Zinoviev and the Evils of Printing

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In Number 5 of the Bolshevik of this year, Zinoviev once more “fuses” with the Party – by that single method now accessible to him. Zinoviev writes:

“In 1922, Trotsky predicted that ‘the real rise of socialist’ economy will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the most important countries of Europe.’ This prediction has not been confirmed, just as many other predictions of the author mentioned. The real rise of our socialist economy became possible already prior to the victory of the proletariat in the most important countries of Europe. The real rise is developing before our very eyes.”

The same Zinoviev, beginning with the same year 1922, accused Trotsky of “super-industrialism”, that is, of demanding a too speedy industrial rise. How should this be reconciled?

The Opposition was accused of non-belief in socialist construction and at the same time that it wants to rob the peasantry. If that were so, why did it have to “rob” the peasantry? In reality, the Opposition spoke of compelling the Kulak and the upper layer of the peasantry in general to bring sacrifices for socialist construction – the one which the Opposition was supposed “not to have believed”. A fiery belief in socialist construction was manifested only by those who struggled against “super-industrialism” and proclaimed the empty slogan “face towards the village”. Zinoviev proposed to the peasantry, instead of cotton prints and a tractor, a pleasant smiling “face”.

In 1930 as well as in 1922 Trotsky considers that “the real rise of socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the most important countries of Europe.” Only it must be understood – and this is not so difficult, after all – that by socialist economy we have here in mind precisely socialist economy and not the contradictory transitory economy of the NEP and that by a real rise we understand such a rise which will completely reconstruct the habitual and cultural conditions of life of the toiling masses, destroying not only the “queues”, O wise Zinoviev, but also the contradiction between the city and the village. Only in this sense can a Marxist speak about a real rise in socialist economy.

After his struggle with “Trotskyism” in 1923–1926, Zinoviev in July 1926, officially admitted that the basic core of the Opposition of 1923 was correct in its prognosis. And now for the sake of fusion with Yaroslavsky, Zinoviev once more rushes into all the difficulties and warms over the old dishes.

It is worth while therefore, to recall that this same Zinoviev signed, and in part wrote on the question he now touches, in the Platform of the Opposition:

“When we, in the words of Lenin, say that in order to construct a socialist society in our country a victory of the proletarian revolution is needed in one or more of the advanced capitalist countries, and that the final victory of socialism in one country and a backward one at that as impossible, as Marx, Engels and Lenin proved, the Stalin group ascribes to us the view that we ‘do not believe’ in socialism and socialist construction in the U.S.S.R.” (Platform of the Bolshevik-Leninists, page 72)

Not badly said, is it? How to explain these scurryings from falsifications to repentance and from repentance to falsifications? On this point the Platform of the Opposition does not leave us without an answer:

“... The petty bourgeois tendency within our own Party cannot struggle against our Leninist views otherwise than by ascribing to us things we never thought or said.” (ibid., page 72)

The last lines were not only signed by Zinoviev, but, unless we are mistaken, were written by him. Truly Joseph Gutenberg has rendered some people a very poor service. Particularly when they have to “fuse” with the other “Joseph” who, it is true, did not invent printing, but works very conscientiously at its destruction.