Doubts and Objections About the Bulgarian Manifesto

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I have only today found an opportunity to inform you about a few reflections on the subject of your manifesto. I appreciate very much your expose of the zigzags in the Stalin-Bukharin policies in Bulgaria; you have revealed the complete identity of the general line "in Bulgaria with that same line in Russia, in China, etc." In various countries and in different forms, opportunism and adventurism, succeeding and complementing one another, have revealed everywhere the same essential features. As for myself, two important facts have been disclosed to me by your manifesto: the opportunist electoral bloc in 1926 and the upward swing of the trade-union movement in the same year. It would be very useful for you to make a short historical analysis for our international press with a study of the minute details and the concrete conditions in which these two stages took place.

Finally allow me to express in all frankness several doubts as well as a few objections. It is possible that in one case or the other I will be knocking on open doors, that is to say, I will raise objections to points of view and tendencies which you do not at all uphold and which unfortunate wording in the manifesto wrongly attributes to you. If that is so, all the better. In politics a certain amount of scolding from one side or the other is far better than indifference and negligence.

1. You correctly condemn the tactic of individual and mass terror when it is applied in conditions other than those of mass revolution. But I believe that you attach to your judgment an excessively moral and unfortunate character. You speak of the "inglorious epoch of the Russian Social Revolutionaries." I for my part should not have expressed myself in that manner.

In the tactics of the Social Revolutionaries there was indeed an adventuristic element which we condemned, but we never spoke of an inglorious epoch, even in regard to the heroic acts of individual terror, although we warned against policies of this sort. The Social Revolutionary Party became inglorious after it had given up the revolutionary struggle altogether and made a bloc with the bourgeoisie.

2. On page 6 you speak of the adventurism of the "illegal Communist Party" and on page 8 you speak of the "joy of the workers" when they witnessed the birth of the Labor Party as "the legal political organ of the workers' movement." These two quotations give the impression that you condemn every sort of illegal organization in general, counterposing to it a legal form as the only form of organization fit for a mass movement. It is evident that such a point of view is entirely wrong, and I have no doubt at all that you do not share it. It is quite possible that you were restricted in this question by the censorship. Of course we must take this into account. But if the censorship can restrain us from saying what we have in mind, it cannot in any case force us to say what we do not have in mind, especially when it is so basic a question as that of the relation between legality and illegality in the revolutionary movement.

3. For the same reasons I consider it sufficient to characterize the attempted assassination in April as indiscreet, but it is superfluous to add into the bargain that it was "monstrous and criminal." We cannot in any case make concessions of this sort to bourgeois public opinion, despite all the reservations we may make as to the revolutionary usefulness of these terrorist acts. On this point, I would advise you to read the letter of Engels to Bernstein and the correspondence between Engels and Marx (on the question of the attempts on the life of Bismarck, Napoleon III, etc.).

4. On page 7 you put the blame for the decomposition of the trade-union movement on Pastoukhov and on Dimitrov, placing yourselves on neutral territory between the two. Here too it is only a question, I hope, of an unfortunate formulation and not of a principled deviation. Pastoukhov is an agent of the bourgeoisie, that is to say, our class enemy. Dimitrov is a confused revolutionary who combines proletarian aims with petty-bourgeois methods. You say that the one as well as the other wants to be the "sole ruler" of the trade-union movement. Every socialist or communist tendency wants to exert maximum influence in the trade-union movement. When your organization will become a force, you too will be accused of claiming the role of "absolute ruler" of the trade-union movement — and I wish with all my heart that you merit as soon as possible such an accusation. It is not a question of the tendency of one group or the other to try to gain influence in the trade unions (that is inevitable), but of the content of the ideas and the methods that each brings into the trade-union movement. Pastoukhov tends to subordinate the trade-union movement to the interests of the bourgeoisie. The Dimitrovs are opposed to that, but by their false policies they assure, in spite of themselves, the success of Pastoukhov. We cannot put them all on the same level.

5. I cannot see clearly how the successes of the liquidationist group around Novy Pont can consolidate the Marxist group around Osvobozhdenie (page 13).

6. On page 14 you write that your task does not consist in creating "a sort of new political workers' group" which will compete with the Labor Party. You counterpose to that the creation of a Marxist group with purely ideological tasks. It is possible that this hazy formulation is also conditioned by considerations of the censorship. At any rate, a Marxist group which wants to influence the party and the entire labor movement cannot be anything but a political grouping. It is not an independent party that competes with the official party, but it is an independent faction which sets itself the task of taking a part in the life of the party and of the working class.

These are all my objections. I shall be very pleased to hear that you have made progress in the immediate task that you have set yourselves — the creation of a weekly paper.

Communist greetings,

L. Trotsky