Stalin spotted all of Trotsky’s weaknesses and exploited them to the full. As the Party’s chief administrator, he was in a position to ensure that only those who were against Trotsky were given important posts (in due course, any post). The policy was practised imperceptibly, but the effect was that Stalin’s position was strengthened and Trotsky’s weakened. Even those who saw the positive side of Trotsky’s platform were doubtful that he could succeed. He soon became a general without an army. Who was supporting him?
In 1926, when Zinoviev and Kamenev went over to him, the list looked impressive, in quality if not in length. The ‘Statement of the 46’ had included the noteworthy remark: ‘A wavering few are leaving the opposition, while tens and hundreds of convinced … Party rank and file are joining us.’78 Only the first part of this statement was true. At the height of its popularity, the opposition could not muster more than seven or eight thousand members. To be sure, the number of those who did not accept Trotsky and his views may not have been many more, but the rest of the Party were objects of Stalin’s manipulations, and it was precisely the amorphous nature of the rank and file membership that permitted Stalin to retain supremacy, for at decisive moments tens of thousands of members obediently followed the line laid down by the Central Committee, which was Stalin’s to control.
In the spring of 1926 Zinoviev and Kamenev finally realized that they had underrated Stalin’s strength and overrated Trotsky’s. When in April 1926, after a three-year interval, the three politicians met at Kamenev’s apartment, they were all aware of just how cleverly Stalin had beaten them. Unable to look Trotsky in the eye, Zinoviev and Kamenev talked at length, blaming him, too, for the mistake they had made in supporting Stalin. Why, they asked, had he insisted on raking up their conduct in October 1917? Why hadn’t he come to Lenin’s funeral? Did he not realize just how hopeless it was to come out against Stalin virtually alone?
Trotsky’s new allies described the years they had spent with Stalin as a nightmare. They declared that they had each written letters, which they had hidden in safe places, stating that in the event of their sudden and unexplained death the world should know it was at Stalin’s hands, and they told Trotsky to do likewise. Stalin, they said, had not yet liquidated Trotsky only because he feared that some young, convinced Trotskyist might take revenge on him. They went on, Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher writes, that if the three of them were to unite and confront the people and the Party, it was possible to turn the Party back onto ‘the true path’. With Trotsky’s brilliant intellect and popularity, nothing would be easier than to remove Stalin from power.79 They believed that they had not yet missed the train.
But in fact it was too late. Had this alliance emerged soon after Lenin’s death, such an outcome might have been possible. But Trotsky also realized, with regret, that his new allies had only come over to him temporarily. He knew they were not capable of decisive struggle; they would not even seek a compromise, but would beg for Stalin’s forgiveness. The less reliable of the two, Trotsky also knew, was Zinoviev, who had begun his adult life as a shop assistant in his native Kherson province. Trotsky had first met him at the turn of the century in Geneva and London. He had seen the potential in Zinoviev, then a chemistry student, later a law student at Berne University, and later had good cause to recognize the abilities of the young revolutionary with a keen intelligence and European culture. But even before the revolution, Zinoviev was known for his rapid changes of view, his weak resistance to political pressure and his lack of a philosophy.
It was due to Lenin that Zinoviev entered the upper ranks of the Party: as early as 1905, at the Fifth Party Congress in London, Lenin had put him forward for Bolshevik Central Committee membership, a position he was to hold for twenty years. In the spring of 1917 he would cross Germany with Lenin in the famous ‘sealed train’, as they travelled via Scandinavia to Petrograd. And it was with Zinoviev that Lenin would go into hiding from the Provisional Government in the summer of 1917. Zinoviev almost constantly followed Lenin. ‘Almost’, because he was against the April Theses at first, but chiefly because on 10 October, with Kamenev at a secret meeting of the Central Committee, he courageously spoke up against the policy of staging an armed coup. Courage, however, was not one of his main features. Despite his revolutionary pedigree, and the fact that he was the first President of Comintern, Zinoviev’s inconsistency made him an object of political and in due course physical beatings.
Trotsky was not to know that Zinoviev would experience a host of further humiliations. When the GPU came for him on a December night in 1934, Zinoviev realized that it was the end. With a trembling hand, he wrote a hurried note to Stalin while his apartment was being searched: ‘… in no way, no way, am I guilty before the Party, before the Central Committee or before you, personally. I swear to you all by everything that is holy to a Bolshevik, I swear to you by Lenin’s memory. I cannot even imagine what could have raised suspicion against me. I beg you to believe this, my word of honour. I am shaken to the depths of my soul.’ Stalin merely speeded up the trial, and a month later, on 16 January 1935, his old Party comrade, a former member of his ‘ring’, would be sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, having first confessed all of his non-existent crimes and in addition undertaken to name ‘all those I can and will remember as former participants in the anti-Party struggle’.80
Trotsky was right to call Stalin a sadist. He was the type who was not fully satisfied by the death of his victim: what he needed was complete moral surrender, and Zinoviev submitted completely on 14 April 1935. Looking back on the behaviour of Zinoviev and Kamenev in October 1917, it is impossible to deny that they had demonstrated considerable political courage in calling their leader’s policy disastrous. And, indeed, on a number of occasions Zinoviev expressed what others believed in silence. In his book Leninism, for instance, which came out in 1925, he wrote: ‘What is the direct source of power in the USSR? Who embodies the power of the working class? The Communist Party! It is in that sense that we have a dictatorship of the Party. Hence, the dictatorship of the Party is a function of the dictatorship of the proletariat.’81
Trotsky recognized that the alliance with Zinoviev had been provoked by the latter’s loss of his post in the Politburo, his hostility towards Stalin and his unquenched political ambition. As anticipated, after their expulsion from the Party for factionalism, both Zinoviev and Kamenev sent a letter of repentance on 19 December 1927 to the presidium of the Fifteenth Party Congress, asking to be reinstated. The Party relented, but thereafter Trotsky’s ephemeral allies were forced constantly to rehearse the unmasking of Trotskyism.
Trotsky had had better hopes of Kamenev, even though his disagreements with him were no less than with Zinoviev. However, Kamenev was not only Trotsky’s brother-in-law, but was also endowed with more character than Zinoviev. At the April 1917 Party Conference, Lenin had described Kamenev and the work he had done for the Party for ten years as valuable,82 and had nominated him as one of his deputies in the Sovnarkom and Council of Labour and Defence. In the latter capacity, Kamenev had been effective in getting supplies into Moscow and Petrograd, particularly tens of thousands of tons of grain. He was also noted for having conducted personal negotiations with the Ukrainian anarchist guerrilla leader Makhno, which had led to an agreement. Trotsky was also aware, however, that Kamenev had frequently called for ‘a struggle against the undermining of Leninism by Trotskyism’. In January 1925 Sermuks showed Trotsky an extract from an article by Kamenev condemning Trotsky: ‘We were right not to allow Leninism to be undermined by some other teaching. Now that we are the ruling party, we have to manoeuvre skilfully within internal petty bourgeois and external capitalistic encirclement—we must be especially watchful, especially attentive to any form of deviation.’83 When Kamenev came to Trotsky in April 1926 it was no doubt a courageous step for him to take. At the Fourteenth Congress four months earlier, as we have seen, he had declared prophetically: ‘I have become convinced that Comrade Stalin cannot
fulfil the role of unifier of Bolshevik headquarters …’84 It was probably the only speech made at the congress giving the Party warning of a future dictator and virtually proposing that Stalin be removed.
Trotsky later combed the minutes of this congress, noting in particular this and other similar sentiments in Kamenev’s speeches, and using the material in his books and articles in exile. He would never bring himself to admit that the many oppositions, factions and groups that he had personally inspired had been no more than ripples on the smooth surface of the vast Russian sea, and that its depths had remained undisturbed. His temporary allies did not strengthen his position. He had not grasped the fact that the sources of Caesarism and totalitarianism lay deeper than the office of the General Secretary. Stalin was not the cause. The burgeoning bureaucracy would have found its Stalin, regardless.
One of the last attempts by the opposition to give an account of itself, of its disagreement with the dictatorship of the Party and the emerging one-man rule, was undertaken in November 1927 on the tenth anniversary of the October coup. But any hopes that new supporters would emerge were dashed. Acting on Stalin’s orders, the GPU did not stand on ceremony. The ranks of Trotsky’s supporters were thinned. Some published personal statements, declaring that they were terminating their factional activity, others were exiled beyond the Urals, to Siberia and Central Asia, while yet others were given a more honourable exile as ambassadors or trade representatives. Some took a different path. Adolf Ioffe, for instance, an old Bolshevik and a long-standing friend of Trotsky, after a prolonged fit of depression shot himself. In his suicide letter he wrote that Trotsky had always been politically right, but that he did not have enough of Lenin’s inflexibility and obstinacy.85 Trotsky’s speech at Ioffe’s funeral was his last public address to his supporters in Russia.
Among Trotsky’s longest-lasting supporters was Karl Berngardovich Radek, who was exiled to western Siberia after the opposition was smashed. Well-known as a brilliant journalist, Radek also had the reputation of being impulsive in both his personal and political life. Born in Poland—his pseudonym, K. Radek, was based on the Polish word for thief, kradek, as he had had to leave the Polish Social Democratic Party because of rumours of dishonesty—Radek never lost the political and cultural traditions of his native land. A witty polyglot and the reputed source of many jokes, he was a bon vivant with friends in many countries and in many walks of life. One of his chief characteristics was an ability to change political direction rapidly. A supporter of Trotsky during the Brest-Litovsk peace talks, he had managed simultaneously to side with Bukharin’s group of Left Communists. On Lenin’s orders he took part in helping to create the German Communist Party, and he was among the first to espouse the idea of the Popular Front.
Trotsky always viewed Radek with interest, but also with a measure of caution, as he was aware of his tendency to sudden changes of mind. When he was for a while the Rector of the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, Radek visited Trotsky frequently to discuss international issues, bringing news and lapping up Trotsky’s prognostications. Most people seemed to find Radek likeable, even Stalin. At the same time, no one took him quite seriously. His wit and original turn of mind were recognized, as was his irrepressible optimism, but his apparent lack of systematic thought and the impression he gave of personal disorder concealed the powerful intellect of a penetrating analyst, who lacked, to be sure, sufficient willpower.
The first letter Trotsky received in exile in Alma Ata was from Radek, who was exiled in Tomsk together with Ivan Smilga, a Latvian Bolshevik who had risen to prominence during the civil war and who had later become a supporter of Trotsky. Radek wrote about the daily life of an exile, reflected on possible future developments, and urged Trotsky to take courage. Trotsky’s replies, which have been gathering dust in the Party archives, include the following excerpts from various letters. On 27 February 1928 he wrote:
Knowing how much you detest manuscripts, I am writing this on a typewriter. I recall the prophetic words of [my son] Seryozha: ‘Don’t make a bloc either with Iosif [Stalin], or with Grigory [Zinoviev]. Iosif will deceive and Grigory will run away.’ I’m translating Marx’s book Mr Fogt for the Marx-Engels Institute. I haven’t been hunting again, yet. Sermuks is no longer with me; they arrested him and took him off … I strongly urge you to organize a proper way of life in order to preserve yourself. Whatever it takes. We are still of much, much use …86
Two days later, he wrote again: ‘I’m reading a lot about China, world politics … How are your kidneys? I shake you by your lazy hand with sympathy and reproach.’87 On 7 March 1928, he wrote:
Have you seen Bukharin’s stupidity in Pravda? It’s about my trip. Why do little people have to prostitute themselves when they’ve lost their principles? The GPU are creating obstacles … I haven’t been hunting once. I read a lot about the Chinese revolution … I’ve had no news from Serebryakov. My correspondence with others is gradually being established. I got a letter of indignation over Pyatakov’s letter. I have long regarded him as someone who can stand on his own two feet. He is an able man with a mathematically administrative turn of mind, but he is politically not very clever. Lenin turned out to be right about this, too, when he warned that one should not rely on Pyatakov in big political matters … His letter to the press was his own epitaph.88
Trotsky had long regarded Bukharin as one of Stalin’s chief mainstays—hence the abuse—but he also realized that Stalin was only exploiting Bukharin for as long as it suited him. On a number of occasions, Trotsky had approached Bukharin with proposals of various kinds in an effort to improve their relations. For instance, when a Jewish Communist wrote to Trotsky about antisemitism in his Party cell, where they were saying ‘the Yids are making trouble in the Politburo’, on 4 March 1926 Trotsky wrote to Bukharin:
You’ll say it’s an exaggeration! And I’d like to think so, myself. So I suggest we go to the cell together and see for ourselves. I think the two of us together, as two members of the Politburo, can combine sufficiently to make an effort calmly and with goodwill to check and see whether it is true, whether it is possible that in our Party, in Moscow, within a workers’ cell, foul, slanderous antisemitic propaganda can go on without being punished.89
Whether Bukharin took up Trotsky’s offer is not recorded.
Radek had still enough energy and courage to protest about the way Trotsky was being treated. On 25 September 1928 he wrote to the Central Committee:
Having heard that Comrade L.D. Trotsky is ill, I request the Central Committee move him to conditions offering the possibility of his recovery. You expelled us from the Party and exiled us as counterrevolutionaries without any regard for the fact that the elder among us have fought for Communism for a quarter of a century … To keep in exile those who have fought with the kulaks is either lunacy or it is consciously giving aid to the kulaks. A revolutionary Bolshevik, whose past is not inferior to yours, is expected to restore his strength on thirty roubles a month. The story of Comrade Trotsky’s illness is the last straw. You must raise the question of ending the exile of Bolshevik-Leninists, above all of Comrade Trotsky. Do this quickly, so that we who have seen Comrade Trotsky on all the fronts of the civil war shall not have the shame of having to raise our voices to save him. We have been deprived of our Party cards, but we do have a card stamped by the GPU with charges under Article 58.90
Although Radek was writing on Trotsky’s behalf, it is equally clear that he was speaking for himself. His later letters to the Central Committee show a gradual surrender, an evolution typical not only of Radek and Smilga, but of the entire opposition. In a declaration to the Central Committee, dated Tomsk, 29 March 1929, Radek and Smilga wrote:
A number of articles by Comrade Trotsky have appeared in the bourgeois world press about his deportation and the situation in the USSR and the Party. Yaroslavsky is generating real slander on the basis of these articles, of which our own press has distorted the content and in places blatantly falsified the text
. Yaroslavsky is trying to depict Trotsky as one who is selling his political conscience to the world bourgeoisie. Not one worker, not a single Party member, who knows of the service Trotsky has given to the cause of the revolution for more than thirty years will believe this slander … It was a political error for Trotsky to publish these articles of an internal Party character. But we do not repudiate the possibility of publishing in the bourgeois press articles against the Bolshevik Party to which we want to return. Trotsky has presented the struggle of recent years as a plot by Stalin against Trotsky, but he has been silent about the danger from the right …91
These are the words of people who have half-capitulated. The number of those who were capable of staying their chosen course, like Trotsky, was extremely small. It is one of the mysteries of the Soviet period that after the death of Lenin there were so few revolutionaries with the courage to resist Stalin. There were many, as we now know, who in the 1920s and 1930s did not share Stalin’s concept of ‘building socialism in one country’ by means of sacrifice. But the majority adapted and made themselves believe that he was right. Much of this was due to ordinary human weakness, the willingness to go along with naked force, coercion and demagoguery. There is, however, another element that explains the compliancy of the revolutionaries of the time. They did not recognize the value of liberty. They thought the liberty that had been thrown to them by the fortuity of the First World War and Kerensky’s mistakes was the prize for their loyalty to Marxism. Their reverential attitude to the dogmatization of Marxism, and then Leninism, meant that even the most obviously wrong-headed policies of the leadership, embellished by the customary dozen or so quotations from holy writ, could be presented as if inspired by a higher order.
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