Is Stalin Weakening or the Soviets?

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The writer of this article is being plied on all sides with the question — now gleefully ironical, now genuinely perplexed: Why is the ruling group in the Soviet Union at this time wholly engrossed in historical research? While Japan masters Manchuria and Hitler makes ready to master Germany, Stalin is composing extensive dissertations on the policies of Trotsky in the year 1905 and other questions equally up-to-date. Three years have passed since Stalin and Molotov announced that "Trotskyism" was dead and buried, and now a new campaign — a fifth or sixth campaign — against this same "Trotskyism" has sprung up in the pages of the Soviet press. The unexpectedness of this — for what is the sense of fighting corpses? — and the unusual viciousness of the attack have caused something of a sensation in the European press. Both English and French papers have published disclosures of a mighty conspiracy of "Trotskyists" in the USSR. They are receiving 60,000 rubles monthly from abroad; they have captured the most important positions in the industrial, administrative, and educational fields, etc., etc. Most captivating is the accuracy with which the amount of the foreign subsidy is reported.

With all its absurdity this report rests upon an authority sufficiently precise in its own way — the authority of Stalin himself. Stalin quite recently announced that "Trotskyism" is not a movement within the Communist Party, as the party members in spite of everything still continue to believe, but is "the vanguard of the bourgeois counterrevolution." If this statement be taken seriously, a number of inferences follow. The goal of the counterrevolution is to reestablish capitalism in the Soviet Union, a goal which can be achieved only by overthrowing the Bolshevik power. If the "Trotskyists" are the vanguard of the counterrevolution, that can only mean that they are preparing the destruction of the Soviet regime. From this it is but a step to the conclusion that the interested capitalist circles of Europe must be generously financing their work. To speak plainly, it is just this interpretation of his words that Stalin is counting on. Just as in 1917 Miliukov and Kerensky felt obliged to assert that Lenin and Trotsky were agents of German militarism, so now Stalin is trying to get it on record that Trotsky and the Opposition are agents of counterrevolution.

Some months ago a widely circulated Polish newspaper printed over my signature a forged article — not the first of its kind — about the complete breakdown of the five-year plan and the inevitable fall of the Soviets. Although the crudeness of the forgery was obvious even to an inexperienced eye, Yaroslavsky, die official historiographer of the Stalin faction, published a facsimile of the article in the Moscow Pravda, giving it out as an authentic document and drawing the corresponding inferences in regard to "Trotskyism." A formal declaration from me that the article was a falsification from beginning to end was refused publication in Pravda, The Stalin faction considered it more expedient to support the tale that a powerful group among the Bolsheviks, a group led by the closest associates of Lenin, considers inevitable the downfall of the Soviet power and is working to that end.

The same game has been played before. Government circles must have been surprised four years ago when they read that Rakovsky, who so forcefully and brilliantly defended the interests of the Soviet Union during the Franco-Soviet negotiations, is in reality a most vicious enemy of the Soviet power. They doubtless said to themselves at that time: "Things must be going badly with the Soviet republic, if even Rakovsky has turned up among the counterrevolutionaries." If the French government has hesitated of late years to develop economic relations with the Soviets, or, on the other hand, to break off diplomatic relations, the banishment of Rakovsky has contributed to this hesitation.

The present campaign against the Opposition, arming itself with cruder exaggeration even than the preceding ones, is again placing a weapon in the hands of the most implacable enemies of the Soviet Union in all countries. "Evidently," they are saying, "the situation in the country is getting extremely bad if the inner struggle has again become so bitter." It is this fact that the struggle against "Trotskyism" is being waged with methods deeply injuring the interests of the Soviet Union which impels me to take up a subject which otherwise I would prefer to let alone.

If the "Trotskyists" are in reality "the vanguard of the bourgeois counterrevolution" — so the man in the street must reason — then how explain the fact that the European governments, including even the government of the brand-new Spanish republic, have one after the other refused asylum to Trotsky? Such an inhospitable attitude toward one's own "vanguard" is difficult to explain. The European bourgeoisie has had enough experience to be able by this time to distinguish its friends from its enemies.

The so-called "Trotskyists," the older generation at least, took part in the revolutionary struggle against czarism, in the October Revolution of 1917, in the building of the Soviet republic, in the creation of the Red Army, in the defense of the land of the Soviets against innumerable enemies during three years of civil war, and they played an intimate and frequently a leading part in the economic revival of the country. During these recent years, under the blows of the repression, they have remained completely loyal to those tasks which they set themselves long before 1917. It is needless to say that at a moment of danger to the Soviets the "Trotskyists" would be found in the first line of defense, a position familiar to them in the experience of the past years.

The Stalin faction knows and understands this better than anybody else. If it puts into circulation accusations which are obviously damaging to the Soviet Union, and thus at the same time compromising to itself, the explanation lies in the political situation in which the course of events and its own preceding policies have placed the Stalin faction.

Stalinism, the Policy of a Conservative Bureaucracy

The first campaign against "Trotskyism" was opened in 1923, while Lenin was on his deathbed and during a protracted illness of Trotsky. The second and more violent attack developed in 1924, shortly after the death of Lenin. These dates speak for themselves. The members of the old Politburo, the body which actually governed the Soviet republic, were: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Rykov, and Tomsky (or Bukharin). In the present Politburo only Stalin is left of the old staff, although all its members, except Lenin, are living. The selection of leaders of a great historic party is no accidental process. How can it happen that the leaders of the party during the heavy years preceding the revolution, and during the years when the foundations of the Soviets were laid and the building in construction was being defended with the sword, have suddenly turned out to be "inner enemies," at a time when the daily Soviet work has become to a certain degree a matter of bureaucratic routine?

These shifts and replacements which stand out at a glance in the Politburo or the Council of People's Commissars have also been taking place during the recent period in all levels of the party building, right down to the village councils. The present staff of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, the personnel of the provincial party secretariats, of the industrial, military, and diplomatic bodies — all of them with but few exceptions are men of the new crowd. A majority of them took no part in the October Revolution. A very considerable number were in the camp of its open enemies. To be sure, a small minority of the new ruling layer did belong to the Bolshevik Party before October; but these were all revolutionary figures of second or third magnitude. Such a combination is wholly according to the laws of history. A new bureaucratic stratum requires an "authoritative" covering. This covering has been created by those among the Old Bolsheviks who in the period of storm and assault were pushed to one side, those who felt a little out of place, who found themselves in silent semi-opposition to the actual leaders of the insurrection, and became able to enjoy their authority as "Old Bolsheviks" only in the second stage of the revolution.

It has never yet happened in history that a stratum which achieved a revolution and guided and defended it in the most difficult circumstances, suddenly, when the work of its hands was assured, turned out to be a "counterrevolutionary" stratum, and that a few years after the revolution a new genuinely revolutionary stratum arrived to take its place. Indeed, the opposite fact is to be observed in the history of all great revolutions: when the victory is assured and has brought forth a new ruling stratum with its own interests and pretensions, and when this more moderate stratum, reflecting the demand for "law and order," has pushed aside the revolutionists of the first draft, it always accuses its predecessors of a lack of revolutionary spirit. The most conservative bureaucracy which might issue from a revolution could not otherwise defend its right to power except by declaring its opponents moderate, halfhearted, and even counterrevolutionary. The methods of Stalin present nothing new whatever. We must not think, however, that Stalin is consciously plagiarizing anybody. He does not know enough history for that. He is simply obeying the logic of his own situation.

Economic Disagreements

In order to get the sense of Stalin's present political difficulties, it is necessary to recall briefly the essence of those disagreements which lay at the bottom of the dispute between us and the Stalin faction. The Opposition demonstrated that the bureaucracy was underestimating the possibilities of industrialization and collectivization, that the economic work was being carried on empirically in a hand-to-mouth manner, that it was necessary to adopt a broader scale and a faster tempo. The Opposition demanded the abandonment of the one-year for the five-year plan, and asserted that a yearly 20 percent growth of industrial production presented nothing unattainable with a centralized leadership. The Stalin bureaucracy accused the Opposition at that time of super-industrialization and utopianism. Kowtowing to the individual peasant proprietor, preparation to abandon the nationalization of the land, defense of a tortoise tempo in industry, and mockery of the planning principle — such was the platform of the Stalin faction from 1923 to 1928. All the present members of the Politburo without a single exception answered our demand for an increased tempo of industrialization with the stereotyped question: Where shall we get the means? The first draft of the five-year plan, upon which the government institutions got to work in 1927 under pressure from the persecuted "Trotskyists," was constructed on the principle of the descending curve: the growth of production was charted to fall from 9 to 4 percent. This draft was subjected to a withering criticism by the Opposition. The second variant of the five-year plan, the one officially ratified by that Fifteenth Party Congress which condemned the industrial "romanticism" of the Opposition, called for an average growth of 9 percent.

How far Stalin himself fell short of the scale of the present five-year plan before its ratification may be seen in the mere fact that in April 1926, answering Trotsky — who was then president of the Dnieprostroi Commission — he declared at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee: "For us to build the Dnieprostroi [the mighty electrical power plant on the Dnieper] would be just the same as to buy the peasant a phonograph instead of a cow." In the stenographic report of the Central Committee those words are inscribed as the most authentic opinion of Stalin. Subsequent attempts to explain his struggle against industrialization with references to the "prematureness" of the proposals of the Opposition are meaningless, since it was not a question of a particular task of the moment but of the general prospects of industry and the five-year program. The trial of the engineer-conspirators, publicly staged a year or so ago, showed that the actual leadership was in the hands of the irreconcilable enemies of the socialist economy. In defending his plans for a "tortoise tempo" Stalin employed methods of repression against the Opposition.

With its usual shortsighted empiricism the Stalin bureaucracy, under the influence of successes, began in 1928 to increase uncritically the tempo of industrialization and collectivization. Here the roles were exchanged. The Left Opposition came out with a warning: with a too swift pace, not tested out by previous experience, disproportions may arise between the cities and the country, and between the different branches of industry, creating dangerous crises. Moreover — and this was the chief argument of the Opposition — a too rapid investment of capital in industry will cut off excessively the share allotted to current consumption, and fail to guarantee the necessary rise of the standard of living of the people. Although cut off from the whole world in his exile in Barnaul, Christian G. Rakovsky sounded the alarm. It is necessary, he said, even at the cost of a lowered tempo, to better the material condition of the laboring masses. Here too the Stalin bureaucracy has been ultimately compelled to listen to the voice of the Opposition. Quite recently a separate Commissariat of Manufacturing Industries was formed out of the staff of the Supreme Council of National Economy. Its task is to take care of the current needs of the population. At the present stage this reform has a purely bureaucratic character, but its goal is clear: to create in the government mechanism certain guarantees that the daily needs of the masses will not be too much sacrificed to the interest of the heavy industries. Here too the Stalin faction, lacking perspective and creative force, is compelled to bless today what it was cursing yesterday.

"Peppery Dishes”

Early in 1928 mass raids against the Opposition were carried out — expulsions, arrests, banishments. During that same year a new five-year plan was put into force, following upon all essential questions the platform of the Left Opposition. This about-face was so sharp that the bureaucracy directly contradicted everything that it had defended during the first four years after Lenin's death. The accusation of super-industrialization lost all meaning, and active repressions against the Left Opposition still more so.

But here the interest of the new ruling stratum in its own self-preservation stepped to the front. If the Opposition was right in its judgments and proposals, so much the worse for the Opposition. If yesterday's arguments against it are worthless, we must have new ones — and in order to justify repressions we must have extraordinarily bitter ones. It is just in this sphere, however, that Stalin is especially gifted. In 1922, when Stalin was first elected general secretary of the party, Lenin remarked warningly to a small circle: "This cook will give us only peppery dishes." In his deathbed letter to the party, commonly called his "testament," where he insisted on the removal of Stalin from his position as general secretary, Lenin pointed to the crudeness of his methods, his disloyalty and inclination to misuse of power. All these personal traits of Stalin, subsequently developed to a high degree, have been especially well manifested in his struggle against the Opposition.

It was not enough, however, to bring forward fantastic accusations; it was necessary that people should believe them, or at least be afraid to object In its struggle for self-preservation, the Stalin bureaucracy was, therefore, compelled to begin by suppressing all criticism. Along this line, accordingly, the Opposition opened its most fervent struggle — a struggle for a democratic regime in the party, in the trade unions, in the Soviets. We were defending one of the basic traditions of Bolshevism.

In the very heaviest years of the past — in the period of the underground struggle under czarism, in 1917 when the country passed through two revolutions, during the following three years when twenty armies were fighting on a front seven thousand miles long — the party lived a seething inner life. All questions were freely discussed from the top of the party to the bottom; the freedom of judgment within the party was unqualified. The Stalin apparatus directed its chief efforts to the destruction of this embarrassing party democracy. Tens of thousands of so-called "Trotskyists" were excluded from the party. More than ten thousand were subjected to various forms of criminal repression. Several were shot. Many tens of thousands of fighting revolutionists of the first draft were retained in the party only because they turned away and kept their mouths shut. Thus, in the course of these years, not only the membership of the ruling stratum has completely changed, but also the inner regime of the Bolshevik Party.

Whereas Lenin, to say nothing of his closest comrades-in-arms, was subjected hundreds of times to the most furious blows of inner-party criticism, at the present time any Communist who ventures to doubt the absolute correctness of Stalin upon every question whatever, and, moreover, who does not express a conviction as to his innate sinlessness, is expelled from the party and suffers all the consequences which flow from that. The shattering of the Opposition has become at the same time a shattering of the party of Lenin.

This shattering has been promoted by deep, although transitory, causes. The years of the revolutionary earthquake and the civil war left the masses in a desperate need of rest. The workers, oppressed with need and hunger, wanted a revival of economic life at any price. In the presence of considerable unemployment the removal of a worker from a factory for Oppositional views was a fearful weapon in the hands of the Stalin faction. Political interests fell away. The workers were ready to give the bureaucracy the broadest powers, if only it would restore order, offer an opportunity to revive the factories, and furnish provisions and raw material from the country. In this reaction of weariness, quite inevitable after every great revolutionary tension, lies the chief cause of the consolidation of the bureaucratic regime and the growth of that personal power of Stalin, in whom the new bureaucracy has found its personification.

Trotskyist Contraband

When living voices had been finally suppressed it turned out that in the libraries, in the clubs, in the Soviet bookstores, on the shelves of students and workers, old books were standing which continued to talk the same language they had talked in the days when the names of Lenin and Trotsky were inseparable. It is this barricade of hostile books that the Stalin bureaucracy has now come up against.

After nine years of uninterrupted struggle against the Opposition, the leaders have suddenly discovered that the fundamental scientific works and textbooks on questions of economics, sociology, history — and above all the history of the October Revolution and the Communist International — are chock-full of "Trotskyist contraband," and that the most important chairs of social science in many institutions of learning are occupied by "Trotskyists" or "semi-Trotskyists." Worst of all, those have been found guilty of Trotskyism who up to now had been its chief prosecutors.

In order to show how far this thing has gone it is sufficient to adduce an example touching the history of Bolshevism. Immediately after the death of Lenin a history of the party hastily written by Zinoviev was put into circulation, its sole purpose being to portray the whole past as a struggle between two principles, the good and the evil, in the persons of Lenin and Trotsky. But since this history accorded to Zinoviev himself a place in the camp of the good and, what is still more horrible, said nothing whatever about the providential role of Stalin, Zinoviev's history was placed on the index as early as 1926, the date of the open conflict between Zinoviev and Stalin.

The man designated to write an authentic history of the party was now Yaroslavsky. In the order of the party hierarchy it fell to Yaroslavsky, a member of the presidium of the Central Control Commission, to captain the whole struggle against the Left Opposition. All the indictments leading to arrests and expulsions, and also a majority of the articles lighting up the repressions against "Trotskyists" in the Soviet press, came from the pen of Yaroslavsky. It was he, indeed, who reprinted in Pravda the forged article from a Polish newspaper. To be sure, the scientific-literary standing of Yaroslavsky was not wholly adequate, but he made up for this with his complete willingness to rewrite all history, including that of ancient Egypt, according to the demands of the bureaucratic stratum led by Stalin. A more reliable historiographer the Stalin bureaucracy could not possibly desire.

The result, however, was a completely unexpected one. In November of last year Stalin found himself compelled to come down on the fourth volume of Yaroslavsky history with a severe article. This too, it seems, was filled with "Trotskyist contraband." If Stanley Baldwin in one of his speeches should accuse Winston Churchill of a sympathy for Bolshevism, this would hardly cause a greater sensation in England than did Stalin's accusing Yaroslavsky of abetting "Trotskyism" in the Soviet Union. That accusatory article of Stalin served as an introduction to this last campaign. Obeying the signal, hundreds and thousands of functionaries, professors, journalists, distinguished in nothing but their zeal, rushed out to rummage through all the Soviet publications. Horrors! "Trotskyism" at every step! There is no escape from "contraband"!

But, after all, how could such a thing happen? Every new stratum as it rises to power shows an inclination to embellish its own past Since the Stalin bureaucracy cannot, like other ruling classes, find reinforcement among the high places of religion, it is compelled to create its own historic mythology. It paints in dark colors the past of all those who resisted it, while brushing up its own past with the brightest tints of the spectrum. The biographies of the leading actors of the revolution are made over from year to year in accordance with the changes in the staff of the ruling stratum and the growth of its pretensions. But the historical material puts up some resistance. No matter how great is the zeal of the official historians, they are held in leash by the archives, the periodical press of past years, and by the old articles — among them the articles of Stalin himself. That is the root of the evil!

Under the leadership of Yaroslavsky a number of young historians have been working over the history of the party. They have done all they could. But running into certain unsubmissive facts and documents, they found themselves unable, in spite of their zeal, either to crowd Trotsky out of the October Revolution or provide Stalin with a sufficiently imposing role in it. It was just along this line that Yaroslavsky fell under indictment for circulating "Trotskyist contraband": he did not carry the remaking of history clear through to the end. Woe to him who leaves his job half-done!

In many cases the accusation of harboring contraband has another source Thousands of the less resolute partisans of the Opposition formally renounced their views during the last years, and were returned to the party and set to work. It soon became evident, however, that the Opposition school had been for them an invaluable school for scientific thinking. Former "Trotskyists" have occupied prominent positions in the sphere of economics, science, literature, and educational activities. They are submissive, as frightened functionaries know how to be, but they also know the facts. In their brain convolutions a number of critical habits have got stuck. The agents of Stalin, spying upon them from all sides, have had no difficulty in discovering in their books and lectures the poison of "Trotskyist contraband."

There is also a third source of this poison, no less dangerous. Serious young investigators, not at all bound up in the past with the Opposition, to a considerable extent nonpolitical but also free from careerist motives, frequently become victims of the scientific material they are working on and their own conscientiousness. Upon a whole series of questions, without ever suspecting it, they fall into the tracks laid down by the Left Opposition. The system of opinions which the Stalin bureaucracy imposes has come into more and more serious conflict, not only with the traditions of the party, but also with any somewhat serious independent investigations in the various spheres of historical and social science, thus giving rise to Opposition moods. As a result it has suddenly been discovered that highly important branches of the social work in the Soviet Union are in the hands of the "vanguard of the bourgeois counterrevolution"!

The Strengthening of the Soviet Economy Weakens Stalin

The bitter character of the present campaign against "Trotskyists" has inspired the Russian emigrant press to new prophecies of the coming downfall of the Soviet power. And these voices, in spite of the discouraging experience of the last fourteen years, have found an echo even in the great European and American newspapers. This is not, after all, surprising: not only does the Stalin bureaucracy stubbornly identify itself with the Soviet regime, but its enemies also, in search for comforting illusions, become victims of the same political aberration.

As a matter of fact, there is not the slightest foundation for this talk of the approaching long-awaited "end." The development of the productive forces of the Soviet Union is the most colossal phenomenon of contemporary history. The gigantic advantage of a planned leadership has been demonstrated with a force which nothing can ever refute. The nearsightedness and zigzagging of the Stalin bureaucracy only the more clearly emphasize the power of the methods themselves. Only the maniacs of the restoration can imagine that the toiling masses of Russia want to turn back to the conditions of backward Russian capitalism.

But it is no less an error to imagine that the economic successes in strengthening the new industrial regime have also automatically reinforced the political position of Stalin and his faction. Up to a certain moment it was so. But at present a process of exactly the opposite kind is developing. A people who have achieved a mighty revolution may temporarily, in difficult circumstances, hand over the guidance of their destinies to a bureaucracy. But they are not able to renounce politics for long. It would be blindness not to see that the very strengthening of the economic situation of the country sets the toiling masses in more and more hostile opposition to the omnipotence of a bureaucracy. The workers, not without justification, attribute to themselves the achieved successes, and follow the bureaucracy with more and more critical eyes. For the masses see from below not only the successes and the possibilities flowing from them, but also the crude mistakes of the leaders and their continuous tendency to shift the responsibility for these mistakes from themselves to their agents. In raising the pride of the workers, the successes have also raised their political demands.

The lessons of the economic zigzags, especially the astounding exposures of the trials of the saboteurs, have taken deep root in the consciousness of the population and greatly undermined even the prestige of Stalin. The inference comes of itself: "It seems as though the Opposition was right!" The ideas of the Opposition, although not showing themselves on the surface, have long been laying down hidden roots. A critical period is now opening. The workers desire not only to obey but to decide. They intend to change many things. It is more than ever demanded of them, however, that they merely ratify decisions adopted without them. The workers are discontented — not with the Soviet regime but with the fact that a bureaucracy is replacing the Soviets. In various workers' councils the "Trotskyists" are lifting their heads, sometimes very courageously. They are being expelled. This has opened a new chapter in the life of the ruling party. Critical voices can no longer be silenced.

Whereas the former party crises reflected directly the difficulties and contradictions of the development of the Soviet republic under bureaucratic leadership, what comes to view in the present period is the contradiction in the position of the Stalin faction and, above all, of Stalin himself.

When these lines see the light the Seventeenth Party Conference will already be ending in Moscow, a conference which is nothing but a meeting of the apparatus, that is, the centralized Stalinist faction. Without a doubt the conference will pass off sufficiently well for the present leadership. But no matter how strong the Stalin faction is, it will not decide. The decision will be made in the last analysis by industrial processes on the one side, and, on the other, by deep political processes taking place in the consciousness of the masses.

The campaign against "Trotskyism" now developing signalizes the twilight of the omnipotence of the Stalin bureaucracy. But therewith it foretells, not the fall of the Bolshevik power, but on the contrary a new rise of the Soviet regime — not only its industry, but its politics and culture. That movement to which the author belongs is firmly confident of finding its place in the gigantic work to come.