THE TROTSKY LEGEND IN THE SOVIET UNION у P RICHARDS
It was during the agitated days following the doing for decades now, they were being careful
XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, in a remote village deep in the
Siberian taiga. The radio (its installation in the farthest-off regions had almost been completed)
items given various current news bout the shifts among the tops of the party and the Soviets, and a few kolkhoz activists were sitting around, as was usual on Sundays, having a few rounds of vodka together, exchanging remarks about the news. Everything was going along very tamely, and, as people had got in the habit of not to go beyond the formulations used in the official news. "Yes, Malenkov was not competent." the kolkhoz secretary said in a melancholy tone. "Bulganin, though, is capable enough," the president hastened to say, to show his loyalty for the "new man." And the organizational secretary of he party tossed off another glass. and added visely: "Sure! Above all we have Khrushchev as the First Secretary of the Party — he'll really do something."
And thus the political part of the usual agenda
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FOURTH INTERNATIONAL would have been completed if Frol Ivanovich, who was sitting in the place of honor, had not cleared his throat - which was a sign that he had something to say. Frol no longer held any ›ost in either the local soviet or in the kolkhoz. But the solid old man who, at 82, still went fishing through the ice on the lenissei, and, in the hot harvest season, could still rival in labor many of the young men, had a unique place in the party group of the kolkhoz: his party card bore 1918 as the date of his joining, and he was the only survivor for far around who not only could remember the fights of the partisans against Kolchak, but had himself taken part in them and had been decorated with the Order of the Red Flag.
And so frol always found a hearing, though he did not much like to talk and seldom mixed into the discussions. But now Frol Ivanovich said in a solemn tone: "I'd like to say something else: now that Stalin is dead and we know that he wasn't right, we ought to come back to... Lev the drinkers knew who was meant. They looked at Davidovich... Only a small number one another, puzzled, and then hurried on to take up another subject.
But in the transitional months of 1955 and 1956, both before and after, this was not the only case where in party circles, among the workers as well as among the Soviet intelligentsia, the name of Trotsky, which for decades had been unmentioned or copiously insulted and reviled, rose up again. For the logic of the propaganda poured out for a quarter of a century by every means at the disposal of a gigantic apparatus led directly to the conclusion of the old kolkhoz-peasant and party-member Frol: the antipodes of Stalin was Trotsky. Stalin could be accepted or rejected only en bloc. The belief in Stalin was an erroneous belief (the "personality cult"). And so... "TROTSKYISM" AND TROTSKYISM
For decades Stalin and his henchmen neglected nothing that might create in the population of the Soviet Union a legendary notion that was the incarnation of all that was negative, reprehensible, and contemptible.
If already in the years of the fraction struggles the Stalinist clique had put forward innumerable falsifications and calumnies instead of objective arguments, during the thirties any indication about what Trotsky had really said and done and what the platform of his supporters at ditterent periods had been, was simply wiped out. Ideological struggle was forbidden in any form. The pretext was: "Since Trotskyism has ceased to be an ideological current, and has been transformed into a vanguard of international capitalism, , into a gang of bandits, etc, the struggle against it is a matter for the organs of repression, and the tions, etc. Struggle are reprisals, arrests, deporta- means of
Thus there appeared in the Soviet Union in the thirties what was called "Trotskyism" - a purely metaphysical scarecrow, which had absolutely nothing in common with the living Trotsky or with his supporters inside and outside the Soviet Union. This imaginary "Trotskyism" provided the pretext which the security organs — following the personal directives of Stalin, who first through Yezhov and then through Beria, had ensured himself of direct control over the apparatus of terror - used in order to send hundreds of thousands of innocent workers, peasants, and Soviet intellectuals — among them innumerpersons who were entirely uninterested in politics, who could not even be counted among the malcontents — to jail cells, to camps in Siberia, in the Far East, in Kazakstan, and in the Arctic regions, and also to death by shooting.
The campaign of slanders that accompanied this vast action of purging on the widest scale, rose to fantastic heights: profound experts abroad (among them also some who were not directly in the pay of Stalin's agents) believed that they could justify the mass terror by saying that "here and there" insurrections against the Soviet Union hire takat place, that ate is be no used, without where a plane is being used, shavings fall." The truth is that all prosecutions under pretext of "Trotskyite" conspiracies, including the show trials of 1936 and 1937, were based on lies and provocation. The first ray of light of an objective investigation of these revelations based on the fiction of "Trotskyism," of the perjuries and extorted testimonies, permits of recognizing the real contours of this manoeuvre in deception, which was camouflaged by a refined mass-hypnosis: nothing can be maintained of the accusations of the thirties, and the victims of "the great madness" (such is now the term used in the Soviet Union itself for the blood-orgies of the thirties) are being — although for the most part posthumously - rehabilitated THE LOYAL ONES FELL STANDING, LIKE TREES
In the great sea of mass terror of those thirties, a single wave could scarcely find an echo; and so even now, after more than twenty years, nothing or still very little) has reached the outside world about the fate of that little group of unshakably loval ones. who never renounced the banner of the "Bolshevik-Leninists" and their leader Trotsky, who never for an instant capitulated, and whom neither threats, tortures, and refined torments, nor seductions and promises, could bring to flinch or to weaken.
In the Autumn of 1937, when the uncontrolled
tyrannical rage reached its peak, no more than a few hundreds of steel-hard Trotskyists, scribed in the administrative language of the NKVD by the professional term "orthodox," still remained alive in the whole Soviet Union.
They were assembled, with their families -wives and children — in special barracks separated off by barbed wire, which were in the neighborhood of far-away camps surrounded by deserts of ice (Vorkuta, Norilsk, Kolima), and,
The description of the last days and the last road of this "iron guard" of the Soviet working class will provide, as soon as it is known to public opinion in the East and the West, the sharpest contrast with that grotesque danse macabre under the staff direction of Vischinsky before the public of the Hall of Columns in Moscow, and bring to light real unfaked heroism and martyrdom such as are rare in our century, rich though it is in drama and tragedies.
The staging of the "Trotskyite" trials was, besides its other purposes, above all counted on to cover up the truth about the assassination of the last loyal Bolshevik-Leninists. For these fell standing, like trees. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LEGEND
A lying and infamous historical writing (A Short Course in the History of the C P SU) was to serve to wipe out the traces of the crime; but the youth itself in the Soviet Union, to whom this disfiguring, hatefully slick, distorted chronicle was presented as the truth, to be believed in as something sacred, had its doubts. Even in the forties, in which Stalin had to be honored as a god and the Short Course was as untouchable as the word of god, the party "propagandists" who had to deal with instruction in the Short Course were constantly complaining about the refractory and skeptical questions of pupils and audiences to whom the chapters about the "Espionnage and Acts of Diversion" of the "Trotskyites" were not at all self-evident.
There were even heretics who went so far as to ask what Trotsky had really wanted, how he had reached his position in the Communist Party,
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL and so on; and ever more and more — there were every year tens of thousands of cases - the se- -curity apparatus had to intervene, to put under lock and key such bold questioners, or their protessors too, who had allowed such questions to be asked.
And the clearer it became that the state set up by Stalin did not at all resemble the soviet state predicted in Lenin's works, the more Soviet youth, especially the part that was more worthwhile and more interested in social progress, became eager to know the real content which must be covered up by the legend of "Trotskyism." There could e no question ot getting one s hands on any worl * Irotsky in textual form. But there were stil documents in the public libraries, kept, it is true, only in secret cabinets, but that were given out against a sufficient guarantee by the reader. And among these were the minutes of Communist Party congresses, which had been printed in the twenties and early thirties (before the publication of the Short Gourse).
In Moscow, during the Summer of 1956, one of the books most read by the students and young party activitists was the minutes of the XVth Congress of the CP SU. To the question why precisely this congress aroused such intense interest, a young engineer who had just moved up from the Komsomol into the party itself answered: "Why? Because it's there you find the big speeches of Trotsky and the other oppositional leaders. And that's so timely!"
In these last years the leadership of the CP SU has become uneasy over this growing interest in Trotsky. It cannot fail to realize that the Trotsky legend - and above all, its other side, now that the Stalin legend has been reduced to ashes -is directed against its own bureaucratic and dogmatic course. Hasty attempts are made to plug up the holes in the pot of the party history; the Short Course has been liquidated without more ado, but only, of course, to be replaced by other threadbare yarns, which, it is true, are no longer
L D Trotsky if the hand of the murderer had lot prevented hım from reaching his eightiett rear, would not be too displeased with develop. ments in the Soviet Union: behind the Trotsky legend the shadow of the genuine Trotsky is beginning to appear.