Sixty years ago, on August 20, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was killed by an agent of Stalin. A decade after the "collapse of communism", is there any point remembering this anniversary? In his time, Trotsky was feared and maligned by capitalist rulers and Soviet bureaucrats alike, but is he still relevant today?
Trotsky's greatest achievements were associated with the leading role he played in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Soviet state. However, he is most often remembered for trying to defend the revolution against its Stalinist degeneration in the 1920s and '30s.
The myth persists that "socialism failed" since (it is supposed) the regime headed by Stalin and his heirs was a continuation of the revolution led by Lenin. But what collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was not socialism.
As the degeneration of the Soviet Union unfolded, Trotsky analysed the process and mustered a tragically unsuccessful fight against it. Trotsky was killed in Mexico in 1940, the last in a long line of leaders of the 1917 revolution to be executed by the Stalin regime.
Moscow trials
The "Moscow show trials" of 1936-38 were frame-ups of such outstanding Bolsheviks as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Tomsky as well as secondary leaders such as Radek and Pyatakov.
Stalin had to kill virtually every leader of the revolution: testimony that the regime he headed was the antithesis rather than the continuator of Bolshevism. The three main trials included every single member of Lenin's Politbureau, virtually all of the 1917 Central Committee, two former heads of the Communist International, the leader of the trade unions and numerous other party and state officials.
The supposed crimes included everything from attempted assassination of Stalin to the attempt to restore capitalism in league with the Nazis.
Trotsky analysed the trials from exile, and proved them to be frame-ups. Not only did they include no solid evidence except the confessions of terrorised prisoners; not only did the charges and the confessions defy all logic; the evidence presented blatantly contradicted known facts. One example of the latter was a supposed meeting with Trotsky's son in Copenhagen — a city his son had never visited — in a hotel that had been destroyed more than a decade before the meeting allegedly took place.
Trotsky declared that he would turn himself over to Stalin if it were proved in a fair court that even the minor crimes of which he was accused were true. He dared Stalin to try to extradite him, which Stalin refused to do, since this would have meant raising the issues in a foreign court that Stalin couldn't control.
In fact a commission led by noted liberal John Dewey, comprising figures from different countries with a range of political views, was assembled. The Dewey Commission examined extensive evidence and declared the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups.
Historian Isaac Deutscher wrote: "If these charges, which accumulated from trial to trial, had been true, it would be impossible to account for the existence and survival of the Soviet state".
Even more absurd is the notion that Lenin could have led a socialist revolution in 1917 when all of his chief collaborators were pro-capitalist imperialist agents. (To add to the irony, many of the figures on the prosecution side had actually been opponents of the revolution in 1917.)
Political reversal
It was not just the top leaders who were repressed. The Stalin regime had to imprison or kill literally millions of workers, party members and officials, including the majority of party members of 1917. Purges, imprisonments, exiles, secret trials and executions without trial were constant features of Soviet life from the late 1920s until Stalin called an end to them in March 1939 (within the Soviet Union at least), only to resume them after the war.
This dramatic upheaval is one of the clearest indications that Stalinism represented something totally foreign to the Bolshevism of the revolution. The bureaucracy betrayed the political program of the Bolsheviks in order to protect and improve the privileges it had secured for itself. Thus soviet democracy was replaced by bureaucratic tyranny; revolutionary internationalism was replaced by the conservative theory of "socialism in one country"; and the Communist movement abroad was directed to become a prop for the foreign policy of the Soviet elite.
Whereas the early years of the revolution were characterised by wide social reform, reaction became the norm in the late 1920s and 1930s.
In the first decade of the revolution, Soviet women won legal equality with men, the right to vote, the right to abortion and the simple registration of marriage and divorce. To the extent possible in the conditions of the time, the revolution did its best to liberate women from inequality and household drudgery.
This changed dramatically with the consolidation of Stalinist rule. Many legal rights previously won were overturned, and the bureaucracy reinstituted an ideology of support for the family — the source of women's oppression.
Trotsky wrote: "The retreat not only assumes forms of disgusting hypocrisy, but also is going infinitely farther than iron economic necessity demands. To the objective causes producing this return to such bourgeois forms as the payment of alimony, there is added the social interest of the ruling stratum in the deepening of bourgeois law."
Lenin's fight
The Bolsheviks were aware that a certain degree of bureaucratism was inevitable in the young Soviet state because of the tremendous scarcity and backwardness. Trotsky much later described the basis of bureaucracy: "When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a police [officer] to keep order. Such is the starting point of the Soviet bureaucracy."
However, Stalinism is more than simply bureaucracy. Stalinism is the political triumph of a crystallised bureaucratic layer.
Stalin came to represent the interests of an emerging bureaucratic layer, and he built a faction to support its interests. He did not start out as a reactionary, but became corrupted by the same factors that nourished the rest of the bureaucracy. These included the lack of skilled personnel, forcing the state to rely on tsarist bureaucrats, the general backwardness of the country, and the retreat from political life by wide layers of workers. This latter factor was caused by the exhaustion of the civil war and demoralisation caused by the failure of the German revolution.
Lenin saw and understood the danger of bureaucratism early and was the first to take action against it. He recognised at least as early as 1921 that the young Soviet state had bureaucratic deformations and proposed various measures to combat them.
His early clashes with Stalin and Stalin's direct supporters were over important policy issues. Thus Lenin opposed the attempt to weaken the state monopoly of foreign trade, which would have benefited most the wealthy peasants and traders — a crucial base for the bureaucracy.
Perhaps more important was the dispute between Stalin's supporters and the leaders of the Bolshevik party in Georgia over the formation of the Soviet Union. Stalin was trying to create one single administrative apparatus — in the interests of the bureaucracy — and, in the process, trampling on the national rights of the Georgians. Lenin opposed Stalin's policy and methods, supporting instead the Georgian Bolsheviks.
Trotsky agreed with Lenin on these key questions, and Lenin invited Trotsky to form a bloc to argue for their common positions at the 12th congress of the party. Trotsky agreed, but did not see as clearly as Lenin that Stalin was the chief representative of the bureaucratic stratum. Lenin recommended that Stalin be removed from his post of general secretary and even cut off all personal and political relations with him.
Trotsky delayed taking decisive action at the 12th congress in 1923, partly because he hoped for Lenin's recovery and partly because he misunderstood the situation. Instead he compromised, which Stalin used to buy time. When the fight came out into the open later that year, the balance of forces had shifted and the bureaucratic faction won the early battles.
Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had been key leaders with Stalin of the campaign against "Trotskyism", united with Trotsky in 1926 when they realised that the revolution was being strangled. By this stage, however, the Communist Party had been flooded by careerists, and the Stalin faction was able to keep control.
By 1929, Trotsky was exiled and the cadres of the left opposition were imprisoned if they had not capitulated to Stalin. In the 1930s, Trotsky attempted to broaden the fight against Stalinism onto the international arena, but in most countries could muster only a small number of committed Marxist oppositionists. Nevertheless, his writings in this period are still tremendously useful because they developed the Marxist analysis of Stalinism and bureaucracy begun by Lenin and then the Left Opposition in the 1920s.
Trotsky characterised the Soviet Union in the 1930s as a "degenerated workers' state". By this he meant that the revolution had been betrayed by the bureaucracy (which had usurped power from the workers), but that the social (or economic) foundations of the workers' state had not been overturned. Thus the bureaucracy was not a new capitalist ruling class, since the source of its privileges was the nationalised property of the workers' state.
Nevertheless, Stalinism was anti-socialist in its essence. It represented capitalist interests and values within the workers' state.
Leadership
Trotsky described this as a contradictory state of affairs that could not persist indefinitely: "Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers' state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism".
Without ruling out the possibility that Stalinism could have been overthrown from the left, it is clearer today that Stalinism represented a stage in the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. The victory of the Stalin faction was a political counter-revolution, which prepared the way for capitalist restoration decades later. Far from opposing the reintroduction of capitalism, the bureaucrats rushed to transform themselves into capitalists.
There was, however, nothing inevitable about Stalinism's victory — the fact that the fight was so deep, so long and so bitter is testimony to that. There were many objective difficulties in combating Stalinism, not the least of which was the fact that it was an unprecedented phenomenon. However, in the final analysis, the political balance of forces (and hence political leadership) were key.
Trotsky wrote later: "I have no doubt that if I had come forward on the eve of the twelfth congress in the spirit of a 'bloc of Lenin and Trotsky' against the Stalin bureaucracy, I should have been victorious even if Lenin had taken no direct part in the struggle".
Faced with an emerging bureaucratic faction in Cuba, the Castro leadership publicly exposed this faction headed by Anibal Escalante. They took concrete measures to cut back the size of the bureaucracy and to punish those found to be corrupt. They also launched an ideological campaign against bureaucratic methods and privileges. While bureaucracy is an ongoing problem, the revolution has not been strangled by Stalinism because the bureaucrats never won political power.
While the socialist alternative to "globalisation" is becoming increasingly popular, workers are naturally suspicious of restrictions on democratic rights and will remember the evil example of Stalinism for a long time yet. The revolutionary struggles of the 21st century will need to be armed with an anti-Stalinist analysis, and for this the writings of Trotsky are still useful. Even more important is the inspiration that can be generated by remembering and studying the early years of the revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky.
BY ALEX BAINBRIDGE