History of the Russian Revolution
“According to Lenin,” Stalin affirms, “the revolution finds its force first of all among the workers and peasants of Russia itself. Trotsky has it that the necessary forces can be found only on the arena of the world revolution of the proletariat.” To this manufactured contrast, as to many another, Lenin made his answer in advance: “Not for one minute have we forgotten, nor will we forget,” he said on May 14, 1918, at a session of the Central Executive Committee. “the weaknesses of the Russian working class in comparison with other detachments of the international proletariat ... But we must remain at our post until our ally comes, the international proletariat.” On the third anniversary of the October revolution, Lenin confirmed this: “We always staked our play upon an international revolution and this was unconditionally right ... We always emphasised the fact that in one country it is impossible to accomplish such a work as a socialist revolution.” In February 1921, Lenin declared at a congress of the workers in the needle trades: “We have always and repeatedly pointed out to the workers that the underlying chief task and basic condition of our victory is the propagation of the revolution at least to several of the more advanced countries.” No. Lenin is too much compromised by his stubborn desire to find forces in the world arena: you cannot wash him white!
Just as Trotsky is placed in opposition to Lenin, so Lenin himself is placed in opposition to Marx – and with the same foundation. If Marx assumed that the proletarian revolution would begin in France but be completed only in England, this is explained, according to Stalin, by the fact that Marx did not yet know the law of uneven development. In reality the Marxist prognosis contrasting the country of revolutionary initiative with the country of socialist accomplishment, was based wholly upon the law of uneven development. In any case Lenin himself, who permitted no reticence upon big problems, never and nowhere recorded his disagreement with Marx and Engels in regard to the international character of the revolution. Exactly the opposite! If “things have turned out otherwise than Marx and Engels expected,” Lenin said at the third Congress of the Soviets, it is only in relation to the historic sequence of the countries. The course of events has allotted to the Russian proletariat “the honourable rôle of vanguard of the international social revolution, and we now see clearly how the development of the revolution, will proceed further; the Russian began – the German, the Frenchmen, the Englishmen will carry it through, and socialism will conquer.”
We are further admonished by an argument from the standpoint of state prestige. A denial of the theory of national socialism – according to Stalin – “leads to the uncrowning of our country.” This phraseology alone, intolerable to a Marxian ear, gives away the depth of the break with Bolshevik tradition. It was not “uncrowning” that Lenin feared but national bigotry. “We are one of the revolutionary detachments of the working class,” he taught in April 1918 at a session of the Moscow Soviet, “advanced to the front not because we are better than others, but precisely because we were one of the most backward countries in the world ... We will arrive at complete victory only together with all the workers of other countries, the workers of the whole world.”
The appeal to sober self-valuation becomes a leitmotif in Lenin’s speeches. “The Russian revolution,” he says on June 4, 1918, was due not to the special merits of the Russian proletariat, but to the course ... of historic events, and this proletariat was placed temporarily in the first position by the will of history and made for a time the vanguard of the world revolution.” “The first rôle occupied by the proletariat of Russia in the world labour movement,” said Lenin at a conference of Factory Committees on July 23, 1918, “is explained not by the industrial development of the country – just the opposite, by the backwardness of Russia ... The Russian proletariat is clearly aware that the necessary condition and fundamental premise of its victory is the united action of the workers of the whole world, or of several countries advanced in capitalist relations.” The October revolution was evoked not only by the backwardness of Russia, and this Lenin well understood. But he consciously bent the stick too far in order to straighten it.
At a congress of the Councils of People’s Economy – the organs especially called to build socialism – Lenin said on May 26, 1918; “We do not shut our eyes to the fact that we alone, with our own forces, could not achieve the socialist revolution in one country, even though it were a good deal less backward than Russia.” And here, anticipating the future voice of bureaucratic bigotry, he explained: “This cannot cause a drop of pessimism, because the task which we have set ourselves is a task of worldwide historic difficulty.”
At the sixth Congress of the Soviets on November 8, he said: “The complete victory of the socialist revolution is unthinkable in one country, but demands the most active co-operation at least of several advanced countries, among which Russia cannot be numbered ...” Lenin not only denies Russia the right to her own socialism, but demonstratively gives her a secondary place in the building of socialism by other countries. What a criminal “uncrowning” of our country!
In March 1919, at a Congress of the Party, Lenin pulls up on the too mettlesome; “We have a practical experience in taking the first steps in the destruction of capitalism in a country with a special relation between proletariat and peasantry. Nothing more. If we swell ourselves out like a frog, and puff and blow, this will be utterly laughable to the whole world. We shall be mere braggarts.” Will anybody be offended by this? On the 19 th of May, 1921, Lenin exclaimed: “Did any one of the Bolsheviks at any time ever deny that the revolution can conquer in a final form only when it comprises all or at least several of the more advanced countries!” In November 1920, at a Moscow provincial conference of the party, he again reminded his audience that the Bolsheviks had neither promised nor dreamed of “making over the whole world with the forces of Russia alone ... Such madness we never reached, but we always said that our revolution will conquer when the workers of all countries support it.”
“We have not,” he writes at the beginning of 1922, “completed even the foundation of a socialist economy. This can still be taken back by the hostile forces of a dying capitalism. We must be clearly aware of this, and openly acknowledge it. For there is nothing more dangerous than illusions and turned heads, especially in high places. And there is absolutely nothing ‘terrible,’ nothing offering a legitimate cause for the slightest discouragement, in recognising this bitter truth; for we always have taught and repeated this ABC truth of Marxism, that for the victory of socialism the combined efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are necessary.”
A little over two years later Stalin will demand a renunciation of Marxism upon this basic question. And upon what ground? On the ground that Marx remained ignorant of the unevenness of evolution – ignorant, that is, of the most elementary law of the dialectic of nature as well as society. But what is to be said of Lenin himself, who according to Stalin is supposed to have first “discovered” this law of unevenness as a result of the experience of imperialism, and who nevertheless stubbornly held fast to the “ABC truth of Marxism?” We should seek in vain for any explanation of this.
“Trotskyism” – according to the indictment and sentence of the Communist International – “derived and continues to derive from the proposition that our revolution in and of itself (!) is not in essence socialistic, that the October revolution is only the signal, impetus and starting-point for a socialist revolution in the west.” Nationalistic degeneration here masks itself with pure scholasticism. The October revolution “in and of itself” does not exist. It would have been impossible without the whole preceding history of Europe, and it would be hopeless without its continuation in Europe and the whole world. “The Russian revolution is only one link in the chain of international revolution” (Lenin). Its strength lies exactly where the Epigones see its “uncrowning.” Exactly because, and only because, it is not a self-sufficient whole but a “signal,” “impetus,” “starting-point,” “link” – exactly for that reason does it acquire a socialist character.
“Of course the final victory of socialism in one country is impossible,” said Lenin at the third Congress of Soviets in January 1918, “but something else is possible: a living example, a getting to work – somewhere in one country – that is what will set fire to the toiling masses in all countries.” In July at a session of the Central Executive Committee: “Our task now is ... to hold fast ... this torch of socialism so that it may continue to scatter as many sparks as possible to the increasing conflagration of the social revolution.” A month later at a workers’ meeting: “The (European) revolution is growing ... and we must hold the Soviet power until it begins. Our mistakes must serve as a lesson to the western proletariat.” A few days later at a congress of educational workers: “The Russian revolution is only an example, only a first step in a series of revolutions.” In March 1919, at a congress of the party: “The Russian revolution was in essence a dress-rehearsal ... of the worldwide proletarian revolution.” Not a revolution “in and of itself” but a torch, a lesson, an example only, a first step only, only a link! Not an independent performance, but only a dress-rehearsal! What a stubborn and ruthless “uncrowning”!
But Lenin did not stop even here; “If it should happen,” he said on November 8, 1918, “that we were suddenly swept away ... we would have the right to say, without concealing our mistakes, that we used the period of time that fate gave us wholly for the socialist world revolution.” How far this is, both in method of thinking and in political psychology, from the bigoted self-complacence of the Epigones, imagining themselves an eternal belly-button of the earth.
A lie upon a fundamental question, if political interest compels you to cling to it, leads to innumerable resulting mistakes and gradually revises all your thinking. “Our party has no right to deceive the working class,” said Stalin at a plenary session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1926. “It ought to say frankly that a lack of confidence in the possibility of building socialism in our country will lead to a renunciation of power, and the passing of our party from the position of a ruling to that of an opposition party.” The Communist International has canonised this view in its resolution: “The denial of this possibility (the possibility of a socialist society in a separate country) on the part of the opposition, is nothing but a denial of the premises for a socialist revolution in Russia.” The “premises” are not the general condition of world economy, not the inner contradictions of imperialism, not the correlation of classes in Russia, but a guarantee given in advance of the possibility of realising socialism in a separate country!
To this teleological argument advanced by the Epigones in the autumn of 1926, we may reply with the same considerations with which we answered the Mensheviks in the spring of 1905. “Once the objective development of the class struggle confronts the proletariat at a certain moment of the revolution with the alternative: either take upon yourself the rights and obligations of state power or surrender your class position – the social democracy will place the conquest of state power on the order of the day. In doing this it will not in the least ignore developmental processes of a deeper kind, processes of growth and concentration of production. But it says: When the logic of the class struggle, resting in the last analysis upon the course of economic development, impels the proletariat towards dictatorship before the bourgeoisie has fulfilled its economic mission ... this means only that history has put upon the proletariat a task colossal in its difficulty. Perhaps the proletariat will even become exhausted in the struggle and fall under its weight – perhaps. But it cannot refuse these tasks through fear of class degeneration and of plunging the whole country into barbarism.” To this we could add nothing at the present time.
“It would be an irreparable mistake,” wrote Lenin in May 1918, “to declare that once the lack of correspondence between our economic and our political forces is organised, ‘it follows’ that we should not have seized the power ... Only ‘people in a glass case’ reason that way, forgetting that there will never be a ‘correspondence,’ that there cannot be, either in the evolution of nature or in the evolution of society, that only by way of a whole senses of attempts – each one of which taken separately will be one-sided, will suffer from a certain lack of correspondence – can complete socialism be created out of the revolutionary co-operation of the proletarians of all countries.” The difficulties of the international revolution will be overcome not by passive adaptation, not by a renunciation of power, not by a national watching and waiting for the universal insurrection, but by live action, by overcoming contradictions, by the dynamic of struggle and the extending of its radius.
If you take seriously the historic philosophy of the Epigones, the Bolsheviks ought to have known in advance on the eve of October, both that they would hold out against a legion of enemies, and that they would pass over from military communism to the NEP; also that in case of need they would build their own national socialism. In a word, before seizing the power they ought to have cast their accounts accurately, and made sure of a credit balance. What happened in reality was little similar to this pious caricature.
In a report at the party congress in March 1919, Lenin said: “We often have to grope our way along; this fact becomes most obvious when we try to take in with one glance what we have been through. But that did not unnerve us a bit, even on the 10 th of October, 1917, when deciding the question about the seizure of power. We had no doubt that it was up to us, according to Comrade Trotsky’s expression, to experiment – to make the trial. We undertook a job which nobody in the world had ever before undertaken on such a scale.” And further: “Who could ever make a gigantic revolution, knowing in advance how to carry it through to the end? Where could you get such knowledge? It cannot be found in books, No such books exist. Our decision could only be born of the experience of the masses.”
The Bolsheviks did not seek any assurance that Russia would be able to create a socialist society. They had no need of it. They had no use for it. It contradicted all that they had learned in the school of Marxism. “The tactics of the Bolsheviks,” wrote Lenin against Kautsky, “were the only international tactics, for they were based not on the cowardly fear of the world revolution, not on Philistine lack of confidence in it ...” The Bolsheviks “contributed the maximum possible in one country to the development, support, stimulus, of revolution in all countries.” With such a tactic it was impossible to mark out in advance an infallible line-of-march, and still less possible to guarantee yourself a national victory. But the Bolsheviks knew that danger was an element of revolution, as of war. They went to meet danger with open eyes.
Placing before the world proletariat as an example and a reproach the manner in which the bourgeoisie boldly risks war in the name of its interests, Lenin branded with hatred those socialists who “are afraid to begin the fight until they are ‘guaranteed’ an easy victory ... Boot-lickers of international socialism, lackeys of bourgeois morality who think this way deserve triple contempt.” Lenin, as is well known, did not stop to choose his words when he was choking with indignation.
“But what shall we do,” Stalin has kept on inquiring, “if the international revolution is destined to be delayed? Is there any light ahead for our revolution? Trotsky does not give any light.” The Epigones demand historic privileges for the Russian proletariat: it must have a road-bed laid down for an uninterrupted movement towards socialism, regardless of what happens to the rest of humanity. History, alas, has prepared no such road-bed. “If you look at things from a worldwide historic scale,” said Lenin at the seventh Congress of the Party, “there is not the slightest doubt that the ultimate victory of our revolution, if it should remain solitary would be hopeless.”
But even in this case it would not have been fruitless. “Even if the imperialists should overthrow the Bolshevik power tomorrow,” said Lenin in May 1919, at a teachers’ congress, “we would not regret for one second that we took the power. And not one of the class-conscious workers ... would regret it, or would doubt that our revolution had nevertheless conquered.” For Lenin thought of victory only in terms of an international succession of development in struggle. “The new society ... is an abstraction which can take living body not otherwise than through a series of differing incomplete concrete attempts to create this or that socialist state.” This sharp distinction, and in some sense contrast, between “socialist state” and “new society” offers a key to the innumerable abuses perpetrated by the Epigone literature upon the texts of Lenin.
Lenin explained with the utmost simplicity the meaning of the Bolshevik strategy at the end of the fifth year after the conquest of power. “When we began at the time we did the international revolution, we did this not with the conviction that we could anticipate its development, but because a whole series of circumstances impelled us to begin this revolution. Our thought was: Either the international revolution will come to our aid, and in that case our victories are wholly assured, or we will do our modest revolutionary work in the consciousness that in case of defeat we have nevertheless served the cause of the revolution, and our experiment will be of help to other revolutions. It was clear to us that without the support of the international world revolution a victory of the proletarian overturn was impossible. Even before the revolution, and likewise after it, our thought was: immediately, or at any rate very quickly, a revolution will begin in the other countries, in capitalistically more developed countries – or in the contrary case we will have to perish. In spite of this consciousness we did everything to preserve the soviet system in all circumstances and at whatever cost, since we knew that we were working not only for ourselves, but for the international revolution. We knew this, we frequently expressed this conviction before the October revolution, exactly as we did immediately after it and during the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace. And, generally speaking, this was right.” The dates have shifted, the pattern of events has formed itself in many respects unexpectedly, but the fundamental orientation remains unchanged.
What can be added to these words? “We began ... the international revolution.” If a revolution in the west does not begin “immediately, or at any rate very quickly” – assumed the Bolsheviks – “we will have to perish.” But in that case too, the conquest of power will have been justified: others will learn from the experience of those who perished. “We are working not only for ourselves but for the international revolution.” These ideas, saturated through and through with internationalism, Lenin expounded to the Communist International. Did anybody oppose him? Did anybody offer a hint of the possibility of a national socialist society? Nobody. Not one single word!
Five years later, at the seventh Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, Stalin developed ideas exactly opposite to these. They are already known to us: If there is not “confidence in the possibility of building socialism in our country,” then the party must pass over “from the position of a ruling, to that of an opposition party ...” We must have a preliminary guarantee of success before taking the powers: it is permitted to seek this guarantee only in national conditions; we must have confidence in the possibility of building socialism in peasant Russia; then we can get along quite well without confidence in the victory of the world proletariat. Each of these links in a chain of reasoning slaps in the face the tradition of Bolshevism.
To cover up their break with the past, the Stalin school have tried to make use of certain lines of Lenin, which seem the least unsuitable. An article of 1915 on The United States of Europe throws out incidentally the remark that the working class in each separate country ought to win the power and enter upon the socialist construction without waiting for the others. If behind these indisputable lines there lurked a thought about a national socialist society, how could Lenin so fundamentally have forgotten it during the years following, and so stubbornly have contradicted it at every step? But there is no use resorting to oblique inferences when we have direct statements. The programme theses drafted by Lenin in the same year, 1915, answer the question accurately and directly: “The task of the proletariat of Russia is to carry through to the end the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, in order to kindle the socialist revolution in Europe. This second task has now come extremely near to the first, but it remains nevertheless a special and a second task, for it is a question of different classes co-operating with the proletariat of Russia. For the first task the collaborator is the petty-bourgeois peasantry of Russia, for the second the proletariat of other countries.” No greater clarity could be demanded.
The second attempt to quote Lenin is no better founded. His unfinished article about co-operation says that in the Soviet Republic we have on hand “all that is necessary and enough” in order without new revolutions to accomplish the transition to socialism. Here it is a question, as is perfectly clear from the text, of the political and legal premises of socialism. The author does not forget to remind his readers that the productive and cultural premises are inadequate. In general Lenin repeated this thought many times. “We ... lack the civilisation to make the transition directly to socialism,” he wrote in an article of the same period, the beginning of 1923, “although we have the political premises for it.” In this case as in all others, Lenin started from the assumption that the proletariat of the west would come to socialism along with the Russian proletariat and ahead of it. The article on co-operation does not contain a hint to the effect that the Soviet Republic might harmoniously and by reformist measures create its own national socialism, instead of taking its place through a process of antagonistic and revolutionary development in the world socialist society. Both quotations, introduced even into the text of the programme of the Communist International, were long ago explained in our Criticism of the Programme , and our opponents have not once attempted to defend their distortions and mistakes. The attempt would be too hopeless.
In March 1923 – in the same last period of his creative work – Lenin wrote: “We stand ... at the present moment before the question: shall we succeed in holding out with our petty and very petty peasant production, with our ruined condition, until the west European capitalist countries complete their development to socialism?” We see again: the dates have shifted, the web of events changed, but the international foundation of the policy remains unshaken. That faith in the international revolution – according to Stalin a “distrust in the inner forces of the Russian revolution” – went with the great internationalist to his grave. Only after pinning Lenin down under a mausoleum, were the Epigones able to nationalise his views.
From the worldwide division of labour, from the unevenness of development of different countries, from their mutual economic dependence, from the unevenness of different aspects of culture in the different countries, from the dynamic of the contemporary productive forces, it follows that the socialist structure can be built only by a system of economic spiral, only by taking the inner discords of a separate country out into a whole group of countries, only by a mutual service between different countries, and a mutual supplementation of the different branches of their industry and culture – that is, in the last analysis, only on the world arena.
The old programme of the party, adopted in 1903, begins with the words: “The development of exchange has established such close bonds between the peoples of the civilised world that the great liberating movement of the proletariat must become, and long ago has become, international ...” The preparation of the proletariat for the coming social revolution is defined as the task of the “international social democracy.” However, “on the road to their common final goal ... the social-democrats of various countries are obliged to set themselves dissimilar immediate tasks.” In Russia the overthrow of czarism is such a task. The democratic revolution was thus regarded in advance as a national step to an international socialist revolution.
The same conception lies at the bottom of our programme adopted by the party after the conquest of power. In a preliminary discussion of the draft of this programme at the Seventh Congress, Miliutin proposed an editorial correction in the resolution of Lenin: “I propose,” he said, “that we insert the words ‘international socialist revolution’ where it says ‘the era of social revolution now begun’ ... I think it is unnecessary to argue this ... Our social revolution can conquer only as an international revolution. It cannot conquer in Russia alone, leaving the bourgeois structure in the surrounding countries ... I propose that this be inserted to avoid misunderstanding.” The chairman Sverdlov: “Comrade Lenin accepts this amendment, a vote is therefore unnecessary.” A tiny episode of parliamentary technique (“unnecessary to argue” and “a vote is unnecessary”) refutes the false historiography of the epigones more convincingly perhaps than the most painstaking investigation! The circumstance that Miliutin himself, like Skvortzov-Stepanov whom we quoted above, and like hundreds and thousands of others, soon after condemned his own views under the name of “Trotskyism,” makes no change in the facts. Great historic currents are stronger than human backbones. The floodtide lifts up and the ebbtide sweeps away whole political generations. Ideas, on the other hand, are able to live even after the physical and spiritual death of those who carried them. A year later, at the eighth Congress of the Party which ratified the new programme, the same question was again illumined in a sharp exchange of retorts between Lenin and Podbelsky. The Moscow delegate protested against the fact that in spite of the October overturn the programme still spoke of the social revolution in the future tense, “Podbelsky,” says Lenin, “attacks the fact that in one of the paragraphs the programme speaks of the coming social revolution ... His argument is obviously inconsequent, for in our programme we are talking about the social revolution on a world scale.” Truly the history of the party has not left the Epigones a single unillumined corner to hide in.
In the programme of the Communist Youth adopted in 1921, the same question is put forward in an especially popular and simple form. “Russia,” says one paragraph, “although possessing enormous natural resources is nevertheless in the matter of industry a backward country in which a petty-bourgeois population predominates. It can come to socialism only through the socialist world revolution, the epoch for the development of which we have now entered.” Ratified in its day by the Politburo, with the participation not only of Lenin and Trotsky but also of Stalin, this programme was in full force in the autumn of 1926 when the Executive Committee of the Communist International converted the non-acceptance of socialism in a separate country into a mortal sin.
In the two years ensuing, however, the Epigones were compelled to file away in the archives the programme documents of the Lenin epoch. Their new documents, patched together out of fragments, they called the programme of the Communist International. Whereas with Lenin in the “Russian” programme the talk is of international revolution, with the Epigones in the international programme the talk is of “Russian” socialism.
Just when and how did the break with the first openly reveal itself? The historic date is easy to indicate, since it coincides with a turning-point in the biography of Stalin. As late as April 1924, three months after the death of Lenin, Stalin was modestly expounding the traditional views of the party. “To overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie and establish the power of the proletariat in one country,” he wrote in his Problems of Leninism , “does not mean to guarantee the complete victory of socialism. The chief task of socialism – the organisation of socialist production – lies still ahead. Can this task be accomplished? Is it possible to attain the final victory of socialism in one country, without the combined efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries. No, it is not. The efforts of one country are enough for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie – this is what the history of our revolution tells us. For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant country like Russia, are not enough – for this we must have the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries.” Stalin concludes his exposition of these thoughts with the words: “Such in general are the characteristic features of the Leninist theory of the proletarian revolution.”
By autumn of the same year, under the influence of the struggle with Trotskyism, it was suddenly discovered that Russia is the very country, in distinction from others, which will be able to build the socialist society with her own forces, if she is not hindered by intervention. In a new edition of the same work, Stalin wrote: “Having consolidated its power, and taking the lead of the peasantry, the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society.” Can and must! Only in order “fully to guarantee the country against intervention ... is the victory of the revolution necessary ... at least in several countries.” The proclamation of this new conception, which allots to the world proletariat the rôle of border police, ends with those same words: “Such in general are the characteristic features of the Leninist theory of the proletarian revolution.” In the course of one year, Stalin has imputed to Lenin two directly opposite views upon a fundamental problem of socialism.
At a plenary session of the Central Committee in 1927, Trotsky said about these two contradictory opinions of Stalin: “You may say that Stalin made a mistake and afterward corrected himself. But how could he make such a mistake upon such a question? If it were true that Lenin already in 1915 gave out the theory of building socialism in a separate country (which is utterly untrue), if it were true that subsequently Lenin only reinforced and developed this point of view (which is utterly untrue) – then how, we must ask, could Stalin think up for himself during the life of Lenin, during the last period of his life, that opinion upon this most important question which finds its expression in the Stalinist quotation of 1924? It appears that upon this fundamental question Stalin had always been a Trotskyist, and only after 1924 ceased to be one. It would be well if Stalin could find at least one quotation from his own writings showing that before 1924 he said something about the building of socialism in one country. He will not find it!” This challenge remained unanswered.
We should not, however, exaggerate the actual depth of the change made by Stalin. Just as in the question of war, of our relation to the provisional government, or the national question, so on the general perspectives of the revolution. Stalin had two positions: one independent, organic, not always expressed, or at least never wholly expressed, and the other conditional, phraseological, borrowed from Lenin. Between two people belonging to one and the same party it would be impossible to imagine a deeper gulf than that which separated Stalin from Lenin, both upon fundamental questions of revolutionary conception and in political psychology. Stalin’s opportunist character is disguised now by the fact that his power rests upon a victorious proletarian revolution. But we have seen the independent position of Stalin in March 1917. Having behind him an already accomplished bourgeois revolution, he set the party the task of “putting brakes on the splitting away” of the bourgeoisie – that is, of actually resisting the proletarian revolution. If that revolution was achieved, it is not his fault. But together with all the bureaucracy Stalin has taken his stand upon the basis of accomplished fact. Once there is a dictatorship of the proletariat, there must be socialism too. Turning inside out the argument of the Mensheviks against the proletarian revolution in Russia, Stalin, with his theory of socialism in a separate country, began to barricade himself against international revolution. And since he has never thought any question of principle through to the end, it could not but seem to him that “in essence” he always thought as he thought in the autumn of 1924. And since he moreover never got into contradiction with the prevailing opinion of the party, it could not but seem to him that the party too “in essence” thought as he did.
The initial substitution was unconscious. It was not a question of falsification, but of ideological shedding. But in proportion as the doctrine of national socialism came up against a well-armed criticism, there was need of an organised, and predominantly surgical, interference on the part of the machine. The theory of national socialism was then decreed. It was proven by the method of contraries – by the arrest of those who did not agree with it. At the same time the era was opened of systematic remaking of the party’s past. The history of the party was turned into a palimpsest. This destruction of parchments still continues, and moreover with steadily increasing fury.
The decisive factor, however, was not repressions nor falsifications. The triumph of the new views corresponding to the situation and interests of the bureaucracy, has rested upon objective circumstances – temporary but extremely powerful. The possibility has opened before the Soviet Republic of playing both in foreign and domestic politics a far more significant rôle than anybody before the revolution could have estimated. The isolated worker state has not only held its own among a legion of enemies, but has elevated itself economically. This weighty fact has formed the social opinion of the younger generation, who have not yet learned to think historically – that is, to compare and foresee.
The European bourgeoisie got too badly burned in the last war to lightly undertake another. A fear of revolutionary consequences has so far paralysed the plans of military intervention. But the factor of fear is an unstable one. The threat of a revolution has never yet replaced the revolution itself. A danger which remains long unrealised loses its effect. At the same time the irreconcilable antagonism between the workers’ state and the world of imperialism pushes towards the surface. Recent events have been so eloquent that the hope of a “neutralisation” of the world bourgeoisie up to the completion of the socialist structure, has been abandoned by the present ruling faction; to a certain degree it has even been converted into its opposite.
The industrial successes attained during these peaceful years are an imperishable demonstration of the incomparable advantages of a planned economy. This fact in no wise contradicts the international character of the revolution: socialism could not be realised in the world arena, were not its elements and its points of support prepared in separate countries. It is no accident that the enemies of the theory of national socialism were the very protagonists of industrialisation, of the planning principle, the Five Year Plan, and collectivisation. Rakovsky, and with him thousands of other Bolsheviks, are paying for their fight for a bold industrial initiative with years of exile and prison. But they too, on the other hand, have been the first to rise against an overestimation of the results attained, against national complacency. On the other hand, the mistrustful and short-sighted “practicals,” who formerly thought that the proletariat of backward Russia could not conquer the power, and after the conquest of power denied the possibility of broad industrialisation and collectivisation, have taken subsequently exactly the opposite position. The successes attained against their own expectations, they have simply multiplied into a whole series of Five Year Plans, substituting the multiplication table for a historic perspective. That is the theory of socialism in a separate country.
In reality the growth of the present soviet economy remains an antagonistic process. In strengthening the workers’ state, the economic successes are by no means leading automatically to the creation of a harmonious society. On the contrary, they are preparing a sharpening of the contradictions of an isolated socialist structure on a higher level. Rural Russia needs, as before, a mutual industrial plan with urban Europe. The worldwide division of labour stands over the dictatorship of the proletariat in a separate country, and imperatively dictates its further road. The October revolution did not exclude Russia from the development of the rest of humanity, but on the contrary bound her more closely to it. Russia is not a ghetto of barbarism, nor yet an Arcadia of socialism. It is the most transitional country in our transitional epoch. “The Russian revolution is only one link in the chain of international revolution.” The present condition of world economy makes it possible to say without hesitation: Capitalism has come far closer to the proletarian revolution than the Soviet Union to socialism. The fate of the first workers’ state is inseparably bound up with the fate of the liberating movement in the west and east. But this large theme demands independent investigation. We hope to return to it.
Appendix I | History of the Russian Revolution | Appendix III
Last updated on: 1 February 2018
Appendix III: Historic References on the Theory of Permanent Revolution
Leon Trotsky
The History of the Russian Revolution
Volume Three: The Triumph of the Soviets
Volume 3: Appendix 3
Historic References on the Theory of “Permanent Revolution”
In the Appendix to the first volume of this history we gave extended excerpts from a series of articles written by us in March 1917 in New York, and from our more recent polemic articles against Professor Pokrovsky. In both cases the matter concerned was an analysis of the moving forces of the Russian, and partly also of the international, revolution. It was upon the basis of this problem that the fundamental principled groupings had crystallised themselves in the Russian revolutionary camp ever since the beginning of the century. In proportion as the revolutionary tide rose, they acquired more and more the character of a strategic programme, and then finally a directly tactical character. The years 1903 to 1906 were a period of intensive crystallisation of political tendencies in the Russian social democracy. It was at that time that our work, Summaries and Perspectives was written. It was written in sections and for different purposes. An imprisonment in December 1905 permitted the author to expound more systematically than before his views on the character of the Russian revolution and its prospects. This collected work appeared as a book in the Russian language in 1906. In order that the excerpts from it given below may take a proper place in the mind of the reader, we must remind him again that in 1904-5 no one of the Russian Marxists defended, or even uttered, the thought of the possibility of building a socialist society in a single country in general, and particularly in Russia. This conception was first expressed in print only twenty years later, in the autumn of 1924. In the period of the first revolution, as also in the years between the two revolutions, the dispute concerned the dynamics of the bourgeois revolution, and not the chances and possibilities of a socialist revolution. All the present partisans of the theory of socialism in one country, without a single exception, were during that period confining the prospects of the Russian revolution to a bourgeois-democratic republic, and until April 1917 they were considering impossible not only the building of national socialism, but also the conquest of power by the proletariat of Russia before the dictatorship of the proletariat should be inaugurated in more advanced countries.
By “Trotskyism,” in the period from 1905 to 1917, was meant that revolutionary conception according to which the bourgeois revolution in Russia would not be able to solve its problems without placing the proletariat in power. Only in the autumn of 1924 did “Trotskyism” begin to mean the conception according to which the Russian proletariat, having come to power, would not be able to build a national socialist society with its own forces alone.
For the convenience of the reader we shall present the dispute schematically in the form of a dialogue in which the letter T signifies a representative of the “Trotskyist” conception, and the letter S means one of those Russian “practicals” who now stands at the head of the soviet bureaucracy.
1905-1917
T.: The Russian revolution cannot solve its democratic problem, above all the agrarian problem, without placing the working class in power.
S.: But does not that mean the dictatorship of the proletariat?
T.: Unquestionably.
S.: In backward Russia? Before it happens in the advanced capitalist countries?
T.: Exactly so.
S.: But you are ignoring the Russian village – that is, the backward peasantry stuck in the mud of semi-serfdom.
T.: On the contrary, it is only the depth of the agrarian problem that opens the immediate prospect of a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia.
S.: You reject, then, the bourgeois revolution?
T.: No, I only try to show that its dynamic leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
S.: But that means that Russia is ripe for the building of socialism?
T.: No, it does not. Historic evolution has no such planned and harmonious character. The conquest of power by the proletariat in backward Russia flows inexorably from the correlation of forces in the bourgeois revolution. What further economic prospects will be opened by the dictatorship of the proletariat depends upon the domestic and world conditions under which it is inaugurated. It goes without saying that Russia cannot arrive at socialism independently. But once having opened an era of socialist transformation, she can supply the impetus to a socialist development of Europe and thus arrive at socialism in the wake of the advanced countries
1917-1923
S.: We must acknowledge that Trotsky “even before the revolution of 1905 advanced the original and now especially famous theory of Permanent Revolution, asserting that the bourgeois revolution of 1905 would go directly over into a socialist revolution and prove the first of a series of national revolutions.” (The quotation is from the notes to the Complete Works of Lenin , published during his life.)
1924-1932
S.: And so you deny that our revolution can arrive at socialism?
T.: I think, as before, that our revolution can and should lead to socialism after having acquired an international character.
S.: You do not believe, then, in the inner forces of the Russian revolution?
T.: Strange that this did not prevent me from foreseeing and preaching the dictatorship of the proletariat when you rejected it as Utopian.
S.: But you none the less deny the socialist revolution in Russia?
T.: Until April 1917 you accused me of rejecting the bourgeois revolution. The secret of your theoretical contradictions lies in the fact that you got way behind the historic process and now you are trying to catch up and pass it. To tell the truth, this also is the secret of your industrial mistakes.
The reader should have always before him these three historic stages in the development of revolutionary conceptions in Russia, if he wishes correctly to judge the actual issues in the present struggle of factions and groups in Russian communism.
Excerpts from the Article of the Year 1905, Summaries and Perspectives
Section 4
Revolution and the proletariat
The proletariat will grow and strengthen together with the growth of capitalism. In this sense the development of capitalism is the development of the proletariat toward dictatorship. But the day and hour when the power will pass to the hands of the working class depend directly not upon the level obtained by the productive forces, but upon relations in the class struggle, upon the international situation, and finally upon a series of subjective factors – traditions, initiatives, preparedness for fighting ...
In a country economically more backward the proletariat may come to power sooner than in a country capitalistically advanced ...
The idea of some sort of automatic dependence of the proletarian dictatorship upon the technical forces and resources of a country is a prejudice derived from an extremely over-simplified “economic” materialism. Such a view has nothing in common with Marxism.
The Russian revolution, according to our view, will create conditions in which the power may (and with the victory of the revolution must) pass to the proletariat before the politicians of bourgeois liberalism get a chance to develop their statesmanly genius to the full.
Marxism is above all a method of analysis – not analysis of texts but analysis of social relations. Is it true in regard to Russia that the weakness of capitalistic liberalism necessarily means a weakness of the labour movement?
The numbers of the industrial proletariat, their concentration, their culture, their political weight, undoubtedly depend upon the degree of development of capitalist industry. But this dependence is not direct. Between the productive forces of the country and the political force of its classes at each given moment various sociopolitical factors of national and international character intervene, and they displace, and even completely change the form of, the political expression of economic relations. Notwithstanding that the productive forces of industry in the United States are ten times higher than ours, the political rôle of the Russian proletariat, its influence upon the policy of the country, and the possibility of its coming influence upon world politics, is incomparably higher than the rôle and significance of the American proletariat.
Section 5
The Proletariat in Power and the Peasantry.
In the event of a decisive victory of the revolution the power will come into the hands of that class which played the leading rôle in the struggle – in other words, into the hands of the proletariat. We add at once as self-evident that this does not exclude the entry into the government of revolutionary representatives of non-proletarian social groups ... The whole question is, who will supply the content of the government policy? Who will consolidate in the government a homogeneous majority? It is one thing when representatives of the democratic layers of the people participate in a government which is working-class in its majority. It is another thing when representatives of the proletariat participate, in the character of more or less respected hostages, in a definitely bourgeois-democratic government. The proletariat cannot perpetuate its power without broadening the base of the revolution. Many strata of the toiling masses, especially in the country, will be first drawn into the revolution and acquire political organisation only after the vanguard of the revolution, the city proletariat, stands at the helm of state.
... The character of our socio-historic relations, which throws the whole weight of the bourgeois revolution upon the shoulders of the proletariat, will not only create enormous difficulties for the workers’ government, but will also, at least in the first period of its existence, give it priceless advantages. This will express itself in the relations between the proletariat and the peasantry.
The Russian revolution does not permit, and for a long time will not permit, the creation of any sort of bourgeois-constitutional order which might solve the most elementary problems of democracy ... In consequence of this the fate of the most elementary revolutionary interests of the peasantry – even of the entire peasantry as a caste – is bound up with the fate of the whole revolution – that is, with the fate of the proletariat. The proletariat in power will appear to the peasantry as an emancipator class.
But perhaps the peasantry itself will crowd out the proletariat and occupy its place? That is impossible. All the experience of history protests against this assumption. It shows that the peasantry is completely incapable of playing an independent political rôle.
The Russian bourgeoisie will surrender all revolutionary positions to the proletariat. It will have to surrender also the revolutionary leadership of the peasantry. In the situation which will be created by a transfer of power to the proletariat the peasantry will have nothing left to do but adhere to the régime of workers’ democracy. Granted even that they will do this with no more consciousness than they have in adhering to the bourgeois régime! But whereas every bourgeois party after winning the votes of the peasants makes haste to use its power in order to rob them and deceive them of all their hopes and faith in promises, and then when worst comes to worst yields its place to another capitalist party, the proletariat, relying upon the peasantry, will bring all its forces into play to raise the cultural level of the village and develop in the peasantry a political consciousness.
Section 6
The Proletarian Régime
The proletariat can come to power only while relying upon a national awakening, upon a universal popular inspiration. The proletariat will enter the government as a revolutionary representative of the nation, as the recognised leader of the people in their struggle with absolutism and feudal barbarism. But having come to power, the proletariat will open a new epoch – an epoch of revolutionary legislation, of affirmative politics – and here the preservation of its rôle as recognised spokesman of the nation is by no means guaranteed.
Each day will deepen the policy of the proletariat in power, and more and more define its class character. And therewith the revolutionary bond between the proletariat and the nation will be broken. The class dismemberment of the peasantry will appear in political form. The antagonism between its constituent parts will increase in the same degree that the policy of the workers’ government defines itself and from being a general democratic policy becomes a class policy.
The destruction of feudal serfdom will have the support of the entire peasantry as a burdened caste ... But legislative measures in defence of the agricultural proletariat not only will win no such active sympathy from the majority, but will come up against the active resistance of the minority. The proletariat will find itself obliged to carry the class struggle into the country, and thus destroy that community of interests which is undoubtedly to be found in every peasantry, although within comparatively narrow limits. The proletariat will be obliged, in the very earliest moments of its rule, to seek support in opposing the rural poor to the rural rich, the agricultural proletariat to the peasant bourgeoisie.
Once the power is in the hands of a revolutionary government with a socialist majority, at that moment the difference between minimum and maximum programme loses both its significance in principle and its directly practical significance. A proletarian government cannot possibly restrain itself within the limits of this distinction.
Entering the government not as impotent hostages but as a ruling power, the representatives of the proletariat will by this very act destroy the boundary between minimum and maximum programme. That is, they will place collectivism on the order of the day. At what point the proletariat will be stopped in this direction depends upon the correlation of forces, but not at all upon the original intentions of the party of the proletariat.
That is why there can be no talk of any special form of proletarian dictatorship in a bourgeois revolution, namely a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat (or of the proletariat and the peasantry). The working class cannot guarantee the democratic character of its dictatorship without transgressing the limits of its democratic programme. Any illusions on this point would be absolutely ruinous.
Once the party of the proletariat takes the power, it will fight for it to the end. While one means of waging this struggle for the preservation and perpetuation of its power will be agitation and organisation, especially in the country, another means will be a collectivist policy. Collectivism will become not only an inevitable inference from the position of the party in power, but also a means of preserving its position while relying upon the proletariat.
When the idea was formulated in the socialist press of an uninterrupted revolution, linking up the liquidation of absolutism and of civil serfdom with a socialist revolution, thanks to multiplying social clashes, uprisings of new layers of the masses, unceasing attacks of the proletariat upon the political and economic privileges of the ruling classes, our “progressive” press raised a unanimous howl of indignation.
The more radical representatives of that same democracy ... not only considered fantastic the very idea of a workers’ government in Russia, but also denied the possibility of a socialist revolution in Europe in the coming historic epoch. The necessary “premises” are not yet at hand. Is this true? It is not, of course, a question of setting the date of a socialist revolution, but of giving it a place in the actual historic perspective ...
(Here follows an analysis of the general premises of a socialist economy and the proof that at the present time – the beginning of the 20 th century – these premises, if you take the question on a European and world scale, are already at hand.)
... Within the closed boundaries of separate states a socialist production could not in any case be introduced – both for economic and political reasons.
Section 8
A Workers’ Government in Russia and Socialism.
We have shown above that the objective premises of a socialist revolution have already been created by the economic development of the advanced capitalist countries. But what can be said in this respect about Russia? Can we expect that the transfer of power to the Russian proletariat will be the beginning of a transformation of our national economy upon socialist principles?
The Parisian workers, as Marx said, did not demand miracles of the Commune. Now, too, you cannot expect instantaneous miracles of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The state power is not omnipotent. It would be absurd to imagine that the proletariat has only to receive the power and it will replace capitalism by socialism with a few decrees. An economic structure is not a product of the activity of the state. The proletariat can only employ the state power with all its might in order to promote economic evolution in the direction of collectivism, and shorten its road.
The socialisation of production begins in those branches which offer the least difficulties. During the first period socialised production will take the form of oases united with private industrial enterprises by the laws of commodity circulation. The broader the field already seized by socialised industry the more obvious will be its advantages, the solider will the new political régime feel, and the more bold will be the further industrial undertakings of the proletariat. In these undertakings the proletariat will be able to, and will, rely not only upon the national productive forces, but also upon international technique, just as in its revolutionary politics it will rely not only upon the experience of national class relations, but also upon the whole historic experience of the international proletariat.
The proletarian régime will be compelled from the very first to undertake the solution of the agrarian problem, with which is bound up the fate of the immense mass of the population of Russia. In solving this problem, as in solving all others, the proletariat will take as its point of departure the fundamental effort of its economic policy: to conquer as large a field as possible for the organisation of socialist industry. And the forms and tempo of this policy on the agrarian problem will have to be determined both by those material resources in the command of the proletariat, and by the necessity of so deploying its activities as not to push possible allies into the ranks of the counter-revolution.
But how far can the socialist policy of the working class go in the industrial conditions of Russia? Only one thing can be said with certainty. It will run into political obstacles long before it comes up against the technical backwardness of the country. Without direct state support from the European proletariat the working class of Russia cannot remain in power and cannot convert its temporary rule into a prolonged socialist dictatorship ...
Political “optimism” may take two forms. It may exaggerate its own forces and the advantageous aspects of the revolutionary situation, and set itself tasks whose solution is not permitted by the given correlation of forces. But it may, on the other hand, optimistically set a bound to its revolutionary tasks beyond which the logic of the situation will inevitably push us.
We may set a bound to all the problems of the revolution by asserting that our revolution is bourgeois in its objective aims, and therefore in its inevitable result, and we may thus shut our eyes to the fact that the chief agent of this bourgeois revolution will be the proletariat, and the proletariat will be pushed toward the power by the whole course of the revolution ...
You may lull yourself with the thought that the social conditions of Russia are not yet ripe for a socialist economy, and therewith you may neglect to consider the fact that the proletariat, once in power, will inevitably be compelled by the whole logic of its situation to introduce an economy operated by the state.
The general sociological definition, “bourgeois revolution,” does not by any means solve those politico-tactical problems, contradictions and difficulties which will be put forward by the mechanics of the given bourgeois revolution.
Within the framework of the bourgeois revolution at the end of the 18 th century, whose objective task was to establish the rule of capital, a dictatorship of the Sansculottes proved possible. In a revolution at the beginning of the 20 th century, which is also bourgeois in its immediate objective tasks, there appears in the near perspective the inevitability, or at the very least the probability, of a political rulership of the proletariat. That this rulership shall not prove a mere passing “episode,” as certain realistic philistines hope – the proletariat itself will see to this. But it is not too early now to pose the question: Must this dictatorship of the proletariat inevitably be shattered against the boundaries of the bourgeois revolution? May it not, upon the given world-historic foundations, open before itself the prospect of a victory to be achieved after shattering these limited boundaries?
(Here follows a development of the thought that the Russian revolution may, and in all probability will, unleash a proletarian revolution in the west, which in its turn will guarantee the socialist development of Russia.)
It should be added that during the first years of the existence of the Communist International the above-quoted work was officially published in foreign languages as a theoretic interpretation of the October revolution.
Appendix II | History of the Russian Revolution
Last updated on: 1 February 2018