The Responsibility for the Turns Lies with ... Trotskyism

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It is known that the Opposition is pulling to the “Right”, that it is against socialism and collectivization. It is no less known that the Opposition is for compulsory collectivization. And being that the selection and training of the apparatus, as is further well known, were in the past years in the hands of tine Opposition, then with it, naturally, lies the responsibility for the turns. At any rate this is all they talk about in Pravda. If you do not like it, do not listen, but do not interfere with the “general line”.

In the preceding issue we quoted the official Platform of the Opposition published in 1927 in regards to collectivization. But let us go way back of 1927, to the period of military Communism when civil war and famine necessitated a rigorous policy of bread requisitions. How did the Bolsheviks in those severe years paint the perspective of collectivization? In a speech devoted to the peasant uprisings on the ground of the requisitioning of bread, comrade Trotsky spoke on April 6, 1919:

“These uprisings gave us the possibility to realize our greatest ideological and organizational strength. But alongside of this, it is understood, the uprisings were also a sign of our weakness, because they drew into their wake not only the Kulaks but also – we must not deceive ourselves on this score – a certain part of the middle and intermediate peasantry. This can be explained by the general reasons which have been depicted by me – by the backwardness of the peasantry itself. We must not however, blame everything on the backwardness. Marx said on one occasion that a peasant not only has prejudice but also judgement, and one can appeal from the prejudice of the peasant to his judgement, to lead him towards a new order on the basis of experience. The peasantry should feel by deeds that in the working class, in its Party, in its Soviet apparatus, it has a leader, a defender; the peasant should understand the requisitions to which we were forced, should accept them as something unavoidable; he should know that we are entering into the internal life of the village, that we examine for whom it is easier, for whom it is more difficult, that we make an internal differentiation and seek the closest friendly bonds with the middle peasants.

“This we need first of all because as long as in Western Europe the working class has not gained power, as long as our Left flank cannot lean on the proletarian dictatorship of Germany, France and other countries, so long are we compelled to lean our Right flank on the Russian middle peasant. But not only in this period, no, also after the decisive, inevitable and historically pre-determined victory of the working class throughout Europe, for us, in our country, there will remain the important enormous task of the socialization of our agricultural economy, transforming it from a scattered, backward, peasant economy into a new, collective group, Communist economy. Can this greatest transition in world history be in any way computed against the desires of the peasantry? In no way. Not measures of violence will be needed here, not measures of compulsion, but educational measures, measures of influencing, of support, of good example, of encouragement – these are the methods by which the organized and enlightened working class speaks to the middle peasant.” (L.Trotsky, Vol.XVII, pages 119–120)