Trotsky’s absence during the time of the funeral created a very unfavourable impression among the population, especially Party members, many of whom took it as a sign of disrespect for Lenin’s memory. This was perhaps the decisive event leading to Trotsky’s defeat. Trotsky was deeply moved by a letter he received from Krupskaya in Sukhumi a few days after the funeral, and possibly it gave him some relief from the guilt and frustration he felt at having been absent. Krupskaya wrote that ‘about a month before his death, as he was looking through your book, Vladimir Ilyich stopped at the place where you sum up Marx and Lenin, and asked me to read it over again to him: he listened very attentively, and then looked it over again himself. And here is another thing I want to tell you: the attitude of V.I. towards you at the time when you came to us in London from Siberia has not changed until his death. I wish you, Lev Davydovich, strength and health, and I embrace you warmly.’62
After the revolution, Lenin had indeed shown not only great confidence in Trotsky, but also concern for his well-being. On 20 March 1921 he had hand-written a draft order for the Politburo which stated that: ‘… on the basis of the physician Professor Rakhman’s opinion that improper nutrition is one of the causes of Comrade Trotsky’s illness and of the difficulty in curing it, the Orgburo is to organize adequate nutrition for Comrade Trotsky according to the doctor’s orders, acting on the direct instruction of the Central Committee and via the Soviet agencies (VTsIK and the People’s Commissariat for Food).’63
Trotsky often returned in his memories to the days of Lenin’s funeral; they were not only a time of grief, but were the time when he lost hope of playing what he called ‘the leading role’ in the Party and the country. In Coyoacan, during the last year of his life, he wrote to his supporter Malamut on 17 November 1939:
On the way back to Moscow from Sukhumi with a few close comrades, when the conversation turned to the funeral—it was only touched upon, as three months had already passed—they told me that he (Stalin) or they (the triumvirate) had had no intention whatever of holding it on the Saturday, and were only concerned to ensure my absence. Who told me this? Perhaps V. Smirnov or N. Muralov, it was hardly E. Sklyansky, who was so reserved and cautious … I see now that the plot was more complex.
Trotsky then asserted that Stalin had regarded the Saturday as a fictitious date from the start. In a special personal coded telegram, he had summoned major Party leaders to Moscow from all over the country, men who were loyal to him: ‘In view of the critical importance of the moment, Stalin mobilized his functionaries throughout the country. In the end, everyone turned up, except me, as I had been purposely misinformed by Stalin himself.’
Not long before his own death, on more than one occasion, Trotsky suggested and eventually came to believe—and tried to convince others—that Stalin had poisoned Lenin. In his article ‘The SuperBorgia in the Kremlin’ he described how G. Yagoda, a close confidant of Stalin’s, ‘had a special cupboard full of poisons from which he would take a flask when it was needed and give it to his agents with appropriate instructions. Stalin could not wait passively for Lenin to get better, for the fate of this Borgia depended on it. He knew that whether he was to become the boss of the organization and thus also of the country depended on it.’ This was one occasion when Trotsky was wrong, or perhaps deliberately misleading, about Stalin’s motives and behaviour. It is now possible to assert on the basis of documentary evidence that in fact Lenin himself, through Krupskaya, asked Stalin to obtain potassium cyanide for him to use when his suffering became unbearable. Stalin reported to his colleagues that Krupskaya told him she had even tried to poison Lenin herself, but her nerve had failed her. (A detailed account of this episode is to be found in my study of Lenin.64)
After Lenin’s death, the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky took on a more one-sided character: the former attacked, the latter defended. To be sure, Trotsky could still stir the public with his speeches and articles, but perceptive observers could see that he had lost the fight, and lost it badly. In January 1925 he was relieved of the posts of People’s Commissar for Military Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. At the January 1925 Central Committee plenum where Trotsky’s position was discussed in his absence, as he was ill at the time, Zinoviev and Kamenev unexpectedly proposed that his place as Military Commissar be taken by Stalin. The General Secretary at once objected, gazing askance at the other members. The proposal collapsed and Stalin remained at the helm of the fast-growing bureaucracy.
As long as Trotsky had been in charge of the armed forces, Stalin had feared him. He could not have forgotten that V.A. Antonov-Ovseenko had written to the Politburo in defence of Trotsky: ‘Communists in the military are already saying that we must all as one support Comrade Trotsky.’65 After consultation, the triumvirate found Trotsky three jobs that would shift him to the political sidelines and load him down with bureaucratic affairs. He was made head of the Chief Concessions Committee, the Electro-technical Board and chairman of the Scientific and Technical Industrial Board. He was no longer dangerous.
For a while Trotsky threw himself into his new work, grappling with technical problems and absorbed by the possibility of putting science to work for the new society. He toured laboratories, meeting scientists and holding conferences with engineering workers. He attended the Politburo rarely, citing his new work as an excuse. It seemed he was satisfied with his modest role as a ‘technocrat’ and the extra time it gave him for his literary work. Meanwhile, the anti-Trotsky campaign continued in the press, dragging up his old sins, and before long he felt constrained to drop his new jobs, retaining only the chairmanship of the Concessions Committee, in order to return to full-time politics.
By now, a split had developed within the triumvirate. Zinoviev and Kamenev eventually realized that by supporting Stalin they had reinforced the bureaucratic regime and prepared the ground for a dictator. The ‘Bolshevik twins’ turned to Trotsky. ‘At our very first meeting,’ Trotsky recalled, ‘Kamenev declared: “It is enough for you and Zinoviev to appear on the same platform, and the Party will find its true Central Committee.”’66 But they had failed to take account of the work Stalin had been doing to surround himself with a loyal following by appointing dedicated functionaries to various key posts in the organization.
For his part, Trotsky was not particularly sanguine about his new allies. He simply did not trust them. In notes he entitled ‘The Bloc with Zinoviev (for the diary)’, made in December 1925, he remarked perceptively that the Leningrad (i.e. Zinoviev) opposition was a ‘bureaucratic-demagogic adaptation by the organizational leadership to the alarm being expressed by leading elements of the working class about the general progress of our development’.67 The alarm was being expressed in debates about the methods and pace of constructing socialism. Linking the progress of revolution in Russia to that of the world revolution, as was his wont, Trotsky still maintained radical, leftist views. In a 1926 draft he underlined several typical phrases: ‘Why in fact rob the peasantry if socialism is impossible?’; ‘… we are regarded as “pessimists” and “faint-hearted” because we think the snail’s pace is inadequate.’68 He seemed to be contradicting himself, declaring on the one hand that without a world revolutionary conflagration it would be impossible to build socialism in the Soviet Union, while on the other hand calling for a decisive transformation of the country, and at a fast pace. Stalin was aware of this apparent weakness in Trotsky’s thinking and waited for the chance to pounce.
At the Fourteenth Party Congress of December 1925, Zinoviev, as joint spokesman for the opposition, warned the Party of the danger of bureaucratic degeneration, but his arguments were weak. Kamenev gave a much tougher speech, declaring: ‘… we are against creating a “leader’s” theory, we are against making a “leader” … I personally do not think our General Secretary is the person who can unite the old Bolshevik headquarters around himself …’69 But he only succeeded in arousing the delegates’ indignation, and the gr
ound under the ‘left’ opposition dwindled. Stalin tightened his grip. In June 1926 he wrote to Molotov that it was time ‘to smash the mugs of Trotsky and Grisha [Zinoviev] and Kamenev’ and turn them into renegades. By September he was more precise: ‘It is quite possible that he’ll fly out of the [Politburo] right now.’70 In October 1926, Trotsky and Zinoviev were removed from the Politburo and a year later from the Central Committee. In November 1927 Trotsky was expelled from the Party.
The oppositionists issued a statement which declared: ‘It is untrue that the opposition path would lead to an uprising against the Party and the Soviet regime. But it is indisputably true that the Stalinist faction coldly intends to unleash physical destruction on the way to achieving its goals. The opposition has given not the slightest hint of a threat of insurrection. But the Stalinist faction represents a real threat of further usurpation of the Party’s supreme rights … The opposition cannot be crushed by repression; what we think right we will defend to the last.’71
Having lost practically everything, Trotsky belatedly hastened to rally an anti-Stalinist organization within the Party. Illegal meetings were held, political struggle groups formed, attempts made to publish oppositional material, clandestine channels were opened. Throughout, however, Trotsky stressed that the opposition must limit itselfto strictly ideological and political methods. He issued memoranda and instructions to his followers, defining their tasks. These appear in the reminiscences of one of his rank and file supporters, N.N. Gavrilov, who recalled some of the tasks he was called upon to perform: ‘1) to come out actively in support of my own views at Party meetings; 2) to spread the word of the opposition among the masses; 3) to collect money for paper and to help comrades who were being persecuted; 4) to make contact with other supporters; 5) to maintain contact with the leadership of the Leningrad opposition group.’72
Trotsky’s position was further weakened when Zinoviev decided to repent before Stalin, hoping in this way to return to his former favour. Trotsky was not especially surprised by this turn of events, and recalled his son Seryozha’s gloomy prediction that Stalin would deceive, and Zinoviev would run away.73 The press campaign meanwhile did not slacken. Trotsky’s efforts to justify himself were blocked by Stalin’s orders to editors not to print his replies, but he would not surrender. The archives contain much material plainly intended for distribution in unofficial organs. For example, the following extract was printed on cigarette-paper:
Dear Comrades,
After a long interval, Comrade Zinoviev and his close friends have resurrected the legend against Trotskyism … in order to cover their own retreat. The legend of Trotskyism is a conspiracy by the [Party] organization against Trotsky. Bukharin has distinguished himself as the most productive practitioner of this underhand work. It would be a mortal punishment for this man if his collected works were published … One should not trifle with ideas. They have a way of becoming attached to class realities and continuing to live their own lives independently.74
The duel of ‘outstanding leaders’ was only one of appearances. The face-to-face confrontation did not happen. Personally unattractive and uninteresting, but empowered by his command of the Party organization, Stalin was able to carry the majority of the Party with him. Sparkling and talented (even if somewhat faded after the civil war), Trotsky was virtually alone. What exiguous groups of support he managed to assemble entered the fray far too late, and their calls for a struggle against bureaucracy, Communist arrogance and organizational heavy-handedness were barely comprehensible to rank and file Party members, for most of whom Trotsky now appeared as nothing more than an oppositionist, a factionalist and a man who was at last revealing his former Menshevik leanings. The duel was indeed only one of appearances. In political contest, Stalin preferred murder to duelling.
The Thinning Ranks of Supporters
We have already seen that Trotsky was a man of paradoxes. While a convinced advocate of radical methods for solving social, economic and spiritual problems, he also simultaneously fought for the democratization of the regime in the Party. Perhaps his most puzzling feature was his vain attempt to combine the uncombinable: totalitarianism and democratism, militarism and culture. The hero of the revolution was a graphic expression of the contradictions of the Russian revolution itself. The revolution lit the torch of liberty, yet in carrying it forward, it also spread coercion. Proclaiming people’s power, a handful of individuals decided the fate of millions; while trying to create the new, the revolution mercilessly destroyed the historically valuable, as well as that which had permanent importance for the future. Trotsky’s paradoxical character was that of any revolution, especially the Russian revolution.
One such paradox was the disproportionate ratio of Trotsky’s popularity to the number of his supporters. During the revolution and civil war, his name was known throughout the country and well beyond its borders. He was seen as the idol and symbol of the revolution, and many admired his energy, and his versatility as a military leader, state official, politician, public speaker, journalist and tireless advocate of world revolution. It seemed as if this veritable generator of revolution was capable of uniting millions by his indefatigable efforts. But the circle of people personally dedicated to him was narrow. He had set himself the task of becoming a leader, and leaders as a rule have few friends.
Like anyone else who wielded great power, Trotsky would respond to personal requests. With the help of his large secretariat he was willing to give help in various ways. For example, he forwarded a letter to the Orgburo from an old female revolutionary called Rozanova, with an accompanying note: ‘I lived with her and her husband in Saratov, really as an illegal. I used her help in the sense of the apartment, addresses and so on. It was in 1902. I recall that Rozanova and her husband were Populists and, I think, later on in exile joined [the SR] Chernov … We ought to help the old woman.’75 For Klara Zetkin, the German Communist and member of ECCI, he asked for ‘more bearable conditions, as she’s living in a cold room in the Lux Hotel. Perhaps we could give her an electric stove or find her another apartment.’76 He did not turn away from people, he gave advice and did some good deeds.
But the revolutionary wave had subsided, and it suddenly appeared that the second man in the Party and the country had very few supporters. This provoked a discussion in the Party which was enlivened by Trotsky’s letter to the Central Committee in October 1923, and again by the ‘Statement of the 46’, inspired by him, sent to the Politburo a week later.77
For Trotsky, the saddest thing was to realize that all his efforts to move the Party from its ‘secretarial hierarchical’ course had been doomed from the start. He had wanted what the revolution had proclaimed, what Marxism had declared and what met the interests of the Party members. The failure was due to a number of causes. First, most Party members were too ill-educated politically to understand what was at stake. The Party came into its own and grew in conditions of war, which explained the predominance of its military methods and use of military terminology, such as ‘fronts’, ‘attacks’, ‘storming’, ‘treachery’ and ‘concentration’. Whoever stood at the Party’s administrative helm could more or less determine the course of a debate, ensure the formation of the appropriate public opinion, create images of enemies and allies. Attempting to influence the Party line, Trotsky addressed the Party machine, the very ‘secretarial hierarchy’—the ‘ring’—which was set on stifling him. Since he was trying to reduce the influence of the organization, it was unlikely he would find supporters among it. And the power of the organization was spreading from top to bottom.
Furthermore, Trotsky was extraordinarily inept at choosing the moment to engage in political struggle. He was no tactician. He knew very well the poor impression it would make on the Party, his supporters and the army if he, the second man of the revolution, were absent from Lenin’s funeral, even if it was through no fault of his own. But he recognized the full magnitude of the omission only later. Often at the most critical moments of
the struggle he left the arena, either through illness, or by taking a vacation in the Caucasus, or going to Berlin for treatment. Once, when the Politburo was reviewing his factional activity, he was on a hunting expedition with Muralov. The fact is, the functionaries and Party members preferred to give their allegiance to successful leaders, and Trotsky came across in the political battle as a loser, which did nothing to swell the ranks of his supporters.
Finally, his political opposition itself appeared as a naked struggle for power, jobs and influence. Stalin had understood the importance of appearing as the defender of Lenin and his heritage. All of his speeches against Trotsky and the opposition were laced with quotations from Lenin and references to the dead leader. Trotsky, meanwhile, was having constantly to defend and justify himself, and to demonstrate his loyalty to the Central Committee and Politburo. His defensive posture created the impression that he was in the wrong, that his views were dubious and harmful. This was morally depressing for his supporters, who were dwindling steadily. From the late 1920s many deserted him and recanted their views, and not only from fear of sanction.
As a result of Stalin’s efforts, and Trotsky’s, too, the latter appeared before the Communist masses as a malicious splitter of the Party. And, after all, Lenin himself had stressed that a split would be more dangerous for the Party than the White generals: the Party had to be monolithic. Hence the hostility towards Trotsky and the support for Stalin who, shoulder to shoulder with the Central Committee, appeared as the upholder of unity. As for the ideological differences, the majority of the Party, despite their belief in world revolution, were impressed by Stalin’s goal of building socialism in one country first. The apparent lack of confidence shown by Trotsky and his supporters in the possibility of a socialist victory in the USSR, moreover, was presented by Stalin as nothing less than a desire to bring back capitalism.
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