Trotsky (28 page)

A few weeks after the conclave in Paris, on Friday, October 28, 1938, at 8:00 p.m., the American Trotskyists gathered in the main auditorium of the Center Hotel, the future Hotel Diplomat, just off Times Square, on West 43rd Street. They came together to celebrate the founding of the Fourth International and the tenth anniversary of the American Trotskyist movement. New York had supplanted Paris as the center of Trotskyism, and on this night Times Square was its epicenter. An overflow crowd of up to 1,400 Trotskyists, sympathizers, and the curious
packed the hall, including both galleries, paying twenty-five cents in order to witness the celebration and, more importantly, to hear Trotsky speak.

The hall was festively decorated with banners and streamers honoring the Fourth International and its American section, the Socialist Workers Party. Above the speakers’ platform hung a six-by-four-foot charcoal drawing, draped in red, of Lenin and Trotsky. The Trotsky youth, some fifty strong, most in their early twenties, performed ceremonial duties, outfitted in uniforms of blue denim and red ties, with red armbands that read “Young People’s Socialist League, 4th International.”

The mass meeting began with the singing of the “Internationale.” The program included speeches from the party’s leaders, each accompanied by mounting anticipation of the performance of the evening’s headliner, Comrade Trotsky, who naturally was saved for last. When the moment finally arrived, it was after ten o’clock. The audience fell silent as thirty male comrades came forward and positioned themselves below the front of the stage. They stood with arms folded and faces hardened in an attitude of defiance. The organizers were taking no chances, remembering that Trotsky’s attempt to address an audience at the New York Hippodrome the year before had been sabotaged.

The lights were extinguished and a spotlight beam illuminated a photographic portrait of Trotsky placed at the center of the stage. “I hope that this time my voice will reach you and that I will be permitted in this way to participate in your double celebration,” Trotsky began in his heavily accented English. The Bolshevik-Leninists, he continued, were genuine Marxists, governed not by wishful thinking but by an objective evaluation of the march of events. Trotsky’s analysis of those events, which lasted close to fifteen minutes, came across clearly, despite some hiss and the occasional crackle from the gramophone record.

There was certainly no mistaking Trotsky’s revolutionary optimism. The Communist International, he reminded his audience, had become a “stinking cadaver.” The Fourth International had replaced it as the world party of socialist revolution. Its victory in the coming revolution was assured. “During the next ten years the program of the Fourth International will become the guide of millions and these revolution
ary millions will know how to storm earth and heaven. Long live the Socialist Workers Party of the United States! Long live the Fourth International!” The hall erupted in tumultuous applause.

Trotsky’s uplifting message notwithstanding, the Socialist Workers Party, the nucleus of the newborn Fourth International, was divided against itself. The party, all of ten months old, had been founded after a near-decade of Trotskyist splits and mergers. It was led by three able men of widely different backgrounds and talents: James Cannon, Max Shachtman, and James Burnham.

Cannon, the party’s leader, was born in 1890 in rural Kansas, the son of Irish immigrants with strong socialist convictions. In his youth he was an itinerant organizer for the trade unionist Industrial Workers of the World and a member of the Socialist Party of America. He belonged to the Socialist left wing, which in 1919 broke away to form the first Communist party in the United States. Cannon sat on the presidium of the Comintern in Moscow in 1922 and 1923, and he attended its sixth congress in 1928. Shortly afterward, he along with Shachtman and a third comrade were expelled from the party for their Trotskyist sympathies, and together they formed the Communist League of America, the original American Trotskyist group.

By the late 1930s, Cannon, with his stocky build, thick gray hair, and florid complexion, fit the stereotype of the jovial, hard-drinking Irishman. He operated out of the party’s headquarters near Union Square, but his political base was the Teamsters organization in Minneapolis. A forceful public speaker, he spent eight months in 1936 and 1937 agitating among the seamen and cannery workers on the California coast, and he maintained ties to the unionized automobile workers in Ohio and Michigan.

Max Shachtman was born in 1904 in Warsaw, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, and was brought to New York as a small child. He was the party’s leading journalist and its most brilliant orator. Shachtman, like Cannon, had a keen wit, and he was able to exploit his Yiddish accent in the service of a laugh line, especially when addressing his constituents in the Bronx.

Unlike Cannon and Shachtman, James Burnham was not a professional revolutionary. The son of an executive of the Burlington Rail
road, Burnham, a relative newcomer to the movement, was born in Chicago in 1905. He was educated at Princeton and Oxford, and taught philosophy at New York University, where he came to national attention as co-editor of the journal
Symposium
and as coauthor of a well regarded textbook,
Introduction to Philosophical Analysis.
Burnham was the party’s leading theorist, and he and Shachtman edited its monthly journal,
New International.
His Manhattan address, 34 Sutton Place, testified to his privileged circumstances, as did his occasional appearance at political meetings in a tuxedo, donned earlier in the evening for some high society social gathering.

Burnham and Cannon coexisted uneasily. Cannon was wary of Burnham’s social and academic status, while Burnham objected to Cannon’s authoritarian management style, his anti-intellectualism, and the crude invective he hurled at his opponents: “scoundrels,” “bloodhounds,” “sons-of-bitches,” “shysters,” “miserable,” “contemptible,” “sniveling,” “stinking,” and so on. Burnham also criticized Cannon for blindly following Trotsky’s lead. “The tendency in your letters to lump together all our opponents as ‘Stalinist agents,’” he complained to Cannon in June 1937, “(analogous to, and perhaps copied from, T’s recent habit of calling everyone who disagrees with him a ‘G.P.U. agent’) seems to me unprofitable.”

The real trouble between the two men started when Burnham began to challenge Trotsky’s position on what was known in the movement as the “Russian question.” Trotsky had long maintained that despite the repressiveness of the Soviet bureaucracy, even the purges and the Terror, the fundamental achievement of the October Revolution—the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production—remained intact. The USSR, Trotsky said, was a “degenerated workers’ state,” deeply flawed but still salvageable for socialism and therefore deserving of “unconditional defense” should it come under military attack. Any attempt by Bolshevik-Leninists to deny the proletarian nature of the Soviet Union, Trotsky had warned, would be regarded as “treason.”

In 1937, Burnham, together with another comrade, Joseph Carter, began to argue that the Soviet bureaucracy was no mere caste, as Trotsky insisted, but a new exploiting class, and that therefore the USSR could not be characterized as a workers’ state, not even a degenerated one.
Burnham and Carter described the Soviet system as “bureaucratic collectivism.” An increasing number of comrades thought this analysis made sense, to the point where, toward the end of 1937, Cannon alerted Trotsky that the party was experiencing “a little epidemic of revisionism.” From this and other reports reaching him, Trotsky learned that the opposition was centered in New York, and was especially strong among the youth.

At the founding congress of the Socialist Workers Party, which convened in Chicago on December 31, 1937, Burnham and Carter’s statement on the Russian question received only four out of seventy-five votes. Cannon hoped this would end the matter, but the controversy became more acute under the pressure of events, including the third Moscow trial in March 1938 and continued Soviet treachery against the non-Communist left in Spain. What was the difference, a growing number of comrades openly began to ask, between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR?

Here the dissenters could support their arguments with quotations from Trotsky’s recent book
The Revolution Betrayed,
where he described Stalinism and fascism as “totalitarian” twins bearing a “deadly similarity.” The essential difference, in Trotsky’s view, was that the Soviet government had nationalized the means of production. But for an increasing number of comrades, this was a distinction without a difference. A factional fight was brewing by the summer of 1939, even before the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Trotsky failed to appreciate the enormous shock the pact produced on his followers. For many of them, the aftershocks were no less disorienting. Trotsky had been predicting that the Kremlin would reach a purely defensive agreement with Nazi Germany, as a way to keep the war off Soviet territory for as long as possible. The Soviet invasion of Poland, which began on September 17, only two and a half weeks after the German assault from the west, demonstrated that the pact was no mere nonaggression treaty, but an aggressive military alliance. This confounded the Trotskyists and, it seems clear, staggered Trotsky himself.

The Germans had launched their blitzkrieg with a massive attack from the air that destroyed the Polish air force and communication lines. As bombs rained from the sky, German armored columns plunged
deep into the Polish interior, up to thirty miles ahead of the infantry, scattering civilians, spreading terror, and leaving the Poles no chance to mount a coordinated defense. In three weeks, western Poland was entirely overrun. Only Warsaw managed to hold out for another week under the Luftwaffe’s relentless aerial bombardment.

By comparison, the Soviet invasion from the east was more like an occupation. The Poles there had been ordered not to fight because it was believed—or at least hoped—that the Red Army was entering to join the fight against the Germans. Instead, the Soviets arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of Poles to remote regions of the USSR. Tens of thousands more Poles were executed. The most infamous episode came to be known as the Katyn Forest Massacre, in which more than 21,000 Polish reserve officers who had been mobilized at the outbreak of the war—the large majority of them teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other members of Poland’s intelligentsia—were shot to death and buried in mass graves. The Soviets would later attempt to place responsibility for this atrocity on the German armies that invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa.

As the German and Soviet armies erased Poland from the map, Trotsky dictated a long article called “The USSR in War,” which he completed on September 25. Much of it was devoted to a theoretical discussion about whether Stalinism, fascism, and even the New Deal constituted a new political paradigm, so-called bureaucratic collectivism. Trotsky turned back this theoretical challenge, but in doing so he said something entirely unexpected. Socialism, he announced, was about to face its ultimate test. If the Second World War did not spark a proletarian revolution in the West, or if the proletariat were to take power but then surrender it to a privileged bureaucracy as in the USSR, this would confirm the emergence of a new form of totalitarianism. In that case, Trotsky acknowledged, “nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society ended as a Utopia.”

Less than a year earlier, Trotsky had presented a vision of the Bolshevik-Leninists preparing to storm heaven and earth. Now he appeared to be harboring doubts about the entire socialist project, and this admission took his followers by surprise. It also undermined their confidence
in his analysis of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, which was another surprising part of his article. In Trotsky’s view, the Red Army, far from behaving like a mirror image of the Wehrmacht, was serving as a vehicle for progress in Poland by expropriating the large landowners and nationalizing the means of production. In other words, despite the reactionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet Union was objectively spreading the features of socialism abroad. Most of Trotsky’s American comrades found this judgment difficult to square with what common sense told them about the Soviet subjugation of Poland.

“The USSR in War,” instead of uniting the Socialist Workers Party, served to sharpen its discord. Shachtman had now joined forces with Burnham. Together they declared that the Soviet Union could in no sense whatsoever be classified as a workers’ state, that the Soviet invasion of Poland was an act of imperialism, and that the party should disavow its pledge to defend the USSR unconditionally. A serious factional fight had broken out. Trotsky now put everything aside in order to devote his energies to preventing the party from splitting in two. Anyone familiar with his past record as a conciliator in factional politics could have anticipated that disaster lay ahead.

At the zenith of Trotsky’s glory, after he had masterminded the Bolshevik insurrection in October 1917 and then led the Red Army to victory in the civil war, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar of Education, wrote a profile of him. Among the inevitable comparisons with Lenin, one came out decidedly in Trotsky’s favor. Lenin, although irreplaceable as the chief executive of the Soviet government, “could never have coped with the titanic mission which Trotsky took upon his own shoulders, with those lightning moves from place to place, those astounding speeches, those fanfares of on-the-spot orders, that role of being the unceasing electrifier of a weakening army, now at one spot, now at another. There is not a man on earth who could have replaced Trotsky in that respect.”

And yet, Lunacharsky testified, “Trotsky was extremely bad at organizing not only the Party but even a small group of it.” The same charismatic personality that swept people off their feet was “clumsy and ill-suited” to working within a political organization. He could electrify crowds, but not persuade individuals. “He had practically no wholehearted supporters at all.”