Review
A FAMOUS SET OF MINUTES
By Louis Couturier _
Les Bolcheviks et la Révolution d'Octobre:- présentation et notes de
Giuseppe Boffa. Editions Maspéro. Paris, 361 pp. 19 francs.
I Bolscevichi e la Rivoluzione d'Ottobre. Verbali delle sedute del
Comitato centrale del Partito operaio socialdemocratico russo
(bolscevico) dalltagosto 1917 al febbraio 1918. Introduzione
di Giuseppe Boffa., Editori Riuniti. Rome. 468 pp. 3,000
lire. [in Italian, ] Oe
_ French-reading students of the Russian Revolution at last have available the complete minutes of the sessions of the Central. Committee of the Bolshevik party from August 1917 to February 1918. Maspéro Publications have found these old documents of interest in contrast to the publishing houses of the French Communist party which loftily ignores them. The Communist party of the Soviet Union published them in 1958 and the Italian Communist party in 1962; but the PCF, always prudent, doubtlessly preferred to wait until time has tempered the passions and perhaps wiped out the memories of those who learned the history of the Russian Revolution from the party's manuals, .: oe . ; |
To read these dense pages with their crossfire is utterly ab- . sorbing. The preparation of the October Revolution, the taking of power and the Brest-Litovsk peace are recorded in expressions of opinion, decisions, minutes of discussions and votes. What is particularly.striking is the frankness in expressing differences when vital political questions in the revolution were discussed, The | speakers defended their points of view with sharpness but the arguments they used, even reproduced almost fifty years later, lose none of their political honesty. Different tactics or strategic lines clashed; a.spade was called a spade, and there was no need at.ail to adduce old age or compromising associations to criticize concepts or acts, nos a Bop
Lenin comes down from the divine throne where Stalinist hagiography put him to take his ‘place. among the worker militants. A front place, certainly, but among the militants. And it is seen that even the most obscure did not fear to express disagreement with Comrade Lenin. Many times, Lenin found himself in a minority, and when he succeeded in getting his line adopted, it was always by power of argument and never by police maneuvers. .. ...The Central Committee strongly resembled a "discussion club" where unanimity of thought was far from the rule, where tendencies formed, worked out documents, resigned. provisionally, confronted each other, in short, worked under conditions that would seem to paralyze action. . . Yet this "debaters'" Central Committee accomplished more than the later monolithic Stalin-
ist ruling bodies that issued orders to everyone. It can be understood how-little Thorez' successors are inclined to let poopie learn about this. instructive aspect of the lesson of October 1917, .
i ‘There are two ways of taking liberties with such explosive documents.” The first is to completely ignore them. It is easily seen: how provisional this must be and what it says about the moral level: of. those who follow such a course. The second is even iess. | effective. The documents are published. (which is a great deal, we admit) but they are preceded by a commentary that plays the same — role as:an.injection of morphine when the victim is wheeled to the operating table. . Giuseppe: Boffa, editor in chief of Rinascita, the journal of “the Italian Communist party, was assigned to anesthetize the reader, Maspéro Publications have already brought out two small works’ by this author and they publicize him as being “already very well known for his notable essays on Soviet history." But Boffa has never produced anything but poor pieces of. politico~literary clowning that: merit. no attention. At most, one could ascribe the "errors" abounding in his book The Great Turn to the five years he had just spent in Mos~ cow-where objective information is not easily obtained. But today! He lives in Italy where a-number of.works have appeared on the Russian Revolution, particularly by Trotsky. Yet Boffa seems. to know them only through the criticisms made. of them by Stalin.
' He dares to write that when these’ minutes were first published, in 1929, it was to struggle “against the legend of Trotsky" which ~ John Reed's book in particular had served to create. Symmetrically, their republication in 1958 served "to dissolve that of Stalin." But, in reality, Boffa, always adept at adjusting to his milieu, concedes that they "aestroy" no one, but place each one in his proper place.
Boffa goes so far as to affirm that ‘in November 1924, Stalin polemicized with Trotsky "to establish the correct version of the facts"; it was only later that he falsified history. Why then did he wait until 1929 to publish these famous minutes? The so-called legend of Trotsky was gone. In 1929, six years had passed in which oceans of paper had flooded the USSR falsifying the history of the Revolution. Since 1924, Stalin had been lying in hundreds of thousands of copies of books, and Boffa lies doubly in 1964 when he pretends that at that time Stalin was an archangel whose sole preoccupation was to prevent Trotsky from falsifying history. If you take the trouble to check the text by Stalin which Boffa cites and which appeared in No. 7 of the Gahiers du Bolchevisme, January 2, 1925, ("Trotskyism or Leninism™), you will find not only the slanders that later became standard concerning the "permanent revolution," and the scraps of polemical phrases written by Lenin against Trotsky in the 1905-17 period, but also affirmations like this: "It does not enter my mind to contest the importance of the role played by Comrade Trotsky in the insurrection, but I-must say that he did not have and could not have had a special role; as chairman of the Petrograd
‘
“s
Soviet, he only carried out the will por the Party instances in charge who were directing him step by step." And further on he explains that the left Social Revolutionaries also fought very well. ..
In the same number of Cahiers du Bolchevisme there is a document by Zinoviev "Bolshevism or Trotskyism?”" in which, after flagellating himself over his attitude in October, he adds his bit. But this idyllic epoch with Stalin did not last long and Zinoviev joined the Opposition in 1925, staying until 1927, when he capitulated, going over to Stalin for a nine-year period that was crowned by his execu-tion, If these minutes could have destroyed a so-called legend of Trotsky, Stalin would have published them in 1925, But he didn't. -. - « « In 1929, Stalin wanted to make Zinoviev's capitulation irreversible,. Trotsky had been expelled from the party since January 1928 and..exiled, Thousands of members of the Opposition had been deported. To publish the minutes was a way of putting pressure on Zinoviev and Kamenev by recalling their comportment in. October 1917 when they were "eapitulationists." Just as the, police know very well how to make a person sing who has done something wrong, so Stalin knew how to break men by striking at their weak points.
. Boffats, whole introduction runs in the. same vein. It displays flagrant bad faith, a smug, deliberately studied ignorance and an eclecticism which causes one at times to regret the thick lies | of classical Stalinism. At least we knew then:.with whom we were dealing while here the most astounding untruths are packaged in thoughtful considerations about the Stalinist “weaknesses, errors and faults.
Let us “hope that these thirty-eight first pages do not cause: readers to turn aside from the book, The richness of the discussions.of the. Bolsheviks in 1917 offers all the greater contrast to the verbal contortions of badly de-Stalinized individuals working in the interest of new | legends.
Imprimerie: 21 rue. dtAboukir, Paris 2 (imprimé. par les soins de Directeur-Gérant:.: Pierre FRANK. 1téditeur).