Preface and Postscript, Abridged Edition of Ma Vie

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🔍 See also : My Life.

Preface

This work was written in exile on the island of Prinkipo near Constantinople four years ago. It is presented here for the attention of our readers in a new, considerably abridged edition. The author expresses the hope that the work has suffered but little from the condensation and that, in any case, the process has made it accessible to the broad circles of readers for whom it was intended from the beginning.

Postscript

It is now about four years since this book was written. Since then, there has been much water under the bridge. It is necessary to devote at least a few lines to the most recent period in my life.

Four and a half years of my third exile, up until very recently when I settled in France, were spent in Turkey on the island of Prinkipo. These were years of theoretical and literary work, principally on the history of the Russian Revolution. My connections with friends in my native country were, of course, broken off, but not at all to the degree desired or hoped for by the leaders of the ruling faction. They stopped at nothing in order to completely isolate me in Turkey. Blumkin, who assassinated the German ambassador Count Mirbach in 1918 and later became one of the members of my military secretariat, visited me clandestinely in Constantinople with the object of setting up regular delivery into the USSR of the Russian Biulleten Oppozitsii, which I edited. On returning to Moscow he was imprudent or unfortunate enough to confide in someone who betrayed him. Blumkin was executed. He was not the only victim.

On January 11, 1933,1 sent a letter from Turkey to the Central Committee of the party. I will quote several lines from it here:

“I deem it necessary to inform you how and why my daughter committed suicide.

“At the close of 1930 at my request you authorized my tubercular daughter, Zinaida Volkova, to come to Turkey temporarily, for treatment…. I did not suspect that behind this liberalism of Stalin lurked an ulterior motive. My daughter arrived here in January 1931 with pneumothorax of both lungs. After a ten-month sojourn in Turkey we finally obtained — despite the constant resistance of the Soviet foreign representatives — permission for her to go to Germany for treatment. … The invalid began to recover and dreamed only of returning with her child to Russia where her daughter and her husband, who is a Bolshevik-Leninist kept in exile by Stalin, remained.

“On February 20, 1932, you published a decree by which not only my wife, my son, and I, but also my daughter Zinaida were deprived of Soviet citizenship. In the foreign country where you gave her permission to go with a Soviet passport my daughter occupied herself only with her treatment. She did not and because of her health could not take any part in political life. … Depriving her of her citizenship was only a wretched and stupid act of vengeance against me. For her, this act of personal vengeance meant a break with her little daughter, her husband, her work, and all her customary life. Her mental condition, already disturbed by the death of her younger sister and by her own illness, was dealt a fresh blow, all the more atrocious as it was quite surprising and not provoked in any way by her. The psychiatrists unanimously declared that only a return to her normal environment, with her family, and her work could save her. But your decree of February 20 removed precisely this possibility of saving her. …

“The new blow was more than this sick person could bear. On January 5, she asphyxiated herself with gas. She was thirty-two years old.

“In 1928 my younger daughter Nina [Nevelson], whose husband has been locked up in solitary prison by Stalin for the past five years, was bedridden and then hospitalized for a short time after my exile to Alma Ata. The diagnosis was galloping consumption. A purely personal letter addressed to me, without the least relation to politics, was held up by you for sixty-three days so that my answer did not find her alive. She died at the age of twenty-six. …

“I limit myself to this information without drawing conclusions. The time will come for this. …”

Despite all the advantages offered by Turkey as a place of exile, the attempt to isolate me, in the broader sense of the term, was still unsuccessful. Russian friends who were exiled and imprisoned were replaced by foreign friends who were no less loyal. Young comrades from various countries arrived in Prinkipo ready to spend several months and at times a year or more with our family. Among them were French, Germans, Czechoslovakians, English, Americans, Chinese, and Hindus. The new connections and personal friendships that enlivened our existence on the little island were a particular expression of a new political regroupment in the workers’ movement. The Russian Left Opposition gradually took on an international character. Dozens of national sections and publications sprang up. A vast literature was created in all the languages of civilized humanity. At the moment these lines are being written, the Left Opposition movement has definitively broken its ties with the Communist International and has advanced the goal of creating a new International, the Fourth. …

Here a skeptic will no doubt interrupt:

“How many years did you belong to the Second International?” “From 1897 to 1914, hence more than seventeen years.”

“And then?”

“And then — a break with the Second International right at the beginning of the war, and about five years of struggle for the new International, which was founded in 1919.”

“And so you belonged to the Third International for fourteen years?”

“Just about.”

“And now you are preparing to build a Fourth International? Isn’t this rather like the gyrations of a squirrel in its cage?” “No, it is not the same. The whole development of humanity unfolds along a complex rather than a direct line because the route is not laid out by a compass and ruler but by the struggle of living forces which pull in different directions. The historical course of the working class is no exception. For every great achievement, the proletariat, the only progressive class in modern-day human society, pays the price of new defeats, disillusionments, and retreats. In its time, the Second International accomplished a great educational task. But it lost its way due to a spirit limited by nationalism and reformism. When capitalism passed from the epoch of its rise to the epoch of stagnation, the ground began to disappear under the politics of reformism. Moreover, national boundaries became too constricting for economic development: social patriotism took on a profoundly reactionary character. The Second International was replaced by the Third. The October Revolution was its historical baptism. But revolution too is a profoundly contradictory process, whose various stages are conditioned by circumstances of time and place. From the revolution issued a new ruling stratum that defends and at the same time distorts the social system created by the revolution by instituting measures determined by the most myopic, limited, and conservative bureaucratism. And using the authority of the October Revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy subordinated the Communist International to itself, purged it, and rendered it powerless. In the last few years it has brought the proletariat nothing more than a stifling police regime, fatal errors, and crushing defeats. As a result, whatever its intention, it has contributed to a temporary rebirth of the Social Democratic parties, which were condemned by history. Battling against them furiously in words, but ceding them territory in actual fact, it has opened the doors to a reaction of historically unprecedented proportions. The victory of German fascism was made possible by the combined capitulations of the Second and Third Internationals.

Such crimes cannot be pardoned. The parties that bear the guilt for the greatest of political catastrophes are condemned to be thrown on the rubbish heap. Sooner or later the proletariat will emerge from the present terrible reaction and once again enter on the revolutionary path. But it will regroup its ranks under a new flag. This is the historical meaning of the preparation of a Fourth International. Let the skeptics sneer and scoff! History is not made by skeptics. In any case, it is not for the skeptics that this book is written.