From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Official Government Documents from the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs (1917-18)

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.

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Official Government Documents from the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs
Leon Trotsky

The documents presented here are the official documents and proclamations from the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, headed by Leon Trotsky from November of 1917 to March of 1918. These documents were originally transcribed by Brian Baggins for the History of the Soviet Government Documents web site.

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NOTE FROM TROTSKY, PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS, TO THE ALLIED AMBASSADORS IN PETROGRAD ON THE FORMATION OF THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND PROPOSING AN ARMISTICE ON ALL FRONTS
21 November 1917
Kluchnikov & Sabanin, ii, p.91

Herewith I have the honour to inform you, Mr. Ambassador, that on 26 October (8 November) of this year the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies established a new Government of the Russian Republic in the form of the Council of People’s Commissars. The President of this Government is Vladimir Ilich Lenin and the conduct of foreign policy was entrusted to me as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs.

In drawing your attention to the text of the proposal for an armistice and a democratic peace without annexations or indemnities based on national self-determination, a proposal approved by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, I have the honour to request you, Mr Ambassador, to regard the above-mentioned document as a formal proposal for an immediate armistice on all fronts and for the immediate opening of peace negotiations – a proposal which the authorized Government of the Russian Republic is addressing simultaneously to all belligerent nations and to their Governments. I beg you, Mr Ambassador, to accept the assurance of the profound respect of the Soviet Government for the people of your country, who, like all the other peoples exhausted and racked by this unparalleled butchery, cannot do otherwise than ardently desire peace.


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STATEMENT BY TROTSKY ON THE PUBLICATION OF THE SECRET TREATIES
22 November 1917
Trotsky, iii, 2, p.64

In publishing the secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Tsarism and of the bourgeois coalition Governments of the first seven months of the revolution, we are carrying out the undertaking which we made when our party was in opposition. Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to fear the light of day. The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents. The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.

The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy in practice. That is precisely why, while openly proposing an immediate armistice to all the belligerent peoples and their Governments, we are at the same time publishing these treaties and agreements, which have lost all binding force for the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants who have taken power into their own hands.

The bourgeois politicians and journalists of Germany and Austria-Hungary may try to make use of the documents published in order to present the diplomacy of the Central Empires in a more advantageous light. But any such attempt would be doomed to pitiful failure, and that for two reasons. In the first place, we intend quickly to place before the tribunal of public opinion secret documents which treat sufficiently clearly of the diplomacy of the Central Empires. Secondly, and more important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as universal as imperialist robbery. When the German proletariat enters the revolutionary path leading to the secrets of their chancelleries, they will extract documents no whit inferior to those which we are about to publish. It only remains to hope that this will take place quickly.

The workers’ and peasants’ Government abolishes secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies. We have nothing to hide. Our programme, expresses the ardent wishes of millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as possible. In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite.’


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NOTE FROM TROTSKY, PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS, TO THE REPRESENTATIVES OF NORWAY, THE NETHERLANDS, SPAIN, SWITZERLAND, DENMARK, AND SWEDEN ON THE OPENING OF PEACE NEGOTIATION
23 November 1917
Trotsky, iii, 2, p.165

On 8 [21] November, in accordance with the decision of the Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, I addressed, in the name of the Council of People's Commissars, a proposal to the allied Embassies to begin negotiations for an immediate armistice on all fronts and for a democratic peace without annexations and indemnities based on the self-determination of peoples. At the same time, the Council of People's commissars instructed the military authorities and the delegates of the army of the Russia Republic to enter into preliminary negotiations with the military authorities of the enemy armies for the purpose of getting an immediate armistice on our front, as well as on all fronts.

In bringing this to your notice, Mr. Minister, I have the honour to request you to do all that lies in your power to make our proposal for an immediate armistice and the opening of peace negotiations officially known to the enemy Governments.

At the same time I express the hope that you, Mr. Minister, will do everything in your power fully to inform public opinion in the country whose Government you represent of the steps taken by the Soviet Government in the interests of peace.


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REPLY FROM TROTSKY, COMMISSAR FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS, TO THE STATEMENT OF THE BRITISH EMBASSY ON THE SOVIET PEACE PROPOSALS
30 November 1917
Trotsky, iii, 2, p.183

We consider it necessary to make the following explanation, on the basis of information received by us in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, concerning the statement issued by the British Embassy.

An open proposal for an immediate armistice was made to all peoples, allied and enemy, by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on 26 October [8 November]. Thus three days before the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs sent the note, the Allied Governments and Embassies were fully and correctly informed of the steps which the Soviet Government proposed to take. It is clear, therefore, that the People's Commissar had absolutely no interest in making his note known to the German authorities before making it known to the Allied Embassies. The note addressed to the Allies and the orders telegraphed to General Dukhonin were written and sent simultaneously. If it is true that the Embassies received the note later than Dukhonin, that is explained entirely and exclusively by secondary technical reasons wholly unrelated to the policy of the Council of People’s Commissars.

There is no doubt, however, that the Council of People’s Commissars made its appeal to the German military authorities independent of the approval or disapproval of the Allied Governments. In this sense the policy of the Soviet Government is absolutely clear. Since it does not consider itself bound by the formal obligations of the old Governments, the Soviet Government in its struggle for peace is guided only by the principles of democracy and the interests of the world working class. That is precisely why the Soviet Government is aiming at a general and not a separate peace. It is convinced that by the united efforts of the peoples against the imperialist Governments such a peace will be secured.


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NOTE FROM TROTSKY TO THE ALLIED AMBASSADORS ON THE NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE CENTRAL POWERS
6 December 1917
Trotsky, iii, 2, p.192

The negotiations being conducted between the delegates of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria on the one hand, and the delegates of Russia on the other, have been suspended at the request of our delegation for one week in order to provide an opportunity of informing the peoples and Governments of the Allied countries of the fact of the negotiations and of the course they have taken.

On the Russian side it is proposed:

1.To proclaim that the proposed armistice has for its aim a peace on a democratic basis on the lines formulated in the manifesto of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies;
2.That as a condition of the armistice no troops are to be transferred from one front to another;
3.That the Moon Islands be evacuated.
With regard to war aims, the delegates of the opposing side declined to give a definite reply, stating that they had been instructed to deal only with the military side of the armistice. On the question of a general armistice also, the delegates of the opposing side claimed that they had no authority to consider the question of an armistice with countries whose delegates were not taking part in the negotiations. On their part the delegates of the opposing side put forward terms for an armistice on the front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to last for twenty-eight days. They also undertook to transmit to their Governments the Russian delegation’s proposal for an immediate address to all belligerent countries, that is to all Allied countries besides Russia, inviting them to take part in the negotiations. Since our delegation refused to sign a formal armistice in the present stage of negotiations, it was once more agreed to cease hostilities for a week and to suspend negotiations for the same period. Thus, between the Soviet Government’s first decree on peace (26 October) [8 November] and the time when the peace negotiations will be resumed (29 November) [12 December], more than a month will have passed. This time limit, even with the present disorganized means of international communication, is considered quite sufficient to give the Governments of the Allied countries an opportunity to define their attitude to the peace negotiationsÑthat is, to express their readiness or their refusal to take part in the negotiations for an armistice and peace, and in the case of a refusal to state openly before all mankind, clearly, exactly, and definitely, in the name of what aims must the peoples of Europe shed their blood in the fourth year of war.


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NOTE FROM THE COMMISSAR FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS TO THE RUMANIAN AMBASSADOR CONCERNING EVENTS IN BESSARABIA
31 December 1917
Trotsky, iii, 2, p.235

We are informed by the Kishinev Revolutionary Committee that Rumanian troops have occupied Leovo and several Bessarabian villages, and have shot revolutionaries. They state further in their communication: ‘The Rumanian authorities through the intermediary of a Russian Colonel and a Rumanian General, invited all members of the Revolutionary Committee to Jassy, guaranteeing their complete safety. In Jassy, however, the entire Committee was arrested. All members of the Revolutionary Committee were handed over to the authorities who intended having them shot, but the Cossacks came to their senses and would not allow this.’

Since such criminal acts cannot be tolerated, we request the Rumanian Ambassador to let us know in the course of the day everything that is known to his Embassy about this matter, and what steps have up date been taken by the Rumainian Government to punish the criminal elements among the Rumanian officers and the Rumanian bureaucracy who dared to lift a hand against the Russian revolution.

We consider it necessary here and now to warn the Rumanian Embassy that we shall no longer tolerate on the territory of the Russian revolution any reprisals, whether against Russian, or against Rumanian revolutionaries and socialists. Every Rumanian soldier, worker, or peasant can be assured of the support of the Russian Soviet power against the arbitrary acts of the reactionary Rumanian bureaucracy. At the same time we consider it necessary to warn all Rumanian authorities that the Soviet Government will not hesitate to apply the severest measures against Rumanian counter-revolutionary conspirators, the associates of Kaledin, Shcherbachev, or the Rada, regardless of the positions they occupy in the Rumanian hierarchy.


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EXTRACTS FROM A PRESS INTERVIEW BY TROTSKY ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
Trotsky, iii, 2, p.242
2 January 1918

As to the principal negotiations on peace held at Brest-Litovsk, there has been a ten-day break, ending 30 December [5 January]. It is unlikely, however, that negotiations will be resumed at Brest-Litovsk. In many respects we consider it most appropriate, at the stage which the negotiations have now reached, to continue them in a neutral country.

Apart from the declarations of principles, ours and the Austro-German, and the reply of our delegation, we now also have for our consideration a more or less concrete draft of the Austro-German terms of peace with Russia. This is not a draft of a separate peace, but of those relations which, in the opinion of the Austro-German Governments, should be established between Russia on the one hand and Austria and Germany on the other, and in the event of a general peace we shall publish this document, which is only a first draft put forward by the other side, on the same day. The unacceptability of the Austro-German terms of peace is, in the opinion of the People’s Commissar, clearly evident. The point at issue is the principle of the self-determination of nations and its interpretation. The Central Powers recognized this principle in their declaration, but, in its application to Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, and parts of Livonia and Estonia, Germany and Austria-Hungary think they can give the principle of national self-determination a wholly fictitious content. Just as yesterday we recognized the independent Finnish Republic, without any compulsion, we are ready to recognize the independence of the Republics of Poland and Lithuania, the independence of Courland, or the union of these countries with other countries, on condition that any such change in frontiers or the formation of any new States is accomplished solely by the will of the peoples concerned. But the German draft peace terms in their application to Russia distort the national plebiscite into a kind of ritual, deprived of all practical content. If the diplomats on the other side think that we regard the principle enunciated in our declaration as a hollow formality, they are profoundly mistaken. We do not for a moment doubt where the sympathies of the propertied classes of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland lie. But for us the real will of these countries is expressed not by the votes of their landlords, capitalists, and bankers not, that is, by those sections of the nation which oppress the entire working people. We wish, and we demand that the question of Poland’s fate shall be decided by the Polish workers and peasants and, moreover, throughout the whole of Poland.

Our workers have more than once shed their blood together with the workers of former Tsarist Poland in the struggle against Tsarism. And if now we reject the Austro-German draft terms of peace, it is not because we want to keep Poland for Russia, but because we want the Polish people themselves to say what their political destiny is to be. In this they should be free to express their will without any compulsion or coercion. We do not for a moment doubt that this way of putting the question will win the vigorous and warm support of the workers and peasants of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, as well as of Germany and Austria-Hungary. After this cruel and senseless slaughter, prolonged for three and a half years, slaughter in which the people have learnt so much, it is the most senseless, militaristic, and bureaucratic of Utopias to think of forcing on the Poles, Lithuanians, or Latvians, disguised as self-determination, the open or concealed dictatorship of an alien ‘conqueror’.

How ill-founded this policy is may be seen from the fact that the German press has not informed the German people of that part of our delegation’s reply in which we give our interpretation of the principle of self-determination. It is obvious that on this question German diplomacy considers it inexpedient to meet German democratic opinion face to face, since the most important details of the peace negotiations are concealed. But we do not doubt that in one way or another the truth will reach the German people and the peoples of Austria-Hungary, and that the principle of national self-determination, which we apply most scrupulously to the peoples of Russia, will find wide enough support within the frontiers of the Central Empires and make it impossible for the Governments of these States to apply the wholly intolerable interpretation to be found in the draft Austro-German terms of peace with Russia ...

In French ruling circles, as far as we are informed, they think it necessary to ‘suffer’ still another military encounter with Germany and Austria-Hungary, to repel their offensive, and then to open negotiations. It is quite clear that in the conditions in which the war is being fought on the western front a new offensive may well be a repetition, with a few changes, of all previous offensives. The front will be moved a few kilometres in one direction or the other, but the relative strength of the two sides will be little changed. The world will simply be poorer by some hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and Germans. After this the ‘psychological’ conditions for peace negotiations should have become more favourable. This superstition of the French ruling circles is a highly typical trait. What it amounts to in the end is putting off as long as possible the terrible day of reckoning.

Our task is clear; we shall continue the negotiations on the basis of the principles proclaimed by the Russian revolution. We shall do all we can to bring the results of these negotiations to the notice of the popular masses of all European countries, despite the truly humiliating censorship which the European Governments have imposed on military and diplomatic communications. We do not doubt that the negotiations themselves will make us stronger, and the imperialist Governments of all countries weaker.


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NOTE FROM TROTSKY TO THE PERSIAN GOVERNMENT ON THE WITHDRAWAL OF TROOPS FROM PERSIA
4 January 1918
Trotsky, iii, a, p.51

I have received a note from the Persian Charge d’Affaires in Petrograd which runs: ‘I consider it my duty herewith to bring to your notice that the Persian Government, being duly informed of the contents of article IS! [?] of the Armistice agreement concluded at Brest on [15] December, the text of which is given above, has authorized me to enter into negotiations for the withdrawal of troops from Persia with the appropriate Russian body authorized to conduct such negotiations, and that, according to a dispatch from the Teheran Government received by the Persian Embassy in Petrograd, identical instructions were sent at the same time to the Persian Ambassador in Constantinople to open negotiations on the withdrawal by the Turkish Government of Turkish troops from Persian territory. In communicating the above, the undersigned begs to be informed as soon as possible of the day and hour when negotiations for the evacuation of Russian forces from Persia can be opened ...’

In regard to this matter I suggest that it is necessary:

1.To work out a general plan for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Persia in the shortest possible time, and to propose to Turkey, both through the Persian Government and directly through the Turkish delegation at Brest-Litovsk, to co-ordinate their plan for the evacuation of Turkish troops with the Russian plan.
2.To begin immediately the withdrawal of those detachments whose presence in Persia serves no military purpose, and which were used to occupy Persian territory.
3.To recall from Persia the Russian military mission, acting in the capacity of instructors of the Cossack brigade.
4.To appoint commissars immediately to the Russian authorities in Persia, for the purpose of explaining to the various detachments in Persia the general political situation in Russia and the meaning of our new foreign policy, which is based on respect for the rights of all peoples, regardless of their strength or weakness. These commissars to take measures to protect the Persian population from any affront or violence on the part of the less conscious elements of the army.
5.To take steps to secure the provisioning of the Russian army while they remain in Persia, laying as light a burden as possible on the poorer sections of the Persian population.
I should be glad if you would inform me with the least possible delay of the practical steps you consider it possible to take in the direction indicated. The greatest speed is necessary in this matter in order to wipe out as quickly as possible the effects of the acts of violence perpetrated by Tsarism and bourgeois Russian Governments against the Persian people.


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EXTRACTS FROM A STATEMENT BY TROTSKY ON POLAND AT THE BREST-LITOVSK CONFERENCE


3 February 1918

First of all, I must make it clear that neither the German nor the Austro-Hungarian delegation raised the question of inviting the representatives of the Polish Government to the negotiations as representatives of an independent State. That question was only raised when the Russian delegation drew the attention of the other side to the complete contradiction in their attitude, in that the German and Austro-Hungarian Governments, acknowledging in words the sovereign rights of the Polish State, at the same time failed to raise the question of inviting the Polish Government to negotiations concerning the destiny of Poland. Only when the question was raised by us did the other side announce that they were ready to give it favourable consideration. Thus it is very important to underline once again that the German and Austro-Hungarian delegations came to the negotiations without any previous decision having been taken by their Governments about inviting the Polish Government to the negotiations; whereas, if they regard the Polish Ministry as the Government of an independent State, that would have been the inescapable conclusion of their attitude.

We on our side recognize completely and without any limitation the independence of the Polish people and the Polish State ... But for us it is obvious that this independence remains illusory so long as Poland remains under military occupation. Precisely because we recognize the independence of the Polish people and the Polish State, we cannot, without injury to that independence, recognize as plenipotentiary representatives of the Polish people persons nominated by the occupying Powers. We could provisionally only recognize as representatives for independent participation in the peace negotiations a Polish delegation which was sanctioned by the authentic organs of the Polish people themselves. Since the Polish people are rich in political experience, and their social and national aspirations have found expression in strong and stable political parties, we are convinced that the provisional representation of an independent Poland, for the purpose of taking part in the peace negotiations, could quickly be created by voluntary agreement among the Polish political parties, based on the popular masses and in particular on the working class. We for our part are prepared to recognize such a plenipotentiary representation completely and without any limitation. Finally, since the Polish Rada, established in compliance with the wishes of the Central Powers, intends, clearly with the consent of the Central Powers, to take part in the peace negotiations, we assume that the delegations of the Central Powers (the same delegations which declared to us that the Polish Ministry is acting within limits laid down by the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation authorities) could lay down similar terms for the participation of the Polish Ministry in the present negotiations. That would merely be in accordance with the actual state of affairs.

May I remind you that when the question of recognizing the delegation from the Ukrainian Rada was raised here we did not ask the other side to recognize the Ukrainian Republic before the conclusion of the peace treaty. We thought that, in the uncertainty of the situation, relations would be defined in the course of the negotiations themselves. We for our part would welcome participation by the Polish Rada in the negotiations, since it would give the Rada an opportunity to state its views openly, before the Polish people, on such questions as clearing Polish territory of foreign troops and rectifying the frontier at the expense of the independent Polish nation. The declarations and demands of the delegation of the Kucharzewski Ministry would receive all the more thorough and comprehensive consideration here, as our delegation includes a representative of the working masses of Poland.

In conclusion, may I again draw your attention to the logical misunderstanding which has frequently arisen in our negotiations, that the kind of attitude we take towards a Government also holds good for our attitude to a people and a State. If we do not regard the Kucharzewski Ministry, on the facts known to us, as the authoritative Government of the Polish people, that does not by any means signify that we do not recognize the independence of the Polish State and the Polish people. I have not yet heard that the German Government has hastened to recognize the new Finnish Government, but I think that the fact of the existence of a new Finnish Government cannot prevent the German Government from immediately recognizing the independence of the Finnish Republic.


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STATEMENT BY TROTSKY AT THE BREST-LITOVSK PEACE CONFERENCE ON RUSSIA’S WITHDRAWAL FROM THE WAR
10 February 1918

It was the task of the sub-commission, as we understood it, to provide an answer to the question to what extent the frontier proposed by the other side could secure to the Russian people, even in a minimum degree, the right of self-determination. We have heard the reports of our representatives on the territorial sub-commission and, after prolonged discussion and a thorough examination of the question, we have come to the conclusion that the hour of decision has struck. The peoples are impatiently awaiting the results of the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. They are asking, when will there be an end to this unparalleled self-destruction of humanity provoked by the selfish and ambitious ruling classes of all countries. If ever the war was being fought in selfdefence, that has long ceased to be true for either side. When Great Britain seizes African colonies, Baghdad and Jerusalem, that is no longer a war of self-defence; when Germany occupies Serbia, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, and Rumania, and seizes the Moon Islands, that too is not a war of defence. That is a struggle for the partition of the world. Now it is clear, clearer than ever before.

We do not wish to take part any longer in this purely imperialist war, in which the claims of the propertied classes are being paid in blood. We are as implacably opposed to the imperialism of one camp as to the other, and we are no longer willing to shed the blood of our soldiers to defend the interests of one imperialist side against the other.

While awaiting the time, which we hope is not far off, when the oppressed working classes of all countries will take power into their own hands, as the working people of Russia have done, we are withdrawing our army and our people from the war. Our peasant-soldiers must return to their land, so that they can this spring cultivate the soil which the revolution took from the landlords and gave to the peasants. Our workmen-soldiers must return to the workshops to produce there, not the weapons of destruction, but tools for creative labour, and together with the peasants build a new socialist economy.

We are withdrawing from the war. We are informing all peoples and all Governments of this. We are issuing orders for the complete demobilization of our armies now confronting the German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Bulgarian troops. We expect and firmly believe that other peoples will soon follow our example. At the same time we declare that the terms of peace proposed by the Governments of Germany and Austria-Hungary are basically opposed to the interests of all peoples. These terms will be rejected by the working masses of all countries, including even the peoples of Austria-Hungary and Germany. The peoples of Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Courland, and Estonia regard these conditions as a violation of their will, while for the Russian people themselves they represent a permanent threat. The popular masses of the entire world, guided by political consciousness or by moral instinct, reject these conditions, in expectation of the day when the working classes of all countries will establish their own standards of the peaceful co-existence and friendly co-operation of peoples. We refuse to give our sanction to the conditions which German and Austro-Hungarian imperialism writes with the sword on the body of living peoples. We cannot put the signature of the Russian revolution to conditions which carry with them oppression, misfortune, and misery to millions of human beings.

The Governments of Germany and Austria-Hungary want to rule over lands and peoples by the right of armed conquest. Let them do their work openly. We cannot approve violence. We are withdrawing from the war but we are compelled to refuse to sign the treaty of peace.

In connexion with this statement, I am handing to the joint delegations the following written and signed declaration:

In the name of the Council of People's Commissars, the Government of the Russian Federal Republic informs the Governments and peoples of the countries at war with us, and of the Allied and neutral countries that, while refusing to sign an annexationist peace, Russia, for its part, declares the state of war with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey at an end. At the same time, an order is being given for the complete demobilization of the Russian troops along the entire front.

(Signed) L. TROTSKY, A. JOFFE, M. POKROVSKY, A. BITSENKO, V. KARELIN.

I have little to add to what is said in our declaration. The Russian Government in this written declaration says that for its part, it declares the state of war at an end and that, in execution of this decision, it is issuing orders for the complete demobilization of the army on all external fronts. As to the practical difficulties arising from the situation thus created, I am unable to suggest any juridical formula to surmount them. The absence of a necessary juridical formula is not due to an accidental misunderstanding; the entire course of the peace negotiations showed that the divergence in our fundamental attitudes was too great to permit a formula defining the mutual relations of the Russian Government and the Central Powers. As far as I understood the Chairman of the German delegation, he seemed to admit, at least in theory, the practical possibility of finding the missing formula, counting in future on the help of guns and bayonets. I do not believe in that. However greatly the meaning of national defence was abused in the course of this war, and the idea of the defence of the fatherland violated, not one honest man in the whole world will say that in these circumstances the continuation of military operations by Germany and Austria-Hungary is necessary to their national defence. I am profoundly convinced that the German people and the peoples of Austria-Hungary will not allow it; and if our fundamental point of view becomes clear to all, then the practical difficulties will settle themselves one way or another. The document we have handed over leaves no doubt in regard to our intentions. We, on our side, declare the state of war at an end,, and are sending our soldiers back to peaceful labour.


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(NOTE FROM TROTSKY) COMMISSAR FOR WAR, TO COLONEL ROBINS FOR TRANSMISSION TO THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT CONCERNING THE ATTITUDE OF THE ALLIES IF THE SOVIET CONGRESS SHOULD REFUSE TO RATIFY THE BREST-LITOVSK TREATY
5 March 1918

In case (a) the all-Russian congress of the Soviets will refuse to ratify the peace treaty with Germany, or (b) if the German government, breaking the peace treaty, will renew the offensive in order to continue its robbers’ raid, or (c) if the Soviet government will be forced by the actions of Germany to renounce the peace treatyÑbefore or after its ratificationÑand to renew hostilities.

In all these cases, it is very important for the military and political plans of the Soviet power for replies to be given to the following questions:

1.Can the Soviet government rely on the support of the United States of North America, Great Britain, and France in its struggle against Germany?
2.What kind of support could be furnished in the nearest future, and on what conditions-military equipment, transportation supplies, living necessities?
3.What kind of support would be furnished particularly and especially by the United States?
Should Japan, in consequence of an open or tacit understanding with Germany or without such an understanding, attempt to seize Vladivostok and the Eastern-Siberian Railway, which would threaten to cut off Russia from the Pacific Ocean and would greatly impede the concentration of Soviet troops toward the East about the Urals,in such case what steps would be taken by the other allies, particularly and especially by the United States, to prevent a Japanese landing on our Far East and to insure uninterrupted communications with Russia through the Siberian route?

In the opinion of the Government of the United States, to what extent, under the above-mentioned circumstances, would aid be assured from Great Britain through Murmansk and Archangel? What steps could the Government of Great Britain undertake in order to assure this aid and thereby to undermine the foundation of the rumors of the hostile plans against Russia on the part of Great Britain in the nearest future?

All these questions are conditioned with the self-understood assumption that the internal and foreign policies of the Soviet government will continue to be directed in accord with the principles of international socialism and that the Soviet government retains its complete independence of all non-socialist governments.


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ORDER FROM TROTSKY (COMMISSAR FOR WAR) TO LOCAL MILITARY AUTHORITIES CONCERNING PRISONERS OF WAR
20 April 1918
Izvestia, 21 April 1918

All military departments of the Soviet, all local Commissariats of Military Affairs, and all institutions of the Military Department, responsible for the care of enemy prisoners of war, are instructed as follows:

1.Not to permit in the prisoner-of-war camps any violence against prisoners of war holding certain opinions by those of other opinions, in particular officer-prisoners, in order to forestall any such actions, measures must immediately be taken to disarm prisoners of war, in so far as they still have arms.
2.To observe carefully that the prisoners of war of all categories are kept in the camps in accordance with the provisions of international conventions and agreements accepted and ratified by Russia.
3.Agents of the military authorities are strictly to refrain from any violation of article 2 of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which obliges the Soviet Government to refrain from any agitation and propaganda against the Governments or the political institutions of Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey.
4.To accept into the ranks of the Red Army only those volunteers from among foreigners who have accepted Russian citizenship.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky

Click on title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary leader and agitator and later early Soviet Culture and Education commissar, Anatol Lunacharsky. No added comment is needed in this space for the work, life and deeds of this man as his "Revolutionary Silhouettes" posted here today speak for that work.

*Honor The 93rd Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution- From Leon Trotsky's "The History Of The Russian Revolution"-"The October Insurrection"

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives version of Bolshevik chief insurrection organizer Leon Trotsky's Volume Three, Chapter 46, "The October Insurrection", from his seminal "The History Of The Russian Revolution"

*From The "HistoMat" Blog- Remembering Leon Trotsky On The 70th Anniversary Of His Death- Raya Dunayevskaya

Click on the headline to link to a review of a biography of Raya Dunayevskaya- whose memories of Leon Trotsky are posted below via the HistMat (Snowball) blog.

Remembering Leon Trotsky

Seventy years ago this week the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was murdered. In 1965, in 'Some Memories of Trotsky', one of Trotsky's secretaries from 1937-38 in Mexico at a time when Stalinist terror was in full swing, the Russian born Marxist humanist Raya Dunayevskaya recollected her thoughts, and I will reprint them below:

Because of the heroism of the former Russian Commissar of War, the rigors of exile when Stalin won the struggle for power, and the tragedy of Trotsky's assassination at the hands of a GPU assassin, much that has been written about Trotsky's later years has a subjective air about it. His last years seem to have provided a field day for psychological approaches even on the part of political analysts. Recently, a novel has been published -- and a TV "special" based on it -- which imputes to Trotsky a change in political outlook which allegedly he was unwilling to admit. Only people who have no thoughts of their own can so misconstrue the thoughts of others.

Leon Trotsky at no time let the subjective factor enter into any of his anaIyses of objective situations. Quite the contrary.

I remember one incident during the Moscow Trials, when "the General Staff of the Revolution" was killed off by Stalin, and Trotsky himself was accused of the most heinous crimes. The Russian bureaucracy had the state power -- and the Lubianka; the money, the brutality, the total disregard for history and, most of all, the time -- a whole decade -- in which to fabricate the greatest frame-up in all history.

The Mexican press would hold open two columns of space for Trotsky to answer the charges levelled against him at the Moscow Trials in 1937-38. He had only a couple of hours in which to write his answers -- and that only by virtue of the fact that President Cardenas intervened on his behalf and asked the press to inform Trotsky of the charges as they came in on the teletype. Trotsky never knew what the accusations would be, nor what the year was in which he was alleged to have done this or that crime. Moreover, the Trials had come at a time of the greatest personal grief in the Trotsky family, for the long arm of the GPU had reached out to kill the only living son of Trotsky, Leon Sedov. It was a predetermined, insidiously planned feat of a master intriguant, calculated to give Trotsky the blow that they hoped would render him incapable of answering the accusation against himself, that they knew would come in two short weeks.

Indeed, the death of Leon Sedov inflicted the deepest wound, and in a most vulnerable spot. Lev Davidovich and Natalia Ivanovna Trotsky locked themselves into their room and would see no one. For a whole week they did not come out of their room, and only one person was permitted in -- the one who brought them the mail, and food of which they partook little.

Those were dismal days for the whole secretarial staff. We did not see either L.D. or Natalia. We did not know how they fared, and feared the consequences of the tragedy upon them. We moved typewriters, the telephone, and even doorbells to the guardhouse, out of sound of their room. Their part of the house became deathly quiet. There was an oppressive air, as if the whole mountain chain of Mexico was pressing down upon this one house.

The blow was the harder not only because Leon Sedov had been their only remaining living child, but also because he had been Trotsky's closest literary and political collaborator. When Trotsky was interned in Norway, gagged, not permitted to answer the charges leveled against him in the first Moscow Trials (August 1936), Sedov had penned Le Livre Rouge, which, by brilliantly exposing the Moscow falsifiers, dealt an irreparable blow to the prestige of the GPU.

In the dark days after the tragic news had reached us, when Lev Davidovich and Natalia Ivanovna were closeted in their room, he wrote the story of their son's brief life. It was the first time since pre-revolutionary days that Trotsky had written by hand.

On the eighth day, Leon Trotsky emerged from his room. I was petrified at the sight of him. The neat, meticulous Leon Trotsky had not shaved for a whole week. His face was deeply lined. His eyes were swollen from too much crying. Without uttering a word, he handed me the handwritten manuscript, Leon Sedov, Son, Friend, Fighter, which contained some of Trotsky's most poignant writing. "I told Natalia of the death of our son," read one passage, "in the same month of February in which, 32 years ago, she brought to me in jail the news of his birth. Thus ended for us the day of February 16, the blackest day in our personal lives....Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us...."

But even this great grief did not dim Trotsky's ardor for the revolutionary cause. The pamphlet was dedicated "to the proletarian youth." If the GPU had counted on this blow to disable him, they counted on the wrong man.

The following morning, the papers carried the announcement of the Third Moscow Trials (March 1938). Trotsky labored late into the night. One day he was up at 7 a.m. and wrote until midnight. The next day he arose at 8 a.m. and worked straight through to 3 a.m. the following morning. The last day of the week he did not go to sleep until five in the morning. He drove himself harder than any of his staff.

"The Old Man," as we called him affectionately, wrote an average of 2,000 words a day. He gave statements to the NANA, the UP, AP, Havas Agence [Agence France-Presse], France, the London Daily Express, and the Mexican newspapers. His declarations were also issued in the Russian and German languages. The material was dictated in Russian. While I transcribed the dictation, the other secretaries checked every date, name and place mentioned at the trials. Trotsky demanded meticulous, objective research work; the accusers had to be turned into the accused.

Yet so unused to subjectivism was this revolutionary that he was deeply incensed when the daily press printed "rumors" that Stalin had, at no time, been a revolutionist, but had always been "agent of the Tsar" and was now "wreaking vengeance." When I brought him the newspapers which carried this explanation of the blood purge resulting from the Moscow Trials, Trotsky exclaimed, "But Stalin was a revolutionist!"

"Wait a moment," he called to me as I was leaving the room, "We'll add a postscript to today's article." Here is what he dictated:

"The news has been widely spread through the press, to the effect that Stalin allegedly was an agent provocateur during Tsarism, and that he is now avenging himself upon his old enemies. I place no trust whatsoever in this gossip. From his youth Stalin was a revolutionist. All the facts about his life bear witness to this. To reconstruct his biography ex post facto means to ape the present reactionary bureaucracy."

Again, when the John Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky had brought in the verdict: Not Guilty, and a press conference was called, Trotsky was asked: "Do not pessimistic conclusions in regards to socialism flow from the Moscow Trials and the verdict of the Commission?" Trotsky replied:

"No. I do not see any basis for pessimism. It is necessary to take history as it is. Humanity moves forward as did some pilgrims: two steps ahead, one step back. During the time of the backward movement, all seems lost to skeptics and pessimists. But this is an error of historical vision. Nothing is lost. Humanity has developed from the ape to the Comintern. It will advance from the Comintern to actual socialism. The judgment of the Commission demonstrates once more that the correct idea is stronger than the most powerful police force. In this conviction lies the unshakable basis of revolutionary optimism."

Unfortunately, optimism, no more than subjectivism, is at the root of political attitudes. It is theory -- the philosophical premise for it -- which is decisive. Because his theory -- that Russia still remained a workers' state, "though degenerate," and must be "defended" when World War II broke soon after the Hitler-Stalin Pact was concluded -- appeared to me to be at variance with both the reality of state capitalism in Russia and its total perversion of the Humanism of Marxism as a theory of liberation, I broke with Trotsky. My break from Trotsky's politics in no way changed my attitude toward him as one of the greatest revolutionists of our age, one who, with Lenin, led the great October Revolution. He remains "the man of October."

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" -Once Again On Running For The Executive Offices Of The Bourgeois State

Click on the headline to link to an "American Left History" entry on the subject of this writer's mea culpa on running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state.

Markin comment:

Will this political blushing I am forced to undergo for my old position on this issue of running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state at any level never end? (See above linked post.) Of course, as pointed out in the article below, the local executive offices of the bourgeois state (in alleged contrast to the national state) is a key "hotbed" for sliding from revolution to reformism on this question.

Workers Vanguard No. 960
4 June 2010

Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics

The following article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 192 (June 2010).

In 2007, [the reformist group] Lutte Ouvrière (LO) mobilized its members for the following year’s municipal elections, insisting on the importance of getting some municipal representatives. At the end of 2007, by a majority of 97 percent, LO’s party congress adopted a resolution stating:

“Getting some municipal councillors elected is extremely important for our political influence. These elected officials are a means of rooting ourselves in a city and the axis that our local activities can orbit around….

“The conclusion is that we should try to field slates in the maximum number of localities. However, that will not stop us from examining and being open to all proposals for alliances, which we will consider depending on the situation, the local relationship of forces and the possibilities for getting elected that these alliances could really open up to us. Indeed, we have no interest in making alliances on a program of agreements with possible allies if that does not get us some people elected, or even prevents us from getting people elected, and all the more so since we have the means to run independently.”

—Lutte de Classe No. 109, December 2007

In other words, LO was ready for any dirty deal to obtain positions on municipal councils and told its members that it was going to try to negotiate for positions on “left” slates. LO went to beg the Socialist Party [SP], which in most cases said flatly no. But the PCF [French Communist Party] often accepted them on its slates, after making sure that LO would be loyal to the future municipal majority. LO eventually ran on the slates of the bourgeois mayor of Belfort, a fiefdom of [bourgeois politician Jean-Pierre] Chevènement, who served as minister of police under [former SP prime minister Lionel] Jospin.

So far, LO has more than proven that it is a reliable partner for a municipal popular front. We don’t know of any instances when LO voted against a budget. LO national spokesman Nathalie Arthaud, a member of the CP-led municipal majority running Vaulx-en-Velin (in the Lyon suburbs), justified voting for the budget “in the name of LO” during the municipal council meeting on 25 March 2009:

“Of course we are going to vote for the budget presented by the municipal majority, because we are in solidarity with the proposed orientations and choices, whether they are expressed in educational policy, support to associations, rates applied to services rendered or general orientation. The municipal majority is concerned about responding to the needs of the population and especially the underprivileged population, and for us that is essential. Beyond some disagreements on details, we share this majority’s basic choices.”

—Minutes of the Vaulx-en-Velin Municipal Council,
25 March 2009

In spite of LO’s concerns that having municipal councillors was “extremely important for our political influence,” the political influence of these municipal councillors did not reach the pages of the weekly Lutte Ouvrière, which has barely breathed a word about their performance: to our knowledge, LO wrote about them briefly three times in the space of two years. That’s why a 19 February article mentioning them takes on a very particular importance for judging their municipal politics.

The article is about Bagnolet—a municipality in the Paris suburbs—which has been controlled by the CP for decades. Bagnolet is also where an LO regional leader, Jean-Pierre Mercier (also a union bureaucrat in the PSA automobile factory at Aulnay), was elected on the slates of CP mayor Marc Everbecq in 2008. The article recounts the forcible eviction, on the mayor’s orders and in the middle of winter, of the tenants of an apartment building occupied in part by African workers. This time LO condemned the racist eviction, contrary to what they did in 2005 in a similar case in the town of Aubervilliers, which was run at the time by the CP (see our article in Le Bolchévik No. 173 [September 2005]). LO solidarizes with the victims of the Bagnolet eviction and denounces the propaganda of the town administration, which, indeed, does not hesitate to use every racist cliché in order to justify its action, calling the victims smugglers, drug dealers and pimps.

A naive reader, taking LO’s recent hypocritical rhetoric about “communism” at face value, might expect LO to denounce all its past capitulations to the PCF mayor and break its pact with the devil of bourgeois municipalism. Absolutely not! On the contrary, LO’s article states:

“A support committee was set up for the evicted people, with the Right to Housing Committee and other organizations. LO’s municipal councillors in the town participated in its creation. And the evictees were quite happy to find members of the municipal majority at their side, able to condemn the dirty tricks, even when they came from City Hall.”

In other words, LO went to the victims of the municipal government, openly declaring itself part of the very municipal council majority that was evicting them! Under these conditions, LO’s support amounted to reassuring the evictees that they really should not infer from this that the administration of capitalism is necessarily racist (whether in the hands of the PCF and LO or not). It is precisely for this kind of thing that LO is useful to the PCF mayors. The message that LO thus helps to get across is that of course you cannot run a town administration without breaking a few eggs, but in the last analysis there is always somebody in the municipal majority who will come and warm your heart (if nothing else) when you are out on the street and it’s snowing.

LO itself accurately described its conception of municipal work as reformist: “By definition, neither municipal work nor trade-union activity can be revolutionary; they are reformist” (Lutte de Classe No. 110, February 2008). LO deliberately confuses two things. One is the question of administering capitalism at the municipal level by taking part in a municipal council majority—and thus taking responsibility for what running capitalism entails, i.e., inevitably, racist discrimination in public housing; “personnel management,” including the mayor’s office laying off city workers; reducing the number of elementary school classes; cutting back childcare; raising local taxes; setting up “neighborhood police” and police stations; etc. The other is winning an election as a revolutionary proletarian opposition in order to denounce administering capitalism.

For Marxists, however, this is a fundamental difference—a difference of principle. More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx insisted that you cannot take hold of the capitalist state—which is an apparatus of oppression made up of armed bodies whose role is to maintain the dictatorship of capital—in order to make it serve the interest of the working class. This is true for the central government, and it is equally true at the lowest level of the state, the municipal level. Thus, the mayor has police powers within his territory; mayors, including PCF mayors, are the direct representatives of the capitalist state at the municipal level.

That is why Lenin always opposed municipalism, notably during the elections to the local (municipal) dumas in April 1917 in Russia. We recommend to our readers the article in the current issue of our international journal Spartacist [English-language edition No. 61, Spring 2009]. The article documents Lenin’s intransigent struggle, even though the Third International itself had come to questionable conclusions on the question of municipalism at its [1920] Second Congress. Denouncing the bourgeoisie’s institutions of local government, the resolution on parliamentarism stipulated that “to counterpose them to the organs of the state is theoretically incorrect. They are in reality organizations similar to the mechanism of the bourgeois state.” However, the resolution wrongly allowed Communist parties to hold municipal executive office.

The bourgeois state must be destroyed by a workers revolution based on new organs of power—workers councils—unconditionally opposed to the bourgeois order at all levels, national, regional and municipal. So it should be evident that the working class cannot reach this understanding if its revolutionary element itself participates in the institutions of bourgeois power, even municipal ones. From this principled opposition to executive offices of the bourgeois state flows the fact that Marxists cannot run for such posts without risking conferring legitimacy upon them in the eyes of the workers. Therefore we refuse on principle to run for executive office, be it the election of the mayor and his deputies by the municipal council or the election of the president of the republic by universal suffrage. We also refuse to seek to be a part of a parliamentary or municipal majority that takes on executive responsibility.

In contrast, for nearly 40 years LO has never failed to run a candidate for president. In 2008, they took a further step by “getting their hands dirty” at the municipal level. In fact, it is the logic of reformism to set about administering capitalism starting at the municipal level. Our perspective, on the other hand, is international socialist revolution. That perspective begins by opposing LO’s bourgeois municipalism and must end with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will eliminate the organs of bourgeois repression at all levels, including the municipal. Down with executive offices of the capitalist state!

Poet's Corner- Osip Mandelstam's "Epigram Against Stalin"- A Guest Review

Click on the headline to link to a guest review article on the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, especially a close reading of his "Epigram Against Stalin" for which he paid dearly with his life.


Markin comment:

As a follower of the great anti-Stalinist, pro-communist fighter, and Bolshevik Revolution leader, Leon Trotsky, I am all too familiar with the "night of the long knives" Moscow Trials period described here. Our Russian Left Oppositionists (Communists) forebears fought Stalin politically, as best they could. Mandelstam fought with his pen, as best he could. Although a vast gulf separates his ideas from ours we can appreciate his anti-Stalin poem. The story behind it is fascinating, as laid out in the article. Stalin, not known as one of nature's noblemen, obviously would chaff under this poem. When the deal went down Mandelstam, unlike someone like Boris Paternak, paid with his life for his art. We definitely can appreciate that.

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor The Hungarian Worker-Fighters of 1956

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the events in Hungary in 1956 placed here, mainly, for background information about the reasons that we hail these fighters.I have dealt with this embryonic workers revolution more fully elsewhere and will do so in the future as well.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Fighters For The Hungarian Soviet In 1919

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

*Those Who Fight For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- In Honor Of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky-A Commentary

Click on the title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of his 1923 article, "Not Alone By Politics Does Man Thrive", a good exposition of the problems of socialist cultural and economic construction in the early stages of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Markin comment:

We live , at least those of us who fight for the Marxian version of the future international communist society, our day to day lives in some pretty rarefied theoretical and practical air. Although we have imbibed a real body of work like those original works of Marx and his co-worker Engels, the later interpretations of Lenin and Trotsky, and the myriad others who have made lesser contributions over the past 150 years or so, the class-struggle drought that we are going through over the past couple of decades, of necessity, should make us bring us to our knees. And then stand up, dust off the dirt and push on with the propaganda, cadre recruitment and education, and intervention into current political life necessary, as always, to pull us toward that goal. Thus, I already know the tasks ahead we need to perform, or have a pretty good idea. But for just the length of this piece I want to kind of, as is usual for many people at this time of year, make something of a reaffirmation (resolution, if you like) on why we need to continue to fight for that communist future.

Coming off the recent developments in America (and its ramifications internationally): the almost catastrophic economic downturn that has wreaked havoc on many working class families through unemployment, foreclosures and the closing off of educational opportunities; the impending climate control disaster that cries out for an international solution; the health care disaster that will continue to spiral out of control despite the bandage of a so-called ‘comprehensive’ health care bill; and, above all the troop escalation that Obama has staked his presidency on we communist should be sitting in the catbird seat. Any one of these should have had us on the ‘barricades’ long ago. Not so, unfortunately.

These crises cry out to high heaven for communist solutions- starting with that first long step the fight for workers governments, internationally. Yet, as the tepid (and I am being kind here) response of the anti-war left to war-monger Obama’s provocation on the Afghan troop escalations demonstrates we are on the extreme defensive. I will not even go into the subject of the response of the organized labor movement to the economic crisis, at least of its current leadership, as I do not want to see grown people cry. We can say the same for the struggles of racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, class-war prisoners and others. There is more than enough material here to just throw in the towel and let the chips fall where they may.

No, one thousand times no. Hell, make that one million times no. The international capitalist imperialist system that we are saddled with cannot be the “end of history”. Only a fool, cynic or well-paid toady could think so. I wish to associate myself with the proposition- unambiguously, and in the teeth of ten millions pressures to do otherwise, to fight for the communist program in the Obamiad. That fight, is, as it always has been and always will be until we achieve the classless society the primary business of those who take the honorable name communist. I also stand in solidarity with the need to save and preserve that communist program, if not for now, then for future generations that will have to deal with their own versions of the class struggle.

For those versed in the goal of communism- the notion of a classless society where people would spent their time, especially their shortened work time, cooperatively; the notion that government would change its axis from a monstrous control over humankind to the mere administration of things; and, that through intermixing and intermingling racial divisions, ethnic tensions and conflicting religious expressions would be things for the historical museum. I won’t even tempt you with what the future would look like in terms of a replacement of the family as the basic unit of socialization, especially of children because I do not want every harried young mother and stay-at-home father in the world banging at my door today to sign up for the communist program today. All and all though isn't this an attractive program to sell. Agreed? Can even the most starry-eyed bourgeois apologist for international capitalism come up with anything even close? We have seen with the truncated, and totally inadequate, American heath care bill what they are willing to offer. No, thanks. I will fight for the communist program, and gladly.

*************

For those who want a more eloquent exposition of the communist future and, moreover, from one who had to deal very concretely with the issues that arose in trying to construct that future I will end this musing with the last few paragraphs from Chapter 8 of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s 1924 cultural/political polemic,” Literature and Revolution”. Yes, to explain the communist program the way it should be expressed I am more than willing to defer to the “big” guns. Thanks, Comrade Trotsky.

Leon Trotsky:

“...Mankind will come out of the period of civil wars much poorer from terrific destructions, even without the earthquakes of the kind that occurred in Japan. The effort to conquer poverty, hunger, want in all its forms, that is, to conquer nature, will be the dominant tendency for decades to come. The passion for mechanical improvements, as in America, will accompany the first stage of every new Socialist society. The passive enjoyment of nature will disappear from art. Technique will become a more powerful inspiration for artistic work, and later on the contradiction itself between technique and nature will be solved in a higher synthesis.

The personal dreams of a few enthusiasts today for making life more dramatic and for educating man himself rhythmically, find a proper and real place in this outlook. Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life. The care for food and education, which lies like a millstone on the present-day family, will be removed, and will become the subject of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at last free herself from her semi-servile condition. Side by side with technique, education, in the broad sense of the psycho-physical molding of new generations, will take its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful “parties” will form themselves around pedagogic systems. Experiments in social education and an emulation of different methods will take place to a degree which has not been dreamed of before. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected. Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples’ palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous.

More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life. Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

*From The Front Lines Of The Anti-Afghan War Struggle - A Comment On The Lessons Of The Political Struggle Of Trotsky Against Stalin

Click on the title to link to link to the Karl Liebknecht Internet Archive’s copy of his famous 1916 anti-war speech, “The Main Enemy Is At Home”.

From the front lines of the anti-Afghan war struggle, such as it is.

Markin comment:

After some months of very little to discuss, practically speaking, concerning the struggle against American imperialism and its war machine as we have waited for President Obama to make good on his campaign promise to, in effect, stake his presidency on “winning” (or at least not losing) Afghanistan I now find myself with plenty of commentary to make. At least with plenty of comments, painfully learned, concerning the way forward for the seemingly moribund American anti-war movement. Those days, however, with President Obama’s recent announcement of troop level increases are over. What I want to comment on briefly today though is the general question of where the international socialist movement, historically, the strongest and best organized component of any anti-war movement, is going and where it has been historically.

This entry, strangely as will become apparent, is motivated by a comment from a young militant who recently attended one of the sessions of an occasional Marxist study circle that I attend, and sometimes lead. Obviously, given the furor over the seemingly irrational Obama decision on troop levels, the talk among attendees centered on the fight against escalation and how to make America a “peaceful” nation. This study circle is advertised as, and understood to be presented from a socialist perspective, for those who wish to find out something about the mysteries of radical politics. Previous subjects have dealt with basic Marxist texts and struggles led by those who claimed to adhere to a Marxist perspective. Thus, I was rather surprised when this young militant, rather abruptly, blurred out the following- “What the heck does the Bolshevik anti-war policy in World War I have to do with us?” (Exact quote), “What does the controversy between Stalin and Trotsky over international communist policy in the fight against the imperialists have to do with us?” (My paraphrase of his remarks).

Obviously, for old time militants from the 1960s (especially the late 1960s when the turn to the working class and thus classic Marxism hit full stride) this kind of questioning would be almost unthinkable, if not embarrassingly naïve. This, my friends, is what we are up against as we try to impart some lessons from our history. I have already related a separate story about a young women militant that I ran into at a recent anti-war demonstration (see “On The Slogan- Down With The Obama Government”, December, 2009). I am ready to make her a bloody Bolshevik organizer right now compared to the gist of where that attendee's comments were leading.

However, I did not leave that young brother’s question unanswered, nor would that have been appropriate. I pointed out two things to him- for starters. First, Bolshevik anti-war policy in World War I, the successful anti-war policy I might add although that Peace of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans was a hard pill to swallow, was the only time, at least to my knowledge, in modern history that an anti-war movement was successful on its own terms. The only time that “the guns were turned the other way” on one’s own ruling class in war time.

Secondly, the fierce, if unequal, political struggles between the forces led by Stalin and Trotsky over, ultimately, communist war policy toward the international bourgeoisie and international imperialism manifested itself out, in the end, with the defeat of the international socialist movement. And that defeat is a direct contributing cause of why guys like Obama can turn the American war machine on and off as their leisure. If the actions of the majority of the international social democracy in support of their own governments at the start of World War I meant, practically, that that movement was a spent force for socialist solutions to modern society’s problems then the defeat of the Trotsky-led forces after the Russian revolution and the “victory” of Stalinism had the same effect, an effect that we are still struggling against. That, my friends, is the short answer. More, on both these subjects, later.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky

Click on title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary leader and agitator and later early Soviet Culture and Education commissar, Anatol Lunacharsky. No added comment is needed in this space for the work, life and deeds of this man as his "Revolutionary Silhouettes" posted here today speak for that work.

*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- Yakov Sverdlov

Click on title to link to early Bolshevik Culture and Education Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky's profile of Yakov Sverdlov from his 1923 "Revolutionary Silhouettes". Lunarcharsky may have been a "soft" Bolshevik but he had insights into the Bolshevik leadership that helped explain the successes (and some of the subsequent political problems) of that leadership.

*Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution- From Leon Trotsky's "The History Of The Russian Revolution"-"The October Insurrection"

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives version of Bolshevik chief insurrection organizer Leon Trotsky's Volume Three, Chapter 46, "The October Insurrection", from his seminal "The History Of The Russian Revolution"

*A Red Partisan- John Reed's Bird's Eye View Of The Russian Revolution of 1917

Click on title to link to the third part of a four-part series by John Reed, up close and personal on the Russian revolution of 1917, originally published in "The Liberator" in 1918.

*A Red Partisan- John Reed's Bird's Eye View Of The Russian Revolution of 1917

Click on title to link to the second part of a four-part series by John Reed, up close and personal on the Russian revolution of 1917, originally published in "The Liberator" in 1918.

*Fight For The Communist Program -Free, Quality Health Care For All- A Guest Commentary

Click on title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", September 25, 2009, article in favor of socialized medicine, free, quality health care for all. How about that for real single payer health insurance? Also included in a 1991 article on the same subject from the pages of "Women and Revolution, in 1991 around the time of the last "great debate" on health care. Most of the article reads, unfortunately, like it was written today.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" - We Are The Party Of The Russian Revolution- A Guest Commentary

Clink on the headline to link to a Part Three of a three part "Workers Vanguard" commentary , dated December 5, 2008, on the continuing relevance of the lessons of the Russian revolution of 1917 for the international labor movement.

Markin comment:

If you believe, as I do, that the Russian October Revolution of 1917 led by Lenin, Trotsky and their fellow Bolsheviks was the defining moment for the international working class in the 20th century and for world politics you should read this three- part commentary. If you also desire to learn the lessons of that revolution, warts and all, you NEED to read this article as a primer on that revolutionary catalyst. If you fervently want to help create new Octobers then you best get busy and read everything you can on the subject. And then come out and join us, as the children of the Russian revolution, in order to put substance into the slogan in the headline.






Workers Vanguard No. 924
7 November 2008

We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution

Part One

We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by comrade Victor Gibbons given in Los Angeles on 10 November 2007 in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

The vast political gulf that separates the International Communist League from the rest of the left can be summed up in one declaration: “We are the party of the Russian Revolution.” We salute the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in the same spirit as the red proletariat of Petrograd celebrated its first anniversary—as “the greatest event in the history of the world.” And it remains the most important event in the history of human civilization: the path that the workers and toiling masses must follow, if we are to escape the death agony of capitalism and embark on the transition to communist society.

The founder and historic leader of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, stated in his 1939 “Speech on the Russian Question”:

“The Russian Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, once and for all, took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality....

“The October revolution put socialism on the order of the day throughout the world. It revived and shaped and developed the revolutionary labor movement of the world out of the bloody chaos of the war. The Russian revolution showed in practice, by example, how the workers’ revolution is to be made. It revealed in life the role of the party. It showed in life what kind of a party the workers must have.”

For a more extended discussion of the 1917 Revolution, I recommend that you read a series of four educationals on Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (1932) in WV Nos. 874, 875, 877 and 879 (4 August, 1 September, 29 September and 27 October 2006).

During the course of the Russian Revolution, the multinational proletariat, drawing behind it the peasantry and the oppressed nationalities, forged its own new organs of class power, the soviets. With the smashing of the old capitalist state, these organs, under Bolshevik leadership, formed the basis of the new workers state. The vanguard of the workers understood that they were not just taking power in Russia; they were opening the first chapter of the world socialist revolution. They inspired workers uprisings throughout Europe and inspired rebellions by imperialism’s colonial slaves.

The tremors of October 1917 extended all the way around the globe to right here in the richest bastion of imperialism. In 1919, the Bolsheviks launched the Communist International (CI). Under Bolshevik leaders V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the CI and the Soviet state became the most powerful revolutionary force ever yet assembled by the world proletariat.

The October Revolution forged a Red Army that emerged victorious from four years of civil war as well as invasion by the armies of 14 capitalist powers in league with their local capitalist henchmen. The Soviet government expropriated the capitalists and repudiated outright the tsar’s massive debt to foreign bankers. It proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education, as the first steps to building a socialist society.

It gave land to the peasants and self-determination to the many oppressed nations of the tsar’s prison house of peoples. It tore down the whole edifice of Russian patriarchal medievalism. The early Soviet government not only separated church and state, it put all available resources toward universal secular education and science. It eliminated all laws discriminating against national and ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals. Soviet Russia not only gave the vote to women at a time when the Western imperialists were beating them bloody for demanding such a thing; the Bolsheviks put women in the front ranks of proletarian rule as factory managers, state commissars and army commanders.

The Soviet workers state proved the superiority of nationalized property and planned economy over capitalist private property and anarchy in production. Out of the historical poverty left by tsarist Russia, the wreckage left by imperialist invasions, the continuing economic and military encirclement by imperialism, and in spite of Stalinist mismanagement and parasitism, the Soviet Union achieved unrivaled modernization and growth. At the same time as the capitalist world had fallen into the abyss of the 1930s Great Depression, the Soviet planned economy brought tens of millions of Soviet workers and peasants out of Russia’s medieval villages and turned them into educated modern proletarians, scientists, directors of industry and commanders of the mechanized Red Army.

The Soviet Union was the industrial and military powerhouse that made possible, and protected, the overturns of capitalist rule from Cuba to East Europe to China to Vietnam and North Korea. Had it not been for the USSR, the imperialists would have attacked North Korea, China and Vietnam with nuclear weapons during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism there in 1991-92 and in East Europe transformed the political landscape of the planet and threw proletarian consciousness back to a point in which workers today by and large no longer associate their struggles with the goal of socialism. Capitalist counterrevolution triggered an unparalleled economic collapse throughout the former Soviet Union, with skyrocketing rates of poverty and disease combined with a catastrophic decline in the average lifespan. Internationally, with the absence of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to their ambitions, the imperialists feel they have a free hand to project their military might, from Serbia to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The bourgeoisie has always wanted to wipe the October Revolution from historical memory by burying it under a mountain of lies. They often call it a conspiracy or putsch, but the 1917 October Revolution was no putsch and no accident. It was needed because the socially organized productive forces of the planet were tearing at bourgeois private property forms, and at the bourgeois nation-states as well. These had become shackles on social progress. The first imperialist world war of 1914-18 marked the descent of the capitalist system into a barbaric destruction of society’s productive forces, culture and humanity itself. World War I signaled that, to free the planet’s productive forces from the death grip of capitalist imperialism, proletarian revolution, in the historical sense, had to be on the order of the day. The October Revolution happened because it was organized and led by a party that was able to instill in the proletariat this understanding of its historic mission.

Capitalist imperialism is still caught in its fatal contradictions; it still creates a proletariat with the social power to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and it still compels the workers to fight for their survival. Our duty is to make sure that there will be a party like Lenin’s in the right place at the right time. So this talk is not just about what happened in 1917 in Russia, it is also about the fight of the ICL to make new Octobers.

War and Revolution

The immediate backdrop to the outbreak of revolution in Russia in February 1917 was World War I. This war had a profound impact on Lenin’s thinking. It had triggered the collapse of the Second “Socialist” International. Beginning on 4 August 1914, the vast majority of its affiliated parties lined up behind their bourgeoisies’ war mobilizations. The Bolsheviks turned out to be among the few that sought to act on the International’s prior resolutions to use war to hasten workers revolution.

The collapse of the old International led Lenin to generalize his split with the Mensheviks in Russia. That split went back to the 1903 fight over the definition of party membership; the differences broadened shortly thereafter as the Bolsheviks rejected the Mensheviks’ promotion of the liberal bourgeoisie as the purported leadership of an overthrow of the tsar. The split had become definitive by 1912.

Lenin concluded from World War I that opportunism in the workers movement was not a vestigial or localized phenomenon that could be overcome within a common party. He concluded that the Second International had been destroyed and that a new revolutionary international must be built through a complete split with not only the outright jingoists, but also the centrists who covered for them by using fake-Marxist arguments. The archetype of such centrists at the time was the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky.

Lenin held that the war had demonstrated that capitalism was in its final stage of decay and that proletarian socialist revolution offered the only way out of a continuing descent into barbarism. He maintained that the path to proletarian revolution was the transformation of the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war and that the condition for this was that socialists must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state in the war. Lenin’s policies brilliantly anticipated the revolutionary sweep of events to come and pointed to the program needed to meet them.

It was in the Russian capital of Petrograd on International Women’s Day, 23 February 1917 (by the old Julian calendar) when the social tensions exacerbated by World War I burst. A strike of mostly women textile workers demanded bread and war rations. There were over 1,000 casualties as ever more workers joined the street fighting and launched a general strike on the 25th. This was the start of the February Revolution. Throughout Russia, police and state officials were sent packing, and on February 27 the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was formed. The election of soviets in the factories and in the army reflected the workers’ experience in the 1905 Revolution. (You can read a presentation on the 1905 Russian Revolution in WV No. 872, 9 June 2006.)

Let’s take a moment to define “soviets.” These were working-class organs, councils of deputies elected from workplaces and army units. The workers elected their deputies, could actively control them and, whenever need be, recall them. The soviets were organs of struggle, insurgency and proletarian administration.

But the paradox of the February Revolution was that while the autocracy had been overthrown by the workers, many of them schooled over the years by the Bolsheviks, the official government that emerged was bourgeois. Even as street fighting was raging in Petrograd, a self-appointed Provisional Committee of bourgeois-monarchist politicians met in the Tauride Palace on the night of February 27, behind the back of the popular revolution. They declared a Provisional Government aimed at erecting a constitutional monarchy.

And while the Bolsheviks and the workers were still in the streets battling the tsar’s gendarmes, a cabal rushed to the other wing of the Tauride Palace and appointed themselves the heads of the Petrograd and All-Russian soviets. These were the leaders of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs). While the SRs were largely based on the peasantry, the Mensheviks represented urban petty-bourgeois layers and the more conservative and privileged workers. The program of the Mensheviks and SRs was that the bourgeoisie should lead and rule, and they desperately appealed to the bourgeois Provisional Government to take control.

The February Revolution thus resulted in a situation of dual power. That is, alongside the Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie, there stood the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, based on the working class and answering to it. This situation could not last. One class or the other would have to rule.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks’ internal life was an arena of constant debates. And in the course of 1917, a struggle recurred between Lenin and a conservative wing centered around Bolshevik leaders Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin. And as we will see, the latter three would come together again after the October Revolution.

Lenin waged a key fight with them when he returned to Petrograd on April 3. While still trapped in Swiss exile, he had been reading with increasing alarm in the party paper, Pravda, of Kamenev and Stalin’s “conditional” support to the Provisional Government. They dropped Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism on the war and embraced a variety of Menshevik defensism, under the cover of pressuring the Provisional Government to negotiate an end to the war. They moved to merge the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. They were steering the party towards the Menshevik mirage of a parliamentary pressure group on the government of Prince Lvov!

When he finally arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd, Lenin climbed atop an armored car to address the cheering crowds that had brought down the tsar. Lenin hailed them and, to the shock of the official pro-war Soviet welcoming committee, gave an internationalist salute to the German revolutionary Marxist leader Karl Liebknecht who was in a prison cell for opposing German militarism and its fake-socialist supporters: “The hour is not far when, at the summons of our comrade Karl Liebknecht, the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters.... Long live the world-wide socialist revolution!”

This was the opening shot of Lenin’s fight to rearm the party. He was adamant on the principle of no support to the capitalist Provisional Government and its imperialist war. It was a split issue. He was a minority of one, but he knew his program corresponded to the needs of the proletariat and peasantry. Lenin’s program for proletarian seizure of power was already taking shape in the masses’ own struggles. “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!” would be concretized on Bolshevik banners that read “All Power to the Soviets!” and “Down With the War!” What made it possible for Lenin to turn the party wheel toward the proletarian seizure of power was that by the end of April he rallied decisive support from the proletarian provinces and industrial districts of the capital.

Whenever you hear us Spartacists being called “splitters” or you hear sermons about “unity, unity,” just remember: Lenin could not have led a workers revolution alongside supporters of the bourgeois government and imperialist war.

State and Revolution

One of Lenin’s great achievements during 1917 was his revival and defense of the teachings of Karl Marx and his lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels, on the state. In July, as he was hiding from a government death squad, Lenin devoted what he thought might be his last days to completing a pamphlet, The State and Revolution. He wrote that the bourgeoisie uses lies to hide its dictatorship, but that Marxists must state the truth: states are not neutral arbiters above classes.

Engels defined the core of the state as armed bodies of men, the prisons and police who hold a monopoly of violence over society. These instruments were forged in wars and revolutions for the social domination of particular classes. These social classes are defined by their property rights in relation to society’s means of production. Thus all states are instruments for the domination of a particular class’s property forms in the means of production. In modern society, there are only two fundamental classes: the bourgeoisie, which owns the means of production; and the proletariat, defined as those who own only their labor power. The capitalists require private property in the means of production, the workers need socialized ownership of them. The interests of the capitalists and workers are thus absolutely counterposed and cannot be served by one and the same state.

Lenin also explained that it is impossible to make the institutions of the bourgeoisie’s class dictatorship serve the proletariat: “Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the ‘ready-made state machinery,’ and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.” The proletariat had to build up its own organs of state power out of such things as factory committees, unions, red guards, workers militias, soldiers committees and revolutionary soviets, independent of, and in active struggle against, the old bourgeois state. These were built in 1917 and, after the workers’ revolutionary seizure of power, became the basis of a new kind of state: the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was a fundamentally different power from all previous states in that its purpose was ultimately not perpetuation of class domination, but the transition to classless, therefore, stateless, socialist society.

The Bolsheviks’ Fight Against Class Collaboration

The first Provisional Government was brought down in a political firestorm over its pledge to continue the hated imperialist war. A new cabinet was formed on May 5, and this time the SR and Menshevik Soviet leaders took ministerial posts in the capitalist government. Trotsky later called this Russian coalition government “the greatest historical example of the Popular Front.” The popular front was the name that the Stalinists would use, starting in the 1930s, to designate their coalition government betrayals. It also goes by other names: Union of the Left, Unidad Popular, Tripartite Alliance.

Such class collaboration is not a tactic, but the greatest betrayal. Any political bloc that a workers party enters into with capitalist parties, whether in government or in opposition, is a pledge by the traitorous working-class leaders that they will not violate the bourgeois order. It means that the workers party will take political responsibility for policing the bourgeois social order.

Lenin and Trotsky devised a slogan in response to the coalition government: “Down With the Ten Capitalist Ministers!” This meant: break the coalition with the capitalists; the workers and soldiers Soviets should take all the power! The refusal of the Mensheviks and SRs to do this exposed them before the mass of workers, soldiers and peasants of Russia who still followed them.

In June, the coalition government launched a new war offensive. This impelled the Petrograd proletariat and sailors of the neighboring Kronstadt naval base to embark on a three-day armed demonstration in July to demand the Soviet leaders end the hated war and take power. The Bolsheviks strove to prevent a premature showdown but, unable to hold back the mobilization, took their place at its head to provide leadership.

Capitalist Petrograd’s reaction was to bring in reactionary troops from the front and launch a reign of terror. But when even this failed to stop the Bolsheviks, the bourgeoisie in August resolved on a military coup by the Commander-in-Chief of the army, General Lavr Kornilov, to crush the Soviets altogether. The conciliationist Soviet tops were paralyzed, but the masses rallied around the Bolshevik-organized united-front action that stopped Kornilov in his tracks.

Kornilov was gearing up to sweep away the Provisional Government along with the Soviets as a whole. In mobilizing to stop Kornilov, the Bolsheviks were defending the Provisional Government, but this was strictly military defense. The Bolsheviks gave absolutely no political support to the Provisional Government. On the contrary, while the workers and soldiers mobilized against the counterrevolutionary threat, the Bolsheviks exposed the traitors—the Mensheviks and SRs—in the Provisional Government, who were in constant communication with Kornilov.

A crucial corner had been turned by the beginning of September. The masses were convinced through their Bolshevik-led struggle against Kornilov that the old Soviet misleaders were kaput and that only the Bolsheviks would take decisive action to end the war and stop capitalist sabotage of the economy. The General Staff of the army was no longer capable of mobilizing military units against revolutionary Petrograd. The countryside was aflame as returning peasant soldiers seized the landlords’ fields and torched palatial estates. On September 4, Trotsky was released from prison, and by the 23rd he was elected Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. The Bolsheviks finally had solid majorities in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets. Trotsky declared, “Long live the direct and open struggle for a revolutionary power throughout the country!” Lenin hammered home: Get on with it, take power!

The Party, the Soviets and the Conquest of Power

The Bolshevik Central Committee met on October 10 and 16 to finalize the insurrection. At both meetings Zinoviev and Kamenev were opposed to insurrection, while the Lenin and Trotsky wing carried the majority in support of it. Everywhere, factory Red Guards were drilling, workers at the arms factories funneled weapons directly to the workers militias, and the Petrograd Soviet and Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute became a beehive of working-class organization.

On October 18, Kamenev and Zinoviev publicly blew the whistle on the insurrection in the press. Lenin called them strikebreakers and demanded their expulsion. As Trotsky explained in his 1924 work, Lessons of October, sharp turns such as the leap to insurrection footing provoke conservative tendencies latent in the party into opposition. Trotsky defined the essence of Bolshevism as “such a training, such a tempering and such an organization of the proletarian vanguard as enables the latter to seize power, arms in hand” and the social-democratic (Menshevik) tendency as “the acceptance of a reformist opposition activity within the framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e. the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state.”

As we’ve seen, the soviets by themselves do not settle the question of power. They can serve different programs and leaderships. As Trotsky wrote, “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.”

The insurrection took place on the eve of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on October 25th. Lenin reappeared in public and read out declarations on peace, land and the rights of the toilers. The Bolsheviks’ proclamations were punctuated by the steady boom of red naval artillery directed against the government holdouts in the Winter Palace. Lenin declared: “The Russian started the revolution, and the German will carry it through to the end.” He also said: “A new phase has opened up not just in Russia, but throughout the entire world.”

Isolation of the Revolution and Stalinist Degeneration

The masses of workers in war-ravaged Europe looked to the example of Soviet Russia. However, the social-democratic leaders of the mass reformist workers parties sought to preserve the capitalist order and strangle the October Revolution. Hamstrung by this treachery, insurgent workers in Europe failed in their efforts to take and hold power in Finland (1918), Germany (1918-19), Hungary (1919) and Italy (1919-20), where revolutionary struggles went down to defeat. What was lacking were programmatically grounded and battle-tested revolutionary parties like the Bolshevik Party, capable of leading the workers in victory over the social-democratic and nationalist defenders of capitalist rule.

Within Soviet Russia, the Red Army eventually repulsed all the imperialist-sponsored troops and domestic White Guards, but the country emerged exhausted and drained from the Civil War. There was a vast gulf between the Bolsheviks’ communist goals and the prevailing material scarcity and want. Not only was industry in ruins, the vibrant proletariat that had accomplished October had practically ceased to exist. Vast parts of Moscow and Petrograd were like dark, frozen ghost towns. Instead of an influx of material resources from a Soviet Europe to help rebuild Russia’s devastated infrastructure, Soviet Russia was swept by famine that reached the point of cannibalism in the countryside.

Because of the material and cultural poverty inherited from tsarism, the Bolsheviks early on had to utilize those remaining former functionaries, technical specialists and military officers who, often for careerist reasons, offered their services to the new regime. Lenin warned at the March 1922 Eleventh Party Congress that “‘Four thousand seven hundred responsible communists’ in Moscow administer the state machine. ‘Who is leading whom? I doubt very much whether you can say that the communists are in the lead’” (quoted in Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, 1936). A nascent conservative and bureaucratized layer had developed—using its position to secure privileges amidst general scarcity—that became a transmission belt for alien class interests and conservative political moods into the Bolshevik Party itself.

These were the conditions in which the revolutionary core of the Bolshevik Party was outflanked by the growing conservative wing, centered on the party apparatus headed by Stalin. After Lenin was struck down by a stroke in May 1922, Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed a secret “troika” (or triumvirate) to stop Trotsky from succeeding him as central leader of the party. Their bloc against Trotsky became a center around which opponents of the party’s Leninist wing would act to usurp political power. Stalin emerged as the protector and spokesman for the conservative, bureaucratic layer in the party and state apparatuses.

Doing away with Great Russian chauvinist despotism, the Bolsheviks in power offered full democratic rights to all ethnicities in what had been, in Lenin’s words, the tsarist “prison house of peoples.” In order to liberate the myriad peoples at different levels of national consolidation, a variety of soviet republics were established, from Union Republics for fully formed nations to Autonomous Oblasts (provinces) for various nationalities. In areas of heavy interpenetration of peoples, such as the Caucasus, the resulting complicated checkerboard of autonomous regions set an internationalist framework for intercourse among the peoples.

It was precisely over the national question in the Caucasus that the first decisive political fight against the developing Stalinist bureaucracy was waged by Lenin. After Stalin attempted to deny the Georgian, Azerbaijani and Armenian republics their sovereign status and force them into a Transcaucasian federation, Lenin broke with him in late 1922. Lenin resolved to consummate a bloc with Trotsky, preparing to, in the words of one of his secretaries, drop a “bomb” on Stalin at the upcoming Twelfth Party Congress, held in April 1923. However, Lenin was debilitated by another stroke shortly before the Congress opened, ending his active participation in the affairs of the Soviet party and state. With Lenin ill, Trotsky’s primary concern was to avoid a split within the leadership. Thus, he accepted a deal in which his resolutions on key issues, including the national question, were adopted by the Congress while Stalin kept his post as General Secretary (see “A Critical Balance Sheet: Trotsky and the Russian Left Opposition,” Spartacist No. 56, Spring 2001).

The final straw was the defeat of the October 1923 revolution in Germany. It stopped the postwar revolutionary wave, allowing the global bourgeois order to stabilize. This was hugely demoralizing for Soviet workers. They had strained every nerve preparing for common revolutionary struggle alongside a Bolshevik Germany. Instead, they now faced, for the first time, the prospect of national isolation for the foreseeable future.

The delay of international revolution is what enabled the ascendancy of a conservative bureaucracy in Soviet Russia, which step-by-step strangled the remnants of the Bolshevik Party’s revolutionary core. Trotskyism (i.e., genuine Marxism) is the continuation of Leninism. Stalinism did not flow from Leninism; it was a conservative reaction against it.

A qualitative turning point occurred at the Bolshevik Thirteenth Party Conference in January 1924. In the discussions leading up to that conference, Trotsky and the emerging opposition to bureaucratism and Stalin’s Great Russian national chauvinist policies received unexpectedly broad party support. The apparatus panicked and demonstratively slammed shut the doors to the last party forum where Lenin and Trotsky’s revolutionary core might have been able to overcome their opponents. The elections for delegates to this conference were systematically rigged by the Troika to allow only three supporters of Trotsky to attend. The nascent bureaucracy had shaken its fist in the face of the Opposition: you are out!

One of the three Oppositionist delegates seated at the Conference was Ivan Vrachev. As he denounced Stalin’s undermining of Lenin’s party from the floor of the Thirteenth Conference, he was repeatedly interrupted by hecklers. Vrachev fired back in protest: “Comrades, it may be that we have only a few hours left of full democracy, so let us use it!” He was right. From that point on, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled and the purposes for which it was ruled all changed.

It took some time for the bureaucracy to consolidate its rule. The Stalin clique had to carry out bloody purges throughout the 1930s. (As an aside, one of the things that the ICL did in the USSR was to seek out surviving veterans of the Trotskyist Opposition. We found Ivan Vrachev and interviewed him.)

In defending its privileges, the Stalinist bureaucracy necessarily soon acquired political self-consciousness in opposition to the Bolshevik Party’s Marxist program. The change of purpose of the USSR’s leadership was encapsulated in December 1924 when Stalin trampled on October’s banner of world revolution by propagating the false dogma of economic autarky and isolationism known as “socialism in one country.” As a theory it was absurd. A workers state cannot ignore the capitalist-dominated international economy. In order to achieve a classless, socialist society, what is required are socialist revolutions to expropriate the bourgeoisies and establish planned, collectivized economies. But Stalin’s nationalist formula crystallized a mood of conservatism, a retreat into a false hope of stability for which Soviet society ached after years of war, revolution and privation.

As the Kremlin bureaucracy became more conscious of its position, this revisionism of internationalist principle became a rationale for political betrayal. Increasingly, Communist parties abroad were transformed into Soviet foreign-policy bargaining chips in a bid for illusory “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. Over the coming decades, one opportunity after another for socialist revolution in the capitalist countries was strangled.

The Left Opposition that emerged from the crucible of the anti-bureaucratic struggle in the Soviet party was unquestionably the continuity of Leninism, the real heirs to the 1917 Russian Revolution. Trotsky’s Left Opposition fought, both in the Soviet Union and—insofar as they were able—in the Communist International, to preserve and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky’s 1928 “Critique of the Draft Program of the Communist International” proved that the fight in the Russian party was a fight not only for a revival of the Soviet proletariat and against the bureaucratic deformation of the Soviet Union, but also to preserve the theoretical and programmatic heritage of Bolshevism, the revolutionary Marxism of the imperialist epoch. Trotsky’s The Third International After Lenin, containing his 1928 “Critique,” stands as the founding statement of international Trotskyism.

In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany without a single shot being fired. The Stalinists, who were then in an ultra-left phase that they termed the “Third Period,” referred to the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and refused to call for a united front with this mass reformist working-class party against Hitler’s drive to power. In the face of this historic defeat—and the fact that no opposition was voiced nor a balance sheet drawn within the Stalinized Comintern—Trotsky called for forging a new, Fourth International.

The Communist International under Stalin, after the catastrophic ultra-left line, zigzagged to the right and, at the Seventh (and last) Comintern Congress in 1935, consolidated around a policy of forming class-collaborationist coalitions that they termed “popular fronts.” At the time, the Stalinists sought to justify this treacherous policy by arguing that they were uniting with supposedly “democratic” bourgeois parties “against fascism.”

It was through tying the workers politically to their class enemy that the 1936 French general strike was betrayed by the French Socialist and Communist parties. From the Spanish Revolution of 1936-38 to Chile in 1970-73, the popular front has served to undermine any independent bid for proletarian power, paralyze its struggles and set it up for defeat, often bloody. Like Lenin and Trotsky, we are opposed in principle to any coalition with capitalist parties, whether in government or in opposition, and we are against voting for the workers parties that are part of a popular-front coalition.

In the aftermath of the Stalinist betrayal in Germany, followed by the Comintern’s codification of the reformist popular-front line, Trotsky and his comrades founded the Fourth International in 1938. The 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International characterized the Soviet Union under Stalin as follows:

“The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

Trotsky’s program pointed to how these contradictions could be resolved: the Fourth International fought for unconditional military defense of the degenerated workers state from imperialism and counterrevolution. This was based on the understanding that the Stalinist bureaucracy’s usurpation of power was a political, rather than social, counterrevolution because it did not overthrow the proletarian property forms created by October. As Lenin had taught, the state—a repressive apparatus of armed bodies at its core—defends the property relations of the ruling class: a bourgeois state defends capitalist private property relations, a workers state defends collectivized property relations. The Soviet Union, with the political rule of the parasitic and repressive Stalinist bureaucracy, had become a bureaucratically degenerated workers state.

The Trotskyists called for proletarian political revolution. Such a revolution, based on defense of collectivized property forms, is not a social revolution or a counterrevolution, which overturns existing property relations and puts a different class in power. Rather it is a political revolution to oust the bureaucracy, restoring workers soviet democracy and a Trotskyist internationalist leadership such as the one that led the October Revolution.

[TO BE CONTINUED]- Part Two is below



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Workers Vanguard No. 925
21 November 2008

We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution

Part Two

We print below, edited for publication, the second part of a presentation by comrade Victor Gibbons, given in Los Angeles on 10 November 2007 in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Part One of this presentation was published in WV No. 924, 7 November.

Leading the fight against the Stalinist degeneration of the world’s first workers state, which was created by the 1917 Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition upheld the revolutionary-internationalist program of V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. Central to the program of Trotsky’s Fourth International was the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution and the call for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore working-class political power in the USSR.

A crucial turning point in the fate of the Soviet Union—and world history—proved to be the war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In December 1979, Leonid Brezhnev’s Kremlin had intervened militarily into Afghanistan to shore up a strategically important client state along the southern border of Soviet Central Asia. The modernizing bourgeois-nationalist regime in Kabul had repeatedly requested Soviet aid against a reactionary Islamic insurgency—backed and armed by the U.S.—which had taken up arms against the regime’s modest social reforms, especially those that improved the horribly oppressed condition of Afghan women.

In dreadfully backward Afghanistan, the Red Army represented the only real basis for social progress. A Red Army victory and a prolonged occupation of the country posed the extension of the social gains of the October Revolution to Afghanistan, transforming it along the lines of Soviet Central Asia.

It should have been easy for any leftist to see that it was necessary to take the Soviet side in this war. The war was doubly progressive on the part of the USSR, defending both the fate of women and elementary social progress in Afghanistan, as well as defending the Soviet Union’s strategic southern flank. Against the solid front that ran from the imperialists to their “left” drummer boys, the international Spartacist tendency (predecessor of the International Communist League) declared: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to Afghan peoples!”

The 1979 Red Army intervention into Afghanistan cut against the grain of the Stalinists’ nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country.” Our internationalist line, aimed squarely against the CIA-backed mujahedin, at the same time promoted political revolution against the Kremlin bureaucracy.

During the onslaught of the war hysteria cranked out by the U.S. ruling class—beginning with Jimmy Carter’s “human rights” demagogy and escalating to Ronald Reagan’s crusade against the Soviet “evil empire”—a defining moment took place for the left internationally. Much of the left rushed to embrace what was the biggest “covert” CIA operation in history. The lackeys of imperialism did not give a damn about the genuine progress that the Soviet presence from 1979-89 did start to bring about for Afghan women, anymore than they care today about the living hell women have been thrown back into by the triumphal march of imperialism and the Islamic cutthroats that they spawned in the region.

Left apologists for U.S. imperialism’s holy war against the USSR and progress in Afghanistan screamed bloody murder over purported Soviet violations of Afghanistan’s supposed “national rights.” But Afghanistan is not a nation. It is a feudal-derived state that is a mosaic of nationalities, ethnic and tribal groupings. And, in any case, this is beside the point. Even if Afghanistan were a homogeneous nation, revolutionary Marxists would have supported the Soviet Union’s armed intervention since the furthering of social revolution, including defense of the USSR against capitalist imperialism, stands higher than the bourgeois-democratic right of national self-determination.

The war in Afghanistan would prove to be a watershed. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s treacherous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was the direct precursor to capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union itself. As I will explain below, we fought for an internationalist response to help defeat the Afghan reactionaries. We said it would be better to fight against imperialism there than against counterrevolution in Moscow—and we were proved very right.

Bourgeoisie, Social Democrats Promote Counterrevolution in Poland

In the early ’80s, another anti-Communist campaign was waged around events in Poland where striking workers lined up behind an opposition composed of reactionary ultranationalists, Catholic clerics and pro-capitalist social democrats. Significant sections of the working class were mobilized against the Stalinist bureaucracy through Solidarność, a “trade union” sponsored by the CIA, West European social democrats and the Vatican. In the U.S. and West Europe, the trade-union bureaucracy went whole hog in mobilizing support for Solidarność.

The ascendancy of Solidarność was a direct consequence of the political bankruptcy of Stalinism. In Poland in 1956, 1970 and again in 1976, proletarian upheavals were headed off as the bureaucracy each time put forward a new leader or new promises for a better deal. At the same time, the Polish Stalinists strengthened the Catholic church in various ways, including by perpetuating a landowning peasantry. By the late 1970s, having been disillusioned three times with “national-liberal” Stalinism, significant sections of the Polish working class became susceptible to being organized in Solidarność.

At its first national congress in September 1981, Solidarność consolidated around a program of open counterrevolution. Its call for “free trade unions” was a war cry of Cold War anti-Sovietism. In regard to the Stalinist-ruled workers states, we have historically fought for trade unions that are independent of bureaucratic control and are based on the principle of defending the workers state and its collectivized economy. Solidarność also called for “free elections” to the Sejm (parliament), a program of capitalist restoration under the guise of a parliamentary government.

We described Solidarność as a company union for the CIA and bankers. Stressing the need to unconditionally militarily defend the Polish deformed workers state against capitalist restoration, we raised the call “Stop Solidarność Counterrevolution!”

When in December 1981 the bid for power by Solidarność was spiked by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, we unconditionally defended that measure as a means to defend the workers state and buy time for the formation of a Trotskyist party. By contrast, much of the left backed Solidarność. At the same time, we warned that the Stalinists were capable of selling out the Polish workers state to capitalism—and that is exactly what happened. In 1989, the Polish Stalinists ceded governmental power to Solidarność, which had won a landslide electoral victory that June. Thus Solidarność formed the first of the capitalist-restorationist regimes in East and Central Europe.

In Poland today you can see the result of capitalist counterrevolution: whole parts of the Polish economy—mining, heavy industry and textiles—have been massively destroyed. Unemployment—largely nonexistent in the period before 1989—hovers around 20 percent, and there are hardly any unemployment benefits. Women’s rights have been rolled back and a reactionary clerical capitalist government established.

The ICL and the Struggle Against Capitalist Counterrevolution

The fact that the Soviet Union was able to recover from the utter destruction caused by the Nazi invasion during World War II—and become an industrial and military superpower—was further testimony to the superiority of the collectivized planned economy. However, the Soviet economy—its level of productivity and technological base—necessarily continued on the whole to lag behind the advanced centers of the capitalist West. Over the next decades, the Soviet Union was subjected to the unremitting pressures of imperialism—not only military encirclement and an arms buildup aimed at bankrupting the Soviet economy, but also the pressure of the imperialist world market.

Trotsky had explained that the Stalinist bureaucracy was capable of extensive ecomomic growth. The Kremlin oligarchy could and did expand the Soviet economy by crudely transplanting capitalist production methods and even entire factories from abroad. But it was incapable of consistently raising the overall level of technology and labor productivity. As Trotsky put it in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): “Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative—conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.”

Although the planned economy proved its superiority over capitalist anarchy during its period of extensive growth, as the need for quality and intensive development came to the fore, the bureaucratic stranglehold more and more undermined the economy. By the 1980s, the cumulative effects of Stalinist mismanagement and parasitism had brought the USSR’s once explosive growth rate to just a few percentage points a year, and then none at all.

The bureaucratic caste in the Kremlin was no longer able to simultaneously fund defense spending, maintain the steady postwar rise of Soviet workers’ living standards, and invest in new industrial technology. A change of course was inevitable. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with his slogan of perestroika, a program of “market reforms” intended as a whip to spur worker productivity and enterprise efficiency. This was linked to a policy of glasnost (which means “openness”). The attempt to restructure the Soviet economy through so-called “market socialism” signified a transition away from central planning in favor of market mechanisms for running the economy. This led to a deepening of social inequalities and a strengthening of forces pushing for the restoration of capitalism.

These reforms were combined with increased diplomatic conciliation vis-à-vis imperialism under the slogan “new thinking” in foreign policy. When, in early 1989, the Soviet bureaucracy under Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the vain hope of winning the good graces of the imperialists, we denounced this as a crime against both the Afghan and Soviet peoples—as has been amply verified by subsequent events.

The reason Gorbachev threw Afghanistan to the imperialist wolves by withdrawing the Soviet Army was not that the USSR was militarily defeated in Afghanistan. That is a Cold War myth manufactured and marketed by the CIA and its media chorus. Today the imperialists’ spies and diplomats who ran the operation readily concede that the high point of the mujahedin insurgency was in 1980. From then on, the mullahs were consistently “getting beaten” and “are not strong enough to hold or deny territory to the Soviets” (quoted in Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal).

One’s blood boils reading the Politburo records of the generals and party bosses wrestling with the Afghan dilemma. Gorbachev ruled out extending the gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples. Soon after coming to power he lectured the Politburo that, “after all, it’s not socialism we want there.” He stated in 1986 that “the USSR does not intend to remain in Afghanistan and does not seek a ‘breakthrough to warm seas’ [of the Indian Ocean].” Gorbachev was countering those who chafed at the humiliating retreat he demanded by evoking the Stalinists’ shared renunciation of the struggle for world revolution. But it was not just Gorbachev personally who betrayed the masses of Afghanistan for the sake of appeasing Ronald Reagan. No wing of the bureaucracy had an alternative to Gorbachev’s attempt to reduce the Soviet military budget and its commitments through a vain attempt to appease imperialism.

Just days before Gorbachev pulled the last Soviet units out of Afghanistan, the Partisan Defense Committee—the class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—sent a 7 February 1989 letter to the Afghan government offering to organize an international brigade to fight to the death to defend the right of women to read; to defend freedom from the veil and the tyranny of the mullahs and the landlords; to defend the introduction of medical care and the right of all to an education.

Unfortunately, the Afghan government declined our offer. They asked instead that we raise funds internationally for the civilian victims of attacks by the CIA’s cutthroats in the Afghan city of Jalalabad. We took up this cause and raised over $40,000 from all around the world. In immigrant communities, at factories, workplaces and union halls, and among foreign students, people who keenly knew what a victory of the mujahedin would mean donated generously. We also sent a press representative to Jalalabad to help break the imperialist information blockade. You can read about this in our bound volumes of WV for 1989-90; see, for example, “Afghanistan: Scenes of Civil War—Exclusive Photographs from Our Correspondent,” WV No. 484, 1 September 1989.

Had our proposal for fighting internationalist brigades taken shape, it could have had a real impact on the Soviet veterans of the Afghan war, whose socialist aspirations had been rekindled by their internationalist service. It could have helped to galvanize their real but partial and unfocused opposition within the USSR to Gorbachev’s betrayals. Reports emerged stating that “Soviet veterans of the Afghanistan war have asked the Central Committee of the CP to be allowed to return there with a voluntary division” to fight the counterrevolutionaries (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 27 July 1989). This mood was particularly felt by Soviet veterans coming from Central Asia, who in Afghanistan had battled the very slavery that the 1917 October Revolution had saved their grandparents from. The Soviet soldiers who had been told, and rightly believed, that they were fulfilling their internationalist duty in fighting against the reactionary Afghan mujahedin on the USSR’s southern border, were now maligned at home as “war criminals” who had supposedly perpetrated “Russia’s Vietnam.”

Now we have authoritative records kept by participants in Politburo meetings that show Gorbachev’s humiliating orders to “get out!” of Afghanistan. This evoked resistance all the way up to the Politburo, although in the end they bowed to Gorbachev. Had the beginnings of a Soviet Trotskyist party been crystallized in 1989—had our brigades helped to serve as a catalyst for this—history might have taken a very different path. Instead, Gorbachev’s ignominious pullout from Afghanistan only served to instill a sense of defeatism and demoralization among the Soviet masses.

Proletarian Revolt Against Stalinist Regime in China

During the 1980s, the influence of petty-bourgeois democrats and nationalists increasingly gained strength throughout most of East Europe, with the notable exception of East Germany. In July 1989, Gorbachev disavowed Soviet “interference” in the Eastern bloc countries. At the same time, as part of his market restructuring, he announced that the Soviet Union would now sell oil and raw materials to the East European deformed workers states at world market prices for hard currency—i.e., no more subsidies. Gorbachev was offering up East Europe to the imperialists. The fate of the East European and Soviet workers was thus posed: either proletarian political revolutions to defend and extend the gains embodied in the collectivized economies, or capitalist counterrevolution and all-sided social devastation.

The first sign of political revolution in this period appeared not in East Europe but in China. In May-June 1989, a protest initiated by students in Tiananmen Square in Beijing won widespread support among workers, who were furious at growing economic inequalities, rampant corruption and endemic inflation encouraged by Deng Xiaoping’s “market socialist” economy. Under Deng, during the preceding decade, agriculture had been decollectivized and centralized economic planning had been weakened. The “iron rice bowl” of guaranteed lifetime employment and social benefits for workers was becoming rusted out.

Groups of young workers joined the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, which spread throughout the country. As we wrote at the time, “It was the beginnings of a working-class revolt against Deng’s program of ‘building socialism with capitalist methods’ which gave the protests their mass and potentially revolutionary nature” (“Defend Chinese Workers!” WV No. 480, 23 June 1989). Initially, both rank-and-file soldiers and some senior military commanders refused to carry out orders to suppress the protests.

The two weeks during which the army refused to implement martial law were a critical juncture. There was a political vacuum. Even a tiny Chinese Bolshevik organization could have played a significant role in 1989, especially during those two weeks. The situation in which working people were beginning to take control of the cities in their own hands needed to be developed into a fight for political power. Deng was finally able to find military units willing to suppress the protests. This was directed primarily at the working class rather than at the student protesters. The key factor in China in 1989 was the absence of a revolutionary leadership.

Nascent Proletarian Political Revolution in the DDR

The events in China were echoed in Central and East Europe, specifically in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) or East Germany. The broadening crisis there led to growing weekly demonstrations in October against the Stalinist regime of Erich Honecker. Gorbachev and the Soviet Army command in the DDR refused Honecker’s request to use troops against the protesters. The unlamented Honecker regime fell in late October. On November 4, a million-strong demonstration took place in East Berlin. Five days later the Berlin Wall came down.

Today we are constantly subjected to bourgeois propaganda that depicts all East Germans at that time rushing out to embrace West Germany and capitalist reunification. This is a big lie. The mass of workers, students and soldiers wanted to save the DDR from the collapse caused by the bankrupt Stalinist rulers. They marched under banners saying, “For Communist Ideals” and “Against Privileges.”

This was the setting in which we launched the largest and most important effort in the history of our tendency. Comrades, whether they knew German or not, volunteered from all around the world to fly into Germany. In December 1989, we began publishing a near-daily press: Arprekorr (Workers Press Correspondence). We turned our readers’ circles into a series of Spartakist-Gruppen (Spartacist Groups). Arprekorr took on a life of its own. Comrades would hit a new city and discover our press and leaflets had preceded us.

We called for proletarian political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West, as the road to a red, soviet Germany in a Socialist United States of Europe. We called for the founding of workers and soldiers councils. We unconditionally opposed capitalist reunification with imperialist West Germany.

We also directed propaganda and slogans to soldiers in the East German National People’s Army (NVA). Some units and soldiers committees of the East German army responded to our propaganda and circulated Arprekorr in the barracks. The West German bourgeoisie and U.S. imperialists moved to spike the nascent political revolution by fomenting German revanchism. Neo-Nazis incited provocations against the soldiers of the Soviet garrison, which was the decisive military force in the DDR.

We countered this right from the start by massively distributing greetings in the name of the insurgent German workers fighting for political revolution to our class brothers and sisters in the Soviet Army Zone. We saluted them and invited them to join us to celebrate the New Year in the Soviet custom of Novogodnyaya Yolka. We also distributed greetings to Cuban, Vietnamese and other foreign workers in the DDR.

The principal stalking horse intervening in the DDR for capitalist reunification was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). At the same time, the key obstacle to fighting against capitalist reunification was the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party (SED), because many had illusions that it would defend the DDR. Under pressure from below, the SED convened an emergency congress in December 1989 and added to their old name Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The SED-PDS, as it was now called, promised to oppose a “profit-dominated capitalist society.” It simultaneously advocated market-oriented reforms and praised West German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s program for “confederative structures,” which in reality served to incorporate the DDR into capitalist West Germany.

The SED-PDS leadership took the decisive steps toward disbanding the Betriebskampfgruppen (factory militias). These had been the voluntary, armed, factory-based militias for defense of the DDR under the political leadership of the SED. Established after the 17 July 1953 pro-socialist workers uprising in East Berlin against Stalinist rule, these militias were intended by the bureaucracy to be used against any future workers uprising. But it became clear that many workers in the Kampfgruppen did not take kindly to the idea of being used in that way. The Kampfgruppen had the real potential in November 1989 to become a crystallizing point for proletarian political revolution against the bureaucracy in defense of the DDR—so, the Stalinists dissolved them and thus disarmed the working class.

We called for a new Leninist egalitarian party to fight for the revolutionary reunification of Germany and “No to the Sellout of the DDR!” We emphasized: “For an Effective Planned Economy Through Workers Democracy!” Meanwhile, Arprekorr (19 December 1989) argued for the potential of workers political revolution in the USSR:

“All these aims must be combined with a vigorous offensive for a comparable proletarian political renewal in the Soviet Union so that a far larger combined economy in transition from capitalism to socialism may defend itself against the fifth column of social democrats, restorers of capitalism, and large masses of the intelligentsia who imagine, sometimes foolishly, that they will acquire the soft lives of the new capitalist masters. In the short run, look not to the West but to the East!”

The Fight for a Red Germany of Workers Councils

The validity and necessity of this perspective were soon borne out. In late December, the neo-Nazis went so far as to desecrate the Soviet monument in East Berlin’s Treptow Park. This monument honors the Red Army soldiers who fell liberating Germany from the Nazi scourge.

The ICL initiated a united-front demonstration against this provocation. In essence, this was a call to defend the DDR and the Soviet Union. The response to our call ran deep and wide. It compelled the ruling Stalinists to join in the mobilization for the demonstration on 3 January 1990. One leader of the SED-PDS, Lothar Bisky, told us, “You have the workers.” He didn’t mean that we had them organized in our ranks (yet); rather, that our program was articulating the aspirations of the pro-socialist workers. The potential for the explosive growth of a Trotskyist party was real.

The turnout to the demonstration showed the face of the nascent proletarian political revolution. Treptow Park was filled to capacity with over a quarter-million workers, soldiers of the DDR and USSR, immigrant workers and students. At this mass demonstration, for the first time in the history of the Stalinist-ruled Soviet bloc, the ICL was able to present its Trotskyist program in counterposition to the Stalinists’ betrayals of the DDR.

In the face of organized heckling by Stalinist hacks, comrade Renate Dahlhaus declared:

“Economic absorption and political incorporation by stages—which West German imperialism, aided by the SPD, seeks—can turn this political revolution into a social counterrevolution. This must not happen!...

“Our economy is suffering from waste and obsolescence. The SED party dictatorship has shown that it is incompetent to fight this…. The fight for the power to make these decisions and to run this country must lie in the hands of workers councils so that rational decisions satisfactory to the majority can be arrived at. This can only be done through open and sometimes painful debates before the whole people. Perhaps our example will encourage the Soviet Union to take the same road.”

Our program was beginning to take on living form in the struggles of the masses. In many instances, the SED-PDS tops had more knowledge about this than we did at the time. Thus, unbeknownst to us, in the days prior to the Treptow demonstration, a series of mutinies broke out in various DDR garrisons.

Gorbachev saw the historic importance of Treptow too—from his own treacherous point of view. Later, on 8 November 1999, he declared on German TV:

“We changed our point of view on the process of unification of Germany under the impact of events that unfolded in the DDR. And an especially critical situation came about in January. In essence, a breakdown of structures took place.... This began on January 3 and [went] further almost every day.... This was...like a torrent of fiery lava: the current was flowing.”

The Stalinist betrayers from Moscow to Berlin moved swiftly to head off further revolutionary developments. The SPD, howling at our exposure of their counterrevolutionary intentions, castigated the ruling SED-PDS on national TV for sharing a platform with the Trotskyists. The capitulating Stalinists quickly aimed their political fire at us and made any further actions like Treptow “verboten.” Gorbachev immediately summoned Helmut Kohl to Moscow. He gave the green light for capitalist Anschluss (annexation). The West German bourgeoisie threw 20 billion deutschmarks toward annexing East Germany and promised to make the ostmark equivalent to the West German deutschmark. DDR elections were moved up by several months and every CIA Cold War party, agency and priest came flooding in from the West to bury the banner of Treptow and raise in its place the flag of the Fourth Reich, the Greater German Fatherland.

We continued the fight into the elections, which had become a referendum on capitalist reunification. The Spartakist-Gruppen fused with the ICL’s Trotskyist League of Germany to form the Spartakist Workers Party. We ran an electoral campaign for the East German legislature in March 1990. We proposed the following no-contest agreement: if an organization is prepared to say clearly, publicly, unambiguously and in writing that it opposes capitalist reunification, we would call on our supporters to vote for its candidates in places where we don’t run, and the other party would likewise call on its supporters to vote for our candidates where it wasn’t running. Not one party took up our offer! On the ballot, the Spartakist Workers Party stood alone as the party of the Russian Revolution, of proletarian political revolution against Fourth Reich capitalist restoration.

The election results registered the post-Treptow reactionary blitzkrieg: the Auschwitz bourgeoisie was the new master. The workers of East Germany, West Germany, of the USSR and of the whole world had suffered a historic defeat. But history also recorded that the ICL alone knew what to do, and acted on it.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Part Three is linked above in the headline