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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Episode 10.101: The United Opposition
When Lenin died in january 1924, everything changed, and everything stayed the same. Lenin had been the center of gravity in the Bolshevik Party since its inception more than 20 years earlier. With that center of gravity removed the major political moons that had orbited Lenin in all these years — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Trotsky, and the rest — careened wildly through space, pulling away from each other or crashing into each other seemingly at random. So obviously in that sense, everything changed, and would never be the same.
But as they careened and crashed, a kind of political celestial mechanics provided some underlying order to the apparent randomness. Because the object of all these moons was to become the new center of gravity. Because the party Lenin built was built for Lenin to lead. It had always been premised on the existence of a single leader with unmatched authority, influence, and power. As the 1920s unfolded, Joseph Stalin slowly but surely built up his political mass until he became the new center of gravity. And just as it had been with Lenin, loyalty or hostility to Stalin now became the defining feature of Soviet politics.
Those habitually loyal and deferential to Stalin stayed in the party. Those who disagreed with him or opposed him were driven out. So, after Lenin’s death, the Communist Party wound up in a completely different place than it had been before, but also in exactly the same place it had been before: with Comrade Stalin taking Comrade Lenin’s place as the center of gravity around which the party spun.
At first, the Politburo of the Communist Party tried to keep Lenin fixed as the center of gravity, afraid of what his death meant for the Party, for Russia, and for the revolution. Instead of following instructions and giving Lenin a simple private family burial, they resolved to turn him into a permanent fixture of Russian life, to turn him into a kind of secular icon or saint for Russians to worship as a replacement for the icons and saints of the Orthodox Church. Lenin’s image was plastered everywhere. He was referenced constantly. The various political battles of the 1920s and the 1930s were always waged in terms of who most accurately reflected Lenin’s original vision. Unlike most religions, Leninism, the ideological faith, became detached from Lenin the actual man. His own statements were emphasized or suppressed to fit the changing needs and desires of whoever happened to be controlling the church — I mean, Party — half the time. Shortly after his death, they renamed Petrograd, leningrad. The name that it would bear until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And then they went so far as to embark on a kind of lunatic scheme that I’m sure most of you are aware of, to embalm and preserve Lenin’s physical body. After some trial and error with the preservation process, they finally concocted the right mix of chemicals, and so Lenin’s corpse was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum in Moscow, the flesh and bone of Lenin the actual human being turned into an artificially preserved destination for the pilgrims of communism. It also gave the new leaders of the Party a chance to stand beside Lenin anytime they needed to remind the world that they were Lenin’s true disciples, unlike the heretics and the Judases out there who had betrayed his legacy. And though the rituals and ceremonies at Lenin’s mausoleum would stay the same over the years, who remained a faithful disciple and who was branded an incurable heretic would change with absurd regularity.
As we all know, the man who would always be the faithful disciple and never the heretic, at least while he lived, was Stalin. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Stalin’s ascendancy to sole dictatorship was already underway before Lenin died. His incremental consolidation of power had begun way back when he entered the Orgburo in 1919, and skillfully exploited his hiring and firing prerogatives to promote allies and reassign rivals. This process accelerated when he became general-secretary of the party in 1922, and the slow patient, but persistent process of promoting his friends and demoting his rivals, or supporters of his rivals, or friends of his rivals, continued.
Now this could have all come to an abrupt end in 1923 or 1924. The poisonous words in Ilyich’s letter about the secretary could have been the end of him. The other members of the Politburo could have taken the recommendation to remove Stalin to heart, and removed him. But Stalin was both skillful and lucky. He was lucky that Trotsky was right there to seem like an even bigger and more obnoxious threat to the other grandees of the party, and skillful enough to exploit it. At the 13th Party Congress in May 1924, Lenin’s testament was circulated to the various delegations to their shock and consternation. But then in a carefully choreographed show, Stalin offered to resign his post while Zinoviev and Kamenev led the Congress to refuse that resignation and reaffirm their faith in the general secretary. Only later did they realize they probably missed their last best opportunity to stop Stalin’s rise to power, a mistake many of them would pay for with their lives.
In the battle for control of the Party, and the right to emerge as the true heir of Lenin, Trotsky did himself few favors and seemed almost begging to be isolated by everyone else. His relationship with Zinoviev was so toxic that they hadn’t spoken to each other privately in years. In October 1924, Trotsky had a chance to possibly seize the political initiative. Back in more collegial days, the Politburo had approved plans to publish an addition of Trotsky’s writings from 1917. As a preface to this collection, Trotsky wrote a sixty-page essay called Lessons of October that emphasized his close collaboration with Lenin, and how the two of them had persevered in carrying out the revolution in the face of vacillating hesitancy and fearful opposition from other leaders, most obviously Zinoviev and Kamenev. Trotsky sought to make 1917 the test upon which Lenin’s true disciples were evaluated, to nullifies Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s claim to Lenin’s inheritance, because while they had been with him the longest, that was meaningless, because they had not been there when Lenin needed them most. Trotsky, meanwhile stood right by his side.
Now much of what Trotsky wrote was true, but as usual, he wrote with dismissive arrogance and a distinct lack of generosity. So while Lessons of October may have been cathartic and scored a few tactical hits against his rivals, strategically, it proved to be a major, perhaps a fatal setback. The bond of solidarity of the Troika — Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev — had been slowly dissolving throughout 1924. Lessons of October re-solidified them almost immediately. Their alliance had been uncomfortable, and Trotsky came along and helpfully reminded them why they needed to stick together.
So the Troika spent the last months of 1924 assailing Trotsky from every angle. During his fifteen years at odds with the Bolsheviks prior to 1917, Trotsky had left a long and very public trail of abuse of Lenin, ridiculing him, attacking him, mocking him, all of which need only be dug up and passed around to make Trotsky look terrible in the eyes of Party members who had no conception of the dynamics of old emigre politics, who barely even knew that Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had once been two wings of the same party. They also blasted Trotsky for his conduct during the Civil War, highlighting his arbitrary abuses, poor decisions, and how he got good comrades killed, or executed them unnecessarily. By the end of 1924, Trotsky’s reputation was in ruins. In response to all this, all he could do in January 1925 was resign as commissar of the army and navy, that critical post he had held since March of 1918. Trotsky could lay rightful claim to having almost singlehandedly organized victory in the Russian Civil War, completely remaking the Red Army and traveling relentlessly from front to front until victory was secured. But now, after nearly seven years, he was unceremoniously dumped overboard. No one rejected his resignation or begged him to stay. Without Lenin around to protect him anymore, there was nobody to protect Trotsky.
To keep up appearances and to ensure Trotsky remain bound by rules of Party discipline, he retained his seats in both the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Politburo. And though he had plenty of friends and supporters inside the Party, to say nothing of the general public, in those all important committee rooms, he was isolated and alone.
But not for long.
Almost the minute Stalin successfully marginalized Trotsky, he turned on the other two partners of the Troika, Zinoviev and Kamenev, supposedly the senior partners of the Troika. And turning on them turned out to be easier than they could have imagined. In early 1925, there were only seven voting members of the Politburo: Trotsky, Zinoviev Kamenev, Stalin, plus three others: Mikhail Tomsky, Alexey Rykov, and Nikolai Bukharin. All Stalin had to do was come to an agreement with Tomsky, Rykov, and Bukharin, and they could ignore Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev completely. The way the Communist Party had been built, the way the USSR had been built, meant that the tiniest shifts in interpersonal relations inside these all important committees had major political and economic ramifications.
So one day Zinoviev and Kamenev woke up to discover they were no longer invited to the little pre-meetings that would arrange policy votes for the official Politburo sessions. Just weeks earlier, they had been the ones holding these little pre-meetings. Now, they were helplessly cut out. This shift in the balance of power in the Politburo meant a shift in policy to the right. Now labels like right and left are always a bit arbitrary, especially in this context, as we’re still talking about a bunch of Communists, not actual right wing anything, but in this context, Bukharin and his group were understood to be the right, while the opposition would be understood to be coming from the left.
Bukharin now representing the right wing of the Communist Party was surprising, as he had first burst onto the scene back in 1918 as a leader of the left Communists. He had vehemently opposed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a betrayal of the international proletariat. And while he quickly softened that line to avoid associations with the Left-SR revolt, he stayed on “the left” and was a vocal defender of war communism throughout the Civil War. He rationalized the coercive appropriations as vital to the war on a practical level, and wholly in keeping with Marxism on a theoretical level. Over the past several years, Bukharin’s stature had grown — he is after all, now sitting on the Politburo — and he was considered the brightest theoretician in the party. He drafted books and essays that became the basic texts of the Communist Party.
But by the end of the civil war, Bukharin concluded, as Lenin did, that war communism needed massive correction. In the end, all it had gotten them was a ruined economy, peasant revolts, and mass starvation. So when the NEP came around, Bukharin hopped over and became its chief defender however much it might rank them, it was far better to incentivize peasants to grow grain surpluses by offering them the chance for personal material enrichment, rather than simply confiscating those surpluses, which years of war communism had proved would drive the peasants to stop growing surpluses.
But as he defended the principles of the NEP in 1925, Bukharin committed something of a verbal faux pas that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Believing that the major industrialization projects that would bring about full socialism and communism could only come after a slow and steady accumulation of national wealth that would begin by encouraging the peasants to seek profit in what they grew, his policy prescription was, “enrich yourselves,” which in French, is enrichissez-vous, literally the words that François Guizot had used during the July Monarchy, when he was asked how people were supposed to make their voices heard in a closed regime run by bourgeois oligarchs. He did not say we’ll expand the franchise or increase democracy or make the government more responsive, he said, “Enrichissez-vous,” which everyone took to mean, once you have wealth, your voice will count. I mean, there’s a reason Guizot gets specifically namechecked at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, and Bukharin using exactly the same phrase allowed his enemies to make permanent hay of his ill chosen echo of one of the original bête noires of communism. But Bukharin’s point was that the USSR needed to grow its wealth and capital somehow, if they were gonna catch up to the Western powers who had spent centuries running exploitive, colonial empires that accumulated the capital for their economic growth and prosperity.
This question of capital accumulation was vitally important, because in 1924 and 1925 Stalin and Bukharin’s ruling group started tossing around the idea of Socialism in One Country. The idea of Socialism in One Country had been percolating in the communist subconscious going back to 1919, when they first had to face the realities that global revolution wasn’t inevitably surging throughout the world. As we have discussed ad nauseum, all Bolshevik ideology prior to the revolution was premised on Russia being one part of a larger revolutionary whole, that they would eventually get the resources they needed to turn backwards Russia into modern Russia from their friends in neighboring revolutionary regimes. But now years had passed. And they were still basically alone. Revolutions in the west never came. The Poles had stopped the Red Army cold at the Battle of Warsaw. The most recent attempts to launch a revolution in Germany had failed miserably. So, the Stalin/Bukharin clique switched gears, and began saying, hey, we don’t need the west. We can do it all ourselves. Sure we’ll continue to push for international revolution, but in the meantime, we can and must build socialism in one country.
This flew in the face of longstanding Bolshevik ideology and triggered a major pushback inside the Party from what has become known as the Left Opposition. This opposition was not formed by cranks or second rate losers. It included major figures of international communism like Trotsky and Karl Radek, as well as revolutionary heroes like Vladimir Antonoff and Nikolai Muralov, who had literally led Bolshevik forces guns in hand during the October Revolution. These were people who had literally put their lives on the line for the Bolshevik revolution, and whose courage and resiliency and revolutionary credentials could never be challenged — although, of course they would be.
The leading theorist of the left opposition was a guy called Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. In contrast to Bukharin’s theory of slowly building capital by favoring the peasant farmers Preobrazhensky advocated rapid industrialization. Industrialization now. Right now. At all costs. Full communism required a modern industrial economy with its food problem solved by collectivizing all land and turning it into giant mechanized farms, cranking out huge grain surpluses that would both feed Russians and be able to sell something abroad for profit. Profits they could immediately turn and reinvest in further industrialization projects. But like Bukharin, Preobrazhensky committed his own verbal miscue that haunted him and the Left Opposition, because he said that his plans required the exploitation of the peasants, that the party should embark on a kind of internal colonial project that would force the Russian peasants to play the part of exploited colonized people. State taxes and the price of manufactured goods would be set purposefully high, so that any and all wealth the peasantry might accrue for themselves would be necessarily directed right back to the state, who would use it to grow industry.
Most of 1925 was taken up with this debate about economic policy and relations with the peasants. Stalin sided with the right wing, and thus the Politburo maintained those policies supportive of the NEP model of growth. The left, not unreasonably, said all this policy would do is build the economic wealth and political power of class enemies of the proletarian revolution, namely the Kulaks and the NEPmen whose reconciliation with the Communist Party was transparently thin. Bukharin’s plan of enrich yourselves would probably take it to the point where they’d be able to challenge the Communists for political supremacy.
Bukharin, meanwhile, could reasonably tell the left, all you’re doing is calling for return to war communism, and we all know where that leads. We already tried exploit the peasants, and all it did was create violent unrest and lead them to abandon making surpluses entirely, so that not only did we not grow the economy and improve our manufacturing infrastructure, but we actually drove ourselves into a massive famine. Better to let the Kulaks get a little bit rich if it meant everybody’s lives could be improved, and the whole economy grew. Because otherwise it’s misery, chaos, failure, and we all get overthrown.
On account of being iced outta the Politburo, Zinoviev and Kamenev found themselves by default in the opposition. Although their votes no longer mattered in the Politburo, they were still incredibly influential, and Zinoviev in particular held other institutional positions of power. He was head of the Party in Leningrad, and he remained chairman of the Comintern. Throughout 1925, he and Kamenev followed Trotsky’s journey from imperious autocrat to plaintive democrat as soon as they got kicked out of the inner circle of power. They joined together with no less a figure than Krupskaya, the oldest of the old Bolsheviks, who is now carrying the further mantle of Lenin’s widow. They all attacked Stalin’s tightening grip on the party, that strangled free debate and creative discussion. They also joined the Left Opposition’s attacks on Bukharin’s policies that heavily favored the peasants over the workers, which Zinoviev was able to use to great effect from his position in Leningrad, that most heavily proletarian of cities.
Now, a vital point that we have to make here is that these debates were not taking place out in the open, or in public view. They were waged internally between factions of what Lenin had called that thin stratum of the Party. A cohort numbering in the mere thousands. Now that they ran a one-party state, every Communist leader considered it vital to maintain a public facade of party unanimity. Even those opposed to Stalin and Bukharin did not consider going public with their attacks. As I said last week, this self fastened muzzle kept someone like Trotsky from using his most valuable weapons against the ruling clique: his popularity, his fame, and his oratorical skills. And so too it would be for Zinoviev and Kamenev. They wanted to fight for their positions and regain power, but they were never going to call on the people to join them in this effort. In fact, as members of the Central Committee and the Politburo, they were forbidden from freely expressing themselves to the people without permission. Going public with criticism of the Party risked the greatest punishment of all: expulsion from the Party.
So despite bitter disagreements, and an awareness on all sides they were playing a high stakes winner-take-all contest for control of the Party, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the revolution, there restrict limits on how far the opposition would go to defend themselves. This put them permanently on the backfoot, as Stalin, Bukharin, and their allies were free to trumpet their own views as official policy whenever and wherever they wanted.
Going into the 15th Party Congress in December, 1925, there were stirrings, at least inside the party, of a genuine desire to debate openly the policies of Stalin and Bukharin’s clique. Zinoviev and Kamenev found influential allies in the senior leadership, and they came into this Congress ready to demand greater freedom inside the Party, and a review of Bukharin’s economic policies. But they discovered Stalin was way ahead of them. He had long since ensured this Congress would be packed with delegates of loyalty to him and Bukharin. His years of hiring and firing, promoting, and demoting had produced a compliant Congress who had come to do as they were told, not think for themselves. Zinoviev brought with him a loyal delegation from Leningrad, but practically everyone else in the room opposed the Opposition. Their attempt to dramatically carry the party away from Stalin was met with jeers and heckling. They were so thoroughly routed that Kamenev was demoted to non-voting member of the Politburo, and the Central Committee voted a Stalin loyalist named Sergei Kirov to take over the Leningrad Party from Zinoviev. Trotsky, meanwhile, just watched and did nothing. Having himself been pushed out with the gleeful connivance of Zinoviev and Kamenev, he watched from the wings with at least a liiittle bit of Schadenfreude. He did not speak for or against anyone. He just watched, silently, as events played out.
But after his two old foes had been laid low, the simultaneously natural and unnatural inevitability came to pass. In the spring of 1926, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev aligned with one another. Now this was natural, because their only hope of victory against Stalin and Bukharin was joining forces. That was obvious to all of them. But it was unnatural, because they had spent so much time wailing away on each other that it was tough to even sit in the same room. They had crossed the line from policy debates to ad hominem personal attacks years ago. Repairing that damage was not just about making political compromises, but healing emotional wounds, and those wounds did not easily heal.
But still, in the summer of 1926, they emerged as what became known as the United Opposition, which was open to just about anyone who happened to oppose Stalin and Bukharin for just about any reason. And this opposition, too, was not a bunch of scrubs. A good number of the most preeminent old Bolsheviks joined them, and Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev still had enormous influence in moral authority. But by 1926, Stalin had stacked the deck of the Party so adroitly that it probably didn’t matter how well they played their hand, they were gonna lose. The Party apparatus itself was now staffed top to bottom with men and women appointed by Stalin because they were loyal to Stalin. Younger members who had joined after 1917, who cared little about what the old guard thought, and who knew full well that their own career power and prestige were based on Stalin’s personal patronage? They were never gonna support anybody but Stalin. Stalin was their meal ticket, and everyone knew it.
But still the United Opposition fought hard to win control of the Party. Now there were of course, ideological components to this fight: what foreign policy to pursue, what economic policies to pursue, whether to favor peasants or workers, whether to have more or less political freedom. Should we do enrich yourselves or exploit the peasants? But while these ideological disputes were real, what mattered most was who had power and who didn’t. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and the Opposition attacked whatever Stalin and Bukharin and the right did because Stalin and Bukharin were in power, and the opposition was not. And in circumstances like these, one must say white to black, up to down, hot to cold, and always, in every case, framing it not as white or black, up or down, hot or cold, but right or wrong. And conversely, the ruling group denounced, degraded, and lambasted everything the Left Opposition stood for. Their crazy push to bring back forced requisitions, collectivized farming, rapid industrialization at all costs, even it meant the brutalization of the peasants — how could we even consider going back to that?
Foreshadow alert.
And so while they fought hard, the opposition only lost ground. In July 1926, the Central Committee voted Zinoviev out of the Politburo. Shortly thereafter, they eliminated the position of Chairman of the Comintern, leaving Zinoviev with no institutional base of power at all.
This left only Trotsky alone in the Politburo with a single useless vote. And he did not last much longer. In October 1926, he and Stalin got into a heated argument at a Politburo meeting, which was immediately followed by a Party conference that booted Trotsky from the Politburo. Now, for reasons of control and appearance, the Opposition leaders remained in the Central Committee, but now that they were out of the Politburo, they were told if they challenged the Politburo, they would face that fate worse than death: full expulsion from the party. Total political excommunication.
Despite these setbacks, there was still reason to hope going into 1927 the United Opposition would ultimately win. They were, after all, career revolutionaries. They had faced what appeared to be certain defeat numerous times and had yet somehow come out on top. All it took was a shift in perception or a major setback for the government to break through. And in the spring of 1927, they absolutely believed they were on the verge of success, thanks to disastrous events in the Chinese Revolution.
Now, before we go on, let us pause here one second — and I’ll share a heavy sigh that I will not be covering the Chinese Revolution — [heavy sigh] — but if I had covered the Chinese Revolution, we’d probably be in some episode in the early to mid period, say episode 876 or something, where the Nationalist Kuomintang Party has formed a united front with leftist elements, like the small Chinese Communist Party. Stalin was all for this united front, and he used his control of the Comintern to push the line on his Chinese comrades. Stalin confidently said they would squeeze the Chinese bourgeoisie like a lemon and then discard them. And he believed this is how it was gonna go… right up until the moment it didn’t. Conflicts in the KMT between left and right led General Chiang Kai-shek to affect a purge of leftists and communists, culminating with the Shanghai Massacre of April 1927, which saw right wing forces, brutally attack workers, labor unionists, and communists in Shanghai, with a death toll numbering in the thousands. It’s often pointed to as the beginning of the Chinese Civil War.
International communism was scandalized by the affair, and Trotsky, Zinoviev, and the rest of the Opposition were appalled by the news. But they were even more eager to fix the blame for the massacre squarely on Stalin, who had effectively led the Chinese communists to the slaughter by constantly recommending passive obedience to the KMT. Trotsky was now able to gather eighty-four prominent Russian Communists to draft a declaration of opposition to a litany of regime policies, co-signed by another 300 prominent members of the party. He also went and appealed to the Comintern to come adjudicate their complaints against the leaders of the Russian Communist Party.
Now, adjudicating such disputes had always been one of the ComIntern’s functions, but it had only ever been used for the small satellite parties, not the Russian mothership. But it looked like the beginning of the oppositions comeback, and so Stalin moved quickly to quash it. Anyone who signed on to this most recent declaration found themselves reassigned to new posts, often positions abroad that took them out of Russia entirely. Kamenev, for example, was appointed ambassador to Italy, where he would have to endure whatever humiliations Mussolini dreamed up for him. One popular opposition member was sent to a post in Manchuria, but when he departed, an impromptu gathering of thousands saw him off at the station, and this seemed to signal that the fight may be moving out into the street.
Fearing that Trotsky and Zinoviev would use their positions on the Central Committee to reveal damning details about the business in China, Stalin convened a party tribunal in July 1927 to expel them from the Central Committee. The charges were, first, Trotsky’s appeal to the Comintern, and then second, that impromptu gathering at the train station. Trotsky easily fended off the charges, saying on the one hand, he had been following rules agreed to by everyone when he appealed to the Comintern; and as for the incident at the train station, the Politburo itself said these reassignments were totally routine and there was nothing untoward about any of it, and so having a bunch of people come gather to see off someone who the Politburo continued to maintain was a good comrade? How could that be considered an unauthorized act of opposition.
At this meeting, Trotsky also opened up an attack that helps bring the Revolutions Podcast full circle. Everyone was well versed in the French Revolution, and they all believed that different moments, characters and movements from the French Revolution were effectively archetypes for all revolutions. Since going into the Opposition, Trotsky in particular had been banging the drum that Stalin represented the Thermidorian Reaction of the Russian Revolution, that a clique of self-interested bureaucrats were overthrowing the true revolution and replacing it with something venal and reactionary. And because it’ll help tie together the whole podcast now that we’re coming to an end, I’m gonna quote at length some passages from Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, specifically volume two, The Prophet Unarmed, where he quotes at length Trotsky speech during this tribunal. Deutscher writes:
Shortly before the opening of the proceedings, Solz [that is, Aaron Solz, the leader of the tribunal] conversing with one of Trotsky’s associates and trying to show him how pernicious was the Opposition’s role, said, “What does this lead to? You know the history of the French Revolution — and to what this led: to arrests and to the guillotine.” “Is it your intention then to guillotine us?” the Oppositionist asked, to which Solz replied: “Don’t you think that Robespierre was sorry for Danton when he sent him to the guillotine? And then Robespierre had to go himself…. Do you think he was not sorry? Indeed he was, yet he had to do it….”
Once the tribunal got going, Deutscher writes:
Having surveyed the major questions at issue, Trotsky wound up with a forceful evocation of the French Revolution. He referred to the conversation, quoted [before], between Solz and an Oppositionist. He said that he agreed with Solz that they all ought to consult anew the annals of the French Revolution; but it was necessary to use the historical analogy correctly:
And then we quote Trotsky:
During the great French Revolution, many were guillotined. We, too, brought many people before the firing squad. But there were two great chapters in the French Revolution: one went like this, [the speaker points upwards] and the other like that [he points downwards]…. In the first chapter, when the revolution moved upwards, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of that time, guillotined the Royalists and the Girondists. We too, have gone through a similar great chapter when we, the Oppositionists, together with you shot the White Guards and exiled our Girondists. But then another chapter opened in France when … the Thermidorians and the Bonapartists, who had emerged from the right wing of the Jacobin party, began to exile and shoot the left Jacobins…. I would like Comrade Solz to think out his analogy to the end and to answer for himself first of all this question: which chapter is it in which Solz is preparing to have us shot? [Commotion in the hall.] This is no laughing matter; revolution is a serious business. None of us is scared of firing squads. We are all old revolutionaries. But we must know who it is that is to be shot and what chapter it is that we are in. When we did the shooting, we knew firmly what chapter we were in. But do you, Comrade Solz, see clearly in which chapter you are preparing to shoot us? I fear that you were about to do so in… the Thermidorian chapter.
Troskey then went on to say:
Do you think that on the very next day after 9 Thermidor they said to themselves: we have now transferred power into the hand of the bourgeoisie? Nothing of the kind. Look up the newspapers at that time. They said: we have destroyed a handful of people who disturbed the peace in the party, and now after their destruction the revolution will triumph completely. If comrade Solz has any doubt about it…
And then salts interjects to say, “You are practically repeating my own words.”
And Trotsky responds:
… I shall read to you what was said by Brival, a right Jacobin and Thermidorian, when he reported on that session of the Convention which had resolved to handover Robespierre and his associates to the revolutionary tribunal: ‘Intriguers and counter-revolutionaries draping themselves with the togas of patriotism, they had sought the destruction of liberty; and the convention decreed to place them under arrest. They were: Robespierre, Couthon, St. Just, Lebas, and Robespierre the Younger. The Chairman asked what my opinion was. I replied: those who had always voted in accordance with the principles of the Mountain… voted for imprisonment. I did more… I am one of those who proposed this measure. Moreover, as secretary, I hasten to sign and to transmit to you this decree of the Convention.’, That is how the report was made by a Solz… of that time. Robespierre and his associates—these were the counter-revolutionaries. ‘Those who had always voted in accordance with the principles of the Mountain’ meant in the language of that time ‘those who had always been Bolsheviks.’ Brival considered himself an old Bolshevik. To-day, too, there are secretaries who hasten to ‘sign and transmit.’ To-day, too, there are such secretaries…
Then he went on to say:
The odour of the ‘second chapter’ now assails one’s nostrils … the party régime stifles everyone who struggles against Thermidor. The worker, the man of the mass, has been stifled in the party. The rank and file is silent. [Such had also been the condition of the Jacobin Clubs in their decay.] An anonymous reign of terror was instituted there; silence was compulsory; the 100 per cent. vote and abstention from all criticism was demanded; it was obligatory to think in accordance with the orders received from above; men were compelled to stop thinking that the party was a living and an independent organism, not a self-sufficient machine of power…. The Jacobin Clubs, the crucibles of revolution, became the nurseries of Napoleon’s future bureaucracy. We should learn from the French Revolution. But is it really necessary to repeat it?
So a couple of things about all that. Trotsky’s take on the reign of terror — that it was originally a force projected upwards at Royalists and Girondists — is a teensy bit sketchy. Sure, prominent Royalists and aristocrats were definitely caught up in the Reign of Terror, like say Louis the 16th, and Mary Antoinette, but the move against the Girondins was hardly a “upward thrust,” it was much more of a sideways jab, and which Trotsky himself clearly associates in the Russian context with the purge of the Mensheviks and the SRs, actions which he approved of. But unmentioned is the fact that the Reign of Terror was also always pointed downwards, at peasants and journalists and shopkeepers or parish priests, who provided the vast majority of the names of the victims of the Reign of Terror, long before Thermidor. The Jacobins always pointed upwards, but the guillotine always fell downwards. And, in fact, Thermidor was precipitated by those who wanted to stop the Reign of Terror, even if, as we know many of those Thermidorians had been hypocritically the worst of the terrorists.
Now Trotsky also compares himself and the left opposition to Robespierre and the true Jacobins. He criticizes the Jacobin machine for becoming too rigidly bound by enforced top-down dogmas where the slightest deviation or criticism could get your name put on a death list, while, with all due respect to Comrade Trotsky’s scholarship, to say that such things befell the Jacobins after Robespierre’s death would perhaps suggest a closer review of the Jacobin party under Robespierre’s leadership. Now, there is something to the idea that Stalin was building a cynical Bonapartist-style dictatorship that didn’t care about anything but staying in power, and was thus planning to bring the heroic revolutionary period to a close. But, let’s peek ahead just a few years and see if Stalin is planning to wind down the revolution with his newly won dictatorship. As we’ll see next week, that’s not the case at all. And in fact, Stalin would do most of what Trotsky was attacking him for failing to do. And in fact Stalin is about to implement one of the all time leading revolutions from above, not retreating, going backwards, or compromising, but going forward at speeds generated by the sacrifice of millions of lives, defended by a reign of terror that surpassed the original.
Trotsky portrayed himself as the noble Robespierre betrayed by venal bureaucrats of a new Directory. That was the chapter he thought they were in, that was the role he thought he was playing, but really, he’s just the victim of a sideways thrust of one revolutionary faction against another. And if anyone is Robespierre in this analogy, it’s Stalin. And that means Trotsky is probably just another Girondin, set to go have his final supper in the Crypt of the Conciergerie.
Now, even though this tribunal was under Stalin’s direction, they hesitated to go too far, and they did not boot Zinoviev and Trotsky from the Central Committee yet. They warned them though to cease their factional attacks on the Politburo. But sensing weakness, the Opposition instead prepared for a showdown at the 15th Party Congress, which was set for December 1927. They drafted a whole separate platform, and demanded the right to openly debate that platform and circulate it among party members. But of course, the Politburo forbid this the Opposition ignored them, and set to work printing copies anyway, a fact that was quickly uncovered by the GPU, who appeared to catch the Opposition red handed. And even worse, one of those busted at the printing press was a former officer of the White Armies, which seemed clear proof that the Opposition was no better than Kornilov or Kolchak. They were enemies of the revolution. The hilarious part, though, is that it was soon revealed that this former White officer was the police agent planted in the group to inform on. That his presence there was not a shocking discovery, he was their guy on the inside. So, if collaborating with former White officers was a crime, it was mostly the regime’s crime.
By late October 1927, Stalin moved beyond calls for Trotsky and Zinoviev to not just be kicked out of the Central Committee, but out of the Party entirely. Trotsky dared them to go forward with this expulsion. He was betting that Stalin was on the verge of overreaching, and that this would backfire.
And so that brings us to the events of November 7th, 1927, the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. Now, though they did not plan on anything too huge, the Opposition and their supporters decided to use the opportunity of public marches in the streets to unfurl banners and chant slogans in favor of the Opposition and against Stalin. They had posters that read things like “read Lenin’s Testament” or “down with the Kulaks,” y’know, anything that made Stalin’s ruling group look bad. But the secret police, the regular police, and Stalin aligned activists pounced on anyone carrying unauthorized banners, and street scuffling ensued in Moscow and in Petrograd. This scuffling made it look like the Opposition had launched a violent protest, but mostly it was just because they were getting jumped by the regime’s forces and fighting back. Victor Serge, the former anarchist turned Bolshevik, who was now a supporter of the Left Opposition, was there in Leningrad. He said that while he maneuvered amidst the crowd, he shouted, “Long live Trotsky and Zinoviev!” but that this call was met only by silence, until enemies of Trotsky and Zinoviev called, “To the dust bin with them,” a deliberate callback to Trotsky’s own declarations against Russia’s Girondins, the Mensheviks and the SRs, back in 1917, who he was now destined to follow because, it was his factions turn to be declared counter-revolutionary heretics and purged.
The response from Stalin to the events of November 7th was swift. He went straight for the jugular, convening another Party tribunal and calling for Trotsky and Zinoviev to be expelled from the Party entirely for inciting an insurrection. This time, the tribunal did not hesitate. And so in November 1920, ten years after the great October Revolution, two of the most prominent Communists in the world, two men, who had their own claim to being the true heir and disciple of Lenin, were excommunicated, expelled from the Party. It was a shocking turn of events, especially as nearly all of this infighting had been kept under wraps. And so if you were just a regular person going about your business, one minute, everyone was united in solidarity and Trotsky and Zinoviev where heroes of the revolution, and the next minute, they were demons who had been exercised from the party.
Now, Zinoviev would not be able to face this expulsion and he’d come crawling back on bended knee, but Trotsky, never would. Trotsky never could. This was the beginning of the end of his revolutionary career in Russia, and his association with the Russian Communist Party he had done so much to put in power. Kicked out of the Kremlin immediately, and then out of Moscow, he was ordered to internal exile in Kazakhstan, where he would spend a year before being departed from the USSR entirely, never to return.
Ironically, Stalin and Bukharin’s triumph over their rivals in the United Opposition coincided with an abrupt shift in power and in policy. Next time, having triumphed over the Left Opposition politically, Stalin will suddenly embrace all of their policy proposals as if he has not just spent the last few years ceaselessly attacking them. He will turn and train his political guns on Bukharin and the right as he pushes the Soviet Union towards rapid industrialization, five year plans, and mass collectivization.