Trotsky

Ian D. Thatcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134572144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new biography provides a full account of Leon Trotsky's political life, based upon a wealth of primary sources, including previously unpublished material.

Ian D. Thatcher paints a new picture of Trotsky's standing in Russian and world history. Key myths about Trotsky's heroic work as a revolutionary, especially in Russia's first revolution of 1905 and the Russian Civil War, are thrown into question. Although Trotsky had a limited understanding of crucial contemporary events such as Hitler's rise to power, he was an important thinker and politician, not least as a trenchant critic of Stalin's version of communism.

1
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THE YOUNG REVOLUTIONARY, 1879–1907

The main source of our knowledge about Trotsky's early life is the version set out in the autobiography of the late 1920s, My Life. He was born in 1879 in the village of Yanovka in the south of the Ukraine, the third child of David and Anneta Bronstein. By his own account, the young Lev Bronstein, or Leon Trotsky as he came to be known, did not experience any particular hardship. The family was comfortably off and prospering. There was a maid and a cook to help with the domestic chores. The boy Trotsky was a loved and favoured son. His parents set great store by education. Eventually they arranged for Leon to stay with relatives in the town of Odessa so that he could enjoy a better schooling. We cannot be certain how far Trotsky projected the political beliefs he subsequently acquired onto his younger self. He did claim, however, that as a boy he was conscious of his father's unjust exploitation of poorer neighbours and that in school he defended the weak from attack. He even noted that the skirmishes at school offered lessons for the more consequential political conflicts of his future, with ‘the talebearers and the envious at one pole, the frank, courageous boys at the other, and the neutral, vacillating mass in the middle’.¹

FIRST POLITICAL STEPS

When Trotsky was coming of age as a young man, opposition to tsarism was divided into several schools of thought, including nationalist, socialist, populist and liberal. These trends were not necessarily easily demarcated, and anyone new to opposition politics would be open to many possible influences. Political choices would no doubt be made partly by accident, depending upon location and circumstance, upon peers and what literature came one's way in a regime of censorship. It is not clear exactly when Trotsky considered himself a Marxist. His first political acts consisted of reading illegal literature and discussing it with a small circle of associates, and taking part in the so-called Southern Russian Workers' Union (SRWU), which had a brief existence from April 1897 to January 1898. Despite its grand-sounding name, the SRWU was no more than a small body composed mainly of student activist intellectuals similar to the young Trotsky. It was as a member of this organisation that he underwent his first arrest and journey into internal exile in Siberia. From there he wrote an account of the SRWU, which appeared in a pamphlet on the workers' movement in Odessa and Nikolaev, published in Geneva in 1900. This is an interesting source, in which Trotsky identifies the opportunities and difficulties of socialist agitation in provincial Russia.

Trotsky considers Nikolaev to have been ripe for the formation of the SRWU for several reasons. Most notably, thanks to investment from state and foreign capital, the town's factory working class had mushroomed in size from under 1,000 in 1896 to over 5,500 in 1897. Although modern scholarship points out that the Russian working class was not in the main located in large factories, what struck the young Trotsky was precisely the larger industrial plants. It was here, he argued, that the workforce was younger and enjoyed higher literacy levels, a hopeful combination for a revolutionary activist. This early impression left a lasting mark on Trotsky's outlook that always favoured the large factories as the best breeding ground for socialism. Trotsky claims that, unfortunately, it was beyond the material and physical means of the SRWU to satisfy the undoubted desires of the workers for an education in socialism. Most disruptive of all was infiltration by the police, which eventually accounted for the arrest of the leading organisers and the closure of the SRWU. Nevertheless, despite its small scale and quick disappearance, Trotsky's involvement in the SRWU gave him important practical experience, from collecting dues to dividing money amongst strike funds, mutual self-help schemes and the building of libraries, from conducting education circles to writing propaganda. From these tasks he drew important conclusions about how socialists should organise and act in inhospitable Russian conditions.

The best way to reach the workers, Trotsky advised, was through good propaganda, especially the production of a regular newspaper. The majority of its coverage should be dedicated to local issues of real relevance to the readership. Only after contact and trust had been built up in this way could more abstract concepts of exploitation be raised. Socialists should also learn how to write brief and understandable leaflets for distribution at the factories over specific grievances. These were also useful in creating bridges over which the workers could be led from particular conflicts to the general principles of Marxism. As well as focusing upon bread-and-butter issues, Trotsky stressed the need to entertain the workers. Irony, amusing illustrations, stories, poems and songs should all be integral elements of socialist journalism. Beyond this, Trotsky touched upon other topics socialist literature should cover. Given the problems of police surveillance and arrests, he recommended that a manual be produced advising comrades how to identify police spies and listing the rights comrades would have should they fall victim to the oppressive tsarist regime. Recounting the events that led up to the demise of the SRWU, Trotsky warned against excessive centralisation of workers' organisations. The SRWU was made up of a series of local cells, each of no more than twenty-five members and each having its own committee of five office-holders: cashier, bookkeeper, secretary and two deputies. The members would meet twice each week to discuss their cell's progress and activities. Linking the cells to a central committee created nothing, according to Trotsky, but trouble. Once the central committee was compromised and its assets seized, for example, all activities were brought to an abrupt end. A system of independent and isolated cells, answering local needs and questions through their own printing presses or hectographs, was the most sensible method to ensure continuity of action even if one cell was arrested.

Soon after dispatching his essay on the SRWU, Trotsky was engaged as a correspondent of a newspaper published in Irkutsk. The Eastern Review was widely read amongst the local population, including the colony of political prisoners. We do not know how Trotsky was co-opted, but his contributions afforded him a chance to expand his journalistic portfolio. No longer was he writing simple copy for a humble audience. Now he set out to impress with his erudition in classic and contemporary literature and philosophy, commenting and criticising from a Marxist perspective.

Trotsky, for example, exposes the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen as a timid critic of bourgeois society. Sickened by its hypocrisy and restrictions, Ibsen was nevertheless unable to think beyond bourgeois categories:

Ibsen starts with individuality and returns to it. He resolves – or tries to resolve – every social problem within the bounds of individual spirit. He widens and deepens this flexible individual spirit to superhuman dimensions (Brand) without even touching on social conditions.²

Several of Trotsky's essays are concerned with the relationship between art and economic and social progress. Although an enemy of bourgeois exploitation, Trotsky welcomed the spread of capitalism into the dark and ignorant countryside (the poverty of peasant life was a frequent topic of his journalism). Machines more than unspoiled nature, he declared, contain the beauty that inspires great art. Nor, he explained in another contribution, should artists worry that the increasing power of man over nature was rendering the ‘thick novel’ of pre-industrial society obsolete. Rather the novel had to adapt to new conditions, even if, in certain respects, it was being superseded by the contemporary short story:

Life becomes more complicated, it becomes richer … and literature is forced not to reject old forms for embodying creativity, but rather to create new ones. The novel survives as a social frame for all the beauties and horrors of life that look at us in isolated images and scenes in the pages of sketches and essays. … The novel fascinates us for its wide social scope, while the short story achieves the same effect, but with the energy of a psychological blow. But if the novel is dead as a mandatory form, with all its ritual of chapters, parts, prologues and epilogues, it lives on nevertheless as a modern Iliad, as a poem of Reality. So, the novel is dead: long live the novel!³

Not all of Trotsky's essays were easy to digest. An attack on metaphysical thinkers writing in the journal Questions of Philosophy, for example, contains numerous contorted sentences, in which clarity of meaning is lost. However, such excursions were typical of a young man who was not modest in outlook or in viewpoint. An ambitious writer, one who did not hide his dislike of barren lands, Trotsky resolved upon an escape from his Siberian exile. Leaving a wife and children behind, he took flight along a path that was to lead him to Western Europe, with its ranks of local and émigré socialists.

TROTSKY AND ÉMIGRÉ POLITICS, 1902–4

Trotsky entered the world of émigré politics at a particularly important time for Russian social democracy. The movement's First Congress had been held in Minsk in 1898, but this had turned into a largely decorative affair as its participants were quickly arrested. Since then there had been debates over how best to further the cause but no follow-up congress. The party programme and the form of its organisation needed to be clarified. By 1902 several groups and leading individuals were planning the convocation of a new congress. Chief amongst these were the editors of the newspaper The Spark. This had begun publication in December 1900. For V.I. Lenin, producing and distributing The Spark was the means to assert orthodoxy in theory and to build up a network of agents answerable to a centralised leadership under his control. This view of a centralised, professional operation, which Lenin saw as the ideal model for the political party to follow, was much at odds with the loosely connected body of locally based cells favoured by Trotsky after his work in the SRWU. For Lenin, however, Trotsky's suggestions would have smacked of the amateurish, parochial outlook characteristic of the so-called sin of kustarnichestvo (amateurish work).

When Trotsky met Lenin at his London home in 1902 it is not clear to what extent Trotsky had abandoned his former views. He was, however, invited to contribute articles to The Spark. Beginning in November 1902, the topics Trotsky addressed focused on events in Russia. Employing an ironic humour that was to become his trademark as a revolutionary journalist, Trotsky exposed the evils and contradictions of the tsarist system of government, from a corrupt and oppressive Ministry of Internal Affairs to a bankrupt foreign policy in the Balkans. Trotsky's target audience was social democrats and workers, whom he warned of the dangers of liberal opposition tactics of within-system reform, and of the obvious flaws in the regime's attempts to fool the workers to take part in officially sponsored ‘Zubatov’ trade unions, so called after the police chief who thought that they could be used to channel the workers' discontent into less harmful pursuits.

As is clear from their private correspondence, The Spark's working editors, chiefly Lenin and Yu. Martov, were so impressed by Trotsky's talents and energy that in the spring of 1903 Lenin proposed that Trotsky be invited to join the editorial board.⁴ Martov, who in turn urged co-editor and leading theorist Pavel Akselrod to give his support, warmly welcomed this suggestion.⁵ Unfortunately for Trotsky a unanimous vote was required and G. Plekhanov, the ‘father of Russian Marxism’, had sufficient doubts about the young prodigy to have the decision delayed until after the Second Congress, now set for July– August 1903. But in the meantime Trotsky had guaranteed for himself a seat at the congress as the representative of the Siberian Union, a social democratic organisation that Trotsky had joined in his first exile. The already high esteem in which Lenin and Martov held him would also ensure that his voice would be heard. When the Congress actually convened, the 24-year-old Trotsky emerged as an active participant.

A brief glance at the protocols reveals that Trotsky spoke at thirty out of the Second Congress's thirty-seven sessions. Of course not all of his interventions are worth noting; often they were attempts to keep discussions moving by drawing attention to already agreed rules of practice, or were tabled improvements clarifying resolutions. At other points, particularly when defending the concept of a dictatorship of the proletariat and the party's agrarian programme, Trotsky emerged as a bulwark of Marxist orthodoxy against revisionism. However, even minor interjections are testimony to Trotsky's level of commitment, as he and his comrades grappled with complex matters of party organisation. Issues surrounding the role of the large and successful Jewish socialist organisation, the Bund, and rival definitions of party membership proved to be the most contentious of all the topics debated.

Trotsky recognised the special part played by the Bund in conducting socialist propaganda amongst the Russian Empire's Jewish proletariat, but he was not prepared to accept the Bund's desire that the autonomous status it had been granted at the First Congress be reaffirmed. This would only make sense, Trotsky reasoned, if the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) was to adopt a federal rather than a preferred unitary structure. However, there were limits to how far Trotsky was prepared to push the notion of control from a leading central body. He raised objections if he thought that too much power was being taken away from local committees that should be to ‘greater or lesser degrees independent units’. The most famous example of this is when the Congress debated Lenin's demand for stricter control from above over who should count as a party member against Martov's looser formulation. In supporting Martov, Trotsky was concerned that Lenin was using unproductive means to achieve dubious ends. It was Lenin's intention, according to Trotsky, that a powerful Central Committee should oversee the movement, rooting out ‘opportunism’ or beliefs that were considered not fully Marxist. However, he objected, no Central Committee could know and vet each and every party member and, furthermore, no rule, however watertight, could guard against opportunism. Did Lenin and his backers, chiefly Plekhanov, not know that opportunism had deeper causes? The debates around this issue did not produce a compromise resolution. Further sessions were marked by struggles between followers of the so-called ‘hard’ (Lenin) and ‘soft’ (Martov) factions as the functions and make-up of the party's chief offices of Council, Central Committee and the editorial board of the party newspaper were discussed. The Congress ended with division and hurt feelings. Lenin's supporters adopted the name ‘majoritarians’ (‘Bolsheviks’), their opponents accepting the title of ‘minoritarians’ (‘Mensheviks’).

As the delegate of the Siberian Union Trotsky produced his reflections on the Congress soon after its conclusion. These circulated in rough draft before being polished for publication by the party printing presses in Geneva. Although Trotsky did not want readers to lose sight of the Congress's achievements, the bulk of his essay was given over to explaining divisions and disappointments. In part, he felt that too much had been expected of the Congress. Evidently several delegates did not realise that there were objective limits to what any congress could achieve. After all, resolutions could only be effective to the extent that they reflected reality; they could not in and of themselves mould reality. Trotsky illustrated this point with reference to the Bund's behaviour. Because it had stood alone, acting and growing at a time when the RSDLP as such did not exist, nationalist and separatist ideology had naturally taken hold of its leaders. The Bund would return to the general fold only after unification of Jewish and other workers had occurred from below and not because of a congress resolution from above.

Similarly, continued Trotsky, comrade Lenin, having lost a sense of reality, had played the most disruptive role out of all the delegates at the Congress. By this Trotsky meant that Lenin had become so fixated on the ‘metaphysical’ task of rooting out opportunism that he had ignored the way central bodies and local organisations actually interacted. Both served as well as advised each other as complex practical issues were confronted. There was simply no clear line of authority; this varied from central to local bodies depending upon circumstances. Indeed, warned Trotsky, Lenin's centralism would not only ensure Lenin's personal dictatorship over the party, but also a downgrading of everyday concerns. In this way the whole concept of centralism would be thrown into disrepute and the RSDLP would lose any influence it had amongst the workers. Trotsky recalled the experience of the French Revolution to show why Lenin's model of the party, although intended to defeat opportunism, would reap only destruction. Casting Lenin in the role of Robespierre, Trotsky argued that:

Too many hopes are placed on a party ‘government’ … a regime that begins by expelling some of the best party workers promises too many executions and too little good. It inevitably leads to disappointments that could prove disastrous not only for Robespierre and the helots of centralism, but also for the idea of a single fighting party organisation. Then the masters of the situation will be the social democratic opportunistic ‘Thermodorians’ and the doors of the party will be thrown wide open.⁶

Fortunately for Trotsky, Lenin did not enjoy a complete victory at and following the Second Congress. Lenin's formulation for party membership had not entered the statutes, for example, and he lost control of The Spark. Trotsky was thus able to continue as one of its regular correspondents. His post-Congress journalism was full of the prospect of pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• TROTSKY
• ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 The young revolutionary, 1879-1907
• 2 The fight for unity, 1907-14
• 3 War and revolution, 1914-17
• 4 Defending the revolution, 1917-21
• 5 The revolution in decline, 1921-4
• 6 Opposition and defeat, 1925–9
• 7 Against Stalinism and fascism, 1929–33
• 8 The final exile: the Fourth International and world events, 1933–40
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index