Lost Soviet document vindicates Trotsky: there really was “no better Bolshevik!”

“Trotsky said long ago that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik.” Vladimir Lenin delivered this statement to the Bolshevik Petrograd Committee on 1 November 1917 (Old Style).

All evidence of this meeting was expunged from official Soviet histories for almost a century. But thanks to the work of an internet historian, the original, handwritten minutes have been located. No one can deny any longer that these were Lenin’s words!

The existence of this document and the story of its suppression do not merely vindicate Trotsky’s record of a particular meeting. They serve to illustrate Lenin’s real views, which were deliberately buried under a mountain of lies after his death by Stalin and his minions.

What was the context of Lenin’s comments? The Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd was a relatively smooth affair, thanks to the overwhelming authority of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, where the Bolsheviks and their allies had a majority, combined with the meticulous preparatory work of key Bolshevik leaders.

At the time of the October Revolution, Lenin was underground, being hunted by the Provisional Government, and could thus only urge the Bolshevik leaders to action from a distance. In the actual preparatory work for the insurrection, the key role was played by Trotsky as head of the Military Revolutionary Committee, which had been formed by the Petrograd Soviet.

In the words of one commentator:

“All practical work in connection with the organisation of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organised.”

This commentator was no less than Stalin himself! Despite his attempts to scratch this favourable assessment from history, they can be seen in scans of the original editions of Pravda in 1918, which we reproduce here.

The revolution did not play out so neatly everywhere in the country. In Moscow, for example, the local Military Revolutionary Council was briefly ousted from the Kremlin by counter-revolutionary volunteer corps (Junkers), leading to a massacre.

A section of the Bolshevik leadership felt they were in a fragile position and started wavering. The ringleaders of this ‘right wing’, Zinoviev and Kamenev, had previously sought to forge alliances with reformist Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries before the revolution, and resisted the October insurrection, which they called ‘premature’, in opposition to Lenin.

After the revolution, they continued to argue that it was necessary to form a coalition with the Right Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. But, not only had these parties bitterly opposed the revolution, they also operated inside the hated Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky and supported the arrest of leading Bolsheviks during the July Days.

Some of the Bolshevik right wing resigned their positions over this dispute. They also leaned on some of the more conservative layers of the Russian working class, including the railway union Vikzhel, which threatened strikes in an attempt to force the Bolsheviks to compromise. There were even calls for Lenin and Trotsky to stand down to facilitate a deal.

All of this occurred only days after the October Revolution, putting the fledgling Soviet regime in jeopardy.

To deal with this crisis, Pravda announced an emergency meeting of the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party at the Smolny Institute on 1 November. At this meeting, Lenin and Trotsky stood on the left, refusing any compromise. On the right stood Kamenev, Zinoviev and others. Stalin took a middling position and, according to the official record of the meeting, never opened his mouth. This was characteristic of Stalin, who would take a ‘wait and see’ position during a sharp internal conflict in the party, then come down on the stronger side after the fact.

Trotsky formally joined the Bolsheviks in August 1917, at a time when the party was being hounded by Kerensky. He played an exemplary role in the October Revolution and was widely recognised as its second leader, alongside Lenin.

This is the real meaning of Lenin’s words about Trotsky, which were only further confirmed by subsequent events. The two men collaborated closely for years, and Trotsky led the Red Army to victory in the Civil War. In the last year of his life, Lenin intended to form a bloc with him to combat the increasing bureaucratism of the party and Soviet state, until he was laid low by illness.

It is very clear why Lenin’s comments were repressed, as they ran embarrassingly counter to the web of lies the Stalinist epigones tried to weave after he died. Far from being a conciliator or a Menshevik, Trotsky stood firmly with Lenin against any concessions to the Mensheviks and SRs, while Kamenev and Zinoviev were looking to make a deal, and Stalin simply stood in the background, as he always had.

In the Stalin School of Falsification, written by Trotsky in the 1930s, he notes that the minutes of the meeting were conspicuously absent from the official Soviet collection of The First Legal Petrograd Committee of the Bolsheviks in 1917 (published in 1927).

Trotsky somehow obtained access to proof sheets of an earlier version of the book, including a typed transcript, where the minutes are present. But they never made it as far as the final volume. A photograph of the proof sheet was included in a Bulletin of the Opposition in 1929, marked with a slash across the front along with a note by editor P.F. Kudelli:

“The speech of V.I. Lenin was recorded by the secretary of that session of the Petersburg Committee with considerable omissions and numerous abbreviations of various words and sentences. In places, the record of Lenin’s speech cannot be deciphered. To avoid presenting the speech in garbled form, it will, therefore, not be printed.”

As Trotsky points out, this lame excuse doesn’t stand up to the mildest scrutiny. Lenin’s fast style of speaking meant there were often gaps, omissions and inaudible sections of his comments at meetings, but the minutes in these cases were never discarded.

The truth, Trotsky argues, is that Lenin’s words at the meeting ran contrary to the myth that was concocted, first by Zinoviev and Kamenev, and later more outrageously by Stalin (allied with Bukharin and others), that Lenin and Trotsky were always at odds.

Stalin revived and brought attention to all the old, half-forgotten disagreements and polemics between Lenin and Trotsky long before 1917, emphasising his short-lived association with the Mensheviks that lasted only from 1903 to 1904, and suggested that Trotsky was never a ‘real Bolshevik’. In place of the real history, an official myth was gradually woven by the 1930s, whereby the Military Revolutionary Council led by Stalin actually led the October Revolution. In fact, that council never functioned.

Trotsky formally joined the Bolsheviks in August 1917, at a time when the party was being hounded by Kerensky. He played an exemplary role in the October Revolution and was widely recognised as its second leader, alongside Lenin / Image: public domain

It was even suggested (most insidiously of all) that Trotsky had been the one holding back the insurrection, in opposition to Lenin. The latter lie was even included in the otherwise brilliant Sergei Eisenstein film, October.

A resolution by Trotsky that was voted on and passed at the meeting (including by Stalin) was alluded to that same year by a Soviet archivist named Zaviliev, who was working through old central committee meetings. He stated that the text of this resolution “had not survived.” Given the official position of the Bolsheviks after this meeting was for no compromise with the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary wreckers, one can surmise its contents.

In 1989, Trotsky’s Stalin School of Falsification was for the first time made legally available in the Soviet Union under the policy of Perestroika, along with a huge amount of suppressed archival material. In the introduction to the new edition, Soviet historians commented on Trotsky’s rigorous treatment of the facts:

“[I]t is necessary to note the very scrupulous attitude of L.D. Trotsky to all documentary materials, and above all, Lenin’s, which he uses without any ‘exaggerations’ in their natural and logical connection.” [Our emphasis]

Contrast this with the way the Stalinists ceaselessly dug up every disagreement between Lenin and Trotsky while the latter was outside of the Bolshevik Party, long after such differences had been settled.

Or how Stalin’s 1924 collection Foundations of Leninism butchered Lenin’s words, only to be recalled so that they might be butchered a second time in The Problems of Leninism in 1926 to ‘prove’ the anti-Marxist theory of ‘socialism in one country’ was compatible with Lenin’s thought. This is despite the latter’s lifelong insistence that the Russian Revolution could only be the prelude to a European-wide revolution.

In addition to charting this history of coverups, the YouTube channel Noj Rants has managed to expose the minutes of this lost 1 November meeting to the light of day for the first time in over a century in a video entitled: "Stalin School of Falsification": Do the Archives Vindicate Trotsky?. These have never been made available online before.

Apparently, the creator of the video had to submit a written request to the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, after which they agreed to loan him the materials.

As can be seen in the video, comparing the handwritten notes to Trotsky’s version and the proofs published by the opposition in 1929 reveals that the contents are identical. These were indeed Lenin’s words, suppressed by the Stalinist state apparatus as part of their relentless war on the truth.

This seemingly minor episode, concerning a remark by Lenin, illustrates the entire purpose of Stalin’s ‘school of falsification’, to use Trotsky’s phrase. Namely, it aimed to thoroughly distort Lenin’s real legacy and the genuine history of the October Revolution, which had become anathema to the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy by the mid-1920s, and to drive an artificial wedge between Lenin and Trotsky, whose names were bound together from 1917 until the year of Lenin’s death.

We commend Noj Rants on his important work in uncovering this small but significant piece of historical evidence, and invite all our readers to watch his short video in full. As Lenin once wrote: the motor force of history is truth, and not lies.