Trotskyists always deny that Trotsky bears any responsibility for the horrors of Stalinism. It is entirely the fault of the ‘objective conditions’. That Trotsky assisted Lenin in suppressing the working-class, establishing a one-party state and crushing all opposition within the party itself are facts which are overlooked. All of this paved the way for the party’s General Secretary, Stalin, to establish himself as despot over the country and purge his opponents, including Trotsky. Moreover, the massacre of the Tsar and his family, and the taking of entire ‘bourgeois’ families as hostages during the civil war, was a precedent for Stalin’s own grisly form of hereditary collective punishment, with Trotsky’s own family among Stalin’s victims. (Trotsky tried to argue that it was different with his own family, because, after all, they weren’t royalty, and Trotsky was a virtuous revolutionary whilst the Romanovs’ execution was historically necessary. Believe that if you will.) Stalin’s forced collectivisation, which cemented Soviet totalitarianism once and for all, had its origins in the plans that Trotsky and the Left Opposition had for the industrialisation of Russia, and had echoes of the War Communism of the civil war period.
Naturally, Trotsky and his followers fiercely denied having anything to do with Stalin’s forced collectivisation programme. Trotsky had insisted that his programme was different because it depended on the ‘voluntary’ cooperation of the peasantry with the regime. Under the NEP (introduced by the Bolsheviks in 1921 as part of a temporary restoration of capitalism), the regime would give the peasants tractors and other machinery to improve their farms, and in return the peasants would grant the regime the grain it needed to feed the workers at a reduced price. There were two problems with this. The former plan was sustainable only as long as the regime had the hard currency necessary to purchase machinery from abroad and give it to the peasantry in exchange for their grain, which the peasantry could only purchase if they had earned enough money from a successful harvest. If the price of machinery rose, it would be harder to purchase the necessary machinery and the peasants would not hand over their grain. This would be particularly true if grain prices simultaneously fell, as they did with the Scissors Crisis of 1923, which saw the peasants hoarding their grain instead of giving it up, unable to afford the manufactured goods. The long-term problems with the NEP became increasingly apparent. There were only two ways out: end the NEP and bring the agricultural sector under direct state control, collectivising the farms, or make further concessions to the kulak farmers, which meant agreeing to pay more for grain. Trotsky and the Left Opposition pushed for an end to the NEP and a reversion to socialist principles of collectivisation, whilst Bukharin and the Right Opposition fiercely defended the NEP. Bukharin unwittingly gave his opponents a stick with which to beat him when he declared to the kulaks, ‘Enrich yourselves!’ Kulak influence increased within the party as party bureaucrats forged links with wealthy kulaks in the countryside, married into their families and served as middlemen between the countryside and the market. The socialist ideals on which the revolution had been launched were in danger. But the NEP had allowed for an economic recovery and seemed the only feasible way of managing the economy and preserving social peace between workers and peasants.
Trotsky’s plan was straightforward. The peasantry would be ‘encouraged’ to ‘voluntarily’ migrate to the collective farms that had already been set up, part of a plan to merge all of the scattered peasant farms throughout the USSR and created consolidated agricultural blocs that would serve as economies of scale, on the model of what was done in Western Europe as part of the Industrial Revolution, except on a socialist basis. Marxist dogma, based as it was on neoclassical economics, held that larger farms were inherently more efficient (something which has since been disproved). This would presumably increase agricultural production, increasing exports and providing the regime with more hard currency for more machinery and faster industrialisation. The workers would ‘voluntarily’ agree to undergo a severe period of austerity, keeping consumption to a minimum so that all the extra surplus value would be invested in industry. Trotsky did not explain how the voluntary support of peasants and workers for this project was to be secured. Hardly any of the peasants were migrating to the collective farms, and why should they, when they were making a living off of their private enterprise? Nor would the long-suffering workers pay any heed to exhortations of self-denial from Bolshevik bureaucrats living comfortable lifestyles, after the years of starvation, oppression and misery they had already suffered at Bolshevik hands. Trotsky’s proposal was therefore dead in the water. The only means of doing what Trotsky wanted was force. And that is precisely what happened. Despite initially siding with Bukharin against Trotsky, Stalin had never really liked the NEP, seeing it as a temporary aberration from the Leninist path of true socialism. No sooner had Trotsky been exiled from Russia in 1928 than Stalin now turned on the Right Opposition, smashed them and implemented forced collectivisation. Many of Trotsky’s followers left in Russia capitulated to Stalin and went over to his side, renouncing their ties to the Left Opposition. After all, he was implementing ‘their’ programme, even if not in the way that they wanted. (It didn’t save them from being purged years later.) Trotsky disavowed Stalin’s actions, but it is hardly convincing. Trotsky, the butcher of Kronstadt, is hardly convincing as a champion of moderate measures over extreme violence, but it would appear that in this case, Stalin just did what Trotsky did not have the courage to do. Leszek Kolakowski’s own analysis in volume 3 of his Main Currents of Marxism is in line with my own:
It is widely held that in adopting the ‘new course’ and the policy of forced collectivization Stalin was simply taking over the Trotsky-Preobrazhensky programme after first eliminating its authors. This was Bukharin’s charge from the outset, and it was believed by many of the former opposition who hastened to beg Stalin to pardon them on the ground that there was no longer any fundamental clash of policy. Those, such as Radek, who succeeded in this were able to serve the state for a few years longer, though they did not escape final destruction. Several Marxist thinkers have seen the situation in the same light, from Lukacs to Roy Medvedyev. Trotsky, however (who was expelled from the Politburo in autumn 1926 and from the party a year later, deported to Alma Ata at the beginning of 1928, and exiled to Turkey with the consent of the Turkish Government in February 1929) did not share the view that the Stalin’s policy was his own. The Stalinist bureaucracy, he wrote, had indeed been forced by opposition pressure to adopt left-wing objectives, but it had put them into effect in a ruthless and opportunist way. The opposition believed in collectivization, but not in mass coercion; the kulaks should have been checked and combated ‘by economic means’. This was also the line subsequently taken by all Trotsky’s followers.
Their contention, however, is a very weak one. Trotsky, it is true, never spoke of forced collectivization, but then neither did Stalin. Anyone who knew the history of those years only from Stalin’s speeches and articles would unquestionably suppose that the peasants flocked into the collective farms for the sake of a better life, that the ‘revolution from above’ was greeted with unbridled joy, and that the only sufferers from stern measures were a handful of incorrigible saboteurs, enemies of the working people and of the government that infallibly expressed the people’s interests. What is true is that Stalin put the opposition’s programme into effect by the only possible means. All the economic inducements they suggested were tried before Stalin resorted to out-and-out coercion. Tax and price incentives, and a policy of limited terror, had been applied in the previous two years, but the only effect had been that grain deliveries fell and were likely to fall still further. No further means of economic pressure remained, and there were only two alternatives: either to go back to the N.E.P. in its full form and permit free trade, relying on the market to ensure food production and delivery, or to pursue the course already embarked on and eliminate the whole independent peasantry by the mass use of troops and police terror. In choosing the latter policy Stalin gave effect to the demands of the Left in the only feasible way.-pp.39-40
Stephen Kotkin, in his biography of Stalin, confirms that forced collectivisation was the only means of implementing socialism:
Scholarly arguments that “no plan” existed to collectivize Soviet Eurasia are utterly beside the point. No plan could have existed because actually attaining near complete collectivization was, at the time, unimaginable in practical terms. Collectivize one sixth of the earth? How? With what levers? Even the ultraleftist Trotsky, in a speech a few years back, had called a “transition to collective forms” of agriculture a matter of “one or two generations. In the near epoch we are forced to take account of the immense significance of petty peasant individual farming.” As of 1928, peasants were still not joining collective farms voluntarily. Whereas commercial and trade cooperatives encompassed some 55 percent of peasant households, production-oriented cooperatives were rare. Collective farms constituted no more than 1 percent of the total, enrolled on average only fifteen to sixteen peasant households, and each possessed just eight horses and eight to ten cows–economic dwarfs. At the same time, administratively, the regime had attained only a minimal presence in the countryside: outside the provincial capitals, traces of the red banners, slogans, and symbols of the new order vanished, and dedicated personnel were shockingly thin on the ground. The 1922 party census had reported that party members made up just 0.13 percent of rural inhabitants, a mere 300,000 rural Communists out of 120 million people. Siberia counted only 1,331 party cells even in its 4,009 village soviets (and far from every village had a functioning soviet). Moreover, what constituted a “party cell” remained unclear: one Orthodox Church soviet in Western Siberia denounced the local party cell for its card playing and careerism; another rural party cell was found to be holding seances to communicate with the spirit of Karl Marx. Could these cadres, already overwhelmed trying to procure a minimum of the harvest, force 120 million rural inhabitants into collective farms?
…Stalin had concluded – as his speech in Novosibirsk demonstrated – that the impossible was a necessity. In his mind, the regime had become caught in something far worse than a price scissors: namely, a class-based vicious circle. The Bolsheviks desperately needed the peasants to produce good harvests, but the better the peasants did, the more they turned into class enemies, that is, kulaks. To put the matter another way, a non-collectivized countryside was politically unthreatening only if the peasants were poor, but if the peasants were poor they produced insufficient grain to feed the northern cities or the Red Army and to export. That is why, finally, scholars who dismiss Stalin’s Marxist motivations for collectivization are as wrong as those who either hype the absence of a “plan” or render collectivization “necessary”. Stalin had connected the ideological dots, reaching the full logic of a class-based outlook. Everything would be improvised, of course. But Stalin would not improvise the introduction of the rule of law and a constitutional order; he would not improvise granting the peasants freedom; he would not improvise restricting police power. He would improvise a program of building socialism: forcing into being large-scale collective farms, absent private property. We need to understand not only why Stalin did it, but how.-pp.675-676
Trotskyists insist that Stalin carried out forced collectivisation not because he was a better Marxist than Trotsky, but because of the ‘objective conditions’ of Russian backwardness and pressure from the Left Opposition, which had led him to implement leftist policies in a ‘bureaucratic’ manner so as to shore up his regime, rather than for principled ideological reasons. This is in keeping with the Trotskyist slander that Stalin was nothing more than a cynical, apolitical bureaucrat who would do anything to hold onto power. The truth was that Stalin had utterly crushed the Left Opposition and did not have to do anything of the sort. Stalin pushed through forced collectivisation because he believed in it as only a good Marxist could, at a time when many foreign observers hoped that Stalin would in fact allow for the restoration of capitalism (precisely the crime that Trotsky had attributed to him and Bukharin). Kotkin concludes his biography with the following passages:
He would do it. Stalin would force the collectivization of Soviet villages and nomadic steppe inhabited by more than 100 million people between 1928 and 1933, a story taken up in volume II. At least 5 million people, many of the country’s most productive farmers or herders, would be “dekulakized”, that is, enclosed in cattle cars and dumped at far-off wastes, often in winter; some in that number would dekulakize themselves, rushing to sell or abandon their possessions to escape deportation. Those forced into the collectives would burn crops, slaughter animals, and assassinate officials. The regime’s urban shock troops would break peasant resistance, but the country’s inventory of horses would plummet from 35 million to 17 million, cattle from 70 million to 38 million, pigs from 26 million to 12 million, sheep and goats from 147 million to 50 million. In Kazakhstan, the losses would be still more staggering: cattle from 7.5 million to 1.6 million, sheep from 21.9 million to 1.7 million. Countrywide, nearly 40 million people would suffer severe hunger or starvation and between 5 and 7 million people would die in the horrific famine, whose existence the regime denied. “All the dogs have been eaten,” one eyewitness would be told in a Ukrainian village. “We have eaten everything we could lay our hands on–cats, dogs- field mice, birds–when it’s light tomorrow, you will see that the trees have been stripped of bark, for that too has been eaten. And the horse manure has been eaten. Yes, the horse manure. We fight over it. Sometimes there are whole grains in it.”
Scholars who argue that Stalin’s collectivization was necessary in order to force a peasant country into the modern era are dead wrong. The Soviet Union, like imperial Russia, faced an imperative to modernize in order to survive in the brutally unsentimental international order, but market systems have been shown to be fully compatible with fast-paced industrialization, including in peasant countries. Forced wholesale collectivization only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology and its repudiation of capitalism. And economically, collectivization failed to deliver. Stalin assumed it would increase both the state’s share of low-cost grain purchases and the overall size of the harvest, but although procurements doubled immediately, harvests shrank. Over the longer term, collective farming would not prove superior to large-scale capitalist farming or even to smaller-scale capitalist farming when the latter was provided with machinery, fertilizer, agronomy, and effective distribution. In the short term, collectivization would contribute nothing on net to Soviet industrial growth.
Nor was collectivization necessary to sustain a dictatorship. Private capital and dictatorship are perfectly compatible…nothing prevented the Communist dictatorship from embracing capital–nothing, that is, except idees fixes.
Nor did an adverse turn in the world economy compel collectivization. Global deflation in commodity prices did hit the Soviet Union hard, reducing the revenues from the sale abroad of Soviet grain, oil, timber, and sugar, but Stalin, in his grand speech in Siberia on January 20, 1928, made no mention of such conditions as a factor in his decision. If the global terms of trade for primary goods producers had been favorable, would Stalin have said in Novoisibirsk that day, Let’s develop large-scale privately owned kulak farms with privately hired labor? Look at these high global grain prices, we’ll never have to collectivize the peasantry! If the Soviet Union had obtained abundant long-term foreign credits in 1927-28, would Stalin have said, Let’s double down on markets at home? So what if we risk the party’s monopoly! The pernicious idea that global capitalism caused Stalin’s resort to extreme violence and erection of a brutal command system, in order to exercise control over the export commodities needed to finance industrialization, ignores the vast trove of evidence on the salience of ideology, including ideology’s role in worsening the USSR’s international position in the first place. There was a debate inside the USSR in the 1920s about how to modernize the country, but it was a remarkably narrow debate in which important options were closed off.
For that reason, it will not do to simplify collectivization as just another instance in thew Russian state’s infamous strong-arming of a predominantly peasant country because its agricultural season–in its northern climate, on a par with Canada–lasted a mere 125 days, perhaps half the length in Europe, where yields per acre were higher. The image of a Russian state through the centuries as a cruel military occupier at home is one-sided: Alexander had emancipated the serfs and Stolypin’s peasant reforms were voluntary. And Stalin was motivated by more than competition with more fortunate European rivals. Like Stolypin, Stalin wanted consolidated, contiguous farms, not the separated, small strips of the commune, but he ruled out the Stolypin route of betting on independent yeoman farmers (kulaks). Critics of Bolshevism abroad had urged old-regime professionals to work for the Soviet regime precisely in order to transform it from within, toward a Russian nationalist order and a full capitalist restoration. Such hopes were Stalin’s fears. Collectivization would give the Communists control over the vast countryside, a coveted goal no regime in Russia had ever had. But still more fundamentally, collectivization, like state-run and state-owned industry, constituted a form of ostensible modernization that negated capitalism. Thus did Stalin “solve” the Bolsheviks’ conundrum of how, in the words of Lenin’s last public speech, “NEP Russia could become socialist Russia.”There are always alternatives in history. The germane question is, was there an alternative within the Leninist revolution?
…Sokolnikov agreed with Rykov’s and Bukharin’s insistence on a version of industrialization compatible with market equilibrium, but he went much further and explicitly rejected the vision, alluring to almost all Communists, of achieving comprehensive economic planning in practice. (Sokolnikov allowed for the lesser possibility of coordination.) Of course, almost all non-Bolshevik specialists in the finance commissariat and elsewhere were saying this, but Sokolnikov was a member of the Central Committee. He had not argued in favor of capitalism–it is hard to see how any Bolshevik could have done so and survived in a leadership position–and implementing his market socialism would not have been easy. The Soviet party-state lacked much of the institutional capacity necessary to regulate market economy skillfully (Sokolnikov excepted). This was especially true of the mixed-state market economy of the NEP, which required a subtle understanding of the effects on the country’s macroeconomy of price controls and use of state power against private traders. Nonetheless, acceptance of the market and rejection of planning as a chimera were the sine qua non of any alternative path to the one Stalin had proclaimed in Novosibirsk in January 1928.
…Had Stalin not only caused the mass loss of the country’s most productive farmers and half its livestock in collectivization but also failed to finagle the machinery necessary for Soviet industrialization, including tractors for agriculture, his rule would have risked the destruction of the Leninist revolution. But a fortuitous event rescued his reckless gambling. On September 4, 1929, stock prices began to fall in New York and on October 29 the market crashed. A host of structural factors and policy mistakes transformed the financial dislocation into a Great Depression. By 1933, industrial production would drop by 46 percent in the United States, 41 percent in Germany, and 23 percent in Britain. Unemployment in the United States would reach 25 percent and still higher elsewhere. International trade would drop by half. Construction would come to a virtual standstill. The world’s misfortune was Stalin’s great, unforeseen fortune.
Of course, in Marxist thinking this was no accident: Capitalism was seen as inherently prone to booms and busts, a market economy produced depressions, misallocation of capital, mass unemployment, for which planning was supposed to be the answer. But there had never before been a capitalist crisis on the scale of the Great Depression (and there had not been since). The timing of the Depression, moreover, could not have been better for Stalin: right after he launched collectivization and dekulakization. The upshot was a windfall. More than one thousand factories would be newly built or overhauled from top to bottom, and nearly every single blueprint and advanced machine came from abroad. The Depression afforded Stalin unprecedented leverage: suddenly, the capitalists needed the Soviet market as much as the Soviets needed their advanced technology. Without the Great Depression would the capitalists have developed such overwhelming incentives to pursue the Soviet market no matter what? Indeed, the capitalist powers not only sold their best technology to the Communist regime, they continued doing so even after the Soviets were found to be violating contracts by purchasing designs for one factory and using them for others, trickery that was amply recorded in indignant internal foreign company records; the capitalists had no other customers for massive capital goods. Scholars who write of Moscow facing an “uncooperative world economy” have it exactly backward. Ideology and the party monopoly were the constraints; the global economy, the enabler. In fact, the global economic crisis was a double gift. Nothing did more to legitimate Stalin’s system. But Stalin had no idea that a Great Depression was around the corner, and that it would bring the foreign capitalists on bended knee.
If Stalin had died, the likelihood of forced wholesale collectivization–the only kind–would have been near zero, and the likelihood that the Soviet regime would have been transformed into something else or fallen apart would have been high. “More than almost any other great man in history,” wrote the historian E.H. Carr, “Stalin illustrates the thesis that circumstances make the man, not the man the circumstances.” Utterly, eternally wrong. Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth. Right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism, the destruction of the country’s livestock, and unprecedented political destabilization, Stalin did not flinch. Feints in the form of tactical retreats notwithstanding, he would keep going even when told to his face by officials in the inner regime that a catastrophe was unfolding–full speed ahead to socialism. This required extraordinary maneuvering, browbeating, and violence on his part. It also required deep conviction that it had to be done. Stalin was uncommonly skillful in building an awesome personal dictatorship, but also a bungler, getting fascism wrong, stumbling in foreign policy. But he had will. He went to Siberia in January 1928 and did not look back. History, for better and for worse, is made by those who never give up.-pp.724-727, pp.729-730, pp.733-734, pp.736-737, p.739
As we can see, ‘Russian backwardness’ and international isolation did not make forced collectivisation ‘objectively necessary’. Quite the opposite. Stalin’s gambit nearly failed and would almost certainly have brought down the regime had it not been for a fortuitous intersection of events. In the first place, Western capitalists would happily have done a deal with a Soviet regime which gave up on communism and embrace free markets and private property, which would have seen Russia escape diplomatic isolation and gain the foreign assistance for industrialisation that Trotsky was so convinced was only possible through international socialist revolution. That they did so anyway is because of the Wall Street Crash, an event which made American capitalists desperate enough for markets to do a deal with Stalin. Trotsky confirms the favourable international situation for the USSR in The Revolution Betrayed:
The supply to the factories of food and raw materials grew worse from season to season. Unbearable working conditions caused a migration of labor power, malingering, careless work, breakdown of machines, a high percentage of trashy products and general low quality. The average productivity of labor declined 11.7 per cent in 1931. According to an incidental acknowledgement of Molotov, printed in the whole Soviet press, industrial production in 1932 rose only 8.5 per cent, instead of the 36 per cent indicated by the year’s plan. To be sure, the world was informed soon after this that the five-year plan had been fulfilled in four years and three months. But that means only that the cynicism of the bureaucracy in its manipulations of statistics and public opinion is without limit. That, however, is not the chief thing. Not the fate of the five-year plan, but the fate of the regime was at stake.
The regime survived.
But that is the merit of the regime itself, which had put down deep roots in the popular soil. It is in no less degree due to favorable external circumstances. In those years of economic chaos and civil war in the villages, the Soviet Union was essentially paralyzed in the face of a foreign enemy. The discontent of the peasantry swept through the army. Mistrust and vacillation demoralized the bureaucratic machine, and the commanding cadres. A blow either from the East or West at that period might have had fatal consequences.
Kolakowski, like Kotkin, rejects the idea that there was anything inevitable about forced collectivisation:
Why did he do so? The first alternative [N.E.P] was not excluded by any ‘laws of history’, and there was no fatal compulsion to take the second road [forced collectivisation]. None the less, there was a logic in the Soviet system which operated strongly in the direction that was actually chosen. The ideological in force was far more consonant with a slave economy based on terror than with the return to market conditions, even under state control. As long as the bulk of the population was economically more or less independent of the state, and even kept the state in some degree of dependence on itself, the ideal of an indivisible dictatorship could not be fully realized. Marxist-Leninist doctrine taught, however, that socialism could only be built up by a completely centralized political and economic power. The abolition of private ownership of the means of production was the supreme task of humanity and the main obligation of the most progressive system in the world. Marxism held out the prospect of the merging or unification of civil society with the state through the dictatorship of the proletariat; and the only way to such unity was by liquidating all spontaneous forms of political, economic, and cultural life and replacing them by forms imposed by the state. Stalin thus realized Marxism-Leninism in the only possible way by consolidating his dictatorship over society, destroying all social ties that were not state-imposed and all classes, including the working class itself. This process, of course, did not take place overnight. It required, first, the political subjugation of the working class and then on the party: all possible nuclei of resistance had to be crushed, and the proletariat deprived of all means of self-defence. The party was able to do this because at the outset of its power it was supported by a large part of the proletariat. It was not simply that, as Deutscher emphasizes, the old working class, politically conscious and seasoned in battle, was decimated by the Civil War, and that post-war ruin and misery brought about a mood of apathy and fatigue. The party’s success was also due to its using the period of proletarian support in two ways. In the first place, it systematically promoted the ablest members of the working class to privileged positions in the state service, thus turning them into a new ruling class; and secondly, it destroyed all existing forms of working-class organization, especially other socialist parties and trade unions, and saw to it that the material means of reviving such organizations were kept out of the workers’ reach.
…If…Bolshevik ideology is not just a matter of generalities but involves accepting the inevitable consequences of one’s own principles, then Stalin was right to boast himself the most consistent of all Bolsheviks and Leninists.-pp.41-42, p.44
Stalin genuinely believed in Marxism and implemented forced collectivisation in line with his ideological beliefs. This is precisely what Trotsky could not bring himself to accept, for in his eyes, he was the true Marxist and Stalin simply a bungler and an opportunist. How could he admit that his arch-enemy had done precisely what he had sought to do and outwitted him? This was far too painful a conclusion to draw, hence the elaborate mythology Trotsky invented, whereby Stalinist totalitarianism was an unfortunate consequence of the difficult ‘objective conditions’ that made his defeat inevitable. Trotsky’s tactical ineptitude and incompetence is supposedly irrelevant. It was after all Trotsky who wrote, in a private note to himself, that he could bring himself to ally with Stalin against Bukharin, but never with Bukharin against Stalin. Trotsky never took Stalin seriously as an opponent. The main enemy for Trotsky was the Bukharin and his Right Oppositionists, who supported the restoration of capitalism. Stalin, who placed himself between both factions, could be co-opted into Trotsky’s plans, or so he thought. Instead, Stalin outmaneuvered both Bukharin and Trotsky, siding first with Bukharin against Trotsky, then implementing the Left Opposition’s programme and smashing Bukharin and his disciples. Stalinism was not an ‘aberration’ from the true path of Leninism, but a return to it. Lenin had always seen the NEP as a temporary measure, a ‘retreat’ from socialism. Stalin revived the socialist ideal that had died a painful death with the demise of War Communism in 1921.
Trotsky’s attitude towards Stalin remained consistent throughout the years. Stalin was still not the main enemy, capitalism was. Stalinism was nothing more than a temporary ‘aberration’ that would give way to ‘real socialism’ – whatever that was supposed to mean, as Trotsky did not have a conception of socialism that was particularly different from Stalin’s. Yet despite disowning forced collectivisation, Trotsky insisted that the USSR was a workers’ state which had eliminated capitalism and brought about nationalised property forms as part of a planned economy, the so-called ‘gains of October’. These had to be defended at all cost from capitalist restorationists within the USSR (including from within the Stalinist bureaucracy) and foreign capitalists outside, hence the doctrine of ‘critical support’ to the USSR. One might reasonably ask that if Stalinism was such a horrible aberration from true socialism, why did Trotsky insist on giving it ‘critical support’?
Moreover, Trotsky’s counterposition of his concept of ‘permanent revolution’ to Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ is a false debate invented after the fact to create the illusion of difference between himself and Stalin. Both Stalin and Trotsky were convinced that the USSR could begin the work of building socialism in one country in the absence of a world revolution elsewhere. After all, they controlled a sixth of the earth’s surface. Neither saw this as incompatible with also supporting world revolution as and when possible. Lenin and Trotsky saw no problem in utilising realpolitik in their relations with other powers – after all, they turned a blind eye to Ataturk massacring the Turkish Communists, and were ready and willing to abandon the Persian Communists to their fate at the hands of Reza Shah, wishing for good relations with the colonial countries of the Middle East. It is therefore nothing short of hypocrisy for Trotsky to condemn Stalin’s own unprincipled dealings with other countries, for he too could plead tactical necessity as a means of attaining the long-term goal of socialist revolution. And we all know who ended up doing more to spread Marxism worldwide – it wasn’t Trotsky.
Stalin demonstrated that he, not Trotsky, was Lenin’s true disciple. He alone, out of all the Communist Party grandees, had the courage and the willpower to do what was ‘objectively necessary’ from the point of view of Marxist dogma – the imposition of brutal economic dictatorship. There were other options. There was no inevitability, like Trotsky falsely claimed. The problem was that any option short of forced collectivisation meant abandoning Marxism and socialism, and this Trotsky and his followers could not accept. It meant accepting capitalist restoration. It meant giving up on the dream. It meant making peace with the failure of the revolution to spread, accepting that trying to build socialism was premature, that the Mensheviks had been right, and it was time to do the intellectually honest thing and put socialism to one side. Yet how could any true Marxist accept this?
The failure of the revolution to spread is in fact irrelevant, whatever Trotskyists say. If the revolution had spread to other countries, they too would have faced devastation after a prolonged period of civil war and revolutionary terror. How would their shattered economies have been any help to Russia? It is simply wishful thinking to say that if the ‘advanced’ nations of Europe had gone socialist, they could have aided Russia with their ‘superior technology’. As we have seen, Soviet Russia was able to acquire foreign aid in its industrialisation programme without the need for the revolution to spread. If the USSR had not tried to subvert the rest of the continent with Communist ideology, more aid would have been forthcoming. But conceding this means conceding that it was Communist ideology that was the problem. Neither Stalin nor Trotsky could possibly accept this. So Trotsky settled upon a formula which allowed him to hold onto his faith and remain opposed to Stalinism. According to this fantasy, Stalinism was an aberration which would be corrected when the working-class rose like the undead from its long slumber and overthrew the regime. Let us ignore the fact that Trotsky himself was responsible for suppressing the working-class, handing over to Stalin a ready-made, passive, atomised force that could serve as the raw material for his brutal industrialisation progrmme – a working-class that would remain depoliticised and inert until the collapse of the regime in 1991. Trotsky needed to believe that Stalinism was not the logical conclusion of the adventure he and Lenin launched in 1917. He could not repudiate his life’s work. But his life’s work repudiated him.
Every Orthodox Trotskyist, when faced with a choice between Stalinism and capitalism, will give ‘critical support’ to Stalinism, because at least Stalinism represents Marxism in some form, even if it is only a distorted version of socialism. The USSR, in this context, is a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ in the face of hostile imperialist encirclement. The failure of the USSR cannot be the fault of Communist ideology – instead it must be blamed on hostile forces, inside and outside, sabotaging the Soviet experiment, ‘difficult objective conditions’ that ‘inevitably’ created Stalinism. The Orthodox Trotskyists are at least more honest than other Trotskyists or Marxists, who write off the USSR as ‘state capitalism’. At least they tacitly accept that Stalinism is a form of Marxism, even if it is a primitive form. The ‘nationalised property forms’, they argue, were an advance over capitalism. We all now know that this was nonsense, but that is what they believe, and they have no choice but to believe it. If Stalinism represents nothing more than Bolshevik failure, then the rationale for continuing to believe in Marxism falls away. The logical conclusion of renouncing Stalinism completely means accepting some sort of liberalism, as Trotsky pointed out to the SWP Opposition in 1939. When push comes to shove, Trotskyists and Stalinists will join forces as part of the ‘proletarian camp’ against liberal capitalism.
A Trotskyist might insist as part of a counter-factual scenario that the working-class could have overthrown Stalinism and created a more democratic form of socialism, and therefore, not giving up on the USSR completely was the right thing to do. Let us consider the practicalities. Every attempt to liberalise an actually-existing Marxist regime led in the direction of capitalism. Once you loosen the restrictions of centralised planning and devolve power to individual factories and workplaces, market relations and capitalism revive spontaneously. Once you loosen political restrictions, ‘bourgeois’ parties will form. Trotsky argued in The Revolution Betrayed that multi-party democracy should be revived in the USSR, with the caveat that any parties should be pro-revolution – making this ‘democracy’ meaningless, since this could be used to justify banning any party which could be defined as ‘objectively anti-revolution’. There is no scenario in which a truly Marxist, truly socialist regime could have been established without totalitarianism. Every attempt to do so is bound to fail.
We are therefore forced to conclude that, whatever Trotskyists say, Stalinism and Trotskyism cannot meaningfully be distinguished. Forced collectivisation was Stalin implementing Trotsky’s plan in the only possible way. Trotsky’s ‘critical support’ for Stalinism thereafter was a tacit recognition that Stalinism was a form of Marxist socialism, however ‘degenerated’. To this very day, Trotskyists insist on celebrating the ‘achievements’ of the USSR and the ‘gains of October’, whilst separating Trotsky and the Trotskyist tradition from the crimes of Stalinism. All the evidence shows that it is simply not possible to do this. Stalinism is the logical conclusion of Leninism, the terminus of Marxist socialism put into practice. Every attempt at socialism has degenerated, and there is no reason to believe that doing it for the one-thousandth time will see things work out any differently.