C’est la Marche des Evenements!

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Sensation is the inevitable shadow of politics. In the matter of my expulsion from the Soviet Union, this shadow has, however, acquired dimensions that are too grotesque. Moreover, sensationalism is inimical to the kind of politics that is directed toward great ends. My object in writing these lines is not to create more of a sensation but, on the contrary, to undercut this by providing public opinion with objective information — so far as objectivity is attainable in political struggle in general.

In order to blunt the edge of sensationalism, let me say at the outset what one must suppose is not necessary for those readers who are at all well informed, namely, that our attitude toward the October Revolution, Soviet power, Marxist doctrine, and Bolshevism remains unchanged. We do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of our personal fate.

It is true that I am now resorting to a way of communicating with the public that is rather exceptional from the standpoint of the methods to which I have been accustomed during my political life. But this flows from the exceptional nature of the conditions in which I am now placed.

An avalanche of guesses, inventions, and fantasies has piled up around the question of my personal fate — something I would feel quite untroubled about if it did not at the same time mean injury to the cause that I serve and have served. I have no reason to wrap my personal fate in mystery, especially since it has been bound up one way or another with interests of a general nature. On the contrary. Now more than ever it is in my interest to present matters as they really are — not only to my friends but to enemies as well. My object is not propaganda but information.

The precondition I posed to the press agency was complete freedom in stating my point of view. My articles were to be published as written or not at all.

I am writing in Constantinople, where the Soviet vessel Ilyich brought me on February 12 from Odessa. I did not choose this as a place of residence, despite the assertions of a number of newspapers. My closest friends in Germany and France were absolutely right in supposing that I was brought to Turkey against my will.

To the Turkish police officer who boarded the steamer at Buyukdere to check the passengers’ papers — there were no passengers on the boat besides my family and the agents of the GPU — I handed the following statement for transmission to the president of the Turkish republic, Kemal Pasha:

“Dear Sir: At the gateway to Constantinople, I have the honor to inform you that I have arrived at the Turkish frontier not of my own choice and that the only reason I may cross this frontier will be through the use of force upon me. I request you, Mr. President, to accept from me the sentiments that are fitting on this occasion. L. Trotsky. February 12, 1929.”

Since I was being expelled from the USSR despite my emphatic protests, I would naturally have preferred to go to a country with whose language, social life, and culture I was closely familiar. But the interests of exiles are rarely compatible with those of the people who exile them.

So it was in 1916, when the government of the French republic forcibly deported me to Spain, a country whose language I did not know. In its turn, the liberal Spanish government of Senor Romanones did not allow me the time to learn the language of Cervantes but hastened to arrest me without the slightest grounds and to deport me to the other side of the Atlantic. If gloating were a permissible feeling in politics, one might say that I was soon given unusual grounds for satisfaction: Malvy, the Radical minister of the interior who had me expelled from France, was himself expelled from France not long after by the government of Clemenceau. But there was more. The chief of the French political police, Monsieur Bidet-“Fauxpas,” whose reports served as the basis for my expulsion from France, was himself arrested in 1918 in Russia, where he was carrying out a not altogether friendly mission. Brought before me at the Commissariat of War, M. Bidet replied to my question, “How did this happen?” with the rather vague but, in its way, magnificentformula: “C’est la marche des evenements! [That’s the way things go!]”

The new epoch that began with the last war is preeminently one of great upheavals and sharp political turns. We have been witness to many surprises, and will be for a long time to come. In all of them, that classic formula of the police philosopher will come in handy: “C’est la marche des evenements!”

I will not hide the fact that I regard my expulsion from the Soviet Union as anything but history’s final word. It is not, of course, just a matter of my personal fate. The ups and downs of history’s route are tortuous, to be sure. But in the school of historical objectivity I have learned to make do with the paths presented by the actual course of development.

But let us first establish the facts that are needed in order to understand what has happened.

In January 1928 the Fifteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, in reality a congress of the bureaucrats in Stalin’s faction, expelled the Opposition from the party and sanctioned the use of government repression against it. Soon afterward, many hundreds — and by now many thousands — of members of the Opposition were exiled to various parts of Siberia and Central Asia.

Among them were Christian Rakovsky, former chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukraine and ambassador to France, who has to his credit forty years of struggle in the ranks of the working class in France, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Russia; Karl Radek, one of the most remarkable international Marxist writers; LN. Smirnov, a people’s commissar up to the moment of his arrest and one of the oldest party builders; Smilga, one of the organizers of the October Revolution and the Red Army; Preobrazhensky, an economist with a profound education, who was a financial adviser in the negotiations with France; Muralov and Mrachkovsky, organizers of the Red Army and marshals of the revolutionary war; Beloborodov, people’s commissar of internal affairs before being deported; Sosnovsky, who brilliantly served the party with his pen as journalist and social commentator; Kasparova, leader of the work of the party and Comintern among women of the East; Boguslavsky, former president of the “junior” Council of People’s Commissars; and so on.

The lives of these people, and those of dozens of other Oppositionists whom I have not named, are inseparably bound up with the epic tale of three revolutions: those of 1905, February 1917, and October 1917. The personal fates of many of them might serve as the subject of dramas in the grand manner. More importantly, it is beyond dispute that in a political sense these exiles have rendered the Soviet republic infinitely greater services than have those who exiled them.

The place selected for my exile was Alma-Ata, the new capital of Kazakhstan, a malarial city of earthquakes and floods, at the foot of the Tyanshan range, about one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest railroad and twenty-five hundred miles from Moscow. Here my wife and son and I spent a year in the company of books — and nature, which in these regions is truly magnificent. It took newspapers and letters anywhere from twenty days to a month or two, sometimes longer, to arrive, depending on the time of year and the mood of the Moscow authorities.

Although we encountered secret friends at every step, we were completely isolated from the surrounding population, for anyone who tried to make contact with us was punished, sometimes quite severely. Our only links with the outside world were the hunting trips my son and I went on, accompanied by GPU agents, during which we lived the life of nomads on the salt flats and semi-desert steppes for weeks on end, camping out under the stars or in Kirghiz kibitkas and traveling by camel. This region is famous for its abundance of wild goats, wild boar, ducks, geese, and other game, but also for poisonous snakes, scorpions, and spiders. In January this year I was informed by telegram that three tigers had appeared within a hundred and fifty miles of Alma-Ata and were coming up the Ili River from Lake Balkhash. My son and I wondered whether we should declare war — proclaiming it to be a defensive one, of course — or appeal to the Kellogg antiwar pact.The shrewd and experienced old tigers would surely have taken an attitude fully sympathetic with the Kellogg Pact — one need only refer to Clemenceau’s example to see that — after all, it is the strength of one’s claws that decides the outcome in the final analysis.

My son and I had not yet come to a decision regarding these Balkhash predators when our fate was suddenly altered by a new turn of events.

It began with our correspondence. During the first ten months of exile, our letters, though censored, nevertheless reached their destinations roughly fifty percent of the time. Correspondence among the deportees acquired a very broad scope. Sometimes letters assumed the dimensions of political treatises, and were widely reproduced, reaching the political centers of the country and passing beyond its borders. They would be printed and disseminated in all sorts of ways. Toward the end of October last year a sudden change occurred. Our communications with cothinkers, friends, even relatives, were suddenly stopped short; letters and telegrams ceased to reach us at all. At the Moscow telegraph office, as we learned by special means, hundreds of telegrams addressed to me were piling up, especially during the days commemorating the October Revolution and other revolutionary anniversaries. The ring around us was closing in tighter and tighter.

It should be kept in mind that not only the rank and file but even functionaries in Stalin’s apparatus found it hard to swallow these reprisals against leading figures of the October Revolution. They were appeased by those on top with the argument that harsh measures would assure full unanimity within the party and make it possible to work in peace. Stalin’s faction believed, or at least promised, that sending the Opposition leaders into internal exile would bring the activities of the “Trotskyists” to an end.

But that was precisely what did not happen. The year following the Fifteenth Congress was the most troubled year of the party’s existence. Indeed it was only after the Fifteenth Congress that wide layers of the party and working class began to take a real interest in the struggle going on at the top and realized that fundamental differences of principle must be at stake, since dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of people known throughout the country, or at least throughout their regions, districts, or plants, were willing to undergo expulsion from the party and deportation for the sake of their ideas. During 1928, despite continual waves of repression, the Opposition grew noticeably, especially at major industrial plants. This led to further intensification of repression and in particular to prohibition of correspondence by exiles, even among themselves. We expected other measures of the same sort to follow, and we were not mistaken.

On December 16 a special representative of the GPU arrived from Moscow and in the name of that institution handed me an ultimatum: to stop leading the struggle of the Opposition; otherwise, measures would be taken to isolate me from political life entirely. Nothing was said about being shipped abroad. As far as I could tell, measures of a domestic nature were implied. I answered this “ultimatum” with a letter laying down basic principles, addressed to the Central Committee of the party and the presidium of the Comintern. It seems necessary at this point to quote some excerpts from that letter:

“The demand that I abstain from political activity is equivalent to demanding that I renounce the struggle for the interests of the international proletariat, a struggle which I have waged uninterruptedly for thirty-two years, throughout my conscious life. The attempt to represent this activity as ‘counterrevolutionary’ comes from those whom I accuse before the international proletariat of trampling upon the basic teachings of Marx and Lenin,i³ of injuring the historical interests of the world revolution, of breaking with the traditions and heritage of October, and of unconsciously,. and therefore all the more dangerously, preparing the way for Thermidor.”^H

I omit the next part of the document, which lists our main differences on domestic and international questions. Further on, the letter states:

“A period of reaction can occur not only after a bourgeois revolution, but after a proletarian one as well. For six years we have been living in the USSR under conditions of mounting reaction against October, paving the way for Thermidor. The most obvious and complete expression of this reaction within the party is the hounding and organizational routing of the left wing.

“In its recent attempts to resist the openly Thermidorean elements, the Stalin faction is living off of the ‘flotsam’ and ‘jetsam’ of the Opposition’s ideas. As far as creativity goes, it is impotent. The struggle against the left has deprived it of any stability. Its practical policies have no backbone; they are false, contradictory, and unreliable. The noisy campaign against the right danger remains three-quarters sham and serves above all as camouflage for the masses, to hide the real war of annihilation against the Bolshevik-Leninists.”

My letter concludes:

“In the declaration we submitted to the Sixth [World] Congress … we answered the accusation of factional work with the statement that it could be ended only if Article 58,treacherously directed against us, were revoked and ourselves reinstated in the party, not as repentant sinners but as revolutionary fighters who do not betray their banner. And as if in foreknowledge of the ultimatum handed me today, we wrote the following, word for word:

“‘Only completely corrupted bureaucrats could demand such a renunciation from revolutionaries’ (renunciation of political activity, i.e., of serving the party and the international proletariat). ‘Only contemptible renegades could give such a promise.’

“There is nothing I can change in those words.

“To each his own. You wish to continue to conduct affairs under the prompting of class forces hostile to the proletariat. We know our duty and will do it to the end.L. Trotsky. Alma-Ata, December 16, 1928.”