Trotsky Read online

  1938

  February Trotsky’s eldest son Lev dies in Paris in mysterious circumstances.

  March Trial and execution of Bukharin, Rykov and sixteen others.

  April Trotsky’s elder brother, Alexander Bronshtein, executed in Moscow.

  1939

  August Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact

  signed in the Kremlin.

  September Germany invades Poland. USSR invades Poland. Start of Second World War. Founding congress of Fourth International in Paris.

  1940

  February-March Trotsky writes his last will and testament.

  27 May Unsuccessful attempt on Trotsky’s life organized by NKVD.

  20 August Another attempt on Trotsky’s life results in his fatal wounding.

  21 August Trotsky dies.

  December Natalya Sedova sells remainder of Trotsky’s archives to Harvard University.

  1941

  August Last issue of the Bulletin of the Opposition published.

  October Trotsky’s younger sister, Olga Kameneva, executed.

  Editor’s Preface

  By the spring of 1987, it had become clear that the conventional Soviet treatment of modern Russian—more particularly, Soviet—history was about to undergo a fundamental shift. At first, the most dramatic revisions were conducted by a playwright and a novelist—Mikhail Shatrov in his unstaged plays, and Anatoli Rybakov in his semi-autobiographical, semi-factual novel Children of the Arbat—and historians were relatively slow off the mark. Then, over a brief period beginning in January 1988, the Soviet State Prosecutor announced the ‘rehabilitation’ of the ‘Old Guard’ of Bolsheviks who had been liquidated in the infamous show trials of the mid-1930s. The reason given for this belated admission of injustice was that the charges on which they had been executed were groundless, although the evidence for this discovery was not and has never been revealed.

  Articles began appearing on previously taboo subjects, such as the murder of the Polish officer corps at Katyn, and new editions of encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries began to reflect a saner approach to previous ‘non-persons’. Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and exterminated Bolsheviks were reinstated into Russian history, along with liberals, conservatives, White émigrés, tsarist generals and monarchist politicians.

  However, Trotsky’s name did not figure among the rehabilitated cohort of 1917; nor could it, since he had not been officially charged and tried, nor had he been sentenced or executed ‘judicially’. He had undoubtedly figured as the chief inspirer, the éminence grise, the manipulator of the grand conspiracy against the Soviet state and its leaders, and his name had been a constant refrain in all the trials, including those of the Red Army élite, and was used to condemn anyone or any group suspected of real or potential hostility.

  Of the rehabilitated Bolsheviks, it was above all Bukharin who first attracted a measure of interest, since it was thought that his ardent advocacy of Lenin’s New Economic Policy might yield insights at a time when intellectuals and the Gorbachev government were seeking policies that could accommodate both a market and a planned economy. Other leading figures still await reassessment. As for Trotsky, a small number of short studies on his ideas has been produced in post-Soviet Russia, but their aims have been to set the record straight in terms of the facts of his life and his role in the revolution and civil war, and they have therefore concentrated on achieving as neutral, or as ‘normal’, a balance as possible—a laudable achievement, given the paucity of sources and the accumulated mendacity to which Soviet scholars had become accustomed over decades.

  Dmitri Volkogonov was a professional soldier for most of his life, rising to the rank of Colonel-General under Brezhnev as chief of the army’s Political Education Section. In the mid-1980s he became Director of the Institute of Military History in Moscow, and from that time began asking difficult questions about Soviet history. He assembled two (unpublished) volumes of data on the arrests and liquidations of the Red Army officer corps, and wrote a monumental study of Stalin which could not be published for several years. As the era of glasnost, or freer thinking, progressed, he became more outspoken publicly, especially about the Communist Party and its failure to move politically and ideologically with the times. Savagely attacked by the military establishment, and the Minister of Defence in person, for a generally awkward attitude and in particular for his ‘anti-Soviet’ interpretation of the Second World War as expressed in the draft of a new multi-volume history prepared (but never published) by his Institute, in the spring of 1991 he had little choice but to leave his post and devote himself to independent research.

  His political life of Stalin (Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy) had been published in Russia in 1990, and had aroused strong mixed feelings, especially among hard-line Communists who saw in his denigration of the former ‘father of the peoples’ a dangerous trend that could lead to yet further weakening of the state’s authoritarian traditions. They were to be proved right. The rising tide of criticism—of the state and its history, and above all of the Party’s claim to rule alone—eventually inundated the leadership in an unstoppable flood. After the failed coup of August 1991, Volkogonov became a special defence adviser to President Yeltsin and head of the Russian Archive Declassifying Commission, among other posts.

  Published in Russia in 1992, Volkogonov’s book on Trotsky sold about a million copies, but received less critical attention than his Stalin. Trotsky’s legacy, unlike those of Stalin and Lenin, had long been submerged and obliterated as a topic of debate, and his place in Soviet history books had correspondingly been diminished to one of no importance. For Western readers, however, Trotsky has always been one of the most enigmatic and powerful personalities of the Russian revolution, a Mephistophelian figure whose life ended in an appropriately dramatic way. The absence of a balanced view of him from the Soviet side meant that he was seen in too sharply contrasted a light, and it is the merit of Dmitri Volkogonov’s book that he has attempted to rectify this imbalance, while also providing a unique insight into the Soviet dimension.

  This, the first full-scale political biography of Trotsky to emerge from Russia, was made possible by the fact that Volkogonov has had access to the relevant Russian archives that were hitherto absent from Western studies. Isaac Deutscher was granted access to the Trotsky papers at Harvard University by Trotsky’s widow, and his three-volume work, published between 1954 and 1963, remains a valuable source. But Volkogonov has produced materials held by the NKVD that reveal Soviet motives and actions as never before. His access to the archives was complemented by his discovery of surviving members of Trotsky’s family and, most notably, of the functionaries and special agents who were closely involved in Stalin’s personal vendetta against Trotsky and the plan to assassinate him.

  After completing his Trotsky, Volkogonov then went on to produce a political analysis and life of ‘the last bastion to fall’ in his own mind, namely that of Lenin. If Trotsky had become at best little more than a name, and if Stalin had been a real-life memory for millions of Soviet citizens, Lenin had virtually been an icon for generations, an integral part of Soviet education, a totem, a source of ritual and dogma for national and local leaders in need of an ideological prop for a new policy or an apt phrase to support a decision. The response to Volkogonov’s Lenin: Life and Legacy, when it was published in Russia in 1994, was predictably divided and extreme. Those who regarded the dissolution of the Communist Party and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union as crimes against the people were aghast at Volkogonov’s temerity and disloyalty, and his book was condemned as tantamount to sacrilege. It was admired, on the other hand, by those for whom the history of the revolution and the origins of the Stalinist state had long become mere questions of history, those who had come to see Marxism-Leninism, and still more the adoration of a long-dead politician, as utterly irrelevant to the needs of the end of the twentieth century. Both sides thus recognized the book as a demolition of the intellectual foundations of the
old system.

  As a politician himself, Volkogonov believes that knowledge of the recent past, and especially of the origins of the Soviet state, is relevant to the needs of present-day Russia. He has seen both the rising tide of nationalism and the authoritarian response of the government he supports in the face of the problems that have surfaced with a vengeance in the former Soviet Union. His studies of the three leading figures of the revolutionary period—invaluable historical works in themselves—are meant to show the danger of combining radical politics with authoritarian tendencies. Lenin moulded his ideology from such ingredients and based the ‘first workers’ state’ on its foundations, embedding state violence and terror in the very fabric of the new order. Stalin, once his hold on power was unchallenged, applied his hybrid policies of radicalism and reaction—rapid industrialization and terror, collectivization of agriculture and violence.

  Trotsky occupied a unique position. As a militant radical during the revolution and civil war, he saw no need to adopt moderate policies once the internal threat had receded. For him, it was the threat from the capitalist world that was most pressing, and the Russian revolution was only the first stage of the world revolution that was envisaged as inevitable in Marx’s understanding of history and social change. As Trotsky himself confessed in his last will and testament in 1940, he was just as committed to the revolutionary idea in his last days as he had been when he first entered the Russian revolutionary movement in the 1890s, if not more so.

  Commitment to world revolution entailed for Trotsky commitment to radical domestic and foreign policies when he was still a figure with authority in the Soviet Union, and, as Volkogonov shows, it was this above all that alienated him from the rank and file of a Party that was more inclined to begin the economic reconstruction of the country than to embark on further revolutionary adventures. Certainly it would be some time before the Soviets formally abandoned the slogan of world revolution, or even their covert financial support of foreign Communist parties and front organizations in the West, but in the 1920s, when Stalin was working to consolidate his position as Party leader, Trotsky’s arguments as an irreconcilable radical gave his rival the ammunition he needed to hound him out of office and ultimately out of the country.

  Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union coincided with the Party’s adoption of the very measures he had advocated: forced collectivization of the peasants and rapid industrialization, using draconian measures wherever necessary. Volkogonov has traced the continuity between the violence and coercion of Lenin’s ideas and the terror of Stalinism, and he has shown that throughout his adult life Trotsky’s thinking and his actions provide a homogenous link in the chain. There is no suggestion that, had he held power, Trotsky would necessarily have unleashed the wave of terror, the purges and the show trials perpetrated by Stalin: everything Trotsky wrote on this matter argues against such a view, and in any case the question is hypothetical. The claim is, however, made by Volkogonov that Trotsky cannot be exonerated of the crime, as the author now sees it, of creating a system that behaved, while Trotsky was still a part of it and after, in a way the world has become accustomed to call ‘Stalinist’.

  Not all Russian revolutionaries, once they had escaped or were expelled from Soviet Russia, remained committed to the cause of universal Marxist revolution. Some became doctors and engineers, salesmen, archivists and antiquarian book-dealers, retaining only romantic memories of an adventurous youth. Trotsky shared with them a deep hatred of Stalin and his works, but, having left the Soviet Union, he remained fully active in promoting world revolution, publishing a journal, Bulletin of the Opposition, and establishing a Fourth (Marxist) International, as a rival to the Comintern which had become a tool of Soviet foreign policy. The fact that his venture ended in oblivion does not diminish Trotsky’s image as one of the most committed revolutionaries of the twentieth century—the eternal radical, indeed—but rather shows that the ideas to which he devoted his life were both outmoded and Utopian.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Fate of a Revolutionary

  The armoured train was on its way to Kiev, rattling over the rails towards the Ukrainian capital. The passengers in one of the middle wagons were not sleeping. In the large saloon, furnished with leather armchairs and a sofa, a long table and telephone equipment, a man in an unbuttoned tunic and boots was standing at one of the spyholes. He was of medium height, with a neat beard, and above a high forehead he had a full head of hair streaked with grey. His noble Roman nose was surmounted by an elegant pince-nez. He had lively, bright blue eyes. As he stared into the darkness, searching for signs of life, he saw nothing but a vast, war-torn country languishing in ruins and deep gloom. It was August 1919.

  At the table sat a young man in a flannel army shirt, pen in hand. Before him lay telegrams from the 3rd and 4th Armies of the Eastern Front, then advancing on Tobol. The southern grouping was making good progress towards Turkestan. Their reports confirmed that the leader of the White armies on that front, Kolchak’s, days were numbered. The path to the east would be open. But the man in the tunic was thinking of other things. His secretary scribbled down his dictation: ‘The defeat of the Hungarian [Soviet] Republic, our failures in Ukraine and the possible loss of the Black Sea coast, along with our successes on the eastern front, significantly alter our international orientation … The situation looks different when we face the east.’ In confident tone, he continued: ‘There can be no doubt that our Red Army is an incomparably more powerful force on the Asian fields of world politics than it is on the European. We now face the distinct possibility of a long wait while events unfold in Europe, but a period of activity in Asia. The road to India may at this moment be more open to us, and shorter, than the road to Soviet Hungary. Our army, which by European standards is still of little importance, is capable of destroying the unstable balance of colonial relations, giving a push to and ensuring the victory of an uprising of the oppressed masses in Asia.’ He sat down and continued dictating: ‘Naturally, our operations in the east presuppose the building and reinforcement of a mighty base in the Urals. We must concentrate there all the labour force we had intended settling in the Don oblast. We must send to the Urals all our best scientific and technical forces, our best organizers and administrators. We must send the best Ukrainian Party people who for other reasons are now without jobs. If they have lost Ukraine, let them conquer Siberia for the Soviet revolution.’

  As he went on, he outlined not merely the general strategic line of the revolution, but even provided the concrete detail: ‘A cavalry corps of 30-40,000 horsemen must be formed to invade India. The path to Paris and London lies through the cities of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal. Our victories in the Urals and Siberia must greatly raise the prestige of the Soviet Republic throughout oppressed Asia. We must seize the moment and somewhere in the Urals or Turkestan we must concentrate a revolutionary academy, the political and military headquarters of the Asiatic revolution, which could soon become much more effective than the Executive Committee of the Third International. Our task is to shift the centre of gravity of our international policy in good time.’1

  The speaker was Lev Trotsky, Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Republic, Commissar for the Army and Navy, and a member of the Politburo. His secretary was Nikolai Sermuks. In the course of his life Trotsky wrote or dictated about 30,000 documents, the great majority of which are scattered in numerous archives. Virtually everything he wrote was connected in some way with the Russian and world revolution. For him, and those like him, it was considered normal, natural and indeed obligatory to spur on the revolution. In the above notes to the Central Committee he was proposing a new strategy, calling on the Party to turn towards the east, to despatch large cavalry forces to India at a time when, as he knew perfectly well, the whole of the west and south of Russia was in flames, and the greater part of the country’s industry and agriculture, as well as a third of her people, were under German control. Only the next da
y he was informing Lenin of the critical position in the south, and demanding a meeting of the Politburo at which measures could be taken to overcome the ‘threatening danger’.2 But he also knew that India was the Achilles’ heel of the British Empire.

  Even when, twenty years later, he found himself cornered in his concrete Mexican fortress, he would still dream of the world revolution. Of the millions who passed along the revolutionary path, the great majority left no trace. Trotsky, however, remains even today a topic of debate. He is remembered with hatred and respect, anger and admiration. His portrait cannot be properly painted only in black and white, but calls for a wide range of colours. Opinion on this most famous of revolutionaries has swung from glorification to anathema, until at last it is possible to accept him coolly and objectively as a vivid, complex, multi-faceted personality in the gallery of world figures.

  The first study of Trotsky was probably that of G.A. Ziv, his old schoolfriend, who published a short book in New York in 1921.3 There were also official biographies. One, compiled by order of the Central Committee in May 1924, was entitled ‘Bronshtein (Trotsky) Lev Davidovich, also known as “Lvov”, “N. Trotsky”, “Yanovsky”, and by the literary pseudonyms of “Antid Oto”, “Takhotsky”, “Neophyte”, and others’. This five-page document was accompanied by a note which stated that ‘Comrade Trotsky’s biography, with the list of his publications, has been compiled by Comrade [Evgeniya] Bosh by order of Istpart [the Central Committee section dealing with the history of the Party and the October Revolution], and is to be kept in the Secret Section of Istpart for use by research workers’.4