The Essential Trotsky (Routledge Revivals)

Leon Trotsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317744856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

When Lenin died and the Russian Revolution began to devour its leaders, Trotsky survived longer than most as an exile in Mexico, until his assassination in 1940. The Essential Trotsky, first published in 1963, demonstrates the significance of this innovative and radical thinker's contribution to the Bolshevik success, the magnetism of his personality, and also a certain tragic heroism discernible throughout his life.

The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk was written immediately after the events it describes, when Trotsky was attending the negotiations that extracted Russia from the First World War; The Lessons of October, an answer to his opponents in 1924, matches Lenin in power of analysis; and Stalin Falsifies History, written in 1927, presents the beginning of the distorting process by which Stalin secured his position, and defeated a range of attitudes, many more benign than his own, towards the future of the Revolution. This is a fascinating reissue that will be of value to students with an interest in early-twentieth century Russia, the Russian Revolution and the writings of Trotsky more generally.

The Russian Revolution

DOI: 10.4324/9781315794556-3

Events at the present time succeed one another so rapidly that it is difficult to reproduce them from memory even in their simple chronological order. I have no papers or documents at hand. At the same time the periodical breaks in the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk give me a certain amount of leisure which, under present conditions, is not likely to recur. I shall, therefore, try to sketch from memory the course and development of the November Revolution, reserving to myself the right to complete and correct my narrative at some future date, with the aid of documentary evidence.

What distinguished our party almost from the very first stage of the Revolution was the firm conviction that the logic of events would eventually place it in power. I am not speaking here of the theoreticians of our party, who, many years before the Revolution, even before the Revolution of 1905, had come to the conclusion, from a close analysis of the class relations in Russia, that the victorious course of a revolution would inevitably place the power of the State in the hands of the proletariat, supported by the wide masses of the poorest peasantry. The main foundation for this belief was the insignificance of the Russian middle-class democracy and the concentrated character of Russian industry, and, therefore, the immense social importance of the Russian working class. The insignificance of the Russian middle-class democracy is but the obverse side of the power and importance of the proletariat. True, the war temporarily deceived many people on this point, and, above all, it deceived the leading sections of middle-class democracy itself. The war assigned the decisive role in the Revolution to the army, and the old army was the peasantry.

Had the Revolution developed more normally, that is, in conditions of peace-time, such as prevailed in 1912, when it really began, the proletariat would inevitably have taken the leading role throughout, whilst the peasant masses would have been gradually towed along by the proletariat into the revolutionary whirlpool. But the war imparted an entirely different logic to the course of events. The army had organized the peasantry, not on a political, but on a military basis. Before the peasant masses found themselves united on a common platform of definite revolutionary demands and ideas, they had already become united in regiments, divisions, corps, and armies. The lower middle-class democrats, scattered throughout this army, and playing a leading part in it both in a military and intellectual sense, were almost entirely imbued with middle-class revolutionary sentiments. The deep social discontent of the masses grew ever deeper and strove for expression, particularly owing to the military débâcle of Tsardom. Immediately the Revolution broke out, the advanced sections of the proletariat revived the traditions of 1905 by calling upon the popular masses to organize in representative bodies, viz. the ‘Councils’ of delegates (Soviets).

The army thus had to send representatives to revolutionary bodies before its political consciousness in any way corresponded to the level of the rapidly developing revolutionary events. Whom could the soldiers send as their representatives? Naturally, only those intellectuals and semi-intellectuals who were to be found in their midst and who possessed at least a minimum amount of political knowledge, and were capable of giving utterance to it. In this way, by the will of the awakening army, the lower middle-class intellectuals found themselves suddenly raised to a position of enormous influence. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists, who in pre-war days had led a humdrum private life and laid no claim of any sort to political influence, became, overnight, representatives of whole corps and armies, and discovered that they were the ‘leaders’ of the Revolution. The haziness of their political ideas fully corresponded to the formless state of the revolutionary consciousness of the masses themselves. They contemptuously looked down upon us as mere sectarians because we were urging the social demands of the working class and the peasants in a most resolute and uncompromising fashion. At the same time these lower middle-class democrats, in spite of their proud demeanour of revolutionary upstarts, felt a profound distrust both of their own capacities and of the masses who had raised them to such an unexpectedly high place. Calling themselves Socialists and really regarding themselves as such, these intellectuals looked up to the political authority of the Liberal bourgeoisie, to its knowledge and its methods, with an ill-concealed respect. Hence the endeavour of the lower middle-class leaders to obtain, at all costs, the co-operation of the Liberal middle class by way of an alliance or coalition. The programme of the party of Social-Revolutionaries (known usually as the srs),¹based as it all is on vague humanitarian formulae, and employing general sentiments and moral constructions in the place of class-war methods, was the most suitable spiritual dress that could have been found for these improvised leaders. Their efforts to find some sort of support for their own intellectual and political helplessness in the impressive political and scientific knowledge of the bourgeosie found a theoretical sanction in the teaching of the Mensheviks,²who argued that the present Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, and could not, therefore, be carried through without the participation of the bourgeoisie in the Government. A natural bloc was thus formed between the srs and Mensheviks, expressing both the timid and hesitating political mind of the middle-class intellectuals and its vassal attitude towards Imperialist Liberalism.

¹ The srs carried on the tradition of the old Populists (Narodniks) who based themselves on the peasants and were a terrorist party; were divided into a right and a left wing, the left wing sharing Bolshevik aims and in 1918 forming a coalition government with Lenin. ² The right wing of the Russian Social Democratic party which in 1903 had split into Bolsheviks (under Lenin) and Mensheviks (under Martov). In 1917. they were defensists. The basic political doctrines of the two wings were virtually identical; it was personalities and differences on tactics that kept the two wings apart.

To us, it was perfectly clear that the logic of the class struggle would sooner or later destroy this temporary combination and fling aside the leaders of this period of transition. The hegemony of the lower middle-class intellectuals was at bottom the expression of the fact that the peasantry, suddenly called to take part in organized political life through the machinery of the army, had by sheer weight of numbers pushed aside and overwhelmed the proletariat for the time being. Even more, in so far as the middle-class leaders had been raised to a dizzy height by the powerful mass of the army, the working class itself, with the exception of its advanced sections, could not but become imbued with a certain political respect for them and try to maintain political contact with them for fear of finding themselves divorced from the peasantry. And this was a very serious matter, for the older generation still remembered the lesson of 1905, when the proletariat was crushed, just because the massive peasant reserves had not come up in time for the decisive battles. That is why in the first phase of the new Revolution also the proletarian masses showed themselves highly accessible to the political idealogy of the srs and the Mensheviks—especially as the Revolution had aroused the hitherto slumbering backward masses of workers, and thus made the hazy radicalism of the intellectuals a sort of preparatory school for them. The Council of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Delegates meant in these conditions the predominance of peasant amorphousness over proletarian Socialism, and the predominance of intellectual Radicalism over the peasant amorphousness.

The structure of Soviets rose so rapidly to a gigantic height mainly because of the leading part played in their labours by the intellectuals, with their technical knowledge and middle-class connections. But to us it was perfectly clear that this grand structure was built on deep internal contradictions and would inevitably collapse at the next stage of the Revolution.

The Question of War

The Revolution grew directly out of the war, and the latter became the touchstone for all parties and forces of the Revolution. The intellectual leaders had been against the war. Many of them, while the Tsar was still on his throne, considered themselves as belonging to the left wing of the International, and were Zimmer-waldians.¹But everything changed immediately they felt themselves to be in ‘responsible’ positions. To pursue a revolutionary Socialist policy would have meant in the circumstances a break with their own and the Entente bourgeoisie, but, as we have said, the political impotence of the middle-class intellectuals and semi-intellectuals led them to seek protection in an alliance with bourgeois Liberalism. Hence the pitiful and truly disgraceful role of the middle-class leaders on the question of the war. They confined themselves to lamentations and rhetoric, and addressed secret exhortations and entreaties to the Allied Governments, while, in practice, they walked the same paths as the Liberal bourgeoisie. The soldiers in the trenches were, of course, unable to follow the argument that the war, in which they had fought for three years, had changed its character because certain new personalities, calling themselves Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, were taking part in the Government at Petrograd. Miliukov¹had replaced the chinovnik Pokrovsky;²Tereschenko³then succeeded Miliukov—that meant that bureaucratic perfidy was first replaced by militant Cadet Imperialism, then by unprincipled nebulousness and political servility; but this did not result in any objeaive changes, and there seemed no way out of the terrible vicious circle of the war. In this lay the primary cause for the further dissolution of the army. The agitators had been telling the masses of soldiers that the Tsarist Government had been driving them to slaughter for no object or sense; but those who replaced the Tsar were able neither to change in any way the character of the war nor to make a fight for peace.

¹ In Sept. 1915 an international conference of anti-war Socialists was held at Zimmerwald in Switzerland at which both Lenin and Trotsky played an important part. The conference repudiated all Socialists who supported the war, and looked to the formation of a new International to replace the Second International, the ‘international of social patriots’. In April 1916 a follow-up conference was held at Kienthal at which Lenin was present but not Trotsky. ¹ P. N. Miliukov (1859–1943) leader of the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), a member of the Duma and Foreign Minister in the first Provisional Government. ² The last Czarist Foreign Minister, a typical civil servant hence the contemptuous ‘Chinovnik’. ³ M. I. Tereschenko, a prominent financier; Finance Minister in the first Provisional Government and later Foreign Minister.

During the first months of the Revolution there had been a mere marking of time. This provoked the impatience alike of the army and of the Allied Governments. Hence the offensive of July 1st. It had been demanded by the Allies, who insisted that the old Tsarist bills must be honoured by the Revolution. Frightened at their own impotence and at the growing discontent of the masses, the lower middle-class leaders readily accepted these demands. They, indeed, began to think that an attack by the Russian Army was all that was wanted in order to attain peace. An offensive began to appear to them as a way out of the wilderness, as a means of solving the problem of the situation, as the one hope of salvation. It is difficult to imagine a more monstrous and more criminal illusion. At that time they spoke of the offensive in exactly the same terms in which the social patriots of all countries had spoken at the beginning of the war about the necessity of supporting the cause of national defence, of strengthening the sacred unity of the nation, etc. All their Zimmerwaldian internationalism vanished as by magic.

To us, who were in opposition, it was clear that the offensive was a terribly perilous step, that it might even endanger the whole Revolution. We warned all and sundry that the army, newly awakened and shaken as it was by the thunder of events which as yet it had only half understood, could not be sent into battle without previously imparting to it new ideas which it could assimilate. We warned, remonstrated, threatened. But the parties in power, bound as they were to the bourgeoisie, had no other way left open to them, and naturally treated us with enmity and implacable hatred.

The Campaign Against the Bolsheviks

The future historian will be unable, without deep emotion, to look through the Russian press for May and June 1917, when the minds of the people were being prepared for the offensive. Almost all the articles, without exception, in all the official and semiofficial organs were directed against the Bolsheviks. There was scarcely a charge, scarcely a calumny, that was not levelled against us in that period. Of course, the leading role in this campaign was played by the Cadet bourgeoisie, whose class instinct led it to recognize that the question at issue was not merely the offensive, but the entire further course of the Revolution and, in the first place, the form of Government authority. The whole bourgeois machinery for manufacturing ‘public opinion’ was put into motion at full steam. All the Government offices and institutions, publications, public platforms, and university chairs were drawn into the service of this one general aim: of making the Bolsheviks impossible as a political party. In this concentrated effort and in this dramatic newspaper campaign against the Bolsheviks were already contained the first germs of the civil war which was bound to accompany the next phase of the Revolution. The sole aim of all this incitement and slander was to create an impenetrable wall of estrangement and enmity between the labouring masses on the one hand and ‘educated society’ on the other.

The Liberal bourgeoisie understood that it could not win the support of the masses without the help of the lower middle-class democrats, who, as we pointed out above, had temporarily become the leaders of the revolutionary organizations. Consequently, the immediate aim of the political incitements against the Bolsheviks was to bring about an irreconcilable feeling of enmity between our party and the wide ranks of the Socialist intellectuals, who, having broken away from the proletariat, could not but fall into political bondage to the Liberal bourgeoisie.

It was during the first All-Russian Congress of the Soviets (June 16th) that the first alarming crash of thunder occurred which warned of the coming storm. Our party had projected an armed demonstration at Petrograd for June 23rd. Its primary object was to bring pressure to bear upon the Congress. ‘Take over the power in the State’—this it was that the Petrograd workers wanted to tell the srs and Mensheviks who had come from all parts of the country. ‘Spurn the bourgeoisie! Have done with the idea of coalition, and take the reins of power into your own hands!’ We were quite certain that if the srs and Mensheviks broke with the Liberal bourgeoisie, they would be compelled to seek support from the most energetic and most advanced elements of the proletariat, which would thus obtain the leading role in the Revolution. But that was just what frightened the lower middle-class leaders. In conjunction with the Government, in which they had their own representatives, and shoulder to shoulder with the Liberal and counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, they opened a truly savage campaign against the projected demonstration so soon as they got wind of it. Everything possible was set in motion against us. We were at that time a small minority at the Congress. and we gave way; the demonstration did not take place. But all the same it left a very deep mark in the minds of the two contending parties, and made the gulf between them deeper and their mutual antagonism more acute. At the closed sitting of the Presidential Bureau of the Congress, in which also representatives of the various parties took place, Tsereteli,¹then a member of the Coalition Government, speaking with all the resoluteness of a narrow-minded lower middle-class doctrinaire, declared that the only danger threatening the Revolution was the Bolsheviks and the Petrograd workers who had been armed by them. He therefore argued that the people ‘who did not know how to use arms’ must be disarmed. Of course, he had in mind the Petrograd workers, and that portion of the Petrograd garrison which supported our party. However, no disarming took place, as the political and psychological conditions were not yet ripe enough for such an extreme measure.

¹ I. G. Tsereteli (1882- ) leader of the Georgian Mensheviks, returned from exile in 1917; a member of the Soviet Executive Committee and a minister in the second Provisional Government.

To compensate the masses for the loss of their demonstration, the Congress of the Soviets itself organized an unarmed demonstration on July 1st. And that day became the day of our political triumph. The masses turned out in overwhelming numbers, but although they came out in answer to the call of the official Soviet authority—a sort of counterblast to the miscarried demonstration of June 23rd—the workers and soldiers had inscribed on their banners and placards the demands and battlecries of our party: ‘Down with the secret treaties!’ ‘Down with the policy of strategical offensives!’ ‘Long live an honourable peace!’ ‘Down with the ten capitalist Ministers!’ ‘All power for the Soviets!’ There were only three placards with expressions of confidence in the Coalition Government: one from a Cossack regiment, another from the Plekhanov¹group, and a third from the Petrograd ‘Bund’, an organization consisting largely of non-proletarian elements. This demonstration proved not only to our opponents, but also to ourselves, that we were far stronger in Petrograd than had been imagined.

¹ G. V. Plekhanov (1856–1918) the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Russian Marxism and co-founder of the first Russian Marxist organization, the ‘Group for the Emancipation of Labour’; in 1917 he was an ardent defensist. The co-founders of the ‘Group’ were Paul Axelrod (1850–1928), Leon Deutsch, Vera Zasulich and V. Ignatov.

The Offensive of July 1St

As a result of this demonstration of the revolutionary masses a Government crisis seemed inevitable. But the impression made by the demonstration was wiped out by the news from the front announcing that the revolutionary army had taken the offensive. On the very same day when the workers and garrison of Petrograd had been demanding the publication of the secret treaties and a public offer of peace, Kerensky²had thrown the revolutionary troops into the offensive. This, of course, was no fortuitous coincidence. Everything had been arranged beforehand, and the moment for the offensive had been chosen not on military, but on political grounds. On July 2nd there was a series of so-called patriotic demonstrations in the streets of Petrograd. The Nevsky Prospekt, the main bourgeois artery, was full of excited groups of people, amongst which officers, journalists, and well-dressed ladies were carrying on a bitter campaign against the Bolsheviks.

² A. F. Kerensky (1881- ) lea...