TROTSKY ON STALIN
By G. B. THOMAS ROTSKY'S monumental study of Stalin was only two-thirds I completed when he was assassinated in 194o. The work has been finished and translated by Charles Malmamuth.* It is impossible to find in it any trace of the high ideals and principles that are said to have inspired the 'bakers of the Russian Revolution. All one sees is a ruthless and utterly un- scrupulous struggle for power ; unredeemed at any stage by even a passing consciousness of guilt.. "The swing of the pendulum of history," Trotsky wrote, " has returned us in many respects to the epoch of the Renaissance, even exceeding it in the extent and depth of its cruelties and bestialities." I must leave it to the historian to grapple with this comparison. It seems to me to be altogether too facile as a defence of all that has happened in the past twenty-five years. More successfully than any other catastrophe in the history of Christendom, the Russian Revolution has levelled the frontiers between good and evil, and with them the old demarca- tion lines between freedom and slavery, equality and privilege, truth and falsehood, mercy and cruelty ; and not content with breaking the bodies of its children, it has crippled and destroyed their souls. A Renaissance murder was a flamboyant act of wickedness, a challenge to God ; a Soviet murder is nothing more than a dull chore, like washing out a test-tube. A Soviet lie is, as it were, a mere ingredient in the State laboratories. Neither is subject to any moral criteria. " Our epoch," says Trotsky from his grave, " is above all an epoch of lies." He says it in the same casual way as we might say that our epoch is an epoch of the petrol engine. Religion to him is merely one of the many social vices that impede the progress of the revolu- tion. "Religiousness, on the one hand, and drunkenness, card-playing and the like, on the other, waxed stronger than ever in the backward strata of the working class." That is how Trotsky measured the effects of the abortive insurrection in 1905.
Strong as his case against Stalin is, it is nevertheless, in terms of Trotsky's own philosophy, devoid of moral content. Trotsky tells us that Stalin betrayed the Revolution ; he shows how he exterminated all the old Bolsheviks and set up a Soviet reaction whose conditions " were immeasurably more difficult for the Opposition than the con- ditions of the Tsarist reaction had been for the Bolsheviks." He proves how, step by step, and lie by lie, the myth of Stalin's glorious revolutionary past has been enthroned. Even "The literature and art of the Stalinist epoch will go down in history as examples of the most absurd and abject Byzantinism." In spite of it all, we are left with the feeling that things would not have been so very different if Stalin, and not Trotsky, had been murdered in his Mexican exile. The need for order, after the chaos of the Revolution and the wars
* Stalin. (Hollis and Carter, 25s.)
of intervention, was so great that any man or group of men capable of providing it was almost bound to come to the top. Almost half of the book is devoted to Stalin's early years, and as a historical record of this period Trotsky's account is an invaluable source of information. His corrosive hatred for his great rival—a hatred that now, so to speak, emerges from the tomb—is so palpable that we may be inclined to doubt some of his conclusions. He offers no proof for the charge that Stalin murdered Lenin and Gorki. The thread of his narrative is constantly broken by sneers ; sneers like this : "It is easier to imagine him (Stalin) placing traps at night than firing a gun at a bird in flight." His contempt for Stalin is overpowering. Stalin is nothing but a " plebeian democrat and an oafish provincial forced by the trend of the times to assume the Marxist tinge."
Nothing of all this helps us to understand how Stalin managed to scale the lonely peaks of power, and to remain there against the envy of his friends. Not even the qualities which Lenin admired— his " firmness, grit, stubbornness and to a certain extent his slyness " —explain how Stalin managed to grasp power, and to hold on to it against the opposition of abler and more experienced colleagues. The reason must be sought, I think, in his superb sense of timing. Where his ignorance was absolute, as in the field of foreign affairs, he made catastrophic mistakes. But on his own ground he was supreme. In his analysis of the factors that held a power-grouping together, in his instinctive knowledge of the right time to join one grouping, to leave another, or to smash a third, he was, on Trotsky's own showing, a master who towered head and shoulders above them all. His sense of realism was absolute, and Trotsky, and even Lenin, appear almost as romantics by comparison. " In discussions with opponents," Trotsky admits, " Stalin would not let anyone pull the wool over his eyes." The secret of power had been revealed to him.
He was the only one who seemed to understand the bases on which power in Soviet Russia was bound to rest. First of all, there was this fundamental concept: " that the October Revolution, as the source of the new regime, had assumed the central position in the ideology of the new ruling circles." At a very early stage, therefore, Stalin set about establishing the myth that he and Lenin were the fathers of the Revolution. Then, since nationalisation, with its de- pendence upon a bureaucracy, would inevitably set up a new social hierarchy, Stalin grasped that he could always rely upon it to fight to the death against any threat to its power and privileges by a new social class. It is against this background that Trotsky explains Stalin's successful struggle against the kulaks. Finally, " as the life of the bureaucracy grew in stability, it generated an increasing need of comfort." Stalin " rode in on the crest of this spontaneous move- ment for creature comfort, guiding it, harnessing it to his own designs." And ultimately "the control of the surplus product "—that famous surplus product of Marxism—" opened the bureaucracy's road to power." What does it matter that Stalin " without knowing it, is organising not only a new political machine, but a new caste ? " After all, the power is his.
The picture of Stalin as superb machine politician emerges clearly from these pages. What is equally clear is that Stalin " always acted empirically, under the pressure of his natural opportunism, which has always driven him to seek the line of least resistance." Neither the rules of his party nor the principles of the Revolution mattered anything to him ; what was important was the efficiency of the party machine, and his ability to control it. If this be true, and I think it is, we shall have to revise a great many of our present notions about Soviet foreign policy. We shall have to abandon the laboured attempts of our experts to analyse Stalin's speeches and Soviet .news- paper articles in the hope of finding out what Moscow's policy really is. There is no policy, except the policy of weakening opponents in the non-Stalinist world. And if Stalinism is merely another word for opportunism, then Soviet foreign policy is merely a reflection of our own. That is to say, it will be strong when ours is weak, and weak when London and Washington are strong. We can see for ourselves that every territorial gain, every diplomatic victory won by the Soviet Union in the past decade has been the product of first German and later Western diplomatic weakness. Where there has been a rare show of strength as in Persia—Stalin's opportunism has led Russia to give way. Where the West has bluffed and blustered, without the will or the means to put its protests into effect—as in south-eastern Europe—Soviet policy has prevailed. For Stalin, that master realist, is well aware that whatever may be the worth of spiritual forces in time of war, it is only the country with adequate power at its disposal which can hold its own in the days of peace.
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