Was the vehemence with which Trotsky attacked Kamenev, Zinoviev and other Moscow defendants a mere ruse to throw off suspicion in regard to a united Opposition bloc, which, according to Rogovin,[229] had been formalized as an ‘anti-Stalinist bloc’ in 1932?
On Trotsky’s own account he and Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, et al had been at the forefront of a vast counter-revolutionary organization that was of sufficient strength to organize mass disruptions of official events in Moscow and Leningrad, which also had support among military and police personnel.
From his exile in Siberia in 1928, Trotsky on his own account, despite the ever-watchful eye of the Soviet secret police, the GPU, made his home the centre of opposition activities.[230] Trotsky had been treated leniently in Siberian exile, and was asked to refrain from opposition activities, but responded with a defiant letter to the All-Union Communist Party and to the Executive Committee of the Communist International, in which he referred to Stalin’s ‘narrow faction’. He refused to renounce what he called, ‘the struggle for the interests of the international proletariat…’ In the letter to the Politburo dated 15 March 1933, Trotsky warned in grandiose manner:
I consider it my duty to make one more attempt to appeal to the sense of responsibility of those who presently lead the Soviet state. You know conditions better than I. If the internal development proceeds further on its present course, catastrophe is inevitable.[231]
As a means of saving the Soviet Union from self-destruction Trotsky advocated that the Left Opposition be accepted back into the Bolshevik party as an independent political tendency that would co-exist with all other factions, while not repudiating its own programme:[232]
Only from open and honest cooperation between the historically produced fractions, fully transforming them into tendencies in the party and eventually dissolving into it, can concrete conditions restore confidence in the leadership and resurrect the party.[233]
With the failure of the Politburo to reply to Trotsky’s ultimatum, he published both the letter and a statement entitled ‘An Explanation’.[234] Trotsky then cited his ‘declaration’ in reply to the ‘ultimatum’ he had received to forego oppositionist activities, to the Sixth Party Congress from his remote exile in Alma Ata. In this ‘declaration’ he stated what could also be interpreted as revolutionary opposition to the regime, insofar as he considered that the USSR under Stalin had become a bureaucratic state composed of a ‘depraved officialdom’ that was working for ‘class interests hostile to the proletariat’:
To demand from a revolutionary such a renunciation (of political activity, i.e., in the service of the party and the international revolution) would be possible only for a completely depraved officialdom. Only contemptible renegades would be capable of giving such a promise. I cannot alter anything in these words … To everyone, his due. You wish to continue carrying out policies inspired by class forces hostile to the proletariat. We know our duty and we will do it to the end.[235]
The lack of reply from the Politburo in regard to Trotsky’s ultimatum to accept him back into the Government resulted in Trotsky’s final break with the Third◦– Communist◦– International (Comintern) and the creation of the Fourth◦– Trotskyite◦– International in rivalry with the Stalinist parties throughout the world. Trotsky declared that the Bolshevik party and those parties following the Stalinist line, as well as the Comintern now only served an ‘uncontrolled bureaucracy’.[236] That his aims were something other than mass education and the acceptance of a ‘tendency’ within the Bolshevik party became clearer in 1933 when he wrote that, ‘No normal “constitutional” ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletariat only by force’.[237]
What he was advocating was a palace coup that would remove Stalin with minimal disruption. This did not mean ‘an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat but the removal of a malignant growth upon it…’ These would not be ‘measures of a civil war but rather the measures of a police character’.[238] The intent was unequivocal, and it appears disingenuous for Trotsky and his apologists up to the present day to insist that nothing was meant other than for Trotskyism to be accepted as a ‘tendency’ within the Bolshevik party that could debate the issues in parliamentary fashion.
If Trotsky was less than honest with the fawning Dewey Commission, the farcical ‘cross examination’ by the Commission’s counsel was not going to expose it. Heaven forbid that Trotsky could lie to serve his own cause, and that he could be anything but a saintly figure. A less than deferential attitude toward Trotsky by Beals was sufficient to set the one objective Commissioner at loggerhead with the others.
Of the lie as a political weapon, Trotsky was explicit. Trotsky had written in 1938, the very year of the third Moscow Trial, an article chastising a grouplet of German Marxists for adhering to ‘bourgeoisie’ notions of morality such as truthfulness. He stated, ‘that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character’.[239]
Norms ‘obligatory upon all’ become the less forceful the sharper the character assumed by the class struggle. The highest pitch of the class struggle is civil war which explodes into mid-air all moral ties between the hostile classes. … This vacuity in the norms obligatory upon all arises from the fact that in all decisive questions people feel their class membership considerably more profoundly and more directly than their membership in “society”. The norms of “obligatory” morality are in reality charged with class, that is, antagonistic content. … Nevertheless, lying and violence “in themselves” warrant condemnation? Of course, even as does the class society which generates them. A society without social contradictions will naturally be a society without lies and violence. However there is no way of building a bridge to that society save by revolutionary, that is, violent means. The revolution itself is a product of class society and of necessity bears its traits. From the point of view of “eternal truths’ revolution is of course ‘anti-moral.’ … It remains to be added that the very conception of truth and lie was born of social contradictions.[240]
Given the lengthy ideological discourse on the value of the lie and the relativity of morality, it is absurd to rely on any statement Trotsky and his followers make about anything. He lied and obfuscated to the Dewey Commission in the knowledge that he was among friends.
The year after Trotsky’s ultimatum to the Politburo (1934) the popular functionary Kirov was murdered. Trotsky’s view of Kirov was not sympathetic, calling him a ‘rude satrap [whose killing] does not call forth any sympathy’.[241] The consensus now seems to be that Stalin arranged for the murder of Kirov to blame the Opposition as justification for launching a murderous purge against his rivals. For example, Robert Conquest states that Kirov was a moderate and a popular rival to Stalin, whose murder was both a means of eliminating a rival and of launching a purge.[242] Not only Trotskyites and eminent historians such as Conquest share this view, but it was also implied by Khrushchev during his 1956 ‘secret address’ to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party denouncing Stalin.[243] After Stalin’s death several Soviet administrations undertook investigations to try and uncover definitive evidence against him in the Kirov murder.
231
L Trotsky, ‘A Letter to the Politburo’, March 15, 1933, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1932-33) (New York: Pathfinder Press), 141-2.
235
Trotsky, ‘Declaration to the Sixth Party Congress’, December 16, 1926, cited in Trotsky, My Life, op. cit., Chapter 44.
236
Trotsky, ‘Nuzhno stroit’ zanovo kommunistcheskie partii i International’, Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 36-37, 21, July 15, 1933.
237
Trotsky, ‘Klassovaya priroda sovetskogo gosudarstava’, Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 36-37, October 1, 1933, 1-12. At Moscow Vyshinsky cited this article as evidence that Trotsky advocated the violent overthrow of the Soviet state. The emphasis of the word ‘force’ is Trotsky’s.
239
Trotsky, ‘Their Morals and Ours: In Memory of Leon Sedov’, The New International, Vol. IV, no. 6, June 1938, 163-173, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm
The New International was edited by Max Shachtman, whose post-Trotskyite line laid a basis for the ‘neo-con’ movement and support of US foreign policy during the Cold War. CIA asset Sidney Hook was a contributor to The New International. (December 1934, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/hook/1934/12/hess-marx.htm; April 1936, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/hook/1936/04/feuerbach.htm). Albert Goldman, Trotsky’s lawyer at the Mexico Dewey hearings, was also a contributor.
243
N S Khrushchev, “Secret Address at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” February 1956; Henry M Christman (ed.) Communism in Action: a documentary history (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 176-177.