Glasnost changes Trotsky's image
- from "mad dog" to tragic "demon"!
INTRODUCTION
International Viewpoint #148 • October 3, 1988
USSR PUBLISHING excerpts in its
September 9 issue from
General D. Volkogonov's book concerning the relations between Trotsky and Stalin, Pravda attracted the attention of international public opinion, and not without reason. The Western press emphasized the importance of the event with front-page headlines. LIVIO MAITAN
T WAS SIGNIFICANT that Volkogonov's article and the introduction by
Pravda's editors threw out the most monstrous accusations directed against Trotsky in the Stalin era and recognized what no one has ever doubted, that Stalin ordered Trotsky's assassination, as he was previously responsible for the slaughter of a good part of the exiled leader's family.
We cannot know whether Volkogonov based himself on some factual elements or worked only from imagination when he writes that it was after reading a translation of The revolution betrayed made exclusively for him that Stalin reached the conclusion that it was necessary to finish Trotsky off and liquidate all potential oppositionists.
But behind this literary image lies an elementary historical truth. Whether or not he read The revolution betrayed, Stalin understood very clearly what many "historians" still refuse to comprehend - that Trotsky represented the only real alternative to the options imposed on the Soviet Union by the bureaucratic caste. Volkogonov, moreover, recognizes explicitly that Trotsky "did not break, as many others did, before Stalin's dictatorship."
Factual errors and distortions
Nonetheless, simply reading the text indicates unmistakably that Pravda's operation was not exactly designed to reevaluate Leon Trotsky's role, as may have been suggested in some articles in the bourgeois press. On the contrary, it presents an essentially negative view of him, even if in the age of glasnost the arguments of the Stalin-era manuals can no longer be used.
There is no need to point out the many factual errors and distortions in Volkogo20 nov's text. (He even gets some dates wrong.) The author did not go to much trouble to acquaint himself even superficially with the writings of Trotsky to which he refers. For their part, Pravda's editors found nothing better to do than to replay, in a style not very far removed from that of the 1920s, the old game of exploiting the polemics between Trotsky and Lenin in the pre-revolutionary period. In addition, they made quite unscrupulous use of some passages from Lenin's testament.
In reality, the object of this exercise was to demonstrate to readers that Trotsky was no better than Stalin, and that in the last analysis Stalin only put into practice Trotsky's conceptions, especially as regards the collectivization of agriculture. Even the conception of socialist democracy is supposed to have been advanced by Trotsky only hypocritically, for tactical reasons. The article claims that in reality "he was much closer to Bonapartism, to caesarism, to military dictatorship than to the idea of genuine people's power.
Polemics against Trotsky have flourished
Worse still, this general, posing as a historian, wants to have people think that Trotsky's fight was inspired fundamentally by personal ambition. Even a work like The history of the Russian revolution evokes no comment from him other than a denunciation of the author's "ego-
There is no point in going any further into this. The level of Volkogonov's "artistry" is evident from the text we are publishing here. What needs to be stressed is that polemics of this sort against Trotsky - which are in fact by no means new, others having resorted to this kind of thing in the past both inside and outside the workers' movement - have flourished in the USSR in recent months, even before this piece appeared in Pravda.
For example, a writer in issue 12 of Ogonyok equated Stalin and Trotsky, and Nash Sovremennik (issue 3, 1988) did not hesitate to write, "It is hard to imagine what would have become of the European nations if the power that Trotsky desired all his life and which he tried by every means to obtain had finally fallen into his
Pravda itself published the following statement by a writer on April 15: "Endless taxes, compulsory loans, dissolution of the cooperatives, confiscation of their property and finally repression, executions, prison sentences, deportation — all this came to mean Trotskyism for millions of peasant families."
All Trotsky's works must be published
The answer to operations of this type is clear. First of all, Soviet intellectuals and workers have to be able to make their judgments on the basis of knowledge. They have to be able to verify for themselves what Trotsky wrote and what his projects were. It seems that Trotsky's works will once again be accessible in the libraries. But I imagine that very few copies are available, and probably mainly of works published before his exile.
It is necessary for the purposes of the present debate to demand that all Trotsky's works be published, starting with the most important ones, and that they be made available in large popular editions. On this basis, the discussion that has begun can and must continue in far more serious terms than those employed in this sketch by Volkogonov and Pravda's introduction.
It goes without saying that this discussion will have to take into consideration the manifold experiences of the bureaucratized transitional society after Trotsky's death. In this area also, a real, first-hand knowledge of the reflections and programmatic formulations of the Fourth International is a sine qua non for the discussion to be more than an updated version of the old black propaganda.
For our part, we are ready to participate in such a debate without any reservations anywhere where it can take place without censorship or discrimination. * 1. On the current practice in the Soviet press of trying to equate Trotsky with Stalin, see the article by Michal Reiman published in the Italian CP's journal Rinascita and reprinted in /V 147, September 19, 1988.
THE MANY-COLORED, ever unfinished carpet of history is woven by people. The "resultant" of the historical process is determined by the struggle of characters, of passions, of intellects. In fact, life advances through conflicts.
On the historical scene in the October days, along with V...
Lenin there were various people, with unusual fates, views and capacities. One of the figures of that time was Lev
Trotsky (Leyba Davidovich Bronstein), a former Menshevik. It is well known that already in 1911 Lenin had called him a
"Judas." Only in the summer of 1917 did Trotsky join the
Bolsheviks. Not unendowed with journalistic, oratorial and organizational capacities, Trotsky played a prominent role in the October armed insurrection and later in the years of the civil war, when he was people's commissar for military affairs and the chair of the Revolutionary Military Council.
in his political testament, "Letter to the Congress," Lenin called Trotsky and Stalin "the outstanding leaders of the
;," and directed the attention of party members to their serious negative personal characteristics. Their relations with each other, as Lenin foresaw, constituted a danger for the party. The struggle between them came to make up one of the dramatic pages of our history.
After Lenin's death, Trotsky showed outsized pretensions to the leadership of the party. Lenin's assessment of him as a self-satisfied, erratic political faker was confirmed. In exile,
Trotsky slid into anti-Soviet, anti-Marxist positions.
We are offering our readers a selection from the book Triumf i Tragediia by General D. Volkogonov, in which he gives an account of the relations between Stalin and Trotsky. [All
October 3, 1988 present CC, emphases are from the original.] DOCUMENT
O N AUGUST 21, 1940, J.V. Stal-
in came to work as usual at around midday. He greeted Poskrebyshev, went into his office, sat down in his chair and routinely picked up papers. His aide did not give his usual report about current business, telephone calls and urgent meetings, but with a smirk silently handed him a telegram: "Trotsky mortally wounded; maybe killed. Details later."
It was a long-awaited but nonetheless unexpected report. The dual between two "outstanding leaders" of the Russian revolution that had lasted for nearly 20 years was over.
The report from the other side of the ocean was confirmed. On August 24, Pravda returned again to Trotsky, to close his case. In an editorial entitled "Death of an international spy," it said, "A man has gone to the grave, whose name is pronounced with contempt and abomination by working people throughout the world, a man who for many years has fought against the cause of the working class....Trotsky's closest associates have acknowledged that they, along with their chief, already in 1921 were agents of foreign intelligence services, were international spies. They, led by Trotsky, eagerly served the intelligence services and general staffs of England, France, Germany, Japan.... He was finished off by the very same terrorists whom he surreptitiously instructed in murder, betrayal and evil deeds against the working class, against the land of the Soviets. Trotsky, the organizer of the foul murders of Kirov, Kuibyshev and M. Gorky, fell victim to his own intrigues, betrayals, acts of treachery...crimes"
Stalin carefully read the article. He frowned. It was all reduced to "spying." Had he been fighting all these years just against a spy? And, why be so outspoken about who killed him? As if the murder had been committed in Moscow, and we were reliably informed about everything....As if it all could be slurred over with a few unfortunate phrases... Stalin put the paper
USSR Trotsky's nickname was "The Pen" - all illustrations in this article by Evans from Trotsky for Beginners, Tariq All and Phil Evans, published by Writers & Readers, London, 1980 down. For some reason, he remembered his first meetings with Trotsky. Stalin and Trotsky's first encounter
At that time, in the London congress, Trotsky simply did not notice the taciturn man from the Caucasus. They did not actually meet; it was a superficial chance encounter between the two men, whose conflict was to be marked by mutual hatred throughout their lives. The facile way that Trotsky was energetically discussing the difference between poetry and philosophy with a group of young people and a beautiful woman during a break made a painful impression on Stalin. "Poetry," the man with a shock of dark hair said, making elegant gestures "looking at a drop of dew, sees its greatness, through which the entire world can be perceived. But philosophy, spreading a drop of dew on the canvas of life, seeks definite properties, definitions about moisture in this world."
The participants in the discussion looked on Trotsky with admiration, hardly aware 21 that the sage was repeating graphic obser-
• #148 International Viewpoint
International Viewpoint #148 • October 3, 1988
USSR DOCUMENT vations made by L. Feuerbach. Trotsky was a brilliant verbal artist....
Their second meeting took place in the winter of 1913, between Stalin's two arrests. Stalin did not meet Trotsky in St Petersburg, but in Vienna, where he came on Lenin's orders to organize the printing of material for a Bolshevik meeting in Cracow. Stalin, known in party circles more as Dzhugashvili, stayed in a cheap hotel. In the evening, taking a cup, he went down to the snackbar for tea. There was no one there except for two people, who were conversing agitatedly by the samovar. One of them Stalin immediately recognized, a thin, short man with wild dark hair and blue eyes framed in glasses.
Silently and intently, he gazed at Trotsky from head to foot, with unblinking eyes like those of an anteater, poured himself tea and left. Could Trotsky guess that two decades later he would come to write about
"The process of Stalin's rise took place as if behind an impenetrable political curtain. At a certain moment, his figure came down from the Kremlin walls in the full panoply
Historians today are looking for causes. Why did none of the alternative figures, contrary to Lenin's will, prevent Stalin from "coming down from the Kremlin wall." But the future gensek [general secretary] should have been "blocked" not by one figure but by the Central Committee, the whole party. Today reading off the names of Bukharin, Frunze, Rudzutak and other Bolsheviks of the Lenin school, we do not come across one who could have been a collective leader. Trotsky was tormented to the end of his days by the thought that his passivity had helped Stalin successfully "come down from the Kremlin
Why did Stalin now recall the start of the history of his relations with Trotsky, this demon of the revolution? Why has so much always been said about this person? Why, finding himself outside the country (how many such people there were!) did he remain the center of attention? It was 1940, war was on the doorstep. Why did he think about Trotsky?
Stalin understood that Trotsky's death meant the end of one of the most dramatic stages of the fight that began in the first years of this century. Setting up a bureau of the Menshevik party in Geneva, Trotsky -together with Axelrod, Dan, Martov and Potresov — called Lenin a "dictator," a "usurper." He repeated the cliches of the West European reformers. Going over to anti-Bolshevik positions, up until 1917 Trotsky tried to attack the party, sometimes from the left and sometimes from the right. Not without reason, in assessing these ideological somersaults, Lenin exclaimed in 22 February 1917, "That's Trotsky! He is always consistent with his character - he equivocates, fakes, poses as a left, helps the right as long as possible..." Now as regards anti-Sovieteering, Stalin thought, the question is quite clear. Virtually everything that has been created in this country in the more than 20 years since October is only an expression of a "thermidor."
"Trotsky involuntarily increased Stalin's authority as leader"
Stalin had poured so much energy into the struggle with Trotsky that he now felt a feeling of emptiness, a vacuum, which did not provide the expected satisfaction. In essence, in the fight against Trotskyism and other deviations, Stalin had become the leader of the party, its "theoretician." People often said that Stalin did not join any opposition, not seeing that the gensek in GO THROUGH ALL AND SHIP OUT ALL COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY fact created an opposition to Lenin himself, consigning many of the latter's ideas and conclusions to oblivion. From the drafts of reports, it is apparent how carefully Stalin prepared his exposure of factionalists. For the Fifteenth Party Conference and the Seventh Expanded Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), Stalin carefully systematized all the "sins" of the opposition.
At the ECCI plenum, his report "Once again on the social-democratic deviation in our party" (along with its conclusion) lasted for five hours! Stalin essentially waged his fight against the opposition in terms of "Leninism or Trotskyism." Collecting together all the previous mistakes, oscillations, all the many "platforms," the gensek pushed the oppositionists into a hopeless position of inarticulate defensiveness. The gensek did not criticize but "struck," grow-
After 1925, Trotsky's aura as a "hero of the revolution" definitively "faded" and became extinguished. In the eyes of the party and the international proletariat, he increasingly appeared as a phrase monger, a political intriguer, a failed would-be dictator. Stalin still remembered how outraged he was by Trotsky's activity as commissar of military affairs traveling around from front to front in a special train, accompanied by one and sometimes two armored cars, filled with young supporters of the "proletarian leader" wrapped in leather coats. He was sickened by the fact that, shortly after the revolution, Trotsky surrounded himself with a big staff of assistants. Glazman, Butov, Sermuks, Poznanski and other secretaries helped Trotsky build up big files, conduct correspondence, prepare theses and materials for endless articles and speeches, and not infrequently gave him creative inspiration.
Imposing discussion after discussion on the party, Trotsky involuntarily increased Stalin's authority as the leader of the party.
This conclusion is paradoxical, but perhaps no one so much helped to reinforce Stalin's position at the head the party's ranks as much as Trotsky. The gensek led the charge under the flag of defending Lenin, whom Trotsky in the early years of the century had called "Maximilian Lenin," hinting at the dictatorial ways of Robespierre. The gensek literally nailed Trotsky with the fact that his early pamphlet Our political tasks was dedicated to the Menshevik P. Axelrod. Stalin triumphantly read Trotsky's dedication to the roar of the audience: "Dear teacher Pavel Borisovich Axelrod." "Now, what is this?" Stalin "Good riddance to this •dear teacher Pavel Borisovich Axelrod'! Good riddance to him!" Trotsky, a great master of intrigue and metamorphosis, felt that this withering tirade by Stalin heralded his own political end. As he wrote later in Mexico, after Stalin's speech he palpably felt the guillotine blade over his
Trotsky ended up a "general" without troops. The party was hostile to him. It was tired of his intrigues. Trotsky finally became convinced that when the civil war ended, the high point of his life was over. Everything had ended
In his fight with Stalin, which broke out after Lenin's death, Trotsky tried to make use of the ideas of socialist democracy as weapons, although they were alien to him. He stood closer to Bonapartism, to caesarism, to military dictatorship, than to the idea of genuine people's power. He and Stalin were the same age (they were born in 1879 about a month and a half apart). But Trotsky's intellect was better honed, richer. A lively mind and a solid European culture, indomitable energy, wide-ranging erudition and a brilliant speaking style were characteristic of him, according to many biogra-
October 3, 1988 • #148 International Viewpoint phers. But because of overestimating his own importance, Trotsky was always arrogant with everyone (except for Lenin), insolent, authoritarian, categorical and intolerant of other views. The absence of firm Marxist convictions made him "a shooting star," a naive prophet, a fizzled out would-be dictator. Stalin gradually probed all the weak points of Trotsky's nature and exploited them with the utmost thoroughness.
Trotsky's speech to the
October 1927 plenum
Stalin remembered that at the October 1927 plenum, Trotsky made his last speech as a party leader. The speech was confused and demagogic. Later Trotsky wrote that he wanted but did not entirely manage to warn the "blind" that "the triumph of Stalin would not last long and that his regime would collapse abruptly. Momentary victors rely too much on force." Stooped behind the podium, Trotsky read the entire speech hurriedly word for word, trying to shout down the noise in the hall. It was hard to hear him. He was interrupted with shouts of "slander," "lie," "windbag." Trotsky rushed to unload everything that he had written about the weakening of revolutionary principle in the party, the domination of the apparatus, the formation of a "ruling faction" that was leading the country and the party to a thermidorian degeneration. In the speech there were no arguments, no clear theses about socialism. There was ap parent hatred for the leadership of the Central Committee, resentment of Stalin. But this, to the glee of the gensek, touched no chord with the participants in the plenum.
The attempt by Trotsky's supporters to hold a demonstration on the tenth anniversary of October was a challenge that put him outside the party. The slogans of Trotsky's forces were such that their oppositional meaning was comprehensible only to the initiated. "Down with the kulaks, Nepmen and the bureaucrats!"; "Carry out Lenin's Testament!" "Down with opportunism!" "Preserve Bolshevik unity!" They tried to carry portraits of Trotsky and Zinoviev. But Stalin had already taken the "appropriate" measures. The police dispersed the small groups of Trotskyists. Zinoviev, who had come specially to Leningrad, and Trotsky in Moscow (driving around streets and squares in the center of the capital were definitely convinced that they had no following other than individuals. The game
Trotsky could let himself remember that ten years earlier, to a thunderous ovation, he hurled after Martov as the latter was walking out of the Hall of the Soviets, "depart into the garbage can of history!" Now the same words resounded, directed at him, when he tried to address the column of demonstrators in Revolution Square marching to Red Square. Stones flew at Trotsky. The windows of his car were broken. With bitterness, he realized that Stalin was already pushing him into the sewer of history.
Stalin had not forgotten how, at the time of Trotsky's exile to Alma Ata, supporters of the fallen leader tried to stage a protest action. Trotsky refused to go. They carried him to the car and then onto the train. His oldest son was shouting all the time, "Comlook how they are carrying
"Fascism is finding its best helper in Stalinism"
In the Kremlin at the time, Stalin maintained an intense surveillance on the process of exiling Trotsky. He got frequent telephone calls. The gensek silently listened, and at the end, threw out, "No kid gloves! No concessions! Cut off Trotsky's helpers! Quickly and without no messing about." He stopped speaking and nervously walked around the office, intensively thinking something over. Several years later, sitting at a table in a dacha with his associates after discussing a report of Trotsky's latest speech, he said:
"Two mistakes were made then. He should have been kept in Alma Ata. He should never have been let out of the coun try. And what is more, how was he allowed to take out so many papers with him?"
Getting up from the table, Stalin walked around the office, picking up a number of issues of the magazine published by Trotsky, the Bulletin of the Opposition. He found issue 65 for 1938, opened a page, which he folded back, and standing there
DOCUMENT USSR I WONDER WHERE TROTSKY IS KAMENEV...? YES, IT'S ODD ZINOVIEV... he concentrated on reading an editorial by Trotsky. Few people can come back to the lines in which they are defamed and abused. Stalin was not like that. He read and got a blast of hatred. "What, is Stalin still snickering behind the scenes? Fascism is going from victory to victory and finding its best helper in Stalinism. Terrible war threats are knocking at the gates of the Soviet Union, and Stalin has chosen this moment to tear the army apart. The time is coming, and not he, but history will judge him." Stalin slammed the Bulletin shut, threw the magazine on the floor, and walked along the conference table. anyone believe such rubbish? Haven't the Trotskyists and their accomplices publicly admitted their crimes?"
The gensek remembered that when the fight was underway around NEP, Trotsky told the Politburo, "The working class can advance toward socialism only through great sacrifices, by straining all its forces, by giving its blood and sinews." His defeated foe then did not tire of repeating that without a "labor army," without a "militarization of labor," "full self-limitation," the revolution might never break out of the "realm of necessity into the realm of
Almost the entire fifteenth volume of Trotsky's works is devoted to "the militarization of labor." Trotsky called for transforming production regions into multimillioned divisions, for fusing military districts with units of production, for assigning "shock battalions" to especially important targets so that they could raise productivity by personal example and by repression. In fact, Stalin was also impressed by the idea
International Viewpoint #148 • October 3, 1988
USSR DOCUMENT of posing the question in such a way that people would be prepared to willingly "give their blood and sinews." Perhaps that is why Trotsky often wrote about Stalin as an epigone, implying that the gensek lacked originality in his social methodology.
Stalin always resented the fact that during the years of the revolution and the civil war the future exile was closer to Lenin than he, the future gensek. Even judging by the published correspondence, Lenin sent 78 letters and telegrams to Trotsky and 62 to Stalin. Lenin more than once protected Trotsky, valuing his organizational and propagandistic talent. At that time, when their relations were tolerable, Stalin took an attitude of silent approval for some of Trotsky's adventuristic ultra-leftist ideas.
Stalin never opposed Trotsky's ruthlessness. In his memoirs, Trotsky presented his army without repression. You can't lead masses of people to death unless you have the death penalty in your arsenal of command. You have to place soldiers between possible death ahead and certain death be24 "This cook will only cook peppery dishes!" _ Lenin hind'." But Trotsky did not think that way only with respect to the army. "In order to beat the Whites, we plundered all Russia." Earlier than others Stalin grasped the fact that Trotsky's adventurist nature had one incurable weakness. The demon of the revolution was convinced that he was a genius and made little effort to conceal it.
Stalin's dictatorship was resisted by Trotsky
The gensek found it hard to admit even to himself that in the years of the revolution and the civil war the next most popular leader after Lenin was Trotsky. In the lists of names — in those days the "alphabetical" principle was not used — Trotsky always (or almost always) came in second place after Lenin. But Trotsky's popularity was not reflected in a large number of followers. A paradoxical picture took shape. Stalin was not personally popular but in a way he personified the "line" of the party. Trotsky, a notably more popular figure, at the same time acquired the stamp of a "factionalist," which could not increase the number of his co-thinkers. No one knows what Trotsky would have been like if Lenin
Of course, the author expresses many suppositions, remembering the words of J. Jaurès that a researcher has the right to a hypothesis about an already concluded fate. However, there are grounds for considering that in the years when he was an active figure in the party (1917-24) Trotsky was not an enemy of the revolution and socialism. But at that time he was already an enemy of Stalin. Trotsky cannot be denied his due. He did not break, as many did, before Stalin's dictatorship. To the end of his days, he maintained a respectful attitude to
•. Trotsky loved tragedy lay not so much in the battle with Stalinism as in his struggle • with Stalin for power. The undying bitterness at not getting to the top of the pyramid of political power put personal interests to the fore on Trotsky's scale of political and social priorities.
While Stalin consolidated his autocratic power, Trotsky wandered around the world. The Prinkipo islands in the Sea of Marmora, France, Norway and finally
Mexico were milestones on the path of the deported leader of the oppositionists. In the beginning Trotsky hoped that he would soon be going back to the Soviet Union... he did not believe that Stalin would hold on for long. It seemed to him that Stalin's intellectual inadequacies, rudeness, blunders, brutality and cunning were so obvious that by themselves they should generate new opposition, throw up more and more opponents of the gensek.
Once again, for the umpteenth time, Trotsky erred. Wandering among the brown boulders of the tiny island lost in the Sea of Marmora, Trotsky pondered on the capriciousness of human fate. Once this island was a place of exile for Byzantine notables. Now, one of the "architects of the Russian revolution" had turned up there.
The four long years that Trotsky spent on the Prinkipo islands were a time of waiting and determining the future roads of the struggle. Gradually Trotsky's confidence that he would be "called back" to Moscow faded. More and more he came to the conclusion that the only way to stay "afloat" was to continue the struggle with Stalin. He still did not fully understand that his third emigration will be his last, and that he would never again set foot on the soil of the
The revolution betrayed
Sitting in his room in the evening, with windows facing the sea, listening to the sound of the surf Trotsky sorted and leafed through the volumes of his works. In general, of what Trotsky wrote, he considered that the best thing was his History of the
Russian revolution. The book was written already after his break with Stalin. The outstanding feature of the book was the unveiled egocentrism of the author. It is hard to believe it, but in 1927 Trotsky published 21 volumes of his works! Leafing through the pages, he himself was struck by how fast he wrote. Take the eighth volume, Political silhouettes. He wrote about everyone imaginable, about Adler, Kautsky, Bebel,
Vaillant, Plekhanov, Martov, Rakovski, Kolarov, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Witte, Azef, Nikolai II, Sukhomlinov, Milyukov, Pirogov, Hertzen, Struve, Sverdlov,
Litkens, Nogin, Myasnikov, Sklyanski,
Frunze and many, many others. There is no work specially about Lenin, but he often mentions him in accounts about others.
Beginning in 1936, still in Norway, Trotsky wrote the book The revolution betrayed. In it, he says that he knew that around Stalin there were people who did not share his politics. In his prognosis, the idea is expressed that if Germany unleashed a war against the USSR, Stalin
The gensek read this book in one sitting, the last by the failed would-be dictator, from a translation of which only one copy was made for him. Stalin seethed with spite. Two "points" of a long pondered decision came to a head. Stalin seldom took steps that he had not thought over for a considerable time. In the first place, it was necessary to remove Trotsky from the
political arena. The caesarism of the leader could not be complete as long as the distant exile still lived. Secondly, he was even more convinced of the need to remove once and for all those who might potentially be
Stalin remembered the half-forgotten case of Blyumkin. Yes, precisely that S.R. Blyumkin who killed the German ambassador Mirbach in order to scuttle the peace treaty. Then he was sentenced to be shot, but thanks to Trotsky's intervention, the death sentence was commuted to "redemption in battles to defend the revolution."
Blyumkin served long in Trotsky's staff, and then went to work in the GPU. He returned in the summer of 1929 from India via Constantinople, where he met Trotsky. When Blyumkin returned to the USSR, he was arrested. Either he was followed in Turkey when he got on the train for his trip to the Prinkipo islands, or he imprudently shared the secret of his meeting with Trotsky with someone in Moscow. After a brief trial, Blyumkin was shot. Fate was not disposed to smile a second time on a condemned man.
It was not by chance that the "leader's" 1 mind turned to Blyumkin. Maybe some "Blyumkins" instructed by Trotsky were somewhere around him. In fact, they killed Mirbach. How many of them were there? Who were they? How could he know the scope of the real danger? How far had Trotsky spread his tentacles? Doubt, concern, spite, fear, irritation and hatred of Trotsky filled Stalin. For him, Trotsky became a personification of universal evil. "Trotskyism was no longer
La serious danger"
In reality, it was not quite like that. Even at the time of its greatest influence, in the mid-1920s, Trotskyism had very few adherents in the party. After Trotsky's exile, only a few of his supporters remained loyal to him. But these were individuals, maybe a few dozen, hundreds at most. Many felt that for a long time Trotsky was no longer fighting for ideals but waging a personal struggle, smacking of anti-Sovietism.
Others withdrew from political activity or, condemning Trotskyism, started to do constructive work. Trotskyism, in other words, no longer constituted a serious danger.
But Stalin needed a reason in order "once and for all" to do away with all those who did not totally share his views, or who might in the future act against him. In fact, he could not permit the realization of Trotsky's prophecies, the memory of which disturbed him. Especially after Trotsky's latest screed, which "rolled in" two or three months after the January 1937 political trial in Moscow against Pyatakov, Radek,
Sokolnikov, Serebryakov and others. Its
The crimes of Stalin, enough to arouse his ire.
He already knew from an interview that
Trotsky gave to a correspondent for a bourgeois paper in 1938 that the latter had begun to write a book with the laconic title But in deciding to become the biographer of his mortal enemy, Trotsky condemned himself to failure. Nothing other than revenge, malice and bile could flow out of his pen. With a great exertion of will, Trotsky managed to write seven chapters of his projected book. In its center was a Cain, wearing the mask of Soso, Koba [Stalin's nicknames], a revolutionist, a powerful man at the head of the party and a great people. But as Napoleon once remarked, "everything has its limits, even hatred." Exceeding these limits, you have to lose something — the truth, reason, serenity.
"Trotsky swung in the tortuous noose of contradictions"
Between the covers of his unfinished biography, Trotsky left the last drops of objectivity; he did not show even elementary respect for his fatherland, the people to whom he had once belonged. In his works, Trotsky did not baulk at including mocking passages about the Russian people. In his view, "no one governmental figure in Russia ever rose above the level of a third-class imitation of the Duke of Alba, Metternich
According to Trotsky, followed by many chroniclers of historic events, Stalin was born an evil-doer, from his youth he was a moral monster. It is not necessary to prove that such an approach, which we not infrequently encounter even today, is unscientific. A priori, no one can be considered a criminal. And no one is born an evil-doer. The presence of negative traits — suspiciousness, secretiveness, a thirst for power, vengefulness — is not always or immediately expressed in crimes.
Stalin cannot be viewed in the same way in 1918, in 1924 and in 1937. He was both the same and not the same person. Clearly, under the impact of objective and subjective causes and circumstances, Stalin changed greatly. He did many things that cannot be forgiven. At the same time as fighting for the ideals of socialism (which, to be sure, he understood in a distorted, vulgar and dogmatic way, he perpetrated both crimes and errors.
Trotsky had time to evaluate Stalin. He swung tortuously in the noose of contradictions. Totally rejecting Stalin, he could not at all separate from him what remained proletarian, working class and Marxist.
Trotsky asserted that Stalinism was not the result of a historic law but a "historic abnormality." At the end of his life, not knowing when his death would come, Trotsky erred, claiming that the USSR "remained only potentially a workers' state."
The Confederation of Mexican Workers, the Mexican CP and its leader Lombardo
Toledano fiercely protested against Trot-
DOCUMENT USSR sky's coming to Mexico. The exile had a solid reputation of being an "enemy of Stalin remembered that [GPU chief] Beria had reported to him that the Trotskyist organizations, with the help of the Mexican authorities in the locality of Coyoacan, had acquired a big house for the exile, which they turned into a veritable fortress, surrounded by a high concrete fence with a watchtower. It was a building with steelreinforced doors, with a system of signals, guards with machine guns. Trotsky was constantly guarded by no less than ten policemen and special agents. He even had a bulletproof vest, which could be used when he went outside the courtyard.
In his refuge, Trotsky drew up anti-Soviet declarations, gave interviews in which he predicted the collapse of the USSR, the end of Stalin, the inevitable victory of the Fourth International. In his last two years, Trotsky shifted over entirely to ideological warfare with his former fatherland. In April 1940, he prepared a message to the Soviet people entitled "You are being deceived," which in practice called for overthrowing Stalin on the eve of the war.
Two attempts made on
Trotsky's life
Two attempts were made to kill Trotsky, the last of which resulted in his death. The first was in May. Early in the morning, a group of unknown persons in police uniforms disarmed the guards and attacked the rooms where Trotsky lived with his wife, Natalya Sedova, and his grandson. But the couple managed to hide in a corner behind the bed. A few dozen bullet holes were found in the place where they had just been. Many shots into closed and locked rooms had no result. Neither Trotsky, his wife nor their grandson were hit. But they considered every new day a gift of fate. They knew that they were the targets of a serious hunt. Trotsky lived like a condemned man in the rooms, not knowing when the moment of execution would come.
A policeman who came to investigate asked: "Does Mr. Trotsky suspect anyone in particular of this attack?'
"Of course," Trotsky answered. Leaning toward the policeman's ear, with a certain irony, he said, "the author of this attack is
Joseph Stalin."
However, the killer had long been at his side. Already in 1939, he was a guest in
Trotsky's home under the name "Jacques
Mornard", a friend of the American Trotskyist Sylvia Agelof, who was working as one of Trotsky's secretaries. Mornard was involved in the movie business. In business circles, he still went by the name of Jason.
At the beginning Jason became acquainted with Trotsky's friends, Alfred and
Margarite Rosmer. This eventually facili-
1. The term used here is vozhd, a title identified with
Stalin, in the style of führer or duce. October 3, 1988 • #148 International Viewpoint
USSR DOCUMENT tated his access to the carefully guarded
Trotsky. Finally, in May, Jacson met Trotsky personally. After that, he was occain Coyoacan, and in private conversations let it be known that he was
"sympathetic" to Trotsky. He proposed various plans for improving the financial affairs of the Fourth International. In one way or another, as later became known from the American press, Jason gained
Trotsky's confidence. More than once, he made speeches about "strong personalities"
and "a firm hand." Trotsky, as his wife remembered later, even developed suspicions. Was this businessman a fascist?
Thus, in mid-August Jacson asked Trotsky to correct an article of his on some small question. Trotsky made a few remarks. On the evening of Tuesday, August
22, Jason came into Trotsky's study with the corrected article and asked him to look at it. Trotsky was working on the manuscript of the book Stalin. Entering, as Jacson testified later, " I put my coat on the chair, imperceptibly took an ice-pick from under it, and, closing my eyes, hurled it with all my strength at the head of Trotsky, who was absorbed in reading. "The victim, Jacson said in the trial, gave a "terrible, horrible, penetrating scream. I will hear that scream my whole life." Trotsky's death agony continued for twenty-four hours.
The white obelisk on the grave in the courtyard of his last refuge in Coyoacan is thousands of kilometers from Yanovka pod Bobrintsami in the Ukraine where Trotsky, one of the future "outstanding leaders, was born.
Yes, Stalin wanted Trotsky's death. While Trotsky was alive, he remained a reminder of that long-ago time when the "leaders" [vozhdi — see footnote] coldly shook each others' hands, listened to Lenin, argued and quarrelled with each other. Trotsky knew Stalin better than Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov or Malenkov, although they worked alongside him at the time. Trotsky could understand Stalin from the inside, his motives and intentions. They both wanted and strove to become number one. To the great misfortune of history and the people, Lenin's old guard, left without Lenin, removed one of them from the helm 26 but left the other at the helm of the party. Both of them should have been removed. International Viewpoint #148 • October 3, 1988
After Trotsky's death, Beria was promoted. In the West it has long been written that Beria was the main executor and organizer of the decision concerning Trotsky. I think, however, that in the foreseeable future we will not be able to get any authentic documentary evidence confirming or refuting this.
After Trotsky's death, his testament was published. The fundamental part of it was written on February 27, 1940. The prisoner of Coyoacan tried to write in the spirit of
Lenin's last letters. But he did not succeed.
Lenin's last thoughts and will were devoted to the people and the party. Solely and exclusively! Trotsky constructed his testament from various documents and various addenda, writing in them mainly about himself, his "honor," his wife, his personal principles. In the testament, he did not even mention his "child," the Fourth International. But he found room for Stalin.
Trotsky even thought about suicide. "I retain the right to determine the time of my death." Those were the final lines of Trotsky's testament. But the time of his death was determined by others.
"Both Trotsky and Stalin should have been removed"
The members of Trotsky's two families drank their cup of bitterness to the dregs. Trotsky's first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, and her two daughters, Zinaida and Nina, as well as their husbands, were enthusiastic acolytes of Trotskyism. Trotsky had already abandoned his first family in 1902, when his younger daughter was only four months old. In the beginning, he wrote Alexandra Lvovna from abroad, but then time and a new family removed Sokolovskaya and his two daughters, in his words, to "the region of no return."
Trotsky was always concerned about what history would remember of him, what aspects of him would remain in history. He knew that people would remember about his first wife. Getting the jump on the historians, he wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, "Life separated us, while preserving an unbroken union of ideas and friendship." After the revolution, both his daughters were surrounded by the glow of their father's glory. Then, after a few years, they found themselves in a position of severe ostracism. The fate of Trotsky's first family in the following years was sad. For belonging to a "family of enemies," they were all dealt a terrible recompense.
Trotsky's second wife, Natalya Sedova, also began as a "revolutionist." At one time, she and Trotsky lived in St Petersburg under the name of "Vikentyev." In subsequent years, Sedova was constantly with her husband, sharing his rise in the years of the revolution and the civil war and his endless wanderings abroad.
Order given to
"liquidate the Trotskyists"
From his second marriage, Trotsky had two sons. The oldest, Lev, was always at his father's side; he became an active Trotskyist, and died in mysterious circumstances in Paris after his father's exile. The younger son, Sergei, left the family home when the family lived in the Kremlin, declared that
"politics" was "repugnant" to him, and buried himself in science. Refusing to go into exile with his father, as "Trotsky's son" he was naturally a condemned man. In January
1937, an article appeared in Pravda titled
"Sergei Sedov, Trotsky's son, tried to poison workers." Exiled to Krasnoyarsk, Sergei Sedov was declared an "enemy of the
Natalya Sedova outlived her husband by
13 years, dying in the same year as Stalin, her husband's "inseparable enemy." Some of Trotsky's more distant relatives survived and live in Moscow. I managed to meet them. They naturally go by other names.
Soon after the news was received about
Trotsky's murder, the order was given for the "liquidation of the active Trotskyists in the camps." And on the eve of the war, there was another small, quiet wave that swept away the last people condemned as "active Trotskyists." Pechora, Vorkuta,
Kolyma were the mute witnesses to a vengeance exacted in "hot pursuit" of the assassinated leader of the Fourth International. Stalin did not want to recognize that killing someone is an ineffective means of combating ideas.
Trotsky called himself "a citizen of the planet without passport or visa." He tried to play the role of "second genius." He said, "Lenin was taken to the revolution in a sealed train through Germany. Against my will, I was taken on the steamship Ilyich to Constantinople. So, I do not consider my deportation as history's last word." Trotsky always remained an actor who only wanted to play the leading roles. But he did not learn that it suits history to put things in order in its own temple, in which, according to Homer, demons are occasionally born, gods that become evil spirits. Stalin stopped walking around his office, smoked his pipe and sat at his table. He put aside the newspaper with the report about the "death of the international spy," and picked up a file entitled "Documents of the People's Commissariat of Defence." War was on the doorstep. *