Stalin Again Testifies Against Stalin

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The revision of the principles of Bolshevism has irrevocably led to the revision of the history of Bolshevism. In particular, that which is now called the history of the October Revolution is a completely artificial and contradictory construction which concentrates on the private and personal problems of the higher-ups of today's political world and not on the reconstruction and explanation of the facts of the past.

In 1922 the task was entrusted to Yakovlev — then in the People's Commissariat of Agriculture — to compile a "History of the October Revolution." The fact that the Central Committee appointed Trotsky beforehand to edit Yakovlev's work shows how far the Central Committee was — despite the absence of Lenin — from the thought of directing the history of the October Revolution against Trotsky. Redirection in this matter began only in 1924. Yakovlev, it is true, wrote no history of the October Revolution. But he managed to publish a few collections of historical material to which he provided his own prefaces. Roughly, one can lay down the following law: the correctness of Yakovlev's prefaces is in inverse ratio to the square of time which elapsed before the publication of each collection. More simply: the more time passed, the more boldly Yakovlev lied. In 1928, in his preface to the minutes of the Second Congress of Soviets, Yakovlev already was bold enough to assert: "The Bolsheviks did not yield to 'constitutional illusions,' and having rejected the proposal from Comrade Trotsky to time the insurrection without fail [?] for the Second Congress of Soviets, they took power before the opening of the Soviet Congress" (Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, State Publishers, 1928, p. 38).

From the quotation it follows that in the problem of the timing and methods of the insurrection the Central Committee, under Lenin's leadership, carried out a policy opposed to Trotsky's. The falsity of this construction, which belongs not to Yakovlev but to his inspirers, above all to Stalin, is smashed to smithereens by the facts and documents in the appendix to the last volume of Trotsky's History. But of the evidence cited in the History perhaps the most colorful piece is absent.

On April 23, 1920, the Moscow organization celebrated Lenin's fiftieth anniversary. The unwilling "hero" of the festivities stayed away from the celebration and appeared only at its very end in order to express the hope that the party would refrain from the depressing practice of jubilee celebrations. Lenin was mistaken in his hopes. Later jubilee celebrations took on a compulsory character; but this is a special problem. Kamenev was the main speaker at the celebration. Besides him, Gorky, Olminsky, and Stalin also spoke. Instead of forecasting the further development of events, Stalin, in a very short and clumsy speech, set himself the task of "pinpointing a trait [of Lenin] about which no one had as yet spoken — his modesty and the admission of his mistakes." The speaker cited two examples: the first concerning the boycott of the State Duma (1905), the second concerning the timing and method of the October insurrection. Let us quote verbatim Stalin's account about this second "mistake" of Lenin:

"In July 1917, under Kerensky, when the Democratic Conference was called and the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries were setting up a new institution — the Pre-Parliament which was supposed to set the rails for a switch to constitutional government — we in the Central Committee decided to go ahead with reinforcing the Soviets, to summon the Congress of Soviets, to begin the insurrection, and to proclaim the Congress of Soviets the organ of state power. Ilyich [Lenin], who was then in hiding, did not agree and wrote that it was necessary to disperse and arrest this riffraff [the Democratic Conference]. We realized that the matter was not so simple, knowing that the conference consisted of a half or at least a third of delegates from the front, that by arrest and dispersal we could only spoil the whole business and worsen relations with the front. All the holes and pitfalls on our course were more visible to us. But Ilyich is great and doesn't fear [?!] either holes or pitfalls or chasms in his way; he doesn't fear threats and says, 'Be determined and go ahead.' But the fraction saw that it was disadvantageous to act in this way at the time, that it was necessary to go round these obstacles in order to take the bull by the horns. And in spite of Ilyich's demands we went ahead with reinforcement and presented [?] the picture [?] of October 25 as the date of the insurrection. Ilyich, smiling, slyly looked at us and said, 'Yes, you were right.' This astonished us. Sometimes Comrade Lenin in problems of great importance confessed his shortcomings [?]" (The Fiftieth Anniversary of V. I. Ulyanov-Lenin, 1920, pp. 27-28).

Stalin' s speech does not appear in any version of his Works. Nevertheless, it is extremely interesting. In the first place, it does not leave one stone standing of the latest legend, the most "scientific," formulated by Yakovlev, that the Central Committee under Lenin's leadership crushed the constitutional illusions of Trotsky regarding the timing and method of the insurrection. According to Stalin — that is, according to Stalin in 1920 — it transpires, on the contrary, that on this question the Central Committee supported Trotsky against Lenin.

In his recollections of 1924, Trotsky tells how Lenin, appearing in the Smolny on the night of the twenty-fifth [of October] said to him, "All right, one can proceed in this fashion as well, provided we seize power." The "historian" Yaroslavsky in 1930 indignantly denied the authenticity of this account: after all, the overthrow was carried through by the Central Committee in accord with Lenin — against Trotsky; how could Lenin have said, "one can proceed in this fashion"? We learn from Stalin, however, that the Central Committee "in spite of Ilyich's demands" held its course toward the Congress of Soviets and "presented the picture of October 25 as the date of the insurrection"; Lenin, indeed, on his arrival at the Smolny declared, "Yes, you were right." Could one present a more convincing even if involuntary corroboration of Trotsky's account and a more crushing refutation of all later falsifications?

Stalin's jubilee speech is instructive in all its outlines and details. What a devastating primitiveness in the depiction of people and circumstances! Stalin even incorrectly describes the Central Committee's plan: "to go ahead with reinforcing the Soviets, to summon the Congress of Soviets, to begin the insurrection, and to proclaim the Congress of Soviets the organ of state power." This is that very mechanical schematism which Lenin, not unjustifiably, stigmatized as constitutional illusions: to summon the Congress of Soviets beforehand in order only then to announce the insurrection would have meant giving the enemy the chance to strike at the Congress of Soviets before the insurrection. The question arises of itself: Was Lenin's fear a result of one of his meetings with Stalin? In fact, the plan that was actually carried out consisted in mobilizing the masses under the slogan of the Congress of Soviets as the supreme organ of the country and under cover of this legal campaign preparing the insurrection and striking at a suitable moment, near the congress but definitely not after it

Stalin makes a crude mistake in the central point of the October strategy because he did not think out the problems of the insurrection for himself, neither at the time of the events nor afterwards. All the easier was it for him then to bless Yakovlev afterwards for attributing his own, Stalinist, strategical thoughts, not worked out to their conclusion, to Trotsky and for uniting Stalin with Lenin in a struggle against "constitutional illusions"! From this single episode the theoretical level of the epigones stands out in all its dreadful poverty.

The little book of 1920 jubilee speeches which has come into our hands by chance is not exceptional. Not only the archives of the party and of Soviet institutions but also official publications from before 1924 represent their own kind of foundation of dynamite on which is erected the superstructure of epigone ideology. Every brick of this foundation threatens to collapse. In great as in small problems the tradition of Bolshevism is fully on the side of the Left Opposition.