By OSVALDO COGGIOLA*
The Fourth International adopted as its objective to continue the struggle of the Third International for the overthrow of world capitalism through the proletarian revolution
The Left Opposition of the CPSU was created at the end of 1923 against the policy followed by the general secretary, Stalin, and his clandestine faction. The Opposition fought both at the level of domestic politics (for the right to trend and the revitalization of the soviets, for an industrialization plan, which would strengthen the social base of the proletarian dictatorship) and at the level of international politics (against the theory of “socialism in a single country ”, for a revolutionary orientation towards the Communist International, including the united workers’ front against Nazism).
Your fate is known; almost all of its members, including many revolutionary leaders of 1917, were massacred by Stalinist repression, not before organizing themselves internationally, breaking in 1933 (soon after Hitler's victory in Germany) with the Communist International, and founding in 1938 the Fourth International, considered by the organizer of the Red Army as the most important work of his life.
The Fourth International adopted as its objective to continue the struggle of the Third International for the overthrow of world capitalism through the proletarian revolution, which placed it in irreducible opposition to the policy of “peaceful coexistence (or emulation). Leon Trotsky rejected any explanation of Stalinism as a “deviation” due to the “cult of personality”. Every political phenomenon had a social root: Stalinism was the bureaucratization of the Soviet State, due to its international isolation and imperialist siege. As a result, he placed the need for a political revolution in the USSR, which would return political power to the proletariat, and fought for the creation of political instruments from this perspective.
The victory of the Red Army in the Russian civil war (1918-1921) had no continuity with the beginning of the crisis of the Soviet State and the Bolshevik party. A year before the Kronstadt uprising (1921), in fact in the final movement towards the NEP (New Economic Policy), Leon Trotsky – alone, in the political bureau of the Bolshevik party – had proposed renouncing the policy of “war communism” motivated due to the issue of supplying the army, but did not find the necessary support. Leon Trotsky thought that it was necessary to replace the surplus appropriation system with a progressive tax in natura.
This policy was adopted at the end of 1921, at the party's XNUMXth Congress. The delay in the international revolution meant that special measures were needed to maintain the Workers' State. The long period of civil war had devastated the Russian economy. The policy of war communism, designed to defend Soviet Russia from imperialism's attempts at its destruction until the working class of Europe was able to move to its aid, was replaced by the NEP, a concession to capitalism designed to revive agriculture, which has had considerable success in regenerating the country's economic life. However, the economy developed the scissors effect, the growing gap between the two lines of the graph representing the rise in prices of manufactured goods and the fall in prices of agricultural products. Production decreased, wages were delayed, workers were forced to strike. What was needed was a program to lift the industry. Leon Trotsky proposed that planning be introduced.
In November 1922, Lenin wrote: “I refer those who have not sufficiently understood our NEP to the speech of Comrade Leon Trotsky and mine on this question at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.” Ten days later, Lenin addressed Leon Trotsky: “I have read your theses on the NEP and I consider them generally very good; Some formulations are very well designed, a few points seem debatable to me. My desire, now, would be to publish them in the newspapers and then quickly reprint them in brochures”.
This brochure was never published, due to bureaucratic interference. The fight against the bureaucratization of the State and the party was, in the words of Moshe Lewin, “Lenin's last fight”, which he intended to carry out in an alliance with Leon Trotsky. The reproach most frequently made to Leon Trotsky is that of not having made this alliance public, or of not having been consistent with it, especially on the Georgian national question (against the Great Russian chauvinism of the nascent bureaucracy, and of Stalin in particular). ) and on the issue of revealing and implementing Lenin's “Testament” (which defended, among other points, the removal of Stalin from the post of general secretary).
Regarding the first subject, Leon Trotsky wrote: “The idea of forming a Lenin-Trotsky 'bloc' against the bureaucracy only Lenin and I knew about. The other members of the Political Bureau had only vague suspicions. Nobody knew anything about Lenin's letters on the national question or the Testament. If I had started to act, they could say that I was beginning a personal struggle to take Lenin's place. I couldn't think about it without goosebumps. I thought that, even though I won, the end result would be such a demoralization for me that it would cost me dearly. An element of uncertainty entered into all calculations: Lenin himself and his state of health. Can he express his opinion? Will you have time left for that? Will the party understand that Lenin and Leon Trotsky are fighting for the future of the revolution and not that Leon Trotsky is fighting for the position of the ailing Lenin? … The provisional situation continued. But the delay favored the usurpers, since Stalin, as general secretary, directed the entire state machinery during the interregnum.”[I]
On the Georgian national question, Lenin made public his break with Stalin in the last days of 1922, shortly before being almost completely sidelined from politics by illness. As Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin had “Sovietized” Georgia militarily, not only against the will of the majority of the population, but also of the Georgian Bolsheviks. Two of them (Mdivani and Macaradze) publicly protested.
Lenin then expressed himself in a “Letter to the Congress” (from the party): “I think that, in this episode, Stalin's impatience and his taste for administrative coercion, as well as his hatred against the famous 'social chauvinism', exerted an influence fatal... the influence of hatred on politics in general is extremely disastrous. Our case, the case of our relations with the State of Georgia, constitutes a typical example of the need to use the utmost prudence and show a conciliatory and tolerant spirit, if we want to resolve the issue in an authentically proletarian way…”.
He continued later, referring to Stalin: “The Georgian who shows himself to be disdainful of this aspect of the problem, who shamelessly launches accusations of social-nationalism (when he himself is a genuine social-nationalist and also a vulgar Great Russian executioner ), this Georgian, in effect, violates the interests of proletarian class solidarity… Stalin and Djerzinski must be named politically as those responsible for this campaign.”
Soviet historians have proven that Leon Trotsky not only accepted the bloc with Lenin in this regard, but was also politically consistent with it (which does not mean that this bloc was guaranteed his victory).[ii] At the XII Party Congress, in 1923, Leon Trotsky and Bukharin defended Lenin's position on the problem of nationalities against Stalin, the general secretary. Simultaneously, faced with the “scissors crisis”, Leon Trotsky defended state aid to industry, in order to lower prices. Leon Trotsky presented the report “On Industry” which was received by the delegates with ardent and long applause.
This report presented a perspective for the development of the industry in subsequent years. Its essential point coincided with the thesis included in the Congress resolution: “Only an industry that offers more than it consumes can be victorious. The industry that lives at the expense of the budget, that is, agriculture, would not know how to create the stable and lasting support necessary for the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
In the last year of his life, Lenin witnessed the beginnings of a split within the Bolshevik party. The social context of 1923 was that of a new wave of strikes, with the formation of opposition workers groups. The global context was that of hope for a “German October” (a favorable turn of the world revolution). In the context of the German defeat, Leon Trotsky sent a letter to the Political Bureau criticizing the party's internal regime, supported by a declaration from 46 “old Bolsheviks”: the Left Opposition was born, against which he fought “troika” leader of Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev. The organization of the Opposition, with the “Charter”, in October 1923, was taken after going through all remaining political paths, and not only took into account the internal situation of the USSR, but also the international situation.
The German revolution was a key moment in the internal struggle of the Bolshevik party, when an internal faction organized against its bureaucratization, led by Leon Trotsky, manifested itself. In a revolutionary situation, such as that existing in Germany, the vacillations of Zinoviev (main leader of the Communist International) were a decisive factor in the defeat. But they had a clear origin in pressure from Stalin (“it is necessary to stop the Germans, not push them”).[iii] The German defeat condemned the Russian revolution to an indefinite period of isolation.
Faced with the crisis, the Political Bureau established a “new course”. Leon Trotsky attacked the bureaucratization of the State and the party, the hierarchy of secretaries, and evoked the danger of degeneration of the revolution. The military regime within the party, imposed by the conditions of the civil war, was generating a greater danger for the future of the revolution – a vast bureaucratic hierarchy taking shape in the place of a freely elected officialdom. Leon Trotsky, in the pamphlet entitled New path,he called for workers' democracy and the eradication of bureaucracy linked to the prospect of rapid construction of industry through the introduction of a general economic plan. A "troika” accused him of promoting the “struggle of generations” and defended the party and state apparatus.
Lenin's concerns about the bureaucratization of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet State, recorded in a document that became known as his “testament”, caused great embarrassment; in a meeting on the eve of the XIII Congress, it was decided not to remove Stalin from his position (requested by Lenin) and to publish the document only to the main delegates. The decision not to make the document public was adopted by the full party Central Committee. Leon Trotsky secretly communicated it to his American supporter Max Eastman, who published it in the USA, and was then denied by Leon Trotsky himself.
For this and other reasons, some complaints point to Leon Trotsky as co-responsible for Stalin's rise, which was the subject of an observation by Ernest Mandel against those who “want to simultaneously prove two entirely contradictory things: on the one hand, that Leon Trotsky made many mistakes tactical; on the other hand, that Stalin's victory was inevitable, because it corresponded to the objective conditions of Russia at that time. This is particularly clear in Issac Deutscher, where these two theses continually intertwine”.[iv]
Most “Kremlinologists” presented the history of the Russian CP after Lenin’s death as a “struggle for succession”: this is, to say the least, a simplification. In January 1924, Lenin died. Leon Trotsky, ill, did not attend the funerals (apparently mistaken as to their date by Stalin). Soon after, the Left Opposition was condemned at the XII Conference of the PC, which condemned the “fractionalism” of the Opposition and put into practice the “Lenin promotion” (massive recruitment of inexperienced militants). The Opposition was ousted from the press and, soon after, from the party, with bureaucratic methods (displacement of opponents, “shutdown” votes in cells and committees).
Leon Trotsky's “Menshevik past” was attacked in the press: Stalin called him the “patriarch of bureaucrats”. A series of provocations and insults against Leon Trotsky followed, polarizing the scenario. Against Leon Trotsky, a forgotten letter was discovered, written by him in 1913, directing harsh words against Lenin. The objective, with its publication, was clear: to show the incompatibility between “Leninism” and “Trotskyism”. The idyll between Leon Trotsky and the Soviet press quickly faded.
On February 23, 1924, the sixth anniversary of the creation of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky was still celebrated by the Izvestia of the soviets. But the Pravda, the party's official organ, had already begun to forget him. “Dear Comrade Lev Davidovitch, – wrote the Izvestia – on the sixth anniversary of our glorious Red Army, the general assembly of the Moscow Soviet sends a warm greeting to the one who organized and guided it.” The newspaper also published a medical bulletin, explaining that Leon Trotsky had been forced to rest in the South. Pravda, on the contrary, gave coverage to the Red Army celebrations, without mentioning the name of Leon Trotsky. In one article, it was stated that only Lenin was the leader and organizer of the Red Army.
In this general climate, Leon Trotsky counterattacked by publishing, in September 1924, the text October Lessons where, discussing questions of revolutionary strategy, he attacked Zinoviev and Kamenev's past hostility to the insurrection of October 1917, an episode repeated in Germany in 1923, again with Zinoviev (now head of the Communist International). The “troika” solidified itself against the debate provoked by Leon Trotsky, who resigned from the War Commissariat in 1925. Another (“right-wing”) opposition was designed around Bukharin's theses, defending and deepening the NEP.
On November 2, 1924, the Pravda gave the signal of the “anti-Trotskyist” campaign, with a text by Bukharin: “The book of Comrade Leon Trotsky (October Lessons) is quickly becoming 'all the rage'. This is not surprising, as its main objective is to cause a sensation in the party... The introduction (key to the work) is written in somewhat enigmatic language. The allusions and insinuations cannot be easily perceived by the profane reader. That is why it is necessary to unravel the mysteries of this hidden language (so much to Leon Trotsky's liking, despite his demands for 'clarity in criticism'). The author assumes the responsibility of intervening against the political line adopted by the party and the Comintern. This intervention does not have a purely theoretical character, but on the contrary it resembles a political program designed to annul the decisions of the congresses…”.
Lenin's widow, Nadedja Krupskaia, wrote in the same Pravda, on December 16, 1924: “I do not know whether Comrade Leon Trotsky is really guilty of all the mortal sins of which he is accused, not without controversial intentions. But Comrade Leon Trotsky should not regret this. He was not born yesterday and therefore he must know that an article written in the tone of October Lessons can only stir up controversy. But that is not the crux of the issue. The fact is that when inviting us to meditate on the 'lessons of Red October', he proposes to focus on them from precisely the wrong angle... In the decisive years of the revolution, Comrade Leon Trotsky dedicated all his strength to the struggle for Soviet power. He courageously undertook a difficult task... The party never forgets that. But the fight that began in October (1917) is not yet over. It is necessary to fight hard to achieve the goals sought by the October Revolution. At this point, it would be deadly to stray from the Leninist path. And when a comrade like Leon Trotsky strays, perhaps unconsciously, onto the path of revising Leninism, the party has a duty to intervene.”
In December 1924, Bukharin wrote an article focusing on the disagreements between Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Stalin, days later, published an extensive article stating that “Leon Trotsky's permanent revolution is the denial of Lenin's theory of proletarian revolution”. His statements had a great impact on the defense of “socialism in one country” by offering a positive and definable goal, by putting an end to expectations of aid from abroad, and by massaging national pride by presenting the revolution as the fruit of the “vanguard spirit” of the Russian people.
The 1924 controversy had only one major winner: Stalin, who benefited from the mutual wear and tear to which Leon Trotsky and Zinoviev-Kamenev were subjected: “The majority of party members, for whom the 1917 revolution, at best, was not was nothing more than a glorious legend, perhaps he admitted with a certain bitterness the 'bad' role played by Leon Trotsky, without really believing in the merits of the 'good' Zinoviev. At troika, the discreet Stalin is the least affected, since his position in the background in 1917 allows him to escape the discredit that shakes the old holders of the first positions”.[v]
A turnaround occurred at the end of 1925: Zinoviev and Kamenev, responsible for the CP in Leningrad, attacked the pro-kulak policy and took up Leon Trotsky's theses on party democracy (in private, they revealed to him the bureaucratic methods used against him in 1923 -1924). But the weight of the apparatus had an advantage: at the XIV Congress, the Zinoviev-Kamenev opposition was crushed by the Stalin-Bukharin alliance, which imposed Sergei Kirov as head of the party in Leningrad. Zinoviev and Kamenev got closer to Leon Trotsky, forming the United Opposition in 1926, which brought together around 8.000 militants, with numerous “old Bolsheviks”.
With his majority in the governing bodies, Stalin took advantage of the situation to subordinate the party apparatus in Leningrad, Zinoviev and Kamenev's base, which led the latter, in a 180-degree turnaround, to seek an alliance with Leon Trotsky, initially resisted by the members of the Left Opposition. The alliance was finally concluded, thanks to the intervention of Leon Trotsky himself, creating the United Opposition.
Three of the five undisputed leaders of the party were oppositionists (Zinoviev, Kamenev and Leon Trotsky): the Opposition seemed to be an alliance of the old Bolsheviks, the group of Lenin's “comrades”, against Stalin and Bukharin. An alliance of revolutionaries, not “administrators”, of which a good number of Red Army commissars were also part. Influence of Leon Trotsky? But wasn't Ivar Smilga also in the Opposition, who had serious conflicts with Leon Trotsky in the civil war? And also Muralov, the hero of the Moscow battles, Mrachkovsky (born in the prison of tsarism), IN Smirnov, a worker called “the conscience of the party…”.
The United Opposition's struggle lasted from 1925 to 1927, and was strongly conditioned by the international situation, especially by the fate of the Chinese revolution, which appeared as the great hope of bringing the USSR out of international isolation. The political center of the debate moved to the Communist International, where Leon Trotsky faced the Stalin-Bukharin duo; its theoretical center was the question of “permanent revolution”.[vi]
The theory of permanent revolution was accused of not taking into account the changes between the revolution of 1905 and that of October 1917. It was, according to Kamenev, “straight as the flight of a crow”. Bukharin granted Leon Trotsky a certain brilliance, but objected to his formal and literary stance on political issues. The Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, already imprisoned for fascism, noted in his Prison Notebooks that “Bronstein [Leon Trotsky] can be considered the political theorist of the frontal attack, in a period when this can only be a cause of defeat”. Comparing him to Lenin, he added that “Bronstein, who appears as a 'Westernist', was, on the contrary, a cosmopolitan, that is, superficially national and superficially Westernist or European. In contrast, Ilich [Lenin] was deeply national and deeply European. Bronstein, in his memoirs, remembers being told that his theory was demonstrated to be valid fifteen years later, and responds to the epigram with another epigram. His theory, in fact, was not correct fifteen years before nor fifteen years later... he was only right in his most general practical prediction, as if he predicted that a four-year-old child will one day become a mother, and when that happens, at the age of twenty, stated 'I had guessed', not remembering that if she had raped the child at four years old she would not have been a mother. It seems to me that Ilich had understood that a change had taken place from the war of movement, victoriously applied in the East in 1917, to the war of position, the only one possible in the West, where in a short space of time armies can accumulate enormous quantities of ammunition”. [vii]
Regarding the issue of the “war of position” (which Gramsci identified with the “United Front tactic”) and the “war of movement”, Perry Anderson questioned Gramsci's opinion,[viii] who, on the other hand, could not ignore that Leon Trotsky himself was one of the formulators of the United Front policy in the Communist International. Gramsci's criticism of the “permanent revolution” was practically the same as that formulated by Kamenev, he simply ignored the content of this theory, which did not consist in ignoring the stages of historical development, but in establishing the dynamics of the transition from one stage to another under certain conditions. (those of the existence of the proletariat as class). In both cases, Gramsci's opinion seemed less based on an examination of texts and events, than on the caricatural image of Leon Trotsky forged within the framework of the struggle between factions that witnessed the emergence of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Years later (already in exile), Leon Trotsky responded to criticism in his article Three conceptions of the Russian Revolution: “The accusation frequent in the writings of today's Moscow theorists that the program of the dictatorship of the proletariat was 'premature' in 1905 is beside the point. In an empirical sense, the program of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasants also turned out to be 'premature'. The unfavorable combination of forces at the time of the first Revolution not only prevented the dictatorship of the proletariat, but above all the victory of the revolution in general.”
Leon Trotsky not only maintained the idea of the “permanent revolution”, but also expanded, after 1917, its field: from a theory that initially explained the link between the different phases of the revolution (democratic and socialist), also to its international links and to post-revolutionary dynamics. Leon Trotsky not only laid the foundations for understanding the bureaucratization of the State that emerged from the revolution (which many Marxists attributed to the circumstantial fact that Leon Trotsky survived Lenin) but also established an entire theory of the historical epoch: the “era of permanent revolution” . Leon Trotsky ridiculed the Stalinist attempt to construct an artificial “Leninism” opposed not only to the so-called Trotskyism, but also to Marx's Marxism: according to Stalin's definition (“Leninism is the Marxism of the era of proletarian revolutions”) the Marxism of Marx was pre-revolutionary!
Since the beginnings of the Communist International, the Russian CP played a central role, not only due to its political authority, but also through financial aid to other communist parties, which became a right of guardianship. In a short time, CPs that had barely emancipated themselves from the “social democratic model” found themselves faced with “Bolshevization” that imposed on them a monolithic “model”, based on a rigorously centralized apparatus. The IC's international apparatus was created based on financing from the USSR and co-optation, based on the docility and positioning of the leaders in relation to the internal struggles of the Russian CP.
From 1924 onwards, in all CPs a “fraction of the IC” was created which, at the end of the decade, would be the international apparatus of Stalinism, whose construction required the elimination of the pioneer leaders of communism in several countries: Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte in France, Heinrich Brandler and the former supporters of Rosa Luxemburg in Germany. It was the beginning of the careers of Palmiro Togliatti in Italy, Maurice Thorez and Jacques Doriot (future fascist) in France, Ernest Thälmann and Walter Ulbricht in Germany. In some cases, the situation bordered on the ridiculous. The “new policy” in China was explained by the former Menshevik Martinov, who claimed for China the same theory that opposed him to Lenin: the “revolution in stages”…
In the Soviet CP, after some initial success of the United Opposition, the “methods” of 1923 were once again used against it, on a greater scale and depth, including police provocations (such as the Opposition's use of the printing shop of a former Wrangel officer, head of the “white” counter-revolution in the civil war: in fact, he was an agent of the GPU, political police). The Opposition ended up gagged. Despite the new oppositionist outbreak of 1927, when hopes for the Chinese revolution, first, and the condemnation of the suicidal policy imposed by Stalin-Bukharin in China, later, expanded the bases of the Opposition, it was finally crushed, with its theses being thrown out of the mainstream. circulation.
Stalin's victory against the left was not, however, automatic, and he had to go through a series of crises. The Opposition launched an offensive of criticism against the Stalin-Bukharin “Chinese line”. Stalin responded administratively, with mutations, exclusions and repression, including against the opposition demonstration at the Yaroslavl railway terminal, when its leader Ivar Smilga was transferred to the Far East.
The defeat in Germany was not the last episode in the failure of the European revolution. The Anglo-Russian Committee, initially designed to attract left-wing trade union leaders to the influence of the Soviet unions, quickly adopted a conciliatory policy that led to the betrayal of the 1926 general strike. Leon Trotsky requested that this bloc be dissolved. Zinoviev initially wavered, but in the end supported Leon Trotsky's point of view. However, Stalin did not renounce this policy. When British trade union leaders supported the British imperialist attack on Nanking in 1927, the Stalinist group did not break with them. On the contrary, it was the British trade union leaders who abandoned their friends when they no longer needed them rosy. The general strike of 1926 was not only a landmark event in British history, but also in the life of the Russian party. Leon Trotsky's writings in the period, Where is Britain going? e Lessons from the General Strike, in particular, were a decisive reading of the immediate future of the European revolution.
The two factions of the Soviet CP were in crisis: Leon Trotsky maneuvered to retain Zinoviev and Kamenev, who aspired to “unity” with Stalin and Bukharin; in August 1927, Ordjonikidzé challenged Stalin in the Political Bureau of the CP, passing a resolution that did not exclude Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky (as Stalin requested). For Pierre Broué, “Stalin only won thanks to the intervention of the political police and the use of provocation, also putting pressure on his wavering allies. Only Leon Trotsky was able to speak a few times, in the executive of the Communist International. But the police decided the conflict, with the case of using the printing press of 'Wrangel's officer' (a GPU agent) to print the Opposition platform, and their alleged 'military plot'.
The final victory came with the failure of the demonstrations organized by the Opposition for November 7th: it was not, however, the victory of the majority of the party apparatus, but that of the secret police controlled by Stalin over the party, which would be sentenced to death, in the 1930s, with the execution of its former leaders and cadres, including the Stalinists, at the time of the great purges”.[ix] Exclusions from the party and arrests began. In November 1927, on the 10th anniversary of the 1917 revolution, the Opposition demonstrated in public for the last time, with its own banners (“below the nepmen”; “put Lenin’s will into practice”). The physical attacks made her retreat: Leon Trotsky's car was threatened with firearms, his wife Natália Sedova was attacked. The following day, Leon Trotsky gave his last speech in the USSR, at the funeral of Abraham Ioffe, before being detained and deported to Siberia.
On the same day, Leon Trotsky had been excluded from the party, along with Kamenev, Zinoviev, without the militants being informed of the causes, nor of the Opposition's proposals (internal democracy, industrialization based on centralized planning and taxation of kulaki, abandonment of the international strategy of “revolution in stages”). At the XV Congress of the CP, in December 1927, the capitulation of opponents was demanded: the majority of these gave in, with Zinoviev and Kamenev, seeking their reintegration into the party. Leon Trotsky, isolated, did not give in: exiled in Alma-Ata, he reorganized his Left Opposition supporters to continue a fight that would unfold in increasingly precarious conditions. Leon Trotsky's fight against bureaucratization was a continuation of his general political fight against the problems of the Soviet State in the 1920s.
The defeat of the Chinese revolution was a decisive factor in the defeat of the Russian opposition, despite the latter having seen all its predictions about it confirmed: “If, on the one hand, the bureaucratic machine owes its own triumph to the demobilization of the masses, on the other, it It is a factor in demobilization, finding its justification there. The tragic defeats of the Chinese revolution in 1927 represent a resounding confirmation of the opposition's prophecies, which denounce bureaucratic policy as the cause of this misfortune. But, strangely, these defeats terribly weaken the opposition, dealing a mortal blow to the self-confidence, audacity and morale of the militants.
Finally, setbacks reinforce the position of those responsible, making the views of those who had indicated the way to avoid them unrealistic.” [X] The year 1927 marked a decisive moment in the struggle of Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition. The fight to save the October Revolution was literally a life and death struggle, costing thousands of lives of the most dedicated revolutionaries. Prominent figures who had survived years of exile, prisons, tsarist persecution and the devastation of the civil war were swept up and brutally eliminated by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the following years.
Russia's economic backwardness, the devastation caused by the civil war and imperialist intervention, combined with the defeats experienced by the international revolutionary movement, all resulted in the growth of bureaucracy and the exhaustion of the Soviet masses. After Lenin's death, Leon Trotsky's personal authority was unrivaled; the fate of this authority depended on the general social process. Stalin's victory cannot be attributed to skills and Machiavellian maneuvers. Stalinist intrigues were subject to objective conditions; its successes depended on these conditions.
The names of Lenin and Trotsky were closely linked to the revolution in the consciousness of the masses. The reaction had to first prepare the ground through a campaign of slander. In turn, the success of this campaign of lies and distortions depended on the failure of the international revolution. The theory of socialism in one country, a miscarriage conceived of the marriage between domestic reaction and international defeat, had emerged in late 1924. Stalin had written in February 1924, “the final victory of socialism in one country can be achieved.” country, without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No, this is impossible.” Without blushing, Stalin himself could write in November of the same year: “The party has taken as its starting point… the victory of socialism in this country, and this task can be accomplished with the forces of one country.”
At the end of 1927, the Left Opposition was broken and Leon Trotsky was expelled from the party: soon after, he went into “internal exile” in Alma Ata, to finally be expelled from the USSR in 1929, beginning a period of several years in which , amid “stopovers” in several countries (Norway, Turkey, France) the world would transform, for him, into a “planet without entry visas”. Regarding the international impact caused by the internal exile, and then expulsion, of Leon Trotsky, this information speaks eloquently: “When the Germans entered Paris, in June 1940, [editor] Gaston Gallimard took care, before fleeing to Languedoc, to burn some papers compromising their authors, notably an extraordinary document: the plan for an expedition to Kazakhstan conceived by André Malraux in 1929, to free Leon Trotsky, deported in Alma Ata by order of Stalin”.[xi]
The plan included an aerial escape. The young French novelist, already author of The Conquerors, a fighter in the Indochinese revolution (and future fighter in the Spanish Civil War) had created an association to raise funds and gained important members: Gallimard had made him give up the company. Before his public rupture, Leon Trotsky would admire the literary talent of the author of Human Condition, with whom he sustained a controversy collected in Literature and Revolution.[xii]
Between 1923 and 1929, Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition waged a struggle in the USSR on all levels: that of revolutionary theory and program, that of internal politics in all its aspects and that of international politics in the main imperialist countries and in the colonial and semi-colonial world. After Leon Trotsky's exile in 1929, this struggle unfolded into the fight for an international Opposition that would continue the lines of the political current that had led the October Revolution. With the victory of Nazism in 1933, measuring its international reach and the responsibility of Stalinism in this catastrophe, the Opposition proclaimed the need for a new Workers' International, realizing this objective at the conference that, in 1938, on the outskirts of Paris, founded the IV International.
*Osvaldo Coggiola He is a professor at the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of Marxist economic theory: an introduction (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3tkGFRo]
Notes
[I] Leon Leon Trotsky. My Life. Paris, Gallimard, 1953.
[ii] VV Juravlev and NA Nenakorov. Leon Trotsky et l'affaire géorgienne. Cahiers Leon Leon Trotsky No. 41, Paris, March 1990.
[iii] Stalin wrote to Zinoviev and Bukharin in August 1923: “Should communists at the present stage strive to seize power without social democracy? Are they already ripe for this?… If now in Germany, power, so to speak, falls, and the communists get excited about it, they will fall with a bang. This is in the 'best' case. And at worst, they will be crushed and thrown to the ground…. Certainly the fascists are not taking a nap, but for us it is more advantageous for the fascists to attack first. This fact will regroup the entire working class around the communists. Furthermore, the fascists in Germany, according to the data we have, are weak. In my opinion, the Germans must be restrained, not instigated.”
[iv] Ernest Germain [Ernest Mandel]. Bureaucracy in Workers' States. Lisbon, Border, 1975.
[v] Pierre Broue. Le Parti Bolshevik. Paris, Minute, 1971.
[vi] See Pierre Broué. La Question Chinoise dans l'Internationale Communiste. Paris, EDI, 1976; and Grigori Zinoviev et al. The Great Debate. Córdoba, Past and Present, 1972.
[vii] Antonio Gramsci. Prison quarter. In: The works (org. Antonio Santucci). Roma, Riunti, 1997. Gramsci was not only unaware that one day his notebooks would be published, as well as becoming the bible of a movement within the left. You notebooks they are personal notes, in which the author abandons the normal precautions of a text intended for publication. Gramsci, therefore, cannot be considered responsible for the political use and abuse made of them, although, even so, the fragments cited reveal second-hand information and unfounded conclusions (Cf. Luigi Candreva. Gramsci and the “bolscevizazzione” of the PCI. Milan, 1996).
[viii] Perry Anderson. Gramsci's antinomies. Marxist Criticism No. 1, São Paulo, 1986.
[ix] Pierre Broue. The United Opposition (1926-1927). In: Osvaldo Coggiola. Leon Trotsky Today. São Paulo, Essay, 1994.
[X] Pierre Broue. Le Parti Bolshevik. Paris, Minute, 1971.
[xi] Jean Lacouture. André Malraux. Une vie dans le siècle. Paris, Seuil, 1973.
[xii] Malraux's memories of his later meetings with Leon Trotsky, in France, during the Bolshevik leader's temporary exile in that country, are in: André Malraux. Encounters with Leon Leon Trotsky. Leon Trotsky. Buenos Aires, Jorge Álvarez, 1969.
