MIKHAIL Gorbachev's speech on November 2, 1987, on the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution contained serious accusations against Leon Trotsky, chair of the Petrograd Soviet at the time of the revolution, chair of its Revolutionary Military Committee, responsible for the technical organization of the October insurrection, founder and leader of the Red Army, leading member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the USSR and of the Council of the People's Commissars for many years.
Of course, we do not challenge anybody's right to make an extremely critical judgement on the theoretical conceptions, the political opinions and the organizational behaviour of Leon Trotsky at different periods of his life. History will make the final judgement in this respect. No one — not even Stalin with all his bloody repression — could prevent this debate taking place.
Stalin's school of falsification
Gorbachev's judgement on Leon Trotsky however uses well-known methods (curtailed quotations, untruths and accusations flung out without a shadow of proof and so on) from the school of historical falsification founded by Stalin.
These methods become obvious as soon as the statements are contrasted with the relevant documents.
Gorbachev says "Trotsky... displayed excessive pretensions to top leadership in the party, thus fully confirming Lenin's opinion of him as an excessively self-assured politician who always vacillated and cheated."
Reference to Lenin's Testament
This is obviously a reference — although not explicit, and we understand why not — to Lenin's letters to the Twelfth Congress of the CP(B) of the USSR, considered as the Testament of the founder of Bolshevism. Gorbachev refers to the same document in his judgement on Bukharin.
This Testament, while it does reproach Trotsky for "excessive self-assurance and excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work", does not contain any of the other judgements evoked by Gorbachev. If one member of the party leadership could be accused by Lenin of having "excessive pretensions to top leadership" and "vacillating and cheating" it is in fact Joseph Stalin himself, whom the Testament proposed should be removed from his post of general secretary.1
Not only does Gorbachev hide this incontestable truth — he who considers, and this says everything, that Leninism triumphed in the party under the leadership of Stalin — but he passes over the Testament's main judgement on Trotsky ("the most capable man in the central committee"). He thus makes totally incomprehensible the proposals made by Lenin to Trotsky in his last letters of a joint political fight at the Tenth Congress of the Soviets and at the Twelfth Congress.2
Gorbachev adds, "Trotskyism was a political current whose ideologists took cover behind leftist pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, and in effect assumed a defeatist posture."
Trotsky accused of "defeatism"
The excommunication is pronounced without a single example of a "defeatist" position of Trotsky and Trotskyists. There is a very simple reason for this: there is none.
Was it "defeatist" to propose in 1923 a new course of democratization of the party and state, in terms which Gorbachev himself seems to be using in his present campaign for "democratization" and glasnost' in the USSR?
Was it "defeatist" to propose in 1923 a gradual industrialization of the Soviet Union which would have made it possible to spread over 10 years the effort of "socialist accumulation" that the country had to make in a rushed and bloody way (forced collectivization) between 1928 and 1933, at the cost of immense sacrifices inflicted on the population and terrible social and political tensions?
Was it "defeatist" to sound a warning in 1930 about the mortal danger represented by the rise of Nazism in Germany, for the German working class, the USSR and for the world proletariat; to call insistently on the German CP, the Communist International and the workers to prevent Hitler taking power, through a correct united front policy from top to bottom between the German Communist Party(KPD), the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and the trade unions?
Was it "defeatist" to denounce the terrible consequences of the 1937 purges for the Red Army's capacity for action? To warn against Stalin's criminal confidence in the non-aggression pact signed with Hitler's Germany in 1939, which explains the lack of political and military preparation of the USSR for the Wehrmacht's invasion on June 22, 1941?
Gorbachev concludes "It was essential to disprove Trotskyism before the whole people, and to lay bare its anti-socialist essence".
Once again an excommunication without being able to cite a single "anti-socialist" act or idea of Leon Trotsky. And for good reason: he remained until the last day of his life, despite everything, faithful to his convictions as a revolutionary Marxist, as a communist. Just as, despite everything, he maintained his position of unconditional military defence of the Soviet Union against imperialism.
On the subject of Stalinist repression, Gorbachev states: "There are still attempts to turn away from painful matters in our history, to hush them up, to make believe that nothing special happened. We cannot agree to this. This would be disregard for the historical truth, disrespect for the memory of those who were innocent victims of lawless and arbitrary actions."
However, while anathematizing the political positions of Leon Trotsky, the general secretary kept silent on the completely false slanderous accusations which have been made over the last thirty years in the USSR and elsewhere against the founder of the Red Army, his supporters and his allies. These accusations are still echoed today in the Soviet Union: that he was an agent of Hitler and Mikado; that he met Rudolf Hess; that he plotted with foreign powers to break up the territory of the Soviet Union. Trotsky is alleged to have plotted and organized terrorist acts against the leaders of the party and the Soviet state and so on. These calumnies have been judged as "proved" by Soviet tribunals, in particular those of the three notorious "Moscow Trials" (1936-38). Everybody now knows what these proofs are worth.
Moscow trials accusations a tissue of lies
But, on the other hand, what is really proved is that the assassination of Leon Trotsky on August 20, 1940 in Mexico was the work of a GPU agent. The accusation of the "Moscow Trials" was a tissue of lies and the assassination of Leon Trotsky a vile crime: this is the only real "historical truth".
Gorbachev announced in his speech that a commission would be formed for "examing new facts and documents pertaining to these matters". But why is a commission necessary to seek out the "historical truth"?
Do not the whole Soviet people have the right of access to the same documents? Do they not have the right to judge on the basis of the evidence and not on the basis of "truths" revealed by an official commission? Do they not have the right to see all the documents which support the different judgements on Trotsky and Stalin and the other party leaders in the period concerned?
Soviet people have right to judge for themselves
If Gorbachev and the leadership of the Soviet CP are so sure that their positions are right let them allow the mass publication of the works of leaders of the Bolshevik Party such as Trotsky, Bukharin, Preobrazhensky and others! Let them give Soviet citizens the right of access to their own history! Let them have the courage to accept a public debate in the USSR between historians of the October Revolution and of the Soviet state from the entire world! Let them publish for all their co-citizens Khrushchev's report to the Twentieth Congress, a report that to this day has remained "secret" in the USSR!
As the Soviet historian Yuri Afanasyev stated "We are entirely dependent on the past, because it is on this past that our society, all its structures and ourselves were formed".
So, without glasnost' on the past there can be no real glasnost' on the present!
1. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 36, Lawrence & Wishart, London & Moscow, 1966, p.593.
2. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 45, Lawrence & Wishart, London & Moscow, 1966, p.607.