Trotskyism in an article ostensibly devoted to "Socialism and the Cultural Legacy." This was given wide circulation, appearing as a reprint in the September 29 issue of Soviet News, distributed in London by the Soviet embassy. In Havana last January, Fidel Castro in a major speech closing the Tricontinental Cont erence included an attack against Trotskyism.
[Besides such material, an item is occasionally sent out from Moscow, generally in association with the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin's purges, stating that there has been no change in the official attitude toward Leon Trotsky. It is often added that whatever Stalin's errors may have been toward the end of his life, he was correct in his younger days in "defeating" such figures as Trotsky, Bukharin, etc.
[On August 17 Pravda called special attention to an article by one N.P.Mikeshin on the subject of Trotskyism which had been featured in the monthly journal, Problems of the History of the CPSU (Voprosy istorii KPSS). It was clear from the way in which avda lauded this article that it was considered somehow to be definitive, a model on how to deal with Trotskyism. Even before Pravda's reference to Mikeshin's article, it appears to have attracted international attention -- at least in some circles. Thus a Spanish translation appeared in Mexico in Nueva Epoca No. 13 (July 1966).
[In view of the importance which Pravda placed on Mikeshin's article, and the likelihood that it will serve as the source and inspiration for a spate of "studies" on Trotskyism for the edification of circles in and around the Communist parties, we feel that serious attention should be paid to it. The first step in this, of course, is to read it. We have therefore sought to do‘our part in making it available.
[George Saunders has made a translation from the original in Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 12, December 1965, pp. 42-52, where it appeared under the title, "Trotskyism as a Weapon of Imperialist Propaganda," and has also supplied some critical notes. His translation and notes appear below.
[Mikeshin's footnotes have been kept in numerical order as in the original. To avoid confusion, George Saunders' critical notes have been listed alphabetically and placed at the end of the article. Where parenthetical remarks appear in Mikeshin's article, these have been identified as to authorship in each instance where it. was thought necessary. ]
*x* * OK
One of the basic trends in anti-Communism is the falsification of the history of the CPSU, organizer and inspirer of the great victories of the Soviet people. Here, as in all bourgeois historiography, the subjective approach to the elucidation of events, based on the rejection of historical laws, holds sway.
. In its subjectivism, reactionary historiography reveals its class bias and anti- Communist orientation. “Unless you are a pure philologist, you cannot be politically neutral as a scholar of Russian, or Soviet, things,"(1) writes the well-known "Sovietologist" Victor Frank, a careerist in this field in England.
Contemporary bourgeois historiography has grown quite refined in its efforts to cast doubt on the authority of the leader of the October Revolution and founder of the Soviet state, V.I.Lenin.(2) Imperialist propaganda has set itself the task of discred-
(1) Survey. A Journal of Soviet and East European Studies, No. 50, Jan. 1964, p. 93.
(2) The American bourgeois press, for example, calls 1964 a year in which there was "A Bumper Crop" of anti-Lenin works. See Problems of Communism, Jan.—Feb. 1965, p. 53. [Actually p. 48. "A Bumper Crop" is the title of a review by Victor Frank of three biographies of Lenin, all published in 1964. Problems of Communism is a publication of the U.S. Information Agency. -- G.S.]
AW
iting Lenin, as well as other leading figures of the international labor movement, and does not stop at even the pettiest slander in this work. At the same time, it tries to build up renegades of various stripe, perverters of Marxism, presenting them as "the true followers of Marx." Thus, the bourgeoisie execute a flanking maneuver, with the aim, so to speak, of striking at the Communist movement from the rear, the aim of deceiving the masses and diverting them from the revolutionary struggle.
It is precisely in this light that one must view the heightened interest that imperialist propaganda has in recent years displayed in Trotsky. Tons of paper have been used up in reprinting his "works." Thus, in the U.S.A. in 1962, Random House put out The Basic Works of Trotsky. And in recent years they have likewise been published in West Germany, Italy, Greece, France, Denmark, and other capitalist countries. [A]
The "Sovietologists" are continually writing "tracts" both large and small about Trotsky. Outstanding among these is the three-volume biography of Trotsky(3) by Isaac Deutscher, a former Trotskyist who has become one of the West's biggest "Sovietologists."(4) The Biography, first put out in English, was later published in German. It met with a warm response in the reactionary press. The English bourgeois paper The Times [London] wrote of it ecstatically, echoing the reactionary American journal Time, the West German newspaper Deutsche Zeitung, and many other such publications.[B]
A question arises: Why do the. imperialist ideologists propagandize so widely the legacy of a man who, according to their words, stands "on the other side of the barricades"? Why do they find his works "irresistible reading" -- as the bourgeois publishing house Doubleday Anchor Books puts it on the jacket blurb of its American edition of Trotsky's little book [knizhka, a derogatory word -- G.S.] The Russian Revolution?
One need not search far for an answer. In Trotsky's potboilers [knizhonka, doubly derogatory -- G.S.] the ideologists of imperialism find what they are looking for -anti-Soviet and anti-Communist venom with which to poison the minds of people not well versed in history and politics. Behind the mask of "the red dragon" in which Trotskyism vested itself, they long ago discerned its renegade and opportunist essence, its counterrevolutionary and anti-Soviet nature. The bourgeois ideologists understood that Trotskyism, while opposing capitalism in words, in fact brings grist to the latter's mill, that its true sword edge is directed against the ideology and politics of the working class and its Marxist-Leninist party. This was understood even by the white emigré party of Milyukov in its day. Its paper, Poslednie novosti [Latest News], published in Paris, without beating around the bush characterized the Trotskyist opposition as the most fearful enemy of Soviet. power, “which creeps up on it unnoticed, wraps it round in its tentacles, and liquidates it before it notices it has been liquidated."(5) [C] The hopes of the Russian bourgeoisie, as we know, were not justified: not Soviet power but the Trotskyist opposition was liquidated, together with other tendencies hos- ‘tile to socialism. But the desire expressed by the Milyukovite paper nearly forty years ago -- to use Trotskyism for the struggle against Communism -- even today operates as one of the fundamental motives of imperialist propaganda. That is why the scribblings of Trotsky, such as The Revolution Betrayed, have become a sort of gospel of anti- Communism. A curious admission concerning this foul concoction [i.e., The Revolution Betrayed -- G.S.] is made by Deutscher: "...in the 1940's and 1950's, many of the intellectually ambitious 'Sovietologists' and propagandists of the cold war drew, directly or indirectly, their arguments and catch phrases from this source."(6)[D]
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In our epoch, when Marxism-Leninism has become the ideology of hundreds of millions of people, when life itself from moment to moment confirms its correctness, Trotskyism has been a saving grace for imperialist propaganda, fighting by every means against proletarian ideology. It would be hard to find a bourgeois "specialist" on the history of the CPSU, who has passed over the "works" of Trotsky in silence. Besides the biography of Trotsky mentioned above, penned by Deutscher, many other anti-Soviet "essays in historical research" have been written according to Trotsky and in the spirit of Trotsky.
(3) Isaac Deutscher. The Prophet Armed. Trots (1879-1921); The Prophet Unarmed. Trotsky (1921-1929); The Prophet Outcast. Trotsky (1929-1940). London, 1954-1963.
(4) Deutscher has for more than a quarter century been a correspondent for a number of bourgeois newspapers and magazines in England and several other capitalist countries.
(5) Poslednie novosti, 27 August 1926.
(6) I.Deutscher, Prophet Outcast, London, 1963, p. 322.
When the "Sovietologists" delve deeply into the history of the CPSU's struggle for the overthrow of the autocracy and the capitalist order, Trotsky's knizhonka Lessons of October (1924) regularly serves them as a guide rule. There it is argued that the Bolshevik party before October was supposedly groping in the dark, and attained success at last only because it abandoned the policies it had previously followed and adopted the platform of Trotsky. In short, it was not Lenin or the Communist- party, so the argument goes, but Trotsky who was the organizer and inspirer of the October Rev-— olution. The Communist party in the 1920's unmasked this attempt to substitute Trotskyism for Leninism. In well-known party resolutions, as well as in the historical literature of the party, the anti-Bolshevik, petty-bourgeois character of Trotskyism from the moment of its inception was convincingly demonstrated on the basis of broad documentary material. [E]
V.I.Lenin noted, "It is far from sufficiently known as yet abroad that Bolshevism grew up, took shape, and became steeled in long years of struggle against pettybourgeois revolutionism."(7)[F] Forty-five years have passed since those lines were written, a time that would seem fully sufficient for any foreign investigator of the history of the CPSU to master this truth. But in bourgeois historiography, as ever, the uncompromising, thoroughgoing struggle of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against Trotskyism as one of the most dangerous manifestations of petty-bourgeois revolutionism still finds no place. In his "Letter to the Congress" (1922), a document well known to the foreign reader, V.I.Lenin, in summing up the political activity of Trotsky, pointed to his non- Bolshevism.(8)(G] This fact, like many others, speaks volumes. But what are facts to bourgeois falsifiers?
Leonard Schapiro, in his notorious little book, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, attempts to show that supposedly the small ideas [ideiki] of Trotsky "coincided” with Leninism and even "fructified" it. The roots of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution," he asserts, following the author of that theory, "went back to Marx."(9)(H]
Having promised in the introduction to his book to stick to the facts, Schapiro, however, immediately begins to distort them beyond recognition. In an effort to whitewash Trotsky and show the "infallibility" of his so-called theory, Schapiro writes: "Trotsky...had then argued [Lin 1905-1906 -- Mikeshin] that the task of the social democrats was not to relax their efforts after the bourgeois revolution had been accomplished, but to continue straight on with their attempts to bring about the next phase, the social revolution. This was in fact precisely the policy followed by Lenin after March 1917."(10) Here one is amazed not only at the assertion that Lenin was allegedly a pupil at Trotsky's knee (incidentally, this thesis is borrowed from the abovementioned little book of Trotsky's Lessons of October). Schapiro here perpetrates another fraud. According to his version, it seems that Trotsky supposedly assumed the bourgeois-—democratic stage of the revolution as a given, needing no comment. In actual fact he "leaped over," or put it another way, denied, this stage and put forward the fallacious slogan "No tsar but a workers' government." As is well known, V.I.Lenin sharply criticized this slogan, "Trotsky's major mistake," he wrote in 1909, "is that he ignores the bourgeois character of the revolution and has no clear conception of the transition from this revolution to the socialist revolution. "(11){[I]
Schapiro also tries to show that Lenin supposedly shared the Trotskyist point of view on the peasantry, denying it a revolutionary role.(12) Similar efforts to convict Marxist-Leninists of underestimating the peasantry have long since been undertaken by bourgeois ideologists. One of these, the so-called expert on the agrarian question in socialist countries, David Mitrany, in his squib against Marxism writes, "Marxism had always justified its scorn of the peasants on the ground that they were brutish and
(7) V.I.Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 41, p. 14. [Complete Works, fifth Russian edition, 1960-1965. -- G.S.]
(8) Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 45, p. 435.
(9) Schapiro, New York, 1960, p. 288.
(10) Ibid., p. 288.
(11) Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 17, p. 381. [English wording from Collected Works, Vol. 15, 1963, pp. 370-271. -- G.S.]
(12) Op.cit., p. 288.
could not be organized."(13)[J] Here Mitrany intentionally addressed himself to the wrong party. If "Marxism" is replaced by the word "Trotskyism," then everything falls into place. Trotsky never tried to hide his scorn for the peasantry. He never tired of speaking of what he deemed the "political barbarism," "social formlessness," and "unclear character" of the peasantry, emphasizing by this that, supposedly, the "primitive mass of the peasantry will turn against the proletariat with its hostile side."(14)(K] Here, it turns out, is where Mitrany dug up his characterizations. It is clearly apparent in the excerpts cited from Mitrany and Trotsky that not only is the thought absolutely identical but even the wording is similar. ;
In contrast to Trotsky, the Communist party viewed the peasantry as the main ally of the working class. The alliance of the working class with the entire peasantry in the bourgeois-democratic revolution and with the poor peasantry in the socialist revolution ——- under these slogans, put forward by Lenin, the party led the masses to storm the autocracy and capitalism in Russia. Moreover, it untiringly strengthened and developed the alliance of the working class with the toiling masses of the countryside in the course of constructing socialism. This was the unalterable line of its politics, based on the principled positions of Marxist-Leninist teachings.
Marx, Engels, and Lenin had a high opinion of the revolutionary energy of the peasantry. In their works there is not even a hint of underestimation of this ally of the proletariat. On the contrary, they more than once emphasized that the proletariat, once having established its dictatorship, should take measures that would improve the position of the peasants, facilitate their voluntary passing over to collective economy, to socialism. Marx wrote of this in his synopsis of Bakunin'’s book The State and Anarchy (1874-75).(15) We find similar statements in Engels' work The Peasant Question in France and Germany (1894).(16) The ideas of Marx and Engels were developed by Lenin, who originated the concept of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry as the highest principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the decisive condition for the construction of socialism. "We concluded an alliance with the peasantry," said Lenin at the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921. "We interpret this alliance in the following way: the proletariat emancipates the peasantry from the exploitation of the bourgeoisie, from its leadership and influence, and wins it over to its own side in order jointly to defeat the exploiters."(17)(L]
All these propositions of the classics of Marxism-Leninism are sufficiently clear-cut. Anyone familiar with them is easily convinced that they stand in radical opposition to the Trotskyist views on the mutual relations of the proletariat and the peasantry. It is for that very reason that the bourgeois falsifiers of history offer their readers only the small ideas of the Trotskyists on the peasant question and try to attribute these views to Lenin, not citing his own statements on this question. In committing such a coarse forgery, they openly count on the lack of knowledge of their readers, on their insufficient acquaintance with Marxist literature. The political purpose of such falsification is easy to see. The attribution to Lenin of the ideas of Trotsky is carried out with the definite aim of discrediting the CPSU, and conjointly the other fraternal parties, in the eyes of the peasants of the world.
Substituting Trotskyism for Bolshevism, the falsifiers of history, with the help of Trotskyism, undermine other fundamental bulwarks of the Leninist theory of ,socialist revolution. Trotsky, as is well known, denied the possibility of the victory of socialism initially in one country, and especially in such a relatively backward country as Russia. In his steps march the contemporary reactionary historians. Thus, Schapiro declares that the Leninist theory of socialist revolution is, supposedly, nothing more than the "invention" of the heirs of Lenin. Lenin's article, "On the Slogan of the
(13) Marx against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism. North Carolina University Press, 1952, p. ll. [Mikeshin leaves out three words without indicating any omission. The sentence should read: "Marxism had always justified its scorn of the peasants on the ground among other things that they were brutish and could not be organized." I have italicized the missing words. -- G.S.] (14) see Trotsky o Lenine i leninizme [Trotsky on Lenin and Leninism], Leningrad, 1925, p. 10e.
(15) Marx and Engels, Sochineniya [Works, the Russian edition -- G.S.], Vol. 18, pp. 611-612.
(16) Ibid., Vol. 22, p. 520.
(17) Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 44, p. 42. [The wording here follows the English edition, Collected Works, Vol. 32, p. 485. -- G.S.]
United States of Europe." (1915), is known to Schapiro, but picturing himself as an expert on Soviet sources, he fails to see, or more exactly, he does not want to give due significance to Lenin's position in that article on the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country. To him, you see, this position represents merely a phrase dropped by chance, while the theory of socialist revolution itself is insufficiently substantiated. (183[M] As we shall note, Trotsky said approximately the same thing in the mid-1920's. But the absurdity of these assertions becomes apparent even from a superficial reading of such well-known works of Lenin's as: "The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution" (1916); "On the Tax in Kind" (1921); "On Our Revolution" (1923); and "On Cooperation" (1923). In these the idea first stated by him in the article "On the Slogan of the United States of Europe," is deeply and roundly substantiated and concretized.
It is no accident that the ideologists of imperialism counterpose the Trotskyist "theory of permanent revolution" to Lenin's position on the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country. Outwardly ultrarevolutionary, Trotskyism proves in fact to be barefaced opportunism and capitulationism. Thus, it is convenient and useful for the bourgeois falsifiers to picture the Trotskyists as partisans of world revolution and the Marxist-Leninists as opponents of it. It is no accident, then, that Siegfried Bahne in his article "Trotsky on Stalinist Russia" gives the reader to understand that the differences between Trotsky and the Communist party supposedly turned on the question of whether the idea of world revolution should or should not be repudiated. Naturally, in Bahne's version the Trotskyists come out as the "“internationalists." As for the Leninist idea of the possibility of constructing socialism in one country, quoting Trotsky, he calls this a "reactionary utopia" and "national socialism."(19)
Bahne and, especially, Deutscher and Schapiro try to attribute to Marxist science a subjective, pragmatic approach completely foreign to it, but characteristic of bourgeois methodology. For example, they "explain" the advancement of the idea of building socialism in one country not by the objective conditions of the class struggle but by subjective “tactical considerations." But here they lack originality. The first to utter this false note was Trotsky. Seconding him, Schapiro endeavors to show that the Marxist conception of the revolutionary process was, supposedly, revised by the Communist party of the Soviet Union in the early 1920's, when the revolutionary wave had subsided in Europe. According to Schapiro, this was done out of purely practical considerations (it was necessary, he asserts, to find some form of consolation for the people, who were losing faith in the world revolution and beginning to feel isolated). Isaac Deutscher, too, expresses himself along this line.(20) Here, of course, they completely ignore the later works of V.I.Lenin and the party resolutions of that time, in which the policy line of building socialism in the USSR was worked out on the basis of a profound objective analysis of the conditions within the country and on the world arena. The conjectures of the bourgeois falsifiers about an imaginary retreat by the party in the 1920's from the Marxist conception of revolution are spiced with slanderous arguments about the struggle for power that was going on in that period within the party and the Soviet state. Corrupted by the customs of political life in the capitalist countries, where the struggle of ideas in almost every case serves only as a deceptive cover for the unprincipled struggle of bourgeois parties for power, Schapiro, Deutscher, and other "Sovietologists" attribute similar procedures to the Soviet political systen.
The veritable. flood of slander which the Trotskyists unleashed upon our party in the mid-1920's and the following period now flows through the channel of imperialist propaganda. "Thermidor," "bureaucratization," "bourgeois revival" -- thus the Trotskyists evaluated the situation in the party and Soviet state at the very time when the entire country was caught up in the enthusiasm of socialist construction, when the advantages of Soviet democracy were revealed for all to see -- advantages that could not be changed and were not changed by the errors and shortcomings accompanying the cult of personality that was gradually taking shape. It was at that time that bourgeois propaganda first seized upon the fabrications of Trotsky, and to this day they constitute its "methodological foundation."
That not unknown ideologist of imperialism and close associate of the American president, Walt Rostow, in his booklet The Dynamics of Soviet Society, in fact adopted the falsifying schema of Trotsky. The tract by the West German "Sovietologist" G.Scheuer
(18) Schapiro, op.cit., pp. 289-290.
(19) Survey, No. 41, April 1962, p. 31.
(20) Schapiro, op.cit., pp. 289-290; Prophet Unarmed, pp. 241-242, 246.
is composed in the same spirit.(21)
What conclusion do the bourgeois ideologists, together with the Trotskyists, draw from the situation created by their fancy in the Soviet land? Briefly and unambiguously: "The revolution has been betrayed. A new political revolution is needed." A revolution against whom? In their words, against the supposed "bureaucratic Bolshevik leadership," but in fact against the workers and peasants power in the USSR.
It is well known what resounding defeats past attempts to restore the capitalist order in our land have met with. A similar fate awaits those who, with this end in mind, continue to pursue the idea of bringing about a "political revolution," whether in the USSR or in other socialist countries.
Imperialist propaganda displayed special diligence in the period when the critique of the personality cult of Stalin was being developed. It tried in every way to make capital out of that event, undertaking a new attempt to rehabilitate Trotskyism and defame the history of the CPSU's struggle against him. But these efforts did not and will not attain their goal. The condemnation of tne personality cult by the party by no means signifies the rehabilitation of anti~Leninist tendencies. In the program of the CPSU it is considered a historical service of the party to have defended Leninism in sharp struggle against the Trotskyists, the right opportunists, the national deviationists, and other hostile groups.
Imperialist propaganda tries to use Trotsky's "prophetic utterances" to identify the features of the personality cult with the entire social and state structure in the USSR. It is characteristic that bourgeois historiography should try to put over the idea that Trotsky was "the advocate of democracy." This thesis is repeated in every form in every back alley of reactionary propaganda. And this is said of Trotsky, who during his short stay in the Bolshevik party (1917-1927) fully revealed himself as an oligarch and bureaucrat, the creator of the theory of "tightening the screws" and "shaking up the trade unions," and so forth. Here there is no need to elucidate the whole course of the party's struggle with Trotskyism on these yuestions. We will call to mind only certain historical facts, which characterize the true attitude of the Trotskyists toward democracy. Trotsky assigned the proletarian state a "special" role. If the relations between the working class and the peasantry inevitably took the form . of embittered and irreconcilable class struggle, then it followed, he held, that the workers state should constitute the same kind of harsh apparatus of compulsion and repression in relation to the peasants as it did in relation to other hostile classes. The dictatorship of the working class, according to Trotsky, ought to be realized not in the form of an alliance, a bond, with the peasantry, but in the form of domination over them. If Trotsky thought at all about "economic construction," he proposed to carry it out by robbing and squeezing the peasants, viewing them as objects of exploi- ‘tation.
To the extent that ‘lrotsky doubted the creative ability of the toilers of the Soviet land and placed his hopes entirely on help from without, on the part of the Western proletariat, to that extent the executive functions of the Soviet state lost all value in his eyes. On the other hand, coercion and administrative pressure became the normal method of administration. "No social organization except the army," Trotsky asserted, "has ever considered itself justified in subordinating citizens to itself in such a measure, and to control them by its will on all sides to such a degree of coercion as the state organization of the working class in the most difficult transitional epoch."(22)(N] The politics of such a state would inevitably become a politics of willful impulses and extreme adventurism. Trotsky assigned to repression an important place in the realization of such policies. "Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the Socialist dictatorship. "(23)
If the dictatorship of the proletariat, in Trotsky's thinking, was a state of uninterrupted struggle between the proletariat and the peasantry, then it was inevitable, according to this scheme, that the relations of the party toward the working class itself should be molded according to the laws of wartime. Trotsky equated the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the party. "The dictatorship of the proletariat in its very essence," he asserted, "signifies the immediate suprem-
(21) See Georg Scheuer. Von Lenin bis...? Die Geschichte einer Kontrrevolution. Berlin und Hannover, 1957, p. e271.
(22) Leon Trotsky, Sochineniya [Works, the Russian edition of the early 1920's. -- G.S.J], Vol. 12, pp. 161-162.
23) Ibid., p. 143.
acy of the revolutionary vanguard."(24) For him there was not so much a dictatorship of, as a dictatorship over, the proletariat. This idea, by the way, is one that the bourgeois falsifiers often attribute to Lenin. Here again they ignore his countless statements about the democratic essence of the proletarian dictatorship, about the place and role of the party in this system. V.1I.Lenin always stressed the point that persuasion is the only correct, the only possible, method for the party's work among the ranks of the workers. He saw the main essence of the proletarian dictatorship not in force but in the organized and disciplined character of the leading detachment of the toilers, its vanguard and only leader -- the proletariat, which is called upon to build socialism. (25) Even in the sharpest and severest moments of the class struggle Lenin never ceased to point to education of the masses as the fundamental method of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
"The proletarian dictatorship," he said, "should consist above all, in the advanced, most conscious, and most disciplined section of the urban and industrial workers, training, educating and disciplining the rest of the proletariat, which is often unconscious, and the entire mass of toilers and peasantry."(26) The replacement of the method of persuasion with orders and threats in relation to the proletariat, which follows from the writings of Trotsky, radically contradicts the Leninist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The thesis of the "internationalism" of Trotsky also fails to stand up under criticism. Deutscher, for example, tries to show that Trotsky was supposedly against carrying "revolution abroad on the point of bayonets."(27) Facts speak otherwise.
Trotsky was an ardent champion of the idea of "revolutionary" war as a means of instigating revolution from without. To be sure, in 1937, with feigned indignation he denied his part in propagandizing this idea. By speculating on the peace-loving aspirations of the toiling masses, he calculated, he could worm his way into their confidence. However, many of his writings speak to the contrary. In them, in one form or another, the theme of war as the only radical means of solving revolutionary problems comes through. Speaking of the European proletariat, Trotsky wrote: "The war stood them on their feet in a revolutionary sense." Further on, he passionately exclaims: "Was the working class, because of its social weight, capable of carrying out the revolution before the war? The war shook up the working class."(28)
In regard to Russia this "philosophy" had a no less warlike appearance. Thus, falsifying the history of 1918, when Soviet power won the life-saving reprieve of a temporary peace, Trotsky asserted that at that time "it was not a-new breathing spell that had saved the revolution but an acute new danger that disclosed subterranean springs of revolutionary energy among the proletariat."(29) War is the source of the revolutionary energy of the masses; without war the revolution withers and in the last analysis perishes ~~ such is the conclusion that flows from these "discoveries. "[0]
In contrast to Trotsky, V.I.Lenin pointed out that precisely the successes of the Soviet people in building socialism, the propagandizing of the experience of socialist construction, and the superiorities of the Soviet order over the system of capitalist exploitation would serve as a powerful revolutionizing factor, facilitating the victory of the proletariat in other countries. By strengthening the first state where the dictatorship of the working class had been established, the toilers of the USSR under the leadership of the party firmed up the base of the world socialist revolution. They always rendered fraternal assistance to the revolutionary movements in other countries. In the years of World War II it was none other than the Soviet Union that helped the peoples of Europe and Asia to free themselves from the yoke of Hitlerite fascism
(24) Ibid., p. 107.
(25) Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 38, p. 385.
(26) Lenin, op.cit., Vol. 41,.p. 147.
(27) Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, p. 519. [Actually, the quoted phrase appears on p. 517, and the subject is discussed for several pages. -- G.S.]
(28) L.Trotsky, Pyat_ let kominterna, p. 541. [Translated into English by J.G.Wright as The First Five Years of the Communist International, 2 vols., Pioneer Publishers, 1945- 1953. The quotation is to be found in volume 2, pp. 308-309. An ommission in the quotation will be considered separately. -- G.S.] (29) L.Trotsky, O Lenine, p. 122. [The Russian original of Trotsky's Lenin. The English wording followed here is from the "authorized translation," paperback edition, published by Capricorn Books, New York, 1962. -- G.S.]
and Japanese militarism. Thanks to the crushing of these reactionary forces, with the Soviet Union playing a decisive role, favorable conditions arose for the victory of national-democratic and socialist revolutions, for the overthrow of the power of the landlords and capitalists by the peoples of a whole series of countries of Europe and Asia.
As for the Trotskyists, they hindered the development of the world revolution, striving by their splitting activities to weaken the leading revolutionary forces of our time -- the Communist party of the Soviet Union, the other fraternal parties, and the first socialist state in the world. Trotsky himself in 1927, answering the question of the chairman of the Central Control Commission G.K.Ordjonokidze, on the political line of the opposition in the event of war against the USSR, openly declared that the opposition would remove the leadership of the party even in a case where the enemy was at the gates of Moscow. [P]
Louis Aragon wrote of the Trotskyist opposition: "...the opposition's antiparty activity took on an anti-Soviet nature. Trotsky's directive letter of October 21, 1928, was published simultaneously in Maslow's paper and in Rul, the Kadets' journal in Berlin. It stigmatized the regime in the USSR as ‘inside-out Kerenskyism'; it called upon Trotsky's sympathizers to organize strikes [in the USSR! -- Mikeshin]; to bring about the failure of the campaign for the collective contracts; and to prepare the opposition cadres for a possible civil war."(30)[Q]
One can imagine how weighty would have been the consequences for our country had the Communist party not crushed the Trotskyist opposition, both ideologically and organizationally, before the stern years of the war against fascism.
Trotskyism in our country suffered total bankruptcy. Despite the prophecies of the Trotskyists, the Soviet people under the leadership of the Communist party have successfully carried out the legacy of Lenin and will continue to do so. The successes of socialist construction in the Soviet Union assured the eventual political collapse of Trotskyism. It finally turned into a counterrevolutionary tendency, directing the brunt of its efforts against the Soviet Union, the CPSU, and the international Communist movement.
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After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky directed his activities toward splitting the Communist movement. He strived to implant or spread his fractions in all the Communist parties and with their aid to break up these parties. He pursued the idea of building an international Trotskyist center as a counterweight to the Third Communist International, the true general staff of the international proletariat. In September 1938, at a conference of Trotskyist groups from 11 countries, the formation of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International was announced with great ceremony. Trotsky on this occasion loudly proclaimed: "In the course of the next ten years the program of the Fourth International will win millions to its side."
And, lo, not ten but almost thirty years have passed. And? It turns out that the Fourth International has failed to gain influence over the masses of even.a single country. This bitter admission is contained in the basic resolution of the so-called Reunification Congress of the Fourth International (June 1963).[RB]
In order not to pass out of the political picture completely, Trotskyism now tries to change its political coloring, adapt to new conditions, to such real phenomena as the victory of the Soviet Union, together with the freedom-loving peoples of the world, over German fascism and Japanese militarism, the full and complete victory of socialism in the USSR, the unfolding spread of the national liberation movement in the underdeveloped countries, and so forth. In the face of this reality Trotskyism, experiencing a permanent crisis, has begun to hunt feverishly for some means of salvation. Its leaders worked out a tactic of self-preservation which was ultimately christened “entrism" (i.e., "infiltration"). The Trotskyists fastened onto many popular slogans, hoping thus to creep into the confidence of the masses.
; Life has forced the Trotskyists themselves to quietly revise the more odious points in "Trotsky's heritage." Today, even they do not speak of the impossibility of the construction of socialism in a single country. Such assertions in our day would be simply laughable. But the Trotskyists have been quick to find a substitute for their bankrupt dogma: and now they have placed in doubt the construction of communism in
(30) Aragon. Histoire parallele. Histoire de 1'URSS de 1917 A 1960, tome 1, Paris 1962, p. 284. [English wording from Aragon, Louis, A History of the USSR; from Lenin to Khrushchev, translated by Patrick O'Brian, New York. McKay, 1964, p. 256. -- G.S.]
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the USSR.
Life has laughed at the "prophecies" of Trotsky about the inevitability of conflict between the working class and the peasantry, about the collapse of the kolkhoz system, and the unavoidable defeat of Soviet power. Even the. biographer of Trotsky. was forced to corroborate this fact. "In retrospect," writes. Deutscher, "it may. appear that Trotsky took too black a view: the collective farms did not collapse, after all."(41)([S]
V.I.Lenin, pointing to the esserice of petty-bourgeois deviations in the workers movement, noted that those who express such deviations characteristically vacillate from one extreme to another. Such metamorphosis has indeed taken place among the Trotskyists over the peasant question. While Trotsky, to the end of his days, desperately adhered to the old Social—Democratic dogma of the reactionary nature of the peasantry, _ his followers have made a 180-degree turn. As though nothing had happened, they have begun to speak of the "radical," or even the "revolutionary," role of the peasantry, above all of the peasantry of the underdeveloped countries. They now cry out about the great historical significance of the national liberation movement, which previously they had ignored.
It is paradoxical but true: The Trotskyists have imperceptibly returned to their starting point. In spite of everything, Trotsky's dogma about the inevitability of a break, of conflict, between the working class and the peasantry has surfaced again, but this time on the international rather than the intrastate level.
Contemporary Trotskyists preach the sundering of bonds between the world proletariat and the national liberation movement, which is basically of peasant character and composition. They oppose the Leninist theory of the hegemony of the proletariat. in the international revolutionary process, trying in every way to isolate the popular masses of countries that have won their national independence or are fighting for it from the influence of the revolutionary struggle of the peoples of the socialist states and the working class of the developed capitalist countries. On the one hand, they cry out that the socialist countries, above all the USSR, have supposedly "become bour— geoisified," that the working class. of the capitalist countries has become "sullied with opportunism," and on the other, they endeavor to show that the "vanguard," the "main force of the world revolution is the national liberation movement."
.In contrast to this fallacious conception of the Trotskyists, the programmatic documents of the world Communist movement affirm the ideas of the unshakable alliance between the international working class, its offspring ~- the world socialist system -and the national liberation movement of the peaples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Without in the least belittling the significance of the national liberation movement, ‘the Marxist-Leninists declare that only the hegemony of the working class can direct the liberation movement. into the channel of thoroughgoing struggle against imperialism and carry it through to conclusion. Only under this condition will the anti-imperialist liberation movement in the last analysis acquire a truly socialist character.
In the program of contemporary Trotskyists there is one point that is taken whole, without any changes, from the "theory of permanent revolution" -- that is, the denial of peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems. The Trotskyists speak out against the policy of peaceful coexistence, both covertly (hiding behind the formula invented by Trotsky, "Neither war nor peace") and openly (calling the peaceful coexistence policy "opportunist" and a "policy of conciliation with imperialism"). The most brazen of the Trotskyist shouters openly reveal what they would like as a substitute for the policy of peaceful coexistence. "The correct strategy for the workers states," wrote the newspaper Frente Obrero, organ of the Uruguayan Trotskyists, on Jan. 24, 1963, "is as follows: to attack in order to promote the world revolution, so that the masses of the whole world will feel that the promotion of the world revolution, the promotion of the socialist revolution, is the best and only means of breaking down the capitalist countries." War, in their opinion, is the best means for such "promotion" of revolution. In this connection the above-mentioned newspaper emphasized that the Fourth International bases its activity "on the program of taking power, overthrowing capitalism, preparing itself for the atomic war, or preparing a preventive war before imperialism unleashes one." The same line is expressed in several other little papers and journals, published by the Trotskyists of France, Italy, the U.S.A., Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile.({T]
The Fourth International presents a repulsive spectacle. Like spiders in a jar, the Trotskyist grouplets, clinging to its sides, bite at one another. One Trotskyist grouping calls itself the International Secretariat, another the International Commit-
(31) I. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, p. 97.
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tee, a third the Latin American Bureau. In 1954 the bickering within the Fourth International issued in an open split. Arguments among the Trotskyists centered, above all, on the struggle against the Marxist-Leninist parties. Only a short time ago, in June 1964, the Trotskyist organizations of various stripe were formally united again. This happened at the Seventh (so-called Reunification) Congress of the Fourth International. But, barely having united, the Trotskyists split once again. In England the former Labor Review, organ of the Socialist Labour League began to be published as the journal of the International Committee of the Fourth International, under the name Fourth International. This new journal counterposed itself to the old one of the same name, the organ of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International. The "newborn child" accused its "elder brother" of perverting Marxism by its insufficient "radicalism," of trying to adapt itself to circumstances in violation of Trotskyist doctrine. (32) [U]
Does this not testify to the definitive collapse of Trotskyism -- both ideologically and organizationally?
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Imperialist reaction stops at nothing in its struggle against the USSR and the world Communist movement. It eagerly uses all possible opposition grouplets and tendencies that happen to wander into the ranks of the international proletariat. That is why even bankrupt Trotskyism ends up as a weapon of anti-Communism. The imperialist ideologists are not embarrassed by the ultra-revolutionary phraseology of the Trotskyists. What is important for them is the essence of this tendency, whose edge is directed against the Soviet Union, the world socialist system, and the international Communist movement.
But the ideologists of anti-Communism should remember that the working class in all countries long ago discerned the counterrevolutionary essence of Trotskyism. In this they were aided by the many years' experience of our Leninist party in struggle against Trotskyism, its ideology and practice. This experience testifies to the invincibility of the ideas of creative Marxism-Leninism, to the inevitable collapse of dogmatism and revisionism, no matter how "left" the attire in which they clothe themselves.
(32) See Fourth International. A Journal of the International Committee of the Fourth International, 1964, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 4-21.