Trotsky thought it was possible to unite the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, or, to be more accurate, the left-wing tendency in Menshevism represented especially by Martov. He was not the only one. Lenin himself was attracted more than once to the idea of unity with Martov, whose personal and political qualities he always recognised. Lunacharsky recalls that as late as 1917, Lenin dreamed of a bloc with Martov. At this time certainly Lenin held out hopes that Martov would come over:
The next spell of emigration struck Martov a very hard blow; never, perhaps, had his tendency to vacillate been so marked nor probably so agonising. The right wing of Menshevism soon began to go rotten, deviating into so-called ‘liquidationism’. Martov had no wish to be drawn into this petty bourgeois disintegration of the revolutionary spirit. But the ‘liquidators’ had a hold on Dan and Dan on Martov and as usual the heavy ‘tail’ of Menshevism dragged Martov to the bottom. There was a moment when he would literally have made a pact with Lenin, urged to do so by Trotsky and Innokenty, who were dreaming of forming a powerful centre to counter the extreme left and the extreme right.
This line, as we know, was also strongly supported by Plekhanov, but the idyll did not last long, rightism gained the upper hand with Martov and the same discord between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks broke out again.
Martov was then living in Paris. I was told that he had even begun to go slightly to seed, always a lurking danger for émigrés. Politics was degenerating into an affair of petty squabbles and a passion for bohemian café life was beginning to threaten him with a diminution of his intellectual powers. However, when the war came Martov not only pulled himself together but from the start took up an extremely resolute position. (A.V. Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, p. 136.)
Trotsky hoped that all the left-wing elements might come together, on the basis of a break with the extreme right-wing Liquidators and the ultra-left Bolsheviks. Although politically close to Bolshevism, Trotsky was critical of what he saw as Lenin’s ‘factionalism’. He nursed the hope that the left wing of Menshevism would, in time, break with the right, and Lenin’s seeming intransigence infuriated him. From October 1908, he succeeded in publishing a paper called Pravda (The Truth) intended for illegal circulation in Russia, which was a big success. Pravda was published in Vienna and financed by two wealthy sympathisers, Adolf Joffe, the future outstanding Soviet diplomat who was later to commit suicide in protest against the Stalinist bureaucracy, and MI Skobelev, the son of a Baku oil magnate, who later re-emerged as a minister in the Provisional Government. Part of the new paper’s success was that it wrote in a lively and popular style and avoided the strident factional tone that characterised other underground Social Democratic publications. Instead of attacking other publications and groups, it concentrated on denouncing the problems of the working class and attempted to find common ground between the Bolsheviks and left Mensheviks. This was very popular with the workers in Russia, but profoundly irritated Lenin, who was involved in a struggle on two fronts and suspicious of unity-mongering. But Lenin now found himself in a minority in the leadership of his own faction, where conciliationist tendencies were strong.
Trotsky’s wrong position on organisation was the source of endless disputes with Lenin. The period under consideration witnessed the sharpest of clashes between Lenin and Trotsky in which Lenin heatedly denounced ‘Trotskyism’. But it is clear that for Lenin ‘Trotskyism’ was synonymous with Trotsky’s position on organisation (i.e., conciliation) and not at all his political views, which were close to Bolshevism. Moreover, the sharpness of the polemics between the two men had another explanation, which is not immediately obvious to the modern reader. The harshness of Lenin’s language in these polemics was dictated by the fact that, under the guise of ‘Trotskyism’, he was really attacking conciliatory tendencies in the leadership of his own faction. But the real story was for a long time suppressed beneath a thick layer of lies and distortions aimed at justifying the Stalinist bureaucracy and blackening the names of the Old Bolsheviks who fought against it.
In fact, for a time, Trotsky actually appeared to be on the point of succeeding. Many Bolshevik leaders were in agreement with him on the question of unity – that is, they supported precisely the weakest side of Trotsky’s position, not the strongest. On the Central Committee, the Bolsheviks NA Rozhkov and VP Nogin were conciliators. Krupskaya commented ironically that “Nogin was a conciliator who was out to unite all and everyone”. (NK Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 207.) So were Kamenev and Zinoviev. Given the popularity of Trotsky’s paper with workers in Russia, a number of Bolshevik leaders were in favour of using Pravda for the purpose of bringing about a fusion of Bolsheviks and Pro-Party Mensheviks. At the Paris meeting of the Proletary editorial board, Kamenev and Zinoviev, now Lenin’s closest collaborators, proposed the closing down of Proletary and moved that Pravda should be accepted as the official organ of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. This position was also supported by others like Tomsky and Rykov. The proposal was passed against the opposition of Lenin, who counter-proposed the setting up of a popular Bolshevik paper and monthly theoretical journal. In the end, a compromise was reached whereby Proletary would still come out, but not more than once a month. Meanwhile it was agreed to enter into negotiations with Trotsky with a view to making the Vienna Pravda the official organ of the RSDLP CC. This fact shows the strength of the conciliationist tendencies in the ranks of the Bolsheviks, and also tells us quite a lot about the attitude of the Bolsheviks towards Trotsky in this period. The minutes of the meeting of Proletary referred to were published in 1934, in order to discredit Zinoviev and Kamenev before their murder by Stalin, but were later consigned to the archives and hardly ever referred to. (Protokoly soveshchaniya rasshirennoy redaktsy Proletary, Moscow, 1934, quoted in the Istoriya KPSS, vol. 2, p. 293.)
Lenin was increasingly isolated within his own faction, and compelled to make concessions against his better judgement just to hold things together. The psychology of the Bolshevik conciliators was conditioned by the kind of ‘practical politics’ which prides itself on its haughty contempt for theory and principle, and is always looking for short cuts that, in the end, always turn out to be the opposite. This philistine mentality always regards a struggle for principles as ‘sectarianism’, an accusation that was frequently levelled against Lenin by his opponents. Kamenev and his fellow conciliators regarded themselves as infinitely wiser and more practical than Lenin, perhaps not on theory, but in the practical search for solutions to the party’s ills. In November 1908, Kamenev wrote to Bogdanov:
In the ‘squabble’ that has started here I stand in the ‘middle of the road’ line and hope to stay there… I feel that just as the struggle against conciliation was binding on me in 1904, so conciliation is equally binding on me now. (Pod Znamenem Marksizma, No. 9-10, p. 202.)
As late as 1912, when Lenin had already firmly set out on the course of a final split with the opportunists, a significant part of the leadership dragged their feet, as Krupskaya points out:
Obviously, there could be no room in the Party for people who had made up their minds beforehand that they would not abide by the Party decisions. With some comrades, however, the struggle for the Party assumed the form of conciliation; they lost sight of the aim of unity and relapsed into a man-of-the-street striving to unite all and everyone, no matter what they stood for. Even Innokenty, who fully subscribed to Ilyich’s opinion that the main thing was to unite with the Pro-Party-Mensheviks, the Plekhanovites, was so keen to preserve the Party that he began himself to incline towards a conciliatory attitude. Ilyich set him right, however. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 206.)
In retrospect, it seems inexplicable that Trotsky should have wasted so much time in attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. But he was not the only one who failed to understand what Lenin was driving at. It is sufficient to mention the name of Rosa Luxemburg to make the point. Like Rosa, Trotsky was mistaken, but his mistake was that of a sincere revolutionary with the interests of the working class and socialism at heart. Most probably the source of his error was also similar to hers. Rosa Luxemburg was early repelled by the centralised bureaucratic machine of the German SPD and, overreacting to it, tended to reject centralism per se. Not fully understanding Lenin’s position, and taking as gospel the caricature of the Mensheviks, she subjected his organisational ideas to a harsh and unjust criticism that partially clouded their relations, although politically they usually stood on the same side. Trotsky was repelled by the narrowness of the Bolshevik committeemen, who sought to reduce the most complex political questions to simple organisational problems, and presented the dialectical relation between the class and the party in a mechanical way that at times resembled a caricature, as when the Bolshevik committeemen in St. Petersburg demanded that the St. Petersburg Soviet dissolve itself when it refused to accept the leadership of the party. Trotsky was inclined to base his opinion of Bolshevism, not on Lenin, but on a mechanical caricature of Lenin’s ideas which passed for Bolshevism in certain circles. This kept him at a distance, despite the closeness of his political views with those of Lenin, right up to 1917, when the actual experience of the revolution caused all the old disagreements to dissolve.
In later years Trotsky admitted that on this question Lenin had always been in the right. In his autobiography Trotsky explains the basis of his error:
In its view of the future of Menshevism, and of the problems of organisation within the party, the Pravda never arrived at the preciseness of Lenin’s attitude. I was still hoping that the new revolution would force the Mensheviks – as had that of 1905 – to follow a revolutionary path. But I underestimated the importance of preparatory ideological selection and of political case-hardening. In questions of the inner development of the party I was guilty of a sort of social-revolutionary fatalism. This was a mistaken stand, but it was vastly superior to that bureaucratic fatalism, devoid of ideas, which distinguishes the majority of my present-day critics in the camp of the Communist International. (L. Trotsky, My Life, p. 224.)
After Lenin’s death, as part of an unscrupulous campaign to blacken Trotsky’s name, the Stalinists deliberately exaggerated the significance of the differences between Lenin and Trotsky. But these old polemics ceased to have any interest for Lenin after 1917 when Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party and took a firm stand against conciliationism. In November 1917, that is, after the October Revolution, the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ Kamenev and Zinoviev advocated the formation of a coalition government with the Mensheviks. At that time, Lenin said:
As for coalition, I cannot speak about that seriously. Trotsky long ago said that a union was impossible. Trotsky understood this, and from that time there has been no better Bolshevik. (Quoted in L. Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification, p. 105, my emphasis.)