Conflicts in the Bolshevik Party—1917

[p044] CONFLICTS IN THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY 1917 wing leaders of the Soviets was emerging. The spontaneous July rising, held back by the Bol- sheviks, took place against the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet. The new adaptations with the Bolshevik leadership were forced out into the open by this dramatic turn, this change from a peaceful to a violent tempo of development in the class struggle. Lenin had developed the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’, to draw the Party closer to the masses now organized around the Soviets. In giving their support to the Menshevik and Social Revolutionaries in the Soviets, these layers un- consciously allowed the power to be handed by these treacherous leaders to to the old ruling class. This particular slogan could only be put for- ward by the Bolsheviks while the ruling class and its state machine remained paralysed and par- tially shattered by the February upheaval. Trans- fer of power to the working class and poorest sections of the peasantry through a series of shifts within the Soviets was only a political possibility while the forces of reaction remained in this demoralized state, and therefore dependent on collaboration with the Soviet right wing. The ‘July Days’ marked the end of this period. Dual power had not disappeared after July 5, but any talk of transfer of power to the exist-. ing Soviets became dangerous without the actual preparation of the working class for a violent overthrow of the old order. Throughout Russia, the Soviet leaders after July 5 went over from 103

[p045] V. I. Lenin delivers his ‘April Theses’ to the Soviets

[p046] compromise to active collaboration with the rul- ing class against the working class and its Bol- shevik leadership. In this situation, Lenin declared, ‘the slogan calling for the transfer of state power to the Soviets . . . would be deceiving the people; it would be fostering in them the delusion that even now it is enough for the Soviets to want to take power, to pass such a decision, for power to be theirs. . . .? (Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 185.) The real power was now in the hands of the military cadets (the ‘Junkers’) and reactionary Cossack troops. The Soviet leaders were mere puppets. Their violent overthrow by the masses was the only way to power. But that demanded that the Bolsheviks capture the majority in the Soviets. Until that had been accomplished, the Soviets would serve as a pillar of the Provisional Government of Kerensky. ‘Soviets may appear in this new revolution, and indeed, are bound to, but not the present Soviets, not organs collaborat- ing with the bourgeoisie. . . .” (ibid., p. 189.) Lenin had to fight hard for this strategy against - those in the Party who stuck rigidly to the old slogan, turning it into an empty abstraction divorced from the new content of the class struggle after the ‘July Days’. Constitutional illusions thus once more hid behind Bolshevik formulae. By September, Lenin can see the development of this ‘second revolution’. The Bolsheviks have won _ the leadership of decisive sections of the working class and the armed forces. Now begins the fiercest struggle of all, in which the contents of all previous faction fights are concentrated and raised to a new level: the fight for the insurrection itself. From hiding, Lenin has to wage war against tendencies in the Party which try to avoid or postpone the issue of power. He denounces the participation of the Bolsheviks in the so-called’ ‘Democratic Conference’. This had been called by the Soviet right wing in an attempt to resolve the issue of state power in favour of the ruling class. ‘The Bolsheviks should have walked out of the meeting. . . . They should not have allowed themselves to be kept busy with obvious non- sense for the obvious purpose of deceiving the people. ... The Party failed to keep pace with the incredibly fast tempo of history.’ (Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 48.) Was Lenin’s rebuke immediately taken to heart by the entire party? Far from it. When the so- called Pre-Parliament was constituted, the proposal of Trotsky to boycott it was defeated! Once more, it was an ‘Old Bolshevik’ formula which was in- 104 voked to justify this vote. Behind this error lay a whole history of struggle within the Bolshevik faction for a correct approach to work within parliamentary bodies. While the 1905 revolution was in its period of upswing, Lenin insisted that the Bolshevik faction boycott the Duma, established by the Tsar in the constitution pro- claimed on October 17, 1905. The elections to the First Duma took place next spring, during a period of colossal revolutionary upheaval, in which a turn by the working class towards par- liamentarianism could only have acted as a brake on this vast movement. Boycottism in 1905-1906 was a correct tactic. But with the revolution losing its impetus, to maintain the tactic of boycott was also to sustain the dangerous, adventurist illusion that the revo- lution was still on the upswing. Boycottism in 1907, when the elections to the Second and Third Dumas took place, went hand in hand with sec- tarianism and a tactic that would isolate the Bol- shevik faction from the experiences through which the masses were passing. Positions gained in even the most reactionary of Dumas could become vantage points for propaganda work dur- ing the period when the working class was gather- ing its strength for a fresh assault on the ruling class. Ultra-lefts such as Bogdanov, in turning boycottism into a principle, represented an idealist tendency within the Party, against which Lenin fought with all his strength in the period of reac- tion. But in September 1917 participation in the Pre-Parliament meant turning away from the revo- lutionary aspirations of the masses. ‘We must boycott the Pre-Parliament’. writes Lenin. ‘We must go out into the Soviets ... go out into the trade unions, go out in general to the masses.’ Only after two weeks of debate at the meeting of the Party faction in the Pre-Parliament was the boycott finally agreed. Trotsky’s speech at the first session announced the withdrawal of the Bolsheviks. The turn had been made only just in time. Throughout the month of October, Lenin carried on his war against the Party right wing. Basing himself on the international prospects for the revolution and the shifts to the left inside the working class, he fights to break the last ties which still bind the Party to the old social order. Continually he demands that the Central Com- mittee make concrete plans for the seizure of power. Further, he actually prepares to act in- dependently of the Committee, in particular in his ‘conspiratorial’ letter to Smilga of September 27. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER, 1967

[p047] (Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 69.) The culminating battle of this internal war was the struggle against Zinoviev and Kamenev. These, the closest of Lenin’s comrades, had been throughout the firmest opponents of insurrection. In his ‘Letter to Comrades’ of October 17, Lenin takes up every one of their arguments against insurrection and mercilessly strips them down to their class foundations. Despite Stalinist attempts to distort reality, these two were not isolated in their fight against Lenin’s line. After their letter in the non-Party press, opposing the insurrection, Lenin had un- equivocally demanded the expulsion of Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Party as ‘strike-breakers’. But at that time, Lenin did not know that Zinoviev had sent another letter to Pravda, which had appeared with a sympathetic editorial comment: ‘The question may be regarded as settled (sic!). The harsh tone of Comrade Lenin‘s article does not alter the fact that basically we still share the same views.’ The author of these evasive lines was Joseph Stalin! . The ‘strike-breakers’ were not expelled: Lenin’s proposal received not one supporter. Stalin spoke against even accepting Kamenev’s resignation from the CC. When Kamenev’s removal from the Committee was eventually approved, Stalin offered to resign from the editorship of Pravda. _ These upheavals within the top leadership of the Party took place only three days before the victorious insurrection! How was this possible? ‘The high temper of the Bolshevik Party expressed itself, not in an absence of disagreements, waver- ings and even quakings, but in the fact that in CONFLICTS IN THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY 1917 in Defence of Marxism by Leon Trotsky In the course of building the Fourth International, Trotsky played a leading part in the early years of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) of the USA. Almost from the very beginning in the SWP, there developed factions and platforms respond- ing in their own impressionist, non-Marxist way to the many changes in world politics and the class struggle in America in the epoch of imperialism and Stalinism. Marxism’, written between September 1939 and August 1940, now published for the first time in Britain, is the record of Trotsky’s struggle against the first great wave of reaction of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals who had joined the SWP. Price: Soft cover 10s. 6d. Hard cover 21s. NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD., 186a Clapham High St., London, SW4. the most difficult circumstances it gathered itself in good season by means of inner crises, and made good its opportunity to interfere decisively in the course of events.’ (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, p. 1016.) The victory of the working class, and the building of a Marxist party without which that victory is impossible, are processes of acute struggle, whose protagonists are not finished pro- ducts, but themselves contradictory and incom- plete. The struggle for Bolshevism did not end in October 1917, any more than it ended in 1905, 1907 or April 1917. Bolshevism after October 1917 sought to break through the barriers to world revolution erected by the traitors of the Second International, building the Third, Com- munist International. The rise of Stalinism and the growth of bureaucracy posed yet more prob- lems for Bolshevism, which were answered only by the development of the Left Opposition and the establishment of the Fourth International by Leon Trotsky. The spread of the October Revolution to the advanced, metropolitan countries must meet with even greater obstacles in the Labour movements moulded by imperialism than the Russian revo- lutionaries faced. The fight for the Bolshevik party in such countries, which is the decisive question of our time, will therefore involve even deeper conflicts. On the other hand, the great power of the workers’ movement and the immense heritage of the fight of Lenin and Trotsky can enable the Marxists to carry through all these coming battles to a successful conclusion. ‘In Defence of 105

[p048] e Available from New Park Publications Ltd., Price: I2s. 186a Clapham High Street, London, SW4. ‘ NOW AVAILABLE: The real history of how Stalin and the present-day Stalinists in the Soviet Union have betrayed the Revolution. oe WHAT IS THE Hard back 30s. — SOVIET UNION —" AND WHERE Soft cover 12s. 6d. IS IT GOING? BETRAYED Available from: New Park Publications 186a Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4. 106 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER, 1967

[p049] Stalin’s role in history Staline by Jean-Jacques Marie Editions du Seuil, Paris WHETHER THE ‘revelations’ which Svetlana has to make about her father’s life will be worth the mil- lions of dollars which capitalist pub- lishers are willing to pay for them is to be doubted. At least they know that there is a ready market for in- formation about the man who domi- nated Russia for a generation but for whose personality and political life little direct evidence is avail- able. ; In Russia itself Stalin has been all but removed from the history of the past half century. After years of adulation as a demi-god in which surgeons, engineers, explorers and poets attributed their achievements to his genius his successors have done their best to erase even the memory of his name. The account which they give of their own past has no better foundation in fact than the histories which flourished in Stalin’s day. One day, no doubt, the archives will be opened and much which is now obscure or known only by hearsay will be illuminated by a flood of fresh light. Until then what can be written about Stalin is bound to retain a_ provisional character as Jean-Jacques Marie, author of a new popular biography, so far only available in French, points out. His book provides, within a short compass, an excellent introduction to the Stalin era. It reviews the main lines of Stalin’s political life.