In a country in which the overwhelming majority of the population was peasants, the obvious question was what would be the relationship between the urban proletariat and the rural petty bourgeois, i.e. in the event of a victory of the revolution.
Obviously, with a decisive victory of the revolution, the class that played the leading role would take power (especially if that class dominated in the capital, towns and industrial centres and controlled the only national transportation network) – in other words, power would pass into the hands of the proletariat. To Trotsky, as Lenin, it was axiomatic that SDs would participate in such a revolutionary democratic government, any other perspective would have been senseless. To retain power for any significant period of time the proletarian government would have to contain influential representatives of revolutionary non-proletarian social groups – especially the peasantry. Trotsky was open to suggestion on how such a government might be described; as the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, as a dictatorship of the proletariat, peasantry and intelligentsia, or even as a coalition government of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. However, whatever the name of the government, the real issue would be: who determined the content of the government’s policy, who wielded hegemony in the government and through it, in the country at large?[46].
In later years Trotsky would come under fire from the bureaucratic wing of the Bolshevik Party for proposing, in 1906 and after, a “Workers Government”, in the sense of a government composed of workers’ parties only. However, in Results and Prospects there is clearly no intention to exclude the participation of representatives of the peasantry from government, rather the success of the revolution is predicated on peasant participation. Trotsky never doubted that in order for the proletariat to stay in power, it had to widen the base of the revolution. Drawing on the events of 1905, he proposed that there would be an inevitable delay before many sections of the working masses, particularly those in the countryside, would be drawn into the revolution and become politically organised, primarily through Soviets. In many cases it would be after the advance-guard of the revolution, the urban proletariat, had taken state power into its hands. Indeed, having governmental power, the proletariat would be expected to use that power to enact legislation that would revolutionise the rural masses in support of its government, and so give the proletariat an invaluable advantage. (We shall see later, that Lenin, having gone through the experience of the October 1917 Revolution, would propose precisely the same concept.) Governmental recognition of all revolutionary expropriations of land carried out by the peasants would mean ”The proletariat in power will stand before the peasants as the class which has emancipated it”[47].
Thus, the fundamental interests of Russia’s peasants (even including the kulaks) were bound up with the outcome of the revolution, and the fate of the proletariat. The ToPR predicted that in Russia the fundamental problems of democracy, and for the peasants this meant the end of feudal relations on the land, would be solved by a workers’ revolution. The majority of the Russian peasantry would, in the first and most difficult period of the revolution, actively seek to maintain the proletarian government which guaranteed its new property holdings. In such a situation, created by the transfer of power to the proletariat, the peasantry as a whole would rally to support the workers’ regime. However, Trotsky also sounded a cautious and somewhat pessimistic note, warning that in both the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the peasantry, having achieved its aims, lost all interest in progressing the revolution, and betrayed it by placing itself as the foundation-stone of ‘order’[48].
For factional reasons, Stalin, in The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists[49], wrote that Trotsky, in 1905, simply forgot about the peasantry as a revolutionary force and advanced the slogan of “No tsar, but a workers’ government”, that is a revolutionary government without the peasantry. In the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, the weight of the Russian state was placed behind a campaign that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the effect that Trotsky under-estimated the peasantry:
“Stalin quotes from a leaflet which Trotsky did not write and simply forgot about the slogan which Trotsky actually advanced in 1905: Neither Tsar nor Zemtsi (i.e. liberals), but the People! i.e. a slogan embracing the workers and peasants. The leaflet in which this occurs is to be found, along with numerous appeals to the very peasantry which Trotsky “forgot”, in Trotsky’s Collected Works (vol. 2, page 256) which were printed in Russia after the October Revolution”[50].
However, Trotsky’s use of the phrase “a workers’ government” does need clarification because of the apparent similarity between his use of the term and its use by Parvus, a co-worker and colleague, who helped Trotsky launch Nachalo (The Beginning) in 1905. Parvus wrote the introduction to Before the Ninth of January, and there stated that the revolutionary government would be a Social Democratic government. We have seen that Lenin criticised Parvus’ call for a workers’ government for excluding the peasantry. But Parvus limited the tasks of the workers’ government to the democratic tasks, and argued that the “Workers’ Government” brought to power by the revolution would be a reformist workers’ government not a dictatorship of the proletariat, not a workers’ socialist government[51]. Writing in Our Differences, on the differences between his ideas on “a Workers’ Government” and those of Parvus, Trotsky said that at that time (1904), Parvus’ views on the Russian Revolution “bordered closely on mine, without however being identical with them”[52]. Trotsky’s differences with Parvus were twofold: the degree of peasant participation in the government, and whether the workers’ government limited itself to the RDSLP minimum programme or took the first steps towards socialism[53],[54].
As we know, until 1905, Lenin was of the opinion that return of the cut-off lands was all that could be realistically proposed as party policy. In 1905 Trotsky held the view: “… we cannot undertake to carry out a programme of equal distribution … This policy, being directly wasteful from the economic standpoint, could only have a reactionary-utopian ulterior motive, above all would politically weaken the revolutionary party”[55]. These prognostications had to be tested against reality and, in 1917, recognition of the need for the support of the peasantry meant that both Trotsky and Lenin agreed to the Bolshevik Party adopting, without alteration, the agrarian programme of the SRs.
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p201
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Trotsky, L.D., Ibid, p203
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Trotsky, L.D., Ibid, p203
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Stalin, J., The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists, FLPH Peking, 1976, p 124
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Woods, A. and Grant, T., Lenin and Trotsky:What They Really Stood For, Wellred Publications, London, 1976, p69
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Knei-Paz, B., The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1978, p21
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Trotsky, L.D., Permanent Revolution, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p63
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Deutscher, I., op cit, p113-114
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Lowy, M., The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development, Verso, London, 1981, p41. Lenin supports this analysis of Parvus’ having an essentially reformist perspective in Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, March 1905, CW 8:298
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p236