TROTSKY AGAINST THE BOLSHEVIKS: PART ONE: TO 1914
Trotsky Speaks:
"Among the Russian comrades, there was not one from whom I could learn anything…The errors which I have committed . . always referred to questions that were not fundamental or strategic. . . In all conscientiousness I cannot, in the appreciation of the political situation and of its revolutionary perspectives, accuse myself of any serious errors of judgement. Looking back, two years after the revolution, Lenin said:
‘At the moment when it seized the power and created the Soviet republic, Bolshevism drew to itself all the best elements in the currents of Socialist thought that were nearest to it’.
Can there be even a shadow of doubt that when he spoke so deliberately of the best representatives of the currents closest to Bolshevism, Lenin had foremost in mind what is now called 'historical Trotskyism'? . . Whom else could he have had in mind?"
(L. Trotsky: "My Life"; New York; 1970; p. 184, 185, 353).
Lenin:
"Trotsky is very fond of explaining historical events . . in pompous and sonorous phrases, in a manner flattering to Trotsky".
(V.I. Lenin: "Violation Of Unity under Cover Of Cries for Unity", in: "Selected Works", Volume 4; London; 1943; p. 194).
"What a swine this Trotsky is -- Left phrases and a bloc with the Right . . ! He ought to be exposed".
(V.I. Lenin: Letter to Alexandra Kollontai, February 17th., 1917, in: "Collected Works", Volume 35; Moscow; 1966; p. 285).
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I N T R 0 D U C T I 0 N
Revisionism is the perversion of Marxism-Leninism to suit the needs of the exploiting classes, to the elimination of which Marxism-Leninism is directed.
A study of revisionism in Russia is of particular importance to Marxist-Leninists, since it was through revisionism that the socialist society constructed there came to be replaced by an essentially capitalist society.
One of the myths of Trotskyism is that in the years before 1917 Trotsky fought side by side with Lenin from revolutionary positions, and that only after Stalin became General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party in 1922 did a political rift develop between Trotsky and his supporters on the one hand and the leadership of the Party on the other.
The facts documented in this report demonstrate that this theory could hardly be further from the truth. From 1903 to 1917, year after year, Trotsky fought Lenin on almost every political issue that arose, along with other figures whom we shall meet again in connection with the revisionist struggle to prevent the construction of socialism after the revolution and to destroy it when it had been built -- such figures -as Lev Kamenev (Trotsky’s brother-in-law), Grigori Zinoviev, Yuri Piatakov, Grigori Sokolnikov, Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov, Khristian Rakovsky, Adolf Warski, David Ryazanov, Evgenii Preobrazhensky, Solomon Lozovsky and Dmitri Manuilsky.
The first part of this report covers the period up to the outbreak of the first imperialist war in 1914; the second covers the period from 1914 to the "October Revolution" of 1917. Later reports will cover the period from 1917 onwards.
1879 - l895: Childhood
Lev Davidovich Bronstein, who later became Leon Trotsky was born on November 7th.,1879.
His father, David Leontievich Bronstein, was a well-to-do farmer, of Jewish origin but. Indifferent to religion, who worked with the help of wage-labour a large farm called Yanovka, near the small town of Bobrinetz in the province of Kherson in the southern Ukraine.
His mother, Anna Bronstein, was an educated, petty bourgeois, city-bred woman, of Jewish descent and orthodox in religion.
Lev was the Bronsteins’ fifth child, and by the time of his birth they were affluent enough to afford a nursemaid for him.
At the age of. seven his parents sent him to a "kheder" a private Jewish religious school, at Gromokla, a Gernan-Jewish colony about two miles away. There he stayed with relatives. But the tuition was in Yiddish, and the boy learned little there except to read and write a little Russian. After a few months his parents withdrew him from the school and he returned home.
In the autumn of 1888, when Lev was nearly nine, he was sent to stay with other relatives in Odessa in order to attend school there. These relatives --Moissei Filipovich Spentzer, a liberal publisher, and his wife, the headmistress of a secular school for Jewiss girls - gave the boy his first introduction to the great literature of the world. They arranged for him to attend St. Paul's "Realschule" a progressive, cosmopolitan school which taught in Russian.
In the course of his seven years at the "Realschule" he excelled in his studies, became fastidious about his appearance and dress, and acquired, as he says, a feeling of superiority towards his fellow students.
1896-1899: Youth
In l896, at the age of seventeen, he completed his course in Odossa and moved to Nicolayev to attend a similar school for the purpose of matriculating.
Here he lodged with a family whose sons had already been touched by socialist ideas and who argued against Trotsky’s conservative outlook. Six months later he had embraced socialism and had been introduced into radical discussion circle held in a gardener’s hut on the outskirts of the town. Most of the members of this group were Narodniks, adherents of an intellectual, individualistic, vaguely socialist trend, which based itself, not on the working class, but on the peasantryy, and which at first appealed strongly to Trotsky... One member of the group, however --Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, a girl some few years older than Trotsky who later became his first wife was a Marxist and strongly influenced the development of his views.
When his father objected to his association with this radical circle, Trotsky gave up the allowance he had been receiving from home, took up private tutoring and moved from his lodgings to live in the gardener’s hut, as a member of the Narodnik "commune".
In the spring of 1897 he took a leading part in the formation of an underground trade union, the South Russian Workers’ Union, which had grown to about 200 members before the end of the year and published its own duplicated paper "Nashe Delo" (Our Cause).
In the summer of 1897 Trotsky graduated with first-class honours, and at the end of that year was arrested, together with some other leading members of the union. He was kept in a small cell in the prison at Kerson for several months, being transferred to the prison at Odessa in the middle of 1898. He occupied himself here in writing a treatise on freemasonry, and in reading Marxist books smuggled in from outside.
Towards the end of 1899, Trosky received his sentence (without trial) of deportation to Siberia for four years. He was first moved to a transfer prison in Moscow, where he met older and more experienced revolutionaries from all over Russia and made his first acquaintance with the writings of Lenin. In the spring or summer of 1900 he married in the Moscow prison Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, and shortly afterwards he and his wife began their journey into exile.
1900 - 1902: Exile
They reached their place of exile -- the settlement of Verkholensk in the mountains overlooking Lake Baikal -- in the late autumn of 1900. Having come to accept Marxism in the preceding years, Trotsky now identified himself with the labour movement, becoming a leading member of the Siberian Social Democratic Workers’ Union.
In December 1900 he began to write for the "Vostochnoye Obozrenie" (Eastern Review), a progressive newspaper published in Irkutsk, under the pseudonym of "Antid Oto". His contributions consisted, mainly of reportage on the conditions of the Siberian peasants, together with literary criticism.
In the summer of 1902 Trotsky made his escape from Siberia, abandoning his wife, and two children. In Samara he received a message from Lenin asking him to report to the headquarters of ‘Iskra’- (The Spark) in London as soon as possible.
1902 - 1903: Trotsky Becomes an Iskra-ist
Trotsky arrived in London in October 1902 and Lenin found him lodgings. He began to contribute to "Iskra" in November 1902 and soon became known as a brilliant writer and orator.
From time to time he visited Prance, Switzerland and Belgium, and it was on a visit to Paris that he met his second "wife" (he was never formally divorced from Aleksandra Sokolovskaya), a Russian revolutionary of noble birth, Natalya Sedova, who was studying the history of art at the Sorbonne.
1903: The Struggle at the Second Congress
The Second congress Of the Russian Social-Democratic Party attended by 43 delegates, was held in July/August 1903, first in Brussels, and then in London. The main business on its’ agenda was to adopt a programme and rules. Trotsky attended as a delegate from the Siberian Social-Democratic Workers' Union.
The sharpest controversy at the congress arose around the first clause of the rules, defining what was meant by the term "member of the party". In accordance with the principles he had been putting forward for some time in "Iskra", Lenin proposed the following wording for Clause 1:
"A member of the R.S.D.L.P. is one who recognises its programme and supports the Party materially as well as by personal participation in one of the organisations of the Party".
Yuli Martov moved to substitute for the words underlined:
"Working under the control and guidance of one of the organisations of the Party".
Lenin's case against Martov’s formulation was that:
1) It would in practice be impossible to maintain effective "control and guidance" over Party members who did not personally participate in one of the organisations of the Party;
2) It reflected the outlook, not of the working class, which is not shy of organisation and discipline, but of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia, who tend to be individualistic and shy of organisation and discipline;
3) It would widen Party membership to include supporters of the Party, and so would abolish the essential dividing line between the working class and its organised, disciplined vanguard; it would, therefore, have the effect of dissolving the vanguard in the working class as a whole and so would serve the interests of the class enemies of the working class.
Trotsky sided with Martov, whose formulation was adopted by 28 votes to 22 with 1 abstention.
Later, the withdrawal of seven opponents of Lenin from the congress altered the balance of forces in favour of Lenin and his supporters, Lenin then proposed that the editorial board of "Iskra" (which consisted of six members) should be replaced by one of three members. Trotsky countered this manoeuvre with a motion confirming the old editorial board in office, but this was defeated by a majority of 2 votes; thereupon the anti-Leninists abstained from further voting. In the elections which followed three anti-Leninists (Axelrod, Potresov and Vera Zasulich) were dropped from the board, leaving Lenin, Plekhanov and Martov. Furthermore, three supporters of Lenin were elected to form the Central Committee.
Thus, at its Second Congress the Party showed itself to be divided into two factions. From that time those Party members who supported Lenin's political line were known as Bolsheviks (from 'bolshinstvo", majority) while those who opposed Lenin’s political line were known as Mensheviks (from "menshinstvo" minority) .
The Bolshevik trend was a Marxist trend, representing the interests of the working class within the labour movement;
TheMenshevik trend was a revisionist trend representing the interests of the capitalist class within the labour movement.
The "Report of the Siberian Delegation"
Later Trotsky admitted his error in having opposed Lenin at the 2nd. Congress on the question of Party organisation. Speaking of Lenin’s attitude at the Congress, Trotsky says in his autobiography:
"His behaviour seemed unpardonable to me, both horrible and outrageous. And yet, politically, it was right and necessary, from the point of view of organisation.
My break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered "moral" or even personal grounds. But this was merely on the surface. At bottom, the separation was of a political nature and merely expressed itself in the realm of organisational methods.
I thought of myself as a centralist. But there is no doubt that at that at that time I did not fully realise what an intense and imperious centralism the revolutionary party would need to lead millions of people in a war against the old order . . At the time of the London Congress in 1903, revolution was still largely a theoretical abstraction to me. Independently I still could not see Lenin's centralism as the logical conclusion of a clear revolutionary concept".
(L.Trotsky: "My Life"; New York; 1971; p. 162)
His immediate reaction to the congress, however, was to write "Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. (Report of the Siberian Delegation" which was published in Geneva in1903.
In this he defended his, and his delegation’s opposition to Lenin and his supporters at the congress:
"Behind Lenin stood the new compact majority of the ‘hard’ ‘Iskra’ men, opposed to the ‘soft’ ‘Iskra’ men. We, the delegates of the Siberian Union, joined the ‘soft’ones, and . . we do not think that we have thereby blotted our revolutionary record".
(L.Trotsky: "Vtoroi Syezd R.S.D.R.P. (Otchet Sibirskoi Delegatskii)" (Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. (Report of the Siberian Delegation); Geneva: 1903; p.21.)
At the Congress, declared Trotsky, Lenin had:
"..With the energy and talent peculiar to him, assumed the role of the party’s disorganiser".
(L.Trotsky: ibid.;. p.11),
and, like a new Robespierre, was trying to:
"..transform the modest Council of the Party into an omnipotent Committee of Public Safety",
(L. Trotsky: ibid.; p.21),
so preparing the ground for the:
"Thermidorians of Socialist opportunism".
(L. Trotsky: ibid; p.30).
He added in a postscript that Lenin resembled Robespierre, however, only as
"a vulgar farce resembles historic tragedy"...
(L.Trotsky: ibid.; p.33).
The 1903 Menshevik Conference
After the Congress, the Mensheviks -- including Trotsky boycotted "Iskra" and refused to contribute to it.
In September 1903 they held a factional conference in Geneva to decide on future action. A shadow "central committee" was set up, consisting of Pavel Axelrod, Pedor Dan, Yuli Martov, Aleksandr Potresov and Trotsky, to direct the struggle against the Bolsheviks.
In Trotsky's view the immediate aim of the campaign should be to force the Bolsheviks to restore the ousted Mensheviks to their former positions of influence, both in the Central Committee and the editorial board. A resolution, drafted by Martov and Trotsky, was adopted by the conference:
"We consider it our moral and political duty to conduct . . the struggle by all means, without placing ourselves outside the Party and without bringing discredit upon the party and the idea of its central institutions, to bring about a change in the composition of the leading bodies, which will secure to the Party the possibility of working freely towards its own enlightenment".
(P.B. Axelrod &. Y. 0. Martov: "Pisma P.B. Axelroda i.Yu Martova" (Letters of P.B. Axelrod and Y.0.Martv); Berlin; l924; p.94).
The "New" Iskra
Soon after the Second Congress of the Party, Plekhanov gave way to the attacks of the Mensheviks. In violation of the decisions taken at the Party congress, he claimed and exercised the right as joint editor to coopt to the editorial board of "Iskra" the Menshevik former editors. Lenin strongly objected to this step, and resigned from the board.
The new editorial board transformed "Iskra" into a Menshevik organ, which waged unremitting struggle against Lenin and his supporters and against the Bolshevik Central Committee of the Party. Thus, from its 52nd. issue "Iskra" became known in the Party as the "new" "Iskra", in contrast to the "old" Leninist "Iskra". It continued publication until October l905.
Trotsky became a prominent contributor to the "new Iskra" and issued a pamphlet setting forth the Menshevik political line. Lenin commented:
"A new pamphlet by Trotsky came out recently, under the editorship of ‘Iskra’, as was announced. This makes it the ‘Credo’, as it were, of the new ‘Iskra’. The pamphlet is a pack of brazen lies, a distortion of the facts. . . The Second Congress was, in his words, a reactionary attenpt to consolidate sectarian methods of organisation, etc."
(V.1. Lenin: Letter to Yelena Stasova, F.V. Lengnik, and 0thers, 0ctober 1904, in: "Collected Works", Volume 43; Moscow; 1969; p. 129).
l904: The Russo - Japanese War
In Februay l904 the Russo-Japanese War began with a Japanese attack on the Russian fortress of Port Arthur. The Russian Army suffered defeat and almost the entire Russian Navy was destroyed in the Straits of Tsushima, forcing the Tsarist government to conclude an ignominious peace treaty in September 1905.
l904: "0ur Political Tasks".
Between February and May l904, Lenin was engaged on writing the book "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back". In this he expounded at length the principles of party organisation he had put forward at the Second Congress and analysed the character of the Menshevik opposition.
In August l904 Trotsky’s reply to Lenin’s book was published in Geneva under the title "Our Political Tasks" . It was dedicated to "My dear teacher Pavel B.Axelrod".
In "Our Political Tasks" - Trotsky developed his attack upon "Maximillien Lenin"; whom he described as:
".an adroit statistician and a slovenly attorney" (L. Trotsky: ‘ashi Politicheskie Zadachi’(Our Political Tasks) Geneva; l904; p. 95), with a " . . hideous, dissolute and demagogical . " (L.Trotsky : ibid. ; p. 75),
style, whose
"Evil-minded and morally repulsive suspiciousness, a shallow caricature of tragic Jacobinist intolerance, must be liquidated now at all costs, otherwise the Party is threatened with moral and theoretical decay";
(L. Trotsky: ibid. ; p. 95).
He developed his attack upon Lenin’s principles of Party organisation, claiming that they would lead to the establishment, not of the dictatorship of the working class but of a dictatorship over the working class (a dictatorship that would eventually be one of a single individual), which the working class would find intolerable:
"Lenin’s methods lead to this: the Party organisation at first substitutes itself for the Party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally a single ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee…. A proletariat capable of exercising its dictatorship over society will not tolerate any dictatorship over itself".
(L. Trotsky. Ibid.; p. 54, l05)
and declaring that Lenin’s organisational principles would, in any case, be unworkable since any serious faction would defy Party discipline:
"Is it so difficult to see that any group of serious size and importance, if faced with the alternative of silently destroying itself or of fighting for its survival regardless of all discipline, would undoubtedly choose the latter course?"
(L. Trotsky: ibid; p. 72).
Meanwhile, readers of the "new" "Iskra" in Russia had been complaining strongly about Trotsky’s virulent attacks on Lenin in the columns of the paper, and in April l904, on the demand of Plekhanov, he was forced to resign from it.
The Campaign for The Holding Of a Party Congress
In July l9O4, two members of the Central Committee of the Party, Krassin and Noskov, broke with the Bolsheviks, giving the Mensheviks a majority on the committee. The Bolsheviks then began a campaign within the Party for the holding of a new congress.
In August l904 Lenin guided the conference of twenty-two prominent Bolsheviks which took place in Switzerland and which issued an appeal to the Party calling for the convocation of the Third Congress. At the same time a number of conference of Bolsheviks took place in Russia, out of which in December l904 came the Bureau of the Majority Committees which became the organising centre for the campaign for a new congress.
During the autumn of l9O4, the Bolsheviks organised their own publishing house and at the end of the year established their own newspaper "Vperyod" (Forward), the first issue of which appeared on January l904.
l9O4-1905: Parvus Lays the Basis for Trotsky’s "Theory of Permanent. Revolution"
In November and December l904 Trotsky wrote a brochure on the necessity for the working class to play the leading role in the capitalist revolution in Russia which, the following year, he entitled "Before the 9th January" (this being the date, under the old Russian calendar, in 1905 when the first Russian revolution began with the shooting down by the tsar’'s troppsa of an unarmed workers’ demonstration).
When in Munich, Trotsky was accustomed to stay at the home of Aleksandr Helfand a Russian Jew who then claimed to be a Marxist. Helfand published his own political review "Aus der Weltpolitik" (‘World Politics’) and wrote articles for other magazines especially Kautsky’s "Neue Zeit" (New Life) and the new "Iskra" -- under the pen-name "Parvus".
When Trotsky visited Munich in January 1905, he had the proofs of the brochure with him. Parvus was impressed with its contents and decided to put the weight of his authority behind Trotsky by writing a preface to it. In this preface he stated a conclusion which Trotsky still hesitated to draw:
"In Russia only the workers can accomplish a revolutionary insurrection. . . The revolutionary provisional government will be a government of workers’ democracy." (Parvus:Preface to: L.Trotsky: "Do 9 Yanvara"; Geneva; 1905)
In April 1905 Lenin commented on Parvus’s theory that the capitalist revolution in Russia could result in a government of the working class, as it had been put forward in the brochure written by "the windbag Trotsky".
(V. I. Lenin: "Social-Democracy and the Provisional Revolutionary Government"; in: "Selected Works", Volume 3; London; 1946; p. 35)
Lenin declared:
"This cannot be . . This cannot be, because only a revolutionary dictatorship relying on the overwhelming majority of the people can be at all durable.. . The Russian proletariat, however, at present constitutes a minority of the population in Russia. It can become the great overwhelming majority only if it combines with the mass of semi-proletarians, semi-small proprietors, i.e. with the mass of the petty-bourgeois urban and rural poor. And such a composition of the social basis of the possible and desirable revolutionary-democratic dictatorship will of course, find its reflection in the composition of the revolutionary government. With such a composition the participation or even the predominance of the most diversified representatives of revolutionary democracy in such a government will be inevitable".
(V. I. Lenin; ibid.; p. 35).
1905: The Beginning of the 1905 Revolution
On January 22nd., 1905 a peaceful demonstration of unarmed workers, led by a police agent, a priest by the name of Georgi Gapon, was fired on by troops while on its way to present a petition to the tsar at his Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Over a thousand workers were killed, more than two thousand injured.
The massacre taught tens of thousands of workers that they could win their rights only by struggle. During the weeks and months that followed, economic strikes began to pass into political strikes, into demonstrations and in places into clashes with tsarist troops.
In a letter written in Geneva three days after ""Bloody Sunday"", Lenin wrote:
"The Russian proletariat will not forget this lesson. Even the most uneducated, the most backward strata of the working class, who naively trusted the tsar and sincerely wished to put peacefully before ‘the tsar himself’ the requests of a tormented nation, were all taught a lesson by the troops led by the tsar and the tsar’s uncle, the Grand Duke Vladimir. . The arming of the people is becoming one of the immediate tasks of the revolutionary movement… The immediate arming of the workers and of all citizens in general, the preparation and organising of the revolutionary forces for overthrowing the government authorities and institutions -- this is the practical basis on which all revoluionaries can and must unite to strike a common blow.......
Long live the Revolution!
Long live the proletariat in revolt."
(V. I. Lenin: "The Beginning of the Revolution in Russia"", In: "Selected Works",Volume 3; -London; l946;p. 289, 291, 292).
"No Tsar, but a Workers’ Government"
In February 1905 Trotsky returned to Russia, settling first in Kiev. Here he made contact with a member of the Party’s Central Committee who had the previous July played a treacherous role in assisting the Mensheviks to capture the Central Committee -- Leonid Krassin. Krassin was in charge of a clandestine printing plant, which he now placed at Trotsky’s disposal.
A few weeks later Trotsky moved to St. Petersburg, where he became leader of the city’s Menshevik group.
He now adopted the view put forward in Parvus’s preface to his brochure "Before the 9th. January", namely that the capitalist revolution in Russia should result in a workers’ government:
"The composition of the Provisional Government will in the main depend on the proletariat. If the insurrection ends in a decisive victory, those who have led the working class in the rising will gain power."
(L. Trotsky: "Article in Iskra" (The Spark), No. 93; March 17th., 1905).
"Trotskyism: ‘No Tsar, but a workers’ government’. This surely, is wrong. There is a petty bourgeoisie, it cannot be ignored".
(V. I.Lenin: Report on the Political Situation, Petrograd City Conference RSDLP, in: "Collected Works", Volume 20, Book 1; London; 1929; p. 207).
Trotsky however, declared that this formulation of his political line was sloganised by Parvus and not by himself:
"At no time and in no place did I ever write or utter or propose such a slogan as "No Tsar -- but a workers’ government." The fact of the matter is that a proclamation entitled: ‘No Tsar -- but a workers’ government’ was written and published abroad in the summer of 1905 by Parvus".
(L. Trotsky. "The Permanent Revolution"; New York; 1970; p.222)
The Third Party Congress
Early in 1905, the Central Committee acceded to the pressure within the Party and agreed to collaborate with the Bureau of Majority Committees in convening the Third Congress of the Party.
The congress took place in London in April/May 1905, that is, during the rising tide of the 1905 Revolution. It was boycotted by the Mensheviks, and attended by 24 delegates.
The congress adopted a resolution calling on the Party urgently to make all political and technical preparations for an armed uprising, and to organise armed resistance to the violence of the government-sponsored reactionary organisations. It also amended the formulation of point 1 of the Party rules adopted at the 2nd. Congress in order to bring this into line with Lenin’s principles of Party organisation and, abolishing the dual leading bodies (Central Committee and editorial board) established.at the 2nd. Congress, to make the Central Committee the leading body of the Party.
The congress set up a new central organ of the Party "Proletary" (The Proletarian). Lenin, who chaired the congress, was elected to the Central Committee, which at its first meeting, appointed him editor of the paper. This appeared in May l9O5 and was published regularly in Geneva until Lenin returned to Russia in November 1905.
The 1905-Menshevik Conference
The Mensheviks, who boycotted the Third Congress of the Party, held their own conference simultaneously in Geneva. The conference endorsed the Menshevik line on the capitalist revolution (see next section) and refrained from discussing resolutions that had been submitted on the arming of the masses and work among the troops.
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