Trotsky (6 page)

Dewey was unaware that Trotsky himself, as early as 1904, had warned of the dangers of Bolshevik centralism. His misgivings caused him to turn against Lenin, his mentor, who insisted that only a tightly organized and disciplined group of professional revolutionaries could lead Russia’s workers to revolution. Trotsky accused Lenin of engaging in “substitutionism,” which was bound to end in authoritarianism. In Trotsky’s prophetic formulation: “The party organization substitutes itself for the party, the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization and, finally, a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.” Lenin, Trotsky warned, was threatening to transform Marx’s concept of the dictatorship
of
the proletariat into one of dictatorship
over
the proletariat.

Trotsky remained one of Lenin’s harshest critics until 1917, when both men rushed to Petrograd from abroad after the fall of the Romanovs. It was then, during the heady days between the February and October revolutions, that Trotsky embraced Bolshevism, recognizing that the Party machinery created by Lenin was the only vehicle capable of carrying out a socialist revolution in Russia. This was his Faustian pact. Lenin’s part of the bargain was to endorse Trotsky’s concept of the Russian Revolution, which provided the theoretical basis for the Bolshevik seizure of power.

Orthodox Marxism claimed that a socialist revolution could take place only in an advanced capitalist country. Russia in the early twentieth century, although rapidly industrializing, was still a relatively backward country, both economically and politically. It had yet to undergo a bourgeois-democratic revolution to overthrow the autocracy and clear the way for advanced capitalist development. In fact, Russia lagged so far behind the industrialized European countries that its bourgeoisie had grown impotent and was politically unfit to fulfill its historical role. So said Trotsky, who declared that Russia’s proletariat, with the support of the peasantry, could make
both
the bourgeois revolution and, close on its heels, the socialist revolution. Trotsky called his theory “permanent revolution.”

And the chain reaction would not stop there. A socialist revolution, according to Trotsky’s theory, could not be successfully completed within a backward country like Russia. Its ultimate success would
depend on its spread to the advanced capitalist countries, starting most likely with Germany. Trotsky and the Bolsheviks thus justified taking power in Russia and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat by reasoning that their own revolution would serve as the detonator for an international socialist revolution.

The failure of this optimistic scenario became apparent as early as 1920, as the Russian civil war was winding down. The Revolution had triumphed in Russia but had failed to spread. The ruling Bolshevik Party—since 1918 officially called the Communist Party—was forced to retreat from its radical economic program and begin an experiment in limited capitalism known as NEP, the New Economic Policy. Lenin died in 1924 having declared that at some unspecified future date the Party would abandon NEP and resume the socialist offensive. In the power struggle to succeed Lenin, Stalin championed the slogan “socialism in one country,” as a nationalistic alternative to Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.” Trotsky’s theory was now turned against him by Stalin, who portrayed his rival as a defeatist, someone who believed that Russia could not proceed to build socialism without assistance from the Western proletariat.

Just the opposite was true, however. Although Trotsky believed that securing the
ultimate
victory of socialism in Russia hinged on the spread of socialist revolution, he did not propose to wait for Europe. In fact, as leader of the opposition in the 1920s, Trotsky urged the Soviet leadership to adopt a faster-paced industrialization and to impose tighter curbs on capitalism in the countryside. Trotsky’s enemies, Stalin among them, accused him of being a reckless “super-industrializer” and the enemy of the peasant.

And yet, after Trotsky was defeated and banished from the USSR in 1929, Stalin turned sharply to the left, initiating a crash industrialization drive under the five-year plan and, simultaneously, the forced collectivization of the peasants. This revolution-from-above was far more extreme than anything ever advocated by Trotsky. The human toll was steep. Peasant resisters were branded “kulaks” and slaughtered by the millions, many as a result of the man-made famine in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.

Questioned by the Dewey commission about Soviet Russia’s great
leap to a state-controlled economy, Trotsky explained that while he had opposed the use of “brute force” to achieve collectivization, he never denied its “successes.” He also lauded the imposition of state planning in industry, even though he believed it had been carried out recklessly and with unnecessary brutality. Trotsky testified before the commission that the Soviet state’s ownership of the means of production made the USSR the most progressive country in the world. Only the Stalinist regime itself was objectionable. Trotsky defined that regime as a parasitic bureaucratic caste, a product of Russia’s backwardness and isolation.

Trotsky advocated a revolution to overthrow Stalin’s ruling bureaucracy, but he had in mind a narrowly political, as opposed to a social, revolution. The October Revolution created the world’s first workers’ state, and it remained a workers’ state even under Stalin, albeit one that was “degenerated” or “deformed.” To Trotsky, the class structure of the USSR made it worth defending against its enemies, despite the purge trials and the terror that were destroying the men and women who had made the revolution and eliminating Trotsky’s comrades and loved ones. “Even now under the Iron Heel of the new privileged caste, the U.S.S.R. is not the same as Czarist Russia,” he explained to a wealthy American sympathizer who helped finance the Dewey hearings. “And the whole of mankind is, thanks to the October Revolution, incomparably richer in experience and in possibilities.”

D
EWEY, LIKE
F
INERTY,
probed Trotsky but never seriously challenged him, and the other commission members followed suit—all, that is, except for Carleton Beals, the Latin Americanist. Beals treated Trotsky as a hostile witness, and he provided the hearings with their one moment of contentious drama and scandal. From the beginning, Beals had behaved like the commission’s odd man out. He was absent from its pre-hearing meetings held in Mexico City and then missed the opening session. When he spoke, he exhibited a prickliness toward his fellow commission members, especially Dewey.

During the hearings Beals was often seen huddling with
The New York Times
correspondent on the scene, Frank Kluckhohn. Kluckhohn’s reporting from Mexico City made it apparent that he had an ax to grind. He wrote a hostile profile of Trotsky and insinuated that the
hearings were a whitewash. Even before the commission protested to the
Times,
Kluckhohn’s editor had wired him to say that he should do more reporting and less editorializing. This he managed to do for a few days, then he was absent for two more before returning in time for the Beals affair.

On April 16, the penultimate day of the hearings, Beals’s questioning veered into provocation when he asked Trotsky whether, as Soviet war commissar in 1919, he had sent a Soviet agent to Mexico to foment revolution. Everyone in the room recognized that the question was intended to jeopardize Trotsky’s asylum in Mexico. There was a suspicion that Kluckhohn, who had a habit of posing similarly provocative questions at Trotsky’s press conferences, had inspired Beals. His question led to a testy exchange with Trotsky, who bluntly told Beals that his informant was a liar. The next day, Beals informed Dewey by letter of his resignation from the commission. The hearings had proved to be a waste of time, he wrote, and “not a truly serious investigation of the charges.”

That same day, April 17, Trotsky delivered his closing statement before the commission. Its text was so long—Dewey called it “a book”—that Trotsky could read only a portion of it at the hearings, the rest being added to the record. He began speaking toward five o’clock in the afternoon and finished close to 8:45.

Most of his presentation was an exhaustive analysis of the Moscow trials, which he called “the greatest frame-up in history.” He made the case for his own impeccable Marxist-Leninist credentials and assured his audience of “my faith in the clear, bright future of mankind.” He closed with a diplomatic flourish, thanking the committee and its distinguished chairman. “And when he finished,” the court reporter testified, “the audience, a singularly diverse one, burst out into applause, which was, believe me, most spontaneous. This moment I shall never forget.” Dewey avoided stepping on the moment: “Anything I can say will be an anticlimax.” The hearings of the preliminary commission came to a close.

Trotsky and Dewey had thus far been introduced only formally. The organizers had decided that, for appearances’ sake, the two men ought to be kept apart, and so they were, even in the Blue House patio during
recesses in the hearings. A cartoon in one of the popular Mexican daily papers gave a different impression. It showed Trotsky and Dewey seated side by side in the hearing room. The caption had one audience member remarking to another, “What does Trotsky mean by saying he has been denied liberty when he has been all over the world?” The other man replies, “Yes, so he has, just like a lion
[léon]
in a circus.”

Late in the evening after the final session, there was a social gathering for commission members, staff, and journalists at the home of an American well-wisher in Mexico City, an event attended by both Trotsky and Dewey. No longer constrained by protocol, the two men, surrounded by guests, were able to exchange pleasantries. Dewey said to Trotsky, “If all Communists were like you, I would be a Communist.” Trotsky replied: “If all liberals were like you, I would be a liberal.” The nearby guests erupted in laughter at this good-natured display of mutual diplomacy.

Dewey was disappointed to have to leave for New York without being able to converse privately with Trotsky. He wrote to his former student Max Eastman, who had encouraged him to go to Mexico: “You were right about one thing—If it wasn’t exactly a ‘good time,’ it was the most interesting single intellectual experience of my life.”

Dewey canceled his summer vacation plans in Europe in order to direct the work of the full commission in New York. There was other testimony and much documentation to collect, some of it to be supplied by a parallel commission of inquiry set up in Paris. Aside from Dewey and the remaining members of the subcommission—Stolberg, Rühle, and La Follette—there were six other commission members: Wendelin Thomas, a former Communist deputy in the German Reichstag; Alfred Rosmer, former member of the French Communist Party and editor of its newspaper,
L’Humanité
John R. Chamberlain, former literary critic of
The New York Times;
Carlo Tresca, an Italian-American anarchist leader; Edward Alsworth Ross, a professor of sociology at the
University of Wisconsin; and Francisco Zamora, a Mexican economist and journalist.

When Dewey and the others returned from Mexico, they were surprised to find Trotsky’s defenders in such a gloomy state. The American press coverage of the hearings had been less than flattering to the commission. Kluckhohn’s reporting in
The New York Times,
including his earnest coverage of the Beals resignation, was reprinted in the Communist and other pro-Moscow publications, which treated the hearings as a sham. With Dewey’s encouragement, the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky decided to go on the offensive. It arranged a public meeting for May 9 at the Mecca Temple in midtown Manhattan, with Dewey as the featured speaker.

Dewey came out fighting. Before a crowd of more than 3,000 people, he upbraided the pro-Moscow liberals for attempting to create the impression that the hearings were a farce. “When did it become a farce in the United States to give a hearing to a man who had been convicted without a hearing?” Dewey accused the liberal apologists for Stalin of suffering from “intellectual and moral confusion.” As a past defender of socialism in the USSR, he said he understood that certain liberals were hostile to Trotsky because they wished to protect and preserve the one successful attempt in all history to build a socialist society.

But something more was at work here, Dewey observed. Moscow’s defenders believed that Trotsky’s theories and views were mistaken. Yet Trotsky had not been convicted for his theories or his views, but rather for the most heinous of crimes, including assassination and treason. To declare Trotsky guilty because of his opposition to the rulers in the Kremlin was “not fair or square,” said Dewey. “It is in the name of justice and truth as the end that we ask for your support. We go on in confidence that we shall have it. As Zola said in the Dreyfus case: ‘Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.’”

Dewey had given the best speech of his career, said his friends, who were surprised by the intensity and emotion he displayed, quite unlike his usual professorial manner. Sidney Hook told Dewey that if he wrote his philosophy in the same engaging style in which he delivered that speech, more people would be able to understand it. Dewey replied that he could not get mad writing philosophy.

The full committee went about its business, momentarily interrupted on June 11 by another thunderclap out of Moscow, where the authorities announced they had uncovered a treasonous plot involving the Red Army command in a conspiracy with Nazi Germany, under the banner of Trotsky. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the outstanding civil war commander, and seven other top-ranking officers were tried in secret and executed the following day. This was the start of a massive purge of the army’s officer corps. Tens of thousands would perish, including a large majority of the civil war commanders.

This time there was no show trial, so there was no call to battle stations at the Blue House. Instead, Trotsky was forced to deal with a challenge from an entirely different quarter. Friends and former comrades in the United States and Europe, without questioning Trotsky’s legal innocence in the trials, began to raise doubts about his moral right to challenge Stalin. In doing so, they threatened to erase the thick line Trotsky had drawn between Bolshevism and Stalinism. Had not Lenin and the Bolsheviks, they asked, suppressed the rival socialist parties shortly after the Revolution so that Soviet power quickly came to mean Bolshevik power? Had not Lenin’s regime conducted a Red Terror against its declared enemies during the civil war? Had not War Commissar Trotsky, who now condemned Stalin for threatening to execute the wives and children of the trial defendants, seized as hostages the families of former czarist officers serving in the Red Army?