Trotsky’s struggle to rejuvenate the Bolshevik party

After Lenin had been incapacitated by a stroke in March 1923, Trotsky took up the struggle to rejuvenate the Bolshevik Party. Niklas Albin Svensson explains how the conflict between the future Left Opposition against the ‘Troika’ of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev first came out into the open, and draws out the valuable lessons it contains for communists today.

The year 1923 saw the political situation in the USSR take a turn for the worse. Lenin was no longer able to carry out any political activity. The NEP had provided some temporary relief from the economic devastation of the civil war, but it was provoking unrest in the factories, and a number of strikes spread across the country. A rift was developing between the workers and the Bolshevik Party. This was compounded by the strengthening of the state bureaucracy by the NEP. 

Trotsky and Lenin were well aware of the struggle they were facing to keep the party from succumbing to the pressure of the state bureaucracy. Lenin’s last articles and letters directed themselves precisely against both the state bureaucracy and its defenders in the Bolshevik Party. After Lenin had been incapacitated by a stroke in March 1923, it fell to Trotsky to take up the fight to preserve the real traditions of Bolshevism.

The struggle comes out in the open

The first congress of the Bolshevik Party without the presence of Lenin took place in April 1923. Lenin was tragically never able to deliver the “bombshell” he had been preparing for this Congress, and so the inevitable conflict between the genuine principles of Leninism and the emerging bureaucracy remained beneath the surface.

An important flashpoint came in October 1923, when Trotsky wrote a letter to the Central Committee warning of the bureaucratisation of the party, and the prospect of an economic and political crisis if it were not consciously checked by the leadership:

“The bureaucratisation of the party apparatus has developed to unheard-of proportions by means of the method of secretarial selection. There has been created a very broad stratum of party workers, entering into the apparatus of the government of the party, who completely renounce their own party opinion, at least the open expression of it, as though assuming that the secretarial hierarchy is the apparatus which creates party opinion and party decisions. Beneath this stratum, abstaining from their own opinions, there lies the broad mass of the party, before whom every decision stands in the form of a summons or a command. In this foundation-mass of the party there is an unusual amount of dissatisfaction…”^[1]

Trotsky, in very sharp words, attacked the process of selecting local party secretaries and how this creates a bureaucratic clique at the centre of the party. He explained that this leads to passivity on the part of the mass of the party members and the working class as a whole, who get no chance to participate in the discussions and decisions of the party, but are receiving ready-made formulas as a command, their participation “is becoming ever more ephemeral”. ^[2]

This letter was followed by the ‘Declaration of the 46’, a letter to the Central Committee by a group of prominent Bolsheviks, demanding among other things, the end to secretarial appointments from above.

Both letters took aim at the secretary appointments, as this had a particularly negative role at this point in time. By appointing secretaries from above, a layer of administrators had been created at all levels that were accountable not to the membership but to the apparatus. In the past, when the apparatus was relatively healthy, this selection would not at all have had the same effect and, as Trotsky pointed out, it was far more limited in scope. Now, however, selection was taking place on the basis of loyalty to the apparatus, accelerating the bureaucratisation of the party. Trotsky later described this as “a well-organised illegal group within the party”, where party and state officials were “systematically selected by the single criterion: Against Trotsky”. ^[3]

The October letters provoked a crisis, which was aggravated by the failure of the German Communists to take power, ending the hope of relief from the West. The Troika prepared a stitched-up meeting of the CC and the Central Control Commission at the end of October in which Trotsky was unable to participate due to illness, which severely restricted his political activity in the last three months of 1923. 

A resolution (‘On the Intra-party Situation’) passed at the meeting followed the political lines laid out by Lenin and Trotsky, but only so that it could condemn Trotsky and the 46 for “a factional-splitting policy”.^[4] The Triumvirate still felt insecure in its position, not least because of the uncertainty surrounding Lenin’s health, and felt obliged to compromise.

In the spirit of party democracy, which the majority in the party leadership claimed to adhere to, the opposition took the debate into the public in Pravda. At first, the debate confined itself to economic matters, but it moved on to internal party questions. At the end of November, Preobrazhensky (one of the 46 behind the October letter) launched a full broadside against the party for having followed an incorrect line on the internal party regime. This reignited the conflict in the party.

The Troika again felt obliged to attempt to find an agreement with Trotsky. This produced the resolution of 5 December, which was approved at a joint session by the Politburo and the Presidium of the Central Control Commission.

Politically, the 5 December resolution echoed the position of Trotsky, in its explanation and analysis of the problem and the general direction the party needed to move in. However, it omitted an explicit commitment to abolish the system of central appointment of party secretaries and it endorsed the Central Committee’s October resolution, which had condemned Trotsky’s ‘factionalism’, as well as endorsing the “course set by the Politburo for internal party democracy”. ^[5] These were no decisive concessions on Trotsky’s part, but undoubtedly precisely the kind of formulations that the Troika was looking for in order to shield itself from criticism and strengthen its own authority.

E.H. Carr and other non-Marxist historians accuse Trotsky of being ‘naive’, but this is far from the truth. Trotsky knew the nature of the beast he was dealing with better than anyone, but it was precisely his correct estimation of the problem that forced him to proceed with care.

The material basis for the bureaucracy

Despite its limitations, Trotsky set out to try to use the resolution to the fullest extent. In a series of speeches and articles in December 1923 (later published under the name, The New Course) he articulated his position on how the Bolshevik Party was to undertake the ‘new course’ on which it had set itself.

Trotsky explained that the bureaucracy did not base itself on this or that mistake in the Bolshevik leadership. Like Lenin, he always maintained that the bureaucracy grew out of the material conditions and in particular the backwardness of Russia.

The weakness of the working class in Russia was the real source of the problem. Decimated by the world war and civil war, it was now called upon to manage the state. This led to the best workers and party cadres being sucked into the state and economic apparatus. This was only natural because the party, and the working class, needed to exercise control over the state:

“We must still look forward to a very long period during which the most experienced and most active members of the party (including, naturally, those of proletarian origin) will be occupied at different posts of the state, the trade union, the cooperative, and the party apparatuses. And this fact itself implies a danger, for it is one of the sources of bureaucratism.”^[6]

The fact that Communists had gone through the revolution and had a long history in the movement was no guarantee against bureaucratism. Trotsky rejected that as “vulgar fetishism”. ^[7] He further explained:

“The whole daily bureaucratic practice of the Soviet state thus infiltrates the party apparatus and introduces bureaucratism into it. The party, as a collectivity, does not feel its leadership, because it does not realise it.”^[8]

Basically, the bureaucracy was creeping up on the party, which was why many Bolsheviks were unable to see it at the time. In the end, this could only be resolved by the course of the revolution in Europe and economic development, “but to reject fatalistically all responsibility for these objective factors would be a mistake”. ^[9] What was necessary was to expose this process so that it could be fought consciously by the party. This was the essence of the ‘new course’ that Trotsky proposed.

The youth

Trotsky’s analysis of the Bolshevik Party at that time has a much wider application. His articles explain the relationship between the leadership and the membership, between centralism and democracy, and tradition and initiative. It also explains the need for the party to reorient itself, and change the way it was working. These are questions that will resonate with communists today and the questions they face in party building.

Lenin and Trotsky both understood that the youth were the key to the future of the Soviet Union. Just like all revolutionary organisations have found their forces and energy in the youth, so should the Bolsheviks in power. It was for that very reason that the opposition found its strongest base among the youth.

One of the key questions Trotsky emphasised was the need to revitalise the party by giving space to a new generation of party members to involve themselves in the party. This naturally meant dedicating time and effort to integrate and raise the level of the youth:

“It is only by a constant active collaboration with the new generation, within the framework of democracy, that the Old Guard will preserve itself as a revolutionary factor. Of course, it may ossify and become unwittingly the most consummate expression of bureaucratism.”^[10]

He draws a clear choice here for the older generation in the party. They could either collaborate and integrate the new generation, allowing them the space to grow. Or, they could become part of the problem.

Lenin and Trotsky both understood that the youth were the key to the future of the Soviet Union / Image: public domain

Trotsky took particular care in how he addressed this question, because he saw how education and training was already becoming formalistic and dry, removed from real life. He attacked the “purely pedagogical, professorial way”^[11] of raising the ideological level. Instead he argued that each generation had to conquer the theory for themselves:

“That is why the means by which the army’s fighting tradition, or the party’s revolutionary tradition, is transmitted to the young people is of vast importance. Without a continuous lineage, and consequently without a tradition, there cannot be stable progress. But tradition is not a rigid canon or an official manual; it cannot be learned by heart or accepted as gospel; not everything the old generation says can be believed merely ‘on its word of honour.’ On the contrary the tradition must, so to speak, be conquered by internal travail; it must be worked out by oneself in a critical manner, and in that way assimilated. Otherwise the whole structure will be built on sand.”^[12]

The resistance of the older layer of party members was not a new phenomenon but something that Lenin had to battle against time and time again, and Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin frequently appeared at the head of this tendency. Lenin referred to them as the ‘Old Bolsheviks‘ or the ‘committee men’, largely interchangeably. At each decisive turn in the Russian Revolution, these men played a conservative role.

Warlike from head to foot

“Leninism consists of being courageously free of conservative retrospection, of being bound by precedent, purely formal references, and quotations.”^[13]

The Old Guard, in their struggle against Lenin and Trotsky, made constant appeals to the ‘traditions of the Bolshevik Party’. Trotsky attacked the appeal to tradition as thoroughly anti-revolutionary. He compared it to the German Social-Democratic Party, which in a period of relative calm in the class struggle had become particularly infested with this disease:

“This tradition, which is profoundly alien to us, bore a semi-automatic character: each day flowed ‘naturally’ from the day before and just as ‘naturally’ prepared the day to follow. The organisation grew, the press developed, the cash box swelled…

“It is in this automatism that the whole generation following Bebel took shape: a generation of bureaucrats, of philistines, of dullards whose political character was completely revealed in the first hours of the imperialist war.”^[14]

At decisive turning points in history, traditions that have been forged in an earlier period become a massive barrier to the future development of the party. It is not so strange, really, that those that want to break the chains of the old society on the economy, but also on the minds and ideas of humanity, must constantly struggle to free themselves of routine and conservatism:

“Every time objective conditions demand a new turn, a bold aboutface, and creative initiative, conservative resistance betrays a natural tendency to counterpose the ‘old traditions’ and what is called Old Bolshevism but is in reality the empty husk of a period just left behind.” ^[15]

Trotsky described how every turn in the Communist International up to that point had always necessitated a struggle against the old forces, against the conservative elements, regardless of whether this was a turn to the ‘left’, so to speak, or to the ‘right’.

Trotsky explained how in 1921, in his battle against ultra-leftism, Lenin had “saved the International from the destruction and decomposition with which it was threatened if it went the way of automatic, uncritical ‘leftism,’ which, in a brief space of time, had already become a hardened tradition.”^[16]

Yet, the successful united front turn that had been adopted after a struggle in 1921 became an obstacle in 1923. Trotsky wrote that it played “a very serious role in the events of the last half of 1923”. In other words, they led to the defeat of the German Revolution. A new turn had been needed:

“If the Communist Party had abruptly changed the pace of its work and had profited by the five or six months that history accorded it for direct political, organisational, technical preparation for the seizure of power, the outcome of the events could have been quite different from the one we witnessed in November.”^[17]

Trotsky described Leninism as “warlike from head to foot”,^[18] and it is a very good description. It is precisely in the struggle that we test our ideas, identify what works, and what doesn’t. We check our plans, experience and theory against reality:

“[O]nce engaged in the struggle, don’t be excessively preoccupied with canon and precedent, but plunge into reality as it is and seek there the forces necessary for victory.”^[19]

The balance between democracy and centralism

The key to developing a correct line starts with the leadership:

“The essential guarantee, in this case, is a correct leadership, paying opportune attention to the needs of the moment which are reflected in the party, flexibility of the apparatus which ought not paralyse but rather organise the initiative of the party, which ought not fear criticism, nor intimidate the party with the bugbear of factions.”^[20]

At the time, the Bolshevik Party was starting to behave in precisely the opposite fashion. Criticism was branded ‘factionalism’, initiative was stifled, all in the name of ‘unity’ and maintaining the leadership of the party. In reality, as Trotsky pointed out, such measures did not stifle factionalism but on the contrary made it much more severe. They particularly benefited the bureaucratic faction, which thrived in backroom intrigue rather than open debate.

Trotsky described Leninism as “warlike from head to foot” / Image: public domain

“Democracy and centralism are two faces of party organisation. The question is to harmonise them in the most correct manner, that is, the manner best corresponding to the situation. During the last period there was no such equilibrium. The centre of gravity wrongly lodged in the apparatus. The initiative of the party was reduced to the minimum. Thence the habits and procedures of leadership fundamentally contradicting the spirit of a revolutionary proletarian organisation.”^[21]

What Trotsky explained is that the balance between democracy and centralism in a revolutionary organisation is not fixed, but depends on the situation. The consequence of too much centralism is to deprive the ranks of the party of their initiative and their involvement. Under conditions of civil war, of course this was a necessary evil, but under the conditions of 1923, this was becoming dangerous.

It wasn’t a problem of this or that “isolated deviation” but of “the general policy of the apparatus, of its bureaucratic tendency”. This wasn’t just an organisational issue but would inevitably wound up causing political deviations:

“In its prolonged development, bureaucratisation threatens to detach the leaders from the masses, to bring them to concentrate their attention solely upon questions of administration, of appointments and transfers, of narrowing their horizon, of weakening their revolutionary spirit, that is, of provoking a more or less opportunistic degeneration of the Old Guard, or at the very least of a considerable part of it.”^[22]

Trotsky here drew out precisely the problems that were to plague the Communist International for the coming decades. Although there were periods of lurches to the ultra-left, the overwhelming deviation was to the right, with disastrous consequences.

The advice of Trotsky went unheeded by the Troika and its supporters. As Lenin lay on his deathbed, at the January 1924 Party Conference, they proceeded quickly to close down debate in Pravda, and discipline the youth organisation and the opposition.

Politically, the bureaucratisation meant the revival of Menshevism, although now dressed up in new ‘communist’ colours. It resurrected the theory of stages and, in place of Lenin’s mistrust of liberals, advocated an alliance with the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’. And of course, the international revolution was abandoned in favour of ‘socialism in one country’, the logical end point of which was the counter-revolutionary policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ adopted under Krushchev. All these ideas reflected the narrow outlook of the rising bureaucracy, which saw revolutionary movements, initiative and spirit as a threat.

The New Course articles laid the theoretical basis for the Left Opposition, and its struggle against the rising bureaucracy. But the ideas contained in these writings aren’t just of historical interest. The revolutionary spirit and methods that Trotsky advocated are the basis on which the future world revolutionary party will be built.

References

[1] L Trotsky, “First Letter to the CC”, The Challenge of The Left Opposition (1923-25), Pathfinder Press, 2019, pg 69

[2] ibid. pg 68

[3] L Trotsky, My Life, Wellred, 2018, pg 443

[4] R Gregor ed., “On the Intra-Party Situation”, Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Vol. 2, University of Toronto Press, 1974, pg 208

[5] E H Carr, The Interregnum 1923-24, The MacMillan Press, 1978, pg 307

[6] L Trotsky, The New Course, University of Michigan Press, 1965, pg 21

[7] ibid.

[8] ibid. pg 26

[9] ibid. pg 22

[10] ibid. pg 92

[11] ibid.

[12] ibid. pg 103

[13] ibid. pg 53

[14] ibid. pg 47

[15] ibid. pg 54

[16] ibid. pg 48

[17] ibid. pg 49

[18] ibid. pg 56

[19] ibid. pg 53

[20] ibid. pg 33

[21] ibid. pg 90

[22] ibid. pg 18