With each international defeat of the working class, and its accompanying mood of despair and disappointment amongst the Russian proletariat, the bureaucratic reaction in the Soviet Union assumed an increasingly menacing form. The terrible backwardness and low cultural level of the masses proved an insurmountable obstacle to the Russian proletariat, weakened, crushed and exhausted by years of civil war, deprivation and demoralisation. The bureaucracy fed on this mood of weariness and growing scepticism particularly amongst the older generation. Largely left over from the old tsarist state machine, this caste of officials began to flex its muscles and feel more conscious of its independence, importance and power.
The diminishing participation of the masses in political life reinforced this process. The bureaucracy soon revealed its own ideas, feelings and interests. It yearned for stability and the abandonment of international revolution. “On all sides the masses were pushed away gradually from actual participation in the leadership of the country,” remarked Trotsky.
The reaction within the proletariat caused an extraordinary flush of hope and confidence in the petty bourgeois strata of town and country, aroused as they were to new life by the NEP, and growing bolder and bolder. The younger bureaucracy, which had arisen at first as an agent of the proletariat, began to now feel itself a court of arbitration between the classes. Its independence increased from month to month. The international situation was pushing with mighty forces in the same direction. The Soviet bureaucracy became more self-confident, the heavier the blows dealt to the world working class. Between these two facts there was not only a chronological, but a causal connection, and one which worked in two directions. The leaders of the bureaucracy promoted the proletarian defeats; the defeats promoted the rise of the bureaucracy. (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 90.)
The defeat of the German Revolution of 1923, followed by the defeats in Bulgaria and Estonia, constituted a severe blow to the morale of the Russian proletariat. It condemned the Soviet state to a period of further economic and political isolation. Within the Communist Party the initiative and independence of the rank and file was being systematically stifled by bureaucratic ‘commandism’ at all levels. A hierarchy of appointed officials replaced the elected representatives. Trotsky, who had been urged by Lenin to take up the struggle against bureaucratism, formed the Left Opposition to meet this challenge. Their demands centred around the restoration of workers’ democracy within the Party and the co-ordination of industry and agriculture through a national plan. These ideas immediately met with furious opposition from the majority faction of Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin. Trotsky’s defence of Bolshevism was met with abuse and ridicule by the ruling apparatus.
In early 1924, the death of Lenin delivered a further blow to the morale of the Russian workers. Some historians have suggested that if Lenin had lived longer it would have resulted in a totally different development in Russia. But even if Lenin had lived it would not have made a fundamental difference. Lenin’s colossal personal prestige, in itself, would not have been sufficient to prevent the political counter-revolution. As early as 1926, Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, in a meeting of the Left Opposition, pointed out: “If Ilyich [Lenin] were alive, he would probably already be in prison.” At that time this was probably an exaggeration. Had Lenin lived a few more years, the process of degeneration might have been delayed, modifying the course of events. But as long as the revolution remained isolated in conditions of frightful backwardness, the fundamental process would have been the same. Without doubt, Lenin would have fought relentlessly against the bureaucracy but that, in and of itself, would not have been sufficient to have defeated the reaction. Only with the success of the revolution elsewhere, which would have broken the isolation and rekindled the revolutionary élan of the Russian masses, could the bureaucracy have been stopped in its tracks. The fact of the matter is Lenin did not survive his third stroke, which totally incapacitated him for nine months prior to his death.
Does this mean that those who struggled against Stalinism were doomed to defeat? To pose the question in this way would be abstract, schematic, and fatalistic. The emergence of Stalinism was a struggle of living forces, the outcome of which could not be determined in advance. Trotsky and the Left Opposition certainly realised that there were strong objective forces working on the side of the Stalinist bureaucracy. However, there was nothing fatalistic about their attitude. Everything would depend upon the international situation. As Trotsky explained: “The development of the struggle has shown, without any doubt, that the Bolshevik-Leninists would not have been able to win a complete victory in the USSR – that is to say, conquer power and cauterise the ulcer of bureaucratism – without support from the world revolution.” (Trotsky, Writings, 1935-36, p. 178.) That is why the Opposition fought for a correct Marxist policy in Britain, China and elsewhere.
The serious illness and subsequent death of Lenin put effective power in the hands of the ‘troika’ of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. In reality, the central lever of power was already in Stalin’s grip, given his complete organisational domination of the apparatus as General Secretary of the Party. The troika conspired to prevent Trotsky taking over from Lenin. They deliberately suppressed Lenin’s Testament, which had directly called for Stalin’s removal. Another factor was the opening of the Party to a flood of raw, inexperienced new members after Lenin’s death – the so-called Lenin Levy. This swamped the revolutionary nucleus of the Party in a sea of politically backward elements, who were putty in the hands of the apparatus-men, hand-picked by Stalin’s machine. The weakening and isolation of the Party’s Old Guard was the necessary precondition for the victory of the apparatus. Suffice to say that 75-80 per cent of the membership were recruited after 1923. The number of Party members with pre-revolutionary service was less than 1 per cent.
Simultaneously, a campaign of calumny and falsification was opened up against Trotsky. This was precipitated by Trotsky’s publication The Lessons of October, which dealt with the reasons for the defeat of the German Revolution, laying particular responsibility on the failure of leadership. In doing so, Trotsky drew parallels with what had happened in October 1917 in Russia and the vacillation of the Right Wing of Zinoviev and Kamenev who both came out against the insurrection (although they were never mentioned by name). These important lessons were buried in the campaign against ‘Trotskyism’. All the old smears about Trotsky’s non-Bolshevik past (which Lenin had written off in his Testament), about the ‘permanent revolution’, Brest-Litovsk, and the rest, were dragged up by the ruling faction to discredit Trotsky and oust him from the leadership. A stream of literature was brought out against Trotsky, while reinforcing the idea of the Leninist Old Guard of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev: Trotskyism or Leninism (Stalin), Leninism or Trotskyism (Kamenev) and Bolshevism or Trotskyism (Zinoviev). Trotsky was subsequently removed from the post of Peoples’ Commissar of War in January 1925. The campaign against Trotskyism was then taken into the Communist Parties internationally, where votes were demanded supporting the Russian Party majority leadership.
Dialectical materialism has nothing in common with the kind of mechanical approach which sees history as a simple, linear process. Such a view is more in line with religious philosophies like Calvinism, with its fatalistic theory of predestination. Accidents play a role in history as in nature, but, as Hegel brilliantly explained, necessity frequently expresses itself through the medium of accidents. The efforts of Trotsky alone were insufficient to change the Party’s course. Ranged against him was the Old Guard of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Stalin. This played a certain part in the equation. Marxism does not deny the role of the individual or of accidents in history. On the contrary. Individuals can play a tremendous role – for good or ill. Kamenev and, particularly, Zinoviev played an important role in the turn towards reaction after Lenin’s death. Here personal motives played a role. Having worked closely with Lenin for many years, Zinoviev considered that he should inherit Lenin’s mantle. He was ambitious and jealous of Trotsky. As a result, he organised a parallel leadership, even before Lenin’s death, composed of all the members of the Politburo except Trotsky. Using methods entirely alien to Bolshevism, he resorted to manoeuvres and intrigues to discredit Trotsky and drive a wedge between him and Leninism.
By inventing the myth of Trotskyism after Lenin’s death, Zinoviev and Kamenev played a pernicious role, which deepened the disillusionment and increased the disorientation of the workers. Neither of them showed any understanding of the real processes at work. They imagined that they were using Stalin as a tool when in fact it was they who were being used. In this way, without realising it, Kamenev and Zinoviev laid the basis for Stalin’s victory over the Bolshevik Party and over themselves. They felt themselves superior to Stalin, and, in a moral and intellectual sense, they were right. But Stalin’s strength lay, not in his intellect, but in the fact that he reflected the pressure and the interests of millions of officials who were thirsting for power. In this struggle, Kamenev and Zinoviev were handicapped by the very same qualities that had earlier been their strength – their faith in the revolution and loyalty to the cause of the working class. By the time of his break with them, Stalin had none of this. He was motivated purely by ambition for himself, but unlike Kamenev and Zinoviev, was not burdened down by principles. He eagerly based himself upon the bureaucracy, first in the Party, the apparat, which he dominated, and later became the champion of the millions of former tsarist officials, who continued to function under the protective colouring of the Soviet state.
This process eventually ended in the slaughter of the Old Bolsheviks, who could not stomach Stalin’s destruction of the Revolution and the party of Lenin. Stalin thus played the role of the executioner of the Bolshevik Party. Nevertheless, it is necessary to see that if Stalin had not existed, or if he had refused to act in the interests of the bureaucracy, he would merely have been replaced by someone else. In the concrete conditions, it would almost certainly have meant the victory of Bukharin’s faction. This would have meant the victory of capitalist restoration even at that time. In a panic reaction, Stalin was later forced to adopt, in caricature form, many of the policies of the Left Opposition. Without this, the pressure of the kulaks in the countryside and the NEPmen in the towns would undoubtedly have led to the overthrow of the regime. The new policy was enthusiastically received by the working class, who nevertheless remained largely passive. The policy of ‘dekulakisation’ was carried out in a hooligan way by the bureaucracy, which simultaneously covered its rear by striking blows against the Left Opposition.
At the time of their bloc with Stalin, both Kamenev and Zinoviev were not consciously aware of the processes which were taking place in the Soviet state, and which they were unwittingly abetting. They did not realise in what direction their attacks on Trotsky and Trotskyism would lead them, any more than did Stalin, at that time. But in attempting to drive a wedge between Trotskyism and Leninism, they set in motion all the machinery of historical falsification and bureaucratic harassment, which marked the first decisive step away from the ideas and traditions of October towards the monstrous bureaucratic police state of Stalin. Thus, they were acting as the unconscious agents of processes outside their control and beyond their understanding.
Stalin also had no conscious plan of where he was going. He was utterly blind to the processes taking place. Even Trotsky commented at the time of the Purge trials: “Had Stalin been able to foresee where the struggle against ‘Trotskyism’ was to lead him, he would undoubtedly have stopped short, despite the perspective of defeating his opponents. But he foresaw nothing.” (Trotsky, Writings 1936-37, p. 70.) Stalin, with his narrow, administrative, ‘practico’ mentality, reflected the pressures of the rising Soviet bureaucracy: the layer of officials in the state, industry and, increasingly, the Party who had done quite well out of the revolution and were anxious to put a stop to the period of storm and stress, and to get on with the work of organising society, with themselves comfortably installed on top, naturally.
To this layer, the idea of the world socialist revolution was an irritating irrelevance. They had no faith in the Russian working class, let alone the Germans and British. Stalin privately shared their view, although he would never have dared to say so in public while Lenin was still alive. The anti-Marxist theory of ‘socialism in one country’, first expounded by Stalin in the autumn of 1924, went against everything the Bolsheviks and the Communist International had preached. How was it possible to construct a national socialism in a single country, let alone an extremely backward country like Russia? Such a thought never entered the heads of any Bolshevik, including Stalin’s up until 1924. In April 1924, in a speech to students at the Sverdlov University, later published under the title Foundations of Leninism, Stalin stated:
The overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of a proletarian government in one country does not yet guarantee the complete victory of socialism. The main task of socialism, the organisation of socialist production, still lies ahead. Can this task be accomplished, can the victory of socialism in one country be attained, without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No, this is impossible… For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia are insufficient. (Stalin, Lenin and Leninism, p. 40.)
Here without doubt the general position of the Bolshevik Party is correctly expressed. However, in the second edition, published a few months later, these lines were withdrawn and the exact opposite put in their place:
But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been assured. After consolidating its power and leading the peasantry in its wake the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society… (Stalin, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 110, my emphasis.)