[Militant No. 426, 6th October 1978, p. 8-9]
The PCF leadership has touched on a subject which threatens to have explosive repercussions within their own ranks.
In mentioning the historical personality of Trotsky, however tentatively, the CP leaders cannot but foster interest among CP-influenced workers, for whom Trotsky’s ideas were previously official anathema.
Nearly forty years late, the French Communist Party [PCF] has publicly admitted that the murder of Leon Trotsky was ordered by Stalin and carried out by his agents.
This “news”, according to the PCF’s daily paper “L’Humanité”, comes from the recently published memoirs of a veteran member of the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), Valentin Campa.
Out of the blue “L’Humanité” published on 26 and 27 July last, two long extracts from Campa’s book, “My Testimony: Memoirs of a Mexican Communist”. Despite the vague and selective character of his “revelations”, the reprinted passage unmistakenly confirm that Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico in August 1940 was the premeditated work of Stalin.
For all the loyal readers of “L’Humanité” who still stubbornly believe, against all the available evidence, that Trotsky was simply killed by the ice-pick of a madman and that the Kremlin had nothing to do with it, these articles must have come as a profound shock.
The “news” itself is old. When Trotsky was fatally struck down in August 1940, his supporters soon established that his assassin was a Stalinist agent. This last, fatal attack was in any case by no means the first attempt on Trotsky’s life.
Earlier, David Siqueiros, well-known painter and a leading member of the Mexican CP, had led a raiding party which had raked Trotsky’s bedroom with machine-gun fire. Miraculously, he and his wife, Natalia Sedova, had escaped death.
Since he was first forced into foreign exile in Turkey, Trotsky had anticipated attempts on his life. “Stalin seeks to strike not at the ideas of his opponent,” wrote Trotsky en route to his final exile in Mexico “but at his skull”.
Throughout his long imprisonment in Mexico, the assassin Ramon Mercader, alias “Frank Jacson”, refused to reveal his true identity. This silence for a time preserved Stalin’s flimsy alibi in the minds of all those – Stalinists and capitalist representatives alike – who were reluctant to assign responsibility where it really belonged.
In the late 1950s, however, Senate and judicial investigations into Russian espionage in the United States incidentally produced a mass of incontrovertible evidence that Stalin’s agents had indeed systematically plotted Trotsky’s death.
The alias of “Jacson” was clearly established as that of Mercader, who had previously been trained and used in 1936 as an assassin by Stalin’s security police in their campaign of extermination against the “Trotskyists” of the POUM and the Republican militias in the Spanish civil war.
In 1959, Isaac Don Levine documented all the evidence in his book “The Mind of an Assassin”. The facts were set out for anyone whose mind was not closed to the truth.
However, when in 1956 Khrushchev had exposed some of the crimes of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, he had stopped well short of revealing the truth about Trotsky’s murder. Terrified of the ideas and the revolutionary legacy of this long-dead “non-person”, the satellite Communist Parties of the West also maintained their guilty silence about the circumstances of Trotsky’s death.
Even in Mexico, while Campa has spilled the beans in a book published by the CPM’s own publishing house (and ex-members of the CPM have also allotted responsibility to the Stalinists), the official history of the party denies the involvement of its members in the assassination of Trotsky
Ramon Mercader, moreover, is today living in Moscow, decorated with a top medal of the Russian bureaucracy, and reportedly writing a book on the Spanish civil war (which is certainly unlikely to reveal the role of Stalin’s GPU in Spain or to describe how the ripples from the Spanish defeats provoked the bloody Russian trials and purges of 1936 and after!)
Given the history of Stalinism, then, and the domination of the Western Communist Parties by the Russian bureaucracy and its outlook, it is nothing short of astonishing that the leadership of the PCF should now admit Stalin’s hand in Trotsky’s murder.
Although this had been done obliquely, through the re-publication of Campa’s memoirs, the published excerpts were almost certainly at the personal instigation of Marchais himself (the PCF’s general secretary having brought Campa’s book back from a recent holiday in Mexico).
The French press has been full of puzzled speculation as to Marchais’ motives. Not surprisingly! Until 1975 the leader of the PCF was always among the first of the Western CP leaders to sing the praises of Brezhnev and the Russian bureaucracy.
Marchais’ personal reasons apart, however, it is clear that “L’Humanité’s” July affront to the Russian leadership is but the latest fissure in the ever-widening breach that has opened up between the Kremlin and the Western parties.
But in this case, the PCF leadership has touched on a subject which threatens to have explosive repercussions within their own ranks.
When Stalin had Trotsky murdered, the bureaucracy buried the genuine ideas of Bolshevism in an unquiet grave. Now, in touching on the historical personality of Trotsky, however tentatively, the CP leaders cannot but foster interest in his ideas among CP-influenced workers, for whom Trotsky’s ideas were previously official anathema.
Having confirmed Stalin’s criminal responsibility, for how long can the CP leadership avoid the question which inevitably follows? Why was Stalin so determined to do away with an old man, exiled without power in Mexico, and with only a handful of dedicated supporters throughout the world?
Unlike Bukharin, for example, who was executed after a grotesque frame-up trial in 1938 – and for whose rehabilitation the PCF (and others CPs) are currently calling – Trotsky had consistently opposed the development of Stalinism. Not only Trotsky, but literally hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Russia, paid with their lives for their intransigent opposition to the dictatorial methods of the bureaucracy.
Trotsky’s writings, moreover, unlike those of Bukharin or other “old Bolsheviks” already rehabilitated by the Kremlin, contain a critique of Stalinism and a Marxist alternative which retain all their validity today. And criticism of the Russian leadership cannot but at the same time hit the western CP leaders who for so long justified Moscow’s every twist and turn.
While the PCF (and other CP) leaders have in recent years denounced the “crimes”, “excesses” and “mistakes” of Stalin and his successors, they have consistently failed to provide a Marxist explanation for these things. For them, the bureaucracy and its policies are still ultimately the result of the so-called “cult of personality” or (more recently) of the “Stalin phenomenon” – as if they were simply an inexplicable aberration!
Without a clear explanation of Stalinism – the bureaucratic degeneration of a state which nevertheless preserves the progressive property-relations embodied in the nationalised, planned economy established by the October revolution – it is absolutely impossible to pose a clear alternative for socialist democracy.
Trotsky showed that the bureaucracy was not simply the creation of a powerful dictator, but had its roots in the extreme backwardness of Russian society. The bureaucracy was able to crystallise because of the isolation of the revolution internationally. At a certain stage Stalin, its representative, was able to crush all the original elements of workers’ power and consolidate a military-police dictatorship.
Trotsky’s opposition to Stalinism was based on two fundamental principles: (1) the fight for the restoration of workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union; and (2) the recognition of the necessity for an international perspective for the healthy development of the socialist revolution.
However, the step by step breach of the western CP leaders with their former mentors in the Kremlin, has by no means taken them back towards the original ideas of the Russian revolution. It has not led them not to Marxism, but to the total repudiation of Marxism.
The PCF sided with the Italian and Spanish CPs – the so-called Eurocommunist trend – at the sensational conference of European Communist Parties held in East Berlin in 1977. The conference marked the final cutting of the umbilical cord which previously tied the Western parties to the Russian Bureaucracy.
This break was the final result of the accumulated pressures of reformist degeneration. In the period of post war capitalist boom, the mass CPs (like the Italian, French and more recently the Spanish) were subjected to the same hostile social pressures as the social-democratic parties.
Without genuine Marxist leadership, the mass CPs (with the smaller parties like the British in tow) have, like most of their social-democratic counterparts before them, openly abandoned any commitment to the socialist transformation of society.
The CP leaders have embraced the same reformist illusion that partial, lasting reforms are possible within the framework of diseased capitalism.
Their belated break with Moscow is the concomitant of this reformist degeneration.
For decades, the CP leaders accepted domination by Moscow and justified events like the bloody suppression of the Hungarian workers’ rising of 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as “socialist internationalism”.
They have now rejected the Stalinist caricature, but are utterly incapable of understanding a genuine internationalism. Instead, they advocate a separate road for each national CP, and proclaim socialism in French, or Spanish or whatever “colours” – in other words, a contradiction in terms, socialism confined within the limits of the capitalist states.
For decades, too, the CP leaders defended the Stalinist version of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, that is the usurpation of democratic workers’ power by bureaucratic cliques ruling through police-state methods.
Now they cannot conceive of the genuine control of society through workers’ soviets, as existed immediately after the October revolution. Instead, the CP leaders champion the democratic trappings with which big business tries to conceal its naked domination of society.
For the young generation of workers within the ranks of the PCF, however, the regressive path of the leadership is completely unacceptable. Aware of the growing crisis in French society, the rank and file are demanding policies which will measure up to the problems faced by the working class. This was clearly indicated in the run-up to the recent elections, when the PCF leadership was pressurised by its own membership into calling for additional demands for nationalisation to be included in the Common Programme.
Only Marxism, and not the brand of reformism embraced by the PCF leadership, will satisfy the workers within the PCF in the next period.
For the activists of the PCF, therefore, the “rehabilitation” of Trotsky, for which the leadership has said it will call next year on the 100th anniversary of Trotsky’s birth, cannot just be a formal confession of monstrous criminal injustice on the part of the Kremlin – it must mean a thorough examination of the ideas and programme advanced by Trotsky.
Such discussion and debate would undoubtedly give conscious expression to all the doubts and misgivings of critical CP members about the so-called “socialist” states of Eastern Europe, and would crystallise the demand of active CP members for a genuine Marxist policy and perspective.
At the same time, whether or not the Kremlin bureaucrats agree to rehabilitate Trotsky – and how can they! – they will continue to contemplate with fear and dread the wider dissemination of Trotsky’s ideas, which have undoubtedly already experienced a rebirth in the underground opposition circles which certainly exist among the advanced workers in Russia and Eastern Europe.
The relatively progressive role played by the bureaucracy when the nationalised, planned economy was still able to develop the previously backward Russian society, is now completely exhausted. The bureaucracy is now an absolute fetter on development. The vast, highly educated, highly cultured working class that has developed, moreover, is straining at its chains.
It is now only a matter of time before the workers move to throw the parasitic bureaucrats off their backs. And as was demonstrated by the Hungarian workers’ rising 1956 – the harbinger of the political revolution predicted by Trotsky – is to the basic demands advanced by Trotsky and the Left Opposition that the workers of Russia and Eastern Europe will turn:
- Free and democratic elections, with the right of recall of all officials in the state, party and industry. For democratic trade unions independent of state control.
- No official to be paid more than a skilled worker: an end to privilege and corruption.
- No standing army and police force over the people, but an armed working class. Abolition of the KGB and system of Stalinist repression: freedom for all political prisoners.
- An end to the system of bureaucratic rule: for workers’ control and self-management in industry; and a return to the democratic rule of the workers’ councils, created by the October revolution and destroyed by Stalin.
The bureaucracy’s undiminished fear of these ideas elaborated by Trotsky, and the instinctive way in which the active opponents of Stalinism in Eastern Europe strive to rediscover and grasp them, are the finest tribute that history could bestow on the co-leaders of the October revolution!
Having gone so far, the leaders of the French CP should now indeed demand that the Kremlin reveal the full facts about the assassination of Trotsky. More importantly, they should demand the publication and dissemination of Trotsky’s writings for all to read. This, of course, would amount to preparation of suicide on the part of the bureaucracy. In reality, the “rehabilitation” of Trotsky will depend on the workers of Eastern Europe and the political revolution which has been placed on the agenda for the next period.
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