[Socialism Today, No. 30, July 1998]
Vadim Rogovin’s book, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, has just been published in Britain. Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party general secretary, reviews this inspirational account of the Trotskyists‘ heroic struggle against Stalin’s attempt to physically annihilate them.
One of the purposes of the post-1989 bourgeois ideological offensive is to wipe from the historical consciousness vital lessons from the past. An army of ‚historians‘ have rewritten the history of the French and Russian revolutions, the events in France 1968, and even seemingly ‚remote‘ events, like the English revolution of the 17th century. Naturally, the degeneration of revolution, particularly the Russian revolution, is eagerly seized on to discredit revolution in general. The Figes, Solzhenitsyns, Conquests, etc., demonstrate in the crudest terms that ‚Stalinism is lodged within Bolshevism‘, out of which it ‚organically‘ grew. The aim of such revisionism has a serious contemporary purpose: to obliterate any historical reference point for future uprisings, revolutions or movements of the working class.
How refreshing then to read Rogovin’s book. It is like taking in great gulps of oxygen, thereby escaping the cloying historical fog, the crude bourgeois propaganda, which passes for ‚history‘ by most ‚modern‘ academics and commentators.
The period dealt with is one of the darkest in the history of the labour movement and the Soviet Union itself. Yet even today it is not possible to fight for a new socialist world without coming to terms with why these events took place and drawing the lessons. What Rogovin demonstrates brilliantly is that against a background of the crimes, betrayals and savagery of Stalin and Stalinism, the indestructible faith in socialism was kept alive, above all, by the Left Opposition. The Trotskyists were at their most defiant as they were butchered by Stalin’s executioners.
It is true that this is a well-ploughed field. Trotsky and his son, Leon Sedov, subjected the Moscow Trials to the most rigorous Marxist analysis. However, Rogovin has had access to recently opened archives which means that his book is an absolutely indispensable companion volume to Trotsky’s broad analysis, bringing new insights and information.
We discover, for instance, that even Khrushchev in 1923, supported Trotsky in the battle to secure ‚inner party democracy‘. This attracted the suspicion of Stalin and his entourage. Khrushchev, then a fervent Stalinist, even feared that he could fall victim to the Stalinist terror which the Moscow Trials represented. Rogovin’s approach is immeasurably superior to that adopted by Deutscher in his trilogy on Trotsky. Deutscher, while introducing a new generation to many of the ideas of Trotsky, separated himself from Trotsky on many vital points on the analysis of Stalinism, the formation of the Fourth International, etc. Nor does Rogovin have the approach of those, like the historian Tiktin who, while purporting to defend Trotsky, attacks his main ideas. Rogovin’s book is an unvarnished, meticulous defence of Trotsky and the Left Opposition which is indispensable reading, not just for Marxists, but for any literate observer who wishes to understand the inner mechanism of the Moscow Trials and the evolution of the Soviet Union.
This is the first of Rogovin’s books to be translated into English and is the fourth in a projected six-volume history covering the period 1922-40. The first five volumes have already been published and the sixth will be completed by the end of 1998.
The Third Civil War
The author begins with an account of the preparations for the first show trials in 1936. Their causes lay in the ‚bitter contradictions‘ which were ripping apart Soviet society. Both Sedov (in his important analysis, Red Book) and Trotsky, pointed out that the gradual improvement in the material conditions of the masses „after the cruel poverty during the first Five-Year Plan was raising the consciousness of the workers, inducing a desire to defend their interests and actively participate in political life“.
Rogovin, summarising Sedov’s views, comments: „Stalin was attempting to smother their growing social protest with political repression. In order to lend it a ruthless character, he invented ‚terrorism‘. If in the past he had called any social dissatisfaction ‚Trotskyism‘, now he was identifying Trotskyism‘ with ‚terrorism‘. Any person who was critical of the Stalinist regime was no longer threatened with a concentration camp or prison, but with immediate execution“. Sedov further pointed out that the Moscow Trials demonstrated the insecure position of the ruling clique: „People don’t engage in such bloody affairs from a surfeit of power“.
At the same time, Stalin, reflecting the nationalist and bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution, in attempting to come to terms with the world bourgeoisie, offered them the heads of the ‚Old Bolsheviks‘. This symbolised a complete break from the revolutionary and internationalist aims of the October revolution.
In his introduction, Rogovin makes the important point that the Soviet Union experienced not one civil war (1918-20), but three. There was the civil war of 1928-33, of forced collectivisation which significantly weakened the Soviet Union, although „it did accomplish the ‚pacification‘ of the peasantry“. The Moscow Trials, the ‚Yezhov Terror‘, is correctly-described by Rogovin as a „preventative civil war“, the main purpose of which was to annihilate all those who were connected with the October revolution, even though most of the defendants had already politically capitulated to Stalin in the previous period. However, the Spanish revolution, to which Rogovin and his collaborators devote a number of important chapters, if successful, would have ignited a political revolution in Russia itself. In this situation, even the capitulationist ‚Old Bolsheviks‘ could have become a rallying point for the masses to overthrow the Stalinist grandees.
The author also makes the telling point that not one of the anti-Communists who have analysed the Moscow Trials of 1933-38, bothered to turn to the testimony of the main defendant, Leon Trotsky.
Solzhenitsyn, for instance, who has been lionised by the bourgeoisie of the West for his unscholarly Gulag Archipelago, contains no references whatsoever to Trotsky’s works! Nor does he give a proper account of the Trotskyists‘ heroic battles in the camps. He is dismissive and cynical.
A period of repression and executions had preceded the first show trial in 1936. For instance, Trotsky’s son-in-law. Platon Volkov, then a worker in Omsk, was shot with a large group of ‚Trotskyists‘ from Moscow, Gorky and other cities in 1936. Rogovin shows the objective reasons why Stalin organised the trials but also the particularly savage hatred which he retained for the Old Bolsheviks.
Many superficial commentators at the time remarked on the self-abasement of Old Bolsheviks who had led the October revolution: ‚How could they fall so low?‘ Trotsky answered by pointing to the long, slow process of breaking them: isolation, denigration and torture. Not for them the fate of Danton or Robespierre in the French revolution. They struck a defiant note partly because they were removed and executed at the height of their powers. By 1935 Zinoviev had been in prison for a year and a half, and wrote to Stalin: „My soul burns with one desire: to prove to you that I am no longer an enemy… I stare for long stretches at your portrait and those of the other members of the Politburo… I am yours body and soul… I am ready to do anything to be worthy of your forgiveness and leniency“.
Others were firmer. Stalin demanded of Yagoda: „You have to torture them (Zinoviev and Kamenev) so that they finally tell the truth and reveal all their ties“. Kamenev bore himself with courage, only breaking when Stalin’s secret police chief, Yezhov, threatened that Kamenev’s oldest son, who had been in prison since 1935, would also be charged and shot. Though Yezhov had promised to save his oldest son, both he and his middle son (who was 16 at the time) were shot in 1938/39. Ivan Smirnov, an Old Bolshevik who defeated the White General Kolchak during the civil war, initially refused to make any concessions. Interrogated for a whole day, he replied: „I deny this, I deny it once again, I deny it“. One of the former leaders of the Left Opposition, IT Smilga, was even more implacable. He declared at his interrogation: „I am your enemy“. He was therefore not a defendant at one of the public trials but was shot on 10 January 1937.
At the trial in August 1936 where the main defendants were Zinoviev and Kamenev, Rogovin shows that not one document or piece of material evidence was produced. The charge that Trotsky was the organiser of a centre with ties to the Gestapo was reminiscent of the slanders against Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 for being ‚German agents‘. This absurdity was compounded by the fact that Zinoviev and Trotsky were Jews, supposedly in league with the Nazi exterminators of the Jewish people. On the other hand, Vyshinsky, the main prosecutor at the trial, had been a right-wing Menshevik in 1917 and had ordered the arrest of Lenin. Notwithstanding that he demanded that „we shoot the mad dogs – every single one of them“. One of the factors in Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s confession was the hope of a reprieve. But as Trotsky pointed out „He (Stalin) made a compromise with them through the GPU investigator, and then deceived them through the executioner“.
Rogovin’s account of how Stalin’s inner circle mocked the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev, is sickening and exposes Stalin’s anti-Semitic views. While the executions earned the support of Kerensky and Miliukov, who had been exiled after the October revolution, it alienated democratic public opinion in the West. During the trial, Trotsky was imprisoned by the social democratic government in Norway, who had only granted asylum a short time before and were repudiating their actions.
Stalin’s use for sabotage
Rogovin shows in a very clear way the aims of Stalin in the Moscow Trials, as well as their inner mechanism. Stalin had used the murder of Kirov to initiate repression. But his corpse could not be continually used. Zinoviev and Kamenev were not important in and of themselves, having completely capitulated to Stalin, but were used as a necessary step for the removal of Trotsky from the political arena. The same applied to the role assumed by Radek and Pyatakov in the second trial in 1937. Prior to their arrest they were faithful weapons in Stalin’s hands. Pyatakov had offered to personally shoot defendants, including his former wife. Radek’s ‚most filthy deed‘ was the betrayal of Bliumkin, Trotsky’s former secretary, in 1929. Bliumkin was shot without trial. Even those who had nothing to do with the Opposition, but who were former Old Bolsheviks, had „began to boycott Radek and stop greeting him“. But, as Trotsky commentated, „He (Stalin) had no other prominent and famous ex-Trotskyists whom he could set in motion for a new show trial. He was forced to sacrifice Pyatakov and Radek“.
Rogovin demolishes the arguments of Volkogonov, an alleged ‚biographer‘ of Trotsky who endlessly repeats that Trotsky’s ‚absolute rejection of Stalinism‘ was to be explained by his personal hatred for Stalin. He dismisses Volkogonov and the current ‚Russian democrats‘ who measure „the struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism by the yardstick of the unprincipled squabbles between Gorbachev and Yeltsin“ in the recent past.
He also shows that the traditions of the October revolution were still alive in the minds of the masses in the 1930s. The executions after the first Moscow Trial evoked sympathy amongst workers, with slogans appearing in Moscow factories: ‚Down with the murderers of the leaders of October‘, and ‚Too bad they didn’t finish off the Georgian snake‘!
Bukharin and Rykov, of the former right opposition, politically prostrated themselves before Stalin. They were personally and politically isolated and subjected to unmerciful baiting at their ‚trial‘ at the plenum of the Central Committee in February-March 1937. Rogovin comments that the transcript of this meeting „records about 1,000 interjections which were uttered during the discussion of the Bukharin and Rykov case“.
As with Trotsky before, slanders, such as that Rykov had joined Zinoviev and Kamenev in opposing the October uprising, were hurled at him by Stalin. The former right opposition of Rykov and Bukharin were linked to ’sabotage‘ and ‚wrecking‘. It is true that there was economic dislocation at the time, which prompted dissatisfaction amongst the masses, but this was a product of the bungling of the bureaucracy. By way of explanation, Stalin offered up the heads of ’saboteurs‘ and wreckers. In the chapter, ‚Why Did Stalin Need Sabotage‘, Rogovin shows how Stalin’s rule and that of the bureaucracy, squandered the advantages of the planned economy. Forced collectivisation and industrialisation, together with the results of Stalin’s extremely crude miscalculations before and during the war, led to an enormous cost being paid by the Soviet people.
He points out that Hitler’s army seized Soviet territory twice the size of France, in which more than a third of the USSR’s population lived: „In the occupied territory, approximately 32,000 factories, plants and other industrial enterprises, not to mention small enterprises and shops, were fully or partially destroyed and plundered“. Stalin’s policies led to total losses of „about two-thirds of the national wealth, which was located prior to the war on occupied territory“.
Rogovin also shows that in the amalgams constructed by Stalin and his henchmen, there was always a grain of truth. There were ‚economic crimes‘ by the bureaucracy. Occasionally, Stalin would lean on the masses, singling out a particularly blatant example of corruption, thus using mass pressure as a whip against the bureaucracy who more and more swallowed up the surplus which undermined the achievements of the planned economy.
The sections of Rogovin’s book dealing with the trial of the generals and the subsequent execution of those like Tukhachevsky and the flower of the Red Army, are a complete vindication of Trotsky’s analysis at the time, but also contain additional new material. The same applies to the excellent account of the developments of the Spanish revolution, of the executions carried out in the cellars of the GPU in Spain, despite the resistance of people like Largo Caballero. Above all, the effects of the revolution world-wide, and in Russia itself, are traced out. He points out that „a significant part of the Soviet participants in the Spanish war were ruthlessly exterminated“. Even Jose Diaz, the leader of the Spanish Communist Party, ‚committed suicide‘ in 1942 by throwing himself out of the window of his Moscow apartment.
The most dangerous letter
With his slogan of ‚uprooting and routing‘, Stalin also gave the signal that the struggle against ‚Trotskyism‘ was to be extended from the propaganda stage to the task of physically annihilating Trotskyists and Trotsky himself. In the case of the assassination of Ignatz Reiss, who broke from the GPU to come over to the Fourth International, no less than 20 Stalinist agents were used, including former White Guard officers. Reiss had heroically declared prior to his murder that, despite all the crimes of Stalin, he remained committed to socialism. In a letter to the Central Committee breaking with Stalin, he also declared that he had „enough strength to ’start all over again‘.“
This attempt to physically annihilate Trotskyists abroad was matched with the ferocious extermination of the remaining Trotskyists who remained in Russia – in inhuman conditions in concentration camps. The chapter, ‚Trotskyists in the Camps‘, is perhaps the most moving and yet the most inspiring in Rogovin’s work. It starts with the famous extract from Leopold Trepper’s book, The Great Game, which I reviewed in the Militant (predecessor of The Socialist) in 1978. We were the first in Britain to draw attention to Trepper’s recognition of the role of the Trotskyists. Rogovin gives priceless examples and detail of just how heroic they were.
He points out that the Trotskyists were brought to Moscow in 1936 „from their prisons and places of exile for reinvestigation, whereupon they endured monstrous tortures… However, not a single one of them agreed to give testimony that was demanded, and not one of them was tried during the open trials“. He writes that: „Even at the first stage of the Great Purge it became clear that despite all the preceding slander campaigns and furious repression, a new, young generation of Trotskyists had grown up in the Soviet Union; their courage amazed even their executioners“.
In his memoirs ex-Stalinist secret agent, Krivitsky, states: „We belong to the generation which must perish. Stalin has said that the entire pre-revolutionary and war generation must be destroyed as a millstone around the neck of the revolution. But now they’re shooting the young ones, 17 and 18 years of age – girls and boys who were born in the Soviet state and never knew anything else… And lots of them go to their deaths crying, ‚Long Live Trotsky!’“ Ordinary political prisoners were given the initials KRD (counter-revolutionary activity). But the Trotskyists were given the initials KRTD (counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activity). The letter T was the most ‚dangerous‘ in the alphabet in Stalin’s camps.
These heroic figures were the implacables, the defiant Trotskyists who organised the famous Kolyma and Vorkuta hunger strikes. A convoy of Trotskyist prisoners was being sent from Kazakhstan to Vladivostok. They shouted through the windows of the train to workers, „Down with the counter-revolutionary Central Committee of the VKP headed by Stalin!… Comrade workers! Before you stand political prisoners of the Stalinist regime, Bolshevik-Leninist Trotskyists who are being taken to Kolyma for physical extermination. The best part of the proletariat is languishing in Stalinist prisons. A gang of functionaries and bureaucrats, headed by Stalin, is sitting in the government“.
When they arrived in Vladivostok, they unfurled a banner with ‚Down With Stalin!‘ and began to shout: „They write that there are no political prisoners, but they are sending political prisoners in bunches into the camps. Workers! Look – before you are Communists-Bolsheviks-Leninists, surrounded by a convoy of fascism … From exile on their way to Kolyma, about one hundred of them (Trotskyists) were herded through Vladivostok. They walked along and sang: ‚You fell victim in the fatal struggle, dying with unbounded love for the people‘. The guards beat them with rifle butts, but the singing continued. They were driven into the hold of the ship, but even from there the singing could be heard. In Kolyma they declared a hunger strike, demanding a political regimen: correspondence, permission to read, separation from common criminals. On the fifteenth day, forced feeding began. They refused to give in. On the ninetieth day the administration promised to meet their demands. They called off the hunger strike“.
One of the most moving accounts is that which deals with Trotsky’s first wife, Sokolovskaya. She had spent a year in solitary confinement when she met a woman who recorded her observation later. Sokolovskaya „told me about the conceptions of Aslan Davidogly (the conspiratorial name which prisoners use when referring to Trotsky)“. She expressed concern for her grandson, commenting, „In tsarist times they did not take away the children… But this one, he wants to annihilate everyone. To the seventh generation, Liova resembles his grandfather and, like him, seems to be talented. What will happen to him?“ She expressed her feelings for Trotsky. „She looked at me with radiant eyes, proud of her memories of him, of her love for him. And I, who had yet to understand the tribulations of old age, sat in silent wonder at this woman, and the glow of her reminiscences“. The tyrant Stalin took revenge on every possible relation of Trotsky, including his younger son Sergei, who had no connection initially with politics.
Rogovin’s account of the ‚Vorkuta tragedy‘ is epic and demonstrates the almost superhuman heroism of the last band of Trotskyists who were wiped out by Stalin. In October 1936, the culminating point in the Vorkuta tragedy began to unfold – all the Trotskyists who were in the surrounding camps declared a hunger strike. This lasted an unprecedented 132 days. In the spring of 1937, on orders from Moscow, the hunger strikers were told that their demands were being met. Then they were all sent to the ‚brick factory‘, a former site for special punishments, where in the autumn of 1937 the mass shootings of the Trotskyist prisoners began. No doubt Stalin thought that by their physical extermination these heroes and heroines would be forgotten. Through Rogovin’s book, and other accounts, he clearly failed.
In a sense, the knot of history is retied in this book, with the most important ‚blank space‘ – the history of the last Trotskyists in the USSR and their role – being filled in. It is on their shoulders, and those of Trotsky, that the new generation of socialist fighters in the former USSR and throughout the world will stand. This book is an invaluable recognition of their role. But it is a lot more than that. It fills out and deepens Trotsky’s analysis and gives the new generation much better understanding of the mechanism of Stalinism. This, in turn is indispensable for understanding the evolution of the Soviet Union to the position today where capitalism has been restored.
1998 is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Fourth International. There could be no better way to celebrate the accomplishments of Trotsky and the immortal Russian Left Opposition who perished at the hands of Stalin, but whose example and ideas live on, than to give this book the widest circulation. It is therefore, important that supporters of the Socialist Party in particular but hopefully, wide circles of workers will read this book and learn from it. We eagerly look forward to all six volumes of Rogovin’s work appearing in English.
Schreibe einen Kommentar