Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (33 page)

BOOK: Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)
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Generally speaking, the Left Opposition saw itself as the political representative of the proletariat and Stalin as the defender of the power and privilege of the ruling bureaucracy. Bukharin and the Right were characterized as representing the interests of the rich peasants and small businessmen who flourished under the regime of limited private property known as the NEP (1921-1928). Nonetheless, many Trotskyists continued for years to view the Communist Party, however corrupt, as the sole party of the working class in Russia. They consequently saw their mission as reforming it rather than overthrowing it.

Permanent revolution:
Trotsky’s original 1906 theory of the class nature of the Russian revolution. Adopted in practice by Lenin in 1917. Attacked by Stalin after 1923.

Ivan Nikitich Smirnov:
see note for page 48.

Trubkin-Pipeface:
Stalin; his pipe-smoking was famous. (Cf.
Trubka
, Russian for pipe.)

Bulletin of the Opposition:
Edited by Trotsky, published in Berlin. Naturally illegal in the USSR.

Barras, Tallien, Bourdon:
Thermidorians. (See note above.)

Babeuf:
The most extreme representative of the egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution was Gracchus Babeuf, the first to attack the principle of private property and elaborate a communist theory. He inspired the movement known as the “Conspiracy of Equals”. Guillotined in 1797.

Beaten in 1923:
The defeat of the Left-Communist “Manifesto of the Forty-Six” (calling for industrialization and a return to workers’ democracy in Russia), Trotsky’s removal as Commissar for Defence, and the failure of the Communist uprising in Germany (October 1923) were major setbacks for the Left Opposition.

Beaten in 1927:
The defeat and expulsion of the Left Opposition at the 15th Congress of the CP-USSR.

Wuhan:
An industrial city in central China; a centre of Communist activity. Under Stalin’s orders the armed Chinese workers and peasants were directed to end their resistance and submit to Chiang Kaishek, who promptly massacred them.

Treint (Albert):
Head of the French Communist Party 1924–25. Responsible for the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the Party. A follower of Zinoviev, Treint was himself expelled in 1927. He flirted with but never joined the international Trotskyist movement.

Ivan Nikitch (Smirnov)
and
G. L. Piatakov:
Two prominent Russian Left Oppositionists who “capitulated” to Stalin after Stalin’s 1928 “Left” turn in order to participate in industrialization. Like Kostrov, many Oppositionists followed their lead. Smirnov and Piatakov were executed in 1936 and 1937 respectively.

Cheka:
Soviet political police during Civil War period.

Enragés, Equals, or proscripts of Prairial:
The “
Enragés
” (Angry Men), “Equals” (Followers of Babeuf) and “proscripts of Prairial” (banished leaders of the May 1795 insurrection) expressed the revolutionary aspirations of the Parisian poor in the French Revolution. Like Serge’s exiled Oppositionists, they were defeated and outlawed when their revolution entered a reactionary phase.

Karl:
Karl Radek, international Communist revolutionary active in Germany, Austria, Poland and Russia. Co-worker of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Sides with Left Opposition, 1923–1928. Capitulates to Stalin in 1929 and collaborates closely with him. Condemned at second Moscow Trial (1937) to a long prison term during which he was killed. Known for his ironic jokes and clever puns, of which this passage is an example.

United front in Germany:
From 1931 on, Trotsky advocated a common front of German workers’ parties (Communist and Social Democratic) by which the united working class might have blocked Hitler’s rise to power: Stalin, then in his pseudo-Leftist Third Period, insisted that the Social Democratic leaders (labelled social-fascists) were the main enemies of revolution and ordered the German Communist Party to attack them, rather than Hitler, whom Stalin underestimated. Rejecting the need for a common front (“We are not afraid of Hitler”) the German CP adopted the adventurist slogan, “After Hitler, Us!” with disastrous consequences.

Red Plebiscite:
In 1932, the Nazis obtained a plebiscite in Prussia for the purpose of overthrowing Otto Braun’s Social Democratic Cabinet. The German CP—on Stalin’s personal recommendation—joined forces with the Nazis, calling this the “Red” Plebiscite.

Scheidemann, Noske
et al
: In 1918, after Germany’s defeat and the Kaiser’s abdication, a Republic was proclaimed and the Social Democrats, led by Scheidemann and Noske, took power. In the name of order, they conspired with the reactionary leaders of German industry and the Prussian officer corps to repress the revolutionary agitation of the workers, whose outstanding leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were in consequence murdered in January 1919.

Neumann, Kolarov, Dimitrov:
Officials of the Stalinist IIIrd International.

Yakov Blumkin:
Intrepid revolutionary. Sympathizes with Trotsky. Executed in 1930.

Polizeipräsidents:
German police-chiefs.

The Old Man:
Trotsky.

Leon Davidovich Trotsky:
(1879–1940) President of the Petrograd Soviet in the first (1905) Russian revolution, co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, organizer of the victorious Red Army in the Civil War, brilliant writer, orator, administrator and theoretician, Trotsky was a towering figure in the Russian Revolution, second only to Lenin. Manoeuvred out of power by Stalin and his allies (Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev) at the time of Lenin’s fatal stroke (1923–24), besmirched and reviled daily in the Party press, he remained for many Communists the symbol of Bolshevik purity against the increasing corruption of the Party. Trotsky led the Left Opposition in an effort to reverse the Revolution’s drift away from its original goals, but he was hampered by his loyalty to Party discipline and out-manoeuvred at every turn by Stalin, who used his power as Party Secretary to monopolize the apparatus, press and propaganda machine and to command majorities by dispersing the opposition and rewarding his own followers with key posts. Trotsky was expelled from the Party and banished to Alma-Ata in 1927, then exiled to Turkey in January, 1929. In exile, Trotsky continued to call upon the workers of the world to defend the Soviet Union as a workers’ state, albeit a degenerate one, while denouncing Stalin’s bureaucracy as the gravedigger of the Revolution and demanding its overthrow. His heroic effort to build a new world party of revolution (the IVth International) on the basis of this somewhat contradictory platform resulted in an unending series of factional splits, and his inflexibility alienated even such close sympathizers as Victor Serge. Hounded from one precarious exile to another, slandered and reviled by the mass Communist press, Trotsky steadfastly defended the interests of the international working class and exposed Stalin’s crimes until he was cut down by a Stalinist assassin in Mexico on the eve of World War II. The writings he produced in exile (
History of the Russian Revolution, My Life, The Revolution Betrayed, The Spanish Revolution, Whither Germany?, etc.
) provide a continuous and brilliant Marxist analysis of the key questions of the first half of the 20th century. See:
The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky
co-authored by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova (Trotsky’s widow) and the forthcoming Serge-Trotsky correspondence, edited by Peter Sedgwick.

Prinkipo:
Prince’s Isle, near Constantinople (Turkey). Trotsky’s first place of exile.

Baltic-White Sea Canal
(or Belomar): This extraordinary feat of Stalinist engineering was built entirely by prison labour between 1931 and 1933. Working night and day in the bitter cold, prison labourers of both sexes cut through 500 miles of granite and frozen earth using the most primitive wooden implements (steel, concrete and modern construction equipment were not provided). Hundreds of thousands died of cold, hunger, and overwork, but the GPU completed the project on time. Gorky himself edited a book praising the “reforging of souls” that took place thanks to the enthusiastic leadership of the GPU. The canal, unnecessary in the first place (a railroad already connected Leningrad with the White Sea) was never used since it was built too shallow for ocean vessels.

The Secretary General:
Stalin. Also “Josif Vissarionovich”.

Rykov, Alexis:
Lenin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars. Now (1934) in disgrace. Expelled from the Party in 1937, condemned and executed in 1938.

Alianza, Obrera:
Workers’ Alliance. A common front of Spanish workers’ parties and trade-unions. At first boycotted by the Communists (during their ultra-Left period), it was later joined by them and turned into a popular front.

Klim:
Klimentii Yefimovich Vorochilov (1881–1969). Close associate of Stalin. Commissar of Defence.

Director of Propaganda:
According to Peter Sedgwick this probably refers to A. C. Stetsky, a former comrade of Bukharin who went over to Stalin and held the post of Head of the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee from 1929 to around 1937 when he disappeared to a death of uncertain date.

High Commissar for State Security:
Heinrich Grigoryevich Yagoda, Peoples’ Commissar for Internal Affairs, 1934–36. Having been in charge of persecuting the Trotskyists for ten years and having prepared the first Moscow Trial (1936), Yagoda confessed to being a Trotsky agent and was executed in 1938.

The head of the government:
Molotov, close associate of Stalin, long Premier and Foreign Minister (hence “diplomat”). Ousted by Khruschev in 1957.

Georgian from Heavy Industry:
Grigory Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze (1886–1935). Stalin’s fellow-countryman and collaborator in the repression of Georgian autonomy (1922). Organizer of the first Five-Year Plans. May have sought to limit purges.

Serge’s
imaginative vision of the Russian prison system as a vast constellation in this passage anticipates Solzhenitsyn’s “archipelago” image by thirty years.

State Capitalism:
Marxist category used to designate the Communist regime as an exploitative system in which the state plays the role of collective capitalist and the bureaucracy that of a new bourgeoisie.

Fleischman:
This character appears in two earlier Serge novels:
Birth of Our Power
and
Conquered City
.

Azev, Evno:
Head of the Social-revolutionary Party’s terrorist organization and member of its Central Committee from 1903 to 1908. Responsible for the assassination of Tsarist Minister von Plehve and Grand Duke Sergei. Unmasked as an agent of the Okhrana (the Tsarist secret police). Okhrana agents-provocateurs also played prominent roles in the Bolshevik Party (e.g. Malinovsky, Lenin’s spokesman in the Duma), and Stalin (the ex-terrorist “Koba”) was compared to Azev in a 1932 document authored by Riutin and several other well-known Russian Communists.

BOOK: Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)
2.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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