LEON TROTSKY: LENIN'S ALLY AGAINST STALINISM

TROTSKYISM arose as a political tendency in the struggle of the Left Opposition to understand and check the rise of the Soviet bureaucracy as personified and led by Stalin.

Contrary to the claims of the Stalinists, and the slanders of bourgeois publicists and historians, the continuity • of revolutionary Marxism, the theoretical life-line of the international working class, was not preserved by the faction grouped around Stalin at the time of Lenin's death in 1924.

Though masking its break from Bolshevism with a loudlyproclaimed adherence to 'Leninism', Stalin's bureaucratic clique proceeded to undermine all the basic tenets' of Marxism, as defended and developed by Lenin in his struggle to build the Russian Bolshevik Party ana the Communist International.

Stalin first propounded the reformist, nationalist theory that complete socialism could be built Russia without further revolutions in the West less than a year after Lenin died The Communist Parties of the word, within this scheme of things, had to renounce the struggle for state power and convert themselves, in Trotsky's words, into 'frontier guards for the Soviet Union'.

This reactionary line was in fact carried into the various sections of the Communist International, with disastrous results in Britain (the General Strike), China (the victory of Chiang Kai-shek and his masof the Shanghai communists) and finally Germany, where the Nazis crushed the entire workers' movement and began their preparations for war on the Soviet Union.

Side by side with these international defeats the strangling of Soviet democracy within the Party and the state, the ousting of oppositionists from leading positions and their replacement servile careerists - often officials of the old Tsarist regime--loyal to Stalin.

Trotsky, as the main theoretician of the Left Opposition. made a constant analysis of every twist and turn in the line of the bureaucracy, all the time developing alternative policies to strengthen the economy and state at home and turn the International back towards its original Leninist path in the capitalist But in all this work, Trotsky was building on a political foundation already established by Lenin.

The fight for internationalism, for Party democracy and against bureaucracy, for the development of socialist planning and against pro-capitalist elements in town and country -all these essentials of the Left Opposition's programme had been anticipated by Lenin Trotsky Memorial Lectures "Trotsky's struggle against Stalinism' in the last year of his active political life. These facts can no longer be kept from the membership of the British Communist Party by its Stalinist leadership. The theoretical journal of the CPGB, 'Marxism Today', published in its July issue a short but devastating article, by novelist and historian Jack Lindsay, on the origins of Stalinism.

After sketching in the social LENN SVERDLOV TROTSKY DZERZHINSKY STAUN 8 *ILYUTIN KAMENEV ZINOWIEV MURANO: JOFFE RYKOV 11 SHAUMYAN URTSKY SMILGA SOKOLNIKOV (Sergeyev) 23 KOLLONTAI 19 BERZIN The leading 23 members of the Central Committee * Names not encircled died a natural and economic background to 'Lenin's last fight' against Stalin, Lindsay says the following:

'The disaster the crippling and then Lenin, and the assumption of power by Stalin. Stalin did not want to change the system of authority exercised. wholly from above; he did everything to strengthen and petrify the situation of authoritative centralism and bureaucracy. Everyone interested in just what happened should read "Lenin's Last Fight" by Moshe Lewin.

"This book, extremely sympathetic to Lenin, is largely . based on recently published 2 NOGIN BUKHARIN ARTEM LOMOV KRESTINSKY BUBNOV 22 death.

Soviet material: the 'Journal' in Volume XLV of Lenin's 'Works' ..: the 'Memoirs of Fotieva', one of Lenin's personal secretaries: and the articles that Lenin managed to get into print in his last months, despite the opposition of the Politbureau.' So Lindsay's sources are impeccable. They simply tell the same story that Trotsky revealed in his work 'The Lenin and Trotsky on stairs) on he orators' dais, Theatre Square, Moscow. bureaucracy-over the issues of Stalin's nationalist treatment of Georgia, the defence of the state monopoly 'of foreign trade and the weakening of the Soviet powerLenin turned for assistance to Leon Trotsky:

" Lenin ... was at odds with Stalin on thé question of the foreign trade monopoly, considering that Stalin's views would lead to a disintegration of, or at least a serious blow to a socialist economy.

'On December 13 [1922] he suffered two dangerous strokes.

Two days later he wrote to Stalin saying that he had taken the necessary steps to retire and had come to an agreement with Trotsky, who would take up and defend his position.

Stalin saw, that he was up against too strong an opposition [ie, Lenin and Trotsky !] and on the 18th the decision taken on foreign trade was rescinded..:

Lindsay then goes on:

'Lenin wrote to Trotsky congratulating him on their victory. Next day Stalin made a fierce personal attack on Krupskaya for having taken down this letter [the one to Trotsky] at Lenin's dictation.' As Lindsay notes, in the middle of his struggle against Stalin, Lenin drafted his farous and long-suppressed "Testament', the second part of which bluntly denounces Stalin for his disloyalty to the Party, and calls for his removal from the post of General Secretary.

Finally Lindsay deals with the outcome of the inquiry into the 'Georgian Affair', in which Stalin was deeply involved with two other future members of his faction, Dzérzhinsky and Orjonikidze:

"The Politburo did its best to keep the. dossier from him;

its session had endorsed the commission's conclusions and white washed Orjonikidze.

Finally in February Lenin got what he wanted; he was also using his own private committee to find out what was happening.

'He wrote again to Trotsky asking him' to take up the defence of the Georgian CC;

next day, March 6, he wrote a The Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. letter to Stalin demanding an apology for his treatment of Krupskaya;. he also wrote to the Georgians stating that he was on their side against Stalin and Orjonikidze. Kamenev was told by Krupskaya [and she would have known] that Lenin meant to crush Stalin politically.

'But the strain of the situation was more than he could bear; on the 10th a new stroke deprived him of the power to speak. [The vital 12th Party Congress, where Lenin intended to denounce Stalin openly, was due to begin in the middle of April.] 'He lingered on, hopelessly trying to nna was thing about it, and died on January 21, 1924. A more tragic position it is hard to imagine.' Here the roles and political positions of the three main figures in this tragedy are presented in a way totally in conflict with the Stalinist' myths of the period.

Lenin is here accurately portrayed • as an enemy of and nationalism, which was defended within the Party by Stalin. But above all, and this is the significance of the article, Lindsay shows that Trotsky was the only leading Party member to whom Lenin could turn for political solidarity in his "last fight'.

Lindsay concluded his bombshell with the telling comment, aimed, we can be reasonably sure, at his own Party leadership:

'This story of Lenin's last days should be known to all communists. To talk of Leninism and fidelity to Lenin without realizing what his struggle was in those tragic days is to insult his memory.' Lindsay effectively demolishes the lie that Stalin defended and continued Leninism after its founder's death.

He shows that even while work on his biography Lenin lived, Stalin and his supporters were uniting to undermine the conquests of the Revolution, from its economy to the policy of national selldetermination.

But nistory did not stop with Lenin's death. Just where Lindsay ends his analysis of the problems of the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik Party, it is necessary to press What was the relationship between the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its acceptance of 'socialism in one country'?

And in turn, what effect did the adoption of Stalin's policies in Russia have on the development of the parties of the Communist International, including, of course, the Communist Party of Great Britain, of which Lindsay is a member?

The answer to these questions cannot be gleaned from a study of Lenin's last writings alone, for he had only begun to get to grips with the new problem of bureaucracy within a workers' state, and no Party leader had dared to challenge the Marxist axiom that the Russian Revolution could only bring socialism to the Soviet Union once it had conquered on an international scale.

Postcard issued on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, entitled 'The leaders of the Proletarian Revolution', featuring Lenii Trotsky, Kame Lunacharsky, Zinoviev and Sverdlov.

The task of answering this revisionism fell to Trotsky, and it is in his writings, dating from 'The New Course' (late 1923) and 'Lessons of October' (1924) through to 'The Permanent Revolution (1928), "The Class Nature of the Soviet State' (1934) and finally his classic analysis of the Soviet Union 'The Revolution Betrayed' (1937) that the key to turn the Party to the programme of Lenin, and when this proved impossible, to found a new International.

It was in this fight for revolutionary leadership and programme within the working class that the theory of Marxism was defended and developed against its Stalinist and social-democratic enemiés. STALINISM IN BRITAIN A TROTSKYIST ANALYSIS FIRST DAILY TROTSKYIST NEWSPAPER Price 6d.

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