger, within the framework of Party democracy, can preserve the old guard as a revolutionary factor.’36 He hoped that by referring to the domination of the old generation, he would gain the sympathy of the young. It had got to the point, he wrote, ‘that the Party inhabits two storeys, on the upper one they decide everything, and on the lower one they only hear about what has been decided’. The old guard must not decide everything for the whole Party without involving the young; the Party could not live only on the capital of the past. ‘The old generation must not see the new course as a manoeuvre, a diplomatic ploy or temporary concession, but as a new stage in the Party’s political development.’ Trotsky’s desperate plea fell, alas, on deaf ears.
Knowing how much depended on his efforts to find support, he wrote one more article, entitled ‘Tradition and Revolutionary Politics’, in which he urged the Party to base itself on Lenin, whom he called a genius. ‘Leninism,’ he wrote, ‘means being free of the conservative glance backwards, free of precedents, formal references and quotations … Lenin should not be cut up by scissors into suitable quotations for every occasion, formula never took precedence over reality for him, but was always a means to master reality.’ Having as it were thus recruited Lenin to his own side, he concluded with a remark that was an obvious challenge to Stalin: ‘No one should identify bureaucratism with Bolshevism.’37
But in the struggle for a monopoly on Lenin, it was Stalin who in due course would win hands down. He would don his robe as the defender of Leninism and its chief interpreter. Trotsky was not able, or was too late, to adopt this device, which made Stalin invulnerable. Trotsky’s attempt to recruit Lenin failed. Everyone who zealously attacked Trotsky made sure to refer to Lenin’s resolution on unity, and this spelled Trotsky’s defeat.
When the Thirteenth Party Conference was being prepared, Trotsky still thought there was a chance that his line on realizing the Politburo’s resolution on a democratic renewal might succeed. He drafted a resolution and expounded a number of striking ideas. The text, written on 14 January 1924, contained the following:
[It] would be dangerous in the highest degree to underestimate the conservative resistance of the bureaucratic elements who originated the Politburo’s resolution on the need for a new course … Our Party’s entire past shows that internal Party intrigue, including criticism of Central Committee policy, is entirely compatible with real unanimity and firm discipline … The Party must give warning of the danger of bureaucratism and it must guarantee a regime of independence for the Party rank and file.38
Following Stalin’s speech, however, the conference passed a resolution branding the position taken by Trotsky and his supporters as ‘a blatantly expressed petty bourgeois deviation’ and a ‘clear departure from Bolshevism’. It should be noted, however, that there was no ‘new course’ on internal Party democracy, and the struggle against bureaucratism was not implemented, despite there being a strong desire for it among the people. Trotsky had taken the Politburo resolution of 5 December 1923 as the signal for a new course, whereas the leadership had no such intention. The Party had been created by Lenin as enclosed, hierarchical, harsh and bureaucratic. Talk of ‘democratization’ was no more than a ploy to defeat Trotsky.
For a while, Trotsky sagged. He stayed indoors for days on end, saying he was ill. He took a trip for a cure, and went on several hunting expeditions with his friend N. Muralov, the head of the Moscow Military District. He wrote letters, put his huge archives in order and sorted his abundant correspondence. With the help of Sermuks and Poznansky, he collected his speeches, articles and notes for the next volume of his collected works. Among his papers were materials he had intended using in his campaign to aid invalids and civil war veterans. His wife had assisted in the attempt to set up an organization, called Sobes, or Social Security, to care for maimed soldiers, but the country’s poverty and the rapidly burgeoning bureaucracy soon stifled that endeavour. At the end of 1922 he had drafted a memorandum to the Orgburo, saying that ‘with the break-up of Sobes, the question of … civil war invalids has decidedly been left up in the air … There is no one who will concentrate all the responsible work in his own hands. As a result of Comrade Burdukov’s transfer to Ukraine, and with the President of the All-Russian Aid Committee, N.I. Trotskaya, being on sick leave, Sobes has broken up. This threatens to paralyse the whole affair.’39
The leadership had first become aware of the problem of civil war invalids during a parade in honour of the Red Army, when a group of war wounded established themselves near the parade stands and began extorting money from the public. Trotsky was dismayed and angered by what he saw as a slur on his achievement as army chief, and wrote to Muralov: ‘All invalids should be told personally that if they don’t make their applications in the proper way, and choose instead to do so by disrupting parades, popular assemblies and so on, then the guilty will be deported from Moscow to a town in the provinces.’40 He later involved the All-Russian Aid Committee, the Red Army Political Section and other bodies in organizing care for invalids, suggesting that the issue be dealt with on the level ‘of material help and social education’, in other words, to give work to war wounded within their capabilities.41
It seemed as if Trotsky had accepted his loss of influence and was not seeking to worsen his relations with the rest of the leadership. He carried out his duties as a member of the Politburo and Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs rather passively, using his main energies to prepare his collected works for publication. This project had been approved by Lenin and the Central Committee during the civil war, and much of what emerged is of great interest to the historian. While taking the waters at Kislovodsk in 1924, Trotsky wrote a great deal. He noted with irritation that the Party newspapers had taken to referring to his Menshevik past with growing frequency, and he was prompted to write the preface of his volume on the October revolution as a separate article, in a way that would both reply to his numerous critics and explain things as they had been. He wrote very fast and within three days the piece, nearly sixty pages long, was finished. Its main message was to inform the Party’s mostly new and inflated membership of his achievements during the October revolution.
The article, entitled ‘The Lessons of October’, attracted the attention of the entire Party. In it, Trotsky gave high praise to Lenin, dismissed Zinoviev and Kamenev and referred directly to Stalin’s insignificance. He quoted from Kamenev’s letter to the press on the eve of the coup, which had declared: ‘Not only I and Comrade Zinoviev, but also several organizer-comrades, feel that to take upon ourselves the initiative of an armed uprising at the moment, given the present relationship of forces, independently and only a few days before the Congress of Soviets, would be an impermissible, disastrous step for the proletariat and the revolution.’ Trotsky asserted that people should learn what had happened in October. ‘It would be wrong,’ he wrote, ‘to expunge a chapter of the Party’s history, just because not all members had been in step with the proletariat. The Party can and should know everything about its past in order to have a proper evaluation and put everything in its rightful place.’42
But he, too, omitted to point out the significant fact that it had been easy to seize power because no one was prepared to defend it. The picture he painted, of wise leaders, perspicacious plans and a revolutionary population, was more romantic than the reality. The day after the uprising most of the inhabitants of Petrograd had no idea that the government had fallen and that the Bolsheviks had taken power. Trotsky’s article was nevertheless illuminating for many people, but one of his chief purposes was to protect his own name.
The counter-attack came immediately, with all the ‘heavy guns’ being deployed. Kamenev published a long and dismissive article called ‘Leninism or Trotskyism?’, to which Stalin appended ‘the facts about the October uprising’. An editorial in the journal Bolshevik described Trotsky as ‘skimming over the surface, albeit like a maestro, beautifully, even brilliantly, like an ice-skating champion. The trouble is it is all nothing but patterns, remote from practical existence.’43
While Trotsky was awaiting a reply, the Politburo was devising a comprehensive programme to discredit him. The Central Committee Secretariat ordered all Party organizations to go over ‘The Lessons of October’ with a critical eye. Almost every member of the top echelon was expected to condemn Trotsky publicly. Dozens of articles appeared in the press within a short space of time. The criticism escalated from cool analysis to insinuation and outright abuse. Public speeches made by all the leaders—Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Sokolnikov, Krupskaya, Molotov, Bubnov and others—were collected in a large anthology, called For Leninism. Many of the authors wrote diametrically opposite to what they had been saying before 1924.
At first, Trotsky read the daily dose of attacks, but when he started having chest pains and bad headaches and felt generally miserable, he stopped this form of self-punishment. He had not expected such a fierce offensive. His wife tried to reassure and distract him, making him go for walks and reading him letters from their sons. She later recalled that this attack of illness ‘coincided with a monstrous campaign of persecution against him, which we felt as keenly as if we had been suffering from the most malignant disease. The pages of Pravda seemed endless, and every line of the paper, even every word, a lie. L.D. kept silent. Friends called to see him during the day and often at night … He looked pale and thin. In the family we avoided talking about the persecution, and yet we could talk of nothing else.’44
The press campaign hammered home the message that once a politician had been stained by Menshevism, the mark could never be washed away. Sermuks started selecting what to show Trotsky and which ‘retorts to the renegade’ should be filed in Trotsky’s voluminous archives. Factory, regional and university cells throughout the country were unanimously passing resolutions condemning ‘Trotsky’s anti-Bolshevik assault on the foundations of Leninism’, and calling on him to resign from the Party if he was not willing to carry out the policy laid down by the Thirteenth Party Conference.45 The ripples of criticism widened steadily and the image of Trotsky created in revolution and civil war was gradually eroded.
Letters and telegrams of a different character were reaching Trotsky in Kislovodsk, however. Ioffe, Muralov and Rakovsky urged him not to remain silent, but to appeal to the Central Committee to put a stop to the scandalous clamour. Trotsky remained silent. Stalin’s aim had been accurate. Trotsky’s reputation had been based on the October revolution and the civil war, and Stalin succeeded in persuading the Party that it had been grossly inflated. All of Lenin’s pre-revolutionary attacks on Trotsky were now published or republished and the hero quickly became a pariah. 1923 and 1924 were a unique watershed in Trotsky’s life. He was still in the top echelon of the regime and his portrait still hung alongside that of Lenin. Quite a few towns and villages, streets, clubs and factories bore his name, yet his image as a revolutionary was growing dim and the aura had gone. His hopes for a ‘new course’ were unrealized. His attempts to retrieve his reputation were met either by indifference or outright hostility. And it was during this time that Stalin advanced his own ‘theory’ of ‘socialism in one country’.
Many people who, as membe
rs of earlier oppositions, groupings and factions, had suffered defeat on other issues, were drawn to Trotsky and were expressing sympathy, since he was openly identified as an enemy of the present leadership. The Stalinist triumvirate of course seized on this and accused Trotsky of supporting anti-Party forces. For his part, Trotsky made little effort to draw on the help of his own supporters, and when he eventually came round to doing so, it would be too late. Meanwhile, expressions of support for Trotsky, though few, continued to arrive at the Central Committee. In one case, the railway-wagon workshop in Moscow voted by a small majority against the anti-Trotsky campaign as ‘harmful and unworthy of the [Party] and damaging to the prestige of Comintern’, and this despite a personal appearance by Molotov.46
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