Another favourite target of Stalin’s was The Lessons of October, in which Trotsky dredged up the Kamenev–Zinoviev conflicts with Lenin in 1917. The party was split in 1917, argued Trotsky, and the same rightist Old Bolsheviks were holding it back after the revolution. Only Lenin’s incessant pressure for an insurrection to seize power had saved the day.32
Kamenev and Zinoviev were old friends and comrades of Stalin’s and his allies in the struggle against Trotsky, so he rose to their defence, even though he personally was not targeted in The Lessons of October. In a 1924 speech on ‘Trotskyism or Leninism?’ he accepted there were disagreements in the party in 1917 and admitted that Lenin had correctly steered the Bolsheviks towards a more radical policy of opposing and then overthrowing the Provisional Government. But he denied the party was split and pointed out that when the central committee endorsed Lenin’s proposal for an insurrection it established a political oversight group that included Kamenev and Zinoviev, even though they had voted against the proposed putsch. Stalin also decried what he called the ‘legend’ of Trotsky’s special role in 1917:
I am far from denying Trotsky’s undoubtedly important role in the uprising. I must say, however, that Trotsky did not play any special role. . . . Trotsky did, indeed, fight well in October; but Trotsky was not the only one . . . when the enemy is isolated and uprising is growing, it is not difficult to fight well. At such moments even backward people become heroes.33
The Lessons of October was not Trotsky’s first attempt to write the history of the Russian Revolution. During the 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations he spent time drafting a short book called Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya, published later that year and then translated into many languages, appearing in English as History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk.34 It was a pro-Bolshevik propaganda effort by Trotsky so he played down differences within the party. This account of the revolution was much to Stalin’s liking. He read and marked the text in detail and with evident satisfaction at its contents. He was particularly interested in Trotsky’s treatment of the ‘July Days’, when the Bolsheviks had drawn back from a premature uprising – an episode that had embedded itself in the party’s historical memory as an object lesson that sometimes political retreats were necessary in order to live and fight another day.35 And, as we have already seen, in his November 1918 Pravda article on the first anniversary of the revolution, Stalin was fulsome in his praise of Trotsky’s role in organising the insurrection.
A 1921 pamphlet on Trotsky by an M. Smolensky, published in Berlin, was part of a series designed to explain Bolshevik ideas to the workers of the world. According to its author, ‘Trotsky was, perhaps, both the most brilliant and the most paradoxical figure in the Bolshevik leadership.’ Stalin did not mark that particular comment but he did underline the author’s next observation – that while Lenin was a socialist ‘bible scholar’ devoted to the sacred texts of Marxism, Trotsky saw it as a method of analysis: ‘if Lenin’s Marxism was dogmatically orthodox, Trotsky’s was methodological’. There followed a series of faint ticks in the margin by Stalin which seemingly expressed approval of a variety of Trotsky’s quoted views. He also margin-lined Trotsky’s contention that there were currently two socialist ideologies in contention with each other – that of the Second (socialist) International and that of the Third (communist) International.36
Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920) was a reply to a publication of the same name by Karl Kautsky, the ‘renegade’ the Bolsheviks had once much admired, not least for his staunch defence of revolutionary Marxism against the ‘revisionism’ of Eduard Bernstein, who favoured a more moderate and reformist socialist movement. In his pamphlet, Kautsky criticised the violence and dictatorial methods that the Bolsheviks used to gain and hold power, particularly during the ongoing Russian Civil War. In his reply to Kautsky, Trotsky laid out in stark terms the rationale for the Bolsheviks’ violent seizure of power, their subsequent suppression of Russian constitutional democracy, and their use of ‘Red Terror’ in the civil war. Stalin needed no lessons in realpolitik from Machiavelli, or even Lenin, when he had Trotsky’s text to hand.
We can be fairly sure that Stalin read Trotsky’s book quite close to the time of its publication. The Bolsheviks, including Lenin, were keen to refute Kautsky’s critique, not least because it had undermined their standing in the international socialist movement.
Stalin’s heavily underlined copy of the book was peppered throughout by expressions of approval such as NB and tak (in this context, yes).37 ‘The problem’, wrote Trotsky, ‘is to make a civil war a short one; and this is attained only by resoluteness in action. But it is just against revolutionary resoluteness that Kautsky’s whole book is directed.’ NB, wrote Stalin in the margin. He made the same annotation at the head of Chapter Two on the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and wrote out Trotsky’s statement in the first paragraph that ‘the political autocracy of the proletariat is the “sole form” in which it can realise its control of the state’. In the same chapter, Stalin underlined, double margin-lined and wrote NB alongside Trotsky’s barb that ‘the man who repudiates terrorism in principle i.e. repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the socialist revolution and digs the grave of socialism.’
Trotsky next mounted a prolonged defence of the argument that the interests of socialist revolution trumped the democratic process because the latter was merely a façade behind which the bourgeoisie hid its power. Stalin agreed wholeheartedly and was particularly taken by Trotsky’s quotation of Paul Lafargue’s view that parliamentary democracy constituted little more than an illusion of popular self-government. ‘When the proletariat of Europe and America seizes the State, it will have to organise a revolutionary government and govern society as a dictatorship, until the bourgeoisie has disappeared as a class’ is among the Lafargue quotes underlined by Stalin.
Trotsky justified the Bolsheviks’ dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, saying they signed the decree authorising elections to that body, expecting it to vote to dissolve itself in favour of the more representative Soviets. But ‘the Constituent Assembly placed itself across the path of the revolutionary movement, and was swept aside’ (underlined by Stalin).
Stalin liked to number points made by authors and did this to Trotsky’s list of three previous revolutions that had experienced violence, terror and civil war – the sixteenth-century religious Reformation that split the Catholic Church, the English revolutions of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. Trotsky concluded from his historical analysis that ‘the degree of ferocity of the struggle depends on a series of internal and international circumstances. The more ferocious and dangerous is the resistance of the class enemy who has been overthrown, the more inevitably does the system of repression take the form of a system of terror.’ The underlining of the last subclause is Stalin’s.