[Militant International Review, No 44, Summer 1990, p. 6-11]
The open re-appraisal of Trotsky in the USSR, argues Lynn Walsh, is the key to understanding the rise of Stalinism – and to formulating a programme which can provide the working class with a way out of the bureaucratic impasse.
“Restoring historical and judicial justice is a matter of tremendous political importance today.” This was the comment of Pravda (6 January 1989) on a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to speed up the review of Stalin’s repression. “The Central Committee believes … it is necessary to accelerate the re-examination of the cases of those who were sentenced in the years of massive repressions.”
Since Gorbachev came into the leadership in 1985, “judicial justice” has been restored to most of the prominent leaders purged by Stalin, including some of the leaders of the Left Opposition, like Christian Rakovsky. This process, however, has stopped short of the judicial rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky.
The annulment of the sentences on those purged, and the public admission that Stalin’s Byzantine show trials were based on totally false charges and fabricated evidence, has opened the door to the objective re-examination of the role and ideas of those leaders. There has been wide discussion in Soviet journals, for example, of the ideas and role of Bukharin. But while there is much more discussion of Trotsky than before, this still falls far short of a full and honest examination of his record and ideas. Not only the hard-liners like Ligachev, who defend the power and privileges of the apparatus and the bureaucratic elite, but also the reformers fear the affect of Trotsky’s ideas on the workers, especially on the younger generation.
Rehabilitation is not a mere formality – to allow Trotsky to be placed on a pedestal for public admiration. Trotsky, alongside Lenin, played a pre-eminent role in the revolution of 1917 and the civil war which followed. From 1923, Trotsky organised an opposition against the growth of bureaucratism on the basis of workers’ democracy. Until Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky also played a leading role in the Communist International, and subsequently led an international opposition to the disastrous policies of Stalinism on the international arena. Open discussion of Trotsky’s ideas, therefore, based on the publication of his works and public debate, is indispensable to an analysis of the origins and development of Stalinism.
In 1985, the CPSU’s Control Commission began to investigate the cases of former Party members who had not been rehabilitated during the period of Khrushchev’s leadership. In April 1986, NI Muralov, an inspector general in the Red Army who supported Trotsky’s opposition, was rehabilitated without publicity. In July 1987, the Supreme Court declared null and void verdicts against 15 prominent Soviet economists in 1931-35. They included Kondratiev, known for his theory of ‘long cycles’ (taken up by Trotsky in The curve of capitalist development), and other prominent specialists. In 1930-31, they had been accused of belonging to an illegal ‘Toiling Peasant Party’. Over 1,000 ‘members’ of this ‘party’ were arrested; many of them were executed or died in labour camps. The Supreme Court declared in 1987, that the Toiling Peasant Party had never existed. This decision strongly implies that other alleged parties, such as the ‘Industrial Party’ and ‘Menshevik Union Bureau’, for which many were subjected to show trials, also were fabrications of Stalin’s repressive apparatus.
In February, 1988, the Supreme Court cancelled the sentences on Bukharin, Rykov, Rakovsky, Chernov and six others tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court in March 1938, the third Moscow show trial. The case was closed “owing to the absence of any crime in their actions”. Ten of the others accused in the trial, including Krestinsky, Grinko, Zelensky and Bassonov, had already been rehabilitated. Of the twenty-two accused in the March 1938 trial, only Yagoda, head of the secret police (known as the GPU, or NKVD), was not rehabilitated.
In June 1988, the Supreme Court announced its annulment of those sentenced in the Zinoviev-Kamenev and Pyatakov-Radek trials of August 1936 and February 1937, the first and second Moscow trials. This meant that all the accused in all the major public show trials of 1936-8, (except Yagoda) have now been declared innocent.
In July 1988 the Politburo Special Commission made an announcement that the Party Control Commission had posthumously restored party membership to Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, in spite of ‘certain mistakes’ and their “special positions in relation to the roads and methods of socialist reconstruction”; to Trotsky’s close associate Rakovsky, and to other party members tried in March 1938. In August the Commission further announced that the Supreme Court had legally rehabilitated the accused in several other trials, including the secret trials in 1932-3 and 1937 of Riutin and others, No statement was made, however, about the rehabilitation of Trotsky.
Early in 1990 Moscow News published a letter from an historian, Albert Nenarokov, calling for the rehabilitation of Trotsky. “Despite the fact that Trotsky – accused at all these and thousands of other trials with the most ridiculous things – was not formally convicted and sentenced, the USSR Supreme Court is, I think, obliged to clear his name, like the names of many of his comrades, of piles of dirt and lies. Similarly, the USSR Supreme Court, or its Presidium, ought to say what they think of the illegal exile of Trotsky and his wife, stripped of their Soviet citizenship. As for the rehabilitation of Trotsky and others in our history, this is proceeding much more slowly, and less radically than one would want because of the long years of lies, rigid mind-sets and simply professional ignorance.”
The same issue of Moscow News also published an interview with Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, who had recently written to the USSR Supreme Court calling for Trotsky’s rehabilitation. “I haven’t received any official answer yet,” Volkov told Moscow News. “But I have learned… the USSR’s Supreme Court’s position on the matter. It is, I think, casuistic. The implication is that Trotsky wasn’t tried, so he can’t be rehabilitated. But what about the fact that he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and sent into exile? What about the thousands upon thousands of people shot on charges of being Trotskyists, those whose lives were ruined in Stalin’s camps, the entire family shot on mere suspicion of connection with Trotsky? At issue here is not just my grandfather. Since Trotsky had not been cleared of the charges against him, the sentences passed by Stalin on innocent people seem justified, and consequently those people are not to be rehabilitated.”
Asked for a comment by Moscow News, the chairman of the Supreme Court, Yevgeny Smolentsev, replied: “Regarding the essence of the request, I should say that there were no court decisions on LD Trotsky’s case, so there cannot be any rehabilitation.” In the offices of the Supreme Court, the bureaucratic mentality lives on!
At the same time, Smolentsev made a statement on the fate of Trotsky’s son, Sergei. In September 1988, the Supreme Court had decided that, “the resolution of the special conference of the NKVD (USSR) of 14 July and 20 July, 1935, as well as the sentence by the Military Judicial Board of the USSR Supreme Court of 29 October, 1937, with regard to Sedov, Sergei Lvovich, should be repealed and the case dropped for lack of corpus delicti.” The Latin phrase is a lawyer’s term which means, in plain language, there was none of the ingredients necessary to obtain a conviction: no proper charges, no particulars of charges, and no evidence. This long overdue confession of judicial crime could hardly be more perfunctory. However necessary for the historical and political record, no official retraction can restore Sergei’s life, nor the lives of other members of Trotsky’s family who were murdered or driven to their deaths by Stalin.
Discussion of the role of Trotsky is only just beginning.
The mountain of distortion, lies and misconceptions has begun to crumble – but the huge pile of debris has yet to be cleared away.
The accelerated rehabilitation of the victims of the purges has taken place against the background of an increasingly open reassessment of Soviet history and public debate on the issues involved. But discussion of the ideas, writings and political role of Trotsky is only just beginning. The mountain of distortion, lies, misconceptions and political mythology has begun to crumble – but the huge pile of debris has yet to be cleared away.
In 1988 all history examinations throughout the Soviet Union were cancelled. The reason given by Yuri Afanasyev, appointed director of Moscow’s State Historical Archive Institute in September 1986, was that “history textbooks in our country, especially those concerned with Soviet history, are completely falsified. They are not just falsifications in some aspects or minor details, but total falsifications. And to make teenagers repeat all these lies in the course of their exams is, quite frankly, immoral. There is not, and has never been in the world, a people and a country with such a falsified history as ours,” (Interview, New Left Review, September/October 1988).
The writers and academics pushing for the opening up of historical debate have apparently been supported by Gorbachev. In a famous declaration to party editors in February 1987, Gorbachev said: “There should not be any blank pages in either our history or our literature… We must not put those who made the revolution in the shadow… We must let the socialist law of truth have its way.”
When he first took over the leadership, however, Gorbachev was much more cautious. As on other issues, he has been pushed by events. At the same time, the hard-line Stalinists who still have a powerful position in the Party apparatus have kept up a guerrilla battle to maintain the shibboleths of the past. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of victory in the Second World War, in May 1985, Gorbachev was still praising the “gigantic work at the front, in the rear … led by the party and the State Committee of Defence headed by the General Secretary … Stalin.” In February 1986, he told a correspondent of the French CP newspaper, L’’Humanité that “Stalinism is a concept made up by opponents of communism and used on a large scale to smear the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole”, adding that the CPSU had already “drawn proper conclusions from the past”.
In June 1986, he told a group of Soviet writers that “If we start trying to deal with the past, we will lose all our energy … we’ll sort out the past, we will put everything in its place. But right now we have to direct our energy forward.” Clashes within the leadership, however, between the pro-reform group around Gorbachev and the hard-liners around Ligachev, who defended the Stalinist views of the past, pushed Gorbachev into supporting the opening up of more blank pages.
Again, in his report on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, given on 2 November 1987, Gorbachev was hostile to Trotsky. He defended the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939, praised rapid industrialisation, and declared that “Bukharin and his supporters underestimated in practice the importance of the factor of time in the construction of socialism in the 1940s.”
Nevertheless, Gorbachev, in contrast to Brezhnev, had to concede that “the understanding of our history which we achieved in preparing for the 70th anniversary of October is not something frozen and given once-and-for-all. It will be deepened and developed in the course of further research … For us, no smoothing out of history is acceptable. It already exists. And it is only a matter of showing it correctly.”
While Gorbachev has declared himself in favour of free investigation of the past, he has continuously warned that new history should be written “responsibly and scientifically …” without a “thirst for sensations”. “The impatience of public opinion is understandable,” Gorbachev said to the February 1988 Plenum of the Central Committee, but “the wish to look as soon as possible at the closed pages of our past … cannot justify rash statements … It is impermissible that instead of real scientific research, time-serving snippets should be thrown at the general public, which conceal rather than reveal the truth.” Ligachev had also called for greater frankness about the past. But in July 1987, he began to criticise “excessive emphasis’ on the abuses of the Stalin period.
In March 1988, the Sovietskaya Rossiya, controlled by the Central Committee of the party and primarily covering the Russian Federation, (RSFSR), published a full-page letter by Nina Andreeva, under the heading ‘I cannot give up my principles’. Andreeva is a chemistry teacher, but there is little doubt that her letter was written in consultation with Ligachev and his staff. The letter was an ‘anti-Perestroika manifesto’, used by hard-liners in many local CP branches. By ‘principles’ Andreeva really means ‘the doctrine of the bureaucracy’.
The letter opened by supporting the historians who had strongly criticised the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, whose plays Brest-Litovsk and Onward … Onward … Onward were published in a prominent literary journal in 1987- 88. Rather than portraying the usual Stalinist stereotypes, they presented the leaders of the Russian revolution, including Trotsky, as rounded-out personalities debating the aims, strategy and tactics of the revolution. Andreeva denounced as ‘tendentious accusation’ Shatrov’s claims that Stalin was responsible for the murders of Kirov and Trotsky. While condemning the repressions of the 1930s, Andreeva defended Stalin as a great man, even citing Churchill’s admiration for Stalin. One reference to Trotsky, moreover, revives the shameful strain of anti-Semitism that has always run through Stalinist attacks on Trotsky. She complains about ‘militant cosmopolitanism’, and denounces Trotsky’s ‘internationalism’ as being associated with the denigration of the Russian proletariat as ‘backward and uncultured’.
Three weeks later, Pravda (5 April 1988) published a full page reply to Andreeva, criticising her letter as “an ideological platform, a manifesto of the forces against perestroika”. Andreeva and her supporters, the editorial claimed, wanted “to retain the system under which bureaucratism, corruption, usury and petit-bourgeois degeneration flowered luxuriously”. It accused her of “historical fatalism”’. However, in rejecting her favourable view of Stalin, the Pravda article failed to take up her points or argue the case against her hardline Stalinist assertions. It simply counterpoised the need to support perestroika.
Nevertheless, more and more articles are appearing, notably in journals like Moscow News, discussing Trotsky’s role in the revolution and civil war. Some journals have published excerpts from Trotsky’s writings. The magazine Voprosy Istorii (number 7, 1989) has begun serialising his important book The Stalin School of Falsification (to which we will return). One measure of the interest in Trotsky and the appeal of his ideas are the increasingly sophisticated attempts to discredit him. An article by Dr V Dolgov in the youth paper Komsomolskaya Pravda (republished in Soviet Weekly, 19 November 1988) paid grudging tribute to Trotsky’s revolutionary record, recognising that he was “a fine speaker and propagandist”. “The young people of the time (1920) breathed and lived Trotsky.” But, Dolgov continues, “they did not always see that, as the revolutionary process in Russia was progressing, he was losing his gilding of genuine socialism.” Having paid a number of backhanded tributes, the article proceeds to catalogue all the various Stalinist calumnies: that Trotsky was ‘superficial’, was “doing everything to advertise himself’, was “devoid of any profound theoretical analysis”. While repeating all the old Stalinist formulas against Trotsky, however, this article, written in the era of ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’, has a new twist. One of Stalin’s main mistakes, it now asserts, was his failure to nip Trotsky’s “all-out offensive on the Party” in the bud early in 1924. Stalin, it is now claimed, was “seeking a conciliation with Trotsky”, and only got round to “crushing Trotskyism” in the Summer of 1924.
Even writers who are strongly anti-Stalin and not overtly hostile to Trotsky nevertheless perpetuate misrepresentations and false interpretations of Trotsky’s ideas. In his book Triumph and Tragedy, for instance, (General) Dmitry Volkogonov sets out the details of Trotsky’s assassination, although commenting that it is unlikely that the true story will emerge “in the near future”. Why? An extract from the book covering Trotsky’s murder was published in Pravda (9 September 1988), the first time that the assassination has ever been dealt with in an official mass-circulation newspaper. Volkogonov, however, repeats characterisations of Trotsky that originated with the bureaucratic leadership that coalesced around Stalin after 1924. For instance, asked why Trotsky, as “the second man of the October revolution”, did not become the leader of the Party after Lenin (interview, Moscow News, 4 March 1990), Volkogonov says, “I believe many were repulsed by his arrogance and extreme radicalism.” He then adds, “Trotsky’s paradox is that, for all his extreme leftism, he did not break away completely (at least ideologically) from the social democratic tradition.” Later, he claims that at the time of the New Economic Policy, Lenin introduced a “modification in our whole outlook on socialism” which “neither Stalin nor Trotsky ever accepted. Until the end of his days, Trotsky remained a ‘romantic of world revolution’.” The implication is that Trotsky would not have accepted the ‘second correction’, a “political reform adequate to the socio-political situation of the NEP”, a ‘correction’ which the reformist Gorbachev wing of the bureaucracy now claim to be making.
It is surely Volkogonov’s comments which are paradoxical. In 1917 Trotsky, alongside Lenin, supported the independent struggle for power by the proletariat, against the “old Bolsheviks” who advocated compromise with the provisional government. Yet Trotsky, according to Volkogonov, never broke away from ‘the social democratic tradition’.
Then Volkogonov criticises Trotsky from the opposite direction. But in fact Trotsky was first to advocate a ‘new course’, of temporary concessions to the richer farmers, traders and private manufacturers, in order for the Soviet government to gain time and prepare the ground for the strengthening of economic planning. What is implied by Volkogonov, however, is that Lenin would have favoured, had he lived, a permanent turn towards the market, a conclusion for which there is no evidence in Lenin’s articles or statements. The criticism of Trotsky here is that he would not have accepted a dilution of workers’ democracy in order to facilitate a turn back to the market – a policy which neither Lenin nor Trotsky would have accepted.
Such confusion and distortion of history and theory, even by those like Volkogonov who are trying to fill in the ‘blank pages’, underlies the urgency of restoring the true historical and political record in relation to Trotsky. Yet even among the most politically conscious workers in the Soviet Union there is scepticism about rehabilitation. Under the bureaucracy, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and even deathly grey functionaries like Brezhnev, were canonised as “great leaders”. The real figure of Lenin was transformed into a wax-works saint the better to exorcise what he really stood for. “We don’t need more political saints, say some of the youth, reacting against decades of bureaucratic propaganda.
But nothing would be achieved by promoting Trotsky as a new political icon, as just another figure in the bureaucratic Pantheon ‘whose time has come’. Such an approach would be alien to Trotsky’s own personality and method. Rehabilitation is necessary because the open, thorough-going reappraisal of Trotsky in the Soviet Union is the key to understanding the rise of Stalinism – and to formulating a programme which can provide the working class with a way out of the bureaucratic impasse.
This is understood even by Yuri Afanasyev, who is quick to point out: “I am not a Trotskyist sympathiser,” (New Left Review). ‘The question of Trotsky is a very special one … because getting rid of the stereotypes of Trotsky is a measure of our success in ridding ourselves of the last vestiges of Stalinism … It is impossible to get rid of the Stalinist legacy without getting rid of the Stalinist stereotype of Trotsky.”
When a bureaucratic leadership began to crystallise around Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev at the time of Lenin’s last illness and death, they attempted to justify themselves through the invention in 1924 of the legend of ‘Trotskyism’. This was later admitted by Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1926, when they fell out with Stalin and temporarily joined the opposition.
Stalin’s leadership began with relatively minor historical falsifications, particularly of the history of Bolshevism and the events of 1917. From 1923, Trotsky led an opposition to the emerging bureaucratic leadership on the basis of the real aims of October and genuine Marxism. “Trotskyism’ was invented to simultaneously identify the revolutionary essence of Bolshevism as an ‘alien’ doctrine, and to stigmatise Trotsky as a dangerous opponent of the revolution, now allegedly defended by Stalin and his cohorts.
‘Trotskyism’, as Trotsky explained from the very beginning, was the spindle around which all subsequent, monstrous falsifications were spun. The small, distorted cameos of 1924 became the ‘hellish frescoes’ of the show trials of 1936-37, travesties of ‘revolutionary justice’ which shocked the conscience of the world.
The attack on Trotsky and the repudiation of the Bolshevik tradition through the campaign against Trotskyism represented, in a negative form, the creation of an ideology to justify the existence of an elite intent on consolidating its power and privileges. The monumental lies constituted a political weapon intended to ensure the subjugation of the Communist Party to the bureaucracy and to poison the consciousness of the ruling strata. False history and pseudo-theory, justified by a web of lies, became institutionalised ‘truths’. Genuine traditions were crudely adapted to fit the needs of the bureaucracy and to confuse the workers. The new anti-Trotskyist ideology was used to pervert genuine Marxism, which aims to eliminate all inequality, and to legitimise the privileges of the elite.
The exposure of the bureaucracy’s self justifying falsifications was initiated by Trotsky himself at the very beginning of the process under the most adverse conditions of opposition. In 1924, Trotsky wrote The Lessons of October against the attempts by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev to mis-interpret the strategy and tactics followed by the Bolshevik leadership in 1917. It was this article which prompted the ‘troika’ to fabricate the ‘legend of Trotskyism’. In many other articles, Trotsky defended historical truth against Stalin and company.
In 1927 Trotsky wrote a systematic answer to the “falsification of the history of the October revolution, the history of the revolution, and the history of the Party”. This was his Letter to the Bureau of Party History, written in reply to an Istpart questionnaire. “The Letter’, Trotsky wrote, “circulated from hand to hand in the USSR in hundreds of copies, either retyped or copied by hand. Single copies, often inexact, filtered abroad. Translations of them appeared in several languages.” Samizdat, illegal underground ‘self-publishing’, was not the invention of the dissidents of the Brezhnev era!
The letter to Istpart, together with other important speeches and documents, were brought together in The Stalin School of Falsification, first published in 1932. A brief glance at this book, moreover, illustrates another significant aspect of the current debate on history in the Soviet Union. Many of the controversial issues, which are only just beginning to be opened up for debate inside the Soviet Union, were long ago clarified in the writings of Trotsky and the Bulletin of the Opposition. While official archives remained locked in dark cellars and ‘sensitive’ books were segregated in the closed section of libraries, Trotsky published a wealth of documentary evidence drawn from his own personal archives. The documents Trotsky cited were invariably denounced by the Kremlin as forgeries. This did not prevent Stalin’s agents from trying to destroy his archives through burglary or arson.
It is to some extent inevitable, because the political consciousness of the Soviet working class has been profoundly set back under Stalinism, that a new generation of politically conscious workers and youth will have to rediscover their own history in their own way and by their own route. In this process, the opening up of official archives in the Soviet Union, which is only just beginning, will be of tremendous importance. No one who claims to stand on the ideas of Marxism can support the continued suppression of materials which can illuminate the history of the revolution, the development of Stalinism, the struggle of the Left Opposition, and the international dimension of developments in the Soviet Union. However, “ridding ourselves of the last vestiges of Stalinism,” is not simply a technical question of opening up archives, publishing documents, and allowing professional historians the access needed to reappraise the past.
Reassessment of Soviet history is inescapably bound up with fundamental political issues. This is reflected in Gorbachev’s caution about filling in the ‘blank pages’. History cannot be reappraised without asking: ‘Reappraise from what standpoint, in whose interest?’ Yuri Afanasyev and many advisers around Gorbachev undoubtedly support the thorough opening up of the past. It is clear, however, they approach this task from the point of view of the repudiation of the real aims of the October revolution. Afanasyev supports the pro-capitalist policies of ‘radicals’ like Boris Yeltsin. They favour the historical rehabilitation of Trotsky, but they are using Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism not only to bury Stalinism, but to bury genuine Marxism as well. Our approach is entirely different. We stand for the rehabilitation of Trotsky precisely because, through the struggle of the international Left Opposition, Trotsky upheld the genuine ideas of Marxism against their Stalinist perversion. A clear understanding of his ideas is indispensable for a theoretical explanation of the development of Stalinism, including. its prolongation up to the present time. Above all, his ideas provide the key to the programme and perspectives, strategy and tactics, for both the political revolution in the East and social revolution in the West (as explained in Ted Grant’s article in this issue).
More and more of Trotsky’s articles and books are beginning to be published within the Soviet Union. The debate on his record and ideas is spreading beyond relatively narrow circles of intellectuals and professional historians. We confidently predict that whatever the attitude of the ruling elite (whether diehard Stalinists or pro-capitalist ‘radicals’), Trotsky’s ideas will become known in the next few years to millions and millions of workers in the Soviet Union – and will be taken up as indispensable weapons in their political struggle.
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