Trotsky

by Dmitri Volkogonov

  In order to gain an impression of how far public opinion had deteriorated, it is enough to read extracts of the Soviet press or some of the books of the period. For instance, in the memoirs of the labour hero Alexei Stakhanov—ghosted in fact on Moscow’s order by I. Gershberg—the author ‘recalled’:

  When the trials were going on in Moscow first of Zinoviev and Kamenev and then of Pyatakov and his gang, we immediately demanded they be shot … In our village even women who had never been interested in politics clenched their fists when they heard what was in the newspapers. Both old and young demanded the bandits be destroyed. When the court gave its sentence and said in our name that the Trotskyist spies should be shot, I wanted to see the newspaper that would announce they had been executed. When I heard on the radio that the sentences had been carried out, my spirits rose … If these vermin had fallen into our hands, any one of us would have torn them apart. But the old swine Trotsky is still alive. I think that his time will come, too, and we will deal with him in the proper way.189

  More than fifty years have elapsed since Trotsky’s death, yet his ideas, although they never seized the minds of millions, still live. They express fanatical rebelliousness, commitment to the revolutionary tradition and the hope for a global, social cataclysm, as the result of which a new world will arise. The obelisk on his grave marks not only the tragic fate of a human being, but also the simplicity of the idea that moved him. At the end Trotsky left no verse about his distant childhood in Yanovka, or the cobblestones of the Kremlin, or the vast Russian plain. It is not known whether he read the poems of Zinaida Gippius, who wrote in 1929, the year of Trotsky’s deportation, the lines:

  Lord, let me see!

  I pray in the small hours.

  Let me once more see my native Russia.190

  Trotsky suffered, but memories of his native land were swallowed in the global scale of his suffering. The thirst for revolution had long ago taken the place of sentimental yearnings, but there was nothing with which to slake his thirst. Where there should have been a longing to see his country once again, there was only a desire for revolution.

  EPILOGUE

  The Prisoner of an Idea

  All his life Trotsky had thought in terms of epochs, continents and revolutions. When he addressed crowds of thousands of workers, peasants and soldiers he created the impression that he was bringing the future closer with his words. He did not dissemble, his faith in what he said was genuine. Speaking on 24 October 1918 in the city park of Kamyshin, he said as he stood gesticulating on the former tsar’s Packard: ‘We shall create our kingdom of labour, and the capitalists and landowners can go where they like, to another planet or the next life … A new world revolutionary front is emerging, on one side of which stand the oppressors of all lands, and on the other the working class … This moment will sound the death-knell of world imperialism and then we shall achieve the kingdom of freedom and justice.’1 His audience felt that a reign of prosperity was at hand, and they applauded him zealously.

  Trotsky was convinced that history would justify all the sacrifices that would have to be made to achieve the kingdom of freedom. Sometimes in his fanaticism, however, his proposals were apocalyptic. A few weeks before the speech at Kamyshin, he told Party workers and Soviet employees at a meeting in the theatre in Kazan: ‘We value science, culture and art, and we want to make art and science and all the schools and universities accessible to the people. But if our class enemies were once again to show that all this exists only for them, then we shall say, death to theatre, science and to art.’ After loud approving noises from his audience, he continued: ‘We, Comrades, love the sun which illuminates us, but if the rich and the oppressors wanted to monopolize the sun, we would say, let the sun go out and let darkness reign, eternal gloom!’2

  It seemed that the speaker in his shiny leather outfit was a free man, who was capable of achieving the impossible. The intoxicating power of the Idea captivated not only Trotsky but millions of others. Some became accustomed to believing part of it. Others saw in the revolutionary idol a chance to change the world for the better, while yet others were simply caught up in the momentum of the revolutionary upheaval.

  Trotsky wrote a large number of books and articles, yet it is impossible to find in them any explanation of his fanatical faith in Marxism and the revolution. Berdyaev asks: ‘Why did Trotsky become a revolutionary, why did socialism become his faith, why did he devote all his life to social revolution?’3 These questions are nowhere answered satisfactorily in Trotsky’s writings, but it may be said that the faith he held, and which went beyond rational explanation, was close to fanaticism. All his strivings were aimed towards revolution, and while such dedication implied great mental strength, it also denoted a great weakness: strength because such people are capable of influencing human life, and weakness because they are prisoners of the Idea. They do not have the capacity to change or adapt to new circumstances. For such people this kind of Marxism is a revolutionary religion. Their values, however, are not the universal human values of the world’s great religions, but are embodied in the dictatorship of the proletariat, the class struggle and the unlimited predominance of a single party.

  Trotsky was the prisoner of the Communist idea. When he wrote on 27 February 1940 in his testament, ‘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,’ he was not mouthing a ritual formula. What were the consequences of this ‘imprisonment’? Why should blind, fanatical devotion to the Idea lead to defeat, and how was this expressed in Trotsky?

  First of all, he recognized only social revolution, and despised reformism. He never questioned the Leninist thesis that the transfer of power from one class to another was the fundamental sign of a revolution in every sense.4 The historic fallacy of this notion consists in speaking of the dominance of a class, not of the people, while in fact it is impossible to achieve justice by placing one class above others. We ourselves have witnessed that infinitely more can be achieved by means of reform. The revolutions that have taken place in Europe at the end of the twentieth century are all based on non-violent reform and have given rise to such terms as ‘the velvet revolution’. In the Bolshevik ideology such evolution was rejected at the outset, and Trotsky was one of the most consistent advocates of the ‘traditional’ violent solution of world problems. Shortly before his death he declared: ‘The only worthy way for mankind to develop is by the path of socialist revolution.’5 He was indeed a prisoner of the Idea, but he had chosen this path for himself.

  In the draft of his speech to the Ninth Party Congress, entitled ‘Routine Tasks of Economic Construction’, Trotsky wrote that what was needed was ‘regular, systematic, persistent and harsh struggle against labour desertion, in particular by publishing lists of penalties for desertion, by creating penal workers’ teams out of deserters, and finally imprisoning them in concentration camps’.6

  It is not too far fetched to suggest that such methods eventually became a normal means of ‘socialist construction’. In March 1947 the Minister of the Interior, S. Kruglov, reported on the camps to Beria: ‘In the second quarter there will be a need to build for a further 400,000 people. We shall have to allocate 50,000 to Dalstroy [the Far East], 60,000 to BAM [the Baikal-Amur Railway], 50,000 to Special Construction, 50,000 to logging camps, 40,000 to Vorkuta-Ukhta-Norilsk, and 100,000 to make up for losses [i.e. those who had died]. I request that the additional obligation to supply this labour force not be placed on the Ministry of the Interior at the present time.’7 Despite the astonishing scale of the repressions, there were still not enough slaves. Such was the logic of violence: from the militarization of labour to penal labour teams and thence the Gulag industry.

  Trotsky did not differ from the other leaders about the role of the Party in the socialist revolution. He firmly believed, with Lenin, in the dictatorship of one party, and in its monopoly on power, ideas and all decision-making, the very factors leading to the e
mergence of totalitarianism. Speaking on 7 December 1919 at the Seventh Congress of Soviets, he declared: ‘I must say that in the form of our commissars and leading Communists we have a new order of Samurai, who without caste privileges will know how to die and will teach others to die for the cause of the working class.’8 Within four years he would change his position somewhat, and would speak against the ‘bureaucratization of the Party organization’, and the ‘false internal Party line of the Central Committee’ and ‘secretarial omnipotence’,9 but he would never question the right of that single party to determine the fate of the vast population. He merely wanted to ‘democratize the organization of the working class’, without realizing that the monopoly would inevitably turn that organization into a weapon of totalitarianism. Trotsky strove to move ahead, but the totalitarian goals of the Party monopoly forced him to face the past.

  Twenty years before the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, Trotsky predicted the inevitable collapse of the Stalinist tower of lies. He himself did much to bring this about, although he was not without fault. Whether intentionally or not, Trotsky brought people to see that the chief idea to which he devoted his life was Utopian. The more he preached the inevitability of world revolution, the more ephemeral it seemed. In his own lifetime fewer and fewer people came to believe in the cleansing mystery of a world cataclysm. His nemesis in the USSR—Stalin—was showing what Bolshevik radicalism could lead to in one country, and it was not hard to imagine what would happen if the entire planet were consumed by the revolutionary fire.

  Trotsky was loved as a leader of the revolution, yet by the end of the 1920s his name had become a term of abuse. It took Stalin no more than five years to turn a hero into a pariah. Trotsky himself was partly responsible for this. His tragedy lay in the fact that in his tireless and passionate struggle with Stalin, he facilitated Stalin’s seizure of power in the Party. It was Trotsky’s own doing that allowed Stalin to surround him with a circle of schismatics, heretics and other ‘internal enemies’. Paradoxically, it was Trotsky’s furious fight against Stalin that helped Stalin to become a bloody dictator. The new Party leader labelled Trotsky’s statements as just another ‘deviation’, but Stalin himself took many of the left opposition’s ideas for his own use. In his draft notes ‘On the Building of Socialism in One Country’, Trotsky defined the possibility of broad social reform as ‘a social democratic deviation’. He pushed Stalin towards ‘revolutionary tempos’. ‘They regard us as pessimists and sceptics,’ he wrote, ‘because we regard the snail’s pace as inadequate.’10

  It may be argued that Trotsky inadvertently urged Stalin to adopt radical policies in the draft ‘Platform of the Bolshevik Leninists’ which he presented to the Fifteenth Party Congress of 1927. He declared that: ‘Stalin’s group has proved powerless to avert the growth of those forces which want to turn our country onto the capitalist path and which want to weaken the positions of the working class and poorest peasants against the growing strength of the kulak, the Nepman and the bureaucrat … The growing strength of the farmer class in the countryside must be opposed by a faster growth of the collectives … Rental relations are coming increasingly under the influence of the kulaks.’11

  In view of these and similar statements, we may assume that, had Trotsky come to power, he would have carried out this programme with energy. In practice, however, it was Stalin who conducted the savage struggle against ‘the growing strength of the Nepman and kulak’. While responsibility for the tremendous sufferings imposed on the Soviet people belongs squarely with the Communist Party under Stalin and his circle, the ideological origins of the policy of coercion and the forcing of social change should be laid at the door of the left opposition.

  After the murder of Trotsky, the NKVD at home and abroad soon lost its interest in Trotskyism. Without its leader, the Fourth International was no threat to anybody. This fact highlights the paradox that lay in the contrast between his massive personality and the puny ideological movement to which Trotsky gave birth. Sooner perhaps than by other agencies, this was recognized by the NKVD. On 1 July 1941, a week after Hitler’s armies had begun ploughing up Trotsky’s native land with their tank-tracks, state security officials Agoyants and Klykov drafted a memorandum ‘closing the agency’s case on Trotsky and Trotskyist publications abroad’. The final document stated that ‘all this material is no longer of any operational interest’.12

  Beria’s functionaries may have lost all interest in Trotsky once they had destroyed him, but he remains a major figure in the history of twentieth-century politics. He cannot be described in grey colours, for he combined the rebellious spirit of the Russian revolutionaries, their radicalism and dedication, with extreme Jacobinism and a readiness to serve the Idea fanatically. As Berdyaev perceptively observed:

  Trotsky is a very typical revolutionary, a revolutionary with great style, but he is not a typical Communist. He does not understand the main point of what I call the mystique of the collective … The collective and the general line of the Communist Party are analogous to a church congregation and anyone who wishes to remain orthodox must submit to the conscience and consciousness of the collective … Trotsky still attributes importance to the individual, he thinks individual opinion, individual criticism and individual initiative are still possible, he believes in the role of heroic revolutionary personalities and he despises mediocrity and lack of talent.13

  Trotsky’s individuality lay primarily in his obsession with the Idea. For him the Idea was the equivalent of a philosophical temple, in which everything created within it belonged to eternity. For him the greatest spiritual luxury consisted in the ability to think and reflect freely. We shall never know everything about this man, for the more unusual the personality, the more enigmatic it remains.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Central State Archives of the Soviet Army (TsGASA), f.33 987, op. 2, d.32, ll.279-80.

  2. Ibid., l.282.

  3. Ziv, G.A., Trotskii: Kharakteristika (Po lichnym vospominaniyam), New York, Narodopravstvo, 1921.

  4. TsGASA, f.4, op. 14, d.55, l.8.

  5. Marx-Lenin Central Party Archive (TsPA IML), f.17, op. 2, d.612, vyp.III, l.7.

  6. Kropotkin, P.A., Rechi buntovshchika, St Petersburg, 1906, p. 85.

  7. TsPA IML, f.325, op. 1, d.228, l.20.

  8. Byulleten’ oppozitsii, No.87, August 1941, p. 5.

  9. Trotskii, L., Moya zhizn’, Berlin, vol.2, 1930, p. 336.

  10. Byulleten’ oppozitsii, No.87, August 1941, p. 8.

  11. More than sixty years passed before the Soviet taboo was lifted. 1990-91 saw the publication in the Soviet Union of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, Political Silhouettes, Stalin, The Stalinist School of Falsification, My Life and Literature and the Revolution.

  12. TsPA IML, f.130, op. 1, d.3, l.24.

  13. TsPA IML, f.2, op. 1, d.22 947, l.6.

  Chapter 1

  1. TsGASA, f.33 987, op. 3, d.60, l.21.

  2. TsPA IML, f.325, op. 2, d.14, l.1

  3. Trotskii, Moya zhizn’, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 17.

  4. Ibid., p. 36.

  5. TsPA IML, f.325, op. 1, d.14, l.1.

  6. Ziv, Trotskii, op. cit., p. 12.

  7. Trotskii, Moya zhizn’, op. cit., vol.1, pp. 99-100.

  8. Ibid., p. 36

  9. Trotskii, L., Dnevniki i pis’ma, New Jersey, 1986, p. 154.

  10. Letter to V.I. Nevsky, 1921. TsPA IML, f.325, op. 1, d.17, l.1-2.

  11. The incident was described by I.M. Vasilevsky after the revolution in his Nikolai II, pp. 4-46.

  12. Ziv, Trotskii, op. cit., p. 18.

  13. TsPa IML, f.325, op. 1, d.14, ll.4-8.

  14. Trotskii, Dnevniki i pis’ma, op. cit., P-43

  15. TsPA IML, f.325, op. 1, d.1, l.1.

  16. Shura, Shurochka, Sasha and Sashenka are only some of the diminutives of the name Alexandra.

  17. TsPA IML, f-325, op. 1, d.1 ll.2-3.

  18. Trotsky, My Life, Scribner’s, New Y
ork, 1930, p. 124.

  19. Trotsky, L. (trans. Elena Zarudnaya), Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, Faber & Faber, London, 1959, pp. 61-2, 71.

  20. TsPA IML, f.325, op. 1, d.178, l.9.

  21. Ibid., d.18, ll.19-20.

  22. Sochineniya Gleba Uspenskogo, SPB., 1889, vol.II, pp. 139-40.

  23. TsPA IML, f.325, op. 1, d.2, l.1.

  24. Ibid., l.3.

  25. Ibid., l.8.

  26. Trotskii, Sochineniya, vol.8, Moscow, 1926, pp. 14-15.

  27. Trotsky, My Life, op. cit., p. 19.

  28. Berdyaev, N., Samopoznanie: opyt filosovskoy autobiografii, YMCA, Paris, 1949, p. 275.

  29. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS), vol.46, p. 277.

  30. Trotskii, N., Nashi politicheskie zadachi, Geneva, 1904. (The initial ‘N’ was commonly used at the time by those writing under aliases, e.g. N. Lenin.)