Another view of Stalin (8 page)

Behind the leftist verbiage of `world revolution', Trotsky  took up the fundamental idea of the Mensheviks: it was impossible to build socialism in the Soviet Union. The Mensheviks openly said that neither the masses nor the objective conditions were ripe for socialism. As for Trotsky,  he said that the proletariat, as class-in-itself, and the mass of individualist peasants, would inevitably enter into conflict. Without the outside support of a victorious European revolution, the Soviet working class would be incapable of building socialism. With this conclusion, Trotsky  returned to the fold of his Menshevik friends.

In 1923, during his struggle for the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky  launched his second campaign. He tried to clear out the Bolshevik Party's old cadres and replace them with young ones, whom he hoped to be able to manipulate. In preparation for the seizure of the Party's leadership, Trotsky  returned, almost to a word, to his 1904 anti-Leninist  ideas for the Party.

At that time, Trotsky  had attacked with the greatest vehemence Lenin's  entire concept of the Bolshevik Party and its leadership. His 1923 attacks against the Bolshevik leadership are clear evidence of the persistence of his petit-bourgeois ideals.

In 1904, Trotsky  the individualist fought virulently against the Leninist  concept of the Party. He called Lenin  a `fanatical secessionist', a `revolutionary bourgeois democrat', an `organization fetichist', a partisan of the `army mentality' and of `organizational pettiness', a `dictator wanting to substitute himself for the central committee', a `dictator wanting to impose dictatorship on the proletariat' for whom `any mixture of elements thinking differently is a pathological phenomenon'.

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Trotsky,  Nos tвches politiques (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1970), pp. 39--41, 128, 159, 195, 198, 204.

Note that this hatred was directed, not at the infamous Stalin, but, rather, at his revered master, Lenin.  That book, published by Trotsky  in 1904, is crucial to understanding his ideology. He made himself known as an unrepentent bourgeois individualist. All the slanders and insults that he would direct twenty-five years later against Stalin, he had already hurled in that work against Lenin. 

Trotsky  did everything he could to depict Stalin as a dictator ruling over the Party. Yet, when Lenin  created the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky  accused him of creating an `Orthodox theocracy' and an `autocratic-Asiatic centralism'.

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Ibid. , pp. 97, 170.

Trotsky  always claimed that Stalin had adopted a cynical, pragmatic attitude towards Marxism,  which he reduced to ready-made formulas. Writing about One step forward, two steps back, Trotsky  wrote:

`One cannot show more cynicism for the ideological heritage of the proletariat as does Comrade Lenin!  For him, Marxism  is not a scientific method of analysis.'

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Ibid. , p. 160.

In his 1904 work, Trotsky  invented the term `substitutionism' to attack the Leninist  party and its leadership.

`The ``professional revolutionary'' group acted in the place of the proletariat.'

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Ibid. , p. 103.

`The organization substitutes itself for the Party, the Central Committee for the organization and its financing and the dictator for the Central Committee.'

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Ibid. , p. 128.

So, in 1923, often using the same words that he used against Lenin,  Trotsky  attacked the Leninist  concept of party and leadership: `the old generation accustomed itself to think and to decide, as it still does, for the party'. Trotsky  noted `A certain tendency of the apparatus to think and to decide for the whole organization'.

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Leon Trotsky,  The New Course. The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923--1925) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975), pp. 71, 128.

In 1904, Trotsky  attacked the Leninist  concept of the Party by affirming that it `separated the conscious activity from the executive activity. (There is) a Center and, underneath, there are only disciplined executives of technical functions.' In his bourgeois individualist worldview, Trotsky  rejected the hierarchy and the different levels of responsibility and discipline. His ideal was `the global political personality, who imposes on all `centers' his will in all possible forms, including boycott'!

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Trotsky,  Nos tвches, pp. 140--141.

This is the motto of an individualist, of an anarchist.

Trotsky  again used this criticism against the Party: `the apparatus manifests a growing tendency to counterpose a few thousand comrades, who form the leading cadres, to the rest of the mass, whom they look upon only as an object of action'.

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Trotsky,  The New Course, p. 71.

In 1904, Trotsky  accused Lenin  of being a bureaucrat making the Party degenerate into a revolutionary-bourgeois organization. Lenin  was blinded by `the bureaucratic logic of such and such ``organizational plan'' ', but `the fiasco of organizational fetichism' was certain. `The head of the reactionary wing of our Party, comrade Lenin,  gives social-democracy a definition that is a theoretical attack against the class nature of our Party.' Lenin  `formulated a tendency for the Party, the revolutionary-bourgeois tendency'.

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Trotsky,  Nos tвches, pp. 192, 195, 204.

In 1923, Trotsky  wrote the same thing against Stalin, but using a more moderate tone: `bureaucratization threatens to ... provoke a more or less opportunistic degeneration of the Old Guard'.

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Trotsky,  The New Course, p. 72.

In 1904, the bureaucrat Lenin  was accused of `terrorizing' the Party:

`The task of Iskra (Lenin's  newspaper) was to theoretically terrorize the intelligentsia. For social-democrats educated in this school, orthodoxy is something close to the absolute `Truth' that inspired the Jacobins (French revolutionary democrats). Orthodox Truth foresees everything. Those who contest are excluded; those who doubt are on the verge of being excluded.'

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Trotsky,  Nos tвches, p. 190.

In 1923, Trotsky  called for `replacing the mummified bureaucrats' so that `from now on nobody will dare terrorize the party'.

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Trotsky,  The New Course, pp. 126--127.

To conclude, this 1923 text shows that Trotsky  was also unscrupulously ambitious. In 1923, to seize power in the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky  wanted to `liquidate' the old Bolshevik guard, who knew only too well his fanatical struggle against Lenin's  ideas. No old Bolshevik was ready to abandon Leninism  for Trotskyism.  Hence Trotsky's  tactics: he declared the old Bolsheviks to be `degenerating' and flattered the youth who were not familiar with his anti-Leninist  past. Under the slogan of `democratization' of the party, Trotsky  wanted to install youth who supported him in the leadership.

Yet, ten years later, when men such as Zinoviev  and Kamenev  would openly show their opportunistic personalities, Trotsky  declared that they represented `the old Bolshevik guard' persecuted by Stalin: he allied himself with these opportunists, invoking the glorious past of the `old guard'!

Trotsky's  position within the Party continued to weaken in 1924--1925, and he attacked the Party leadership with increasing rage.

Starting from the idea that it was impossible to build socialism in a single country, Trotsky  concluded that Bukharin's  1925--1926 political line, the current focus of his hatred, represented kulak (rich peasants; see chapter 4) interests and the new bourgeois, called Nep-man. Power was becoming kulak power. Discussion started yet again about the `disintegration' of the Bolshevik Party. Since they were evolving towards disintegration and kulak power, Trotsky  appropriated himself the right to create factions and to work clandestinely within the Party.

The debate was led openly and honestly for five years. When the discussion was closed in 1927 by a Party vote, those who defended the theses of impossibility of building socialism in the Soviet Union and the right to form factions received between one and one and a half per cent of the votes. Trotsky  was expelled from the Party, sent to Siberia and, finally, banished from the Soviet Union.

Socialist industrialization

At the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks inherited a completely ruined country whose industry had been ravaged by eight years of military operations. The banks and large companies were nationalized and, with extraordinary effort, the Soviet Union reconstructed the industrial apparatus.

In 1928, the production of steel, coal, cement, industrial looms and machine tools had reached or surpassed the pre-war level. It was then that the Soviet Union set itself the impossible challenge: to lay down the basis of modern industry in a national Five Year Plan, essentially using the country's inner resources. To succeed, the country was set on a war footing to undertake a forced march towards industrialization.

Socialist industrialization was the key to building socialism in the Soviet Union. Everything depended on its success.

Industrialization was to lay the material basis for socialism. It would allow the radical transformation of agriculture, using machinery and modern techniques. It would offer material and cultural well-being to the workers. It would provide the means for a real cultural revolution. It would produce the infrastructure of a modern, efficient state. And it alone would give the working people the modern arms necessary to defend its independence against the most advanced imperialist powers.

On February 4, 1931, Stalin explained why the country had to maintain the extremely rapid rate of industrialization:

`Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and lose its independence

`We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do this or they crush us.'

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Stalin, The Tasks of Business Executives. Leninism,  p. 200.

During the thirties, the German fascists, like the British and French imperialists, drew in full color the `terror' which accompanied the `forced industrialization'. They all sought revenge for their defeat in 1918--1921, when they intervened militarily in the Soviet Union. They all wanted a Soviet Union that was easy to crush.

In asking for extraordinary efforts from the workers, Stalin held his eye on the terrifying menace of war and imperialist aggression that hovered over the first socialist country.

The giant effort to industrialize the country during the years 1928--1932 was called Stalin's Industrial Revolution by Hirokai Kuromiya.  It is also called `the second revolution' or the `revolution from above'. The most conscious and energetic revolutionaries were at the head of the State and, from this position, they mobilized and provided discipline to tens of millions of worker-peasants, who had up to that point been left in the shadows of illiteracy and religious obscurantism. The central thesis of Kuromiya's  book is that Stalin succeeded in mobilizing the workers for an accelerated industrialization by presenting it as a class war of the oppressed against the old exploiting classes and against the saboteurs found in their own ranks.

To be able to direct this giant industrialization effort, the Party had to grow. The number of members rose from 1,300,000 in 1928 to 1,670,000 in 1930. During the same period, the percentage of members of working class background rose from 57 to 65 per cent. Eighty per cent of the new recruits were shock workers: they were in general relatively young workers who had received technical training, Komsomol activists, who had distinguished themselves as model workers, who helped rationalize production to obtain higher productivity.

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Hiroaki Kuromiya,  Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928--1932 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 115, 319.

This refutes the fable of `bureaucratization' of the Stalinist party: the party reinforced its worker base and its capacity to fight.

Industrialization was accompanied by extraordinary upheavals. Millions of illiterate peasants were pulled out of the Middle Ages and hurled into the world of modern machinery. `(B)y the end of 1932, the industrial labor force doubled from 1928 to more than six million.'

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Ibid. , p. 290.

Over the same period of four years and for all sectors, 12.5 million people had found a new occupation in the city; 8.5 million among them had been former peasants.

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Ibid. , p. 306.

Heroism and enthusiasm

Despising socialism, the bourgeoisie loves to stress the `forced' character of the industrialization. Those who lived through or observed the socialist industrialization through the eyes of the working masses emphasize these essential traits: heroism at work and the enthusiasm and combative character of the working masses.

During the First Five Year Plan, Anna Louise Strong,  a young U.S. journalist hired by the Soviet Moscow News newspaper, traveled the country. When in 1956, Khrushchev  made his insidious attack on Stalin, she recalled certain essential facts. Speaking of the First Five Year Plan, she made the following judgment: `never in history was so great an advance so swift'.