STALIN VS. TROTSKY
I. Dzhugashvili and Bronstein
Joseph Stalin, born Dzhugashvili, and Leon Trotsky, born Bronstein,
were the same age, and both had been from early youth members
of the Russian Social Democratic party. As dedicated Communists,
they had common basic outlook: they were philosophical materialists,
committed to the unity of theory and practice and bent upon spreading
Communism throughout the whole world. While Lenin was alive (at
any rate until 1922) both men had a secure place in his favor
and therefore in the party as a whole. Since 1917, at least, Trotsky
had supported Lenin on the main issues and seemed to have more
of his candor and flexibility than Stalin. However, as Lenin sickened
and died, the mutual antagonism between Trotsky and Stalin, who
had never been compatible, deepened into a life-and-death struggle.
A. Stalin
It is difficult to compare the later lives of the two men,
for Stalin achieved sole power and Trotsky was exiled. Since Trotsky
thus escaped Stalin's dilemmas, it is uncertain how he would have
responded to them, although he detested Stalin's rule. Stalin
hated his adversary so deeply that he caused his name to be written
simply "Judas Trotsky" in officially commissioned books,
but he borrowed many of his ideas and methods. Their earlier lives,
however, suggest something of the personal differences which were
to be complicated by disagreements over doctrine and practice.
Stalin was the eldest surviving child of the shoemaker Vissarion
Dzhugashvili of Gori in Georgia. Today the hut in which he was
born is preserved by a temple-like structure erected over it.
As a boy he attended a church school in Gori and then the theological
seminary in Tiflis. Today the seminary has been converted into
a museum of medieval Georgian art. Young Joseph joined a Marxist
society known as Mesame-Dasi while a student at the seminary,
but it is not clear whether this had anything to do with his expulsion
in 1899. During the next two years his Marxism crystallized, and
his first Marxist essays appeared in a Georgian newspaper in 1901.
At that time he was already an enthusiastic defender of Lenin
and the other orthodox Marxist exiles who published the newspaper
Iskra. His literary style was not then distinguished; in
fact, it never got much better.
Stalin was active in the revolutionary movement in Tiflis,
Batum, and elsewhere, not as Dzhugashvili, nor yet "Stalin,"
but as "Koba." This meant something like "courageous"
in Turkish, and it was also the name of a labeled Georgian freebooter.
It is uncertain which the nickname first signified. Later he was
called, indeed, practically dubbed himself, the "Lenin of
the Cauccasus." However, he was not necessarily the most
outstanding leader of the Caucasian Social Democrats, nor even
of the Georgian Bolsheviks after the party split in 1903. The
great majority of the Marxists in Georgia became and stayed Menshevik.
Among the Bolsheviks Stalin was prominent, but that did not mean
a great deal. Very soon after the news of the London Congress
of 1903 reached the Caucasus, he took a firmly pro-Bolshevik stand,
and he continued to do so in 1905. it seems that it was at the
Tammerfors Party conference at the end of 1905, that Stalin first
met Lenin.
After the Revolution of 1905, in defiance of the ban of the
then Menshevik-controlled Party, "Koba" led "fighting
squads" in raiding banks in order to augment scant Party
funds. In one raid in Tifiis a squad seized ad quarter of a million
rubles. This is the basis of the legend that Stalin was a bank
robber. But he did not act as gunman, and he did not pocket the
proceeds. He spent much of the period between revolutions in jail
or in exile, but made a few important trips abroad in 1912.
By this time the Bolshevik organizations in Russia had been
gravely weakened, and the Bolsheviks of the Caucasus had assumed
an importance quite out of proportion to their numbers. Stalin
had became editor of the Party newspaper, Pravda, and he was co-opted
by Lenin onto the Party Central Committee just after the Prague
conference of 1912, at which the Bolsheviks broke permanently
with the other Marxist factions. He visited Lenin in exile and
spent some time with him. As a result of their talks, he wrote
an essay on the "nationalities question" which led Lenin
to inform Gorky that a "wonderful Georgian" had done
a fine job on the subject. The pseudonym with which the pamphlet
was signed was "K. Stalin."
At the outbreak of World War I Stalin was in Siberian exile,
sharing a hut with Sverdlov, future Chairman of the Presidium
(president} of the Soviet republic, who, it seems, found Stalin
an uncomradely hut partner. Stalin chose not to try to escape
during the war. In 1916 he was summoned to Krasnoiarsk to be drafted
but was found physically unfit for military service owing to his
withered left arm. During the war period he apparently wrote next
to nothing.
Liberated by the February Revolution, Stalin hastened to Petrograd
and, as the only member of the Central Committee on the spot,
assumed temporary leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Like almost
all other Bolsheviks, he became identified with the movement for
reunification with the Mensheviks. When Lenin arrived and sharply
castigated such tendencies to compromise, Stalin was as dumfounded
as anyone else, but he took his scolding without protest. He owed
his position in the Party to the fact that he worked hard and
did not argue with his comrades, especially Lenin.
B. Trotsky
Trotsky, like Stalin, was born in 1879. His real name was
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. His father was a well-to-do Jewish farmer
in the Ukrainian province of Kherson. He attended school in Odessa,
developing an early brilliance and bookishness. He reports his
observation of the composition of his class: "the tale-bearers
and envious at one pole, the frank, courageous boys at the other,
and the neutral, vacillating mass in the middle." He was
to apply the same threefold classification to his fellow revolutionaries
and fellow citizens of the Empire and the world. In his teens
he went to Nikolaev, met a number of populists, became enamored
of a girl in the group, and accepted the populist doctrine. Soon,
however, he became converted to Marxism, engaged in revolutionary
activity, and for it spent his eighteenth birthday in jail. He
was exiled to Siberia but soon escaped and arrived in London in
1902 to join Lenin. In Western Europe he met another young lady.
The girl from Nikolaev was known as Mrs. Bronstein, the Parisian
as Mrs. Trotsky, and neither seemed to complain.
After the II Congress in 1903 Trotsky was for a time associated
with the Mensheviks, but in 1905 he developed an independent doctrinal
line and between revolutions belonged to neither the Bolshevik
nor the Menshevik wing. In 1905 he won renown for his brief chairmanship
of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies. During the
next few years he tried to reunite the Party and for that reason
refrained form trying to build a faction of his own. None of the
other groups found this pose to its taste. During the years just
before World War I Trotsky's anti-factionalist stand became in
effect an anti-Leninist one. After the war began he went to New
York, and it was from there that he traveled to Russia in the
spring of 1917. During the summer he joined the Bolshevik Party,
although he clearly implied that his only reason for doing so
was that the party had belatedly adopted the analysis and tactical
line which he had espoused all along.
His ability and his logic did not always endear him to his
comrades, but his oratorical and practical gifts did win him broad
popularity among the urban workers and soldiers in late 1917 and
during the Civil War. having failed as foreign commissar to put
into effect his dialectical but quixotic policy of "no war,
no peace," he had become war commissar, and his most brilliant
success was achieved in organizing the finally victorious Red
Army. As war commissar he clashed with Stalin, who ensconced himself
at Tsaritsyn with some of his old friends from Caucasus days and
flouted Trotsky's authority. However, Stalin was as yet no adversary
in the field of theory and policy, which Trotsky considered fundamental.
As the triumvirate took form, Trotsky was plainly the most
important figure outside it. But no one regarded Stalin as the
most eminent of the three. Zinoviev, especially, had an international
prestige which Stalin lacked, while both Kamenev and he were regarded
as theorists in a way Stalin was not--and a Communist leader had
to be a theorist. As the struggle developed between Trotsky and
the triumvirs, Stalin counted less on his own influence than on
Trotsky's vulnerability. He did not at first try to turn the struggle
into a personal contest. An eye witness has told the story of
how Zinoviev and Kamenev would snub Trotsky in Politburo meetings,
while Stalin would greet him warmly
II. Trotsky Against the Triumvirate
On the eve of Lenin's death, the Thirteenth Party Conference
published, on Stalin's motion, the decision empowering the Central
Committee to expel Party members for factionalism. At the moment
the leader died a new sanctity enveloped his every word and deed,
including this decision, in which Lenin had taken part. Simultaneously
the triumvirs decreed a new recruiting campaign, nominally with
a view to strengthening the actual worker element in Party ranks.
Actually Stalin, as general secretary, was able to bolster his
own influence by guiding the Party machinery in selecting new
members. In a few short weeks nearly a quarter of a million men
and women were admitted in the new "Lenin enrollment."
At the time of the XIII Party Congress in May 1924, the economic
situation was improving sufficiently to enable the triumvirs to
call their critics to account. Zinoviev openly attacked Trotsky
and demanded that he retract his "errors." As Stalin
had only shortly before opposed Zinoviev's demand for Trotsky's
arrest, he found it wise to remain in the background. Trotsky
replied to Zinoviev with a cri de coeur which went to the root
of his whole position, morally requiring him to sit passive in
the face of doom:
The party in the last analysis is always right because the
party is the single historic instrument given to the proletariat
for the solution of its fundamental problems. I have already
said that in front of one's own party nothing could be easier
than to say: all my criticisms, my statements, my warnings, my
protests--the whole thing was a mere mistake. I, however, comrades,
cannot say that, because I do not think it. I know that one must
not be right against the party. One can be right only with the
party, and through the party, for history has created no other
road for the realization of what is right.
The Congress was unmoved. It promptly took steps to discipline
the Russian Troskyites, as well as dissidents in the other parties
of the Comintern.
A. "Permanent Revolution"
After the XIII Congress, as far as could be seen the chief
antagonists were Trotsky on the one hand and Zinoviev and Kamenev
on the other. In the autumn of 1924 Trotsky published The Lessons
of October, in which he distinguished between objectively
revolutionary situations and subjective failures of revolutionary
leaders in such situations. As illustrations oft he latter, he
cited Zinoviev's and Kamenev's opposition to Lenin's decision
to launch an armed uprising in the fall of 1917--thus reopening
an extremely ugly wound--and he also implied that Zinoviev was
largely responsible for the failure of the German Communist revolt
of 1923.
Trotsky restated his old theory of "permanent revolution,"
with its emphasis on the world leadership of the proletariat and
its implicit challenge to the Leninist position on the role of
the poor peasantry in building socialism. "October,"
said Trotsky, was the crucial stage in the history of the Party.
"October" meant to him the time when Lenin adopted Trotsky's
theory of permanent revolution--at least in the sense of rapid
passage from the bourgeois to the socialist stage.
Trotsky had made a tactical error. By his emphasis on "October"
he opened the way for Zinoviev and Kamenev to retaliate by reminding
the Party again of Trotsky's sharp disagreements with Lenin prior
to 1917. Stalin's caution had reaped its reward. Since he was
not directly drawn into this controversy, he was in a position
to make public statements in November which in effect forgave
Zinoviev and Kamenev for their earlier mistakes--he even acknowledged
some of his own--but forcefully recalled to his hearers the fact
that Trotsky was, after all, a newcomer in Party ranks.
B. "Socialism in one country"
Meanwhile Stalin unleashed a new weapon, which Trotsky probably
had not considered him capable of producing. He set forth a theoretical
position of his own from which he could challenge Trotsky. in
order to do so he had to reverse himself within the space of a
few months. In Foundations of Leninism~ published early in 1924,
he had denied that a proletarian dictatorship could establish
socialism before the victory of the world revolution. A few months
later, in Problems of Leninism, he advanced his theory of "Socialism
in one country."
The theory was an innovation and a repudiation of some things
which Lenin had said years earlier; but it was a perfectly logical
extension of what Lenin had said and done in 1917 and later. If
the Russian Communists were not to be indefinitely bogged down
in the NEP state, they must push on to socialism, even if the
world revolution was still further delayed. Authority for such
an effort could be found in Lenin. Like Lenin, Trotsky believed
the building of socialism could begin in Russia alone. But what
Stalin did was to assert that it could be completed with success
and to furnish reasons for his contention. Russia was an enormous
country, rich in natural resources. Provided that "capitalist"
intervention was not renewed, the Russian proletariat, drawing
on Russia's great potential wealth and protected by its vast spaces,
could accomplish the task.
For a time, however, the theory of "socialism in one
country" was overshadowed by the acrimonious personal struggle
between Trotsky and the two most prominent triumvirs. In January
1925 the Central Committee removed Trotsky from the War Commissariat,
even though he remained in uneasy possession of a seat on the
Politburo. This was the decisive blow. Although he was still not
completely crushed, Trotsky receded to the background. If he had
been another kind of man, he might have tried to use the Red Army
against his adversaries, but his loyalty to the Party was paramount,
and he accepted his deposition without trying to resist.
Although Trotsky was defeated, Zinoviev and Kamenev soon discovered
that the victory was not theirs. In March 1925 the Fourteenth
Conference of the Party accepted Stalin's theory of "socialism
in one country," while Zinoviev and Kamenev paid little attention.
Soon afterward Stalin was able to break up the triumvirate quietly.
Too late Zinoviev and Kamenev attacked Stalin's new theory. By
the middle of 1925 he had found new allies in Bukharin, Rykov,
and Tomsky, who accepted "socialism in one country."
Far from yet aspiring openly to individual power, Stalin chose
to be regarded as a mediator, and he asserted that "after
Ilich [Lenin]" collegial--or what would later be called "collective"--leadership
was the only conceivable way of running the party.
III. Stalin allied with the Right
Rykov had become Lenin's successor as chairman of the Council
of People's Commissars. Tomsky was the leader of the Soviet trade-unions.
Bukharin, the "Left" Communist of 1918, was now, like
Rykov and Tomsky, on the "right" and the leader of those
who felt that the NEP was a success, and while indeed socialism
might be built in Russia, the ground was secure and there was
no great need for haste. Zinoviev and Kamenev, on the contrary,
were profoundly uneasy about the continuation of the NEP, but
they had been abruptly thrust into the minority. In the autumn
of 1925 Zinoviev published his Leninism, attacking NEP as a policy
of "continuous retreat," and demanded a renewal of the
"policy of 1918" directed against the kulak. Zinoviev
managed to use his position in Leningrad to rally the powerful
Party organization there to is support, in opposition to the new
Politburo majority.
Zinoviev and Kamenev tardily recognized Stalin as the man
from whom they had most to fear and carefully prepared an attack
on him for the XIV Party Congress, to be held in December 1925.
However, the plan completely miscarried. Kamenev, who spoke most
sharply in criticism of Stalin at the Congress, was punished by
demotion from full member to candidate member of the Politburo.
As reconstituted just after the Congress, the Politburo had three
new full members: Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kalinin, all loyal
henchmen of Stalin's. Stalin also added several supporters to
the list of candidate members of the Politburo and to the newly
enlarged Central Committee.
Shortly before, Voroshilov had replaced Michael Frunze, who
had been named Trotsky's successor but had died soon afterward,
as war commissar. Stalin had established a formidable position
of strength within both Party and government. Leningrad remained
the only stronghold of resistance, and Stalin followed up his
victory at the XIV Congress by sending Sergei Kirov to replace
Zinoviev as Party leader there, ordering him to clean out the
opposition.
Only then, in the spring of 1926, when the supporters of all
three had been scattered, did Zinoviev and Kamenev make common
cause with Trotsky. Stalin's reaction was, "Ah, they have
granted themselves a mutual amnesty"--since a few short months
earlier they had been bitterly attacking each other. The three
were united enough in their opposition to continuance of the NEP
and the "alliance with the middle peasantry" on which
it was based; but their past personal antagonisms made their alliance
an uneasy and incongruous one.
In the meantime the Right wing oft he Politburo was championing
the NEP and all that it implied. Bukharin advised the peasants,
"Enrich yourselves,' which was a phrase Guizot had used under
the French monarchy of Louis Philippe, whatever Marxist glosses
might be given it. At the XIV Congress Bukharin had set forth
the basis on which he accepted Stalin's theory of "socialism
in one country": "We shall creep at a snail's pace,
but...we are building socialism and ... we shall complete the
building of it." This amounted to a frame of mind to which
the NEP idea was congenial, rather than something uneasily and
temporarily accepted for tactical reasons.
For the time being, however, Stalin was less concerned about
policy than with getting rid of his enemies in the Left Opposition
led by Zinoviev and Trotsky, which was not hard for him to do.
In July 1926 Lashevich, a Zinovievite who was Voroshilov's deputy
war commissar, was accused for organizing oppositionist groups
within the Red Army and was dismissed. Stalin seized the opportunity
to expel Zinoviev from the Politburo. On October 4 all the major
opposition leaders replied with a statement admitting violation
of Party statutes and pledging disbandment of the opposition,
but they could not refrain from repeating their policy criticisms
of the Politburo majority.
Stalin's reply was to remove Trotsky from the Politburo and
Zinoviev from the presidency of the Comintern. However, lesser
figures in the opposition leadership were allowed to recant and
to obtain well-publicized rewards fro their submission. At the
end of October 1926 the Fifteenth Party Conference sanctioned
all these maneuvers and applauded Stalin's description of the
opposition leaders as "Social Democratic" deviators
who were reverting to the line of the Second International.
By the beginning of 1927 the Left Opposition had thus lost
any immediate hope of success, but its leaders were not yet silenced.
Trotsky and his colleagues attacked the Politburo for "Thermidorism,
degeneration, Menshevism, betrayal, treachery, kulak-nepman policy
against the workers, against the poor peasants, against the Chinese
revolution," as the Stalinist writer Popov sums it up. The
opposition leaders were able to blame the Politburo majority for
a series of foreign setbacks: Britain's rupture of diplomatic
relations with the USSR, the assassination of the Soviet ambassador
in Warsaw, and especially the crushing of the Chinese Communists
by Chiang-Kai-shek.
In an article submitted to Pravda, Trotsky climaxed opposition
criticism by calling on his adherents to follow the example of
Clemenceau (who had opened the way to take over as French premier
by attacking his predecessor's failures in World War I) in case
war engulfed the USSR (a prospect taken seriously by the Communists
in 1927). However, advocating a change of government was dangerous
in the Soviet Union. If, as all good Communists agreed, the existing
regime represented the proletariat, then any move to change it
was bound to be anti-proletarian and therefore treasonable. For
that reason Stalin promptly engineered the expulsion of Trotsky
and Zinoviev from the Central Committee. After the two men led
street demonstrations on the tenth anniversary of the October
Revolution (November 7, 1927), they were expelled from the Party.
The way was now clear for Stalin to oust the opposition from
the Party en masse. The XV Congress, in December 1927, decreed
as much. It might have been expected that Stalin's tactics would
have drawn his opponents together, but on the contrary, the result
was that they were neatly split down the middle. Trotsky refused
to accept the Congress decision and was thereupon exiled to Alma
Ata in Central Asia. But Zinoviev and Kamenev submitted and renounced
their earlier-stated views. They were permitted to crawl back
into the Party.
IV. Trotsky Defeated
As far as the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern were
concerned, the controversy between Stalin and Trotsky was now
at an end. The followers of Trotsky left what they henceforth
called "Stalinist" ranks and attempted to build their
own parties and organize them into a Fourth International. The
dispute shook and divided the Communist parties throughout the
world as no such controversy before or since ever did (the immediately
ensuing struggle between Stalin and Bukharin had fewer repercussions
abroad, for it seemed to center on the peasant, for whom most
Communists never had any use).
By 1927, however, Trotsky and his sympathizers had given up
any immediate hope of overcoming Stalin's ascendancy from within
the Russian Party. They declared that a "bureaucracy"
had come to power in the USSR, and that it must be eliminated.
This assertion was difficult to explain on Marxist grounds, unless
it were to be on the basis of Marx's analysis of Oriental society,
and the Trotskyites shrank from that. Since Trotsky continued
to believe that a distorted socialism still existed in the USSR,
it was also difficult to think of any way through which the Stalinist
leadership could be displaced without disturbing the economic
foundation. As a result the Trotskyites had to retreat into a
position comparable to that of the prewar Social Democrats, opposing
all existing governments and declaring that there could be no
basic improvement unless they took power. They never managed to
do so anywhere.
The rank and file of the world's Communists had little chance
to observe the personal differences and antagonisms between Stalin
and Trotsky, and supported one or the other on the basis of his
theoretical position. The differences may be briefly formulated
thus: Trotsky declared that it was impossible to build socialism
in Russia because the peasants did not want it. That it would
only be possible to do so if the workers of the West revolted,
and he was right. Stalin declared that it was impossible to wait
for the Western workers to revolt before building socialism, because
they were not likely to revolt in the immediate future. Therefore
socialism could be built in Russia only if the Party used the
peasantry, and he was also right.
However, that the Western workers were not Communist, Trotsky
could never admit. He could only assert that they would be soon.
The Russian peasants were not Communist, Stalin could never admit,
but he could try to compel them to be. As a result Trotsky retreated
into utopianism, while Stalin proceeded to establish a minority
dictatorship built on terror.
Send comments and questions to Professor
Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College.