A few months ago, I was collecting all of the books I had bought from the IMT’s Wellred Books to deposit in the shed, where they belong. I picked up the third volume of Trotsky’s three-volume History of the Russian Revolution and skimmed it. It is a marvellous work of literature, providing a wealth of factual detail, but with no pretence at strict impartiality. It certainly has the merit of being more instructive than any of the hagiographical tripe written by Stalin and his acolytes. This is what Trotsky has to say at the very end of the book, a passage which I underlined when I first read it:
‘Enemies are gleeful that fifteen years after the revolution the Soviet country is still but little like a kingdom of universal well-being. Such an argument, if not really to be explained as due to a blinding hostility, could only be dictated by an excessive worship of the magic power of socialist methods. Capitalism required a hundred years to elevate science and technique to the heights and plunge humanity into the hell of war and crisis. To socialism its enemies allow only fifteen years to create furnish a terrestrial paradise. We took no such obligation upon ourselves. We never set these dates. The process of vast transformations must be measured by an adequate scale.’
Communists are fond of echoing this argument by Trotsky and others – that the Soviet experiment did not have ‘enough time’ to develop, and therefore, it is not fair to pass a definitive judgement on communism on the basis of the Soviet experience, or indeed, on the basis of the experience of any Communist regime. At the time Trotsky was writing, the Bolsheviks had been in power for a less than two decades. Surely, to write it off so early was utterly unfair? Indeed, Trotsky repeated this line of argument in the face of those perspicacious sceptics within the Trotskyist movement that dared to challenge the line on giving ‘critical support’ to the USSR. To give up on the USSR after such a short period of time indicated giving in to ‘panic’ and ‘despair’, which Trotsky associated with a petty-bourgeois mentality. Everyone knows that a ‘true Marxist’ is supposed to be rational, measured and objective in his or her assessments, analysing everything with the ‘scientific’ method of dialectical materialism.
Let us accept, for the sake of argument, that Trotsky was right at the time. Since the seismic events of 1917, we have had about 100 years to judge communism. I think 100 years is enough time to write it off as a manifest failure. It is entirely arbitrary for Marxists to argue that 100 years is too soon to judge Communism, but a few hundred years is enough time to judge capitalism – a system which even Marx acknowledged to be more dynamic and progressive than anything that has come before it. Some Marxists are at the point where they are willing to write off even the United States, the world’s premier liberal democracy, as ‘fascist’, and declare that the American experiment is dead – socialism’s time has come. I merely observe that America, that pinnacle of bourgeois republicanism, has lasted barely 250 years. Ancient empires have lasted centuries, enduring all sorts of crises and disasters, but have clawed their way back to health time and time again. They were far less powerful and far less dynamic than America, and endured their fair share of bad governance, just as the United States has. Is 250 years really sufficient to call time on the American experiment? Some Marxists believe this, but squeal at the injustice of judging Communism after 100 years. We can put this down to hypocrisy and an emotional attachment to the cause of revolutionary socialism, which they cling to like a religious faith, a comfort blanket that shields them from the biting winds of reality – winds which nip in all the places where common sense should be. So much for Marxist ‘science’, with its pretensions to objectivity and rational standards of criticism. As Leszek Kolakowski said in his devastating riposte to E.P. Thompson in 1974:
And so, what is fifty years to a historian? Fifty years covering the life of an obscure Russian worker Marchenko or of a still more obscure Lithuanian student who has not even written a book? Let us not hurry to judge “a new social system”. Certainly I could ask you how many years you needed to assess the merits of the new military regime in Chile or in Greece, but I know your answer: there is no analogy – Chile and Greece remain within capitalism (factories are privately owned) while Russia started a new “alternative society” (factories are state owned, as is land, as are all its inhabitants). As genuine historians we can wait for another century and keep our slightly melancholic but cautiously optimistic historical wisdom.
Thompson’s position, condemned by Kolakowski, is identical to the Trotskyist one – the USSR is an imperfect society, transitioning to communism, which has only lasted for a short amount of time, and therefore, to pass a definitive judgement upon it is premature. The hypocrisy of this position is brilliantly exposed by Kolakowski. Elsewhere, Kolakowski condemns those who are full of fire and fury when venting their spleen against capitalism, but become ‘wise historiosophists or cool rationalists’ when confronted with the worse horrors of Communism.
Nor is it the mere passage of time since Communism first loosed itself in spectacularly bloody fashion upon an unsuspecting world that allows us to dismiss it as a failed project. Of course, the charred ruins of art and culture, the millions of broken corpses and the loathsome, pernicious tyranny that characterised life under Communism in its 70 years of existence would all be bad enough. But remember, the apologists for Communism say that Communism did not have ideal starting conditions. Trotsky always pointed to the economic and cultural backwardness of Russia, the devastation of WWI and the subsequent civil war, and imperialist sabotage and diplomatic isolation as being the main reasons why the revolution ‘degenerated’. Surely, these are all mitigating factors that should be taken into consideration?
Of course, the truth is that a revolution by definition is an immensely disruptive event, and therefore, no revolution will ever have ‘ideal’ conditions. There will always be the threat of counter-revolution, economic breakdown and foreign intervention hanging like a sword of Damocles over any such event, and these are all things that any would-be revolutionary must prepare for, insofar as preparation is possible. To expect perfect conditions for a revolution is the height of stupidity, and even Lenin acknowledged this on more than one occasion. The fact is that the Bolsheviks thought that October was well worth the gamble. They gambled and lost, but in the end, they must bear the responsibility for their reckless actions. We must not allow them or their latter-day descendants and spokespeople to lay the blame for the miserable demise of their project on unfortunate circumstances, especially when they were partly responsible for calling those circumstances into being. (It is, after all, generally acknowledged that a civil war takes at least two belligerents to bring about.)
Moreover, the Bolsheviks had immense advantages to balance the difficult conditions with which they had to contend. At least by the end of the civil war, it can be said that they controlled an eighth of the world’s surface, a gigantic landmass that kept them relatively safe from foreign intervention. (Just look at the trouble the Nazi forces faced in WWII in terms of supply lines across a country that vast.) Even during the civil war, foreign intervention (which we always hyped up for propaganda purposes when I was in the IMT) was not particularly consequential. Indeed, Lenin and Trotsky secretly welcomed the British deployment at Murmansk because it deterred the Germans from getting any closer to Moscow. (The Japanese invasion of the Far East was more worrying). The territories of the former Russian Empire gave the Bolsheviks control over Europe’s largest population – an enviable source of manpower that could be deployed for both civilian and military purposes. Indeed, the Soviet victory over Nazism owed much to manpower, and from its pool of citizens the USSR was able to train more engineers, doctors, mathematicians, scientists, economists and professionals than the countries of Western Europe. It also had an immense amount of natural resources – oil, iron ore, manganese, you name it – that gave it a tremendous head-start over its rivals. After all, all countries were economically damaged after WWI – Germany arguably more so than Russia. And yet, tiny countries like Japan and South Korea, with relatively few natural resources, were able to become more prosperous than the USSR in the decades that followed. During the Cold War, even the USSR’s satellite states, like East Germany and Czechoslovakia, enjoyed higher living standards, despite being smaller countries in both landmass and population size, with less resources at their disposal. What a searing indictment of the planned economy and Communism’s ability to exploit the economic potential of a country.
If a tiny country like Israel, with a small population and hardly any natural resources, could weather wars, economic blockades and diplomatic isolation, along with wave after wave of hundreds of thousands of refugees washing up onto its soil, and emerge as a prosperous, capitalist liberal democracy with a healthy, happy and well-educated population that is the envy of the region and of the entire world, all in a mere 73 years, then the USSR’s manifest failure in that regard is all the more pitiful and pathetic. In that same amount of time, Communism in the USSR and elsewhere demonstrated its utter worthlessness as a system of economic development. The excuse of economic and diplomatic isolation does not work when a third of the world was at one point Communist, and when an entire inter-continental political and economic alliance of Second World countries was in existence. Beyond that, the Communist world enjoyed relations with many countries in the Third World. As if that was not enough, one of the world’s only superpowers was a Communist regime. Despite the myth that U.S. sabotage helped bring down the USSR, the U.S. did not want the USSR to collapse and was taken by surprise by the end of Communism. Under Gorbachev, the former superpower rivals had become allies, and Bush Sr.’s administration even sought to prop up the regime. Even with all these advantages, Communism still failed.
Trotsky makes another statement in the extract I quoted which is far less forgivable than his earlier one. In fact, it is positively monstrous in the amount of ignorance it displays. I was shocked when I re-read it. I didn’t realise how absurd it was until that moment, when I had already been out of the Trotskyist echo-chamber for some time, and was no longer reading his work in worshipful awe but with a critical eye. Yes, dear reader, the great genius Trotsky really did say something as monumentally stupid as this:
It will hardly pay now to pause upon the assertions of injured Russian proprietors that the revolution led to the cultural decline of the country. That aristocratic culture overthrown by the October revolution was in the last analysis only a superficial imitation of higher western models. Remaining inaccessible to the Russian people, it added nothing essential to the treasure-store of humanity. The October revolution laid the foundation of a new culture taking everybody into consideration, and for that very reason immediately acquiring international significance. Even supposing for a moment that owing to unfavourable circumstances and hostile blows the Soviet regime should be temporarily overthrown, the inexpugnable impress of the October revolution would nevertheless remain upon the whole future development of mankind. (bold mine)
This is the same Trotsky who, shoulder-to-shoulder with Lenin, attacked the Proletkult movement because, they argued, it was ‘ultra-left’ – it argued that in order to create a new, ‘proletarian culture’, all of the culture of the past had to be cast into the dustbin of history as so much dross that was preventing a cultural revival. Lenin and Trotsky pointed out that the bourgeois culture of the past, whatever its flaws, had been a great development for mankind, and that socialism had to build on this development. Trotsky stated that the proletariat could not create a culture of its own, because it was too busy fighting capitalism. Only once socialism had been fully achieved, and class society eliminated, would there be the time and space for a new human culture to develop.
Yet in this singularly idiotic passage, Trotsky now says that the culture of the old regime that was overthrown by the Bolsheviks ‘added nothing essential to the treasure-store of humanity’! The Russia of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff, of Pushkin and Tolstoy and Chekov, of Dostoevsky and Gogol and Gorky, ‘added nothing essential to the treasure-store of humanity’! Trotsky completely forgot what he had written during the 1920s, in a more critical frame of mind. Instead, writing with a singularly dogmatic cast of mind, obsessed with justifying the Bolshevik coup above all else (especially to the doubting Thomases among his followers), he came up with this utterly propagandistic drivel, which even he must only have half-believed. A cultured man such as himself should have known better. Even today, it is universally acknowledged that the USSR contributed next to nothing in terms of lasting cultural achievements. If anything, it set Russia back culturally. The Stalinist regimentation of art and culture produced the absurdities of ‘socialist realism’ and other abortions of that kind. The brief cultural renaissance of the 1920s was destroyed by state repression. There were exceptions – a Shostakovich here, a Pasternak there – but in general, little or nothing. All the cultural developments of world-historical import during the twentieth century happened, for the most part, in the West – in the U.S. in particular. The USSR was a cultural wasteland.
He concludes with the following:
The language of the civilised nations has clearly marked off two epochs in the development of Russia. Where the aristocratic culture introduced into world parlance such barbarisms such as czar, pogrom, knout, October has internationalised such words as Bolshevik, soviet and piatiletka. This alone justifies the proletarian revolution, if you imagine that it needs justification.
Another piece of sophistry from Trotsky. If we are going to judge the progressive nature of the Russian Revolution by analysing its legacy in lingustic terms, then it is safe to say, from our vantage point over 80 years later, that the Russian Revolution has internationalised words that we now associate with repression, tyranny and cruelty. A ‘Bolshevik’ is someone who is extreme, dogmatic and repellent. ‘Soviet’ is an unwelcome reminder of the brutal, inhuman regime that governed much of Eurasia only a few decades ago. ‘Five-Year Plans’ (which is what ‘piatiletka’ means in English) are now associated with Stalin’s murderous drive for industrial growth alongside total control over the population, and with famine, needless death, destruction and waste, the fleeting glories of Magnitogorsk not withstanding. Besides that, October has also internationalised words such as ‘gulag’, ‘purge’ and ‘re-education’, with all their sinister connotations. Even the very notion of ‘socialism’ now tastes like ashes in the mouth of anyone who knows anything about Soviet socialism.
With that, Trotsky’s sophistical defence of Communism has died a brutal death.