The Expulsion of Zinoviev

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The Lessons of the Second Expulsion of the Capitulators

PART I

Wireless and telegraph have flashed news to the entire world of the expulsion of Zinoviev and Kamenev from the party, and along with them of more than a score of Bolsheviks. According to the official communication, those who are expelled were, presumably, striving to reestablish capitalism in the Soviet Union. The political import of this new repression is imposing in itself. Its symptomatic significance is tremendous.

In the course of many years, Zinoviev and Kamenev were the closest pupils and collaborators of Lenin. Better than any one else, Lenin knew their weak traits; but he was also able to utilize their strong sides. In his Testament, so cautious in tone, wherein both praise and censure are equally modulated in order not to strengthen some too much and weaken others, Lenin deemed it urgent to remind the party that the behavior of Zinoviev and Kamenev in October was “not accidental”. Subsequent events confirmed these words all too clearly. But no more accidental was also that role which Zinoviev and Kamenev played in the Leninist party. And their present expulsion brings to mind their old and unaccidental role.

Zinoviev and Kamenev were members of the Politbureau, which in Lenin’s time was directly in charge of the fate of the party and of the revolution. Zinoviev was the chairman of the Communist International. Together with Rykov and Tsiurupa, Kamenev was Lenin’s alternate, during the final period of Lenin’s life, for the office of chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars. After Lenin’s death Kamenev presided over the Politbureau and the Soviet of Labor and Defense, the highest economic organ of land.

In 1923, Zinoviev and Kameuev launched a campaign against Trotsky. At the beginning of the struggle, they took very poor account of its consequences, which, of course does not testify to their political far-sightedness. Zinoviev was primarily an agitator, exceptionally talented, but almost exclusively an agitator. Kamenev – “a wise politician” in Lenin’s estimation, but lacking great will power and too easily inclined to adapt himself to the intellectual, culturally middle class and bureaucratic milieu.

Stalin’s role in this struggle bore a much more organic character. The spirit of petty-bourgeois provincialism, the absence of theoretical preparation, narrowness of vision – that is what characterizes Stalin, notwithstanding his Bolshevism His enmity toward “Trotskyism” had roots much deeper than that of Zinoviev and Kamenev, and for a long time previously it had sought for its political expression. Incapable himself of theoretical generalizations, Stalin urged on in turn Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bucharin and picked out from their speeches and articles whatever seemed to him most appropriate for his own aims.

The struggle of the majority of the Politbureau against Trotsky, which began, to a considerable degree, as a personal conspiracy disclosed all too quickly its political content. It was neither simple nor homogeneous. The Left Opposition included within itself, around its authoritative Bolshevik kernel, many of the organizers of the October overturn, militant participators of the Civil War, and a considerable stratum of Marxists from out of the student youth. But in the wake of this vanguard, during the first stages, there dragged along the tail-end of all sorts of dissatisfied, ill-equipped and even chagrined careerists. Only the arduous development of the subsequent struggles liberated the Opposition from its accidental and uninvited fellow wayfarers.

Under the banner of the “troika” – Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin – were united many “old Bolsheviks” particularly those, who, as Lenin advised as early as April 1917, should have been relegated to the archives; but there also were many serious underground members, strong party organizers who sincerely believed that there was impending the danger of Leninism being displaced by Trotskyism. However, the further matters progressed the more solidly and cohesively, the growing and intrenching bureaucracy rose up against “the permanent revolution”. And it was this that subsequently guaranteed Stalin’s preponderance over Zinoviev and Kamenev.

The fight within the “Troika”, beginning in a considerable measure also as a personal fight – politics are made by people and through people, and nothing that is human is foreign to politics – soon, in its own turn, disclosed its content of principle. Zinoviev, the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, and Kamenev, chairman of the Moscow Soviet, sought the support of the workers of the two capitals. Stalin’s chief support was in the provinces and in the apparatus; in the backward provinces the apparatus became all-powerful sooner than in the capitals. Zinoviev, chairman of the Comintern, cherished his international position. Stalin looked down with contempt upon the Communist parties of the West. He found the formula for his nationalistic limitations in 1924: socialism in one country. Zinoviev and Kamenev counterposed against him their doubts and refutations. But as it turned out, it was sufficient for Stalin to depend upon those forces which were mobilized by the “troika” against Trotskyism in order automatically to overwhelm Zinoviev and Kamenev.

Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s past, the years of their joint work with Lenin, the international school of emigration – all this must needs have counterposed them inimically to that wave of self-dependency that threatened, in the last analysis, to sweep away the October revolution. The result of the new fight on top came to many as absolutely astounding; two of the most violent instigators of the hue and cry against “Trotskyism”, ended up in the camp of the “Trotskyists”.

In order to facilitate the bloc, the Left Opposition – against the objections and warnings of the author of these lines – modulated isolated formulations of their platform, and temporarily refrained from making official replies to the most acute theoretical questions This was hardly correct. But the Left Opposition of 1923 still did not take to the path of making concessions in essence. We remained true to ourselves. Zinoviev and Kamenev came to us. There is no need to recapitulate the degree to which the coining over to the side of the Opposition of 1923, of the sworn enemies of yesterday strengthened the assurance of our ranks and our conviction in our historical correctness.

However, Zinoviev and Kamenev, on this occasion as well, did not foresee all the political consequences of their step. In 1923 they had hoped, by means of a few agitational campaigns and organizational maneuvers, to free the party from the “hegemony of Trotsky”, pushing all other things aside, and now it seemed to them that, allied with the Opposition of 1923, they would quickly cope with the apparatus and reestablish both their own personal positions, and the Leninist course of the party.

Once again they were mistaken. Personal antagonisms and groupings within the party had already become completely the tools of anonymous social forces, strata and classes. There was its own inner lawfulness in the reaction against the October overturn, and it was impossible to skip over its ponderous rhythm by means of combinations and maneuvers.

Sharpening from day to day, the struggle between the Opposition bloc and the bureaucracy reached its final limits.

The matter now, no longer concerned discussion, even if under the whip, but a break with the official Soviet apparatus, i.e., the perspective of an arduous struggle for a number of years – a struggle surrounded by great dangers and the issue of which could not be foretold.

Zinoviev and Kamenev recoiled. As in 1917, on the eve of October, they had become frightened at a break with the petty bourgeois democracy, so ten years later they became frightened of a break with the Soviet bureaucracy. And this was all the more “not accidental” since the Soviet bureaucracy was three-quarters composed of those same elements which in 1917 scared the Bolsheviks with the inevitable flop of the October “adventure”.

The capitulation of Zinoviev and Kamenev, before the XVth congress, at the moment of the organized extirpation of Bolshevik-Leninists, was accepted by the Left Opposition as an act of monstrous perfidy. Such it was in its essence. Still, even in this capitulation there was its measure of lawfulness, not only psychological, but political. On a series of fundamental questions of Marxism – (the proletariat and the peasantry, “democratic dictatorship”, permanent revolution) – Zinoviev and Kamenev stood betwixt the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Left Opposition. Theoretical amorphousness avenged itself inexorably, as it always does, in practise.

Prinkipo, October 1932

L. TROTSKY

PART II

With all his agitational radicalism, Zinoviev always pulled up short before the actual inferences of political formulae. Fighting against Stalinist policies in China, Zinoviev opposed to the end the break of the Communist party with tho Kuo Min Tang. Exposing Stalin’s alliance with Purcell and Citrine, Zinoviev was poised irresolutely before the split with the Anglo-Russian Committee. Joining in the struggle against Thermidorian tendencies, he took a vow beforehand: in no case to bring matters to a pitch of facing expulsion from the party. In this spirit of going fifty-fifty there was ingrained his inevitable downfall. “Everything, except Stalinism” within those limits that would be permitted by Stalin.

After their capitulation, Zinoviev and Kamenev did absolutely everything they could in order to restore the confidence of the ruling clique in themselves and in order to be assimilated into the official milieu. Zinoviev made his peace with the theory of Socialism in one country, and once again exposed “Trotskyism” and even made attempts to burn incense to Stalin personally. Nothing helped. The capitulators suffered, shut up, and waited. And with all that they still did not succeed in hanging on to celebrate the fifth anniversary of their own capitulation; it seems that they were involved in a “conspiracy”, and therefore were expelled from the party, perhaps to be deported or exiled.

What is astounding is that Zinoviev and Kamenev got it in the neck not for their own cause and not under their own banner. The warp of the list of those expelled according to the decision of October 9th, consists of outright Rights, i.e., the followers of Rykov-Bucharin-Tomsky. Does it mean that Left Centrism has unified with Tight Centrism against the bureaucratic core? Let us not rush to conclusions.

The most eminent names in the list, after Zinoviev and Kamenev, are those of Uglanov and Riutin, two former members of the C.E.C. Uglanov, as the general secretary of the Moscow Committee and Riutin, as the head of the Agitprop, were in charge in the capital of the struggle against the Left Opposition, clearing every corner and by-path of Trotskyism in 1926–1927. They raised a particularly venomous hue and cry after Zinoviev and Kamenev as the “traitors” to the ruling faction. When Uglanov and Riutin, as a consequence of the Stalinist zigzag to the Left, turned out to be the chief practical organizers of the Right Opposition, all the official articles and speeches harped on one and the same note, “No one can deny the great service rendered by Uglanov and Riutin in the struggle against Trotskyism; but their platform nevertheless is that of kulaks and bourgeois-liberals.” The Stalinists pretend that they are unaware that it was on account of just this program that the struggle had taken place. As then, so now only the Rights and the Lefts had positions based on principle. The Stalinists thrived on the sops from the one and the other.

As early as 1928, Uglanov and Riutin began to assert that the Left Opposition turned out to be correct in its stand on the question of the party regime – this acknowledged is all the more instructive since none could boast of such successes in implanting the Stalinist regime as Uglanov and Riutin. However, “solidarity” on the question of party democracy cannot soften the heart of the Left Opposition in its relation to the Right. Party democracy is not an abstract ideal; least of all, is it predestined to serve as a screen for Thermidoriau tendencies. And in the meantime, Uglanov and Riutin, at least in those years, represented the most out and out Thermidorian wing in the camp of the Rights.

Among the participators iu the conspiracy, the C.E.C. lists other leading Rights, like Slepkov and Maretsky, Red professors of the Bucharin School, directors of the Komsomol and Pravda, instigators of many programmatic resolutions of the C.E.C. and authors of countless articles and brochures against “Trotskyism”.

On the proscribed list there are to be found Ptashny and Gorelov with a notation of their former adherence to the “Trotskyist Opposition”. We have no means of judging whether the matter concerns here two very little known Left capitulators, who subsequently threw in their lot with the Rights, or whether we have before us a falsification in order to fool the party. The former is by no means excluded, but in all probability neither is the latter.

In the summary of the participants, the chief leaders of the Right Opposition are conspicuously absent. Cables to the bourgeois papers report that Bucharin “has completely reestablished his party position” and is apparently slated for the Narkompros in place of Bubnov, who is being transferred to the G.P.U.; as for Rykov, he is once again in favor, makes speeches over the radio, etc. The fact that in the list of “the conspirators” there is neither Rykov nor Bucharin nor Tomsky really does make plausible some temporary bureaucratic indulgences in favor of the former leaders of the Right Opposition. But, of their being reestablished in their old positions in the party, there cannot be the slightest considera[tion.]

The group as a whole is accused of an attempt to create “a bourgeois kulak organization in order to restore capitalism in the U.S.S.R. and the kulak, in particular.” An amazing formulation! An organization to restore “capitalism and the kulak, in particular (!)”. This “particularly” gives away the whole, or at least hints at it. There is no debating mat some of those expelled, like Slepkov and Maretsky, in the period of the struggle against “Trotskyism” developed, after the manner of their teacher Bucharin, the idea of “the kulak’s growing into socialism”. What stand they have taken since that time, we do not know. But it is quite possible that their present guilt consists not so much in their desire to “restore” the kulak as in their failure to recognize Stalin’s victories in the sphere of “liquidation of the kulak as a class’’.

However, what is the relation of Zinoviev and Kamenev to the program of “restoring capitalism”? The Soviet press informs us about the following as regards to their participation in the crime, “Knowing of the counter-revolutionary documents that were being circulated, instead of immediately exposing the agents of the Kulak agencies, they preferred to deliberate over this document (?) and by this act alone, they placed themselves as the direct accomplices of the anti-party, counter-revolutionary group.” So, Zinoviev and Kamenev “preferred to deliberate over the document” instead of “immediately exposing” it. The accusers do not even dare to assert that Zinoviev and Kamenev were entirely beyond considering its “exposure”. No, their crime consisted in their “preferring to deliberate” before “exposing”. Where, how and with whom did they deliberate? Had this occurred during a secret session of the Right organization, the accusers would not have failed to inform us about it. Obviously, Zinoviev and Kamenev “preferred to deliberate” with their own four eyes and within their own four walls. As a result of their deliberation, did they express their sympathy for the platform of the Rights. If there was even the slightest hint in the matter about such a sympathy, we would have been told about it in the decision. Silence on the matter testifies to the contrary; Zinoviev and Kamenev, obviously, subjected the platform to criticism instead of immediately ringing up Yagoda. But in view of the fact that they nevertheless did not telephone, Pravda feels it justified to ascribe to them this concept, “The enemy of my enemy is – my friend.”

The coarse strain of the accusation against Zinoviev-Kamenev makes it possible for us to conclude with assurance that blow was direct against them, and primarily them. Not because they evinced some political activity during the last period. We know nothing about it, and what is more important the C.E.C. knows nothing about either, as is evident from the decree. But the objective political situation has become so much worse as to make it impossible for Stalin to tolerate any longer legal candidates for leadership in the composition of this or the other Opposition group.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, of course, has long since been aware that Zinoviev and. Kamenev whom it had spurned were very much “interested” in the oppositionist trends within the party and were reading all sorts of documents that were not destined for Yagoda. In 1928, Kamenev even carried on secret negotiations with Bucharin regarding the possibility of a bloc. Records of these negotiations were published at the time by the Left Opposition. The Stalinists, however, could not decide upon expelling Zinoviev and Kamenev. They did not wish to compromise themselves by new scandals of repressions unless there was urgent necessity. The period of economic successes was then being inaugurated, in part actual, in part fictitious. Zinoviev and Kamenev did not appear to be immediately dangerous.

L. TROTSKY

PART III

Now the situation has changed at the root. True, the newspaper articles explaining the expulsion proclaim that because we have grown economically extremely strong, and because the party has become absolutely monolithic, therefore we cannot tolerate “the slightest conciliatory spirit.” But in this explanation, the white threads that baste it together, stick out all too clumsily in open view. The necessity for the expulsion of Zinoviev and Kamenev, for an obviously fictitious reason, testifies quite on the contrary to the extreme weakening of Stalin and his fraction. Zinoviev and Kamenev had to be liquidated post haste not because of a change in their behavior but because of a change in the background. Riutin’s group, independently of its actual activity, is dragged along, in the given instance, in order to garnish the service. In the foreknowledge of the fact that they may be soon brought to account, the Stalinists are “taking measures.”

In general, one cannot deny the fact that the judicial combination of the Rights, who inspired. Stalin’s policies in 1923–1929, of two actual or supposed former “Trotskyists” and of Zinoviev and Kamenev, guilty of knowing but of not informing, – that this, to repeat, is a product entirely worthy of the political creativeness of Stalin, Yaroslavsky and Yagoda. A classical amalgam of the Thermidorian type! The goal of the combination consists in mixing up the cards, disorienting the party, increasing the ideological confusion and thus hindering the workers from making out what’s what, and finding the way out. The supplementary task consists in politically lowering Zinoviev and Kamenev, former leaders of the Left Opposition, now being expelled for “amity” toward the Right Opposition.

Zinoviev’s Game with History

Inevitably a question arises, how is it that old Bolsheviks, men who are wise and experienced in politics, gave their opponent an opportunity to deal them such a blow? How could they, who renounced their own platform tor the sake of remaining in the party, when all is said and done, fly out of the party because of a fictitious connection with a platform foreign to them? One must perforce reply that this result also did not come about accidentally. Zinoviev and Kamenev tried to play tricks with history. Of course, they were motivated, first of all, by solicitude for the Soviet Union, for the unity of the party, and not at all for their personal welfare But they posed their tasks not on the plane of the Russian and World revolution but on a much lower plane of the Soviet bureaucracy.

In those most difficult hours for them, on the eve of capitalism, they adjured us, then their allies, “to meet the party half-way”. We replied that we were prepared to meet the party all the way, but in another and a higher sense than was required by Stalin and Yaroslavsky. But was that not a split? Was that not a threat of civil war and of the downfall of the Soviet power? – We replied, if it did not encounter our opposition, Stalin’s polcies would inevitably doom the Soviet power to ruin. And this is the idea that is expressed in our platform. What conquers are principles. Capitulation can never be victorious. We shall do everything in our power so that the struggle for principles be led in consonance with and after consideration of the entire situation, both domestic and foreign. But it is impossible to foresee all the variations of development Nevertheless it is absurd and criminal to play hide and seek with revolution, to use trickery in dealing with classes and diplomacy with history. In such complex and responsible situations one must be guided by a rule so excellently expressed by the French in the proverb, Fais ce que doit, advienne que pourra! Perform your duty, let come what may!

Zinoviev and Kamenev have fallen the victims because they did not keep to this rule.

* * * *

If one leaves aside the absolutely demoralized part of the capitulators of the type of Radek and Piatakov, who, as journalists or functionaries, will continue to serve every victorious faction (under the pretext of serving socialism), then the capitulators taken as a political group, represent in themselves moderate intra-party “liberals” who, at a given moment, rushed too far to the Left (or to the Right) and who subsequently took to the road of coming to terms with the ruling bureaucracy. But the present day is characterized by the fact that this conciliation, which appeared so final, has begun to crack and to explode, and thereto in an extremely acute form. The tremendous symptomatic significance of the expulsion of Zinoviev Kamenev, Uglanov and the others originates in the fact that in the new clashes at the “tops” there are reflected the profound surges in the masses.

The Basis Under the Capitulations

What political prerequisites were there that conditioned the period of capitulations in 1929–1930? They were: the bureaucratic turn of the helm to the Left; the successes of the industrialization; the quick growth of collectivization. The five year plan absorbed the working masses. A great perspective was opened up. The workers were reconciled to the loss of political independence in expectation of near and decisive, socialist successes. The peasant poor awaited from the collectives a change in their future. The standard of living of the lowest layers of the peasantry rose higher; it is true, to a considerable measure, at the expense of the basic funds of rural economy. Such were the economic prerequisites and the political atmosphere of the epidemic of capitulation.

The growth of economic disproportions, the aggravation in the situation of the masses, the growth of dissatisfaction, of the workers as well as of the peasants, confusion in the apparatus itself – these are the prerequisites for the revival of all, and of every kind of Opposition. The sharpness of contradictions and the intensity of alarm in the party push ever more onto the road of protest the moderate, cautious and always-ready-for-compromise, party “liberals”. Driven into a blind alley the bureaucracy immediately replies with repressions, in a large measure preventive.

We do not as yet hear the voice of the Left Opposition in the open. Small wonder: those same bourgeois papers that relate about the favors presumably in store for Ilykov and Bucharin, simultaneously report “new mass arrests among the Trotskyists”. The Left Opposition in the USSR was subjected in the course of a number of years to such fearful police persecution, its cadres were placed in such exceptional conditions that it is infinitely more difficult for it than for the legal “liberals” openly to formulate its opposition and to intervene organizationally into the developing events. By the by, the history of bourgeois revolutions reminds us that in their struggle against autocracy, the liberals, utilizing their legal prerogatives, always came out first in the name of the “people”; only the struggle between the liberal bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy cleared the way for the petty-bourgeois democracy and the proletariat. Of course what is concerned here is merely a matter of historical analogy; but we still think that it does explain something.

The resolution of the September plenum of the C.E.C. boasts out of time and out of place that having crushed counter-revolutionary Trotskyism, having exposed the anti-Leninist kulak essence of the Right opportunists, “the party ... has attained at the present time decisive successes ...” The nearest future, one should expect, will make clear that the Left and the Right Opposition are not only neither crushed nor annihilated but, on the contrary, that they alone exist politically. It was precisely the official policies of the last three or four years that prepared the conditions for a new upsurge of the Right-Thermidorian tendencies. The striving of the Stalinists to lump into a single pile the Lefts and the Rights is facilitated to some measure by the fact that the Lefts and the Rights speak of a retreat for the time given. This is inevitable: the exigent need of a regulated retreat from the line of adventuristic leap ahead has become the vital task of the proletarian state. The Centrist bureaucrats themselves dream of nothing else but the possibility of retreating in order, and without losing face completely, yet they cannot but recognize that a retreat in the face of the need for foodstuffs and for all other things may cost them all too dearly. For this reason they are retreating by stealth and by accusing the opposition of tendencies toward retreat.

The actual political danger consists in the fact that the Rights are a faction of permanent retreat and that they have now been given the opportunity to claim, “we have always demanded this”. The twilight in which the party lives does not allow the workers to make out quickly the dialectics of economic processes and to appraise correctly the limited, temporary and conjunctural “correctness” of the Rights, along with the erroneous of their fundamental position.

The Importance of Our Policy

All the more important, therefore, becomes the clear, independent, and looking to the far future, policy of the Bolshevik-Leninists. Follow carefully all the processes in the country and within the party! Appraise correctly different groupings according to their ideas and the social, ties! Do not become frightened at isolated tactical coincidences with the Rights! Do not forget, because of tactical coincidences, the antagonism of the strategic lines!

The political differentiation in the Soviet proletariat will occur along the line of the following questions: – How to retreat? What are the limits of the retreat? When and how to pass over to a new offensive? What should be the tempos of the offensive? No matter how important these questions are in themselves, they alone do not suffice. We are not building policies for one country. The fate of the Soviet Union will be resolved in an indissoluble jointure with the world development. It is necessary to place again before the Russian workers the problems of world Communism in their full scope

Only the independent emergence of the Left Opposition and the joining together of the basic proletarian kernel under its banner can resurrect the party, the Workers’ State and the Communist International.

Prinkipo, October 1932

L.T.