The Revolutionary Appraised: An Extended Review of Leon Trotsky’s “The Revolution Betrayed” (1937)
In Dialogue with a Bolshevik Philosopher
This review began as a Sunday Meditation, but it quickly outgrew that category. It is easily my most involved essay on Medium to date.
In chapter five of Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explains the actual bureaucratic mechanism by which Stalin managed to win the power struggle.
Lenin dies in 1924, but was already incapacitated and sidelined by 1923. A “Leninist Levy” is launched from 1923–1925, partly in response to internal criticism that the party was too dominated by the educated classes. The Bolshevik Party, which had to that point a strictly regulated membership, suddenly threw open its doors to almost anyone who wished to join. The levy brings hundreds of thousands of new members into the party. Moreover, these new members were rapidly given full voting rights.
However, these new members were not part of the old working class which carried out the revolution; most of that group had died in the Russian Civil War or the following famine. The new members were largely bureaucrats and clerks from the Tsarist days. They joined the party for the opportunity to lead a better life for themselves and their families. While understandable, it also means that they were mainly in it for themselves. They did not have a dedication to or theoretical understanding of Marxism or the working class struggle, at least at the level of the Old Bolsheviks. Their specialty was following orders, which they were happy to do since it meant they were less likely to lose their privileges in an authoritarian state.
Thus by the time of the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927, the Left Opposition is overwhelmingly voted out by the hundreds of apparatchiks who had been slotted in by the general secretary over the previous few years.
Let’s take a step back and start with the Bolshevik Revolution.
Political History I
When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia at the end of 1917, they set up the foundations of the Soviet State. From the beginning, then, there were two organizations, often housed in the same buildings and embodied in the same people: the party and the state. The party represents ideology and political agenda, while the state represents the running of the country’s day-to-day affairs. The state, an administrative body, was to be dominated by the Bolshevik Party, which was the mind or spirit (so to speak) of the state.
Given the backwardness of Russian industry and administration (barring repressive measures), however, and given the strains of the Civil War, the state was continually expanded and empowered from day one. The chronically malnourished body of the Russian state (which had needed reform at least as far back as the 1850s) quickly became ravenous, to the horror of many revolutionaries, including Lenin.
With the Leninist levy, the state succeeded in overwhelming the old guard of the party and replacing it with itself. The quantitative surge of membership resulted in a qualitative change in the character of the Bolshevik Party. Since most of the new members were in fact old Tsarists, it completed what Trotsky calls, “the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party.”
Stalin was the man of the hour, according to Trotsky, because he naturally fit both roles as a party activist and state administrator. He was an Old Bolshevik, having worked with Lenin since at least 1905. But he was also administrative in character, and saw socialism as something to be accomplished through administrative measures. Stalin’s ascension to power is therefore distinct from Hitler’s. While Hitler seized the state as a megalomaniac forcing his will onto the world, Stalin fit into his role like a Tetris block. He was merely the perfect cog in the apparatus over which he himself presided. He was the natural choice because, in his person, there was no remainder between party and state.
A third, informal group emerged from the state-party. This was the bureaucracy, or the nomenklatura, the ruling stratum of privileged executives. Notice that it is not a class in the traditional sense of the word: it is not defined by a unique relation to the means of production. It was, technically, a workers’ party representing a workers’ movement. Yet it was not responsible to the working class movement because that movement had been effectively destroyed or exhausted, and forced out of government in the 1920s. Trotsky characterizes it as hovering above the society; the tail wags the dog. The difference between the totalitarianism of the USSR and the totalitarianism of fascism, then, is precisely that the Soviet bureaucracy is disconnected from the class it represents, while the fascist bureaucracies are joined at the hip to the interests of the business class.
The exact boundaries between party, state, and bureaucracy are not always clear. Nor was the line between licit and illicit behavior.
At the beginning of chapter five, Trotsky makes a powerful insight:
A political struggle is in its essence a struggle of interests and forces, not of arguments. The quality of the leadership is, of course, far from a matter of indifference for the outcome of the conflict, but it is not the only factor, and in the last analysis is not decisive (Trotsky, 66).
A few pages later…
The bureaucracy conquered something more than the Left Opposition. It conquered the Bolshevik party. It defeated the program of Lenin, who had seen the chief danger in the conversion of the organs of the state “from servants of society to lords over society.” It defeated all these enemies, the Opposition, the party and Lenin, not with ideas and arguments, but with its own social weight. The leaden rump of the bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution. That is the secret of the Soviet’s Thermidor (Trotsky, 71–72).
He is right to minimize the role of individual leaders and their ideas. Trotsky lost, not because he had worse arguments than the victors (though that may have been the case) but because the political interests and forces Trotsky represented were overwhelmed by those his opponents represented.
However, it also reeks too much of the absolution of personal responsibility we find in other totalitarian states. In the Nazi state, for instance, we heard appeals to “nature,” “survival of the fittest,” and führerprinzip to justify murder without a sense of guilt (“I was just following orders”). In the USSR we get the same thing under different slogans. It is not just a matter of arguments though. In both cases the bureaucracy absorbs the responsibility of the individual. It suggests the Frankfurt School critique that we are living in an administrated world. In Nazism, in Soviet socialism, and in American corporate capitalism, it is administration and administrative methods which dominate. Ironically, it ties us back to Trotsky’s critique of the Soviet bureaucracy.
His analysis of Stalin is also flawed. Trotsky, an educated member of the Russian intelligentsia, sees Stalin, who grew up in a poor Georgian family, as inherently rude, aggressive, and lacking in intellectual capacity. He regularly spoke of Stalin’s “mediocrity.”
That analysis was somewhat unfair. It is true that Stalin was not a theorist at the level of Trotsky, but few are. Stalin was capable in the realm of theory, and he had a fantastic memory for numbers, facts, and arrangements. He had precisely the kind of intelligence necessary for a high level administrator.
Moreover, Trotsky’s personal bias against Stalin ironically hindered him from seeing the extent of Stalin’s own wickedness. Trotsky’s analysis minimized the role of the leader, which is important to those of us in the West who tend to emphasize the individual leader as a matter of habit. But Stalin was not merely a cog in the machine, as outlined above in summary of Trotsky’s ideas.
Stalin took an active role in the consolidation of power around himself, and knew what he was doing when he allied with Bukharin (the Bolshevik Right) against Trotsky (the Bolshevik Left), before turning on Bukharin himself. Stalin knew what he was doing when he executed the revolutionary generation in a series of show trials. He knew what he was doing when he used secret police chief Heinrich Yagoda to execute the victims of one show trial, then used his successor Nikolai Yezhov to execute Yagoda at the next show trial, then used his successor Lavrentiy Beria to execute Yezhov in turn. The individual is not everything, but it is something.
Trotsky misses a major fault in his own program. To understand the problem requires some more historical context.
Political History II
The Bolshevik Party takes power in 1917 in a popular revolution. What follows is several years of atrocious civil war, killing some thirty million people. After the war is a famine. The Bolshevik Party is in power, but it rules over ruins. What is to be done?
In response to armed revolts against what was called “war communism,” the Bolshevik Party introduces a new economic policy, which they call the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP allows for some capitalist economic mechanisms to help especially the peasants rebuild their portion of the economy and get food and money moving through the country again.
The NEP is enormously successful in rebuilding the economy. Yet it also produces a burgeoning group of middle men (“NEPmen”) who are extracting personal profits and getting wealthy as merchants. There is a threat that capitalism may re emerge from the NEP. Recall, most of this takes place within the peasant economy, which produces most of the country’s food.
In response to the problems of the NEP, there emerge three camps within the ruling Bolshevik clique. In the “center,” representing the official state position, is Stalin. His position is determined by the maneuvers of his opponents. Trotsky represents the Bolshevik Left, which argues that the NEP ought to be abandoned and the economy ought to be built as a socialist economy, rather than built on capitalist terms and later transitioning to socialism. This Left Opposition was suspicious of the peasantry as a hotbed of reactionary politics (which it was). The Bolshevik Right, represented by Nikolai Bukharin, argued that the NEP should be the status quo for that generation, and later generations could worry about building socialism. Bukharin famously told the peasantry and the NEPmen to “get rich!”
In contrast to the center and right, for Trotsky, building the economy and socializing it should have been the same process.
Yet Trotsky’s project would have required an enormous state-bureaucratic apparatus, that very thing he criticized in Stalin’s regime. That fault often goes unmentioned by Trotsky’s more political critics, who are more interested in contrasting him with Lenin to make him seem like a heretic.
In the early 1930s when Stalin engaged in collectivization and industrialization, he was, in part, following a blueprint laid out by the Left Opposition in the 1920s. But by then the situation was different, and Stalin’s methods were different than Trotsky’s. While Stalin was an administrator, Trotsky was a technocrat. Indeed, Trotsky’s critique of Stalin’s “adventurism” in Revolution Betrayed is largely that the USSR lacks the technological base to accomplish what Stalin was trying to do.
If on one hand is a technocratic Trotsky, and on the other an administrative Stalin, what is lacking is a humanist. And that lack was recognized by anarchist Victor Serge, a colleague of Trotsky’s in the Left Opposition. In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Serge relates the contents of a letter he wrote just prior to his imprisonment in the USSR, dated February 1st, 1933.
At the present moment, we are more and more confronted by an absolute, castocratic totalitarian State, drunk with its own power, for which man does not count […] The concentration of economic and political powers by which the individual is held by bread, clothing, work, and placed totally at the disposition of the machine–allows it to neglect the individual and to concern itself only with big numbers and the long term. This regime is in contradiction with everything that was stated, proclaimed, intended, and thought during the Revolution itself. (Serge, 326).
Serge goes on to identify “Defense of Man” (political rights), “Defense of Truth,” and “Defense of Thought” as the three fundamental points, “superior to all tactical considerations.” The Bolsheviks, ruthless to the bone, did not recognize these sorts of demands. Nor does Serge exempt Trotsky from his critique.
I wrote earlier about “armed rebellions against what was called ‘War Communism,’” but this deserves some more detailing.
The Bolshevik Party was not the only left wing or socialist party in 1917. But it was the one that survived, in part because of its ruthlessness and willingness to suppress other left wing organizations. In 1921, the Bolshevik-sympathetic soldiers at the fortress city of Kronstadt revolted against Bolshevik rule. They demanded the end of one-party rule and the restoration of political power to the workers’ councils (soviets). This was a big deal because they had been key to the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War and their loyalty was ferocious. Their rebellion meant trouble for Bolshevik government, both in terms of its power and its legitimacy.
After a series of half-hearted negotiations the Bolshevik state, with Lenin and Trotsky at its helm, crushed the rebellion with characteristic brutality. Hannah Arendt remarked that since Kronstadt, the term “Soviet Union” was a lie, as the soviets (i.e. worker’s councils) did not actually rule, the Bolshevik Party did (Arendt, 249). Yet the name gave up the lie, that it was really the idea of working class power which was so popular, not the Bolshevik Party.
The Kronstadt Rebellion remains controversial and was the first of several episodes which suggested that the Bolshevik Revolution was not going quite the direction the the international Left hoped for.
Years later, when criticized by anarchist Emma Goldman over his role in suppressing the sailors at Kronstadt, Trotsky could not admit that the Bolsheviks erred. Similar criticisms were articulated by Serge.
He [Trotsky] refused to admit that in the terrible Kronstadt episode of 1921 the responsibilities of the Bolshevik Central Committee had been simply enormous, that the subsequent repression had been needlessly barbarous, and that the establishment of the CHEKA (later the GPU) with its techniques of secret inquisition had been a grievous error on the part of the revolutionary leadership, and one incompatible with any Socialist philosophy (Serge, 406).
Goldman is less kind in her assessment of Trotsky’s “very small character:”
The old saying of the leopard changing his spots but not his nature forcibly applies to Leon Trotsky. The Calvary he has endured during his years of exile, the tragic loss of those near and dear to him, and, more poignantly still, the betrayal by his former comrades in arms, have taught him nothing. Not a glimmer of human kindness or mellowness has affected Trotsky’s rancorous spirit.
Side by side, these two passages paint a devastating picture of the revolutionary in his last years. Alienated by his friends and followers, ever more shrill and combative, ever more hunted and hounded, the utopian in him died but he authoritarian still lived.
The Utopian and the Authoritarian
Historian Robert Daniels identifies two psychological strains within Bolshevism, one utopian and the other authoritarian. The utopian side he equates with a long-standing left opposition.
The roots of the Left Opposition go back as early as 1907 […] The left-wing of the Communist party had a long, continuous history, including a major role in the October Revolution and the initial organization of soviet power. It was not, as it is often simplistically portrayed, merely the entourage of one disaffected leader (Daniels, 277).
Daniels goes on to identify a key feature of left Bolshevism: the belief that the working class can achieve its own revolutionary consciousness. That belief was rejected by Lenin in What is To Be Done? (1902), where he advocated a vanguard party of radical intellectuals to lead the revolution.
In Daniels’ characterization, the magic (so to speak) of 1917 was the convergence of utopian and authoritarian perspectives within Bolshevism that gave that party a political insight the other left wing groups lacked.
After Lenin’s death, Trotsky mostly returned to his utopian-democratic leanings, advocating for the working-class democracy that he helped to suppress during the civil war. The bureaucracy by contrast leaned heavily into the authoritarian elements, later turning the utopian elements into Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.
Here is a passage from Revolution Betrayed that illustrates both Trotsky’s utopianism and his technocratism.
Marxism sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress, and constructs the communist program upon the dynamic of the productive forces […] [T]here is not the slightest scientific ground for setting any limit in advance to our technical productive and cultural possibilities. Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress, and that alone, by the way, makes it irreconcilably opposed to religion (Trotsky, 35).
The “optimism of progress” is here tied up with the language of “productive forces,” and the “development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress.” By utopianism, I do not mean irrational optimism, but simply the belief in and movement toward making the world a better place. By technocratism, I mean something similar to scientism as a political movement. I suspect that Trotsky, despite writing a book on literature and being a dialectician rather than a crude empiricist, is more of a “science bro” than he comes across. He is not the sort of person (I don’t think) who understands the value of the humanities, convinced as he is in the “scientific” content of Marxism.
International relations scholar Michael Cox describes four typical opinions of Trotsky: the orthodox Trotskyist, who sees in Trotsky’s ideas the proper way the USSR should have developed and the roadmap for future socialist activism. Next come the sympathetic critics, such as Serge, James Burnham, or others who were sympathetic to Trotsky’s ideas but did not agree with him on any number of issues. Third were the skeptics who see little meaningful difference between Trotsky and Stalin by virtue of their shared authoritarian politics. Lastly are the realists, who accuse Trotsky of being a utopian zealot whose entire project was flawed from the beginning.
I would fall into the category of sympathetic critic. I am not a “Trotskyist,” whatever that means. But I also do not think Trotsky was merely Stalin by another name, nor do I think he was an out-of-touch egghead.
Conclusions
I used to call Trotsky a “problematic favorite:” someone who you acknowledge was imperfect and may even have had some serious flaws, but who you nevertheless admired. I think the term is redundant though. Is there anyone who is unproblematic? Sure, not everyone has blood on their hands like Trotsky did. But not everyone can speak multiple languages, organize a military and win a civil war, and write influential historical and literary treatises. He was a polymath who maintained expert level knowledge and abilities across multiple distinct fields. He is someone who dared to affect history, and there is no way of doing that without causing damage. The magnificence of his accomplishments is mirrored only by the depths of his iniquity.
References:
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. United States: Penguin Classics, 1963
Cox, Michael. “Trotsky and His Interpreters: Will the Real Leon Trotsky Please Stand Up?” The Russian Review Vol 51 No. 1 (January, 1992), pp. 84–102.
Daniels, Robert V. “The Left Opposition as a Real Alternative to Stalinism.” Slavic Review Vol 50 No. 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 277–285.
Goldman, Emma. “Trotsky Protests Too Much.” Originally published in The Anarchist Federation, 1938. Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved October 26th, 2023. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1938/trotsky-protests.htm
Serge, Victor. Memoirs of a Revolutionary. New York: New York Review of Books, 1951.
Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004.
