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The Stalin School of Falsification

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This is an excellent book for those who have heard the various lies put forth about Trotsky by Stalinists and their ilk. It corrects the history of the Russian Revolution, tossing out the fumbling falsifications brought by it's second leader, Joseph Stalin. Trotsky's commentary is quite informative and intelligent, and it gives insight into why the "comrades" of the Soviet Party against Trotsky behaved in the matter in which they did. Great book for those who want the truth; Stalinists won't like it.

Written in the midst of the cut-and-thrust (literally) of the early years of the Russian revolution, this book has a kind of thrilling rawness. Trotsky describes how, during the civil war against rich peasants, tsarist forces and their foreign backers, army commanders in Stalin's circle would be encouraged to disobey orders, troup transfers would be messed up and the revolution imperilled. Starkly, urgently, you see the contest between a course that could win freedom, and a mediocre, narrow-minded, petty road to failure. Over and over Trotsky gives proof that he and Lenin acted as one: Lenin gave Trotsky a blank sheet of paper, for example, with his signature at the bottom -- so that Trotsky could give any order he wished and automatically give it Lenin's seal of approval. But in order to win supremacy for his clique, in order for his own personal priviledge to be secured, Stalin had to utterly obscure and totally rewrite the truth of the most powerful rebellion in human history. And so he set about the task of separating Lenin from Trotsky in the public mind, and identifying Lenin with Stalin as the real revolution. Includes verbatim renditions of key meetings at the very dawn of the revolution -- with speeches on how and whether to aim for power bouncing back and forth. Gives you a feel for Stalin's shabby role right from the outset, and makes for pretty exciting reading. And makes you wonder -- if you had been there, what would you have said?

More than the lies.

What is important here is more than the unmaking of the lies that Stalin and the bureaucrats used to defeat Trotsky and smother the true defenders of the Russian revolution. What is at stake here is the issue of power. In this book Trotsky recounts the practical and the programmatic steps that led the Bolshevik party to seize power, defends the practical process that the revolution organized itself, defends the practical work that the Bolshevik party and the peasants and workers of Russia defeated the intervention by imperialism and the reactionary armies that sought to defeat the revolution. In this book, Trotsky recounts the truth about the struggle that he and Lenin began against Stalin and other bureaucrats. In this book Trotsky recounts the genuine Bolshevik response to the 1924 general strike in Great Britain and the disasterous slaughter of the Chinese Communists and Workers by Chaing Kai Shek in 1927.

The falsifications were not just about which picture Trotsky appeared with Lenin in, but about the bureaucracy's retreat from Bolshevism in regard to revolutions around the world and in regard to its campaign against the freedom of discussion and debate in the party and working class indepedent mass action that Lenin's power had been based on.

The social crisis that is deepening across our planet is going to revive these questions, not as history but as practical life and death questions of survival for billions of workers, peasants, and youth. We will need these books, not only to know our history, but to know the way tTo fight for our future.

Today in 2006, at first glance it is not obvious why militant leftists should read about Leon Trotsky's fight in the 1920's not only to save and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution but to vindicate his revolutionary honor against the attempts by Stalin and others to diminish his role in it. Fair enough. However, aside from the need to set the historical record straight as a matter of elementary political hygiene (which is a worthy endeavor in itself) a close reading of this work will demonstrate to militants leftists the need to fight for their own politics despite attempts by forces inside and outside the ostensibly socialist movement to call those politics into question. Although the last serious ideological fight against the bogie of "Trotskyism" occurred in the 1960's and 70's ( granted a long time ago) when various international Maoist and guerilla warfare tendencies went to the Stalinist stockpile that does not eliminate a resurgence of such falsification if revolutionary socialist struggle comes back on the agenda. This writer notes that every time ostensibly socialist tendencies want to denigrate currents to their left they take their arguments from the stockpile of falsifications that Trotsky fought to correct here.

The attempts to discredit the revolutionary role and political leadership of Trotsky went through various stages depending on the various alignments in the Russian Communist Party in the 1920's (and by extension in the Communist International as well when it became an adjunct to Soviet foreign policy rather than a vehicle for international revolutionary strategy). The issues, however, remained fairly constant; Trotsky's alleged Menshevism (he stood outside of the Bolshevik Party until 1917); his `underestimation of the peasantry' (a particularly charged issue in a peasant-dominated country like Russia); his theory of permanent revolution which put the socialist revolution on the immediate agenda both for Russian and later, by extension, internationally; his flair for administrative solutions to Soviet economic problems, for example, on the militarization of labor during the late stages of war communism and his later dispute with Lenin on the role of trade unions in the Soviet state; and, not unimportantly, his willingness to step on some very big toes to get tasks done i.e. his ardent , if prickly, personality.

These issues mingled together in the various disputes first as Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev (known as the triumvirate) tried to keep Trotsky from leadership after Lenin's death by attempting to drive an unbridgeable chasm between Lenin's policies and his. Then as Zinoviev and Kamenev went into opposition (and for a time joining Trotsky) Stalin and Bukharin did the same. Later, the victorious Stalinist faction put all these previous factional lineups in the shade by their rewriting of the history of the revolution to exclude Trotsky. The final efforts culminated in the charges against Trotsky (in absentia) during the frame-up Moscow Trials of the late 1930's. Underlying all these efforts was the attempt to eliminate Trotsky's role as leader of the October Revolution and the Red Army and ultimately to build up Stalin's slight role in them. And when it counted, in the 1920's, these efforts were unfortunately successful.

Trotsky, as an individual revolutionary trying to defend his revolutionary honor, faced the same problem then as the various left oppositions which he led in the Russian Bolshevik Party faced. That is the ability of the Stalin-dominated bureaucracy to set the terms and tone of the debate in the struggle for power by the weight of sheer numbers and by control of the state media and propaganda apparatus. Given the vast disproportion of forces Trotsky, in the end, was not able to fully vindicate himself before the party and Russian public opinion. But, as this book demonstrates, he did leave those who wanted to learn a record. Unfortunately, before the demise of the Soviet Union in 1990-91 Trotsky was still not vindicated before revolutionary history. The best the latter day Stalinists under Gorbachev could come up with is that he was a dangerous "ultra-left" visionary- a global class warrior. No, definitely not a man to their bureaucratic liking. Trotsky may still wait his vindication before history. He is, however, in no need of a certificate of revolutionary good conduct by his political opponents, this writer or the reader.