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Authors: Bertrand M. Patenaude
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Trotsky’s theory, could not be successfully completed within a backward country like Russia. Its ultimate success woulddepend on its spread to the advanced capitalist countries, starting most likely with Germany. Trotsky and the Bolsheviks thus justified taking power in Russia and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat by reasoning that their own revolution would serve as the detonator for an international socialist revolution.
The failure of this optimistic scenario became apparent as early as 1920, as the Russian civil war was winding down. The Revolution had triumphed in Russia but had failed to spread. The ruling Bolshevik Party—since 1918 officially called the Communist Party—was forced to retreat from its radical economic program and begin an experiment in limited capitalism known as NEP, the New Economic Policy. Lenin died in 1924 having declared that at some unspecified future date the Party would abandon NEP and resume the socialist offensive. In the power struggle to succeed Lenin, Stalin championed the slogan “socialism in one country,” as a nationalistic alternative to Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.” Trotsky’s theory was now turned against him by Stalin, who portrayed his rival as a defeatist, someone who believed that Russia could not proceed to build socialism without assistance from the Western proletariat.
Just the opposite was true, however. Although Trotsky believed that securing the ultimate victory of socialism in Russia hinged on the spread of socialist revolution, he did not propose to wait for Europe. In fact, as leader of the opposition in the 1920s, Trotsky urged the Soviet leadership to adopt a faster-paced industrialization and to impose tighter curbs on capitalism in the countryside. Trotsky’s enemies, Stalin among them, accused him of being a reckless “super-industrializer” and the enemy of the peasant.
And yet, after Trotsky was defeated and banished from the USSR in 1929, Stalin turned sharply to the left, initiating a crash industrialization drive under the five-year plan and, simultaneously, the forced collectivization of the peasants. This revolution-from-above was far more extreme than anything ever advocated by Trotsky. The human toll was steep. Peasant resisters were branded “kulaks” and slaughtered by the millions, many as a result of the man-made famine in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.
Questioned by the Dewey commission about Soviet Russia’s greatleap to a state-controlled economy, Trotsky explained that while he had opposed the use of “brute force” to achieve collectivization, he never denied its “successes.” He also lauded the imposition of state planning in industry, even though he believed it had been carried out recklessly and with unnecessary brutality. Trotsky testified before the commission that the Soviet state’s ownership of the means of production made the USSR the most progressive country in the world. Only the Stalinist regime itself was objectionable. Trotsky defined that regime as a parasitic bureaucratic caste, a product of Russia’s backwardness and isolation.
Trotsky advocated a revolution to overthrow Stalin’s ruling bureaucracy, but he had in mind a narrowly political, as opposed to a social, revolution. The October Revolution created the world’s first workers’ state, and it remained a workers’ state even under Stalin, albeit one that was “degenerated” or “deformed.” To Trotsky, the class structure of the USSR made it worth defending against its enemies, despite the purge trials and the terror that were destroying the men and women who had made the revolution and eliminating Trotsky’s comrades and loved ones. “Even now under the Iron Heel of the new privileged caste, the U.S.S.R. is not the same as Czarist Russia,” he explained to a wealthy American sympathizer who helped finance the Dewey hearings. “And the whole of mankind is, thanks to the October Revolution, incomparably richer in
The failure of this optimistic scenario became apparent as early as 1920, as the Russian civil war was winding down. The Revolution had triumphed in Russia but had failed to spread. The ruling Bolshevik Party—since 1918 officially called the Communist Party—was forced to retreat from its radical economic program and begin an experiment in limited capitalism known as NEP, the New Economic Policy. Lenin died in 1924 having declared that at some unspecified future date the Party would abandon NEP and resume the socialist offensive. In the power struggle to succeed Lenin, Stalin championed the slogan “socialism in one country,” as a nationalistic alternative to Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.” Trotsky’s theory was now turned against him by Stalin, who portrayed his rival as a defeatist, someone who believed that Russia could not proceed to build socialism without assistance from the Western proletariat.
Just the opposite was true, however. Although Trotsky believed that securing the ultimate victory of socialism in Russia hinged on the spread of socialist revolution, he did not propose to wait for Europe. In fact, as leader of the opposition in the 1920s, Trotsky urged the Soviet leadership to adopt a faster-paced industrialization and to impose tighter curbs on capitalism in the countryside. Trotsky’s enemies, Stalin among them, accused him of being a reckless “super-industrializer” and the enemy of the peasant.
And yet, after Trotsky was defeated and banished from the USSR in 1929, Stalin turned sharply to the left, initiating a crash industrialization drive under the five-year plan and, simultaneously, the forced collectivization of the peasants. This revolution-from-above was far more extreme than anything ever advocated by Trotsky. The human toll was steep. Peasant resisters were branded “kulaks” and slaughtered by the millions, many as a result of the man-made famine in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.
Questioned by the Dewey commission about Soviet Russia’s greatleap to a state-controlled economy, Trotsky explained that while he had opposed the use of “brute force” to achieve collectivization, he never denied its “successes.” He also lauded the imposition of state planning in industry, even though he believed it had been carried out recklessly and with unnecessary brutality. Trotsky testified before the commission that the Soviet state’s ownership of the means of production made the USSR the most progressive country in the world. Only the Stalinist regime itself was objectionable. Trotsky defined that regime as a parasitic bureaucratic caste, a product of Russia’s backwardness and isolation.
Trotsky advocated a revolution to overthrow Stalin’s ruling bureaucracy, but he had in mind a narrowly political, as opposed to a social, revolution. The October Revolution created the world’s first workers’ state, and it remained a workers’ state even under Stalin, albeit one that was “degenerated” or “deformed.” To Trotsky, the class structure of the USSR made it worth defending against its enemies, despite the purge trials and the terror that were destroying the men and women who had made the revolution and eliminating Trotsky’s comrades and loved ones. “Even now under the Iron Heel of the new privileged caste, the U.S.S.R. is not the same as Czarist Russia,” he explained to a wealthy American sympathizer who helped finance the Dewey hearings. “And the whole of mankind is, thanks to the October Revolution, incomparably richer in
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