One of the most enduring myths of Trotskyism is that there was no positive relationship between Leninism and Stalinism. Stalinism is seen as an ‘aberration’ from Leninism. Leninism is entirely innocent of all the crimes of Stalin. This comforting falsehood is used by Trotskyists to justify their continuing commitment to the revolutionary project in the face of its real-world failures, which are blamed on ‘difficult objective conditions’ of backwardness, imperialist encirclement and civil strife. They say this as if all revolutions would not undergo this problem. It is hard to think of any revolution that has not led to foreign imperialist intervention, civil war and economic disruption. This is the sine qua non of any revolution. Only someone utterly unschooled in world history would deny this.
This does not stop Trotskyists from trying in vain to separate the virtuous ideology of Leninism from the evils of Stalinism. Let us think about how bizarre this interpretation of the history of the Russian Revolution is. The issue of continuities versus discontinuities in history is one of the most talked about aspects of historiography in academic circles. Indeed, it is one of those scholastic disputes that Marxists purport to despise as mere bourgeois navel-gazing. For all that, we can say that there are definitely continuities in history, however much they may be outweighed by the discontinuities. If there were no continuities in history at all, then history would be so fragmented as to be beyond understanding – indeed, Marxists would condemn such a view as post-modernism! Everyone accepts that there are continuities between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, between Prussia-Imperial Germany-Weimar Germany-Nazi Germany-contemporary Germany, between Tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia, between the British Empire and contemporary Britain. (Indeed, if anyone denied the latter, Marxists would accuse them of whitewashing the crimes of empire and covering up the complicity of today’s ruling class with the evils of colonialism.) There are continuities in history. What is debated is the relative weight of continuity versus discontinuity. Trotsky once drew an analogy saying that the relationship between Leninism and Stalinism was like that between early Christianity and the Roman Church. Trotsky was trying to emphasise the discontinuity of Stalinism with Leninism, but everyone accepts that there was also continuity between the early Christian Church and the Roman Church, however much Christianity has changed and evolved as a result of internal and external pressures. Indeed, the whole of Christian teaching over 2000 years can be described as a dialogue within the faith, between the early Christians of Rome and those who seek to update or clarify aspects of doctrine in one way or another. However different Christianity may be now to how it was in the past, there is still a transhistorical religious faith that can be identified as Christian, existing in continuity with all of the forms of Christianity that existed in the past.
Trotsky was utterly mistaken. The relationship between early Christianity and contemporary Christianity is undoubtedly one of great discontinuity and evolution as Christianity was coopted by temporal rulers and warlords for their own interests. But the link between Stalinism and Leninism is one of far more continuity than that between early Christianity and, say, Lutheranism or Catholicism. For a start, Stalinism followed on very quickly from Leninism, within a few years, whereas it took centuries for Catholicism to develop out of early Christianity. The amount of distortion the Catholic Church had to practice upon the texts and doctrine of the religion is more far-reaching than anything Stalin had to do to Lenin’s writings in order to justify his regime. Granted, the main difference is that Leninism gained control of an empire fairly early on – one which was one-sixth of the Earth’s surface. Moreover, this empire was surrounded by enemies, its economy was in tatters and its population utterly traumatised by decades of Tsarist oppression, violent revolution and brutal civil war – the ‘objective conditions’ spoken of by Trotsky. But there was undoubtedly something about Leninist ideology which made it very easy to co-opt for a new Oriental despotism – which Leszek Kolakowski brilliantly demonstrates in his wonderful essay, ‘The Marxist Roots of Stalinism’. Leninism had an independent power of its own. For Trotskyists to deny that ideology played an independent role in the development of Stalinism is to say that the ideology which they love to hail as the solution to all mankind’s problems is actually useless.
Even if we accept that Stalinism was so different from Leninism as to make any continuity between the two minimal, there was still continuity. However small, the seeds of Stalinism existed within Leninism. And this is significant. Trotskyists themselves put stress on the ‘subjective factor’ – things which are within human control, like ideology and leadership. The ‘objective conditions’ – economics, the geopolitical situation – are beyond human control, or can only be minimally controlled by human beings. Using Trotskyist logic, surely we should learn from the failure of past revolutions and focus on making adjustments to that which we can control – ideas – and tweak them so as to minimise the risk of Stalinism repeating itself? Instead, Trotskyists angrily insist that Leninism played no part whatsoever in the degeneration of the revolution, minimal or otherwise, and that it remains utterly valid despite all the examples of its real-world failure. They hold the contradictory belief that Leninism was vital to the success of the Bolsheviks in 1917, proving the importance of the ‘subjective factor’, but had nothing to do with the disaster that followed. So ideology is only effective when things are going well. When things go badly, it is the ‘objective conditions’. Even if we accept this, all it means is that Leninism is worthless, since it cannot prevent a revolution degenerating.
The intellectually honest solution to this dilemma is to accept that the roots of Stalinism existed within Leninism. Rejecting Stalinism means at the very least modifying Leninist doctrine, if not abandoning Leninism outright.