The changes taking place in Europe and the USSR shaped the content of the Bulletin, which can be roughly divided into three broad periods. First, from its foundation until 1933-34, with the rise to power of Hitler and the consolidation of Stalin’s position following the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. Many of Trotsky’s articles on the German question formed the basis of his book on the German revolution. In 1932 he predicted: ‘Fascism has not conquered in Germany. Gigantic forces still stand in its way. But if they are not brought into action, the irreversible could occur.’47 During this period, the journal also persistently declared the need to return to the Leninist sources of Party life inside the country and in Comintern.
The second period of the journal, from 1933-34 to 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War, was marked by Trotsky’s stubborn efforts to create an alternative international union of Communists, the Fourth International. At the same time as the Stalinist bloodbath of terror was being perpetrated inside the USSR, Trotsky openly called for a ‘political revolution’ in the country and the immediate removal of Stalin.
The third and final period—one might say the unfinished period—is associated with the activities of the Trotskyist and other Communist organizations in the context of the war. The Bulletin formulated its unequivocal attitude both to Stalin and to Hitler, and defined the place of the ‘Bolshevik-Leninists’, as Trotsky dubbed his supporters, in defence of the first ‘proletarian state’ in the world.
The character of the Bulletin, of which we have given only the sketchiest outline, was conditioned not only by changes in international affairs, but also by the fact that after 1931 it became practically impossible to distribute copies inside the Soviet Union. By 1932-33, and of course later, showing the slightest interest in the journal was judged as tantamount to belonging to the ‘Trotskyist bloc’ and subject to punishment under Article 58 of the Criminal Code. Stalin himself was, naturally, immune from such sanctions. Indeed, B. Tal, the Central Committee functionary responsible for the press and publishing, ensured that the General Secretary regularly received a wide range of anti-Soviet publications, including Trotsky’s Bulletin.48 It was obtained from arrested Trotskyists and also by Soviet agencies abroad. The ‘Sneevliet archive’, held in the Party Archives,49 shows that Stalin’s secret agents kept Stalin fully informed of the contents of the Bulletin, well before Zborowski entered the scene. What he read there only inflamed his already seething hatred for the man whose deportation had been, in Stalin’s own words, ‘a big mistake’.
There were occasions when, thanks to Zborowski, Stalin knew the contents of an issue of the Bulletin even before it had been published. For instance, on 25 February 1938 Yezhov sent him extracts of two articles by Trotsky, dated 13 and 15 January 1938 and entitled ‘Is the Soviet Government Still Following the Principles Established Twenty Years Ago?’ and ‘The Fuss About Kronstadt’. ‘These articles,’ Yezhovnoted, ‘are scheduled for publication in the March issue of the Bulletin.’50 Trotsky had no conception that Stalin’s tentacles could reach so deep. For his part, Stalin wanted to know the scale of the Trotskyist movement, its organizational scope and what it was publishing. In March 1937, the security organs submitted a list of Trotskyist publications abroad, showing that they amounted to fifty-four newspapers, journals and bulletins, printed in different countries. Stalin was surprised by the scale of these operations, but was reassured when told that most of these organs were published irregularly and only in a few hundred copies.51
Besides Trotskyist publications, there were also a host of other anti-Soviet organs published by leading émigré writers, Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and liberal politicians. Stalin issued his orders and the foreign section of the OGPU diligently collected and studied such publications, gleaning a mass of information about every shade of Russian political opinion abroad through its agents, who were as far as possible recruited from across this spectrum.
In his Bulletin Trotsky tried from the outset to report ‘the revolutionary news from the USSR’. In the June-July 1930 issue, for instance, under the heading ‘Letters from the USSR’, he reported the beating of Trotskyists in a camp in the Urals, a protest from the ‘Kamensk exile colony of Bolshevik-Leninists’ and included an article entitled ‘Stalin and the Red Army, or How History is Written’. On another occasion he argued, rather unconvincingly, that Soviet society was becoming ‘bourgeoisified’ because the number of workers in the leadership, already minimal, was shrinking, and they were being replaced increasingly by ‘petty bourgeois elements’. As evidence, he cited the names of former White officers, all of them with unsavoury records, who had now been recruited into significant positions in the new hierarchy.52
Sometimes he commented on isolated facts. Having read in Pravda, for instance, of the disgrace of the poet Demyan Bedny in 1932, he wrote venomously: ‘For a long time Demyan Bedny was dignified by the title of proletarian poet. Someone [the critic L.P. Averbakh] even suggested the “demyanization” of Soviet literature. That was supposed to mean giving it a truly proletarian character: he was a “poet-Bolshevik”, a “dialectician”, a “Leninist in poetry” … In fact, Demyan Bedny personified everything in the October revolution except its proletarian current. Only the pathetic sketchiness, simple ideas and parroting of the [Stalinist] period can explain the astonishing fact that Demyan Bedny was called a proletarian poet.’ Demyan Bedny, Trotsky concluded, had taken to the violence of the revolution ‘like a fish to water’.53
The central theme of the Bulletin was, of course, Stalin, who was shown invariably in an extremely negative light, accompanied by devastating comment and ill-concealed hatred. Most of what Trotsky said of Stalin has now become common coin. For instance, replying to American friends about the part played by Stalin’s minions in the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, even though he had no concrete evidence to go on, he wrote: ‘There can be not the slightest doubt that the accusation made by Stalin against Zinoviev’s group is false from beginning to end: in regard to the aim—the restoration of capitalism, and in regard to the means—terrorism … Stalin is responding to Nikolaev’s [the assassin’s] act with intensified terror against the Party … By following the tracks of the Zinoviev group, Stalin expects to reach “Trotskyism”.’54
As he observed from afar, Trotsky came to the conclusion that Stalin was leading the revolution and socialism up a blind alley. True, his accusations included ‘the return to the market’, ‘a shift towards a neo-NEP’, ‘the workers are paying for the mistakes in the countryside’, and so on. In other words, he never doubted that the main danger for socialism would come from the right. But he was correct about one thing: ‘… after the assault on the left, sooner or later will come the assault on the right … The chief danger for the USSR is Stalinism,’ or what Trotsky perceptively called ‘bureaucratic absolutism’,55 a term that probably better expresses the nature of the Soviet regime than ‘the command-administrative system’ which became current in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
As Trotsky rightly claimed, the use of force and coercion was integral to ‘bureaucratic absolutism’. In every issue of the Bulletin he published the facts of Stalin’s repression. More rarely he was able to include material provided by someone who had miraculously escaped, such as Anton Ciliga, a former member of the Yugoslav Politburo who had spent several years in the Gulag, and who recounted what he knew of the fate of many leading Bolsheviks and others: ‘The OGPU-NKVD can repeat endlessly, automatically and without trial, sentences of imprisonment and exile for anyone who has ever been sentenced.’56 Such testimony made a marked impression on Trotsky’s meagre readership. The journal was generally passed from hand to hand and some of its material was reprinted in left-wing papers. The longer the Bulletin continued to exist, the more hatred it generated in the dictator, who on a number of occasions irritably asked his intelligence chiefs ‘when they would end this slander of socialism?’57
As war approached, Stalin felt Trotsky’s jabs with growing sensitivity. In t
he spring of 1939 Trotsky published two articles in a single issue which drove Stalin into a frenzy. They were entitled ‘Hitler and Stalin’ and ‘Stalin Surrenders’. From Mexico, where he was now settled, Trotsky could observe the diplomatic game in which Stalin was engaged with Germany and the Western democracies. Each party wanted to guarantee its own security at the cost of the other. It was not yet clear how the game would end, but Trotsky declared that ‘a rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler is most likely’: they were two dictators who understood each other. Such an understanding, he believed, would be dangerous for everyone. ‘Over the last three years,’ he wrote, ‘Stalin has labelled every one of Lenin’s comrades-in-arms agents of Hitler. He has destroyed the flower of the command staff, shot, replaced or exiled around 30,000 officers [the real number was more than 43,000]—all on the same charge, namely that they were agents or allies of Hitler. Having destroyed the Party and decapitated the army, Stalin is now openly advancing his candidature as Hitler’s chief agent.’58
Analysing the international situation from within his reinforced stockade in Coyoacan, Trotsky often indulged in wishful thinking, or saw what he wanted to see, including a place for himself in the great game. In January 1940 he published a routine article on ‘The Dual Star: Hitler-Stalin’. Correctly defining the international situation, he noted that in the event of a war between Germany and the USSR, it was quite possible that both dictators would be swept away by a revolutionary war launched by their respective peoples. He quoted what the French ambassador in Moscow, R. Coulondre, had apparently said to Hitler on 25 August 1939: in case of war the real victor would be Trotsky. And he claimed, on the basis of a newspaper report, that ‘Under the cover of darkness, revolutionary elements in Berlin are putting up posters in the working-class districts saying “Down with Hitler and Stalin!” and “Long Live Trotsky!’” He added, ‘It’s lucky Stalin doesn’t have to black Moscow out at night, otherwise the streets of the Soviet capital would also be covered with equally meaningful posters.’59
At times, isolated as he was in his Mexican stronghold, Trotsky lost contact with reality. Still conditioned by the old dogmas, he believed that the world war might end in world revolution, and then the sixty-year-old revolutionary might get his last historical chance. Although he devoted most of his attention to his struggle with Stalin, Trotsky also persisted in his attempt to create an international Communist organization that could become an alternative to the one centred in Moscow. Thanks to his efforts, on the eve of the war Trotskyist groups were to be found in more than forty countries. They were, however, small in scale and quite unable to attract workers, not that this dampened Trotsky’s zeal in any way.
The October 1933 issue of the Bulletin was devoted to the need to create a Fourth International, and all the articles were by Trotsky himself. Shortly before this time, Lev Sedov, representing the left Soviet opposition, and delegates from the German Socialist Workers Party and the Independent Socialist Party of Holland, signed a declaration outlining the principles of the emerging Fourth International, the basic one being that the Third International was incapable of carrying out its historic role. Commenting on this document in ‘The Class Character of the Soviet State’, Trotsky drew a number of conclusions. He stressed that the Twelfth Party Congress had been ‘the last congress of the Bolshevik Party. The subsequent congresses have all been bureaucratic parades … No normal “constitutional” paths for the removal of the governing clique now remain. The only way to compel the bureaucracy to hand over power to the proletarian vanguard is by force.” Stalin would henceforth use this assertion on every possible occasion to justify his mass terror, by accusing Trotsky of trying to change the existing system in the USSR by forceful means.
Trotsky, however, remained true to himself. In demonstrating the timeliness of the Fourth International, he was simultaneously asserting that ‘only in the circumstances of the victorious development of world revolution is the root-and-branch reform of the Soviet state possible.’60 Now a new ingredient was added to the older idea of the inevitability of world revolution: that it was permissible to use force to get rid of ‘bureaucratic absolutism’ in the USSR, to create a new party in a state that would itself have been reformed fundamentally. It was the task of the Fourth International to accomplish all these aims.
Writing in 1933, Trotsky realized that the parties and groups that shared his views were not all ready to join the new International. He was seriously committed to the idea, but he could not undertake the work of organization openly, as he was being hunted by Stalin’s intelligence agents, as well as those of Comintern. Since there were many foreign Communist and labour parties which were prepared to help Stalin neutralize Trotsky, he had to observe extreme caution and secrecy. The founding congress of the Fourth International did not take place until September 1938, calling itself at Trotsky’s suggestion the World Party of Social Revolution. While Trotsky’s prognoses about Stalin and Stalinism were on the whole accurate, as far as the Fourth International was concerned, he obviously misjudged the position.
In October 1938 in Coyoacan, Trotsky recorded a speech on a gramophone record for a meeting of Trotskyists in New York, which he concluded by declaiming: ‘[In] the course of the next ten years the programme of the Fourth International will become the programme of millions, and these revolutionary millions will be able to take heaven and earth by storm!’ So firm were his convictions that his supporters began to believe his ideas had a future.
In his Bulletin Trotsky was merciless in exposing the torchbearers of the coming war, but he looked upon the danger from his revolutionary ivory tower. ‘It would be immeasurably better,’ he wrote, ‘if the proletarian revolution had prevented the war. But that did not happen and the chance of it happening is, frankly speaking, not great. The war is coming faster than new cadres of the proletarian revolution are being formed.’ He concluded: ‘Never has historical determinism taken on such fatal form as now: all the forces of old society, whether Fascism or democracy or social-patriotism or Stalinism, are equally afraid of the war and are equally heading for war.’ These were not the sober views of an intellectual innovator, but the feelings of a fanatical revolutionary. ‘Nothing will help them,’ he wrote. ‘They have provoked the war and they will be swept away by it. They have fully deserved it.’61 Thus, Trotsky. When analysing general questions of civilization and society, he was a prophet and dialectician; when the issue was world revolution, a metaphysician and utter fanatic.
Although his financial position was chronically straitened, Trotsky bore all the costs of publishing the Bulletin, as well as providing for his family and two or three secretaries who doubled as his guards, out of his royalties. These were just sufficient for printing not more than a thousand copies per issue, and the journal produced no income whatever. The correspondence with his son and with his publishers shows how carefully he had to watch the marks, dollars and francs. Lev wrote to him from Berlin: ‘650 copies of the History have been sent out, and 2400 of the Autobiography. This is a record. No other Russian book has had such a print-run abroad. On 10 August they’ll pay 500 marks for the History and the remaining 1,500 on publication … I’ve received another 30 marks, but that crook Fuchtman hasn’t sent any more … Petropolis [the publishers] will print the index but don’t want to pay … I think they ought to pay at least 150-200 marks and I’m going to press them to do so …’62
After the death of Lev in 1938, things became even harder for the journal. On the anniversary of his death Trotsky wrote: ‘In constant danger from the GPU agents who followed on his heels, he knew he would die and his main concern was to ensure the future of the Bulletin. Its future and who would replace him troubled Sedov more than anything.’63
It had proved extremely difficult to distribute the Bulletin in the USSR. Only a few odd issues found their way there after 1933, brought in under diplomatic cover or smuggled in through merchant navy channels. It was therefore unknown to the Communist Party with the exception of a few
NKVD officials and Stalin’s entourage. The NKVD did its best to hamper publication of the journal and even to influence its contents. Since Trotsky’s articles were sent to Lev in Paris, and thus came into Zborowski’s hands, it was decided in Moscow that an attempt should be made to alter and distort the sense of some of his writings, and even to include in the journal material written by the NKVD. The following is a coded telegram from Moscow to Paris, from ‘Oleg’ to ‘Peter’:
Further to our telegram No. 969 about slipping into the next issue of the Bulletin a few articles or paragraphs, it is essential that the following be borne in mind. There are two possibilities: first, to insert our articles under L.D.’s name, and second, to dilute all the articles with our paragraphs. Which choice shall we make? We think the second, but it is the more difficult one, as our insertions have to be done so well that the article should not lose its meaning, while clearly unmasking the face of Trotskyism … The first choice is easier, but it gives the publisher the trump card of being able to find us out during the typesetting. The articles cannot pass us by, they will come to us via ‘Mack’, but all this has to be done without blowing his cover, so it is essential that we recruit the printer.64
In fact, the Soviet secret service was unable to put the plan into effect, thanks to the vigilance of L. Estrin, who read the proofs for the Bulletin. Estrin, a female assistant of Lev’s who was identified in OGPU correspondence as ‘Neighbour’, was a relation of the Menshevik leader Fedor Dan, and had been working in the Mensheviks’ organization abroad for some time. Then she became closely acquainted with Lev, and began working for the Trotskyists. She met Dan on several occasions, and he tried in vain to alter her political views. Like Dan and the rest of the Menshevik leaders abroad, Estrin knew perfectly well that she was under surveillance by the OGPU-NKVD. The blanket watch kept on this group of Russian Social Democrats is noted in a special report to Moscow by the secret service in Paris.65 In another report from Paris of July 1939, agent ‘Ajax’ gave details of Dan’s relatives in the USSR: his brother M. Gurvich, his nephew L. Gurvich, his wife’s relatives the Tsederbaums (she was Martov’s sister) and Kranikhfelds. It was also noted that Dan received news of his family from Yekaterina Peshkova* when she travelled abroad.66
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