WHO is Stalin?" After the 1925 Congress everyone was asking himself this question which Skliansky had put to Trotsky earlier in the year. "The most eminent mediocrity in our party," Trotsky replied, although in earlier days he had described Stalin to Max Eastman as "a brave man and a sincere revolutionary." These descriptions are not entirely contradictory, since revolutionary sincerity, physical courage and intellectual mediocrity may all go together. In fact the description adequately fits the average Bolshevik under Lenin, but the change in Trotsky's tone, after an interval of less than a year, was unmistakable.
Trotsky, therefore, took a long time to form the more unfavourable opinion which later he was to express in so many ways in his writings. No one knew what the General Secretary was capable of; and Stalin himself, before he had so easily got the better of his clumsy and impatient rivals, probably had no idea of the prospects that would one day be open to him. As usually happens in such cases, his horizon broadened as his responsibilities increased. The heads of the Party looked on him above all as an "organiser," a vague expression which later became more precise as the astonishing results of his particular talents made themselves felt. Those who were close to him knew that his chief superiority over his over-eloquent colleagues was his precious gift of dumbness, a natural tendency not to waste words, in addition to the gifts of order, punctuality, devotion to the Party and capacity for hard work, which Lenin had admired. But these gifts do not explain his final domination. Although, in his fraction, Dzerzhinsky was morally and Bukharin culturally his superior, no one was his equal in shrewdness, manoeuvering, administrative ability or in the continuity of his drive towards power. Yet at that time no one saw him as a future figure in history nor as the typical representative of a growing social class.
Trotsky explains his unfavourable opinion by saying: "The victorious counter-revolution may have its great men. But its first stage, Thermidor, has need of mediocrities who cannot see beyond the end of their noses." According to this view, expressed after long reflection, a Thermidorian reaction had already begun in Russia, of which Stalin was the unconscious instrument. "For the first time I attacked squarely, one might almost say, with physical conviction, the problem of Thermidor," Trotsky goes on, forgetting his own thesis of 1921 on the N.E.P. as a Thermidor accomplished in good time, and within the necessary limits, by the Jacobins of the proletariat. The incident of Zalutsky shows that he was not alone in reasoning thus. Although this shabby accuser rapidly retracted, the accusation of "Thermidorianism" gained ground. Thus, on this point, Trotsky and his worst enemies thought alike; and soon the latter in their turn were borrowing his arguments in favour of planned production, industrialisation, and the democracy of the Party.
Nevertheless, Trotsky still hesitated to declare himself between the two fractions at odds with one another. In 1925 he was made President of the Committee of Concessions and director of technico-scientific services. After a diplomatic holiday in the Caucasus, he took up his new duties with "that praiseworthy ambition which urges a man to excel at whatever he puts his hand to," as Washington said, and abstained from becoming involved in the quarrels of the triumvirate. Both in speeches and writings he urged the necessity of improving the quality of industrial products, and also studied projects for electrification, preparing notes on the great Dnieprostroy scheme. Feeling that it was politic to make a show of official optimism, he published a series of articles: Towards Socialism or Capitalism?" in which he refuted those socialist theoreticians who saw in the economic restoration of Russia a retreat from the revolution. In these he quoted, with child-like confidence, the doubtful statistics of the Gosplan, from which was to come "the magnificent music of developing socialism." Collective economy was gaining the ascendency over private initiative, according to the "statistics," and he endeavoured to show that the rate of progress forecast must lead to its success. He took no account of the uneconomic means of coercion used by the State to repress capitalist tendencies and to secure an artificial control. As regards external events, he considered the social revolution in Europe in the near future as the most likely hypothesis.
But Stalin was in no way grateful to him for this attitude. He put increasing difficulties in his way, rendered his work impossible and persecuted his collaborators. Trotsky gave further proof of submission by disavowing those rare foreign communists who defended him. He even went so far as to condemn Max Eastman, whose book, Since Lenin Died, exposed all the facts of the crisis in the Bolshevik Party as far as was possible with the documents and information then available. He even denied the existence and the suppression of Lenin's Testament, by quibbling with words. Krupskaya followed his example. For the sake of the good of the Party, which perhaps they misunderstood, and which they certainly interpreted very narrowly, and confused with reasons of state, Bolsheviks of all colours put their solidarity as a caste above the truth and laughed at all honesty as a limited prejudice. Trotsky himself hoped to buy a political truce by sacrificing the comrades who had been his allies in ideas and in the struggle. Vainly, for by so doing he encouraged Stalin and discouraged the Opposition. At this point the conflicts of the integral Leninists provided the respite he needed; Trotskyism was no longer a burning question, but was discussed only in an academic manner. Stalin and Zinoviev, in their controversy over socialism in one country, quoted their old adversary without passion. Kamenev charged him with excessive optimism, which was almost equivalent to a compliment, and took on himself the reproaches of pessimism which were once reserved for the metaphysician of the "permanent revolution." At the Fourteenth Congress Trotsky remained silent. He hesitated to take sides, although tempted to give the demagogues of the new Opposition who dared to talk of democracy a piece of his mind. His ex-lieutenant, Antonov-Ovseenko wrote to him, "I know that you were ready to intervene at the Congress against Zinoviev-Kamenev. I bitterly regret and deplore that the impatience and blindness of the comrades in our fraction should have caused you, against your own judgment, to abandon this intervention which was already decided upon." The rank and file militants in the two opposition groups, all equally ill-used, tended to fraternise and wished to bring their leaders together. After the Congress, Trotsky was obliged, at the Central Committee, to disapprove on principle of any repression against those who were defeated. Both sides then made advances to him and a more hopeful prospect began to open out for him.
Despite their common lot and the desire of their partisans to come together, an alliance between the old Opposition and the new appeared, in 1926, to be impossible. Trotsky was supposed to represent the Left of the Party, while Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sokolnikov and others were the Right incarnate. According to his own theory, the two currents reflected irreconcilable class antagonism, proletarian and bourgeois. At a pinch, the Left: might support a centre bloc, of which Stalin was the typical expression, against the danger from the Right, but a coalition of the two wings would mean that both were compromised. It was no accident that Zinoviev and Kamenev should have "flinched" in October, and quite recently demanded Trotsky's exclusion, or that Sokolnikov should be the most hostile to the economic and industrial plans of the Left. If the new Opposition rallied itself around the limited democratic programme of the old, it was by an egotistic instinct of self-preservation. But Zinoviev could not do otherwise than confirm Trotsky's point of view on the utopianism of establishing socialism in Russia alone. Next Kamenev was found defending the ideas of the Left on planning and industry; his views on the disquieting progress made by peasant capitalism agreed with those of economists of similar tendencies. Ideas also coincided on Thermidor, but this was as yet unadmitted. All this caused great distress of mind among the leaders of the minorities and in the ranks, in which there was a strong conviction of the necessity for unity of all the oppositions without distinction of origin.
While the adversaries of the dominant fraction were getting together, Stalin was not losing any time. Control Commissions and "packed" local Committees executed his orders with precision. The cadres of the Party, the trade unions and the State were purged by police measures. In Leningrad and elsewhere, thousands of Oppositionists were dismissed from their places and rendered destitute. In the Communist International and its sections a similar fate overtook the misguided followers of the ex-President. Everywhere places were open for those who were willing to stake their fortune on the new master. This gave food for thought to any who might have been recalcitrant. Zinoviev and Kamenev were faced with the loss of all their posts of influence, being left only with titles which the stranglehold of the machine rendered valueless. The rest of the old guard were to be still more roughly handled. Stalin's creatures and minions waited for the spoils, taking possession of all offices and prospects of advancement. The bureaucratic rampart grew and strengthened around the Secretary of the secretaries.
Stalin managed with caution the changes necessary for his slow and prudent advance towards absolute power. He disarmed his critics in the Party, but made use of some of the more capable of them in subordinate positions where they were allowed to find refuge. By this means he disguised to some extent the inadequacy of those who had recently been promoted and also gave prominent members of the minority a chance to amend their attitude at leisure, to make their choice between their costly convictions and their immediate personal interest. The embassies and commercial missions swarmed with Oppositionists, rendered impotent by their isolation from one another and the necessity of making a show of orthodoxy before foreigners. Many were also to be found in the Departments of Economics and of scientific research, where ex-Mensheviks were also employed, and among specialists of all categories. Most hard hit were the rank and file working-class supporters, who had great difficulty in finding work. Together with the dismissed functionaries, these unemployed maintained an undertone of discontent, which those leaders who were not reconciled to retreat and were looking for a way out were glad to claim as the first symptoms of a "turn." The new Opposition, less adept at the theoretical researches beloved of the old, built up a clandestine organisation according to the standard pattern and lulled itself with hopes of working for revenge. In other directions, the good offices of mutual friends and of reconciled enemies gradually softened the more marked discordances between the various dissatisfied groups. At a session of the Central Committee in April 1926, the only two minorities represented both submitted similar amendments and made parallel reservations, and on the following day a pact was concluded: the impossible was achieved under the banner of "the Opposition bloc." Zinoviev and his partners rendered homage to the clairvoyance of the Left whose political and economic programme they adopted. Trotsky retracted his severe condemnation of the October defaulters. "A reciprocal amnesty," commented Stalin.
Into this "unprincipled bloc," as the reigning oligarchy at once named it, Zinoviev by ingenious arguments succeeded in luring the remnants of the Workers' Opposition which had been hostile to Trotsky. The Georgian communists, whom Stalin had turned out, also joined. The classic plank of democratic centralism was already pan of the programme of the section of the Left known as Trotskyist, and all the other already defeated sections now came to add their weakness to the common fund. Since the leaders were now agreed, most of their partisans followed, although disliking the idea of victory under the banner of Trotsky. The divergent opinions which still existed were felt to be of less importance than the essential points of the common programme: industrialisation of the country and democratisation of the Party. In reality, the main object was to attack the monopoly of power, not in order to abolish it, but in order to turn out those who held it and divide it among themselves.
Already Trotsky had more or less handed Stalin the dictatorship by his lack of foresight, his tactic of patient waiting broken by sudden and inconsequent reactions, and his mistaken calculations, yet up to that time all was not entirely lost, the last word had not been said. But with the formation of the "bloc," Trotsky achieved his final ruin as a political leader, by this association with men devoid of character or credit who had nothing concrete to offer to offset the disrepute they brought with them. Whatever he may say after the event, he did not understand the nature of the evolution of Bolshevism nor the root of the problem which had to be solved. His most brilliant gifts were a handicap in a struggle in which Stalin's minor talents were lust what was needed. He imagined that he had gained the adherence of the "Leningrad workers" whom Zinoviev had deceived and could not now undeceive. In reality he introduced the germs of panic and decomposition into the "bloc." He had the illusion of gaining, if not a majority of the Party, at least a sufficient section to make Stalin pause, but he had forgotten that the genuine Party no longer existed. (He had himself written many times, "The Party will cease to be a party.") He hoped to dispose of the legend of Trotskyism by allying himself with the originators of this falsehood; but what he did in reality was to range himself with the Leninism of the epigones, whose degeneracy he himself had pointed out. By contradictions and complications which the masses could not follow, he threw away all chance of getting a genuine following, or of dissociating himself from the opposing fraction. The working class, whose highest hopes he bragged of representing, was by now so profoundly disappointed by the course of the revolution that it had no longer any faith in any section of a Party whose promises had proved to be such lies. For years had gone by, already the tenth anniversary of October was drawing near, yet the conditions of the masses were getting steadily worse.
THE Standard of life in the industrial centres in 1926, taking all salaries into consideration, was definitely lower than under the old regime. The averages, which the statistics recorded with fussy precision, were arrived at by totally unscientific-subterfuges, but odd fragments of information demonstrated the fallaciousness of the official figures. All those with inside knowledge are aware how much store Stalin sets by statistics and how he causes them to be falsified at need. In any case, only a very small portion of the proletariat received as much as or more than the "average" wage, and a comparison with 1914 indicates a state of misery. As Riazanov truly said on this point, "There are certain categories of workers who have a wage 110 per cent higher than before the War, but in fact they live 100 per cent below the level of a human existence."
That was not all: various illegal reductions in wages under the form of deductions for obligatory contributions and forced subscriptions, long delays in payment, sometimes even of several months, which meant a corresponding depreciation in value, the shameful and crying inequality at the factory between specialised and unskilled workers and between men and women doing the same work, an inequality greater than in any capitalist country, the disregard of the laws and decrees in relation to protection, safety and assistance of the workers, the shameful exploitation of women and children, general disregard of the eight-hour day and the constant violation of the collective contracts by the State as employer, these were the real facts of the situation as stated in the documents of the Soviet, side by side with hollow propaganda phrases. The Central Committee recognised that the housing shortage was a "catastrophic state of affairs"; the average space occupied per worker in Moscow was less than three square metres. The press described in horrible detail the worm-eaten and insanitary barracks where each inhabitant occupied "the dimensions of a coffin."
And these were the privileged wage-earners. The lot of the disinherited was even worse. From a mass of incoherent figures given by various organisations, which admitted to more than a million unemployed, for the most part without any relief, it is possible to arrive at the truth by multiplying four or five times the number disclosed. Kalinin calculated that the unemployed agricultural labourers amounted to 15 million; the Assistant-Commissar of Works later admitted to 25 million. The population was increasing by 3 million a year and unemployment and misery were in proportion.
Homeless children were another directly connected phenomenon, which the People's Commissars described as "our greatest evil" and Semashko as "a living reproach to our conscience." Official figures admitted to 7, 8 and 9 millions of abandoned children, living by begging, stealing, prostitution and crime. "The roots of this evil are not only in the past but in the present" noted Krupskaya, distressed to find that the trouble was "three-quarters due, not to the misery and carelessness of the old days, but to conditions to-day, to unemployment and to the extreme poverty of the peasants." Anyone outside the Bolshevik aristocracy who had used similar language would soon have lost the last remnants of his liberty.
Dzerzhinsky, one of the few people in responsible positions who preferred plain speaking to the satisfaction of commanding a lot of terrified functionaries, explained the under-consumption to which the Soviet population was condemned by the shortage of manufactured goods and the consequent increase in agricultural prices: all the basic industries (coal, steel, etc.) had decreased since 1914, productivity of labour was less in spite of payment by piece work, costs of manufacture were up and imports were stopped. Consumption had fallen on an average by more than half, per head of the population, by two-thirds for certain basic necessities. Nevertheless, the Government announced that in the tenth year of the revolution, production was equal to before the War. "In Russia, the classic country of lies and charlatanism, figures have a purely relative value and lend themselves with remarkable elasticity to all sorts of metamorphoses," says F. Lacroix in his book Mysteries of Russia from which we have already quoted.
The unified Opposition could not shut its eyes to the uncomfortable picture of the "total costs" of the revolution. Stimulated by those elements which were closest to the working class, companions of Sapronov or Shliapnikov, and filled with a natural desire for popularity, they put the elementary demands of the workers in the forefront of their programme. But they put forward nothing which the majority could not accept and the solution was no nearer since they had no means of realising it. Fearful of incurring the reproach of Menshevism or pessimism, they dared not broach the question of bringing the N.E.P. to an end, which Lenin had hinted at, nor face up squarely to the need for reform of the system of government. Their economic policy, which was still vague, did nothing to alter the "general line." It did not lay down any practicable and rapid scheme for overcoming the deficit on industry and transport, replacing outworn equipment, reducing the net costs, stopping speculation by middlemen and stabilising the collapsing chervonetz. Owing to this, all their plans for raising real wages and their respect for the eight-hour day were no more than the abstract solicitude of Bolsheviks for the proletariat, since all these identical plans had existed on paper for ten years. Their abuse of the bureaucracy was no more forceful than that of some of the actual leaders. Dzerzhinsky at the Central Committee declared: "When I look at our apparatus, at our system of organisation, our incredible bureaucracy and our utter disorder combined with every conceivable sort of red-tape, I am literally horrified." Bukharin, speaking at a Communist Youth Congress, recognised the danger of a "hardening of caste distinctions" and admitted the "incontestable degeneration" due to the "complete immunity" of Communist Party members. The Opposition did not, therefore, have a monopoly of platonic reformist criticism nor of ineffective goodwill. On the question of democracy, Sokolnikov caused a scandal by suggesting that other parties should be allowed. Ossinsky alone agreed with this, thinking that if the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were legalised, then all communists would be obliged to unite against the common enemy.
The two fractions were more completely divided on the question of planned economy. The traditional Left attributed all misfortunes to the fact that industry lagged behind agriculture, and offered as a cure the speeding up of industry as part of the complete economic plan, in order to weld together the town and country and to equalise the supply and demand of goods. In opposition to this "industrial deviation" the majority alleged the lack of funds which the State had at its disposal. Stalin had predicted at a recent Congress: "Since, however, there is a great lack of capital in this country, we have good reason to expect that in the future the growth of our industry will not proceed so rapidly as it has in the past." The passage in his report in which he makes this remarkable prediction also replies to the proposals of the Left which he purposely exaggerated:
We might devote double the present sum to the development of industry. But this would bring about an unduly rapid tempo in the development of industry, so that, owing to the lack of a sufficiency of free capital, we should not be able to keep step with that development, and there would certainly be a fiasco—to say nothing of the fact that if we were to spend so much upon industry, there would be nothing left over for agricultural credits.
We might increase our imports twofold, especially the Import of machinery, in order to hasten the growth of industry; but this, by making our imports greatly exceed our exports, would lead to an unfavourable balance of trade, and would disturb our exchange. This would mean an undermining of the foundation on which alone a carefully planned guidance and development of manufacturing industry is possible.
We might greatly increase exports, without paying heed to any other of the main constituents of our economic life. We might do this regardless of the condition of the home market. The consequences of such a policy would inevitably be to produce great complications in the towns, owing to an enormous increase in the price of agricultural produce, this meaning a decline in real wages and a sort of artificially organised famine with all its disastrous consequences.
The "industrialists" considered it unnecessary to set aside further credits for agriculture; in fact, they hoped to get from the countryside funds to subsidise industry. In his studies for the Communist Academy and in his much-discussed work The New Economy, Preobrazhensky attempted to demonstrate this theoretically. According to his thesis, the stage of primitive capitalist accumulation such as Marx analyses in Capital, must inevitably be gone through by all socialist societies without colonies, in order to set up an "accumulated fund" at the expense of the peasant producer. In 1925, Kamenev's unexpected views on the prosperity of the kulaks gave unforeseen confirmation to the economic algebra of the Left, since, failing any financial co-operation from abroad, it disclosed a valuable source of revenues and subsidies in the interior. The "bloc" wavered between different methods of laying hands on the capital of the peasants and merchants: forced loans, re-assessment of taxation, readjustment of prices. Thus were the kulak and the N.E.P. man to become sleeping partners in State industry in spite of themselves.
In April 1926, the Central Committee, following the Leninist principle of appropriating ideas from the Opposition in order to render them unworkable, had admitted that industrialisation was "the principal task" and that "a disciplined plan" was the only way out of the disorder. Rykov, in his official report on the economic situation and the budget, attributed the scarcity of goods and the agricultural stagnation from which the Soviet Union was suffering to the backwardness of industry. But during the debate Stalin poured ridicule on the idea of vast plans quite disproportionate to the resources of Russia, and in particular on the project of an immense power station on the Dnieper, which he compared to the purchase of a costly and useless gramophone by a mujik whose cart was in need of repair. Later, in summing-up at Leningrad, he made frequent allusions to the "industrial deviation," but in an impersonal manner, since the evasions and shiftings of the Opposition still left him somewhat in the dark. While reiterating "the slogan of industrialisation proclaimed at the Fourteenth Congress" and declaring that "our country has entered upon a new period of the N.E.P., a period of bold industrialisation," he polemicises thus: "It is impossible to develop industry in the void, if there are no raw materials in the country, if there is no food for the workers, if there is no agriculture, however undeveloped, since this is the prime market for industry." Even more than in America, according to him, industry must depend on the internal market, and particularly on the peasant market. Exports must be developed but not by depriving the population, "since the workers and peasants wish to feed themselves like men." No exaggerations of the Dnieprostroy type. "We are too fond of building fantastic plans for industry without reckoning up our resources. People seem to forget that it is impossible to make plans, or to embark on any enterprise, more or less grandiose, without a certain minimum of resources and a certain minimum of reserves." Finally, Stalin, with obvious implications, rebuked "those persons who look on the mass of labouring peasants as a foreign body, an object to be exploited for the benefit of industry, a sort of colony." As against the industrialist Left, Stalin set himself up as the defender of the peasants.
In 1923 Trotsky had objected to any additional taxation of the farmers in order that "the peasant might become richer"—an incontestable precedent for Bukharin's "Enrich yourselves!" "We are fond of describing any peasant who has enough to eat as a kulak," said Zinoviev in 1924. In 1925 Trotsky still spoke of enlarging "the scale of profits of the capitalist-merchants in agriculture," of strengthening "the capitalist economy of the farmer." But in the same year Kamenev suddenly discovered the kulak danger and reproached the Central Committee with underestimating it. In 1926 the "bloc" was insisting that the better-off peasants had considerable reserves: it was there that the State should look for the resources necessary to develop industry and so come to the rescue of the proletariat. This volte-face had two good harvests in a ruined country as its only justification.
On July to, 1926, Dzerzhinsky replied to the full Assembly of the Central Committee: "The mujiks have hoarded up 400 million roubles, perhaps 4 each...." The disconnected and passionate speech which contained this pertinent remark, as well as the few lines quoted on bureaucracy, was his last political act. The founder of the Cheka died after leaving the tribune from which he had violently apostrophised his opponents Kamenev and Pyatakov and threatened the Opposition with "fresh gunpowder" in the autumn. Although this threat was omitted from the printed text, it made a great impression on the audience. The atmosphere of tension and nervousness throughout this session of the "Bolshevik Parliament" was intense, not so much owing to the economic questions under debate as to the particular political circumstances at that time. Dzerzhinsky's death, following immediately on his menacing words, which the press did not reproduce, brought to a head the emotions born of other events. The Opposition "bloc" openly declared itself, "seriously and for a long time to come," as Zinoviev said, and the struggle for power entered on a new phase.
AS SOON as he learned of the result of the negotiations between his adversaries, Stalin set himself to break up the alliance. He attempted first to discredit Zinoviev and Kamenev by printing the unpublished letter of Lenin, in which he stigmatised the "deserters" of October. This letter had been suppressed in the Complete Works, but had already been circulated illegally in the Party by the Trotskyists. The two friends replied by demanding the publication of the Testament, which they had themselves helped to suppress, and the existence of which Trotsky and Krupskaya had only recently been forced to deny. This Stalin refused, at the same time redoubling police precautions for the suppression of clandestine factional activity; the increase in secret meetings, the passing of prohibited documents from, hand to hand, and the alarming increase in spontaneous strikes, might give the Left their opportunity. Zinoviev's followers actually held a conspiratorial meeting in a wood at which Lashevich, the Assistant-Commissar for War, spoke; the inevitable spy having reported this to Stalin, he seized the pretext to strike his blow. For this he made use of a private letter seized at Uaku, two years earlier, written by Medvediev, an old member of the Workers' Opposition which was now part of the "bloc." Stalin always utilised to the utmost any weapon that came into his hands. He hoped now by attacking the subordinates to strike at the leaders, perhaps to overcome them.
Pravda opened a campaign against a new "danger from the Right," with the idea of compromising the Left. The confiscated letter, mangled and falsified, formed the basis for this. Medvediev had, in a private letter, dared to envisage the desirability of a broad policy of concessions, in imitation of Krassin, just as Lenin before him had envisaged an extension of the N.E.P. This was sufficient to bring down on him the accusation of being "100 per cent Menshevik." He had written in confidence what many, even among those close to Stalin, were saying under their breath, that the Communist sections in different countries were artificial growths and the so-called representatives of the international revolution in Moscow were "lackeys" supported by "Russian gold." This condemned him as a blasphemer End a liquidator. Medvediev and his comrades had no means of clearing themselves publicly. Neither had Lashevich and the others. The Politbureau alone controlled all newspapers, pamphlets and meetings. Agents of the Secretariat began to spread the suggestion that the Opposition had not only set itself up against the Party but also against the State. Voices clamoured for violent measures, expulsions. Stalin likes to set going exaggerated demands in order that he may appear in the role of mediator, proposing a compromise, which can then easily be put over.
When the July session opened, in an atmosphere heavy with alarming rumours, in which the word "Thermidor" continually recurred, nothing remained but to ratify the measures which Stalin and his friends had already discussed. The Control Commission had prepared all their weapons for intimidating the new Opposition, which was not expected to show fight. Stalin had boasted privately of "bringing Zinoviev and Kamenev to their knees." But these two declared their solidarity with the other militants convicted of "fractionalism" and "defeatism." They declared their allegiance to the theses of the Left which they had recently violently abused for imaginary "Trotskyism." Later, they worked themselves into a state of indignation over the permanent state of siege then existing in the Party, but it did not occur to them to demand the restitution of consitutional liberty for everyone else in the State at the same time. Their opponents reminded them in vain of their own violent attacks on Trotsky, their demands for his expulsion, even his imprisonment, with quotations from their own articles and oratorical diatribes. They replied by lifting the veil from the machinations of the "anti-Trotskyists," in which they themselves had played a large part, the activities of the semiorka, and the rest. Zinoviev admitted that he had made a worse mistake in 1923 than in 1917. "Yes, on the question of bureaucratic repression, Trotsky was right, and I was wrong." He demanded the reading of the famous Testament, which everyone spoke of by hearsay and yet which was not supposed to exist. Stalin felt impelled to make known Lenin's secret letters on the national question and on the State plan; for the curiosity aroused relaxed momentarily the discipline of the fraction without breaking it. Trotsky alone benefited by this glimpse into the past, but the audience remained unshaken. The minority had eighteen votes at the beginning of the session and eighteen at the end. Of these, five, among whom were Smilga, Rakovsky, and Ossinsky, constituted a "buffer-group," intended to deaden shocks, a tactical ruse which had no effect; Stalin always sees through these little games, although his enemies rarely see through his.
A fresh quarrel broke out over international policy. The Opposition criticised Stalin for sending an untimely ultimatum to China about the Manchurian railway, a move which might have led to armed conflict, without consulting the Politbureau. They held him responsible for the action of the Polish Communist Party in supporting Pilsudski in his military coup d'etat. They challenged him on the sterility of the collaboration between the Russian and British trade unions, and on Tomsky's role in the British General Strike. He was blamed for all this because no internal or external action was ever taken in the name of "Moscow," except with Stalin's initiative and consent.
The last question raised let loose an interminable polemic in which the "Anglo-Russian Committee" figured largely and helped to confuse an already complex question still further. In 1925 Trotsky had written a book on the future of England in which he predicted the imminence of a revolution in that country and the final victory of communism. The Politbureau, which had to conduct simultaneously both the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which was necessarily opportunist, and the Communist International, which was, by definition, revolutionary, had embarked on a queer diplomatic adventure with the General Council of the Trade Union Congress using the bureaucratic Russian trade unions as intermediaries. An Anglo-Russian Committee, drawn from high officials of both organisations, was set up to secure mutual understanding and co-operation, based on highly ambiguous principles from which both parties hoped to further their own ends. The English hoped that by affecting sympathy for communism they would increase the commercial relations between the two countries, thus benefiting both their own capitalists and the unemployed, while the Russians, by professing an insincere devotion to trade unionism, hoped to make use of the trade unions for their own ends. When the General Strike began in 1926, Trotsky felt that his prophecies were about to be confirmed, and that its sudden collapse could only be due to the treason of the leaders; from this he concluded that the Angle-Russian Committee must be dissolved and the "traitors" unmasked. Neither his friends, Rakovsky and Radek, nor his new ally Zinoviev, shared this simple-minded view. Tomsky, head of the Russian trade unions, had endorsed the decision to end the strike, and Stalin's fraction felt that the Committee could still be put to further use.
The Opposition, which was brought round to Trotsky's point of view, made yet one more mistake in attempting to use the "English question" as a stick to beat Stalin, since it was a question in which the distressed Russian masses had no direct interest. They wasted time on it at the Central Committee and wore themselves out making speeches behind closed doors which the press would never publish. They bared the flank of the Opposition to reprisals without any tactical necessity for so doing, and thus allowed themselves to be forced out of their last remaining Government positions without being able either to defend or demonstratively to retire from them. The result was that the majority, instead of being split, were driven closer together.
The balance-sheet of the July encounter was strongly in Stalin's favour. Little he cared about the magnificent doctrinal theses of his critics, or the brilliance of their literature. His policy was based on more immediate human realities. Lashevich, caught out in flagrant insubordination, had been relieved of his military posts, excluded from the Central Committee and allotted a post of secondary importance in Siberia; Zinoviev, suspected of connivance, had been eliminated from the Politbureau, where Rudzutak took his place; Kamenev had been forced to resign from the Moscow Soviet and dismissed from the Commissariat of Commerce, which was taken over by Mikoyan; Kuibyshev had been chosen as Dzerzhinsky's successor on the Economic Council; Ordjonikidze, Mikoyan, Kirov, Andreyev, and Kaganovich had been chosen as alternates for the Politbureau—these were the "organisational conclusions" announced by Stalin and ratified with mechanical precision by the Central Committee. Against these minutely worked-out arrangements, the finest thesis in the world was not worth the snap of a finger.
Following on the thinning-out at the top, came a purge of the lower ranks; thousands were recalled, particularly in Leningrad, which still swarmed with refractory persons, despite the apparent unanimity on the surface; the usual method being an "administrative change" to that part of the country where the thermometer falls to below forty-five degrees in winter. "We have triumphed but not convinced," admitted Kalinin on his return from a punitive expedition to Leningrad. For example, Ossovsky, someone quite unknown, was expelled from the Party with a terrific outcry; let those who would not take this warning beware! With a remarkable unanimity of thought and expression, all the telegrams received from the provinces expressed their "entire and complete approval" of the severity of the Central Committee, even demanding that it be increased. By a curious bureaucratic irony, "Zinovievsk" called for greater severity against Zinoviev. The machine was so perfected as to obtain similar telegraphic resolutions from Berlin, New York, Paris, London, Prague and Stockholm, where emissaries of the Secretariat had fulfilled their task as prompters to the "bolshevised" sections of the Communist International.
By increasing the number of alternates in the Politbureau, Stalin was strongly defending his rear, since the newly promoted members, owing their improvised careers to him, would certainly support him if necessary against the titular members who might desert him. Ordjonikidze had always been a crony of his, Mikoyan was another of his Caucasian followers, Kirov, who had fallen heir to Zinoviev's position in Leningrad, had never expected to climb so high, Andreyev and Kaganotrich both had a temporary "Trotskyist" aberration to do penance for, and Stalin is enough of a psychologist to know that deserters make the humblest followers. After all that had happened since Lenin's death, there were plenty of mediocrities who coveted a seat on the Central Committee or the Control Commission, plenty of third-rate officials who aspired towards the Politbureau. The expert use which Stalin made of these ambitions was devastating for his antagonists, who were all infected with intellectual superiority.
But he was not content merely to manipulate men. He was haunted by the Leninist tradition which urged him also to meddle with ideas. In any case, men and ideas appear to him inseparable and he can only understand the latter through the former. At the Executive of the International, where Zinoviev, the so-called President, no longer had the right to open his mouth, Stalin attacked the "deviations of the Right and the extreme Left," by which he meant anyone who opposed any of the dogmatic commonplaces of the majority;`he accused one opponent who attempted to carry on an "ideological struggle" without "discrediting the leaders of the Opposition," of having the "morals of a vicar." He repeated his well-known assertion: "I say that such a struggle cannot exist in nature. I say that whoever agrees to the struggle on condition that the leaders are not attacked, is denying the possibility of any ideological struggle within the Party." At least his opponents were duly warned, but instead of acting on the warnings they stuck to their profitless abstractions.
While implacably abusing other people in order to discredit their ideas and limit their influence, Stalin was careful to put himself in a good light in order to strengthen his policy. But he took care always to say the opposite of what he did, and to do the opposite of what he said. In making the partly autobiographical speech at Tiflis, from which we have already quoted, he snubbed the flatterers who described him as the "hero of October," "leader of the International," etc. "This is all nonsense, comrades, nothing but foolish exaggeration." At the same time he wasted no opportunity of commercial self-advertisement in order to acquire that notoriety which neither his actions nor his work had yet brought him. All the illustrated papers were ordered to reproduce his portrait, which still did not become popular, and the walls of all offices were adorned with a photograph, of which innumerable copies were printed, in which he figured at Lenin's side ... before the rupture, of which everyone was ignorant (at the Gosizdat, already several times purged, flourished a "Stalinist" functionary, as his followers were now beginning to be called). He wished to give his name to other towns as well as Stalingrad; Iuzovo became Stalino, and Iuzovka Stalin. One day there were to be Stalinabad, Stalinsk and even Stalin-Aoul, in the Caucasus. Many servile functionaries thought to do themselves good by christening streets, establishments and enterprises in this way; Stalin never disavowed them since they furthered his own wishes. Bureaucratic conformism began to consist more and more in a hypocritical admiration, demonstrated by external signs, of the arid personality of the General Secretary.
The same brutal contrast between theory and practice was shown when Stalin, in his April report in Leningrad, exhorted his hearers to democracy. They knew how much of that to believe. He blamed the conduct of the "police brigade" established under Zinoviev, while making use himself of the same methods, doubled and tripled, throughout the whole of Russia. "The Party ought to embark resolutely on the path of internal democracy," he declared without a smile to his subordinates, not one of whom had been elected or was controlled from below, and who had his mandate to efface all vestiges of liberty and crush out any slight desire for independence. "The method of persuasion is our principal method of work," but he was speaking to a circle where it was already customary, on the pretext of discipline, to suppress the slightest conscientious objection or the least individuality of ideas as an attack on morality or the crime of lese-revolution.
The would-be objective historian of the future, who refers only to the official documents will have difficulty in separating truth from falsehood in Stalin's written and spoken discourses. He is not the first statesman who has made use of the spoken and written word sometimes to conceal his intentions, sometimes to cover up the deficiencies in his knowledge. But the material and spiritual conditions of Russia and the resources of modern technique for propaganda and intimidation have enabled him to achieve heights in this direction which were quite unknown before the Soviet "experiment." The same applies to his henchmen. The more the monopoly of the Party developed into the omnipotence of the Secretariat, the more often one heard autocrats praising democracy, bureaucrats denouncing bureaucracy, wasters preaching economy, ignoramuses extolling science, and everywhere a complete contradiction between the real and the ideal.
After the lively altercation in July, Stalin sought to deprive his opponents of their favourite weapon by sending out a call "to all Party organisations and Soviets" to put an end to bureaucracy, waste, and inertia. "Our economic and administrative apparatus consumes approximately two milliards of roubles a year. It should be possible to reduce these expenses to three or four hundred million, to the benefit of our industry." This was exactly the thesis of the Left, to within a hundred million anyway. A further unprecedented anomaly: The message was signed by Rykov, President of the Council of Commissars, by Stalin as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, by Kuibyshev, as President of the Party Control Commission. These titles and signatures implied for the first time a public usurpation of attributes and prerogatives, an open violation of the Constitution, no article of which allowed for the unwarrantable interference of the functionaries of any Party whatever in the affairs of the State. But Stalin, by reason of the powers which the G.P.U. gave him, codified the situation in his own person. If, on paper, he still allowed a little authority to the Council of Commissars, it was only for the benefit of the gallery and to soften the transition.
In his speech at Tiflis he mentioned in particular the General Strike in England and the happenings in Poland. But anyone unversed in the casuistry of decadent Bolshevism, unaccustomed to the examination of this sort of thing, would have had difficulty in distinguishing his views from those of the Left. Besides which he never hesitated to quote from Trotsky or Zinoviev without indicating the authors, contenting himself with arriving at different conclusions or with omitting the conclusions altogether. When by any chance he produced an original idea, such as: "The British Communist Party is one of the best sections of the Communist International," when speaking of a group whose influence on social life in Britain was nil, he gave a sample of his ability, but the complete atrophy of all critical spirit among the governed, as well as the firm hand of the governors, saved him from any unpleasant contradictions. Except within the walls of the Politbureau and the supreme Economic Council, where Trotsky and Pyatakov fought side by side a battle which was never heard of outside, the Opposition kept quiet and bided its time.
Would it have the wisdom to await the ripening of the disagreements which were already beginning in the majority fraction? This would not have suited Stalin, whose aim was to hasten the expulsion of the irreconcilables. A Party Conference was due to be held in October 1926, the Congress having been adjourned until the following year. It was essential to confront the assembly with an accomplished fact, and since the Opposition seemed in no hurry to attack, Stalin set himself to provoke them.
He was an expert at this sort of task. In September he launched a "campaign of explanation," that is to say defamation, against the gagged minority. Trotsky and Pyatakov were eliminated from the Department of Economics; Kamenev refused to go to Japan. The Oppositionists, slandered, abused and subjected to threats, had nothing but secretly duplicated pamphlets and clandestine conversations to defend themselves with. The majority of the Party never heard anything of their declarations or their "theses." Krupskaya decided at last to part with a copy of the famous Testament, which was immediately sent abroad, where it was published by Trotsky's friends. But in Russia its underground circulation was very small, and in any case, came too late to be effective. Under these conditions any attack was hopeless for the present and without value for the future. Nevertheless, the defiant Opposition was unable to resign itself to keep silent and "wait and see," which was the only possible tactic in the circumstances. They did not then understand the need to take a long view, "to re-educate the new generation and look ahead" and also, as Trotsky wrote later, but too late, "not to be impatient, not to fret oneself or others, but to learn and to wait." The Opposition persisted in visualising the Party as an unalterable entity, from which it was only separated by a temporary misunderstanding. After a prolonged internal debate, in which the prudence of some members continually clashed with the impatience of others, it was decided to take the decisive step. At the beginning of October 1926, the foremost militants forced their way into the Communist cells in the factories, with the intention of replying to the attacks of Stalin's agents. Stalin asked for nothing better.
THE annals of Bolshevism contain plenty of bitter fights, barbed polemics and noisy and passionate episodes. But in this Party, where Lenin practically never used the familiar "thou" to anyone, the strictest courtesy was always the rule, even in the midst of the Civil War, and exceptions strike a jarring note. The era of Stalin inaugurated new usages.
The Oppositionists were made aware of this by their reception at the workers' meetings: shouts and insults, volleys of whistles, a systematic uproar. Flying squads of interrupters were dispatched by lorry to any point where the members of the Left were speaking, with orders to drown their voices by various methods imitated from fascism, to assault them if need be and throw them out by physical force. It was not necessary for Stalin to give exact instructions for this procedure; his lieutenants were quick to see what was expected of them and to make it known that the hooligans would not be punished. In general, the Opposition did not succeed in making itself heard. Even if it had, the result would have been the same, since the proletariat would not have followed their overlearned and theoretical viewpoint, being frightened of prolonged unemployment above all things. Radek was able to speak for three minutes—and Trotsky, who had once received an ovation in that same factory, was forced to leave the platform after an equally short time, without being able to explain his programme. "The Party does not want arguments," Pravda constantly stated. An artificial outbreak of collective hysteria whipped the bureaucracy to a fury. The press devoted entire pages to vituperation against the renegades, fractionaries and counter-revolutionaries in prose; Demian Biedny, the official versifier, abused and mocked at them in verse. Molotov, under the direct inspiration of Stalin, did not blush to upbraid them for having gone into emigration under the Tsar, as if Lenin and the entire staff of Iskra had not done likewise, following the example of Hemen and Bakunin. Even anti-Semitism was used against the leaders of the Opposition. One ironic detail was that the Zinoviev University anathematised the "criminal attempts at schism" of its namesake. And Kirov announced without a smile: "If we are speaking of democracy, there has never been greater democracy in the history of our Party than we have to-day." After a few days of this unparalleled democracy, the Opposition, faced with the dilemma of submission or insurrection, chose to retreat. On October 4th it offered to make peace with the Politbureau, which imposed its own conditions, and on October 16th it submitted. In a declaration signed by Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev, Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, and Yevdokimov, it recognised its offences against discipline, condemned its own fractional activity, disowned Krupskaya for an innocent allusion in her speech at the last Congress, repudiated its followers abroad, and finally abandoned its members of the old Workers' Opposition. While it is true that they did not abjure their intimate convictions, they promised to remain in a state of political catalepsy, and to submit themselves without reserve to the Central Committee, which Stalin had called in plenary session for the express purpose of receiving this capitulation and confirming its sanctions: that Trotsky and Kamenev be removed from the Politbureau and replaced by Kuibyshev and S. Kossior; that V. Smirnov, author of Democratic Centralism, be expelled from the Party for having spoken without permission; that a whole series of rank-and-file militants be accused, dismissed, recalled. As for Zinoviev, he was invited to resign from the Presidency of the International, which he did soon after. Towards the end of the month, all the essentials being already decided upon, the Conference was allowed to begin....
Stalin had prepared a thesis on the "Opposition bloc" to which he imputed lack of principles, a defeatist ideology, opportunism, Menshevism, Trotskyism, and which he accused of destroying the unity of the Party and weakening the dictatorship of the proletariat. He dragged up again Zinoviev's and Kapienev's celebrated back-sliding in October, repeated all that had already been said a hundred times on the various questions in dispute and refuted the industrial deviation afresh: "The industrialisation of the country can only be achieved by relying on the progressive amelioration of the material situation of the peasant majority."
During the sitting he gave a long report on the subject. After his biased history of recent events, he reopened the hackneyed argument over socialism in one country, then dug up all the old controversies, such as that on the "permanent revolution," in order to show Lenin and Trotsky in opposition. He insulted Zinoviev, to whom he attributed a "limited nationalist spirit," and Radek, who had ridiculed him at the Communist Academy with his allusions to Shchedrin's satires, coining such phrases as "socialism in a single district" or even "socialism in a single street." He quoted Trotsky's unfortunate phrase "the magnificent historic music of developing socialism," the unflattering appreciations which Trotsky and Zinoviev had written about one another, their later retractions, and frequently quoted Lenin, whom the Oppositionists had constantly used against him. To the industrialists he said yet again: "One cannot further the progress of industry by neglecting the interests of agriculture, or by brutally violating those interests." Finally, Trotsky having predicted the ultimate exclusion of all Opposition, he made a vehement denial: "This assertion of Comrade Trotsky's is absolutely without foundation; it is completely false."
The representatives of the minority, present by right at the Conference as members of the Central Committee, were authorised to reply to the bureaucracy, which had already decided to hear nothing and to interpret everything in the worst possible light. They wasted their time and strength in speaking before this hostile audience as though they recognised in it the authentic representatives of the Party, and confined themselves to prudent generalities, couched in an amicable tone, which corresponded neither to the acuteness of the conflict nor to the gravity of the occasion. Reduced to a defensive position, enmeshed in their own unfruitful strategy, they abandoned their most telling arguments, glossed over differences and blunted their criticisms. The need to manoeuvre took precedence over their slogans to the point of rendering them unrecognisable. In order to prove that Trotskyism was no more, Kamenev read Trotsky's retraction on the "permanent revolution": "Experience has invariably shown that wherever any of us disagreed with Lenin on any fundamental point, Lenin-was always correct." In his pamphlet the New Course, Trotsky had once written: "With regard to the theory of the permanent revolution, I can find absolutely no reason for retracting what I wrote on this subject in 1904, 1905, 1906 and later."
It is quite obvious that these subtleties, incomprehensible to the lay mind, disillusioned the few remaining workers who were faithful to communism, disgusting them alike with the Opposition and the bureaucracy. They had the further unfortunate result of obscuring urgent and immediate questions under a veil of incomprehensible chicanery. Although the two fractions agreed on the necessity of safeguarding the monopoly of their Party, and called vainly on the name of Lenin to arbitrate between them, the Right still reproached the Left with every sort of opportunism dressed up in revolutionary phrases, with petit-bourgeois and Social-Democratic deviations, while the Left accused the Right of idealising the N.E.P., under-estimating the economic power of the kulaks, etc. As a practical measure, the Opposition proposed the exemption of the poor from taxation, the raising of workers' wages, and the increase of subsidies to industry; all this by means of a milliard roubles to be obtained, half by cutting down the expenses of the bureaucracy, and half by increased taxation of the bourgeoisie in the towns and on the countryside. Already labouring under the accusation of demagogy, and unsure of its historic parallels, the Opposition did not dare to speak openly of Thermidor, nor to call Stalin the "grave-digger" of the revolution, or the Tsar of the kulaks, as he was called in whispers, nor openly to compare Voroshilov to General Cavaignac.
At the end of his oration, Stalin triumphantly announced that "Comrade Krupskaya has forsaken the Opposition bloc." Two days before, a letter from Shliapnikov and Medvediev, extracted by threats, had been made known, in which the signatories confessed their errors, judged and humiliated themselves and repented. The moral forces of several Oppositionists were weakening by reason of the impasse into which Trotsky and Zinoviev had strayed; new discords on tactical questions broke out among the shattered ranks. Sapronov and his followers felt ill at ease among the "big guns" of the industrialists. Stalin was fully informed of all this and intrigued to his utmost to increase the differences, while at the same time the machine increased its external pressure: cells, sections, committees, all manifested a fantastic and unanimous loyalty, which deceived no one.
During the Conference, the "ideological struggle" continued unabated outside. Zinoviev complained of a verse quoted from Alexander Blok by a Saratov newspaper: "Is it our fault if your skeleton is crushed by the grip of our soft and heavy paws?" In Pravda Larin stated the alternatives: "Either the Opposition must be excluded and legally suppressed, or the question will be settled with machine-guns in the streets, as the Left Social Revolutionaries did in Moscow in 1918." In an editorial Bukharin swore deliriously to defend, in the name of the Party, "the Leninist purity of his ideology like the apple of his eye" and proclaimed Lenin's disputed "heritage" to be sacrosanct.
In December the dispute was carried on at the Executive of the International, in front of those whom Medvediev had called paid "lackeys." Stalin could have avoided another sham debate, but he preferred to save his face by posing as a believer in universal communism, as continuing the work of Lenin, when he was merely his temporary heir or at most his imitator. Tirelessly he recited the statement which all his hearers had already heard or read to satiety, that litany from the Complete Works which he had already composed for his earlier interventions. Trotsky and Zinoviev gave everlastingly the same answers, which to-morrow would be denounced by Pravda as "lack of discipline." Clara Zetkin, converted to Leninism, mocked at their "bag full of quotations," and the chorus of international followers reviled the heterodox.
But the leaders of the Opposition, urged on by their followers who were weary of diplomacy, began to raise their voices in order to demonstrate the constancy of their ideas. Stalin became more violent, more aggressive, in fact more scurrilous. He exhumed all the ancient errors, real or imagined, of his opponents, and revealed the incident of the telegram of congratulations which Kamenev had sent to the Grand-Duke Michael at the time of the February Revolution. Kamenev invoked a denial, signed by Lenin, in his defence, but Stalin challenged this, stating that Lenin had, m the interests of the Party, knowingly written the opposite of the truth. Thus did personal animosity and a spirit of cliquishness now take precedence over "ideology," so much stressed in official political literature; and this between persons who had once prided themselves as much on the correctness of their relations as on their doctrinal rigour. Trotsky, always anxious to discover a struggle of classes behind the struggles of the cliques, would nevertheless not admit the truth of Jaures's just observation: "History is a strange battle, where the men who fight against one another often serve the same cause." Later he was to attempt to explain his defeats, without explaining anything, by the dumb pressure of the prosperous peasants and the influence of world capitalism, reflected through the laborious empiricism of Stalin.
The Party, therefore, began the tenth year of the revolution, more disunited than ever before. The split which Lenin had foreseen was gradually taking place in fact. Both camps prepared themselves for fresh clashes after the end of 1926, putting no faith either in the promises of democracy from the Right or of discipline from the Left. Stalin arranged his pieces on the chess-board, where the so-called Trotskyists were mere pawns: Ordjonikidze as President of the Control Commission; Chubar to fill the vacancy as alternate of the Politbureau; Bukharin at the helm of the International, without the title of President; lesser personages everywhere where the machine did not appear to be secure. The Opposition, on its side, completed its organisation as a clandestine Party within the only Party, with its own hierarchy in miniature, its Politbureau, its Central Committee, its regional and local agents, its foundation groups, its subscriptions, its circulars, its code for letters. Nevertheless, Zinoviev became discouraged and hesitated whether to persevere. The Sapronovists considered blazing their own trail. Among Trotsky's supporters, many began to doubt their previous convictions. But a fresh problem arose to reawaken the antagonism of the two fractions: civil war in China, which Pravda hailed yet again as "the thunder of the world revolution."
Since the death of Yuan Shih-kai, in the absence of any stable and recognised power beyond certain provincial frontiers, the Chinese Republic had been passing through troubled times, delivered over to military bandits and feudal war lords. The generals, in the pay of the rival Great Powers, divided between them an ephemeral authority over the immense territory, broken by alternate advances and retreats, alliances and ruptures. Finally two poles of attraction emerged: in the North, the militarist reaction, headed by Chang Tso-lin and centred around Mukden; in the South, the democratic revolution, directed by Sun Yatsen from Canton. The nominal Government at Peking, which was in the hands of Wu Pei-fu, really only had jurisdiction within the ancient capital, despite the support of the British. Various generals, among whom was Feng Yu-hsiang, converted to Christianity, and thereafter looked on as a pawn of the United States, sold, lent or withdrew their co-operation in accordance with a thousand vicissitudes. Thanks to Lenin's policy of placing China on a footing of equality, without regard to the "unequal treaties," Bolshevism exercised a considerable influence on the national revolutionary movement. Joffe, as Ambassador from the U.S.S.R., had negotiated and begun an intelligent Russo-Chinese co-operation, of which Karakhan, his successor, saw the first fruits. On his death-bed, Sun Yat-sen dictated two messages: one to the Kuomintang, his party, and the other to the Executive of the Soviets, expressing the wish for a permanent bond between the two revolutions and a lasting alliance of solidarity between the two countries. With his base in Manchuria and aided by the Japanese, Chang Tso-lin succeeded in extending his operations towards the south, preaching the traditional morality of Confucius as against Sun Yat-sen's semi-socialism. He succeeded in taking Peking, and even Shanghai for a short while. But the Kuomintang was supported inside the country by the bourgeois nationalists, the liberal students, the workers and the peasants, and by the Soviet Union from outside. It had succeeded, despite the violence with which the revolting proletariat was treated by the professional soldiers, in raising and training troops with a new mentality who were capable of defeating mercenaries not fighting for an ideal. The Chinese University in Moscow, directed by Radek, the officer-instructors, sent from Russia to the Military School in Canton, among whom was Blucher, under the name of Galen, finally the Russian advisers to the Communist Party, now incorporated in the Kuomintang, such as Bubnov and Borodin, who dispensed large subsidies—all these played no small part in the victorious march of the Southerners towards the North and the valley of the Yangtse, under the command of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1926 the balance of forces was in favour of the Reds. Wu Pei-fu, beaten by Chang, by Feng, by Chiang and others, gradually faded from the scene, as did also Sun Chuan-fang, another venal general of merely temporary importance. Feng rallied decisively to the Kuomintang. The so-called "popular" armies had occupied Hankow and were advancing on Nanking and Shanahai. This, broadly and simply outlined, was the situation in China at the time when Stalin began to take an active part in the leadership of the International.
The young Chinese Communist Party had not renounced its independent press, its political physiognomy and its freedom of action of its own free will, to become the powerless Left wing of the bourgeois Kuomintang. This course of conduct was forced upon it by Moscow. Stalin and Bukharin, his inspirer and ideologue, claimed to he encouraging a socialist evolution in China by means of penetration into the Kuomintang, where the "bloc of four classes," the revolutionaries of the country and the epoch, was to be sealed. The weakness of the Chinese bourgeoisie, Stalin told the Executive of the International in November 1926, justified this tactic, and even authorised communist participation in the capitalist government. He expected that the victory of the Cantonese would bring about democratic liberties "for all revolutionary elements in general and for the workers in particular." In order not to alarm this insignificant bourgeoisie, to reassure Chiang Kai-shek, with whom he had once exchanged signed photographs in Moscow, and to gain the confidence of the civil and military chiefs of Canton, he ordered his emissaries to shut their eyes to the bloody repressions of strikes in the south. He forbade the arming of the workers, the creation of soviets and the encouragement of peasant revolts, even ordering the suppression of these. Already in March 1926, when Chiang Kai-shek had staged a coup d'etat in Canton in order to curb the communists, the Soviet press had had orders to suppress the truth, while simultaneously Bubnov was urging his Chinese subordinates to submit. According to Borodin, the latter were to fulfil the role of political "coolies" in the Kuomintang, which was now admitted to the International as a "sympathetic" section.
Trotsky, on the other hand, while disagreeing with Radek and Zinoviev on several points, demanded a separate policy and organisation in order to rescue the communists from the guardianship of the Kuomintang. Both sides searched the pages of the Complete Works, looking there for a solution which could not be found. It is true that Lenin had always recommended the support of all revolutionary movements, whether bourgeois or nationalist, and advantageous compromises with democratic and liberal parties, but only on the condition that the Communist Party did not give up its liberty nor lose sight of its socialist programme, did not lose itself in or become confused with such parties. Trotsky could make use of this to the fullest extent. But Stalin compared the Kuomintang to the British Labour Party, into which Lenin himself advised the Communist Party to try to enter. Without doubt this was a complete misunderstanding of the different social nature of the two parties, and the disparity between their historical circumstances. In addition, since the death of Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang had been transformed in very much the same manner as the Bolshevik Party since Lenin's death....
In March 1927, following Chiang Kai-shek's entry into Shanghai, where he formed a "popular" Government, two communist ministers participated in the national Government at Hankow. In April, the President of the Kuomintang, Wang Ching-wei, and the Secretary of the Communist Party, Chen Tu-hsiu, proclaimed a permanent collaboration, and the subordination of the military authorities to the civil power. In Moscow, Stalin, irritated by the criticisms of the Opposition, himself guaranteed Chiang Kai-shek's fidelity to Sun Yat-sen's Testament and the Soviet alliance, before a large audience of "active" militants. Radek, on the contrary, predicted a fatal breakdown in the Communist-Nationalist coalition, and gave warning that the workers were in grave danger from Chiang's machine-guns. A few days later came the news of a military coup d'etat in Shanghai: of hundreds, presently of thousands of workers massacred, the Red Government dissolved by the "popular" army, the Russian agents in flight and the members of the Communist Party hunted down. The same thing, preceded by a search of the Soviet Embassy in Peking, took place in Nanking, Canton and elsewhere. The Soviet press exploded into imprecations, fulminating with rage and impotence. Chiang Kai-shek was now a deserter, a traitor, a counter-revolutionary, a feudalist, a dictator, an executioner, a Cavaignac, a Gallifet. Stalin was just in time to prevent Pravda from publishing his lamentable discourse. But the disaster on the Pacific stained him with the blood of the workers. The indignant Opposition came to the fore again; an address presented to the Central Committee by eighty-three Oppositionists was covered with signatures. The fractional struggle broke out with renewed vigour around the Chinese question, about the middle of 1927.
UNSCATHED, Stalin survived an upheaval which must have overthrown him under any regime which was in the smallest degree democratic. There was an excellent reason for this: he enjoyed a complete monopoly of all the means of information and comment, both in print and on the platform. The entire press belonged to him and praised his foresight unblushingly. Not only the immense economic and political administrative apparatus, but also the police and the army were under his orders, through intermediaries. He was free to do whatever he liked except against the members of the Central Committee and the Politbureau, unless he had a majority there. No despot in any age or in any country, has ever enjoyed such powers of deceiving public opinion, or, if that failed, of suppressing it. The Opposition, by word of mouth and by duplicated pamphlets, were able at the end of several months to influence twenty or thirty thousand people at most. The "Declaration of the Eighty-three" collected about three thousand signatures, but most of those sympathisers who were not already marked down, abstained, not wishing to subject themselves to reprisals to no good end. A certain number of workers' circles existed in secret, holding no communication with one another for fear of the spies, both professional and amateur, which swarmed everywhere. Collective apathy and individual instincts of self-preservation between them gave Stalin a free hand, provided always that he continued to safeguard the privileges of the "oligarchy."
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Gribovedov's masterpiece The Misfortune of Having Wit, which was forbidden by the censor, was circulated to the extent of some 40,000 copies, according to some authorities. In the tenth year of Bolshevism, Trotsky's writings were in the same position. This is not the only instance of regression to an earlier century, a reaction which makes the parallel between the Iron Tsar and the "Steel" Secretary even more striking.
When Stalin slakes his vindictiveness by omitting Trotsky from the official history of the revolution, when he denies facts and falsifies texts, and removes from the libraries all books and documents which, though authentic, are contrary to his views, when, in order to deny that his principal adversary played any part in 1917 or in the Civil War, he expurgates the life-stories and memoirs of his contemporaries, witnesses and participants, even Lenin's own unpublished papers, when he causes the anniversaries of the Red Army to be celebrated without mentioning the most important name, and orders that the film October be made as though Trotsky had never existed, how can one help being reminded of Custine's description of the sovereign autocrat, who "adjusts the history of his country to suit his good pleasure, and dispenses each day to his people those historic verities which coincide with the fiction of the moment"? Whether it be a Tsarist Empire or a Soviet Republic, "in that country, historic truth is no more respected than the sacredness of an oath." The printing of certain pages of a Soviet Encyclopedia was held up so that the biography of various persons who had ceased to be in favour while it was in the press could be re-written.
The general public was no better informed about the present than the past, on the defeats in China than on the earlier victories in Russia. Stalin scourged the Opposition even in their graves. When the ashes of Skliansky, who was killed in an accident in the United States, were returned, he refused to allow the urn to be placed in the sepulchre in the Red Square, as though wishing again to illustrate Custine: "In Russia, the dead themselves are subjected to the caprices of the man who rules over the living."
After the sinister miscalculations of Shanghai and Canton, the dark Story continued with the arrest at Peking of twenty Chinese communists, condemned to the horrible torture of strangulation by garrotting. Among them were a founder of the Party, Professor Li Ta-chao, and a young girl, Chen Paiming. But Stalin continued to demonstrate in theses and in imperturbable speeches the correctness of his line, and to reprove the leaders of the Opposition for urging a break with the Kuomintang and the creation of soviets in southern China. At that time he staked his hopes on Feng Yu-hsiang, the Christian General who claimed to be a follower of Sun Pat-sen, and who like so many other mercenaries, and like all the brotherhood of enemies of Bolshevism, called himself a spiritual son of Lenin.
In any case, the affairs of the Far East only interested Stalin in relation to his position in the Party. His friends did not conceal his project of beheading the Opposition by "liquidating" the most important leaders; once expelled from the Party, these intractables could be handed over to the G.P.U. But for this it was necessary to have the consent of the Politbureau. At this period, it was whispered in the corridors of the Kremlin, by those in the know, that since the Politbureau had lost its Left wing, it was divided into Right and Centre factions, four votes against four. Rykov, Bukharin, Tomsky and Kalinin were named as Rightists, without anyone knowing exactly what the division was about. Thus one half of the Politbureau paralysed the other. (The position of Kuibyshev, the ninth member, was still in dispute, since it was illegal by statute to be a member of both the Central Committee and the Control Commission.) Stalin found himself thus in temporary difficulties at the top.
The manner in which he extricated himself from this embarrassment clearly demonstrates his superiority on the low level where he manoeuvres with such skill. Foreseeing all eventualities, he had already enlarged the Politbureau and the Central Committee in order to surround himself as far as possible with docile followers. But his fraction was still not entirely homogeneous since he had to take into account those old Bolsheviks, whose intellectual ability Lenin had not thought much of, but who had helped to defeat first Trotsky, then Zinoviev. Until the whole process was complete, until the genuine Stalinist camarilla formed the majority in the Politbureau, Stalin was forced to make terms, to manoeuvre, to temporise. For this reason he did nothing in haste, but continued his silent work of modifying the numerical proportions to his advantage, even to the extent of only one vote.
On various occasions Trotsky had believed it possible to launch a frontal attack against the stable kernel of the Central Committee. Zinoviev had also made two separate minor attempts, once against Trotsky in concert with Stalin, and once against Stalin with his own forces. Stalin himself never left anything to chance, and never risked an open conflict without accurately measuring his forces and reckoning up his votes. It is therefore necessary to follow carefully the tiresome bureaucratic mutations, the "general post" of the functionaries, since the vital and palpable secret of the Secretary's dictatorship lies in just these colourless combinations, which force us to explore what Carlyle called "the obscure and indescribable regions of history."
Stalin had against him a body of more or less respectable traditions, static tendencies consecrated by time, and reputations which were long established, even overvalued. In order to accustom the Party, or rather the leading cadres, to a revision of customs and a fresh standard of values, it was necessary to proceed slowly and by insensible gradations. After cleaning up the Politbureau, he prepared people's minds for a purge of the Central Committee. There was no hurry about going further: people accepted a downfall more readily than an expulsion. Having already postponed the Party Congress, first for some months, then for a year, he adjourned the Congress of the Soviets for the same period, and put off the Congress of the International to an unspecified date. Little by little it became a habit to allow the Central Committee, or its organs, or, in the last resort, the General Secretary, to act on their own. When the Right in the Politbureau began to be irksome, Stalin exercised patience and compromised, sure of the Central Committee and reckoning, with undeniable perspicacity, on his adversaries' stupidity and the poltroonery of his accomplices. And in fact, one after another, they later came to his aid at the right moment. The period was fertile in occasions and pretexts.
Diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Conservative Britain, already very strained by Russia's part in the General Strike, became acute in 1927, after the Chinese affair. Stalin took advantage of an atmosphere favourable to patriotic exaltation, to take the Opposition at their word when, before the Central Committee in April and in the recent "Declaration of the Eighty-three," they imprudently affirmed: "The threat of war grows greater every day." Exploiting this justification for a state of siege, he set the ignorant population on the alert and proclaimed that the revolution was in peril, only too glad to put the Left in the position of supporting the enemy. Bukharin's and Voroshilov's speeches having already provoked the beginnings of a panic, a run on the shops, Stalin had to calm people's fears by declaring: "We shall not have a war this spring, nor even in the autumn, because our enemies are not yet ready for it." The bogy of war, first raised by the Opposition, could only favour the bureaucracy; the closer the danger, the more severe the dictatorship. At the end of May, Trotsky made an unusually violent and useless speech before the phantoms who composed the Executive of the International, in which he mixed the Anglo-Russian Committee, the Kuomintang, the Soviet bureaucracy and the coming war. Stalin, replying, refused to consider what he had said, "the more so since he reminds one more of an actor than a hero," but continued, nevertheless, to argue step by step the undesirability of forcing the pace of the Chinese Revolution, the need to maintain the understanding with the Kuomintang and to oppose the creation of Chinese soviets. He concluded: "I have just received news that the British Conservative Government has broken off relations with the U.S.S.R. ... The Party is threatened with war from some directions, with splits from others. Thus there is a sort of united front from Chamberlain to Trotsky.... Have no doubts that we shall know how to break this new front." The tone then became more venomous with mutual accusations of Menshevism and treason.
The Opposition continued to strengthen Stalin's position by its thoughtless tactics which resulted in bringing together persons who were previously disaffected. It attacked Tomsky without measure over the Anglo-Russian Committee, and Bukharin over China, which caused them to draw closer to their protector. Stalin seized this propitious moment to summon the Politbureau and propose Trotsky's and Zinoviev's exclusion from the Central Committee, under threat of resignation. Not realising the full gravity of their action, which opened an unlimited field of action for Stalin, the Right gave way. The Control Commission followed suit, despite the unexpected resistance of Ordjonikidze. A tragic external event lent its aid to Stalin's manoeuvre. The assassination of Voykov, Soviet Ambassador to Warsaw, produced a devastating terrorist repercussion in Moscow. Twenty former capitalists and aristocrats, among whom was a Prince Dolgorukov, none of whom had anything to do with the attack, were seized without preliminary warning as hostages, and executed by the G.P.U. Stalin's hand did not waver, and at such a time, when the Kremlin was talking of a new Sarajevo, the Politbureau could not resist.
The Control Commission justified its resolution on "Trotsky's and Zinoviev's lack of discipline," by the fractional activity of the guilty ones. The Opposition had broken its promises, distributed its forbidden literature, held a demonstration by accompanying Smilga (who had been banished to Siberia under cover of a "mission"), to the station (a lapse which was made especially marked by reason of a similar demonstration the day of Kamenev's departure for Rome). In addition, Zinoviev had allowed himself to make certain criticisms at a commemoration ceremony, and Trotsky had done the same at the Executive of the International. Previously he had "libellously accused the Party of Thermidorianism" before the Control Commission, which therefore submitted to the Plenary Session of the Central Organs a demand that "Trotsky's and Zinoviev's names be erased from the list of members of the Central Committee." There had been no instance up to that time of anything unexpected happening in such a case. It seemed as though nothing now remained to impede the bureaucratic Nemesis.
Stalin, however, met with misfortune in China, where Feng Yu-hsiang, following in Chiang Kai-shek's footsteps, severely discomfited him by turning on the communists. Pravda covered the new "traitor" with insults, which, however, in no way prevented the various Chinese generals from hanging and shooting Reds of all shades of opinion, decimating the workers' trade unions and drowning the peasants' revolts in blood. "More than ten thousand proletarians and revolutionary intellectuals have already fallen beneath the murderous blows of the united counter-revolution. Hundreds of the finest sons of China are being slaughtered daily. Prisoners are submitted to indescribable tortures," so people read in a manifesto in Moscow. It only remained for Stalin to pick on Wang Ching-wei, representative of the Kuomintang Left, in order to bring about a fresh disaster, the debacle of the social revolution in China, the collapse of his last illusions, and an exposure of the scandalous bankruptcy of his adventurist strategy. This final turn took place in July 1927, when the session opened in an unbelievable state of disorder.
In order to divert attention from his own heavy responsibility, Stalin made use of an audacious diversion, which deceived no well-informed militant, but might affect the morale of their followers. He sought for a scapegoat, finally throwing on to the shoulders of his Chinese subordinates, his instruments and victims-those who survived the butcheries—the responsibility for the whole series of mistakes committed, thereby stirring up an opportune crisis within the Chinese Communist Party. He had already ordered them to leave the nationalist coalition government, if not the Kuomintang, and he now, at last, took over the Opposition slogan, "Form Soviets." Now that the game was lost, he considered this appropriate. But his chief manoeuvre consisted in threatening the Bolshevik assembly with the menace of war.
"The foremost problem at the present moment is the danger of a fresh outbreak of war ... directed particularly against the Soviet Union," he wrote, without believing it, since in private conversations he was cynical enough to comment ironically on this fairy-story. The Left walked into the trap, the more readily in that they had been the first to sound the alarm. The war question became the centre of all the debates. "The Soviet Union is menaced by armed aggression, and in these conditions ... it is essential that our Party be a united whole, and that the masses which surround it also close their ranks," said Krupskaya, who found it natural to read her one-time fraction a lesson. Chicherin and Ossinsky alone stood out against the panic thesis, and the future was to confirm their sensible and courageous words. Trotsky affirmed the willingness of the Left to fight for the "socialist fatherland," without subscribing to any union sacree, but considered Stalin incapable of achieving the victory, and posed the alternatives: "Thermidor or the Opposition." When accused of defeatism he quoted the example of Clemenceau, who opposed the Government of his country and his class, not in order to hinder its defence but to help in the conduct of the war. When he was interrupted with reminders that the Party existed, he replied: "You have strangled the Party," yet he continued to express his irrational belief in that Party, which Sapronov had called a "corpse." Stalin jeered at the "comic-opera Clemenceau" and his "little group which has more leaders than soldiers." What did the signatures at the bottom of the "Declaration of the Eighty-three" signify when compared to the immense majority which he professed to represent? And his tone changed for a final warning. "In order to conquer this majority it would be necessary to start a civil war in the Party." This was clear. Stalin would not abandon power without resorting to armed force. As for the Opposition, it never made use of anything stronger than words.
Apart from the artificial bogy of war which dominated the assembly, almost all the old disputes which had been argued and re-argued since Lenin's death, were brought up once again. Differences over October, divergencies during the Civil War, the antecedents of Trotskyism, the Anglo-Russian Committee, the Chinese affair. The two fractions fenced indefatigably with quotations, contradictions and threats. But, as usual, the decisive struggle took place in the wings, where the monolithic character of the bureaucratic machine was, as everyone knew, beginning to show serious fissures.
Stalin worked hard to separate Trotsky from Zinoviev, to expel the first and to bring the second to his knees. This calculation was sound, but a little premature. As a result of their frantic cries that war was imminent, the deceivers had finished by half-convincing themselves, and had certainly terrified the majority of the deceived. If the Soviet Union was perhaps on the eve of general mobilisation, how could they afford to dispense with the services of such tried combatants as Trotsky, Smilga, Muralov, Mrachkovsky and so many others' Ordjonikidze could not resign himself to it and sought for a compromise. The provincial delegates were also uneasy and argued that people's minds were not yet prepared. Nevertheless, the exclusion was unanimously voted, following the usual rule, but amid a feeling of great uneasiness, and by an irregularity of procedure, in the absence of Ordjonikidze, who did not concur.
Meanwhile Stalin could content himself with the results achieved, in order, later, to press his advantage further. There was no urgent question for him in the Party at that time and from then on no one in the State could oppose him. The Congress fixed for December 1927, would be chosen so as to ensure the election of a truly harmonious Central Committee. The preliminary discussions in November would coincide with the Tenth Anniversary celebrations, whose well-organised atmosphere of overpowering enthusiasm, would facilitate the task of the omnipotent apparatus. Stalin therefore came to an agreement with Ordjonikidze, who, in turn, invited the Left to take up a more conciliatory attitude in order that they might be saved. Trotsky and Zinoviev agreed and after various hidden manoeuvres and laborious bargainings, the exclusion was annulled, the Opposition once more promised to dissolve, and escaped with "a severe reproof and a warning." Twelve days spent in settling accounts and in exasperated altercations terminated with a soothing remonstrance. But Stalin had trimmed his sails only in the absolute certainty of finally achieving his aim. If he was unable to find a pretext, he would know how to invent one.
"Never before has the Opposition been so unshakably convinced of its position, nor held to it with such unanimity," said Trotsky. In fact, however, his disorientated fraction had already lost or was about to lose, in addition to Krupskaya, many prominent people originally in Zinoviev's circle, notably Sokolnikov, Zalutsy, Shelavin, and Zoff who had made a full apology. Each week other less prominent Oppositionists recognised their errors, sometimes stooping to denounce their comrades as proof of their servile submission. Conversely, Sapronov's group detached itself in order to take up a franker and more radical position. His "Platform of the Fifteen" pointed out the pressing danger of a Thermidor, demanded the re-establishment of the soviets, defended Lenin's'democratic principles formulated in State and Revolution, criticised the G.P.U. for "suppressing the legitimate discontent of the workers," and the Red Army "which threatens to become an instrument of Bonapartist adventurism." The disintegration which was beginning could not be checked so long as Trotsky persisted in regarding the symptoms merely as growing pains.
Nevertheless, the weakness of the Opposition was due far less to lack of numbers than to its intrinsic inability to reason concretely, to its insoluble internal contradictions and to the impenetrable obscurity of its perspective.
Although the Party was no longer a party, although the Party had been strangled, yet for Trotsky the Party still remained sacred, untouchable and taboo. In his eyes, the State, the proletariat, the kulak, the N.E.P. man, the bureaucrat, were so many definite abstractions like the Party. At first he based his hopes on the new generation, which as a whole displayed all the defects of the preceding one, together with a few of its own, and with certain good qualities lacking. Common sense and experience told him to spend time on educating an elite, but, himself a prisoner in an unfortunate "bloc," surrounded by vulgar politicians, he acted as though he shared their absurd impatience and incurable aberrations. When aiming at the oligarchy, he attacked only individuals, not principles, failing utterly to engage the attention of the working masses, the importance of whose active adherence he discounted.
The members of the Opposition vied with one another in mystic and dogmatic Leninism, burying beneath an avalanche of captious quotations from the Scriptures, or unintelligible pamphlets on China, a people who lacked everything and no longer had any rights but only duties. In the new religion of the State, its best elements represented, as against the Jesuitism of the bureaucratic caste, not Free Thought or Rationalism, but a sort of Protestantism or Jansenism, respectful towards a common Scripture. Certainly it can be said of them that, members of a privileged Party and yet despising these privileges, the original core of their group contained "the only characters who never succumbed to the universal fascination of power," as Renan wrote of Port-Royal; but such little public opinion as still existed was unable to distinguish shades of Left and Right in the degenerate Bolshevik Party and therefore unable to tell the good from the bad in it. Such sympathy as the Oppositionists did succeed in arousing or conserving, was, generally, less for their doctrines than for the men who were sufficiently courageous to defy the dictatorship and thus give to the one-time citizens, now become passive subjects, an onerous example in revolutionary citizenship.
Trotsky feared that if he were defeated there was bound to be a Thermidor, followed by the inescapable Brumaire, yet he declared to the Americans in August 1927, speaking of the opposing sides in the struggle, "What separates us is incomparably less than what unites us." He saw himself in the position of Babeuf under the Directory, and would have liked to bring about an upsurge of proletarian Jacobinism; but far from conceiving of a supplementary revolution in order to suppress the regime of oppression and Bolshevik-Soviet exploitation, he planned long-term reforms which would only perpetuate it.
His views on external politics were equally unconvincing, He was over-anxious to load on to Stalin's shoulders what was really a collective responsibility, in which Lenin had a large share, and in which all the chief Leninists have had a part according to their importance. He was careful not to criticise that political dualism which had been shown for example by the Party's verbal solidarity with the Turkish Communists, at a time when the State was in fact allied with Mustapha Kemal who was dispatching them to the scaffold; but he waxed indignant over the collusion with Mussolini, to whom Rykov had telegraphed astonishing congratulations. He is not convincing when he holds Stalin responsible for all the reverses and misfortunes in the international arena, where communism under Lenin had already met with defeat in Germany, in Hungary, in Finland and in Italy, and under Zinoviev in Germany again, in Bulgaria and in Esthonia, long before the checks in Britain and the Chinese catastrophe.
Inconsequent tactics complemented the theoretical contradictions and the illogical policy of the Opposition. It did not know the correct time to throw its full influence and weight into the scale, nor when to be patient and allow favourable circumstances to ripen, while still working for its revenge. By aiming its blows at the wrong time and place it rallied the maximum of bureaucratic unity against itself, and lined up all the conservative interests, whether conscious or unconscious, behind Stalin, instead of disarming some and neutralising others. Passing from sterile waiting to a hopeless offensive, it struck blindly at the "wall" of the Party, and set against itself those whom in other directions it sought to convert to its ideals. It dissipated its energies on doctrinal exegesis and problems of revolutionary strategy when it should have concentrated on the root question of the regime, on which all the rest depended....
BETWEEN two sessions of the Central Committee, Stalin speeded up the preliminaries for a major surgical operation which he had been planning for a long time. One may well believe that the rupture with the Anglo-Russian Committee (finally accomplished in September 1927—but by the trade Union Congress), and the final doom of the Chinese communists, had aroused his deepest rancour against his too clear-sighted adversaries. His spokesmen therefore took advantage of their monopoly of the press and platform to deal a moral blow at the Opposition, already physically fettered, and to prepare people's minds for the "dry guillotine," at the very moment when Pravda was boasting of "the unprecedented extension of democracy under the Soviet regime." Stalin's spies strained every nerve to ferret out indiscipline, or, if possible, to provoke it in order to suppress it. Expulsions multiplied throughout September, and towards the end of the month the Executive of the International eliminated Trotsky, in defiance of the statutes. A new "crime" was discovered by the G.P.U. in the shape of a "clandestine printing plant"; twelve persons, guilty, or said to be so, were expelled from the Party. Preobrazhensky and Serebriakov attempted to shield them and met the same fate; so did thirty of their comrades in Leningrad, on other charges. Mrachkovsky and various others were thrown into prison. Obviously the long-awaited denouement was at hand.
In October, Trotsky and Zinoviev were finally expelled from the Central Committee, before whom they made yet one more superfluous speech, amid an unprecedented uproar, drowned by interruptions and insults. For the last time they seized the chance to lend themselves to a scene which Stalin had adroitly prepared. The latter no longer thought it necessary to preserve any decorum. His discreet and valued agent, Menzhinsky, nominal chief of the police, presented a report on the Opposition which consisted of an absurd and incoherent story about a military plot, intended to implicate them in counter-revolutionary activity with one of Wrangel's officers, who was, in reality, an agent of the G.P.U. This was an obvious provocative machination—"Thermidorian" Trotsky called it—in which the uneasy but submissive audience clearly perceived Stalin's expert hand.
One cannot even compare the Soviet G.P.U. to the Tsarist Okhrana. It is necessary to go back to the time of Nicholas I in order to have some idea of this formidable institution, a cross between the famous Third Section of the Chancellery and the terrible Corps of Gendarmes, but with an up-to-date technique. The parallel is rendered more exact by the fact that the veritable head of the police was the "Steel" Secretary, as the Iron Tsar had been in his time. Everyone felt himself to be under Stalin's surveillance, direct or indirect, and no member of the Bolshevik Parliament, outside the Left, dared to contradict or to oppose him. Corrupt persons and fanatics set the tone and the rest resigned themselves to voting anything. Amid an inconceivable uproar, in which the efforts of the cabal were clearly evident, Trotsky, the finest orator of the Party, was forced to read his speech word for word in order not to lose the thread, and to cut it short before he had finished. None of those who expressed their disgust confidentially in the corridors had the courage to declare it in the hall. Amid a chorus of outcries, only the more moderate of which were recorded by the stenographer, "renegade... traitor ... scum.., chatter-box... boaster... liar.....Menshevik," Trotsky succeeded in making himself heard above the racket: "Stalin's present organisational victory is the prelude to his political collapse." Whistles and cat-calls prevented him from going further.
Stalin, certain of an attentive silence, replied first by a personal defence, delivered in his repetitive style: "That the principal attacks are directed against Stalin is perhaps explained by the fact that he has a greater knowledge than certain comrades of the knaveries of the Opposition, and that he is less easily deceived. That is why Stalin is particularly attacked. Who is Stalin? Stalin is an unimportant individual. Take Lenin....." And he quoted yet again the old polemics from the days of emigration, when Trotsky harshly castigated "Maximilian Lenin."
On the question of the Testament, which the Opposition always raised, he denied having suppressed it, took refuge behind the unanimous decision not to publish it, and finally quoted Trotsky's denials of its existence to Max Eastman. "It is said that in this Testament Lenin proposed that the Congress should examine tile question of replacing Stalin in the post of General Secretary. This is quite true. Let us read this passage, although you have already heard it several times ..." And he read aloud Lenin's well-known lines:
Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority—namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.
He went on to vindicate himself, secure in the mathematical conviction that the votes were already his, but strengthened also by the errors of his opponents.
Yes, comrades, I am rude towards those who rudely and traitorously break their word, who split and destroy the Party. I have never concealed it and I do not conceal it now. Right from the first session of the Central Committee, after the Thirteenth Congress, I asked to be released from the obligations of the General Secretaryship. The Congress itself examined the question. Each delegation examined the question, and every delegation, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, voted unanimously in favour of Stalin remaining at his post. What could I do then? Abandon my post? Such a thing is not in my character....At the end of one year I again asked to be set free and I was again forced to remain at my post. What could I do then?
After this self-justification came the speech for the prosecution:
They complain of our arresting wreckers, men who have been expelled from the Party and are carrying on anti-Soviet intrigues. Yes, we have arrested them and we shall arrest them so long as they undermine the Party and the Soviet power....They say that such things are unknown in the history of the Party. This is not true. What about the Myasnikov Group? And the Workers Truth group? Does not everyone know that Comrades Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves supported the arrest of the members of these groups?
He turned derisively to Zinoviev who had predicted war in the spring of 1927, then in the autumn: "Now it is winter and still the war has not come." He observed that before his "chatter" about Thermidor, Trotsky had in the New Course denied "those historical analogies with the great French Revolution (the downfall of the Jacobins) with which the superficial and inconsequent liberals and Mensheviks seek to console themselves." He accused the Opposition of wishing to form a rival party, which they denied. The intransigence of the Bolshevik caste on this point is well known. "Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, two, three, even four parties may exist, but on condition that one is in power and all the rest in prison," as Tomsky and Bukharin, the Rightists, were soon to say, paraphrasing one another. What a regression in the ten years since Lenin promised "a peaceful competition between parties inside the Soviets!"
The assembly arranged the programme for the next Congress. By an impudent paradox they rendered involuntary homage to the industrialist Left at the very moment when they condemned it to death, by adopting "Directives for the elaboration of an economic Five Year Plan," thus breathing life into the project that Trotsky had cherished since 1920. But there was a great difference in the tone of the two projects, and the proposed tempo of future industrial progress. The Opposition hastened to prepare "counter-theses" of a more ambitious nature, destined for the Congress. The Governmental fraction, safe in its control of the means of persuasion and coercion, finally allowed, with democratic generosity, one month and a special page of Pravda for preliminary discussions. The Left asked for three months, since several weeks at least were necessary to get replies to certain correspondence. As to the freedom to speak one's mind, no one was deceived on that score, knowing very well what it cost those who were courageous enough to make their views known.
The officials of the Party, according to Stalin, numbered 100,000 persons in 1927, out of a total of 1,200,000 members and candidates. In addition, approximately half the effective total, say nearly half a million, consisted of State functionaries, trade union or Co-operative administrators, or those of other institutions connected with the Party. The other half, employed on production, enjoyed appreciably greater material security than non-party members and asked only to be allowed to consolidate this. In these conditions, the rank-and-file communist was faced with a choice between comfortable orthodoxy and hopeless unemployment. Those heroes who were prepared to sacrifice their minimum of comfort, sometimes their children's bread, for their principles, were still unable to make their voices heard at the Congress through the six successive stages, which filtered opinions from below, deadening them from stage to stage and finally suffocating them altogether.
At the end of October, Rakovsky and Kamenev took the risk of holding an open meeting in Moscow, but they were greeted with howls and were unable to speak. In other places similar attempts met with the same result. Nevertheless, the Opposition decided to continue with its combative tactics and to risk a street demonstration on the day of the great anniversary. Encouraged by the modest but fortuitous success of a demonstration in Leningrad, it hoped to make an impression on the bureaucracy by the evidence of its popularity.
That Zinoviev should show such presumption is not surprising. But Trotsky might have remembered Cromwell who, when he returned triumphantly from his campaign in Ireland, wisely remarked that "the crowd would have been still larger if they had come to see me hanged," or Washington, meditating, as he listened to the acclamations after his elections to the Presidency, "on the quite different scenes which perhaps I shall one day witness, in spite of all my, efforts to do right." But, relying on their hypothetical and dogmatic social science, Bolsheviks of the Left, as well as those of the Right and Centre, are disposed to mistake their desires for the reality, their fears for a certainty, and to generalise from every occurrence, no matter how accidental. The Opposition was intoxicated by contact with its partisans in small illegal meetings, particularly when it unexpectedly succeeded in filling the amphitheatre of the Higher Technical School. On November 7, 1927, aliens amid the joyous mood of the celebration, carrying enigmatic slogans inscribed on placards, they launched themselves into the unheeding crowd which filed past singing revolutionary songs—a crowd like that of any other country but at the same time a Soviet Russian crowd, trained to march in line, collectively credulous but sceptical in its component elements, worried and passive, animated by a vague sentiment of revolutionary patriotism tempered with lassitude.
This time Stalin was not caught unprepared. The Opposition, submerged in the indifferent multitude, found itself face to face with well-trained bands, which, according to an official communique "pelted them with rotten potatoes and galoshes," which proved that these henchmen were there on purpose, since no one habitually sets out to celebrate the anniversary of a revolution supplied with rotten potatoes, and galoshes are far too expensive for anyone to throw away, especially at the beginning of the winter. The placards of the Opposition were torn down, the carriers molested, pushed, battered and sworn at by the crowd. A pistol shot—the bullet glanced off Trotsky's car. In Leningrad a brisk skirmish of the same kind resulted in Zinoviev's arrest for several hours. These were all the outstanding incidents of the day. Two small but fierce minorities alone were opposed to each other, the masses remained neutral and inert. On this point Trotsky notes in his My Life: "Those who could see, understood that a rehearsal for Thermidor took place in the streets of Moscow on November 7, 1927."
THE over-emphatic and banal manifesto issued by the Soviet Executive in honour of the anniversary contained a "surprise" among its hackneyed pronouncements and sacramental exclamations: the seven-hour working day was proclaimed, but in the form of a promise to bring this into operation a year later, by successive stages determined by the progress of the rationalisation of industry. In a country where it was officially admitted that the eight-hour day was not enforced, and where the workers, most of whom earned famine wages, were compelled to devote long hours each day to buying poor quality necessities such as bread for themselves and milk for their children, this future reform had not the importance that it was given in the official statement. The position, infuriated by the demagogic unreality of this "gift, never ceased to point this out, a fact which did not endear it further to its opponents. But this new quarrel was only accessory to a wider disagreement over economic policy. The manifesto said nothing about the Five Year Plan, already agreed to in principle by the Central Committee; the leaders still refused to give it a position of more than secondary interest. The counter-theses of the Opposition soon made it a centre of conflict.
A vast mass of apparently documented literature, filled with figures and illustrated by diagrams, purported to show that materially Russia, after ten years of the revolution, had been restored to the low level of before the War. But the whole thing was based on false premises and conditional assumptions. It did not take into account the movements of population, the loss of huge productive territories, the depreciation of the currency, the collapse of external trade, the destruction and depredations caused by the Civil War. On the other hand the Gosplan admitted that the average level of consumption per head still remained well below the wretched pre-War level, and according to the economic plan under discussion, it would not equal it until 1932, which would be the fifteenth anniversary of October. These authoritative calculations showed up the statistical fictions published for propaganda purposes, and stimulated the Left, whose counter-theses criticised such an "insufficient and utterly pessimistic plan."
The Five Year Plan produced by the Right did not, according to these theses, resolve a single difficulty, neither unemployment, nor low wages, nor the housing crisis, nor the inflation of the currency, nor the famine of goods. Indirect taxes, which increased with each budget, were crushing the working class. The production of spirits alone would have tripled in five years, while the development in general consumption goods would be trifling. What was necessary, according to the theses of the Left, was an increased investment of capital in industry. There were a milliard poods of grain in reserve on the countryside; by means of a forced loan of 150 million poods, the State could give a vigorous impulse to the whole economic system, find work for the thousands of unemployed and put fresh goods on the market in considerable quantities. The subsidies allowed to industrial production should be raised, first to 500 million roubles a year, and then increased progressively up to a milliard roubles during the next Five-Year period. It went without saying that this plan could not be realised without the collaboration of its Left promoters, still less against their opposition, and it therefore implied a more democratic "regime within the Party."
But the Opposition had by that time scarcely any means of making known its views, which were ironically dubbed "superindustrialist." By the time Pravda published the counter-theses, the delegates to the local, regional, provincial and national conferences which preceded the Congress, had already been chosen almost everywhere. Further, a merciless repression choked the voices of all minorities. The few discussion journals, a parody of democracy, only served to encourage one-sided polemics. Finally, the Central Committee openly encouraged the breaking up by force of the private meetings of the Opposition. During an arranged interview with foreign visitors Stalin replied to a well-timed question: "You will not find a State anywhere else in the world where the proletariat enjoy so great a liberty of the press as in the U.S.S.R."
On the same occasion he expressed himself on the subject of vodka, the returns on which were more than 500 million roubles, a proportion more or less equal to the "budget of drunkenness" under Tsarism. "I believe that we shall very soon succeed in abolishing the vodka monopoly, and reducing the production of alcohol to the minimum required for technical needs, and later in liquidating the sale of spirits altogether." But his most interesting remark this time was on socialism in the countryside. "We hope to realise collectivisation with reference to the peasants, little by little, by means of orderly economic, financial, cultural and political measures." This is the traditional Bolshevik thesis, in which there is no question of using force. "Collectivisation will be complete when all peasant enterprises have been transformed on a new technical basis of electrification and mechanisationl when the majority of working peasants have been organised in co-operatives, and the majority of villages contain agricultural associations of a collective character."
The interview ended with some grandiloquent words about the G.P.U., which Stalin was not afraid to compare to the Committee of Public Safety of the French Revolution, despite the fact that the Soviet Union had not been at war for seven years and that more exact comparisons could be found in the history of Russia under the Tsars: "We do not wish to repeat the mistakes of the Paris Communards. The G.P.U. is necessary to the revolution and the G.P.U. will continue to exist for the confounding of the enemies of he proletariat." No allusion here to the hunting down of proletarians, socialists, libertarians, syndicalists, Tolstoyans, communists, revolutionaries of all schools, of which the various opposition tendencies were the victims.
On November 15th the Control Commission decided to expel Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Party. Everyone knew that this meant prison or deportation almost at once if the Congress approved of it. The other Left leaders were expelled from the Central Committee and deprived of their offices in the Party and the State. In Moscow people said that Stalin was determined to "strike the Opposition in the belly," to deprive it of work and hence of food and lodging. On the 16th, Joffe, one of the principal inactive Oppositionists, committed suicide. He had been ill for a long time and exposed to the hostility of the Politbureau, but above all, depressed by the persecutions of his fraction, he wished to register a protest against the expulsion of his friends: "This infamy ...means inevitably the beginning of a Thermidorian period" in Russia. In his spiritual testament, a poignant letter to Trotsky, he adjured him to stand firm as Lenin had done and refuse to compromise. The G.P.U. searched the dead man's home and attempted to forbid the funeral cortege entrance to the cemetery. They were still afraid of using physical violence and creating a scandal, without direct instructions from above, but the hour when they would repay their opponents was soon coming.
One week after the first Soviet Ambassador to Europe and Asia had made his tragic gesture, Stalin announced the discomfiture of the Opposition, which, for very good reasons, had not obtained one per cent, and would not have a delegate at the Congress. "A declaration of unity signed by thirty-one Trotskyists has been sent to the Politbureau," he declared, "but what answer can one make to this hypocritical declaration by thirtyone Trotskyists, when the lying promises of the Opposition have again and again been contradicted by their splitting activities?" On December 2nd the Fifteenth Congress opened, a real conclave of functionaries, where "100 per cent unanimity" was guaranteed by every conceivable means.
It was a real masterpiece of its kind. In the whole solid mob of 1,669 delegates, the Left did not possess a single vote. One or two of its representatives, candidates for expulsion, were present according to their incorrigible custom, with consultative rights. What the right to speak consisted in, they were again to learn to their sorrow when they attempted to exercise it. Ceremonies of congratulation took up an enormous proportion of the time. The Congress received nearly 1,500 addresses, motions, telegrams of greetings and congratulations, dispatched under instructions from the centre, and the delegates applauded a vast number of so-called workers' and other delegations, as was expected of them. The less the time allowed for debate, the heavier and longer grew the reports: a vast tome of 1,400 pages enshrined these oratorical excursions, which stretched over thirty sittings. Stalin held forth throughout an entire day, showing his powers of endurance at least, and the other rapporteurs did their utmost to hold the floor for the longest possible time, making up in quanmy what they so completely lacked in quality. On a "proposal" from the leaders, which was equivalent to a command, the obedient assembly "decided," that is to say accepted, a modification of the statutes which, in effect, legalised its arbitrary adjournment. Thereafter the Congress would not meet more often than once every two years. But there was no guarantee that this new stipulation would be respected, any more than all the other protective clauses, legal or constitutional. Finally, in accordance with Stalin's secret desire, the membership of the Central Committee was increased to 121, including alternate members, and that of the Control Commission to 195, in order to enlarge "the basis of the apex" for the benefit of the Secretariat.
The long Political Report given by the General Secretary, a document typical of bureaucratic optimism, concluded with a flattering enumeration of ten Bolshevik victories on diverse fields, both internal and external. Everything was for the best under the best possible dictatorship.... Surrounded by serried ranks of interested henchmen and docile followers, Stalin was secure in spinning out a string of statistical material, which had been furnished by prudent functionaries, far too cautious to risk allowing a personal idea to creep in. If he light-heartedly affirmed that: "We live on the eve of a new revolutionary upsurge, both in the colonies and the older countries," and was later proved wrong by facts, he could always fall back on Lenin's similar prediction, made at quite a different time. Having stolen from the Left his plans for industrialisation, at least on paper, he boasted of "the unprecedented rhythm of our socialist industry," and borrowed from Lenin a vague phrase on the need to "catch up with and surpass the most advanced countries on the economic field," which he transformed into an urgent slogan.
It goes without saying that the more backward a great country is, the more rapidly it will advance in certain circumstances, under the pressure of external competition and the application of the technical knowledge of its rivals, in order to raise itself to the level of a modern state. But this very rapidity demonstrates its backwardness, and is not a cause for boasting, for that "com-boasting" which Lenin so disliked. Tsarist Russia knew periods of feverish industrialisation, before the Soviets. And although one cannot conceive of democratic socialism without mechanical production, it is easy enough to speed up the production and forget the socialism.
Stalin was less satisfied with the state of agriculture, which was too widely spread, in too small strips, and insufficiently productive. Following the Opposition, he awoke, in his turn, to the kulak danger. According to the evidence, the well-to-do Peasants were forced to hoard their grain since they were unable to exchange it for stable currency or for manufactured goods, while the poor peasants vegetated on infinitely subdivided patches of ground, without the necessary manure or tools. "What is at issue is the change from small individual peasant enterprises to large-scale cultivation, on the basis of collective cultivation of the soil ... using a new and improved technique,"' but always going slowly, without compulsion, using the forces of persuasion and example: "Those comrades who think of disposing of the kulak by administrative measures, by the G.P.U., are wrong. This is an easy but not an effective way. The kulak must be dealt with by economic measures on a basis of revolutionary legality. And revolutionary legality is no empty phrase. It does not, however, exclude the use of certain administrative measures against the kulaks...."
No administrative measures, therefore—but administrative measures all the same. And by this euphemism Stalin meant what Lenin termed "the abominations of Bashi-Bazouks," confiscations of wheat from the more provident cultivators, pillage which was at the same time official and illegal, and which could not be carried out without clashes and cruelty. "Administrative" meant the police and the military, since such administration is only practicable by armed men. This prospect meant war against the peasants who held back their grain, or a policy of spoliation such as the majority had reproached the minority with advocating, but which they had annexed, like industrialisation, to their own programme.
On the Opposition, which was the principal theme of the Congress, Stalin was content to repeat all the old stories. He drew up a brief "balance-sheet of the discussion": approximately 4,000 votes were cast for the Opposition, he said, but without explaining that more than a thousand expulsions had intimidated the Party members. A year later Stalin was to speak retrospectively of 10,000 votes against the Central Committee, plus twice as many who did not vote, say 3o,ooo Oppositionists under the bureaucratic terror, "under the knout of the administration" as Trotsky and his followers named it later. Here is another example of the truth of statistics: Stalin mentions 10,346,ooo as the round total of paid workers in all categories both in the towns and country, and S. Kossior gives the number of trade unionists as 10,00,000. The entire total of wage-earners would thus be enrolled in the trade unions, including children, day labourers, domestics, wet-nurses and the millions of illiterates in remote places, far from towns and communications, where occupational unions could not possibly exist.... The other calculations, coefficients and percentages with which the various secretaries and reporters juggled are as little to be trusted.
"The Opposition must disarm, utterly and completely, both in the ideological and the organisational spheres," Stalin concluded. The audience, excited by a series of venomous speeches, knew what its masters expected of it and demonstrated without stint. Trotsky and Zinoviev, already expelled, were not there to reply. Rakovsky, only recently Ambassador in Paris and recalled by the Government as the result of a hostile campaign waged against him by the reactionary French press, was abused like an intruder, covered with insults and sarcasms, interrupted and mocked at every phrase, then at every word, finally chased off the platform, where he had had the useless courage to expose himself as in a pillory. Other comrades of the same tendency were not much better treated. Kamenev alone succeeded more or less in making himself heard, for his conciliatory manner, full of implications, seemed to indicate new possibilities. Nevertheless, the Opposition renewed its desperate efforts to avoid the inevitable.
In a declaration signed by 121 names and countersigned by another 52, the Opposition protested its loyalty and admitted responsibility for the lack of discipline: "We have no disagreement of principle with the Party." It denied having accused the Central Committee of Thermidorian deviations, promised to cease the fractional struggle, to dissolve its organisation, to be completely obedient in future and to propagate its opinions only within the limits laid down by statute. By this means it hoped to obtain the reinstatement of those who had been expelled and the release of the prisoners.
But everyone at the Congress was aware of a latent split in the fragile "Opposition bloc"; the G.P.U. had spies everywhere and was well informed through its censorship of correspondence. According to Trotsky, Zinoviev had already been considering "capitulation" for a year. Further, Stalin insisted on a complete surrender and the abjuration of all heresy, without reserve. On December 10th Ordjonikidze received two separate declarations of submission, one from Kamenev and others who renounced even their right to propagate their ideas legally, and one from Rakovsky and others who were not prepared to do this. On the 18th the expulsion of the 75 leading members of the Trotsky-Zinoviev group and of 23 members of the Sapronov group was voted unanimously. Immediately after, Rakovsky and his friends drew up a fresh declaration of their fidelity to Bolshevism: "Having been expelled from the Party we shall make every effort to return to it."
The Opposition "bloc" was at an end. Zinoviev and Kamenev Who had formed it "seriously and for a long time to come," also made a fresh declaration in which they retracted their most intimate convictions, confessed imaginary sins, endorsed the accusations made against them and disavowed their foreign comrades. "Deserters" in 1927 and "capitulators" in 1927, they crawled on their knees before Stalin, exactly as he had calculated that they would. Nevertheless, this mea culpa did not save them; the Congress postponed taking a definite decision on their fate for six months in order that they might give proofs of their conversion.
The Opposition having been pu