Trotsky’s own analysis began with a description and review of the peculiarities of Russian historical development: the nature and growth of the highly centralised and conservative Russian state, its uniquely low population density and enormous size, the brief Russian summers, and long, bitter Russian winters. By the end of the nineteenth century the autocracy rested upon a highly centralised bureaucratic machine which was quite useless for taking economic, social or political initiatives, but very experienced and effective at carrying out systematic repression. Relative uniformity of action by the administration and secret police could be achieved across the country, despite the enormous distances involved, due to the introduction of the telegraph. The railways, limited though they were, made it possible to transfer military forces relatively rapidly from one end of the country to the other. The army may have proved useless in the Japanese War, but it was sufficient for internal domination.
The Russian government appeared to the world as a colossal military-bureaucratic power, even if it depended to a high degree upon loans from the British Stock Exchange and, even more so, the French Bourse[20]. In 1905 Trotsky gives some figures to show the degree of dependence. In 1908, after the ending of the Russo-Japanese war, interest payments to the “Rothschilds and the Mendelssohns” amounted to some 40% of the entire state budget[21]. Nearly a decade later Lenin would include much the same information in Imperialism, but would draw more general conclusions on how the economic domination of the banks had developed a commonality of interests of the nobility, landowners and capitalists.
The autocracy appeared so strong militarily and financially that it seemed to exclude any chance whatsoever for a successful Russian Revolution. The greater the military strength of the Russian autocracy, the longer it could hold state power after it had ceased to satisfy even the most elementary needs of social development. The longer such a state of affairs dragged on, the less likely – even impossible – it became psychologically for Tsarism to voluntarily take the parliamentary path. Thus, a democratic solution to the agrarian problem, the essence of the Russian democratic revolution, was blocked by the autocracy, leaving a revolution by the masses as the only possible means forward[22]. The entire preceding social development of the country made revolution inevitable, and what was more, argued Trotsky, the revolution would be all the more radical because of the delay imposed by the autocracy.
What social forces would make this revolution? Trotsky noted that Russia’s low economic level together with the disproportionate amount of national wealth taken by the state for military purposes and debt repayment, resulted in an indigenous manufacturing industry that had remained small scale, and an adjunct to agriculture. From the second half of the nineteenth century, when large-scale capitalist industry began to develop widely in Russia it was largely a foreign import. Foreign and national capitalists and industrialists received substantial support from the autocracy and met few obstacles in their path to economic domination – however, the more support they received from the autocracy, the less significant was the role they needed to play politically. Trotsky concluded there would be no serious challenge to the Tsar from this quarter[23].
Trotsky’s scenario was that in an economically-enslaved and backward country such as Russia, European capital had introduced the most advanced methods of production and in doing so had short-circuited a whole series of intermediate technical and economic stages through which it, itself, had had to pass in its own countries. For example, factories had arrived in Russia before the widespread development of town handicrafts, short-circuiting the creation of the craftsman class which provided the bulk of the revolutionaries of Paris during the Great Revolution[24]. The consequence was that the nucleus of the population of a Russian town at the turn of the last century, at least of those towns possessing sufficient industry to be of some economic and political significance, was not self-employed artisans but wage-workers. This fact was destined to play a decisive role in the Russian Revolution[25]:
“The factory industrial system not only brings the proletariat to the forefront but also cuts the ground from under the feet of bourgeois democracy. In previous revolutions the latter found its support in the urban petty-bourgeoisie: craftsmen, small shop-keepers, etc”[26].
Foreign capital had set up enormous factories, employing tens of thousands of workers, making the political weight of the working class employed in those factories, their number, strength and influence, out of all proportion to that of the national bourgeoisie.
Trotsky had begun his political activity by taking part in a small group of mainly student activists – the Southern Russian Workers’ Union – where he gained first hand experience of the rapid industrialisation that could occur due to foreign investment. He saw the number of factory workers increase more than fivefold in just a few years. But, and just as important, he saw that the workforce was predominantly young with a higher than average level of literacy[27]. This was valuable practical experience in determining the likely motor forces of the Russian Revolution.
The late development of Russia created a new situation not previously met by Marxists, an entirely new combination of social and economic forces was created by the introduction of the latest capitalist techniques into a society where the vast majority lived in near feudal conditions. Trotsky argued that one consequence of this unevenness in the economic and social development of Russia was the rapid and extensive growth of Marxism and the RSDLP before the bourgeois revolution.
Trotsky had to answer the question of why the majority of the oppressed people of Russia, the peasants, would not be the leaders of the revolution. His argument was that there was no tradition in Russia of victorious, concerted political struggle by the peasantry; the peasants were scattered in small communities separated by enormous distances and, even in 1905-1906, had significantly failed to overcome this geographical separation. Trotsky summed up this aspect with his much quoted line “Local cretinism is history’s curse on all peasant riots”[28]. He pointed out that the main aim of the peasants during the agrarian riots of 1905 and 1906, appeared to be restricted to driving out their own landowners from their own localities. However, against the peasant revolts the land-owners had the centralised resources of the state:
“The peasantry could have overcome this obstacle only by means of a resolute uprising unified both in time and in effort. But, owing to all the conditions of their existence, the peasants proved quite incapable of such an uprising. They liberate themselves from this curse only to the extent that they cease to be purely peasant movements and merge with the revolutionary movements of new social classes”[29].
Lenin had also addressed this question in, for example What the Friends of the People Are, where he said of agricultural workers: “Scattered, individual, petty exploitation ties the working people to one locality, divides them, prevents them from becoming conscious of class solidarity, prevents them from uniting …”[30].
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p175
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905, Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p6
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p176
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Trotsky, L.D., Ibid p181 – 182
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Trotsky, L.D., Ibid p180
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Trotsky, L.D., Ibid p181
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Trotsky, L.D., Ibid p181
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Thatcher, I. D., Trotsky, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p23-24
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905, Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p48
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Trotsky, L.D., Ibid, p48
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Lenin, V.I., What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are, 1894, CW 1:300