THE FIGHT OF TROTSKY AND COMPANY AGAINST LENIN IN THE PARTY

Trotskyism and Fascism

THE FIGHT OF TROTSKY AND COMPANY AGAINST LENIN IN THE PARTY 

IT'OR a period of fifteen years before the November Revolution, -®- Trotsky, as a confirmed Menshevik, fought against Lenin’s party and against Comrade Lenin under the mask of “Left” phrases and unrestrained demagogy. As far back as 1911 Lenin deservedly nicknamed Trotsky “Yudishka-Trotsky” [1] and stated that Trotsky was behaving like “a despicable careerist and fac- tionalist”. Just before the November Revolution, Trotsky, being a leader without an army, was compelled to join the Bolsheviks. He painted his Menshevik skin with Bolshevik colors and con­cealed his irreconcilable disagreements with Lenin on the most important problems of the proletarian revolution, particularly on the central problem of the revolution, the possibility of building socialism in the Land of Soviets. But even after he joined the Bolshevik Party he always remained an alien element in its ranks.

As for Zinoviev and Kamenev, they, as far back as January, 1910, betrayed Lenin by demanding that the newspaper Proletarii, which Lenin edited, cease publication to please Trotsky and the Mensheviks. In 1916 Zinoviev revealed his duplicity by entering into negotiations, behind Lenin’s back, with a semi-Anarchist group with a view to collaboration. In 1914 Kamenev was arrested together with the Bolshevik deputies of the Duma. At the trial before a tsarist court the Bolshevik Duma deputies staunchly adhered to their principles, but Kamenev betrayed the confidence of the Party by pleading that his position in regard to the impe­rialist war was the same as that of the pro-war Mensheviks. While he was in Siberia the news came of the abdication of the tsar and the transmission of the crown to the Grand Duke Michael. Kamenev, together with the capitalist merchants of 

Siberia, sent a telegram to the Grand Duke Michael, congratu­lating him on his succession to the throne. 

On the eve of the great November Revolution Zinoviev and Kamenev, behind the hack of the Party, published a statement in the semi-Menshevik newspaper Novaya Zhizn, protesting against the decision of the Central Committee of the Party to start the insurrection, thus betraying the plan for the November insurrec­tion to the class enemy. Lenin at that time referred to the action of Zinoviev and Kamenev as “infinite baseness, downright treach­ery”. And after the November Revolution Kamenev and Zinoviev in negotiations with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries agreed to the latter’s proposal to remove Lenin from the leader­ship of the Soviet government and to put the Right Socialist­Revolutionary, Avksentiev, in his place. 

Trying in every way to exaggerate and misinterpret the role which Trotsky and Zinoviev played in the revolution in the past, the defenders of these exposed terrorists ask: Why then, if Kam­enev and Zinoviev were proved guilty of betraying the Party in the interests of the bourgeoisie, were they appointed to respon­sible posts? The answer is: For the same reason that Trotsky, who had fought against the Party for many years, was taken into the Party in 1917. The Party believed the promises and assurances of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev that they would strive to atone for their sins and crimes against the revolution by loyally fight­ing in the cause of the working class. The Party could never sus­pect that these people who claimed to be Marxists could sink to the depths of baseness and treachery they actually sank to. 

Even while Lenin was still alive these people broke their promises in one form or another. But when, during the transition from the period of restoration to the period of reconstruction of Soviet economy, the working class was confronted with the task of overcoming the enormous difficulties of socialist construction, the Trotskyites and Zinovievites tried to take advantage of the death of Lenin in order to seize the leadership of the Party and of the country. They tried to foist upon the Soviet Union the policy of capitulation to capitalism. They exerted every effort to compel the Party to renounce Leninism and adopt Trotskyism. This they did, not openly, but by pretending to be “loyal disciples 

of Lenin”, and by juggling with distorted passages from his works. Thus, Trotskyism became the center of attraction for all the remnants of the defeated opposition factions within the Bol­shevik Party, for all the degenerates and petty-bourgeois adven­turers who had not yet been combed out of the Party. There arose what the late Henri Barbusse aptly called “something in the nature of a deviation trust”. 

Even while they were still an opposition faction within the Bolshevik Party the Trotsky-Zinoviev adventurers, notwithstand­ing their pseudo-radical phrases, earned the praise and approval of the enemies of the Soviet Union, of the Menshevik and White- Guard emigres. This is not surprising, for by their nefarious work the Trotskyites and Zinovievites released the counter-revo­lutionary forces that were still considerable in the country at that time; they strove to disrupt the Bolshevik Party and to dis­credit its central bodies and leaders. The Trotsky-Zinoviev oppo­sition furnished the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie with argu­ments against Bolshevism by their assertion that it was impossible to build socialism in the U.S.S.R., that the degeneration of the Bolsheviks was inevitable, etc. By organizing anti-Soviet demon­strations in Moscow and Leningrad in 1927, the Trotsky-Zinoviev opposition placed a tactical weapon in the hands of the counter­revolutionary bourgeoisie in the U.S.S.R. in their fight against the Soviet government. They also placed an organizational weapon in the hands of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie by setting up their own anti-Bolshevik, underground group. 

At the time of the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party, the Trotskyist opposition faction within the Party had obviously grown into open counter-revolution. After a long and determined struggle under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, Trotskyism was utterly defeated and the Bolshevik Party flung the Trotskyists out of its ranks. The rout of Trotskyism removed from the path of socialist construction the hotbed of decay and disbelief; it imbued the ranks of the working class with new strength and increased the determination of all the builders of socialism to overcome all difficulties. 

Even while it was an opposition faction within the Party, the Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc never dared face the Party and the working class openly. Being themselves a bloc of degenerates who had lost all contact with the working class and who were disrupting the work of socialist construction, the Trotskyites and Zinoviev- ites slanderously shouted about the “degeneration of the Lenin­ist Party”, “Thermidor”, etc. Denying that it was possible to build socialism in the Soviet Union, and urging a policy that would have meant the restoration of capitalism and surrender to the bourgeoisie, the Trotsky-Zinoviev opposition came out in the guise of fighters for the victory of socialism simultaneously in all capitalist countries. Basing their calculations for the over­throw of the Party leadership on the defeat of the U.S.S.R. in a war with the capitalist countries (the so-called “Clemenceau thesis” advanced by Trotsky), the Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc came out in the guise of champions of world proletarian revolution. 

The victory of socialism, the construction in the main of classless, socialist society in the U.S.S.R. removed the last rem­nants of the soil on which deviations and opposition groups could arise within the Bolshevik Party. It is not surprising, therefore, that the new bloc formed in 1932 on the basis of the employment of terror against the Soviet leaders was not in any way an oppo­sition group within the Party, even though several members of this gang held Party membership cards under false pretenses. But these pseudo-members of the Party differed in no way from any White Guard who had managed to steal a Party membership card and thus claim to be a member of the Party. The lower the Trotsky-Zinoviev counter-revolutionaries sank politically, the more subtle and atrocious became the methods of duplicity and provocation by means of which they strove to deceive the Bolshe­vik Party, the Soviet government and the international proletariat.

DUPLICITY—A CLOAK FOR TERRORISM