New campaign against Trotsky obstructs de-Stalinization
THE COLLAPSE of Stalinist falsifications of is that he was as totalitarian as Stalin. This history is continuing to accelerate in the approach has the benefit of appealing to conditions of glasnost. But at the same time social democrats and advocates of even bureaucrats and official intellectuals "convergence" between the Soviet system who support the reform are promoting a and Western capitalism. It also strikes a secondary growth of Stalin's poisonous chord with Soviet intellectuals in rebound excrescences in one area — the question of against Stalinism, who tend to reject the
Trotsky's role in combating the rise of the heritage of the Russian revolution as a whole.
bureaucratic dictatorship. However, it creates new obstacles to untangling the web of Stalinist ideology and
The rehabilitation of the right-wing opposition corresponds to the long-term orientation and interests of the ruling bureaucracy. Thus, it The problems are explained in the following has few problems with rehabilitating article published in the Italian Communist
Bukharin. But it is difficult to strike out the Party theoretical magazine, Rinascita on July condemnations of these victims of the 1930s purges without questioning the accusations Its appearance in an Italian CP publication is against the left oppositionists as well. notable, since the Italian Euro-communists
So, a new line against Trotsky is necessary. It came out openly for Bukharin long ago.
International Viewpoint #147 • September 19, 1988
USSR
H ISTORICAL DEBATE is devel-
Hoping at a surprising speed in the • Soviet Union. At the time of the seventieth anniversary of the October revolution, a little more than six months ago, you could get the impression that the debate was bogged down at a halfway point. Today, on the other hand, it is clear that this debate is leading to a reexamination of a very large body of histori-
In this debate, a wide range of political problems are coming out into the open, as well as a confrontation with the previously dominant ideological system, the mode of organizing the society and the Soviet political system. The acceleration of this debate reflects the rapid maturing of the reform policy and its attempts to achieve deepgoing changes.
In this process of reflection, of maturing, the problem of Trotsky and his place in Soviet and world history in the twentieth century is coming up again and again. There is nothing surprising about this. It is not a secondary question. Trotsky has left his imprint on the world's consciousness by the exceptional role that he played, alongside Lenin, during the October revolution and in founding and leading the Communist International in the early years.
Later Trotsky drew attention to himself by the fight that he waged against the So24 viet party leadership in the post-Leninist ' period. With the passing of time, this battle false history. 9 this year. became a struggle against Stalin and his policy. The essential themes of this confrontation centered on the party regime and the functioning of the state, the usurpation of power by the Stalinist bureaucracy and Stalin himself, the repression, the terror.
A socialist writer of great stature
Whatever one might think about this, if we analyze the ideas of Trotsky today it is a fact that during the 1930s he was the only leader of the Leninist period who drew the full implications of Stalin's repressive policy and political crimes. Moreover, it cannot be forgotten that Trotsky has gone down in the history of our century as a socialist writer of great stature. His works have been published and widely circulated in all the main languages, and have had an influence not only — as many Soviet authors wrongly think — on the ideas of "extremist Trotskyist groups," but also on a broad section of socialist thought, and also on liberal and conservative conceptions, especially with regard to the processes of internal evolution in the Soviet Union.
The question of Trotsky, however, cannot be limited to an evaluation of his role in history. Over long decades, the fight against Trotsky and "Trotskyism" served an an instrument for throttling the slightest independent thought in the USSR and the
Soviet Communist Party. On the basis of the accusations against Trotsky and "Trotskyism," tens and even hundreds of thousands of people were excluded from public and political life, most of them being imprisoned and then liquidated.
Soviet political and police bodies intervened brutally in the life of other Communist parties. They accused, persecuted, and often physically eliminated cadres of the the non-Russian Communist parties. The accusations against Trotsky and "Trotskyism" provided the basic elements for the "anti-Trotskyist" trials of the 1930s. They became one of the important obstacles to uniting the anti-fascist forces. They played an unfortunate role during the Spanish civil war. After the Second World War, these accusations became the pretext for the political repression and frame-up trials in the so-called people's democracies.
Of course, all this is not recalled in order to minimize the contrasts in Trotsky's historical role or cover up the complexity of his political and literary work. But a real discussion of Trotsky will be possible only when those involved in it are aware of the scope and seriousness of this theme. The problem of Trotsky is by no means one that concerns only Russian history. And it cannot be resolved if its decisive place in the Stalinist ideological system is not identified.
It is no secret that the present level of understanding of this problem in the USSR
September 19, 1988 • #147 International Viewpoint does not correspond to the basics pointed out above. As such, that should not be the problem. What is worrying is something else. The body of questions relating to Trotsky is still a restricted area in which research is rarely permitted and has remained very inadequate, although it is necessary to deal with other acute ideological and historical themes (such as some rehabilitations). The consequence is that this restricted area becomes a reserve in which attitudes and the methods used are rooted in the Stalinist past.
The first thing to recognize is the fact that legal rehabilitation of Trotsky is not an easy matter in the USSR. Few authors have come out for this, and most of them have done so only with great timidity and often by only the most veiled allusions. Is this because Trotsky was the principal figure in all the "anti-Trotskyist" trials of the 1930s, whose frame-up character is no longer doubted, even in the USSR?
The sentences handed down in the 1936 and 1937 trials called for the arrest of Trotsky and his son, Leon Sedov, and for them to be brought before a military tribunal. In these verdicts, Trotsky is described as "an enemy of the people," a "saboteur," a"spy," an "ally of the fascists," as a person guilty of violating the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and so on. His assassination in 1940, and that of Leon Sedov three years earlier, were justified by the camouflage of a "sentence of a working-class tribunal."
It flows from this that the question of Trotsky's legal rehabilitation cannot be considered a secondary question. The lack of a solution to such a problem in the Soviet Union generates a pecumakes all sorts of inventhis atmosphere, moreowho can by no means be
If it is necessary to pay attention to this anomaly in Soviet thinking, above all because recently has became a source of dangerous tendencies being expressed in the Soviet press. There have been attempts to equate Trotsky with Stalin, and in fact, to blame him for Stalin's policies and actions. This tendency has taken on such dimensions that it is arousing objections and protests in the USSR itself.
Let us look at some characteristic examples of this phenomenon. In issue 12 of Ogonyok, a valuable scholar, who has made an important contribution to the evolution of the new way of thinking in the USSR, stated, "I could never stand Trotsky. In my opinion, he was yesterday's Stalin, and Stalin is today's Trotsky." In Pravda on April 15, 1988, in an interview with an important Soviet writer, we can read among other things that "endless taxes, loans, the liquidation of the cooperatives, the confiscation of their tools and finally the repression, executions, sentences, exile — all of that was Trotskyism for millions of peasant families."
Conscious and unconscious distortions
In issue 4, 1988, of the political-literary magazine Oktyabr, another scholar, a professor and doctor of philosophy, uses an unpublished document by Maxim Gorky, whose date is not given nor its origins explained. It is supposed to say, "Trotsky is the man most alien to the Russian people and to Russian history."
Another magazine (Nash Sovremenik 3, 1988) published an article containing the same idea. "Men like Martov, Trotsky, and Bogdanov were defined by Lenin with an ironic zest as 'Europeans.' He systematically stressed their remoteness from Russia and the real interests of the Russian proletariat....It is hard to imagine what the situation of the European nations would have been like if power had fallen into the hands of Trotsky, who coveted it his entire life and tried to obtain it by every means."
It is difficult to list all the conscious or unconscious distortions contained in these articles and quotations about Trotsky. Just listing them, re-establishing the truth, would require a great many pages. But the attacks on Trotsky - leaving aside the outbursts of nationalism and anti-Semitism -have a precise foundation. For the majority
USSR of the writers cited, Trotsky is the historical representative of the left wing of Bolshevism. But does this mean that he was responsible for what Stalin did? Does this mean that in his activity Trotsky was motivated by unavowed aims?
Most of these Soviet authors who blame Trotsky for Stalin unquestionably want to maintain that Stalin did nothing other than put into practice what was already contained in Trotsky's ideas and conceptions. Naturally, evidence for such a thesis is thin. The authors in question generally refer to the period of "war communism" (1918-21) in which Trotsky was one of the main advocates of militarizing the economy. But this was a period of civil war and breakdown of the economy. The absolute majority of the Bolshevik leaders at the time, including Lenin, shared Trotsky's views.
Moreover, the statements about Stalin's "Trotskyism" have roots in the tradition of the Bolshevik party itself. In the political battles at the end of the 1920s, the representatives of what was then the "right" of the party - Bukharin, Rykov, Tomski and others — accused Stalin of adopting "Trotskyist" viewpoints. statements by some representatives of the "left" that discovered a so-called left turn by Stalin in order to justify taking their distance from the Left Opposition. But can arguments of this sort be recognized as valid evidence today?
Recently, in the pages of Kommunist the Soviet CP theoretical magazine], another author referred to Trotsky's Open Letter to the Members of the CP(B) of the Union (March 23,1930) in order to support his argument about the similarity of Stalin and Trotsky's positions. But what does this document, which is clearly left, say? It says that it is necessary to put an end to adventurism, to put an end to "total" collectivization, and to replace it by a policy of prudently accepting peasants into the cooperatives on the basis of their free choice; that it is necessary to form kolkhozy (state-supported cooperatives) in conformity with the creation of the material resources for their functioning; that it is necessary to break off the policy of expropriation and forcible transfer of the well-off peasants and to return to the policy of soaking the Kulaks, which would remain the only correct policy for years; that it is necessary to stop the policy of forced-march industrialization; that it is necessary to solve the problem of rates of development on the basis of a fundamental concern for improving the living conditions of the working masses; that it is necessary to improve products and the fight against inflation. All of this involved revising una-
gram for Soviet workers to fight those bureaucrats and managers who see perestrolka as a chance to get rich, as well as the forces of capitalist restoration that could be unleashed. Nevertheless, Yakovlev called "Trotskyism" a "bour-
International Viewpoint #147 • September 19, 1988
USSR chievable plans, giving up the idea of a close, autarkic economic system and orienting to cooperation within the framework of the world market. Underplaying the Trotsky/
Stalin confrontation
So, what should be said about this question? Trotsky's critique of Stalin, at least as regards his general direction, is not very different from the criticism made at the end of the 1920s by the representatives of the "right" wing of the Bolshevik party. Its drift does not differ much from what the general secretary of the CPSU (Gorbachev) said in this regard on the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution.
What impelled these Soviet authors to attack Trotsky so harshly, without first havonomic questions but also on what attitude to take toward many phenomena marking the life of the party and the state. They expressed different orientations on this subject. One line called for intransigent confrontation with Stalin, for breaking with him. That was Trotsky's. Another tended toward adapting to the given situation and collaborating with Stalin. That was Bukharin's.
In my opinion, the attacks against Trotsky reflect a desire to avoid thinking about this second aspect of the confrontation between Bukharin and Trotsky. The best evidence of this lies in the increasingly numerous attempts that are being made in USSR to underplay the Trotsky/Stalin confrontation and to present it systematically as an unprincipled fight for power.
There are no simple answers to the problems cited here, and none will be found in the future. But these problems are taking on an extraordinary importance in Soviet intellectual life.
The body of questions related to the assessment of Trotsky and "Trotskyism" are the area in which the conceptual and methodological continuity of the Stalin epoch are most clearly manifested. This is also the area where this heritage is beginning to be transferred into new rewritings of history, especially in refashioning a new aggressive Russian nationalism, of which the Stalinist legacy is an integral part. In this lies a great threat for the future, a threat that cannot be underestimated. *