From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949-
Soviet Publication of Secret Treaties
Soviet Publication of Secret Treaties
Markin comment (repost from 2012):
On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.
This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.
What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.
That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
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Workers Vanguard No. 971
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7 January 2011
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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Soviet Publication of Secret Treaties
(Quote of the Week)
Two weeks after the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917,
Leon Trotsky, then the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, announced the
Soviet government’s publication of secret treaties, exposing the machinations of
the prior tsarist and Provisional Government regimes and their imperialist
allies. Published after the Soviet government had declared Russia’s withdrawal
from the carnage of World War I, a war of competing imperialist powers for
redivision of the world, the revelations helped foment a wave of struggle by the
imperialists’ colonial victims. Most importantly, the Bolsheviks advanced the
fight to end the war through proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist
countries.
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 peace as soon as possible on the basis of decent coexistence and
collaboration of the peoples. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as
soon 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.”
—“Statement by Trotsky on the Publication of the Secret Treaties,”
22 November 1917,
reprinted in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, Vol. 1 (1917-1924), edited by Jane Degras (1951)
reprinted in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, Vol. 1 (1917-1924), edited by Jane Degras (1951)
