Inventions and Reality -Trotskyism -5- Basmanov
BASMANOV
Even a short survey of the fundamental propositions of
"the theory of permanent revolution" shows how clumsy
were the attempts to present it as being in line with Lenin's
views and his teaching on revolution. One of the most active
propagandists of Trotsky's ideas, Isaac Deutscher, produced
the fantastic idea that "the theory of permanent revolution"
was adopted in all essentials by Lenin and the Bolshevik
party as part of their weaponry. Deutscher readily repeats
the assertion made by Trotsky in his time that the October
Revolution "corresponded more to Trotsky's ideas than to
Lenin's".
Bourgeois sociologists were quick to pick up these wild
ideas, as they have long acted on the principle that the more
fantastic the lie, the more delicious a dish it would make
in the kitchen of the anti-communist propagandists.
It is sufficient to compare the views of Lenin and Trotsky
on the fundamental questions of the strategy of the working-
class movement — the paths and prospects of the revolution,
the relationship between general democratic and socialist
aims, allies of the working class, the combination of the
national and international tasks of the proletariat, the
building of socialism — to find oneself confronted with two
completely different approaches and two lines of thought.
One oriented proletarian revolution on victory and suc-
cessful development, the other spelled defeat.
Bourgeois propaganda is not satisfied with attempts to
present Trotsky as some sort of "revolutionary theoretician".
At the same time various other myths are put into circula-
tion with the object of making Trotsky out a more important
figure, and an outstanding "practising revolutionary".
Thus Trotsky's role in the events of 1905 is exaggerated.
For instance, the author of a number of books published in
the USA, Louis Fischer, states that Trotsky became "a leader
of the revolution" in that period. The same view of Trotsky
is given by that double-dyed falsifier, Leonard Schapiro, in
his book The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In order to make this legend credible the falsifiers assert
that it was Trotsky, as one of the leaders of the Petersburg
Soviet of Workers' Deputies, who energetically pressed for an
armed insurrection and a general political strike.
The facts prove the opposite. As can be seen from the
records of the Petersburg Soviet, the question of armed
insurrection was never on the agenda. Moreover, at the
beginning of December 1905, the Executive Committee of
the Soviet published a resolution in which the necessity for
an armed insurrection was rejected. It noted: "The Execu-
tive Committee has been receiving a significant number of
recommendations to this effect for some time past. The
Executive Committee is not inclined to consider them." One
of the reasons for this attitude of the Petersburg Soviet was
that Trotsky was wholly on the side of the Mensheviks who
had seized control of the Soviet.
In the foreword to the pamphlet Before January 9 Trotsky
expressed his doubts as to the possibility of overcoming
tsarism by means of armed insurrection. And later, in a
letter to the Central Committee of the Russian Social-
Democratic Labour Party of June 14, 1906, he justified the
Mensheviks who had opposed the arming of the working
class. As a result of the position taken up by Trotsky and
his Menshevik colleagues, the Petersburg Soviet did not
become an organ of armed insurrection, and the Petersburg
proletariat did not support the December armed rising in
Moscow.
At the same time Trotsky, while clamouring for a general
political strike and proposing it as an alternative to an
armed insurrection, announced that Petersburg could not
take upon itself the role of initiator, and should only move
after the provinces had moved. When the strike in Petersburg
began to reach considerable dimensions, he hastily brought
before the Petersburg Soviet on November 5 a recommenda-
tion that it should be called off. He was supported by the
Mensheviks. 1 If Trotsky has left any trace of himself in the
history of the first Russian revolution, then it is only as a
defeatist and disbeliever in the revolutionary strength of the
working class.
And here is another false report spread around by the bour-
geois falsifiers. They try to attribute to Trotsky the role of one
of the organisers of the Bolshevik party. In his three-volume
biography of Trotsky, Deutscher persistently attempts to
convince the reader that Trotsky was a founder of the
Bolshevik party. The anti-communist West German journal
Osteuropa saw the main value of Deutscher's books in the
fact that "he has disposed of the version that one comes
across now and again that Trotsky was a man who from
the beginning stood in opposition to the Bolshevik system;
in fact he took part in its foundation". Here is another
fact which the falsifiers carefully pass over: right up to 1917
Trotsky was not in the Bolshevik ranks, so he could not
have played any part in founding the Bolshevik party. For
more than 15 years, starting in 1903, he was attached
organisationally to the Mensheviks, either coming out openly
as a Menshevik, or hiding his adherence by proclaiming him-
self a so-called man of the centre.
Trotsky soon found much in common with the Mensheviks
with regard to questions of the organisational structure
of the party, for the Mensheviks were also opposed to Lenin's
plan for the creation of a monolithic, fighting, disciplined,
revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat. They advocated
free access to the party for the petty-bourgeois, opportunist
elements. It was not by accident that soon after the Second
Congress, at which Trotsky had spoken from Menshevik
positions on programme and organisational problems, he
allied himself with the Mensheviks, who, according to
Martov, "rebelled against Leninism".
During more than ten years before the Revolution, Trotsky
concentrated his energies on fighting Lenin, the Bol-
sheviks. He frankly stated that he saw this as the main
purpose of his political activity. The congratulatory postcard
to Joffe (1910) is sufficiently widely known; in it Trotsky
urged "a great fight" against Lenin, and threatened that in
it "Lenin will meet his death". A few years later, in 1913,
in a letter full of hatred of Lenin, addressed to Chkheidze,
Trotsky wrote venomously: ". . .The whole Lenin edifice . . .
carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own decay."
As an emigre Trotsky never stopped asserting that Bol-
shevism was an accidental, and not a typical phenomenon
of the Russian revolutionary movement. The Amsterdam
International Institute for Social History published in 1969
a hitherto unknown letter from Trotsky to Henriette Roland-
Hoist. She was connected with the journal Vorbote (Fore-
runner), which was published by a group of Left-wing
members of the Zimmerwald conference.* In this letter,
written at the beginning of 1916, Trotsky described Bolshe-
vism as "the product of an amorphous and uncultured social
environment". "There can be no Leninist supporters, to my
mind, either in Germany, or in France, or in Britain," he
asserted. Trotsky opposed in those years Lenin's efforts to
rally internationalist elements within the world revolutionary
movement on the basis of revolutionary Marxism. "Extrem-
ists," he stated, denigrating Lenin's supporters with this
name, "cannot create an International.'"
His plans were at that time directed at weakening the
Bolshevik positions and creating a Menshevik, opportunist
party.
Trotsky sometimes covered up his hostility to Lenin
and the Bolsheviks by appearing as a "conciliator".
Lenin considered this "conciliating" stance one of the worst
aspects of opportunism. "The conciliators," he wrote, "are
not Bolsheviks at all ... they have nothing in common with
Bolshevism ... they are simply inconsistent Trotskyites."
Trotsky formed bloc after bloc, trying to bring together
all the enemies of Bolshevism: the liquidators, the otzovists,
the Bund members'"* and other carriers of bourgeois influence
in the ranks of the party. As a result of the great variety
of political combinations in which Trotsky engaged the
composition of his adherents was constantly changing. In
some cases losing his last supporters, he found himself in
complete political isolation.
As Nadezhda Krupskaya pointed out in a letter to Maria
Fyodorova on April 4, 1912, a new group brought together
by Trotsky consisted "of five Trotskyite intellectuals".
Krupskaya also referred to the predominance of intellectuals
in Trotsky's "alliance" in another letter, of April 20, 1912.
A little later, in 1914, Lenin noted that Trotsky and his
allies had formed a "group of intellectuals" ready to join
in a "most unprincipled alliance of bourgeois intellectuals
against the workers". 1
Trotsky disguised his struggle against the formation of
a Bolshevik party in Russia capable of leading the proletar-
iat and seizing power, with arguments that his views on
the Party and the progress of revolutionary struggle in Russia
were a development of Marxism and the ideas of scientific
socialism. Lenin pointed out in this connection that Trotsky's
tricks were those of a speculator: "Trotsky has never yet
held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism.
He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any
given difference of opinion." In exposing the Trotskyites,
Lenin emphasised that "they make out all the time that
what they 'want' and what are their 'opinions', interpreta-
tions, 'views', are the demands of the working-class move-
ment". This he saw as "one of the greatest, if not the
greatest, faults (or crimes against the working class) of
the . . . Trotskyites"
The clumsy attempts of present-day bourgeois falsifiers
to present Trotsky as one of the founders of the Bolshevik
party are also disproved by the following piece of informa-
tion. In May 1917 Trotsky dissociated himself from the Bol-
shevik party. As can be seen from Lenin's notes, Trotsky
announced at the so-called Mezhrayontsi conference: ".. .1
cannot be called a Bolshevik. .. . We must not be demanded
to recognise Bolshevism.'"
However, a few weeks later he realised that there was
nothing he and a small group of supporters could propose
as an alternative to Bolshevism. Therefore, afraid of "miss-
ing the train", Trotsky requested of the Sixth Congress that
he be admitted to the party. As he noted in his autobi-
ography, My Life, Lenin met him "guardedly and with
restraint". Trotsky was obliged to make a statement agreeing
with all the Bolshevik tenets.
Further events were to show that this agreement was mere
hypocrisy to deceive the party. It was the usual cunning of
"Judas Trotsky", as Lenin aptly described him. He made
use of his membership of the party to prepare better positions
for another series of attacks on Leninism. At first this was
"reconnaissance in force": in 1918 the target was the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk; between 1920 and 1921, the discussions on
the trade unions. In Lenin's last years and especially after
his death, Trotsky decided that at last "his hour had come",
and launched a frontal attack on Leninism and the policy
of the Bolshevik party.
So much for the second invention claiming that Trotsky
was a "founder" of the Bolshevik party.
The third myth circulated by the bourgeois falsifiers
ascribes to Trotsky the leadership of the October Socialist
Revolution.
The facts show that Trotsky took up a position which
objectively helped the enemies of the revolution in the
period of preparation for the armed rising in October. While
before then he had at times been in his utterances "more
Left than the Left" and "the most revolutionary of all
revolutionaries", and had called for leaping over the revolu-
tionary stages, when it came to the days when decisive action
was needed, he became extremely cautious. He started to
talk of the use of "legal" means, and, in effect, tried to put
out the flame of revolutionary battle that had been lit.
Trotsky suggested putting off the date of the uprising to
time it with the opening of the Second All-Russia Congress
of Soviets. What would this have led to? The Provisional
Government would have had time to gather together counter-
revolutionary forces, especially as the day of the opening
of the congress might have been postponed owing to the
efforts of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks.
Under the pretext of talks with the Soviets, Kerensky's
government would undoubtedly have made use of the delay
and taken counter-revolutionary measures.
Lenin resolutely opposed Trotsky's proposal. To waste
the favourable political situation that had arisen and to
wait for the Congress of Soviets, would, he declared, be
"utter idiocy, or sheer treachery" ,'
Even on October 24, when the uprising had virtually
started, Trotsky spoke against it at the meeting of the
Bolshevik group at the Second Congress of Soviets. "The
arrest of the Provisional Government," he said, "is not on
the agenda as an independent task. If the Congress were to
form a government, and Kerensky refused to submit to it,
then it would be a matter for the police and not for politics." 1
Lenin spoke energetically against views of this sort.
In his letter to the members of the Central Committee he
wrote: "With all my might I urge comrades to realise that
everything now hangs by a thread; that we are confronted
by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or
congresses (even congresses of Soviets), but exclusively by
peoples, by the masses, by the struggle of the armed people."
The falsifiers carefully avoid these facts. They prefer to
produce the fiction that Trotsky headed the Revolutionary
Military Committee. As can be seen from the records of the
Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee, Trotsky took
no active part in its work.
In this way the October armed rising took place, first,
in spite of Trotsky's attempts to turn the revolution on to
a bourgeois parliamentary course, and, second, without any
noticeable contribution on his part.
It was Lenin and the Central Committee led by him,
who organised and who were the inspiration of the rising.
They carried out an enormous amount of work in the
preparation and implementation of the greatest revolution
in history.
The fourth legend paints a vivid picture of Trotsky's
"special services" to the Soviet state. The falsifiers carefully
pass over in silence the great wrong done by Trotsky to
Soviet Russia in continually sowing doubt with regard to
the possibility of victoriously developing and strengthening
the revolution. By his persistent struggle against Lenin,
the party, he caused disorganisation of government and
party activity throughout the country.
The establishment of Soviet Russia as a state of workers
and peasants did not fit in with his notorious "theory of
permanent revolution". And he regarded it as some sort of
abnormal act, as "an exception to the rule".
NEXT
.jpg)
