The Prophet and his Prophecies
The Bible says, ‘If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, and the word comes not to pass and is not fulfilled, then it is not the Lord who spoke the word, but the prophet in his audacity.’ Trotsky spoke in the name of the revolution, and for his ‘audacity’ he could only count on Marxist indulgence. If in the 1905 revolution he had thought and acted within the Russian national framework, then in the months following the October victory of 1917 he called on the proletariat of Europe ‘to close ranks … under the banner of peace and social revolution!’4 After the creation of Comintern in 1919, he never tired of telling himself—or the next congress or the whole world—that this was ‘the beginning of the triumph of the proletariat’. In an article of 1919 entitled ‘Thoughts on the Course of the Proletarian Revolution (en route)’, he wrote:
History has always taken the path of least resistance. The revolutionary epoch burst in through the door that was the least barricaded … If today the centre of the Third International is Moscow, then, we are profoundly convinced, tomorrow the centre could move west to Berlin, Paris or London … An international congress in Berlin or Paris would signify the complete triumph of the proletarian revolution in Europe and, therefore, in the whole world.5
Trotsky was deeply convinced that what he said and wrote was right. His speeches were so passionate that they were believed not only by workers and students, but also by the revolutionaries who came to hear him. They believed because they passionately wanted Trotsky’s prophecies to come true. He seemed to be able to see further and predict more surely than others. He spoke of the world revolution as inevitable, irreversible, already decided. And he did so even when it seemed obvious that the wave of revolution had subsided in Europe.
In June 1923 an institute named after Karl Liebknecht, the German revolutionary murdered in 1919, was opened in Moscow, and Trotsky was invited to give the inaugural address. As always he was greeted with an ovation. Also as always, his theme was optimistically revolutionary:
The German working class moves on asphalt, but its hands and feet are bound in class slavery. We stride over ruts, ditches, potholes and puddles, but our feet are free. That, Comrades, is what distinguishes us from the European proletariat … The world that surrounds us is more powerful than we are, and the bourgeoisie will not surrender its positions without fierce fighting. The battles will be the more terrible as the Communist Party becomes stronger, and it is getting stronger … The approach of the world Communist revolution means we will have to go through more big battles.6
The revolution had ebbed, yet Trotsky could speak of the approaching world revolution, and warn that class war would become more intense as the Communist Party became stronger, an idea in many respects foreshadowing an argument advanced by Stalin in the 1930s. Trotsky’s prediction was unambiguous: world revolution was inevitable and it was imminent. What grounds had he for such certainty? First, like all orthodox Russian revolutionaries, he believed in Marxism. While everything else could be subjected to doubt and analysis, the writings of the great German thinkers Marx and Engels were sacrosanct. It was profoundly paradoxical that a man with so powerful an intellect as Trotsky could believe so fanatically in the Utopian idea. Lenin had been equally convinced. In 1919, closing the First Congress of Comintern, he had proclaimed: ‘The victory of the proletarian revolution throughout the world is guaranteed. The founding of the International Soviet Republic is approaching.’7 This confidence, like that of Trotsky, was founded on the experience of October 1917, when power had been seized with extraordinary ease. If it could happen in Russia, why not everywhere else in the world? This view was reinforced by the apparent rise of the revolutionary movement on different continents. Communist Parties were coming into being. There was revolution in Hungary, Germany and China. The optimism of the Leninist International captivated millions, and nourished Trotsky’s faith in the possibility of the impossible. He thought that, alongside Comintern’s active ideological work, concrete organizational steps should be taken to give a revolutionary push to the world community. He proposed that a cavalry corps be sent to India to start a revolution, that the White Poles be smashed and that the revolutionary gates to Europe be opened. These ideas seemed to him realistic.
The Bolsheviks had wanted to act in the west, the south and the east. At the end of the First Congress of Comintern, Lenin wrote to the Bolshevik Yelava in Turkestan of the urgent need for an independent revolutionary base to be established there: ‘Money is no object, we’ll send sufficient gold and foreign currency … The affair must be carried out in total secrecy (as we used to work under the tsar). Greetings, Lenin.’8 And the deed was done. Karakhan, of the Foreign Commissariat, even calculated the exact cost of financing each agitator in northern China and Korea at 10,000 gold roubles.9 There were not enough weapons to defend Soviet Russia and also give help to the world proletariat, and in October 1921 Trotsky proposed an additional allocation of 10 million gold roubles to purchase weapons in America. Lenin approved the proposal.10
It is amazing that Trotsky managed to keep alive his prophecy of world-wide Communist revolution for so many years. In May 1938, shortly before the founding congress of the Fourth International, he drafted an extensive programme of activities which he submitted for discussion by the International secretariat and the national sections. Eloquently entitled ‘The Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International’, the programme asserted that ‘the Fourth International’s strategic task is not to reform capitalism, but to overthrow it.’11 As always, he accused the social democrats of aiding and abetting the capitalists, denied the trade unions a revolutionary role and called for the formation of parties of the Fourth International and the arming of the proletariat. All these measures were, he believed, the prerequisites of world revolution: ‘Any talk about the historical conditions not having “ripened” for socialism is the result of ignorance and conscious deception. The objective prerequisites of proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”, they have already begun to rot. Without socialist revolution, and at the earliest historical period at that, the whole of human culture is threatened by a catastrophe.’12 If the vanguard were willing, he claimed, the masses were ready for revolution.
Soon after the founding of the Fourth International, on 18 October 1938, Trotsky sent greetings to the American Trotskyist party, predicting that the urge for world revolution represented by the new organization would become the programme for millions over the next ten years, and that they ‘will be able to take heaven and earth by storm’.13 Like Lenin, he often set a deadline for the arrival of the radiant future. And, also like Lenin, he was often seriously wrong. Speaking at an All-Union Librarians’ Congress in 1924, he declared that, ‘Before you know it, in ten, fifteen or twenty years the French and English proletariat will have overtaken us in socialist construction, because of their greater cultural development. Of course, we shall not be offended. Go ahead, overtake us, we have been waiting long enough.’14 His words were greeted by laughter and applause. But fifteen years later he was still talking of the same time-frame.
The Second World war had begun, mankind was being rocked by the roar of guns and the voice of reason was drowned by the grinding of tank-tracks. Trotsky could see the only way out in revolution. On 27 February 1940 he wrote his will, in which he declared: ‘My faith in the Communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.’15 The country where Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks had made their revolution, leaving a trail of victims in their wake, was moving towards the spectral goal of Communism, a seventy-year experiment that failed by almost any reckoning. If, as Marx said, the ‘basic principle’ of communism was ‘the full and free development of every individual’,16 then the country where this social experiment took place has provided a picture of spiritual and physical outrage against the individual as monstrous as history has seen or, one would hope, is ever likely to see.
A
lthough the great Soviet prophet and his prophecies have been repudiated in theory, logic and reality, it does not follow that Communism cannot exist as a variant of Utopian theory. The search for a system in which the people exercise real power and where humanism and justice prevail does not have to end because it failed universally in its twentieth-century Communist guise. The Communist Utopia, in which Trotsky—and millions of other Soviet citizens—believed, could not be accomplished, partly because the methods applied by the Bolsheviks were simply criminal, but also because the concept of liberty, as a primary social, economic and spiritual value, was absent from the core of the teaching. The prognoses of the ‘audacious prophet’ were doomed when the Bolsheviks adopted the dictatorship of the proletariat as a fundamental principle—a principle in which Trotsky believed to his dying day.
On the other hand, Trotsky’s prognostications about the future of the Soviet Union were rather accurate, while those he made about Stalin were extraordinarily so. His boldest predictions occur in his book What is the USSR and Where is it Going?, reworked as The Revolution Betrayed. In it he wrote: ‘The trampling of Soviet democracy by the omnipotent bureaucracy, and the crushing of bourgeois democracy by Fascism, derive from the same cause: the world proletariat’s delay in dealing with the historic task set before it. Stalinism and Fascism, despite the profound difference of their social bases, are symmetrical phenomena. In many ways they are murderously similar.’17 The present regime in the USSR, he repeatedly claimed, had no future: ‘Will the bureaucrats consume the workers’ state, or will the working class overcome the bureaucrats? The fate of the USSR depends on the outcome of this question.’18 He argued that a political, as distinct from a social, revolution was inevitable and that it would alter the form of government by getting rid of the Party and the state bureaucracy. ‘The right of criticism and genuinely free elections must be restored,’ he wrote. There must be ‘freedom for Soviet parties’, and ‘the expensive toys’, by which he meant lavish palaces for Party purposes, must be curtailed ‘in favour of workers’ housing’, while ‘ranks should immediately be abolished and trinket medals be thrown into the crucible. Young people should have the chance to breathe freely, to criticize, to make mistakes and become adults. Science and art will be unshackled. Finally, foreign policy must return to the traditions of revolutionary internationalism.’19
After several more decades, to be sure, ‘bureaucratic absolutism’ was eliminated in the Soviet Union, the population was given the right to vote freely, and freedom of criticism was embodied in the glasnost of perestroika. Trotsky had seen that the society constructed by Stalin and his henchmen would end in a blind alley. ‘The chief danger for the USSR,’ he wrote in 1935, ‘lies in Stalinism.’20 Two years later, in an article entitled ‘It is Time to go Over to the Attack Against Stalinism’, he declared: ‘We confidently challenge the Stalinist gang before all of mankind … Some of us might yet fall in this struggle. But its outcome is ordained. Stalinism will be crushed, smashed and buried in dishonour forever.’21
Trotsky’s predictions about Stalin and Stalinism alone have earned him a place in history, even if he chose never to recall his own role in laying the foundations of totalitarianism, a role second only to that of Lenin. Despite this, when it appeared that the monolithic empire was unshakeable and the position of its leader impregnable, Trotsky continued to alert world opinion to the dangers of Stalin’s dictatorship and to predict his inevitable fall. Undoubtedly, personal hostility, even hatred, played a part, but the main motivation was intellectual and ideological: the analysis of Soviet conditions, the USSR’s international position and the profound problems associated with the degeneration of the Party and state. At times by rational means, at times through intuition, Trotsky formulated the notion of ‘bureaucratic absolutism’ as a temporary coercive means of strengthening the system, and he concluded that the system could not long survive the grip of a regime that was girded for war and held in place by punitive organs. Yet any loosening of that grip would inevitably lead society, the population and the Party to the realization that freedom, democracy and respect for pluralism of thought—all long lost in the USSR—were eternal values. As early as 1926, Trotsky was speaking of Stalinism as doomed.
On the eve of the war, Trotsky closely observed the political manoeuvres of the powers. He had predicted the Second World War in the early 1930s, and in an article from the late summer of 1939, entitled ‘Stalin—Hitler’s Quartermaster’, he wrote:
… the author of these lines has the right to refer to the continuous series of his statements in the world’s press, beginning in 1933, to die effect that the basic task of Stalin’s foreign policy was to reach agreement with Hitler … The general causes of the war lie in the irreconcilable differences within world imperialism. The immediate trigger for the opening of military action, however, was the signing of the Soviet-German Pact … Stalin is afraid of Hider. And not for nothing. The [Red] Army has been decapitated. This is no idle phrase, it is a tragic fact. Voroshilov is a fiction. His authority was artificially created by totalitarian agitation. At his dizzy height, he has remained what he always was, a limited provincial with no vision, military capability, nor even the capabilities of an administrator.
The Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, he wrote further, ‘secures for Hitler the opportunity to exploit Soviet raw materials’. Thus, he declared, ‘Hitler conducts his military operations, and Stalin acts as his quartermaster.’ He further asserted that ‘Germany is bound to open an offensive against the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1941.’ It was extremely likely, he wrote, that two years after the occupation of Poland ‘Germany will attack the Soviet Union. In exchange for Poland, Hitler has given Moscow freedom of action in the Baltic [states]. However great these “advantages” may be, they are merely temporary, and their sole guarantee is Ribbentrop’s signature on a scrap of paper.’22
Trotsky may have been a Utopian dreamer where world revolution was concerned, but his analysis of the world situation, and especially of the forthcoming war, was almost faultless. In a series of articles written on the eve of the war, notably in ‘The Dual Star: Hitler-Stalin’ of December 1939 but published posthumously, he correctly analyzed the manoeuvres along the perimeter of the great triangle of the USSR, Germany and the Western democracies. Each side was trying to guarantee its own security at the expense of the others. Cynical deals, embellished by declarations, deceit, the carving up of ‘spheres of interest’, secrecy and the concealing of ultimate goals, all this and more characterize the diplomatic practice of those years. Trotsky’s analysis has much in common with that of present-day historians and political scientists, but he preceded them by decades.
Trotsky’s life following the revolution had been closely associated with the army, and it was therefore not surprising that he would frequently revert to the military theme in his articles. In What is the USSR and Where is it Going? he included a chapter on the Red Army and its doctrine, singling out Tukhachevsky for special mention several times. He remembered that in 1921 Tukhachevsky had suggested that Comintern create an ‘International General Staff’ under its Executive Committee (ECCI). Tukhachevsky had subsequently published his letter to Comintern in a collection of articles called The War of the Classes. Trotsky described Tukhachevsky as ‘talented, but inclined to be impetuous, like most military leaders’.23 When he wrote this article, Trotsky was not aware that virtually at that moment the youngest Marshal of the Soviet Union, aged forty-three, was under surveillance and suspected of harbouring secret intentions, although what they might be the security organs had not yet decided. Certain ‘signals’ had been received. When in early 1936 Tukhachevsky had visited London and Paris on official business, the chief of the 1st Section of Red Army Intelligence, Corps Commissar Steinbruk, had reported regularly to Voroshilov on what was being written in the bourgeois press about Tukhachevsky.
On the whole, the Paris newspapers were well disposed towards the handsome young Marshal, who impressed everyone wit
h his flexible and original mind and courtly manner. Significantly, Voroshilov’s red pencil marked what Tukhachevsky had said about the French officers he had met when he was in German captivity during the First World War: ‘I will never forget our friendship. We have met again after twenty years, just like [the Three Musketeers] …’ He then added: ‘You are coming to Moscow … Now we are not parting for twenty years: now we’re going to see each other much more often.’24 With a thick red line Voroshilov marked a passage in another report: ‘Marshal Tukhachevsky, a former ensign in the Imperial Guards, is of course the most brilliant military man in the USSR … At the age of twenty-six he was commander-in-chief of the Red Army that marched on Warsaw.’25 Voroshilov did not enjoy reading such glowing praise of his deputy, and then at the end of 1936 he became aware of Trotsky’s flattering remarks about the Red Army’s most brilliant officer.
Trotsky would never know the details of the hurried trial of the senior officers Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich, Kork, Eideman, Feldman, Primakov and Putna that took place on 11 June 1937, but he was right to assert that the Red Army had been decapitated and rendered unprepared for war with Hitler. It is worth quoting Marshal Budenny’s report of the trial to Voroshilov. Budenny served as one of the judges and described his ‘impressions of the recent trial of the counter-revolutionary Fascist organization’. Among other things, he wrote that ‘the conspirators were oriented towards Trotsky and his bloc’, that ‘Putna, a patent spy, was a convinced Trotskyist of the modern type, acting under the banner of Fascism’. Putna had confessed, Budenny reported, that after the civil war he ‘had become a firm supporter of Trotsky’, and ‘believed that Trotsky spoke the truth.’ Primakov ‘was given a more serious task by Trotsky, namely to raise an armed uprising in Leningrad … In connection with this special task from Trotsky, Primakov won over the 25th Cavalry Division commanded by … Zybin. In his words, Zybin was supposed to meet Trotsky on the frontier once the insurgents had captured Leningrad. They had prepared one rifle division and an armoured corps for the purpose … From the start of the trial, when the charges were being read out and during the questioning of all the other defendants, Tukhachevsky shook his head, as if to say all this is false, none of it corresponds to reality.’26 The twenty-page report is virtually all in this vein, and is full of coarse abuse of Budenny’s former comrades, especially Tukhachevsky.
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