THIRTY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS about the "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union"
By ERNEST• GERMAIN
At the XXth Congress of the Communist Party creators of the Soviet of the Soviet Union, Anastas Mikoyan stated in trials were falsely and ignominiously accused of passing that the History of the Communist Party the worst crimes.
of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, published in 1938 by a "commission of the Central Committee" of that party, was neither adequate nor truly Marxist. Other speakers followed in his footsteps, quoting specific examples. historian Pankratova for her part boldly stated that the Short Course contained historical falsifications, and demanded that a scientific new version of the party history be published. In his secret report, Khrushchev made fun of the way in which Stalin had had his own eulogy drafted in this history.
After three years of efforts, the new version of the history of the Soviet CP has just seen the light of day. It is a work of collective authorship, namely: Ponomarov, Volkov, Volin, Zaintsez, Kuckin, Mints, Slepov, Soboler, Timofeievski, Khovtov, Chiataghin. Most of these authors are little known, apart from Ponomarov, who is one of the chiefs of the "Agitprop" Section of the Central Committee of the Soviet CP. A first translation of this long work has just appeared in Italy (Editori Riuniti); it comes to no less than 812 pages. It is this translation which we are here subjecting to a critical exam. ination.
The new History differs from the former Stalinist Short Course in three main aspects, of which two are matters of form and one of substance. It lengthens the analysis of certain phenomena, both objective phenomena and the principal works of Lenin, and goes back in greater detail over the prehistory of the Russian workers' movement. It continues the history of the USSR, which in the Short Course ended in 1938, up till the XXIIsts Congress, i e, till the beginning of 1959. It modifies (and partly upsets) the judgments made in the Stalinist version about the nature of certain political and economic problems faced by the Soviet state and the CP between 1918 and 1938, suppressing the most monstrous of the Stalinist falsifications. The biggest "turn" concerns the Moscow Trials, to which the 1938 Short Course had devoted an entire sub-chapter. The new version does not rehabilitate the Old Bolsheviks, leaders of the party, members of Lenin's Central Committee, state, who during these Nor does it state that these trials were infamous staged productions. It simply passes in silence over this whole significant episode of what "official" opinion in the URS S today calls "the personality cult." The Moscow Trials thus become — to use George Orwell's terminology - a "un-fact."
This phenomenon reflects a tragic paradox: setting out to erase a historical falsification, the above-mentioned collective authors have finally replaced it by a new falsification. Granted, this new one is less monstrous than the old one. remains, nonetheless, a falsification. It is typical of this work as a whole, in which abusive interpretations. lies by omission, if not pure and, simple falsifications, can still be counted by the hundreds — even though one timid step has been taken in the direction of truth.
But in taking this timid step while still keeping many forgeries or manufacturing new ones, the authors have got entangled in inextricable contradictions.
The Stalinist version of the history of the Bolshevik Party was coherent. History was frankly Manichæan. On the one side were the "good" people, essentially Stalin and his "faithful companions" (with, in a back seat, Lenin). On the other side were the "bad" people, traitors and spies, who had sold out to the capitalist powers and wanted to restore capitalism from 1918 on: all those who had been opposed to Stalin at any moment during his rise toward power.
To cram history into this simplistic diagramme, it was of course necessary to carve up facts as if they were some sort of plastic. Dates, persons, and events were all pitilessly transformed — not to speaks of ideas. This "history" resembles real history the way a nightmare resembles reality itself. Its actors borrow from reality the pallid features of the living and the external forms of things; and there evident connections between truth and mythology end. Nevertheless, apart from a few gross contradictions, 1 this Short 1 The Short Course asserts on the one hand that the "Trotskyists, Zinovievists, Bukharinists," et al were transformed from an ideological current into a "counter-revolutionary band" beginning in 1932; it asserts on hand that they were foreign spies as early as 1918.
14 Course cannot be denied the virtue of internal consistency.
The new History has kept most of its vioes. But at the same time it has lost this sole virtue. Manichæism has disappeared; it was, however, the labyrinthine thread through this demonological interpretation of history, peculiar to Stalin and Stalinism. It has not been replaced' by any other thread through the labyrinth. Hence the new version appears as an omnium-gatherum of contradictions.
It is no longer Stalin who is the hero of the history of the U S S R; it is the "Leninist Central Committee." But the authors carefully refrain from naming the members of this Central Committee, either in 1917, in 1920, in 1923, or even in 1927. And with good reason! Most of them died, murdered by the Stalinist terror.
The various oppositionals are no longer spies, paid agents of imperialism. They become "opportunists," "revisionists," "implacable adversaries of Leninism." As a result, they appear as representatives of ideological currents. But the authors carefully refrain from specifying what their ideas were, from quoting their works, their platforms, their articles. And with good reason! The correctness of these ideas, in the light of the revelations of Khrushchev's secret report to the XXth Congress, would be dazzlingly evident to all Soviet citizens.
The worst excesses of the Stalinist period are no longer passed over in silence, concerning either the "violation of Soviet legality," or the catastro. phie errors in economic policy (especially the evident failure of agrarian policy). But these events — which upset the fate of millions of human which cost the Soviet people completely avoidable inhuman sacrifices, and which brought about the disappearance of this whole famous "Leninist Central Committee" which was claimed to be the real creator of the Soviet state - these events were explained by just a reference to "the personality cult," and even partially excused! Here are strange Marxists indeed, who interpret one of the most poignant dramas of the history of our epoch without any reference to the class struggle, to the struggles among social groups, to economic and social problems, but exclusively by an appeal to psychopathology.
And so it is not necessary to be a prophet to predict that, though the former Short Course was considered as the "bible" of the Communist Parties for only 15 years (1938-1953), it will certainly not take as many years for the new History to join this Short Course on the heap of works improvised for an occasion and now forgotten and contemned, if not just chucked straight into the old-paper
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL baler. Other "histories" will appear, each taking the same path to oblivion, until there appears a history without falsifications or forgeries, whatever the political judgment of its authors concerning the various events reported on.
This evolution is all the more ineluctable in that, little by little, the veil of silence is beginning to be lifted in the US S R about the first phases of the history of the Soviet Republic. minutes of the 1917 meetings of the Central Committee have been republished; those of 1918 are in course of publication. The celebrated work of John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, the memoirs of Antonov-Ovseyenko, and eyewitness reports of the October Revolution have finally been reprinted. Lenin's testament, the letters and notes scandalously suppressed in the first editions of his Complete Works by Stalin, 2 have seen the light of day. Under these conditions, it is enough for young historians, young economists, and just simply young communists, in the USS R and elsewhere, to compare these originals with the current version of the History, to catch its authors immediately in flagrante delicto of deformation. And they will not fail to do so, from the moment that the police have lost their power to prevent them or to punish by deportation this crime of lèse-bureaucratie.
The reconstitution of historical truth is, in the U S S R, a necessary and inevitable corollary of the abolition of the bureaucratic regime. Necessary, because the renaissance of Marxist thought cannot take place in a vacuum and must take as its point of departure the best that has been acquired in the past (which does not at all mean that it identifies itself therewith). Inevitable, because, in the struggle for genuine soviet democracy, the young generation of communists will begin by condemning the violations of this democracy committed in regard to all communist, soviet, tendencies during the Stalinist period.
And so the hybrid character of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — halfway between Stalinist falsifications and historical truth — is after all only the reflection of the Soviet reality of today, where the pressure of the masses and of objective conditions has obliged the bureaucracy to abolish the most 2 In introduction to Volume XXXVI of Lenin': Complete Works, it is written:
By decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Institute of
Marxism-Leninism is publishing five volumes (36 to 40) as an addition to the fourth edition of Lenin's
Volume 36 includes works which formed part of the third edition, but which were not included in the fourth, as well as texts of Lenin published subsequent to [!] the fourth edition of his [complete!] works. [Our italies.]
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL monstrous aspects of the Stalinist dictatorship, but where at the same time the fundamental characteristics of bureaucratic degeneration continue to exist.
One of the most typical aspects of Stalinist ideology was to bring into question the nature and utility of objective science — at least concerning the social sciences. History, it was claimed, must be an instrument of the class struggle. And it, in order to preserve the Soviet state, ensure the future of mankind, defend the interests of millions of proletarians, it necessary to falsify a few "minor" historical facts, only "petty-bourgeois objectivists" could get up in arms about it. Even today this theory is not entirely abandoned in Stalinist cadre circles.
In reality, Marxists affirm specifically that historical truth is a weapon in the class struggle -at least in the hands of progressive classes or social formations. It is conservative or tionary historical formations, having privileges to defend or vices to hide, who must conceal or deform truth.
Granted, in the class struggle, the proletariat or its party cannot guarantee under all circumstances to tell the truth to the enemy. No coma battle; no serious trade-union leader will, at the beginning of a strike, reveal to the bosses his intentions, his strategy, or the state of his strike relief funds. To don me ty is to Bord a theoretical tool indispensable for present and future combats and victories. own class is to lower its level of consciousness. Lenin expressed himself with all the clarity that could be desired on this point when he stated, in Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disor. der, that it is necessary to know how to apply every tactic "in such a way as to raise, not lower, the general level of consciousness of the proletariat, its revolutionary spirit, its capacity to fight and to win."
Now when anyone falsifies history, when he lies to his own class, when he puts it in a position to discover these lies sooner or later, he can only sow demoralization, skepticism, and cynicism toward the party and Marxism in general. the Marxist method is transformed from an instruinstead of analyzing reality, anyone makes a gross travesty of it, he becomes incapable of working up a correct strategy and tactic, which have to
15 take reality as their starting point. He also undermines the confidence of the toilers in their own forces and in those of their party.
Were it only for this reason, the rectification of a few of the most striking historical falsifications contained in the new History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which we are undertaking in the following pages, is highly useful and necessary. Some will say that all that is already "old hat" and "outlived." But whoever is ignorant of the history of his own movement and his own class is not armed to correct old or new errors. He will be incapable of solving the tasks posed to him by the coming battles.
The rectification of the forgeries and lies by omission contained in the new History not only helps a cause which is particularly close to our hearts: the full and complete rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky, of the Left Opposition of the USSR, of all the Old Bolsheviks. It also provides extremely important political teachings for revolutionaries in the backward countries, the militants of the colonial revolution, who find themselves faced with strategic and tactical problems comparable to those which confronted the Bolsheviks before and after 1917. Study of the real history of the CP of the Soviet Union would help them immensely in solving these problems. Whereas, just like the Short Course of 1938, the new History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is an obstacle to be cleared on the road to such a study. 3
I. DEVELOPMENT AND TEACHINGS
OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION Question 1: All through this History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the "Leninist Central Committee" is presented as the genuine inspirer, organizer, and guarantor of the victory of the great October Revolution. But the composition of this Leninist Central Committee is carefully concealed from the reader. Who were the members of this Central Committee before, during, and after the victory of October, and what was their later fate?
At the XXth Congress of the CP of the Soviet Union, Pankratova declared:
If historical reality is presented in a way that is not in conformance with truth, the efforts of our cadres and our friends abroad to apply correctly the valuable experiences of the struggle of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union may be hindered.
Unfortunately, we are not carrying on a resolute struggle against deviation from the way
Lenin judged historical events, against all anti-historical and oversimplifying elements, against a subjectivist attitude toward history, against the modern.
ization [!] of history and a conception of history
[!] to each given and purely conjunctural
16 Answer: In August 1917, 21 Bolsheviks were elected members of the Central Committee. Out of these 21, seven died natural deaths: Sverdlov, Lenin, Dierjinsky, Nogin, Artem, Kolontaï, and Stalin. Two were murdered by the counterrevolution: Uritzki and Chaumian. Eleven fell victims to the Stalinist terror — one was assassinated abroad by an agent of the GPU: Trotsky; and ten died in Stallinist jails: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin, Miliutin, Krestinsky, Sokolnikov, Bubnov, Smilga, Berzin; the twenty-first, Muranov, disappeared without trace, and was probably also liquidated in 1938.
Between 1918 and 1921, 31 Bolsheviks were members of the Central Committee. Out of these 31, nine died natural deaths: Lenin, Djerjinsky, Uritzky, Sverdlov, Artem, Nogin, Stutchka, Stalin, Kalinin. One was driven to suicide: Tomsky. Eighteen were assassinated under the Stalinist terror: Zinoviev, Kameney, Yevdokimov, Smirnov, Trotsky, Radek, Serebriakov, Sokolnikov, Rykov, Bukharin, Rakovsky, Bielogorodov, Smilga, Krestinsky, Rudzutak, Bubnov, Miliutin, and Preobrazhensky. One was victimized by the Stalinist terror, but survived: Stassova. One disappeared without trace: Muranov. One is still alive and still a member of the Central Committee: Andreyev.
In October 1917, for the first time, a Political Bureau of the Central Committee was elected. It was composed of seven members: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, Bubnov, and Stalin. Two of these seven members died natural deaths; the other five were killed by the Stalinist terror. Up till 1923, the following served on the Political Bureau: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Stalin, Preobrazhensky, Serebriakov, Tomsky, and Rykov. of these ten persons, eight were victims of the Stalinist terror.
The conclusion is clear: the great majority of the members of "Leninist Central Committee" were killed under the reign of
In the old version of the history of the party history (the Short Course of 1938), it explained that these revolutionaries were, underneath, really counter-revolutionaries, agents of imperialism, spies, and even fascists and "Hitlerites." Inevitably Lenin's merits were diminished thereby: what indeed is one to think of a revolutionary leader who surrounds himself with a majority of counter-revolutionaries as his most faithful collaborators?
Today, Lenin was been "rehabilitated": "his" Central Committee is praised to the skies. But how is one not to conclude that the extermination of the majority of the members of this Central Committee could not be either a
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL "regrettable accident" or a simple caprice by a psychopath ("the personality cult"), but provides the most tangible proof of a colossal political transformation that took place in the USSR between the period of Lenin and the triumph of Stalin? How is one not to conclude that there was a counter-revolution, and, more exactly, a political counter-revolution, as we shall specify further on? Question 2: Does The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union speak of the rolle played by the members of this "Leninist Central Committee" in the history of the Russian workers' movement prior to 1917? Answer: It does, but exclusively to speak ill of them! When the "eminent collaborators of Lenin," the "organizers of the party," being quoted, they are scarcely mentioned. Their names are quoted only when it is a matter of uttering spiteful criticisms of them. There Is something quite illogical here. We lack the space to examine all these criticisms. But even if they were true, there would still be a lie by omission. How is it to be supposed indeed that would have proposed all through the revolution and the first years of Soviet power a Central Committee whose members had to their credit nothing but errors?
Sometimes these lies by omission reach the of the grotesque. Thus the book "forgets" to mention (vol I, p 193) that Kamener was sent to Russia by the Central Committee in 1914 to lead the Duma fraction and Pravda. It "forgets" to mention that Zinoviev was elected president of the Communist International at its Founding Congress, and was to occupy that post until 1926. It "forgets" to mention even the composition of the Bolshevik delegation to that congress, and with good reason: it was composed of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinovier, Stalin, Bukharin, and Chicherin. It "forgets" to point out that the Soviet members of the Communist International were: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Radek. It "forgets" to indicate that it was Frotsky who spoke in the name of the Bolshevik fraction at Preparliament, announce that this fraction was going to leave that assembly (vol I, pp 253-4). to mention that Trotsky was the first Bolshevik president of the Petrograd soviet and that as such he also presided over that soviet's Revolutionary Military Committee, entrusted preparing the insurrection. It "forgets" to give composition of revolutionary government (the Council of People's Commissars, presided over by Lenin, elected at the Second Pan-Russian Soviet Congress) (vol I, p 260).
be found in John Reed's in the country, the party of the proletariat could dictatorship in Russia?
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
This can, however, book, currently on sale in the US SR: Lenin, Miliutin, Shliapnikov, Antonov-Ovseyenko, Kry. lenko, Dybenko, Nogin, Lunacharsky, Stepanov, Trotsky, Lomov, Teodorovich, Avilov, Stalin. - Question 3: What were the tasks of the Russian Revolution of 1917?
Answer: The Russian Revolution overthrew the power of the bourgeoisie and the landlords, established the dictatorship of the proletariat, and opened the road to the expropriation of the capitalists and the nationalization of the means of production. At the same time, it solved the principal tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, which the bourgeoisie had turned radical agrarian reform, the question of the nationalities, the question of the unification of the country, etc.
On this subject, however, the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, sows extreme confusion. This confusion arises from the fact that the authors of the work do not always want to admit the evidence, namely, that Lenin (and after him the majority of the Bolshevik Party) modified Bolshevik strategy in April 1917, and that he adopted, in its essentials, the theory of the permanent revolution.
At the time of the Russian revolution of 1905, three positions faced one another in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party:
a) the position of the Mensheviks, which, taking as its starting point the abservation of the fact that Russia had not yet gone through a victorious bourgeois revolution, claimed that the revolution had essentially for its goal the overthrow of Czarism and the elimination of semi-feudal vestiges from the Russian economy and society. The proletariat was to give eritical support to the liberal bourgeoisie, in order to force it to oarry out this revolution in the most radical way, while at the same time fighting for its own immediate demands (right to strike, universal suffrage, eight-hour day, etc).
b) The position of the Bolsheviks, who took as their starting point the observation that the bourgeoisie in the contemporary period, faced by a highly concentrated and conscious industrial proletariat, organized in Marxist parties, was unable to carry out the classic tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, for fear of the revolutionary action of the masses. At • the same time, Lenin observed that, in view of the limited number of the proletariat in society, and of the weakness of the capitalist substructure
17 not hope alone to conquer power. If the revolution were pushed to the end, it would end up in a "democratie dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry," within which the workers' party could participate in a coalition government together with a peasant party. This victorious revolution would be only a radical bourgeois. democratie revolution, and would not immediately take the form of a socialist revolution.
c) The position of Trotsky: like the Mensheviks and Lenin, Trotsky understood that the key question was the agrarian question. But whereas the Mensheviks believed that the liberal bourgeoisie could carry out a radical agrarian reform, and Lenin believed that this reform could be the labor of a coalition government between a workers' party and a peasant party, Trotsky stated that only the proletariat is capable of giving the land to the peasants in a radical way. He specified, in effect, that history had shown that the peasantry was unable to form great national "really peasant" parties, and that it always followed the lead of either a bourgeois or workers' party.
The History of the October Revolution proved Trotsky right, since it was only at the moment when the Bolshevik government was formed, that the decree on the distribution of land to the peasants was voted.
In order to make the victory of October possible, Lenin changed the orientation of the party at the April 1917 Conference, modified the party programme which called for setting up only a democratic republic, and had written in it the goal of setting up immediately the dictatorship of the proletariat, a soviet state.
All that is very clear today. But The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union tries to wriggle out of it in various ways. It tries to deny that there was a change in the Bolshevik Party's strategy in April 1917. To do so, it indicates that the aim of the April Theses drafted by Lenin and the decision of the Bolshevik Party's April Conference was "the struggle for the passage from bourgeois-democratic revolution over to the socialist revolution [vol I, p 225]." We shall return later to what is erroneous in this formula. But we may already observe that it is in opposition to the "strategic goal" of the Bolsheviks in 1905, as the History itself defines it, since it correctly states (vol I, p 92) that the "democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants" foreseen by Lenin in 1905 was not a socialist dictatorship but only a "democratic" dictatorship. Do the authors of the History want to contest the fact that the October Revolution set up a proletarian, socialist,
18
This desperate attempt to deny Lenin's 1917 change in strategic orientation - an attempt which obscures the whole problem of the strategy of the revolutionary party in a backward country, especially in colonial countries — is indicted as false by innumerable witnesses of the period. Let us quote two, which the authors of the History will find hard to challenge.
In 1924, Molotov published an article titled "Lenin and the Party at the Period of the February Revolution," from which we extract the following passage:
But it is necessary to say openly that the party did not have that clarity of vision and that spirit of decision which were required by the revolutionary moment. It did not have them because it did not have a clear attitude of orientation toward the socialist revolution. In general the agitation and the entire practice of the revoluparty lacked a solid foundation, for its thought had not gone forward right up to the bold conclusion of the need for an immediate struggle for socialism and for the socialist revolution.
Trotsky's thought had drawn this "bold con. clusion" already in 1905. Lenin reached it beginning with the February revolution. That is the historical truth.
Volume XX of Lenin's Complete Works appeared in 1928. It was edited by the Lenin Insti. tute under the control of the Central Committee. The first part of this volume is concerned especially with the Bolshevik Party's April 1917 Conference. Here is what is stated in a note on page 557-8 (German edition) on the subject of this conference:
At this conference there was a small group, composed essentially of part of the delegates of the Moscow Committee and the
Moscow Region (Nogin, Rykov, Smidovich,
Ovsiannikov, Angarski, and others); its conception of the revolution corresponds roughlv to the position of the Bolsheviks in 1905 (the formula, "dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry"). [...]
Kamenev, who had a position close to that of this group, was entrusted by them with the presentation of a counter-report. [Our italics.]
It was to this "Moscow" position that Lenin refers in setting up in opposition to it the thesis of the conquest of power by the soviets (pp 334-6). It is true that he considers that this power will be "not yet" socialist, while still being "more than bourgeois-democratic." But on this point history has corrected Comrade Lenin. Nobody
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL today will deny the socialist character of the October Revolution. To be unwilling to understand this problem is to block any possibility of helping the Communist Parties of colonial countries to work up a correct strategy. It is to lose sight of the teachings, not only of the October Revolution, but also of the Jugoslav revolution and the Chinese revolution - not to mention, alas, the dozens of negative lessons wherever the Communist Parties clung to the outlived theses of 1905 and refused to head toward the dictatorship of the proletariat backed up by the poor peasantry. Question 4: What is the general teaching of the October Revolution in this matter? Answer: The teaching of the October Revolution in the matter of the main motive forces of the revolution in countries that have not yet experienced a completed bourgeois-democratic revolution is that the alliance between the workers and peasants, the only one capable of completing the radical agrarian reform, can be brought about only by the dictatorship of the proletariat (the conquest of power by the proletariat). This teaching is confirmed by the history of the Russian Revolution, the history of the Chinese Revolution, and the history of the Jugoslav revolution. There is no example in the history of the last 40 years of any country that succeded in accomplishing the classic tasks of the bourgeois revolution with. out passing through the conquest of power by the proletariat.
There are, on the contrary, innumerable examples of revolutions which, because of the fact that they did not end up in the dictatorship of the proletariat, stopped after the conquest of political independence (India, Indonesia, Burma, Egypt, Morocco, Tunis, ete) or the overthrow of the political agents of imperialism (Iraq, Venezuela), but did not succeed in solving the agrarian problem, not to speak of that of the industrialization of the country. The history of the second Chinese revolution (1925-27) confirms the same teaching. Question 5: Have the authors of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union formulated this teaching? Answer: They have not done so, although it is nevertheless to be found recorded in numerous documents of the Communist International, as well as in the following text by Lenin:
We know from our own experience — and we see confirmation of it in the development of all revolutions, if we take the modern epoch, a hundred and fifty years, say, all over the world - that the result has
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL been the same everywhere: every attempt on the part of the petty bourgeoisie in general, and of the peasants in particular, to realize their strength, to direct economies and politics in their own way, has failed.
Either under the leadership of the proletariat, or under the leadership of the capitalists — there is no middle course. All who hanker after this middle course are empty dreamers, fantasts. ["Speech Delivered to the All-Russian Congress of
Transport Workers," March 27, 1921, in
Selected Works, Moscow 1947 edition, p 691.]
Now that is exactly the same idea that guided Trotsky in working up his theory of the permanent revolution. Trotsky wrote in 1905:
The Russian Revolution prevents [...] the setting up of any bourgeois-constitutional regime whatever which might be able to solve the most primitive tasks of democracy. [...] For this reason, the fate of the most elementary revolutionary interests of the peasantry — even of the peasantry as a whole as a stratum — is tied up with the fate of the revolution as a whole, i e, with the fate of the proletariat. The proletariat in power will appear to the peasants as the class that frees them.
But will the peasantry perhaps push out the proletariat and occupy its place itself!
That is impossible. All historical experience rises up against such a hypothesis.
It shows that the peasantry is absolutely unable to play an independent political role.
The Russian bourgeoisie has bequeathed all revolutionary positions to the proletariat. It will have to abandon to it revolutionary hegemony over the peasantry as well.
Instead of admitting, or at least sketching out, this identity of views, the authors of the History drivel away about the alleged fact that "Trotsky wanted to jump over the stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution" and that he wanted "to isolate the proletariat from the peasantry [vol. I, p 95]." It suffices to compare this "analysis" of the theory of the permanent revolution with the definition • thereof given by its author himself, which we have just quoted, to understand how it is deformed, if not falsified. Question 6: Did the Stalinists and Khrushcherians at least follow this teaching in practice even if they snapped their fingers at it in theory? Answer: Nothing of the sort, unfortunately. In all cases where Communist Parties have been faced
19 with powerful revolutionary movements in the colonies, far from struggling for the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution and heading toward the dictatorship of the proletariat, they have idealized the national bourgeoisie, formed lasting alliances with it, subordinated the mass movement to it, and ended up by— being brutally repressed by that selfsame bourgeoisie. That began with the tragic experience with Chiang Kai-Shek in 1925-27; it continued in Iran under Mossadegh, in Guatemala under Arbenz, in Egypt under Nasser, in Argentina under Frondizi, and in Morocco under King Mohammed V. It is currently continuing in Iraq under Kassem, in India under Nehru, and in Indonesia under Sukarno. The outcome there will be no more brilliant than elsewhere.
True, it is not a question of requiring a Communist Party to fight for power under no matter what conditions or correlation of forces, or of forbidding it to grant critical support to a bourgeois-national movement as long as this movement is effectively leading a mass movement against imperialism. Unfortunately, all the above-mentioned cases show that, under Khrushcher as under Stalin, the Communists have thrown away immense opportunities to become in the immediate or middle future the dominant force among the people, because they subjected themselves in a servile way to the bourgeois-national leadership and contributed to laying its foundations among the masses.
The only striking exceptions are those of the Jugoslav and Chinese CPs, which, going against Stalin's directives, engaged in and won the struggle for power. By establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, they solved "as they went along" the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, without being able to stop at this stage, but passing rapidly on to "collectivist measures, just as Trotky had foreseen— way back in 1905. Question 7: What was the nature of the February revolution? Answer: The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union characterizes the February 1917 revolution as a bourgeois-democratic revolution that it was necessary "to transform" into a proletarian revolution (vol I, p 220). It is true that a few sentences uttered by Lenin in April 1917 — sentences that are not to be found again in any later analysis of the Russian Revolution by Lenin — give weight to this definition. In reality, the data offered by the authors of the History themselves permit emphasizing this definition's confused, or at least incomplete, character.
The February 1917 revolution, as a "bourgeois-democratic revolution," was characterized by the
20 fact that it did not solve its main task. The authors of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union indeed explain on page 214 of the first volume that the provisional government created by the February revolution was neither able nor willing to give the land to the peasants. They specify at the same time that the October Revolution, "which directly accomplished the socialist tasks, also carried through to its end the bourgeois-democratie revolution [vol I, p 273]." Now the History elsewhere states that the most burning task of the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution was "the destruction of the power of the landowners" (p 78), or, better still, liquidation of every vestige of feudalism" (p 205). Obviously, achieved in February 1917; if they had been, the peasantry would never have given its support to the October Revolution. By stating on page 212 that the February bourgeois-democratic revolution reached the first goal of the party, the overthrow of Czarism, and opened up the possibility of liquidating capitalism and installing socialism, the authors of the History themselves jump over the main task of the "bourgeois-democratic stage," namely, the distribution of land, and themselves "ignore" the decisive weight of the peasantry! All these wretched contradictions result from the attempt to ignore the theory of the permanent revolution. Question 8: Who led the October Revolution? when did it begin? and when did it triumph? Answer: The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union repeats on this subject - while attenuating them — the gross falsifications of the Short Course published in 1938. The latter had the nerve to write that at the historic 10 October 1917 session of the Central Committee, which took the decision in favor of the insurrection,
Trotsky did not vote directly against the resolution, but he presented an amendment
- which was to fail of acceptance - reducing the insurrection to nothing. He proposed not to begin the insurrection before the opening of the Second Congress of the Soviets; that would have dragged out the insurrection, announced its date in advance, and warned the Provisional
Government.
Since, in the meantime, John Reed's celebrated work, Ten Days that Shook the World, has been republished, this outrageous falsification, presents Trotsky, the main organizer and leader of the insurrection, as having wanted to cause it to fail (!), has had to be abandoned. John Reed's book is not just any old book. Its preface
•FOURTH INTERNATIONAL was written by Lenin. Reproduced in volume XXXVI of his Complete Works, this preface characterizes John Reed's book as follows:
It is with all my heart that I recommend this work to the workers of all countries.
I hope that this book may be distributed in millions of copies and translated into all languages, because it reports in a veracious and extraordinarily vivid way those events that are so important for understanding whatorship of the proletariat, really is. the proletarian revolution,
Now John Reed's book says that at this very meeting Lenin and Trotsky defended the idea of the insurrection; that, the very next day, Lenin published in the Pravda an article defending the idea of immediate insurrection; that the government, thus learning the "secret," immediately took and- that the insurrection nevertheless took place finally, as Trotsky had proposed, at the moment of the convocation at Petrograd of the Second PanRussian Congress of the Soviets (Modern Library edition, pp 38 et seq). John Reed's book really not leave a single word of the Stalinist falsification standing.
The new version of events offered by the authors of the History is, however, scarcely any more veracious. Seeing that it can be confronted in the sair lone lins, ap l by all Soviet readers (and all Communist readers in the entire world) with John Reed's work, it comes very close to the ridiculous.
It begins by picking up the passage mentioned above, correcting it as follows:
At the meeting of the Central Committee,
Trotsky did not vote against the resolution of the insurrection. But he insisted that the insurrection be put off until the convocation of the Second Congress of the
Soviets — which meant in practice to cause the insurrection to fail, since the Social-
Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks would have been able to delay the convocation of the congress and the government would have had the possibility, on the day opened, of concentrating sufficient [!] forces for the defeat of the insurrection.
The author of this "correction" does not show much brilliance in the consistency of his ideas. He forgets to explain to us why the insurrection, which in fact did coincide with the convocation of the Second Pan-Russian Congress of the Soviets, did not fail "for that reason." He forgets to remind us that, if Trotsky proposed making the two things coincide, it was precisely because the military forces at the government's disposal were insufficient to cause the failure of insurrection, since they came over, regiment after
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL regiment, to put themselves under the command of the Petrograd soviet. explain to us why the government, who were aware of the "date" of the insurrection, did not understand what Stalin, Ponomariov, and Company perceived— 20 years later.
the 1938 Short Course, it was said: On October 16th a session of the enlarged
Central Committee of the party was held.
It elected a Party Centre to direct the insurrection, with Comrade Stalin at its head. It was this centre, the leading nucleus [sic] of the Revolutionary Military
Committee connected with the Petrograd soviet, which in practice guided the insurrection.
In the new version, this falsification has been slightly corrected:
The organ entrusted with carrying out the insurrection in the capital was
Revolutionary Military Committee, created, at the proposal of the C C of the party, in connection with the Petrograd soviet [vol I,
21 garrison into the camp of the soviets and the skilful work of the Revolutionary
Military Committee above all and essentially to Comrade Trotsky. In Pravda,
6 November 1917.] Question 9: Who created the Red Army? Who directed its operations during the Civil War? Answer: Here also The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union gives proof of a mean and petty spirit of falsification. does not point out that Leon Trotsky was the first People's Commissar for Defense, without even mentioning the fact that he was the creator of the Red Army and "the father of victory," as is attested by the decree which accorded him the Order of the Red Flag on 7 November 1919.
The History cites pell-mell a few of the main military and political leaders of the army:
Vorochilov, Budyenny, and others; S Kamenev, Karbichev, Chapochnikov, kievich, and Nicolaïev, on page 307 of volume I; Andreyer, Bubnov, Vorochilov, rjinsky Kossior, Kuibycher, Mechllis, Mikoyan, Zhdanov Kalinin, p 255].
It is true that this committee did carry out all the practical work of the insurrection. The *Ordjonikidze, one lie by omission committed here by the authors of this History is not to recall that its president was Leon Trotsky. the next page, it is stated that, on October 16th,
At the end of the session there was elected a revolutionary military Centre to lead the insurrection, composed of Bubnor, Diffi jinsky, Sverdlov, Stalin, and Uritzky.
was decided that this revolutionary military
Centre should enter the Revolutionary
Military Committee of the Soviet [p 256].
In other words, the organ that was "to lead" simply entered the already existing organism and did not modify either its work or its leading tasks, since Trotsky remained its president, and Antonov-Ovseyenko and Podvoisky his principal "teehnical" lieutenants. And to top off their clumsy "corrections," the authors add: "The entire work of organizing the insurrection was directed by Lenin [p 256]."
In John Reed, however (pp 60 et seq) it can be read that all the work of organization was carried out by • the Revolutionary Military Committee. And to quote finally a witness little to be suspected of Trotskyist sympathies, here is what Stalin himself stated:
The entire labor of practical organization of the insurrection was placed under the immediate direction of the president of the Petrograd soviet, Comrade Trotsky.
It can be stated with certainty, that the party owes the rapid coming over of the
(sic), Ziemliecka, Petrovsky, Postycher, Sverdlov, Stalin, Frunze, Khrushchev Uhvernik, Chiadenko, Yaroslavsky. But this list "forgets" the main communist chiefs of the army, such as the future marshals, Tukhachevski and Yegorov. It forgets all the Bolshevik leaders placed at the head of military operations.
The History informs us only in passing that there was "at one moment" a Revolutionary Council of War. It "forgets" that these military operations were directed by this Military Council of War of the Republic of the Soviets. it was set up in 1918, this council was composed of Trotsky (president), Sklianski (vice-president), of Vatzetis, IN Smirnov, Rosengoltz, Raskolnikov, Muralov, and Yureniev. Out of these eight members five were later • "liquidated" by Stalin. In 1919 IN Smirnov, Rosengoltz, and Raskolnikov were replaced by Smilga and Gussev. To direct the operations in the Ukraine, the Central Committee detached especially Piatakov, Smilga, and Lachevich, all three of whom were to fall victims to the Stalinist terror.
The determinant role played by Trotsky the creator of the Red Army can be attested by three witnesses that today's official circles in the USS R will find it difficult to challenge: Jacques Sadoul, Gorki, and Lenin himself.
Taking the the First Congress of the Communist International, Jacques Sadoul declared:
We owe much gratitude to the leaders
22 of this [Red] Army, but first of all to
Comrade Trotsky, whose indomitable energy, united with high intelligence and genuine genius, was able to infuse a new vital force into the Russian army, which totally falling apart. [Integral minutes in German, p 63.]
In the first edition of Lenin's Complete Works in Russian (volume XVI, page 73), Lenin extolled Trotsky because he had been able to create the Red Army "with the bricks left from the destroyed edifice of the former regime."
In his work, Lenin and the Russian Peasant, Gorki reports on an interview with Lenin, who said to him on the subject of Trotsky:
"Show me another man capable of organizing an almost model army in a single year, and to win the respect of military experts. We have a man of this calibre
[pp 95-6]."
It is true that these two passages eliminated (or softened down) in the later editions of the Complete (sic) Works of Lenin and the work of Gorki. But in this matter also it is not going to take long for historical truth io recover its rights.
Let us mention that the new History even adds one supplementary petty meanness to the falsifications of the former Short Course. The latter, speaking of the mishaps in foreign intervention against the Republic of the Soviets, notes: "It was thus, for example, that the French lose guided be end re Marty, had revoled at
In the new History (vol. I, p. 316), the revolt remains, but the name of André Marty has disappeared.
As for the innumerable falsifications concerning the operations of the Red Army, it is impossible to rectify them here: too much space would be needed. The reader interested in this subject can easily consult the chapter relative thereto in Trotsky's own My Life, and especially in The Prophet Armed of Isaac Deutscher, who has gathered together an impressive bibliography to untangle the Stalinist legends. II. ORIGINS AND STRUGGLES OF THE LEFT
OPPOSITION IN THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY Question 10: Did Trotsky favor the "militarization of labor" in Russia?
Answer: In order to distort the meaning of the systematic struggle carried on by the Left Opposition against the danger of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state, The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, following in the spoor of the Short Courses presents matters as if, on
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL the eve of the formation of the Opposition, Trotsky had declared himself opposed to the development of trade-union democracy, preferring the military and administrative measures that he applied, furthermore, in the
Railway and Internal Waterway Transport
Workers' Union when he was the president of the central committee of that organization
[vol I, p 354]. Two pages farther on, the History accuses Trotsky of having urged the use of methods of coercion instead of methods of persuasion in the trade unions (p 356).
This is a matter of a gross deformation of historical truth. First of all, the formulæ of "militarization of the economy" and the use of "labor armies" are not at all formula invented by Trotsky in 1920; they are formula used by the entire party, as is attested to by a resolution of the IXth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, quoted on page 335 of the History itself! It was a question — at the end of the civil war, at a moment when the productive forces had fallen to their lowest level — of preventing the demobilization of the army from scattering this proletarian vanguard, from condemning it to unemployment or dispersing it over the countryside. It was necessary, on the contrary, to employ it on the tasks of economic reconstruction, by having it carry out great public works of urgent importance for the country's recovery. As military discipline itself, at this period, was a communist discipline, i e, very far from the present customs in the Soviet army, and as there was freedom of discussion within this army, with purely persuasive methods broadly used, even the formula of "labor armies" adopted by the whole party was not exactly synonymous with the "replacement of persuasion by coercion." The real subject-matter of the 1921 debate on the trade-union question was something else again. It was a question of settling the place of the trade unions and the working class within socialized industry. Three theses confronted one another: the anarcho-syndicalist thesis, which wanted immediately to turn the administration of industry over to the trade unions and suppress any centralized administration; the thesis of Lenin and the trade-union leaders, who wanted to preserve trade-union independence toward the state, the unions being considered as instruments of defense of the consumers' interests of the workers, while not modifying the system of management of industry; and the thesis of Trotsky and Bukharin, which wanted to ensure a decisive participa. tion of the unions and the workers in the man. agement of nationalized industry.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
If today we examine this debate in the light of later experience, we immediately observe that Lenin's and Trotsky's theses were, both of them, partly right and partly wrong. Lenin was certainly right when he insisted on the need to preserve trade-union independence toward a "bureaucratically deformed" (the formula is Lenin's) workers' state. But Trotsky was no less right when he specified that the fight against the bureaucracy was utopian as long as that bureau. cracy had not been hit in the real solar plexus wake against bureau of its powers: the control of big industry.
The truth is, that the struggle against bureaucratic deformation of the workers' state, in the transition period between capitalism and socialism, requires both independence of the trade unions (as the instrument of the workers as consumers), and a more and more active participation of the workers in the administration of industry (to defend their interests as producers). The most adequate instrument for ensuring this participation however, not the trade union itself, but the workers' council (factory council). Question I: What was the thesis advocated by Lenin concerning the administration of Soviet industry? Answer: Wishing to justify the measures taken later, in 1930, by Stalin, which gathered together all the powers of the enterprise within the sole hands of the director, The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (vol I, p 291) summarizes Lenin's position on this subject in the following way:
require the unconditional obedience of the masses to the sole will of the director of the labor process. For this reason, the direction of the economy had to be central.
ized, and directors named by the Soviet power had to be at the head of enterprises.
The centralized direction on the part of the state and the unity of command had to be combined with the active and conscious participation of the masses in economic life and with a control in various forms by the rank and file.
It is useful to emphasize in passing that this last bit concerning the multiple forms of control from below is hardly to be found in the 1938 Short Course. And with good reason! Under the Stalinist regime, there was no longer any trace of such a "control" beginning with 1932-3. The administration of the economy and the direction of the factories were competely bureaucratized. And though Khrushcher's reforms have introduced a semblance of control from below, there are scarcely any examples of a ge.
23 nuine participation of the workers in the management of Soviet enterprises today. But that is another subject, to which we shall return farther on.
Is the new History's description of Lenin's conception in conformance with truth? It greatly sins by omission. Here is what Lenin wrote on this subject in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Power:
The more resolutely that we now have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for dictatorship of individual persons, for definite processes of work for definite aspects of purely executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and methods of control from below in order to counteract every shadow of possibility of distorting the Soviet power, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out bureaucracy. [Selected
Works, Moscow 1947, vol II, p 339.]
First difference between Lenin and History: Lenin does not claim that the principle of "sole direction" is an absolute principle, but that it was valid only at that moment, it flowed from the special conditions in which the soviet state and the Russian working class found themselves just after the victory of October. To transform a momentary and painful necessity into a general principle is already to commit an error of some size.
Second difference between Lenin and the new History: Lenin frankly recognizes that the momentary principle of "sole direction" implies danger of bureaucratic deformation. The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is silent on this subject. in the same pamphlet Lenin takes a harsh stand against those who are silent about this sort of danger before the
To conceal from the masses the fact that the enlistment of bourgeois specialists by means of extremely high salaries is a retreat from the principles of the Paris Commune would be tantamount to sinking to the level of bourgeois politicians and to deceiving the masses. Frankly explaining how and why we took this step backward, and then publicly discussing what means are available for making up for lost time, means educating the masses and learning from experience together with the masses how to build up socialism. [Selected Works, Moscow 1947, vol II, p 320.]
It is therefore to the level of "bourgeois politicians" who "deceive the masses" that the authors of the History have fallen in thus mutilating Lenin's thought. Third difference between Lenin and these authors: Lenin implicitly indicates that if the
----- photo credits and running heads -----
iss.
[To be continued in our next
24 forms of control from below are not increased and broadened, bureaucratic deformation will be inevitable, or at least extremely probable. He affirms this explicitly, furthermore, on the subJect of the temporarily high salaries accorded to "specialists":
The corrupting influence of high salaries upon the Soviet government [...] and upon the masses of the workers is indisputable. But every thinking honest worker and poor peasant will agree, will admit, that we cannot immediately rid ourselves of the bad heritage of capitalism, and that we can liberate the Soviet Republic from the duty of paying a "tribute" of fifty million or one hundred million rubles per annum (a tribute for own own backwardness in organizing nation-wide accounting and control from below), only by organizing ourselves, by tightening up discipline in our own ranks [...]. If the class-conscious advanced workers and poor peasants manage with the aid of the Soviet institutions, to organize, became disciplined, pull themselves together, create strong labor discipline in the course of one year [sic], then in a year's time we shall throw off this "tribute" [...J. [Ibidem, p 321.]
And Lenin even specifies:
There is a petty-bourgeois tendency to transform the members of the soviets into
"Members of Parliament," or into bureaucrats. This must be combated by drawing all the members of the soviets into the practical work of administration. In
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL many places the departments of the soviets are gradually becoming merged with the commissariats. Our aim is draw the whole of the poor into the practical administration, and every step that is taken in this direction - the more varied they are, the better - should be carefully recorded, studied, systematized, tested by experience, and passed into law.
Our aim is to ensure that every toiler, after having finished his eight hours' "lesson" in productive labor, shall perform state duties gratis: the transition to this is a particularly difficult one, but this transition alone can guarantee the final consolidation of socialism. [Ibidem, pp 337-8.]
Now during the entire 1930-1955 period, not only were the methods of control "from below" or of performance of "state duties gratis" by "every toiler" not multiplied, but completely abolished. The high salaries were not reduced; they were even extended to include members and leaders of the party (the famous demoralization foreseen by Lenin). The state functions were not performed gratis by every worker, not when they worked eight hours a day, nor when they worked seven hours or even six, as is now the case in certain Soviet industries. Consequently, socialism is not "finally consolidated," "bureaucracy" has not been "weeded out," but has developed in a monstrous way, and bureaucratic deformation has asserted itself until it has become degeneration. Such are the ineluctable conclusions from the very passage of Lenin "quoted" (in mutilated form) by the History.
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