The Romantic Myth of Leon Trotsky Debunked.

The most controversial figure in the pantheon of Russian Revolutionary leaders has remained that of Leon Trotsky and Robert Service's devastatingly accurate biography of this brave and bad man still has the capacity to annoy Trotskyists like Tariq Ali, Chris Harman and Peter Taafe.



Service is far more asture than these ideologues and correctly claims that Trotsky was both an opportunist and self serving ideologue ( no less than his sententious devotees ) and that has led to outrage amongst those who still cannot come to terms with his direct role in creating a horrific totalitarian state.

Service mentions the obvious facts about Trotsky's career as a professional revolutionary: the fact that he joined the Bolsheviks late only when he saw the opportunity to seize power in the run up to October 1917.

This was after having back in 1905 condemned Lenin for his "Jacobinism" and compared him to Robespierre for his factionalism. This was merely a pose to upgrade Trotsky into a potential great man of the Revolution who stood above dull politicking.

The faith in apocalyptic violence was always part of Trotsky's creed of world historical Revolution as only through Terror could a New Man be forged and to which ends millions of lives could be sacrificed.

Trotsky, however, before the Great War posed as the great unifier who was above factional squabbling but once the chance to become a world historical leader presented itself he changed his tune and started playing on crude demagogy and joined the Bolsheviks after February 1917.

As a street agitator denouncing the continuation of the Great War, Trotsky was already countenancing mass terror when addressing the Kronstadt naval garrison on Anchor Square where he called for the violent removal of the Provisional Government,

'I tell you heads must roll, blood must flow...The strength of the French Revolution was in a machine that made the enemies of the people shorter by a head. This is a fine device. We must have it in every city'

This is the point lost on Tariq Ali, a remnant Trotskyist, who condemned Service's "counter-factual school" of history, a total invertion of the truth as it is Ali who is doing that by pretending that had it not been for Lenin and Trotsky, then,

'...what might have happened had Generals Kornilov, Denikin and Yudenich triumphed instead of Lenin and Trotsky. One thing is virtually certain: since the revolution was portrayed as the work of Jewish-Bolsheviks, a wave of pogroms would have decimated the Jews.

This ignores the fact that the Civil War followed the Bolshevik seizure of power and which with Trotsky's backing was designed the telescope revolution in Russia into one universal Civil War across Europe as a specific aim. That was what Trotsky meant by "permanent revolution".

On July 2 1917, Trotsky had already endorsed the idea of a proletarian and peasants revolution in which the Bolsheviks alone were to be the sole vanguard party and about how a dictatorship of the proletariat was to be set up and created and enemies of the people disposed of.

It was enough to smash the entire existing system and break all possibility with liberal democratic politics in such a way that there was no way through consent and negotiation of creating a new government that could not but be based on mass violence and state terror.

Well before the Civil War got under way in 1919-1920, Trotsky was pushing harder for a policy of a totalitarian One Party State that could only but polarise Russia and push it further towards a colossal bloodbath that it became.

For at start the attempted Kornilov Coup was not merely thwarted by the Bolsheviks but by the Socialist Revolutionaries and other left wing groups who defended the Revolution from what was a confused and hardly threatening debacle at the behest of Kerensky himself, leader of the Provisional Government..

Ali's ignorance of the Russian Revolution's dynamic is confirmed by the fact that Denikin and Yudenich's White Forces only started to muster in late 1918 and in full force in 1919 after the Civil War had been started not by anti-semitic reactionaries but by rival left wing groups.

After the Bolsheviks received only a quarter of the vote in the Constituent Assembly of 1918, the Sovnarkom and the power of Military Revolutionary Committee led by Trotsky dissolved it as they would tolerate not rivals, not even from the Left SRs who opposed the war.

Having already committed himself to the Bolshevik's effective hijacking of the Russian Revolution by Lenin and agreed to having made peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, he was bound now to the Bolsheviks if he wanted to continue to make an impact.

When the SRs retreated from St Petersburg to Kazan , Trotsky in his new capacity as the People's Commissariat For Military affairs now turned on the Kronstadt sailors as early as April 1918 when they started complaining of the lack of pay and conditions.

Trotsky harangued the sailors he had just one year before called on to overthrow the Provisional Government by cursing the sailors 'with his tongue for quarter of an hour and sent them away like whipped curs' according to one eye witness.

Furthermore before that he had made it quite clear that his view of the sailors, the "beauty and pride of the Revolution" were always going to be subordinated to his orders and that the masses required as Service puts it 'strict tutelage' by The Party.

When Trotsky dashed out to Samara to whip the disillusioned Czech legions into line, they accused the Bolsheviks of treachery and joined the Committee of the Members of the Constituent Assembly ( Komuch ), an anti-Bolshevik counter government based in Kazan.

Military conflict between the SRs and the Bolsheviks broke out in June 1918 and this threatened to drive a wedge between Petrograd and Moscow and the grain supplies needed in the cities. That was the direct result of the destruction of democracy in Russia.

The Bolsheviks under Trotsky initiated the forced requisitioning of grain from peasants-the Food Dictatorship-which in turn drove the Left SRs to join the so-called "counter-revolution" and who were ruthlessly crushed by detachments of Latvian riflemen.

Forced grain requisitioning at the barrel of the gun and bayonet was justified in laguage later used frequently by Stalin when scapegoating the richer peasants or Kulaks for hoarding grain that they were expected to harvest for nothing other than serving a dictatorial state.

Trotsky called for those 'hoarders' to be sentenced to ten years hard labour, a policy that rapidly started to develop into the policy of the Red Terror ans the enemy deserved 'merciless annihilation' in his words.

The Left SRs were supporters of the Revolution that Trotsky had supported in the early 1900s until he embraced Marxism. Now he was determined to crush with maximum force those like Mikhail Muravev and even previously erstwhile Bolsheviks like Pantaleev.

Pantaleev had been commissar of the Numery Petrograd Regiment and rather than confront the Bolsheviks after battles around Sviyazhsk, he commandeered a steamboat up the Volga to Nizhni Novgorod were Trotsky ordered those on board to be summarily executed

That enraged Bolsheviks serving in the Red Army, that Lenin and Trotsky now fully endorsed an extension of this policy of arbitrary discipline and state terror by using the Cheka, the political police set up in December 1917, to launch an all out Civil War on all 'class enemies'.

As Service makes it clear the point of no return had virtually already been reached,

'Lenin and Trotsky wanted a civil war in order to have the chance to carry out the irreversible suppression of enemies of the October Revolution. Neither of them said this directly in public. A telegram Trotsky sent to Lenin on 17 August summed up their attitude

"....I consider it unacceptable to let steamers sail the Volga under a Red Cross flag. The receipt of grain will be interpreted by charlatans and fools as showing the possibility that agreement can be made and civil war is unnecessary....Air pilots and artillerymen have been ordered to bomb and set fire to the bourgeois districts of Kazan and then Simbirsk and Samara. In these conditions a Red Cross caravan is inappropriate....

To that extent Tariq Ali, rather like Trotsky's hagiographer Isaac Deutscher, is correct to assume that,

The socialist revolution, unlike the bourgeois revolutions that transformed Europe in the 16-18th centuries, was a premeditated project intended for a more advanced country than Russia.

Even for its leaders, the Bolshevik triumph of 1917 was a leap in the dark. Bolshevik orthodoxy did not believe that the infant republic could last on its own. The party leadership was waiting for the German revolution to break its isolation and transform Europe.

Yet this hinged on a tremendous continental wide fantasy and gamble effectively quashed by the suppression of the Spartacist Revolt of November 1918 in Germany led by the romantic Marxists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Yet it was Luxemburg who castigated the Bolsheviks for their arbitrary Red Terror and extension of Tsarist style tactics taken to extremity in crushing democratic activism by the masses and substituting the dictatorship of the proletariat for a dictatorship over them.

'It is amusing to note the strange somersaults that the respectable human “ego” has had to perform in recent Russian history. Knocked to the ground, almost reduced to dust, by Russian absolutism, the “ego” takes revenge by turning to revolutionary activity.

In the shape of a committee of conspirators, in the name of a nonexistent Will of the People, it seats itself on a kind of throne and proclaims it is all-powerful. But the “object” proves to be the stronger. The knout is triumphant, for tsarist might seems to be the “legitimate” expression of history.

Tariq Ali soft peddles the terror and mass murder unleashed by the Bolsheviks thus,

'Instead the main imperialist states decided to back the White counter-revolution, leading to a civil war that was won by the newly created Red Army, but at a terrible cost: the peasants had been alienated by forced requisitions and conscription. The civil war of 1918-21 exhausted the tiny working class. Many died and a layer that survived was rapidly absorbed into the machinery of the new state.

That is an expedient falsehood if the unpleasant realities that happened during the Red Army's methods of inducing and fighting civil war and the fact Trotsky was the commissar on the spot who started the forced grain requisitioning whilst Lenin gave bureaucratic orders from Moscow.

The best Ali can feebly muster in his defence is this,

Trotsky, as the founder and organiser of the Red Army, was undoubtedly ruthless in ensuring the victory of his side – as was Lincoln during the American civil war.

Exhausted at home and isolated abroad, the Bolshevik leaders, obsessed by the fate of Robespierre and Saint-Just, decided that they must hold on to power whatever the cost. An early outcome was the brutal repression of the Kronstadt sailors' mutiny.

What Ali fails to mention is Trotsky's key role in crushing the Kronstadt Revolt in 1921. He mentions it as if it had nothing to do with the way that Lenin and Trotsky had seized power, suppressed any form of democratic accountability..

Moreover the manner Trotsky in the 1920s subordinated workers to the need for centrally commanded "labour armies", all of which was supported by Stalin completely, counters the myth that Trotsky and Stalin were always so fundamentally different during the Revolution.

The facts about Kronstadt are now well established and it is truly chilling that those like Ali can skip over how and what Trotsky did to these sailors in getting Sergei Kamenev, the Red Army Supreme Commander to order Tukhachevski to get troops to suppress the mutiny.

The mutiny was essentially a complete repudiation of every draconian anti-worker policy the Bolsheviks had instituted from forced requisitioning and the armed units that blocked the free exchange of goods as well as the poverty and disease and crushing of trade union rights.

The Kronstadt Mutineers Manifesto was clear,

In carrying out the October Revolution, the working class hoped to achieve its liberation. The outcome has been even greater enslavement of human beings.

Power has passed from a monarchy based on the police and gendarmerie into the hands of usurpers - Communists - who have given the toilers not freedom but the daily dread of ending up in the torture chambers of the Cheka, the horrors of which exceed many times the rule of tsarism's gendarmerie.

Calling for "exceptional measures" the troops marched across the ice and were "petit-bourgeois" counter-revolutionaries who should be "shot like partridges" on the basis that they were prepared to aid an Allied invasion via the Baltic.

Following a practice later used by the Red Army during the Second World War under Stalin was the use of "blocking detachments" to ensure the Red Army did not take one step back. Trotsky's crushing of Kronstadt thus had an other element that led to Stalinism.

Dzierzynski's Cheka stayed in the rear, with their machine guns ready, with orders to kill all retreating soldiers. As Richard Pipes puts it in Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime "Some Red soldiers refused to charged; about one thousand went over to the rebels."

So unpopular was this attack that Tukhachevski even had to send in special units within the regular Red Army troops to combat the possibility of internal dissent and rebellion against the military orders.

The sailors were later either shot or sent to the nascent Gulag labour camp or 'disciplinary colony' at Ukhta in the Russian North or sent to other naval units. This was ordered by the Politburo with Trotsky and Lenin present on 27 April 1921.

In the 1938 when questioned about Kronstadt by Victor Serge, Trotsky simply lied about it all,

“I never spoke of that question [Kronstadt 1921], not that I have anything to hide but, on the contrary, precisely because I have nothing to say...Personally I didn’t participate at all in the crushing of the rebellion, nor in the repression that followed.”

Ali's view of Trotsky being wholly at variance with the terrorism later used against the Bolshevik Party itself is based on a pure ideology divorced from the facts as they really were and indifference to the realities.

Trotsky's draconian policies of decimating soldiers in the Red Army for failures, his kidnapping of Generals families as hostages to ensure "loyalty" and continual threats to execute soldiers for failing were wholly disproportional.

Ali deludes himself completely in the most "counter-factual" manner possible by then asserting that the descent of the Bolshevik Revolution into bloodshed was not inherent in the way they seized power but in the myth of Imperialist Encirclement and war losses.

A later result was Stalinism, which destroyed not simply the aspirations of the revolution but most of its leading cadres.Ninety per cent of Lenin's central committee were denounced as traitors and executed. Stalin killed more Bolsheviks than the Tsar.

That was not merely Stalin's work but was inherent in the militaristic nature of Trotsky's Bolshevism when in 1918 he opined "Soviet saboteurs must be punished as severely as bourgeois ones".

John Gray correctly asserts that Stalin simply took the Terror initiated by Lenin and Trotsky and applied it more ruthlessly, with the exception that he applied it, as Lenin and Trotsky only did on a relatively small scale, to the Bolshevik Party itself.

'Together with Trotsky, Lenin set up concentration camps, instituted a system of hostages to ensure obedience in suspect groups and executed about 200,000 people between 1917 and 1923. The Bolshevik leaders were clear that state terror was indispensably necessary for achieving a communist society in which the State – along with war, property, and religion – would no longer exist. It was Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, who pioneered state terror in Russia, and they did so in order to realise a vision of Utopia

'Trotsky totally destroyed the voluntaristic aspects a citizens militia of idealists for the Revolution and excoriated those like I.M Smirnov, a Left Communist who complained about Trotsky's hierarchical regulations as being contrary to the comradely traditions of the party.

That makes a mockery of Ali's bland insistence that,

Attempts to reform the system from within failed largely because the bureaucracy refused to surrender its power. Ultimately it exhausted itself and capitulated quietly and shamefully to the forces of global capitalism

This is nonsense. The Soviet Union failed precisely because being held together by force, that lack of willpower to maintain it by such means by the late 1980s accelerated the desire to be rid of this totalitarian state as the historical truth of the early years came out under Gorbachev

In fact long before perestroika and glasnost, Trotsky's complicity in crushing the Kronstadt sailors in 1921 had been publicised by those opposed to Trotsky's later desire to cover it up in the 1930's when he wrote The Revolution Betrayed and My Life.

Every occasion on which Trotsky tried to talk about what Ali calls his devotion to 'the transition from the the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom and workers 'self-emancipation' he was embarrassed by those like Victor Serge who kept bringing it up.

This was particularly humiliating when Trotsky was trying to pose as the champion of anti-Stalinist resistance during the Spanish Civil War ( 1936-1939 ) when he castigated Stalinist agents of the NKVD for tracking down and liquidating the rival democratic left.

Viktor Serge, a former anarchist of Russian parentage who had gone to Russia to support the Revolution demanded Trotsky face up to his role in crushing the Kronstadt Mutiny and thus his role in setting up a One Party State.

Trotsky's reply was intellectually feeble rationalisation based on what Service correctly calls 'casuistry' and 'Jesuitical sophistry' as he maintained that the Kronstadt sailors of 1917 were not the' same ones' he ordered to be mercilessly crushed in 1921.

But they were the same sailors, of course. In 1919 the sailors had fought bravely for the Red Army but of the 10,000 who had been stationed there in 1917, some 4,000 had turned in their Bolshevik membership cards by the winter of 1920-1921.

So in the sense that there were 4000 fewer Bolshevik Kronstadt sailors they could be considered not exactly the same sailors. A devious sleight of hand. Serge was having none of Trotsky's evasions and dissimulation . In Once More: Kronstadt, Serge insisted,

'There remains broadly the fact that the uprisings of Kronstadt and other localities signified to the party the absolute impossibility of persevering on the road of War Communism. The country was dying of bitter-end state-ification. Who then was right? The Central Committee which clung to a road without issue or the masses driven to extremities by famine?

L.D. Trotsky emphasizes that the sailors and soldiers of the Kronstadt of 1921 were no longer the same, with regard to revolutionary consciousness, as those of 1918.... But the party of 1921 – was it the same as that of 1918? Was it not already suffering from a bureaucratic befoulment which often detached it from the masses and rendered it inhuman towards them?

When and how did it begin to employ towards the toiling masses, whose energy and highest consciousness it expressed, non-socialist methods which must be condemned because they ended by assuring the victory of the bureaucracy over the proletariat?

This question posed, it can be seen that the first symptoms of the evil date far back. In 1920, the Menshevik social-democrats were falsely accused, in a communiqué of the Cheka, of intelligence with the enemy, of sabotage, etc. This communiqué, monstrously false, served to outlaw them

Let us go back still further. Has not the moment come to declare that the day of the glorious year of 1918 when the Central Committee of the party decided to permit the Extraordinary Commissions to apply the death penalty on the basis of secret procedure, without hearing the accused who could not defend themselves, is a black day?

That day the Central Committee was in a position to restore or not restore an Inquisitional procedure forgotten by European civilization. In any case, it committed a mistake. It did not necessarily behoove a victorious socialist party to commit that mistake. The revolution could have defended itself better without that.

We would indeed be wrong to conceal from ourselves today that the whole historical acquisition of the Russian revolution is being called into question.

Out of the vast experience of Bolshevism, the revolutionary Marxists will save what is essential, durable, only by taking up all the problems again from the bottom, with a genuine freedom of mind, without party vanity

Trotsky's response was simply to ignore it or blatantly lie about his role in it, as do his dwindling band of fanatical theologians of revolution who still cling to the myth of Trotsky as as some "martyr" to the Russian Revolution or, as Deutscher put it, The Prophet Outcast.

Bibliography

Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography.
Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime.
Victor Serge, Once More: Kronstadt.
Victor Serge, Kronstadt 1921, Trotsky’s Defense. Response to Trotsky.
John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Revolution and the Death of Utopia.
John Gray, A Trail of Terror Stretching 200 years ( The Times )
John Gray, Behind the Myth ( Literary Review )