The practical steps taken by Trotsky were as harmful as his "theory". - 6
BASMANOV
His not very long period as Commissar for Foreign
Affairs was distinguished by one particular act — the break-
ing off of peace negotiations with the representatives of
Kaiser Germany at Brest-Litovsk, an act that exposed Soviet
Russia to mortal danger.
Trotsky did not confine himself to declaring that Soviet
Russia would stop the war against Germany and would
demobilise the Army. He sent a telegram to the Com-
mander-in-Chief, N. V. Krylenko, insisting that orders be
sent out immediately demobilising the Army. The personal
intervention of Lenin was needed to countermand Trotsky's
unauthorised instruction. 1
The people of Russia paid dearly for Trotsky's "dip-
lomatic" activity. It was his fault that in the fighting
that took place near Pskov, Revel and Narva thousands
of Red Army men were killed resisting the German troops.
Because of Trotsky's treacherous policy, the new peace
terms proved a great deal heavier and more humiliating
than those which, despite Lenin's directive, Trotsky had
rejected.
The falsifiers praise Trotsky to the skies for his "military
activity": as member and head of the Revolutionary Military
Council of the Republic he is alleged to have done a great
deal to secure the defences of the Soviet state in the years
of the Civil War. Trotsky is depicted as "the organiser
of the Red Army". For a long time the bourgeois press
has given space to statements aimed at belittling the part
played by Lenin, the Communist Party in creating
the Soviet Armed Forces and organising the country's
defences.
In actual fact it was Lenin, the party that were in
charge of the formation of the Red Army. The Red Army
was created by their efforts in those same threatening days
of February 1918, when they repudiated Trotsky's treach-
erous line of unilateral demobilisation of the Russian forces
and surrendering Petrograd and Moscow to the Germans for
the sake of keeping the world "in a state of tension".
Lenin, the party worked out the principles for building
up the Red Army, which embodied the alliance of the working
class and the peasantry, an alliance of the working people
of all Russia's peoples. The Central Committee of the party
determined the strategy of the most important operations of
the Red Army and mobilised the human and material
resources for it.
This huge work was organised by the Council of Workers'
and Peasants' Defence, set up on November 30, 1918 (in 1920
its name was changed to the Council of Labour and
Defence). This body was entrusted with full powers to turn
the country into a war camp and mobilise all forces and
resources in order to defend the Soviet state. The Council of
Workers' and Peasants' Defence, with Lenin as its chairman,
worked in accordance with the political line of the Central
Committee of the Party, and the most important commissions
of the Council were at the same time commissions of the
Central Committee.
The activity of the Revolutionary Military Council of the
Republic and other military organisations was carried on
under the strictest party control. In December 1918 the
Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party passed
a special resolution, which emphasised that "the policy of
the military department, as of all other departments and
establishments, is carried out in complete conformity with
general directives, issued by the party through the Central
Committee, and under its immediate control". 1
"The Communist Party — Organiser of the Victory of the Great
Trotsky sometimes tried to act in contravention of the
party directives. Whenever this happened, a stop was put to
it. At the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party
in 1919 there was some particularly sharp criticism of
Trotsky's striving to act against the opinion of the party
organisations in the Army.
In this connection, the party's Central Committee, elected
at the Eighth Congress, at its very first meeting on March 25,
1919, described the congress delegates' criticism of Trotsky
as a "serious warning". In a special decision signed on
March 26 by those members of the Central Committee, who
constituted the Politbureau, it was stated: "(5) To point out
to Comrade Trotsky the need for the most thoughtful atti-
tude to Communists working at the front, since the policy
of the Central Committee in military matters cannot be
carried out without the fullest comradely solidarity with
them." 1
In spite of this the falsifiers try to create the impression
that Trotsky was also "prominent" even in the period when
Soviet Russia was changing over to peaceful economic
reconstruction. They base their assertions, partly, on the fact
that he enjoyed great influence on the biggest trade union in
the country — the Central Committee of the Railwaymen's and
Water Transport Workers' Union (Tsektran). Trotsky is
credited with "special" services in the solution of the most
important problem facing the republic — the restoration of
transport dislocated by the war. With an astounding lack of
scruples bourgeois historians bestow on him the title of
"founder of the Soviet trade unions".
One has only to study the resolutions of Party congresses
and of the Central Committee, and to go through the news-
papers of that period, to realise the absurdity of these asser-
tions. The work of restoring transport in 1920 was organised
by the party under the personal supervision of Lenin. A
tenth of the delegates to the Ninth Party Congress and
thousands of the best Communists from various parts of
the country were sent to restore transport and organise party
political work among the transport workers. The newspapers
daily published news of the progress of the transport restora-
tion work side by side with military reports. It was due to
the efforts of the working class, led by the Communists, that
the transport situation improved.
At that time Trotsky was instituting in Tsektran dictato-
rial management methods and petty tyranny, was suppress-
ing democracy and carrying out a policy which he himself
called "tightening the screws". It was Trotsky's factional
activity that brought about the split in Tsektran, and the
creation of a gulf between the leadership and the rank-and-
file members of the union. The harm done by Trotsky's
policy was considerable because the enormous problems that
faced the transport workers demanded good teamwork.
The party firmly rejected Trotsky's "advice". It had
worked out the principles of the activity of Soviet trade
unions and defined their role and place in the life of the
socialist state as social non-party organisations without which
the broad masses could not be drawn into manage-
ment of the state and production, and building the new
socialist society. Noting the immense significance of trade
unions as the embodiment of the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat, Lenin said: "But it is not a state organisation; nor
is it one designed for coercion, but for education. It is an
organisation designed to draw in and to train; it is, in fact,
a school: a school of administration, a school of economic
management, a school of communism.'"
The fifth legend sets out to present the ideological and
organisational defeat of Trotskyism in the twenties as
having been due to some kind of "coincidence", and to reduce
the very serious differences of opinion that had arisen regard-
ing the paths of development of the Soviet state to motives
of a personal nature. 2
Meanwhile the Soviet Communists showed great clarity of
mind in the twenties, a time when the fate of all mankind
hung in the balance, by casting aside the defeatists who
advocated giving up the idea of building socialism. Who can
deny the colossal influence exercised by the building of soci-
alism in the USSR on the whole course of history? The
peoples of the world were shown an actually existing social-
ist society, and the experience of the Soviet Union became
the treasured possession of the international communist
movement.
And how could mankind have been saved from the threat
of fascist enslavement, if the political monolith of the Soviet
Union, with its highly developed socialist economy, had
not existed? The transformation of the communist movement
into the most influential force of modern times, the establish-
ment of a world socialist system, the development of the
national liberation movement, the continually growing power
of attraction throughout the whole world of the ideas of
scientific socialism — all these events, characteristic of our
times, proved Lenin's prophecy that fundamental socialist
reforms would have the very greatest influence on the whole
progress of world history.
In the twenties the Trotskyites did all they could to hinder
the development of these events, and to block the continuous
movement of the Soviet peoples along the road to socialism.
From forcing one discussion after another on the Party,
from creating factions and groupings, from attempts
to substitute Trotskyism for Leninism, they turned to open
anti-Soviet action. Trotskyites organised anti-party demon-
strations, printed slanderous pamphlets and declarations on
underground presses, arranged conspiratorial meetings, and
even created illegal Trotskyite centres. 1
For these same purposes Trotsky made slanderous state-
ments concerning the "degeneration" of the Soviet state and
"thermidor". Having always advocated "tightening the
screws", the principle of appointement instead of electivity,
army-type command of the working masses, and "the iron
dictatorship of the party", he tried to pose as some sort of
fighter for democracy. By means of this demagogic device
Trotsky hoped to break up the unity of the Soviet people and
the unity of the party. The logic of many years of anti-party
struggle brought him into the camp of the enemies of the So-
viet state, the counter-revolutionary camp.
Thus, the ideological and organisational defeat of
Trotskyism was not the result of some fatal coincidence or
"unfortunate moves". Having put himself in opposition to
the Soviet people and the party, he was fated to suffer
defeat.
next
.jpg)
