Published On : Feb 24,2022
The present anthology is a collection of articles written by prominent leaders of the Bolshevik Party in response to Trotsky’s attempt to revise the history of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Bolshevik Party and the guiding ideology of Leninism in 1924-25, immediately after the death of Lenin. The contributors include Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya, Bukharin, Sokolnikov and Kuusinin. The anthology also includes a brief response from Trotsky, where he tries to hide his underhanded attempts to revise Leninism and smuggle in Trotskyism and finally the ultimate response from the Central Committee of the RCP (B), which clearly exposes these vain attempts of Trotsky. We have reprinted the book as published by the Communist Party of Great Britain in May 1925.
The collection is particularly important because it includes criticisms of Trotskyism from the likes of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, who later deviated from Leninism and played the role of renegades to Soviet Socialism and, as a consequence, were purged by the Bolshevik Party. These figures have been used by the “critics” of Stalin and Soviet Union including Trotsky and Trotskyites of different shades as evidence of the alleged purge of “Lenin’s CC” by Stalin during the so-called “Stalinist terror”. However, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, who were later purged from the RCP (B) during the period of Stalin due to their departure from Marxism-Leninism and their conspiracies against the Soviet State and Party, did play commendable roles during their period as committed Bolsheviks. They also committed certain mistakes during this period, but they subjected themselves to honest self-criticisms during the same. The method of seeking the cause of the ultimate departure of a communist from communism in their personal history from the beginning is not a dialectical method at all but a metaphysical method. Dialectics teaches us that the world is a complex of processes that are constantly changing and the task of the revolutionary is to understand the generality of the motion as well as the particularity of the motion at each stage. Even Trotsky did play an important role during the October insurrection under the leadership of the Leninist party.
However, Trotsky stands apart from the above-mentioned figures in a substantial way: Trotsky never truly accepted Leninism and Bolshevism. From mid-1917 to 1924, he continued to express his allegiance to Bolshevism. However, immediately after the death of Lenin he began to show his true colours. Even between 1917 and 1923, Lenin constantly fought against Trotsky on questions of central importance like the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the role of Trade Unions during the dictatorship of the proletariat, the economic policy and attitude towards peasantry. Trotsky did submit to the party discipline and accepted the criticisms made by Lenin and the party before the death of Lenin. However, from 1924, Trotsky began his attempts to retrospectively revise the history of the Russian Revolution from 1903 to February Revolution of 1917 and the history of Socialist Revolution from March 1917 to October 1917. In these attempts by stealth, Trotsky in essence argued that in order to accomplish the Socialist Revolution in October 1917, Lenin had to rechristen Leninism and Bolshevism through Trotskyism! In order to prove this, the entire history of the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Party and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism was distorted by Trotsky in the most dishonest way. Trotsky presents a picture in which Lenin had become the best Trotskyite after April 1917!
In these guileful tricks, Trotsky smuggles back his neo- Lassallean theory of “permanent revolution”, which is characterized by its inability to analyze the concrete relations between class forces and ignoring the masses of working peasants. Peasants are presented as unknown variables, a wall that can fall any way. Proletariat is presented, not as the leading revolutionary class, but as the ‘only revolutionary class’. This idea is a departure from the basic Marxist principle that it is the masses that make history, though masses can make history only under the leadership of proletariat organized as a political class under the leadership of its vanguard party. Trotsky is obliged in this endeavour to distort Lenin’s theory of democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and claims that it is meaningful only if perceived as a particular phase in the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it makes sense only in so far as it is a step towards “permanent revolution”.
The kernel of this Trotskyite stratagem was the total neglect of the peasant masses and that of the difference between the stage of peoples’ democratic revolution, which will be based on the class alliance between the entire peasantry and the proletariat, and the stage of socialist revolution based on the strategic class alliance of the poor and middle peasantry and the proletariat. In the particular conditions of Russia, Lenin explained, even in the stage of socialist revolution, the very foundations of dictatorship of the proletariat depended on the strong alliance between the working peasant masses and the proletariat. He had argued, and the history of Russian Revolution during the years of Civil War and ‘war communism’ and then NEP proved him entirely correct, that any attempt to bring socialism through decrees from above in a predominantly peasant country like Russia is doomed to failure from the outset. It was clear to the Bolshevik leadership of the party that the masses of peasants must be persuaded to accept the socialist forms of agriculture through leadership by examples. The path was full of complexities and establishment of socialist property relations in agriculture in the Soviet Union could only have taken place through a step-by-step process. The proletarian line of collectivization was clear but it had to be carried out through many short-term programs. However, for Trotsky, the peasant masses could simply be leapt over in the formulation of policy by the Soviet party and state, as evident from his stand on ‘militarization of labour’ and ‘statization of trade unions’ as well as his stand on policy on prices in the early-1920s.
In essence, Trotsky had never quite left his own neo-Lassallean theory of “permanent revolution” and as soon as he sensed an opportune moment (after the death of Lenin), he attempted to smuggle in his petty-bourgeois theory, which was Right in deed and Left in phraseology. This is one of the characteristic features of Trotskyism, as identified accurately by Kuusinin at that time:
“In reality the case is this: In his actions he deviates towards the Right, but he describes these actions in Left, very Left, terms. The Right type is the type of the man of action who speaks little, who does his work and says nothing about it. The Left type, is a man, anxious to play a prominent public role, a man who talks a great deal and does very little, and knows little about work except to describe it. But the descriptions given by the Left type differ entirely from the work actually done by the Right type.
“Comrade Trotsky is not simply an ordinary opportunist. He possesses a finely developed sense of the æsthetic. He feels the æsthetic defects of the external form of opportunist policy. The external forms of politics please him more and more in proportion to their deviation to the Left. In art this may be very good, even excellent, and the Bible praises those whose right hand knoweth not what their left hand doeth; but in politics every inconsistency between form and contents, between description and actuality, between theory and practice, is invariably detrimental.”
The contributors to this volume like Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Sokolnikov and Kuusinin have taken Trotsky to task in a very clear manner and the cheap tricks of Trotsky, his individualism, intellectual dishonesty and his attempts to rechristen Leninism as Trotskyism are exposed in the most lucid way.
Trostky, before the special plenum of the CC of RCP (B) on the Trotskyite deviation, wrote a letter to the Plenum of the CC expressing his inability to attend the Plenum due to bad health. This letter, too, is included in the present anthology. In this letter, he tries, in part, to apologetically hide his underhanded tactics of revising Leninism and Bolshevism and putting himself in the centre of things and, in part, tries to stick to his theory of “permanent revolution”, though the other way round. The Plenum of the CC responded to this letter and once again exposed the vain attempts of Trotsky to defend himself and revealed the true anti-Marxist-Leninist character of Trotskyism. This response is the last chapter of the present collection.
Also included in this volume is the foreword written by J.T. Murphy on behalf of the CPGB in 1925 when the latter published this anthology in English. This foreword gives an overview of the history and central issues of the entire controversy from the perspective of CPGB, which was still a revolutionary communist party at that time.
There are few words of caution that need to be shared with the readers of the present volume. In some of the articles, Bolshevik leaders reiterate the need of a ‘monolithic party’ as the true Leninist and Bolshevik party. This has to be understood in the context of the demand for freedom of factions by Trotsky who, finding himself in minority, had suddenly become a “warrior for internal party democracy” after playing the role of the “bureaucrat of the bureaucrats” during the period of ‘war communism’! The reiteration by the Bolsehviks against Trotsky of the need of a ‘monolithic party’ was not a negation of the need for two-line struggle within the party, but a response to the Trotskyite cries for ‘factionalist freedom’. In view of the mudslinging and slandering by Trotskyites and agents of imperialism, this clarification was in order because the present readers might misunderstand the contextual meaning of ‘monolithic’ here, which simply means that factions within the party with their own internal discipline cannot be tolerated, as it would lead to a ‘party within the party’ and would rob the revolutionary proletarian party off its fighting ability and character. This is in total congruence with the Leninist principal of democratic centralism, which stipulates that till the political line is determined, full freedom of debates and discussion and once the political line is determined by the majority of the party, full centralism. Needless to say that in the relation between democracy and centralism, one transmutes into the other. In other words, broader the base of democracy in the determination of political line, higher is the peak of centralism in action.
The second important caveat is that the consistent emphasis of Bolsheviks, as evident in the articles of present anthology, on the role of working peasants in maintaining socialist system and dictatorship of the proletariat in the particular situations of a peasant country (where peasants predominate in the total population) and the importance of giving freedom of private property and private trade to the peasants during the period of NEP and bringing them to the socialist forms of agriculture only through persuasion and leading by example, must be understood in the historical context. Peasants constituted 85 percent of Russian population in 1917. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks were obliged to implement the most radical bourgeois democratic land program, namely, nationalization of land, distribution of land to peasant families on labour principle and consumption principle on the basis of usufruct (the right to use) and the prohibition of exploitation of wage labour. During NEP, the peasants were given the freedom to trade their grain surpluses after paying the tax in kind to the Soviet government and requisition was discontinued. This was a ‘strategic retreat’ in order to save the worker-peasant alliance on which proletarian power depended in Socialist Russia and which had been weakened during the period of ‘war communism’ partly due to objective conditions of civil war and partly due to the mistakes of the likes of Trotsky and Bukharin and the adventurist practice of the poor peasant committees who targeted not only the kulaks and rich capitalist farmers, a minority, but the middle peasants too, who now constituted the largest part of the entire peasant population after the land reforms introduced by the October Revolution. Lenin explained that in a country like Russia the socialist construction is bound to be a series of ‘strategic offensives’ followed by ‘retreats’.
In the Tenth Party Congress, Lenin corrected the mistakes of certain party leaders, in principal, Trotsky and Bukharin on the one hand and anarcho-syndicalists like Shlyapnikov and Kollontai on the other, committed during the period of ‘war communism’. Lenin pointed out that the former argued for ‘statization of the trade unions’ whereas the latter faction argued for the ‘trade unionization of the state’ and both, despite different lines, represent economism. The former is the right-wing of economism whereas the latter is the left-wing of economism and precisely due to the economistic understanding, both fail to understand the importance of working peasant masses in Socialist Russia. Lenin pointed out that both attitudes represent dangers for ‘smytchka’, or, ‘worker-peasant alliance’, essential for the survival of proletarian power in Soviet Russia.
In contrast to the Russia of early-20th century, in countries like India, the relations of class forces have changed qualitatively. The peasants have become a minority even within the rural population and agricultural proletariat outnumbers peasants by far. In the total population, peasants represent an even smaller minority. Among peasants, hardly 10 percent represent the class of capitalist farmers and kulaks (rich and upper-middle peasantry), whereas around 90 percent are marginal and small peasants who have, in the main, become semi-proletariat because the principal source of their income is not cultivation anymore, but wage-labour. Thus, any program of redistributive land reforms holds no relevance in India whatsoever. The future socialist revolution in India can directly confiscate the land owned by the rich capitalist farmers and kulaks and establish collective and state farms with the large population of agricultural workers. The land of marginal and small peasants will not be confiscated and they will be persuaded by the socialist state and communist party and will be led by example to adopt the socialist forms of agriculture in a process. However, this much is certain: the resolution of peasant question and agrarian question will not be similar to the Soviet socialist experiment in the future socialist revolutions in countries like India, that is, the relatively backward capitalist countries of the so-called ‘third world’. Therefore, the attitude of the Bolsheviks on the peasant and agrarian questions and specifically the liberties given to the class of petty-bourgeois peasants during the NEP period has to be understood in the historical context. Rather than understanding the transitional Bolshevik programs of NEP or ‘war communism’ as the proletarian political line, it is essential to understand the Bolshevik proletarian line as the target of collectivization, which can be achieved in future socialist revolutions in countries like India with less intermediate programs and smaller number of transitional steps for the simple reason: the relations of class forces has changed qualitatively.
These two caveats are important for present readers in order to make proper sense of the contributions of this volume. We hope that the present anthology will help readers understand the reactionary and non-Marxist nature of Trotskyist ideology and politics and also the petty-bourgeois individualist nature of Trotsky.
– Rahul Foundation
10.01.2022
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