My notes and quotes I've collected

  1. Ismail
    Ismail
    Some of you may be wondering how I can get so many quotes sometimes. Well this is because I take note of certain sentences, etc. in books. I've decided to post all of them from August 2008 onwards. These are in no particular order (well, generally earliest to latest), so I just transition from quotes to good links to quotes, etc.
    =============================================

    "…when we are told that the victory of socialism is possible only on a world scale, we regard this merely as an attempt, a particularly hopeless attempt, on the part of the bourgeoisie and its voluntary and involuntary supporters to distort the irrefutable truth. The 'final' victory of socialism in a single country is of course impossible". (Lenin, Speech to the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets, 1918.)

    "A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism—about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic. As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others." (Lenin, V.I. On the Slogan for a United States of Europe. Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 21, pages 339-343. Sotsial-Demokrat No. 44, August 23, 1915, 1974.)

    "But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been ensured. After consolidating its power and leading the peasantry in its wake the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society. But does this mean that it will thereby achieve the complete and final victory of socialism, i.e., does it mean that with the forces of only one country it can finally consolidate socialism and fully guarantee that country against intervention and, consequently, also against restoration? No, it does not. For this the victory of the revolution in at least several countries is needed. Therefore, the development and support of revolution in other countries is an essential task of the victorious revolution. Therefore, the revolution which has been victorious in one country must regard itself not as a self-sufficient entity, but as an aid, as a means for hastening the victory of the proletariat in other countries. Lenin expressed this thought succinctly when he said that the task of the victorious revolution is to do "the utmost possible in one country for the development, support and awakening of the revolution in all countries. (Stalin, Vol. XXIII: The Foundations of Leninism, p. 385)"

    “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of
    capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several
    or even in one capitalist country, taken singly. The victorious proletariat
    of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its
    own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world,
    the capitalist world, attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of
    other countries ... A free union of nations in socialism is impossible
    without a more or less prolonged and stubborn struggle by the socialist
    republics against the backward states.”
    (V.I. Lenin, Works, Vol. 21, p. 342)

    "The capitalists, the bourgeoisie, can at 'best' put off the victory of socialism in one country or another at the cost of slaughtering further hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants. But they cannot save capitalism..." (Lenin, CW. Vol. 29, pp. 515-19)

    ‘The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in the various countries. It cannot be otherwise under the commodity production system. From this, it follows irrefutably that Socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois for some time’. (V. I. Lenin: C. W. Russ. Ed. Vol. 19; p.325).


    ‘As a matter of fact, the political power of the Soviet over all large-scale means of production, the power in the state in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured leadership of the peasantry by the proletariat, etc, …is not this all that is necessary in order from the co-operatives - from the co-operatives alone, which we formerly treated as huckstering, and which, from a certain aspect, we have the right to treat as such now, under the new economic policy - is not this all that is necessary in order to build a complete socialist society? This is not yet the building of socialist society but it is all that is necessary and sufficient for this building’. (See Lenin’s article on co-operation, Vol. 27; p.392).

    Or;

    "As a matter of fact, the political power of the Soviet over all large-scale means of production, the power in the state in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured leadership of the peasantry by the proletariat, etc, … is not this all that is necessary in order... to build a complete socialist society? This is not yet the building of socialist society but it is all that is necessary and sufficient for this building." (Lenin, "On Cooperation," 1923.)

    "If you are unable to adapt yourself, if you are not inclined to crawl on your belly in the mud, you are not a revolutionary but a chatterbox; and I propose this, not because I like it, but because we have no other road, because history has not been kind enough to bring the revolution to maturity everywhere simultaneously." (Lenin, Political Report of the CC to the Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the RCP(B), March 7 1918, Collected Works, Vol 27).

    It was in response to Trotsky saying "we can only be saved, in the true meaning of the word, by a European Revolution." (Ibid.) Trotsky was talking about his actions concerning Brest-Litovsk.

    - Source is Trotskyism or Leninism?, pages 16-17.

    http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/.../1938/01/18.htm
    Stalin, J.V. On the Final Victory of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. Works, Vol. 14. London: Red Star Press Ltd., 1978.

    18 January 1938 - 12 February 1938
    Can the victorious Socialism of one country, which is encircled by many strong capitalist countries, regard itself as being fully guaranteed against the danger of military invasion, and hence, against attempts to restore capitalism in our country?

    Can our working class and our peasantry, by their own efforts, without the serious assistance of the working class in capitalist countries, overcome the bourgeoisie of other countries in the same way as we overcame our own bourgeoisie? In other words :

    Can we regard the victory of Socialism in our country as final, i.e., as being free from the dangers of military attack and of attempts to restore capitalism, assuming that Socialism is victorious only in one country and that the capitalist encirclement continues to exist?

    Such are the problems that are connected with the second side of the question of the victory of Socialism in our country.

    Leninism answers these problems in the negative.

    Leninism teaches that "the final victory of Socialism, in the sense of full guarantee against the restoration of bourgeois relations, is possible only on an international scale" (c.f. resolution of the Fourteenth Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).

    This means that the serious assistance of the international proletariat is a force without which the problem of the final victory of Socialism in one country cannot be solved.

    This, of course, does not mean that we must sit with folded arms and wait for assistance from outside.

    On the contrary, this assistance of the international proletariat must be combined with our work to strengthen the defence of our country, to strengthen the Red Army and the Red Navy, to mobilise the whole country for the purpose of resisting military attack and attempts to restore bourgeois relations.

    This is what Lenin says on this score :

    "We are living not merely in a State but in a system of States, and it is inconceivable that the Soviet Republic should continue to coexist for a long period side by side with imperialist States. Ultimately one or other must conquer. Meanwhile, a number of terrible clashes between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois States is inevitable. This means that if the proletariat, as the ruling class, wants to and will rule, it must prove this also by military organization." (Collected Works, Vol. 24. P. 122.)

    And further :

    "We are surrounded by people, classes and governments which openly express their hatred for us. We must remember that we are at all times but a hair's breadth from invasion." (Collected Works, Vol. 27. P. 117.)

    This is said sharply and strongly but honestly and truthfully without embellishment as Lenin was able to speak.

    On the basis of these premises Stalin stated in "Problems of Leninism" that :

    "The final victory of Socialism is the full guarantee against attempts at intervention, and that means against restoration, for any serious attempt at restoration can take place only with serious support from outside, only with the support of international capital.

    "Hence the support of our revolution by the workers of all countries, and still more, the victory of the workers in at least several countries, is a necessary condition for fully guaranteeing the first victorious country against attempts at intervention and restoration, a necessary condition for the final victory of Socialism," (Problems of Leninism, 1937. P. 134.)

    Indeed, it would be ridiculous and stupid to close our eyes to the capitalist encirclement and to think that our external enemies, the fascists, for example, will not, if the opportunity arises, make an attempt at a military attack upon the U.S.S.R. Only blind braggarts or masked enemies who desire to lull the vigilance of our people can think like that.

    No less ridiculous would it be to deny that in the event of the slightest success of military intervention, the interventionists would try to destroy the Soviet system in the districts they occupied and restore the bourgeois system.

    Did not Denikin and Kolchak restore the bourgeois system in the districts they occupied? Are the fascists any better than Denikin or Kolchak?

    Only blockheads or masked enemies who with their boastfulness want to conceal their hostility and are striving to demobilise the people, can deny the danger of military intervention and attempts at restoration as long as the capitalist encirclement exists.

    Can the victory of Socialism in one country be regarded as final if this country is encircled by capitalism, and if it is not fully guaranteed against the danger of intervention and restoration?

    Clearly, it cannot, This is the position in regard to the question of the victory of Socialism in one country.

    It follows that this question contains two different problems :

    1. The problem of the internal relations in our country, i.e., the problem of overcoming our own bourgeoisie and building complete Socialism; and

    2. The problem of the external relations of our country, i.e., the problem of completely ensuring our country against the dangers of military intervention and restoration.

    We have already solved the first problem, for our bourgeoisie has already been liquidated and Socialism has already been built in the main. This is what we call the victory of Socialism, or, to be more exact, the victory of Socialist Construction in one country.

    We could say that this victory is final if our country were situated on an island and if it were not surrounded by numerous capitalist countries.

    But as we are not living on an island but "in a system of States," a considerable number of which are hostile to the land of Socialism and create the danger of intervention and restoration, we say openly and honestly that the victory of Socialism in our country is not yet final.

    But from this it follows that the second problem is not yet solved and that it has yet to be solved.

    More than that : the second problem cannot be solved in the way that we solved the first problem, i.e., solely by the efforts of our country.

    The second problem can be solved only by combining the serious efforts of the international proletariat with the still more serious efforts of the whole of our Soviet people.

    The international proletarian ties between the working class of the U.S.S.R. and the working class in bourgeois countries must be increased and strengthened; the political assistance of the working class in the bourgeois countries for the working class of our country must be organized in the event of a military attack on our country; and also every assistance of the working class of our country for the working class in bourgeois countries must be organized; our Red Army, Red Navy, Red Air Fleet, and the Chemical and Air Defence Society must be increased and strengthened to the utmost.

    The whole of our people must be kept in a state of mobilisation and preparedness in the face of the danger of a military attack, so that no "accident" and no tricks on the part of our external enemies may take us by surprise . . .

    From your letter it is evident that Comrade Urozhenko adheres to different and not quite Leninist opinions. He, it appears, asserts that "we now have the final victory of Socialism and full guarantee against intervention and the restoration of capitalism."

    There cannot be the slightest doubt that Comrade Urozhenko is fundamentally wrong.

    Comrade Urozhenko's assertion can be explained only by his failure to understand the surrounding reality and his ignorance of the elementary propositions of Leninism, or by empty boastfulness of a conceited young bureaucrat.

    If it is true that "we have full guarantee against intervention and restoration of capitalism," then why do we need a strong Red Army, Red Navy, Red Air Fleet, a strong Chemical and Air Defence Society, more and stronger ties with the international proletariat?

    Would it not be better to spend the milliards that now go for the purpose of strengthening the Red Army on other needs and to reduce the Red Army to the utmost, or even to dissolve it altogether?

    People like Comrade Urozhenko, even if subjectively they are loyal to our cause, are objectively dangerous to it because by their boastfulness they - willingly or unwillingly (it makes no difference!) - lull the vigilance of our people, demobilise the workers and peasants and help the enemies to take us by surprise in the event of international complications.

    As for the fact that, as it appears, you, Comrade Ivanov, have been "removed from propaganda work and the question has been raised of your fitness to remain in the Y.C.L.," you have nothing to fear.

    If the people in the Regional Committee of the Y.C.L. really want to imitate Chekov's Sergeant Prishibeyev, you can be quite sure that they will lose on this game.

    Prishibeyevs are not liked in our country.

    Now you can judge whether the passage from the book "Problems of Leninism" on the victory of Socialism in one country is out of date or not.

    I myself would very much like it to be out of date.

    I would like unpleasant things like capitalist encirclement, the danger of military attack, the danger of the restoration of capitalism, etc., to be things of the past. Unfortunately, however, these unpleasant things still exist.

    (Signed) J. Stalin.
    February 12, 1938.

    Pravda
    14 February 1938
    Molotov Remembers, pages 202-204:
    All of Khrushchev's errors flowed from this mistake. Marx raised this question, and Lenin confirmed it in his essay State and Revolution. I know it well. There he wrote that at the final stage of communism the principle will be: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." The later formulation has only part of this phrase, but the second part, "to each according to his needs," was replaced by "to each according to his work." Our press follows this line like a law, but it's not correct from a Marxist perspective.

    Why? First, Marx wrote that only at the final stage of communism could the principle be fulfilled. Why? You can't demand the best from the common laborer under our conditions. But the constitution was written in 1936, when it was impossible to take "from each according to his ability." They didn't even have housing. Only at a higher stage could you talk about it. Could one demand this of a collective farmer? After all, we have established that he must work a certain minimum number of labor-days. But he is paid only a pittance for these labor-days. If he does not fulfill his quota of labor-days, the kolkhoz has the right to exclude him from membership. So what kind of "according to his ability" is that? It's nothing but window dressing. But window dressing is intolerable in Marxism. Marxism is an objective science; it views things soberly. It calls bad things bad and good things good. It demands genuine, uncompromising struggle for good.

    Marx argued, and Lenin confirmed, that the rights of man cannot exceed his economic potential. You can demand that a communist work "according to his ability," and it doesn't matter what his working conditions are. But you can't demand this from the people. How can we have the same demands under socialism as under communism? Do we create some kind of fiction about something that does not exist?... Revolutionaries must destroy what is bad and sacrifice themselves if necessary. Workers scape by and receive their crusts of bread—what more can we demand of them? Meet your quota! That's it. God grant that everyone conscientiously fulfill his norm. We would lead a much richer life. Better yet—exceed one's norm. This applies all the more to communists; a communist must work better. This means that contrary to "from each according to his ability" we must inscribe: fulfillment of the norms established by society. Fulfill what is demanded of you by the state, by society; conscientiously fulfill the norms prescribed by the factory, the workshop, the kolkhoz. This applies especially to white-collar workers. They are so many idlers. As they gossip and smoke in corridors, do you believe they are actually working "according to their ability"?

    Second, "to each according to his work." This is especially popular. All of our books go on about it. Some people interpret it as follows: If I work in a factory, I am paid according to my work. But if you are a boss, you have no work-norm to fulfill. In a word, you can take all kinds of liberties...

    Marx and Engels said, to each according to his work, but in a economy that has abolished money-commodity relations... Our 1961 program states [the opposite]: money-commodity relations are to be retained throughout socialism. It has things turned around... In Lenin's State and Revolution, the words "commodity" and "money" are not even mentioned. Why? Everything was already based on them. But these are vestiges of capitalism.
    “Without direct State support from the European proletariat, the working class of Russia cannot maintain itself in power and transform its temporary rule into a durable Socialist dictatorship. This we cannot doubt for an instant.”
    (Leon Trotsky, Our Revolution, Russian Edition, 1906, p. 278.)

    Back when Trotsky was a virulently anti-Leninist Menshevik.

    Focused on stages and peasantry:

    "In this book I above all restore the theory of the permanent revolution as it was formulated in 1905 with regard to the internal problems of the Russian revolution. I show wherein my position actually differed from Lenin’s, and how and why it coincided with Lenin’s position in every decisive situation.

    (.....)

    Radek is also wrong with regard to Parvus—whose views on the Russian Revolution in 1905 bordered closely on mine, without however being identical with them... Parvus was not of the opinion that a workers’ Government in Russia could move in the direction of the socialist revolution, that is, that in the process of fulfilling the democratic tasks it could grow over into the socialist dictatorship." (Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. English Ed. Militant Publishing Association, 1931.)

    Parvus being a Menshevik.

    "We cannot get out of the bourgeois-democratic boundaries of the Russian revolution, but we can vastly extend these boundaries, and within these boundaries we can and must fight for the interests of the proletariat, for its immediate needs and for conditions that will make it possible to prepare its forces for the future complete victory." (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol . 9, p. 52.)

    "... from the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way." (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol . 9, p. 37.)

    "Trotsky... has never been able to form any definite views on the role of the proletariat in the Russian bourgeois revolution." (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol . 10, p. 380.)

    "Trotsky's major mistake was that he ignored the bourgeois character of the revolution and had no clear conception of the transition from this revolution to the socialist revolution." (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol . 15, p. 371.)

    "But are we not in danger of falling into subjectivism, of wanting to arrive at the socialist revolution by 'skipping' the bourgeois-democratic revolution—which is not yet completed and has not yet exhausted the peasant movement? I might be incurring this danger if I said: 'No Tsar, but a workers' government.'" (V. I. Lenin, Letters on Tactics, Collected Works, Vol . 24, p. 48.)

    "It is nonsense to say that it is impossible in general to leap over stages. A living historical process always leaps." (Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. English Ed. Militant Publishing Association, 1931.)

    "…all Russian workers and all the rural poor must fight with both hands and on two sides; with one hand – fight against all the bourgeois, in alliance with all the workers; and with the other hand – fight against the rural officials, against the feudal landlords, in alliance with all the peasants." (quoting Lenin, Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of the Marxist Peasant Revolution, 64.)

    "In every socialist revolution, however—and consequently in the socialist revolution in Russia which we began on October 25, 1917—the principal task of the proletariat, and of the poor peasants which it leads, is the positive or constructive work of setting up an extremely intricate and delicate system of new organisational relationships extending to the planned production and distribution of the goods required for the existence of tens of millions of people... Only if the proletariat and the poor peasants display sufficient class-consciousness, devotion to principle, self-sacrifice and perseverance, will the victory of the socialist revolution be assured." (Lenin, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, 1918.)

    "... a revolution cannot be 'made', that revolutions develop from objectively mature crises and turns in history" (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol . 21, p. 240.)

    "On the political market the party can offer for consideration not the objective interests of the proletariat, theoretically sifted, but the consciously organised will of the proletariat." (Leon Trotsky, quoted from the journal Under the Banner of Marxism, No. 9, 1930, p. 155 (in Russian).)

    "Thus, for example, articles can be found in which I expressed doubts about the future revolutionary role of the peasantry..." (Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. English Ed. Militant Publishing Association, 1931.)

    "The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First, with the 'whole' of the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one." (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol . 28, p. 300.)

    And on the national-democratic revolution:

    "Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses." (Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. English Ed. Militant Publishing Association, 1931.)

    "I cannot be called a Bolshevik... We must not be demanded to recognise Bolshevism." (Leon Trotsky, Mezhrayontsi conference, May 1917, quoted in Lenin, Miscellany IV, Russ. ed., 1925, p. 303.)

    95%+ of these quotes came from Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature.

    Here's an old MIM thing:
    Trotsky preferring social-democrats over Stalin and Trotsky's role in
    aiding Japanese imperialism

    From [email protected] Fri Oct 27 22:40:34 1995
    Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 22:40:33 -0400 (EDT)
    From: Maoist Internationalist Movement
    To: Chegitz Guevara
    cc: [email protected]
    Subject: Trotsky: Sectarian turned traitor


    On Fri, 27 Oct 1995, Chegitz Guevara wrote:
    > Pat, your amazing distortion of facts is almost to confusing to follow.
    > The fact that Trotsky felt that the SOVIET bureaucracy was no longer
    > capable of being reformed, does not mean that Trotsky felt the same way

    Pat for MIM replies: Exactly, he thought the Soviet Union
    couldn't be reformed except with him as leader, but at the same
    time, he judged various Western anti-Soviet labor bureaucrats as capable of
    reform. That's exactly what I'm saying C.G. We are not disagreeing
    over the facts unless you want to deny that Trotsky
    favored alliance with labor bureaucrats and social-dem hacks
    generally.

    > about the CP's outside of the Soviet Union whom he continued to appeal to
    > in the fight against fascism. Trotsky tried to get, both the CP's and the
    > SD's to work together against the fascists, while you keep on talking
    > about the importance of fighting the SD's, and IGNORING FASCISM.

    Pat for MIM replies: The people responsible for outlawing
    communist militias in Germany were social-democrats. The same people
    legalized the Nazis. Now if you are sincere about agreeing that
    the thing in Germany was going to be settled in the street anyway,
    how could you possibly proceed to arm youth and workers WITHOUT
    lumping the social-democrats with the enemy? It only made
    sense in that context to let the social-dems off the hook if
    you hinged your strategy on electoral alliance with social-dems.
    The social-democrats were worthless otherwise in any potential
    alliance against the Nazis. They weren't about to fight the Nazis.

    Actually from one of C.G.'s comments we see some electoral
    illuions anyway. As often with Trotsky-defenders they share the
    master's ambiguity with regard to Menshevism. We will return to this.

    Something else to note is that C.G. is taking a "country-by
    country" approach above. Trotsky might not have wanted it.
    In addition, how much does C.G. think the CPs were interested
    in Trots preparing the Ukraine for Hitler to pounce on? In times
    of war, issues sharpen and what is international becomes
    domestic.

    > Meanwhile you talk of alliances with the bourgeoisie over alliances with
    > the backwards aspects of the labor movement. Oh, and the only Stalin led
    > Bolsheviks were the ones who were led to the grave. The Bolshevik party
    > was murdered by the Stalinist bureaucracy. I'm gonna have to drag out
    > that old picture of the 1919 Bolsheivk leadership. Of the 42 people in
    > the picture, by 1941, only Stalin and Kollentai were still alive. A
    > handful died of natural causes, but the vast majority mysteriously turned
    > traitor to their revolution and were executed.
    >

    Pat for MIM replies: Where did we deny that the 1930s were
    hard times? That's all your above paragraph establishes.
    But since you are defending Trotsky you might as well admit that
    the majority of those 42 opposed him in his fight with Stalin.
    While you are at it, tell us how you would have avoided
    the fate of the rest of Europe to be overrun by pro-Nazi
    traitors and regimes. When you are done, can I line up some
    babies for you to kiss and become your campaign manager for
    political office?

    > > Anyone who reads Trotsky with one-tenth the critical eye
    > > that is applied to Stalin will see that Trotsky spewed
    > > some good Marxist rhetoric at times, but whenever it came
    > > to issues of timing or strategy, he always made it clear
    > > whose side he was really on--the imperialists'--as movement
    > > history this century amply proves in its total lack of
    > > Trotskyist revolution against imperialism.
    >

    > This is a bald faced lie. I challange you to substatiate it, with quotes

    Pat for MIM replies: What are you some post-modern relativist?
    Does reality matter to you at all? There is nothing to substantiate
    when speaking of lack of Trotskyist revolution. A lack of
    action by definition can't be substantiated, only compared
    with the actuality of revolution led by communists in the tradition
    of Stalin.

    Since reality doesn't enter a Trotskyist's political opportunism,
    and since all that matters to Trotskyists is being able like any bourgeois
    politician to make verbal promises, I will now present another
    example of Trotsky's sectarian anti-Soviet strategy for those who care
    about action above empty dogmas no matter how well expressed.

    Since Trotsky sought power in the Soviet Union, he was hoping
    for imperialists to knock Stalin out. To this end he
    instigated Japanese imperalism, and this is RECORDED IN
    TROTSKY'S OWN PUBLISHED WRITINGS.

    How did he get away with this? He told his supporters
    that Japan was imperialist and hence going to attack
    the Soviet Union anyway. As we can imagine now, it kinda
    sounded reasonable to the rank-and-file Trots of the
    time.

    He warms up by revealing Soviet spying techniques to the whole world,
    which is an example of the kind of thing why the U.S. House Un-American
    Activities Committee invited him for testimony, and as was fully admitted
    by him. (The Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1939-40, NY: Merit Publishers, p.
    125.)

    In his "The Tanaka Memorial" article in a section titled
    "Last Articles and Letters," Trotsky has sections called
    "Early Soviet Advantages in Intelligence Work" and
    "Why I can Verify It's Authenticity." The "it" being
    referred to is a Japanese government memo on its upcoming
    war plans. Then Trotsky reveals "How the Document Was
    Secured." He goes right into the details of
    photography and agent work. That's what he considered
    defending the Soviet Union, revealing Soviet intelligence
    methods to the imperialists.

    But it doesn't stop there. He admits that Stalin doesn't
    reveal the Tanaka Memorial document, because Stalin does
    not want "to provoke Tokio." (Ibid., p. 113)

    Next he admits he can't be sure that he isn't revealing
    certain agents to the Japanese, because he's not sure
    if they are in Japan still. (Ibid.)

    Finally, for the usual lack of strategic acuity demonstrated
    by Trotsky after Lenin died, we have the following:
    "It is more than likely that this time too Moscow
    does not wish to cause any annoyances to Tokio in view
    of the negotiations now under way in the hope of
    reaching a more stable and lasting agreement. All these
    considerations, however, recede to the background
    as the world war spreads its concentric circles ever wider."
    (Ibid.) Trotsky was fond of saying Stalin was too
    cautious and conservative and would blow the war that
    way. Trotsky proved wrong.

    So above Trotsky is admitting his revelations could
    cause difficulties for Soviet peace negotiations
    with Japan in 1940. Trotskyists at the time
    swallowed Trotsky's leadership whole, because
    he was very articulate and attractive to those
    of wishful minds. Trotskyists imagined
    Trotsky's revelations about Soviet intelligence
    and the provocations against Japan were
    a good idea, because Trotsky knew how to
    defend the Soviet Union better than Stalin
    did anyway. It was arrogant sectarianism
    that played into imperialist hands again and
    again.

    However what is really disgusting at a level
    about ten times more than anything else is that even once Stalin
    proved Trotsky wrong, the Trotskyists still
    cling to his traitorous anti-communism in the name
    of Marxism. Stalin did succeed in putting aside the
    war with Japan contrary to Trotsky's predictions,
    and long enough that Stalin's Soviet Union only had to enter
    the war against Japan at the very end when it was already
    basically over--after the Soviets had won the war with
    Germany.
    "A socialist Europe will proclaim the full independence of the colonies,
    establish friendly economic relations with them and, step by step,
    without the slightest violence, by means of example and collaboration,
    introduce them into a world socialist federation. . . . The economy
    of the unified Europe will function as one whole."

    "The World Situation and Perspectives," St. Louis Post Dispatch, 1940
    Writings of Leon Trotsky
    (NY: Merit Publishers, 1969), p. 25.

    "The revolutionary center of gravity has shifted
    definitely to the West, where the immediate
    possibilities of building parties are immeasurably
    greater."

    --Leon Trotsky, "The Class Nature of the Soviet State," 1933

    "I should also like to emphasize here the importance
    of the movement in the colonies. In this respect
    we witness in all the old parties of the Second and Two-
    and-a-Half Internationals the survivals of old sentimental
    conceptions--there is much sympathy for the oppressed
    peoples of the colonies and semi-colonies. The movement in the colonies
    is still regarded as an insignificant national and completely
    peaceful movement. However, that is not the case. For great
    changes have taken place in this respect since the beginning
    of the twentieth century, namely, millions and hundreds of millions
    --actually the overwhelming majority of the world's population--
    are now coming out as an independent and active revolutionary
    factor. And it should be perfectly clear that in the coming decisive
    battles of the world revolution, this movement of the majority of the
    world's population, originally aimed at national liberation, will
    turn against capitalism and imperialism and will, perhaps, play
    a much more revolutionary role than we have been led to expect."

    --Lenin, "Tactics of the Russian Communist Party, Report to the Third Congress
    of the Communist International" (July 5 1921)

    "In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will
    be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc.,
    account for the overwhelming majority of the population
    of the globe."

    --Lenin, "Better Fewer, But Better," March 2, 1923



    If we are to believe that Trotsky basically fantasized about the Japanese or Germans invading the USSR and then Trotsky magically comes to the USSR and takes power, this shows one of his delusions that the Nazi armies will suddenly turn socialist:

    "Hitler's soldiers are German workers and peasants. . . . The armies of occupation must live side by side with the conquered peoples; they must observe the impoverishment and despair of the toiling masses; they must observe the latter's attempts at resistance and protest, at first muffled and then more and more open and bold. . . . The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants, will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste. The necessity to act at every step in the capacity of 'pacifiers' and oppressors will swiftly disintegrate the armies of occupation, infecting them with a revolutionary spirit." --1940
    Leon Trotsky
    "On the Future of Hitler's Armies"
    Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40)
    (NY: Merit Publishers, 1969), p. 113.

    Anyway, more MIM stuff can be found here:
    http://web.archive.org/web/20071210143145/...cs/trotsky.html

    Some various Lenin and Comintern quotes on Western Europe, etc.
    V. I. Lenin
    Collected Works, Vol. 31
    Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960, pp. 248-9

    "Speech on the Terms of Admission to the Communist International July 30"

    "Crispien went on to speak of high wages. The position in Germany, he
    said, is that the workers are quite well off compared with the workers
    in Russia or in general, in the East of Europe. A revolution, as he sees
    it, can be made only if it does not worsen the workers' conditions 'too
    much'. Is it permissible, in a Communist Party, to speak in a tone like
    this, I ask? This is the language of counter-revolution. . .The workers'
    victory cannot be achieved without sacrifices, without a temporary
    deterioration of their conditions. We must tell the workers the very
    opposite of what Crispien has said. If, in desiring to prepare the
    workers for the dictatorship, one tells them that their conditions will
    not be worsened 'too much', one is losing sight of the main thing, namely,
    that it was by helping their 'own' bourgeoisie to conquer and strangle
    the whole world by imperialist methods, with the aim of thereby ensuring
    better pay for themselves, that the labor aristocracy developed. If
    the German workers now want to work for the revolution they must make
    sacrifices, and not be afraid to do so. . . .

    "To tell the workers in the handful of rich countries where life is
    easier, thanks to imperialist pillage, that they must be afraid of 'too
    great' impoverishment, is counter-revolutionary. It is the reverse that
    they should be told. The labour aristocracy that is afraid of sacrifices,
    afraid of 'too great' impoverishment during the revolutionary struggle,
    cannot belong to the Party. Otherwise, the dictatorship is impossible,
    especially in West-European countries."
    COMINTERN
    Alan Adler, ed., Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First
    Four Congresses of the Third International
    London: Ink Links, "On Tactics," pp. 293-4

    "Our Attitude to the Semi-Proletarian Strata"

    "In Western Europe there is no class other than the proletariat which is
    capable of playing the significant role in the world revolution that,
    as a consequence of the war and the land hunger, the peasants did in
    Russia. But, even so, a section of the Western-European peasantry and
    a considerable part of the urban petty bourgeoisie and broad layers
    of the so- called middle class, of office workers etc., are facing
    deteriorating standards of living and, under the pressure of rising
    prices, the housing problems and insecurity, are being shaken out of
    their political apathy and drawn into the struggle between revolution
    and counter-revolution. . . ."

    "It is also important to win the sympathy of technicians,
    white-collar workers, the middle and lower-ranking civil servants and
    the intelligentsia, who can assist the proletarian dictatorship in the
    period of transition from capitalism to Communism by helping with the
    problems of state and economic administration. If such layers identify
    with the revolution, the enemy will be demoralized and the popular view
    of the proletariat as an isolated group will be discredited."

    [MC5 adds: The above was accepted by the COMINTERN including Lenin,
    Stalin, Zinoviev and Trotsky.]
    "They [Social-Democrats] are just as much traitors to socialism... They represent that top section of workers who have been bribed by the bourgeoisie... for in all the civilised, advanced countries the bourgeoisie rob—either by colonial oppression or by financially extracting 'gain' from formally independent weak countries—they rob a population many times larger than that of 'their own' country. This is the economic factor that enables the imperialist bourgeoisie to obtain superprofits, part of which is used to bribe the top section of the proletariat and convert it into a reformist, opportunist petty bourgeoisie that fears revolution."
    (V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol. 28. Progress Publishers: Moscow. 1974. p. 433.)

    http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/wo...919/jan/21.htm

    "The development of the economy in the West after the war also exerted a great influence on the spread of opportunist and revisionist ideas in the communist parties. True, Western Europe was devastated by the war but its recovery was carried out relatively quickly. The American capital which poured into Europe through the 'Marshall Plan' made it possible to reconstruct the factories, plants, transport and agriculture so that their production extended rapidly. This development opened up many jobs and for a long period, not only absorbed all the free labour force but even created a certain shortage of labour.

    This situation, which brought the bourgeoisie great superprofits, allowed it to loosen its purse-strings a little and soften the labour conflicts to some degree. In the social field, in such matters as social insurance, health, education, labour legislation etc., it took some measures for which the working class had fought hard. The obvious improvement of the standard of living of the working people in comparison with that of the time of the war and even before the war, the rapid growth of production, which came as a result of the reconstruction of industry and agriculture and the beginning of the technical and scientific revolution, and the full employment of the work force, opened the way to the flowering amongst the unformed opportunist element of views about the development of capitalism without class conflicts, about its ability to avoid crises, the elimination of the phenomenon of unemployment etc. That major teaching of Marxism-Leninism, that the periods of peaceful development of capitalism becomes a source for the spread of opportunism, was confirmed once again. The new stratum of the worker aristocracy, which increased considerably during this period, began to exert an ever more negative influence in the ranks of the parties and their leaderships by introducing reformist and opportunist views and ideas.

    Under pressure of these circumstances, the programs of these communist parties were reduced more and more to democratic and reformist minimum programs, while the idea of the revolution and socialism became ever more remote. The major strategy of the revolutionary transformation of society gave way to the minor strategy about current problems of the day which was absolutized and became the general political and ideological line."
    (Enver Hoxha. Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1980. pp. 82-83.)

    [/QUOTE]Trotsky's 'Letter to South African Revolutionaries' is interesting. On one hand you have dumb quotes:

    "The thesis points out that in 1917 Lenin openly and once and for all discarded the slogan of 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' as if it were a necessary condition for the solution of the agrarian question. This is entirely correct." "A Soviet England will be able to exercise a powerful economic and cultural influence on South Africa through the medium of those whites who in deed, in actual struggle, have bound up their fate with that of the present colonial slaves. This influence will be based not on domination, but on proletarian mutual cooperation."

    It does however have some quotes of interest:

    "But to avoid misunderstanding, it should be added: a) Lenin always spoke of a revolutionary bourgeois democratic dictatorship, and not about a spiritual 'people’s' state; b) in the struggle for a bourgeois democratic dictatorship he offered not a bloc of all 'anti-czarist forces,' but carried out an independent class policy of the proletariat. An 'anti-czarist' bloc was the idea of the Russian Social-Revolutionaries and the Left Cadets, that is, the parties of the petty and middle bourgeoisie. Against these parties the Bolsheviks always waged an irreconcilable struggle." "When the thesis says that the slogan of a 'Black Republic' is equally harmful for the revolutionary cause as is the slogan of a 'South Africa for the Whites,' then we cannot agree with the form of the statement. Whereas in the latter there is the case of supporting complete oppression, in the former there is the case of taking the first steps toward liberation."

    Though the idea of supporting a separate black state in South Africa is wrong. South Africa belonged to the Africans.

    "The Russians were shocked by what was demanded of them in the aftermath of [the Brest-Litovsk] meeting. Trotsky threw up his hands, telling the Germans that he would never agree to what they wanted and urging Lenin to adopt a 'no war, no peace' policy in which Russia would neither continue to fight nor agree to Germany's terms... The Ukrainian capital of Kiev fell to the Germans on March 1. Trotsky, furious, said that Russia should rejoin the Entente and resume the war. Lenin, fearing the capture of Petrograd and the destruction of his fledgling regime, moved his government to Moscow and said no."
    (Meyer, G.J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War: 1914-1918. New York: Bantam Dell, 2006., pp. 619-20.)

    Radek:
    "After Lenin's death we, nineteen men of the Executive Committee, sat together and anxiously awaited the advice which our leader would give us from the tomb. Lenin's widow had brought us the letter. Stalin read it aloud to us. As he did so, nobody made a sound. When it came to speak of Trotsky, the letter [essentially] said: 'His un-Bolshevik past is not an accident.' All at once Trotsky interrupted the reading and asked: 'What was that?' The sentence was repeated. These were the only words that were spoken during that solemn hour."
    (Karl Radek, quoted in Ludwig, Emil. Leaders of Europe. London: I. Nicholson and Watson Ltd., 1934, p. 364.)

    1905:
    “During the whole period of its activity, the Petersburg Soviet had at its head a very intelligent and clever Menshevik... The name of that Menshevik was Trotsky. He was a genuine, full-blown Menshevik who had no desire whatever for armed insurrection...” (M. N. Pokrovsky, Brief History of Russia, Vol. II, p. 320).

    February 1917:
    “In my opinion, our main task is to guard against getting entangled in foolish attempts at ‘unity’ with the social-patriots (or, what is still more dangerous, with the wavering ones, like . . . Trotsky and Co.) and to continue the work of our own party in a consistently internationalist spirit.” (V. I. Lenin, The Revolution of 1917, Vol. I, English edition, p. 21.)

    May 1917:
    “The vacillations of the petty-bourgeois: Trotsky . . .” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XXX, Russian edition, p. 331.)

    From Communist Voice, obviously they have some strange, idealistic views (which basically amount too "neither Trotsky nor Stalin, but Lenin), but still a decent text:
    "NON-CAPITALISM" IN ONE COUNTRY

    . Thus Trotskyist theorizing on the issue of "socialism in one country" has not provided answers to the serious questions of revolutionary tactics and orientation with regard to the relationship between individual revolutionary regimes or movements, and the world movement. But moreover, the Trotskyist denial of "socialism in one country" is, in large part, a mere quibble. While Trotsky held that there couldn't be "socialism in one country", he simultaneously held that there could be socialist revolution in one country. Indeed, his theory of "permanent revolution" is based on the idea that no revolution should be anything but a socialist revolution, and it should immediately establish a workers' state, a proletarian dictatorship.

    . Thus Trotsky didn't call for the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) to drop "socialist" from its name. He held it was a workers' state, and moreover he held that the state sector of the Soviet economy was socialist. For that matter, he believed, even after a new bourgeoisie (he saw it only as Stalinist bureaucracy) took political power from the working class, that the Soviet Union was still a demonstration of socialism to the entire world; he wrote in 1936 that

    "socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth's surface--not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity."(12)

    . So, according to Trotsky, something that he held was essentially socialist could, and did, exist in a single country (albeit a giant one, the USSR). It was simply that it was only part-way to full socialism, and should sometimes be called socialist (as when demonstrating the victory of socialism), and sometimes (as when denouncing the Stalinists) should not. But in any case, whether this regime should be called "socialist" or a "workers state" or even "a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism", Trotsky held that it had already departed from capitalism, and it could only be drawn back on the "road to capitalism" by a counterrevolution and a "capitalist restoration". (13)

    Only full socialism

    . Thus Trotsky held only that full socialism -- including the abolition of classes, money, commodity production, and the state -- couldn't be achieved in one country. But he held that a proletarian dictatorship, or workers' state, could be achieved in a single country. Indeed, he held that the Soviet economy had already become a new economic system. In his view, it remained such even under the Stalinist system that consolidated in the 1930s. But aside from the issue that he mistook state-capitalism for workers' rule, the point is that he believed that workers' rule could exist in a single country, and that a single country could depart from capitalism.

    . And this is the time-worn, orthodox Trotskyist position. It is also argued, for example, by the late Ernst Mandel in his book Marxist Economic Theory. When he wanted to refute the view that the Soviet Union was socialist, he compared it to full Marxist socialism. But at the same time, he stated that it wasn't capitalist either, and did "not display any of the fundamental aspects of capitalist economy." It only shared mere "forms" and "superficial phenomena" with capitalism. (14)

    . The present-day Trotskyist movement is divided over whether the Stalinist regime was a workers' rule. But they are not divided over the issue of whether it is possible that a single country might depart from capitalism. Even those Trotskyists who recognize the Stalinist regime was state-capitalist nevertheless hold that a single country (although not a Stalinist regime) could depart from capitalism. It is a fundamental point of Trotskyist doctrine that a socialist revolution can establish a proletarian dictatorship in a single country, and that this workers' rule would be non-capitalist and socialistic.

    What's the difference?

    . But Trotsky's recognition of the possibility of socialistic regimes in one country empties most of the content from his denial of "socialism in one country". The main question is what regimes represent the interest of the working class, and deserve support from their own working class and from the world working class. Can there be such a regime "in one country"? Whether such a country had full socialism, or was simply a workers' state making progress on the way to socialism, it would deserve support from the world proletarian movement.

    . The question of when a country should be said to have reached full socialism is a secondary issue, provided the country really is a revolutionary regime of the working class. There probably will be different shades of working-class opinion on this question, and even different shades of socialist opinion. But it is unlikely to be a dividing line between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries.

    . This question does bear strongly on the analysis of the economy of the transitional period between capitalism and full socialism. But as we shall see later on, Trotskyism does quite poorly here, and is similar to Stalinism on this question.

    . Yet Trotskyism claims that belief in the possibility of "socialism in one country" is the root cause for betrayal of the revolution, and that it leads to subordinating the world movement to safeguarding the supposed socialist state. But if so, why wouldn't Trotskyist belief in the possibility of "non-capitalism in one country" have similar consequences with respect to the supposed non-capitalist state?

    ON THE NATURE OF SOCIALISM

    . The Bolshevik revolution gave rise to the first sustained attempt to dispossess the bourgeoisie and build a socialist society. The experience of millions of workers and activists in trying to build a new economic system gave an immense impetus to communist thought about the problem of the practical economic steps that have to be taken after a proletarian revolution in order to actually replace capitalism with socialism. It especially raised the question of the period after the old bourgeoisie has been displaced but commodity production, classes and a sort of mixed economy still exist. With the death of the revolution and the consolidation of a Stalinist state-capitalist order in the Soviet Union, an additional issue arose of distinguishing between state-capitalism and a revolutionary economy moving towards socialism. Both these issues have only become more important with the experience of the other revolutions of the last century.

    . Trotskyism claimed to represent the alternative to Stalinism. But it is notable is how little Trotskyism differs from Stalinism as far as it's analysis of the basic structure of the Stalinist economy or of the nature of the transitional period.

    APOLOGISTS OF STALINIST STATE-CAPITALISM

    . It may seem strange to say that the Trotskyists, who accuse Stalin of every crime they can think of, are apologists of Stalinist state-capitalism. Who doesn't know that Trotskyists denounce Stalin, and that Stalin murdered many Trotskyists? But the vehemence of their denunciations of Stalin as an individual covers over their support for the basic structure of the Stalinist economy. Trotsky regarded the Stalinist Soviet Union as being a workers' state, but with bad leaders. Since then, orthodox Trotskyists have regarded the Soviet Union, and other Stalinist regimes, as workers regimes, albeit degenerated or deformed workers regimes. They have continually called on workers and activists to defend these regimes.

    . Trotsky's main idea is that, in a country where the old bourgeoisie has been displaced, the state sector is inherently socialist. If the state sector is dominant, then the country is, in his view, a workers' regime. And it is such, whether or not the workers actually control the state sector. In the 1930s, Trotsky saw the consolidation of the Stalinist system in Russia, but he also saw that the state sector became stronger and more dominant than ever. So, while bitterly denouncing Stalin, Trotsky nevertheless put forward a series of arguments to defend Stalinist society from the charge of being state-capitalism.

    Trotsky denied the possibility of
    a new bourgeoisie

    . For example, Trotsky denied that the Stalinist state and party bureaucracy could coalesce into a ruling class, whose power was based on its domination of the state and the state sector of the economy. Had the Soviet bureaucracy taken all power into its own hands and rendered the workers passive? This, according to Trotsky, wasn't relevant to whether the bureaucracy had actually become a ruling class. The simple existence of the nationalized economy was supposed to prove that it was the working class which was the ruling class, no matter whether it seemed to have a voice on any decision at all. Trotsky thought that the power of the Soviet bureaucracy merely meant that this bureaucracy was somewhat more independent of the supposed real rulers than is typical in other countries:

    ". . . In no other regime has a bureaucracy ever achieved such a degree of independence from the dominating class. . . . The Soviet bureaucracy has risen above a class which is hardly emerging from destitution and darkness, and has no tradition of dominion or command."(15)

    . For Trotsky, the dividing line was always the existence of the state sector. There could be no capitalist restoration, there could be no new ruling class, unless the state sector was supplanted by some other form of property. He wrote that

    "The bureaucracy has not yet created social supports for its dominion in the form of special types of property. It is compelled to defend state property as the source of its power and its income. In this aspect of its activity it still remains a weapon of proletarian dictatorship."(16)

    Trotsky denied the possibility of state-capitalism

    . Indeed, when he was arguing about the nature of the Stalinist system, Trotsky went so far as to declare not only that the Stalinist system wasn't state-capitalism, but that there couldn't possibly be a system of "integral state-capitalism", not anywhere, not anytime. (By "integral" he meant a complete or comprehensive system, rather than the state-sector being only one of many sectors of the economy. ) He wrote that

    . "Theoretically, to be sure, it is possible to conceive a situation in which the bourgeoisie as a whole constitutes itself a stock company which, by mean of the state, administers the whole national economy. . . . Such a regime never existed, however, and, because of profound contradictions among the proprietors themselves, never will exist. . . " And, he wrote, "State capitalism means the substitution of state property for private property, and for that very reason remains partial in character."(17)

    . As we have seen, Trotsky didn't even consider the possibility that a new bourgeoisie might arise based on its control of the state sector. He didn't imagine that either capitalism or the bourgeoisie could take on new forms, different from that of traditional capitalism. His argument is that the rule of a new bourgeoisie couldn't be state-capitalism because, according to his definition, state-capitalism must refer to the previous proprietors joining together to administer the economy through the state and through such old forms as "a stock company".

    . Now, whether the old proprietors would ever feel threatened enough to nationalize the economy is irrelevant to the analysis of the Soviet economy. Here the question is whether a new bourgeois class can come into being, a class which exploits the working class based on its control of the state. Trotsky himself admitted that the Soviet bureaucracy defended nationalized property "as the source of its power and its income". So if this group ruled the working class based on its control of nationalized property, and if it did so in an economic system which was based on commodity production, why wasn't this state-capitalism?

    . Trotsky's reply was that there's nothing new under the sun. There wasn't such a class in the past, so by definition state-capitalism must refer to the old proprietors. Yet, when a factory is seized by one owner from another owner, whether by means fair or foul, it doesn't mean that capitalism has been abolished, only that the ownership has changed. It is only when the working masses take over the factories that capitalism is threatened.

    [...]

    About those Trotskyists who recognize the existence
    of state-capitalism

    . As mentioned above, there are some Trotskyist groups who do recognize that the Stalinist countries are state-capitalist regimes, and not workers' states. But they still try to follow Trotsky's general standpoint on the nature of socialism.

    . For example, the trend around the SWP of Britain (the International Socialist trend) follows the theories of Tony Cliff, who held that Stalinist Russia was state-capitalist. But Cliff also held that, as the state sector was dominant in Russia, capitalism intruded upon the Soviet Union only due to its relationship to the world market. Otherwise, he believed, the Soviet state sector would have functioned harmoniously as a single large factory, and produced simply for use-value. This brings his conception of the state sector close to Trotsky. True, Cliff believed that Stalinism would still have been a system of exploitation, albeit a non-capitalist one. But Cliff didn't see the internal forces of competition and anarchy in the Soviet state sector.

    . The League for the Revolutionary Party is one of the few Trotskyist groups that recognize the competition and anarchy that sprang up from inside the Soviet state sector. This is developed in Walter Daum's book The Life and Death of Stalinism. But due to his holding fast to various Trotskyist dogmas, Daum can't analyze the Soviet economy consistently. Thus Daum will at one point stress the competition and anarchy that arises internally in state-capitalism, and at another point denigrate this competition and say the Soviet economy should be looked at from the point of view that it formed a "single national capital". Sometimes he says that the law of value is good, sometimes bad. And so on. (21)

    (12) The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, Ch. 1, "What Has Been Achieved", Section 1, p. 8 (Merit Publishers edition). The "sixth part of the earth's surface" is, of course, a reference to the USSR.

    (13) The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter IX, "Social Relations in the Soviet Union, Sec. 2 "The Question of the Character of the Soviet Union Not Yet Decided by History", pp. 254-5, 285.

    (14) Marxist Economic Theory, 1968, vol. II. See Chapter 15, "The Soviet Economy", section "The 'economic categories' in the U.S.S.R.", p. 560 for the assertion that it is not capitalist. See pp. 564-5 for the assertion that it is not socialist. Also see Ch. 18 "Origin, Rise and Withering Away of Political Economy", section "An apologetic variant of Marxism", p. 724 for criticism of the view that "the construction of socialism had been completed" in the Soviet Union.

    (15) Chapter 9 "Social Relations in the Soviet Union", Section 2 "Is the Bureaucracy a Ruling Class?", The Revolution Betrayed, p. 248.

    (16) Ibid. , p. 249.

    (17) Chapter IX "Social Relations in the Soviet Union", Section 1 "State Capitalism?", The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 245-6.

    (21) See "On Walter Daum's 'The Life and Death of Stalinism': Competition among Soviet enterprises and ministries, and the collapse of the Soviet Union" in Communist Voice #19, December 8, 1998. It is also available on the internet at <www. communistvoice. org/19cDaum. html>.
    "The capitalist mode of production is based on a monopoly of the means of production in the hands of the class of capitalists… There is no difference in principle whatsoever whether the state power is a direct expression of this monopoly or whether this monopoly is 'privately' organised. In either case there remains commodity economy (in the first place the world market) and, what is more important, the class relations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie."
    (Nikolai Bukharin, quoted in Michael Haynes, Nikolai Bukharin & the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, 1985, New York, Holmes & Meier, p. 35.)

    "... of course, our economic system can be changed into 'true' state capitalism, if the class struggles in the sphere of direct processes of production and in the political sphere result in the loss of power by the working class."
    (N.I. Bukharin, 'The Economic Structure of Soviet Russia', International Press Correspondence, vol. 2, no. 22, 21 MARCH 1922, p, 165; Pravda, no. 30, 8 February 1922, p. 1.)

    From The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia. Warning, get ready for epic fail:
    On September 24, 1938, with the Nazis moving on Czechoslovakia, the leading editorial in the Socialist Appeal, New York Trotskyist newspaper declared: "Czechoslovakia is one of the most monstrous national abortions produced by the labors of the infamous Versailles conference... Czechoslovakia's democracy has never been more than a shabby cloak for advanced capitalist exploitation... This perspective necessarily entails the firmest revolutionary opposition to the Czechoslovakian bourgeois state, under any and all circumstances."

    Under such pseudo-revolutionary slogans, the Trotskyists throughout Europe and America carried on an incessant campaign against the defense of small nations from Axis aggression and against collective security. As Abyssinia, Spain, North and Central China, Austria and Czechoslovakia were invaded one after another by Germany, Italy and Japan, the members of Trotsky's Fourth International spread throughout the world the propaganda that collective security was an "incitement to war."

    [....]

    "The Stalinist version of the United Front," declared C.L.R. James, a leading British Trotskyist, "is not unity for action but unity to lead all workers into imperialistic war."

    Trotsky himself ceaselessly "warned" against the "dangers" involved in an Axis defeat at the hands of the nonaggressor nations. "A victory of France, of Great Britain and the Soviet Union... over Germany and Japan," Trotsky declared at the Hearings in Mexico in April 1937, "could signify first a transformation of the Soviet Union into a bourgeois state and the transformation of France into a fascist state, because for a victory over Hitler it is necessary to have a monstrous military machine... A victory can signify the destruction of fascism in Germany and the establishment of fascism in France."
    The prominent American Trotskyist James Burnham, subsequently author of the widely promoted The Managerial Revolution, represented the Moscow Trials as an insidious attempt on Stalin's part to enlist the aid of France, Great Britain and the United States in a "holy war" against the Axis, and to bring about the international persecution of "all those who. stand for the policies of revolutionary defeatism [i.e., the Trotskyists]." On April 15, 1937, in an introduction to a Trotskyist pamphlet on the Pyatakov-Radek trial, Burnham wrote. "Yes: the Trials are an integral and an outstanding part of the preparations of Stalinism for the coming war. Stalinism aims to enlist the masses of France, Great Britain and the United States in the armies of their own imperialist governments, in a holy war against the attack which Stalin expects to be launched against the Soviet Union by Germany and Japan. Through the Trials, operating on a world-wide scale, Stalinism thus attempts to eliminate every possible center of resistance to this social-patriotic betrayal."
    “After the experiences of the last few years, it would be childish to suppose that the Stalinist bureaucracy can be removed by means of a party or soviet congress. In reality, the last congress of the Bolshevik Party took place at the beginning of 1923, the Twelfth Party Congress. All subsequent congresses were bureaucratic parades. Today, even such congresses have been discarded. No normal 'constitutional' ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletarian vanguard only by force”
    (Trotsky, The Class Nature of the Soviet State, 1933.)

    ''Fascism is winning victory after victory and its best ally, the one that is clearing its path throughout the world, is Stalinism.''
    -Trotsky, Caïn Dugachvili va jusqu'au bout (April 1938). L'appareil, p. 238.

    Also, Lenin calling for the expelling of Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Party, 1917: http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/LPM17.html

    ‘It will take decades to overcome the evils of bureaucracy. It is a very difficult struggle, and anyone who says we can rid ourselves of bureaucratic practices overnight by adopting anti-bureaucratic platforms is nothing but a quack with a bent for fine words’. (See Lenin: Collected Works Volume 32; pp. 56-57)

    A RevLeft post by user Leo, abridged. It is a left-communist work, but it is interesting because it sheds some light on the semi-left-communism of the early Bukharin.
    Bukharin was probably among the most intelligent leaders of the Bolshevik Party, if not the brightest mind among them all. This did not, however, lead to good policies all the time... "He will slay us, he will strangle us, he is the new Genghis Khan" he said of Stalin. [On] the internal direction in Russia, he said: "the root of the evil is that the party and the state are so completely merged."

    "Stalin will stop at nothing. His policy is leading us to civil war, he will compelled to drown rebellions in blood. He will denounce us as the defenders of the kulak". The issue for Bukharin was about industrialization Bukharin said in the 1924-28 faction fights that the application of Trotsky's 'super-industrialization' strategy could only be carried out by the most elephantine state bureaucracy history had ever seen. When Stalin's... industrial program [was] put it into practice, he completely confirmed Bukharin, as Trotsky himself acknowledged in a backhanded way after most of his faction in Russia had capitulated to Stalin. Bukharin had said: "The attempt to replace all the petty producers and small peasants by bureaucrats produces an apparatus so colossal that the expense of maintaining it is incomparably greater than the unproductive expenditures resulting from the anarchic conditions of petty production: in sum, the whole economic apparatus of the proletarian state not only does not facilitate but actually hinders the development of the productive forces. It leads directly to the opposite of what it is supposed to do."

    [...] For example the Italian left communist Bordiga.. had supported Trotsky in the faction fight of the 20's, largely for... opposition to 'socialism in one country' [and] took his distance from the super-industrialization strategy of the Left Opposition. Bordiga felt after 1945 that only something like Bukharin's internal strategy had any hope of preserving... the regime, which to Bordiga was more important than Russian industrialization... the industrialization policy was the fatal blow[.]

    [...] Although the most famous position of the first Russian left communist group Kommunist was their opposition to the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, this wasn't their most significant.. point historically. Bukharin's analysis of imperialism basically laid the foundations of Lenin's work, however... Bukharin opposed the right of nations to self-determination as a proletarian tactic at the Berne Conference of the Bolshevik Party in 1915, Lenin was the first to point out that one could not reject one point in the proletariat’s struggle for democracy without calling into question this struggle itself: if self-determination was impossible to achieve in the imperialist epoch, why not all other democratic demands? Lenin posed the problem as how to link the advent of imperialism with the struggle for reforms and democracy, and from this standpoint he denounced Bukharin’s position as imperialist economism; that is, a rejection of the need for a political struggle, and therefore a capitulation to imperialism.

    Bukharin and the Kommunist group posed the problem... Whereas communists were formerly in favour of the struggle for [bourgeois] democracy, now they opposed it... "It is perfectly clear, that the specific slogans and aims of the movement are wholly dependent on the character of the epoch in which the fighting proletariat has to operate. The past era was one of gathering strength and preparing for revolution. The present era is one of the revolution itself, and this fundamental distinction also gives rise to profound differences in the concrete slogans and aims of the movement. The proletariat needed [bourgeois] democracy in the past because it was as yet unable to think about dictatorship in real terms... Democracy was valuable in so far as it helped the proletariat to climb a step higher in its consciousness, but the proletariat was forced to present its class demands in a 'democratic' form... But there is no need to make a virtue out of a necessity... the time has come for a direct assault on the capitalist fortress and the suppression of the exploiters."

    Since [in Bukharin's view] the period of progressive bourgeois democracy was now over, and imperialism was inherent to capitalism’s continued existence; it was utopian and reactionary to advance anti-imperialist demands which left capitalist relations intact. The only answer to imperialism was the proletarian revolution: "Any advancement of 'partial' tasks, of the 'liberation of nations' within the realm of capitalist civilization, means the diverting of proletarian forces from the actual solution to the problem, and their fusion with the forces of the corresponding national bourgeois groups... The slogan of 'self-determination of nations' is first of all utopian (it cannot be realized within the limits of capitalism) and harmful as a slogan which disseminates illusions. In this respect it does not differ at all from the slogans of the courts of arbitration, of disarmament, etc, which presupposes the possibility of so-called 'peaceful capitalism.'"

    But Bukharin went further in his rejection of the minimum programme... Whereas in ascendant capitalism the state had ensured the general conditions for exploitation by individual capitalist, the imperialist epoch gave rise to a militaristic state machine which directly exploited the proletariat, with a change from individual ownership of capital to collective ownership through unified capitalist structures (in trust, syndicates, etc.) and the fusion of these structures with the state. This tendency towards state capitalism spread from the economy to all areas of social life: "All these organizations have a tendency to fuse with one another and to become transformed into one organization of the rulers. This is the newest step of development, and one which has become especially apparent during the war... So there comes into being a single, all-embracing organization, the modern imperialist pirate state, an omnipotent organization of bourgeois dominance.... and if only the most advanced states have attained this stage, then each day, and especially each day of war, tends to make this fact general."

    [...] The Kommunist group also [stated] in 1918: "'The defense of the socialist fatherland' will then prove in actual fact to be defense of a petty bourgeois motherland subject to the influence of international capital."

    The late Bukharin almost completely reversed his early positions....
    http://www.ericlee.info/2005/02/menshevism_in_iraq.html
    Interestingly enough, Trotsky's own views on Menshevism underwent a change once he escaped from the suffocating atmosphere of the Leninist party in Russia. Though he initially supported the infamous Menshevik Party trial in the early 1930s seen by many as a dress rehearsal for the later Stalinist show trials he later repudiated his own view, admitting that the Mensheviks accused of sabotage were probably innocent victims of the emerging Stalinist terror. Even he began to understand that not every bad thing said about the Mensheviks was necessarily true.

    Furthermore, as his views in the 1930s grew closer and closer to those of the Mensheviks, there were even some contacts which unfortunately did not bear any fruit.

    The great Menshevik historian Boris Nicolaevsky befriended Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov. Some Mensheviks drifted into the Trotskyist camp. Others were increasingly blunt about the similarities in their emerging analysis of the Stalinist regime.

    Sometimes the parallels are striking. For example, most Trotskyists know about the split in the Fourth International in 1940 and the development by Max Shachtman of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism to explain the rise of new exploiting ruling class in the USSR.

    But few will be familiar with a parallel development in the Menshevik camp at precisely the same moment. Rudolf Hilferding, described by some as "the most outstanding Marxist theorist alive" in 1940, wrote an essay called "State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy" in 1940, arguing that Stalinist Russia was neither capitalist nor socialist, but was a new form of society. This view nearly identical to Shachtman's appeared in the Menshevik publication Sotsialisticheskii vestnik.

    Had Trotsky and the Mensheviks in exile been somewhat more open to one another, the history of the non-Stalinist left might have been radically different.

    [....]

    The Mensheviks originated in the Iskra group of Marxists led by Lenin and Martov. That group succeeded in taking over the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party at its 1903 congress, but split over several organizational questions. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks remained, formally, members of the same party, sharing the same program and often cooperating, more or less until the 1917 revolution. Several attempts at party unity were made, usually with the backing of the International, but to little avail. Trotsky was far closer to the Mensheviks, sharing their concerns about a possible concentration of power in the Leninist faction.

    In 1917 the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks drew even closer with the outbreak of revolution. Lenin's arrival in Petrograd put an end to all that as he saw the chance for the Bolsheviks to seize and hold state power.

    In October 1917, the Mensheviks divided over the question of their attitude toward the Bolshevik revolution, but eventually the faction headed by Martov prevailed. Martov supported the Bolsheviks in the civil war, and his party played a role in the unions and the soviets until the early 1920s when they were finally crushed. His faction's support for the revolution became known as the "Martov Line".

    For many decades thereafter, the Menshevik party in exile played the role that Trotskyists later grew so fond of: being left-wing critics of the Stalinist regime. Reading over the writings of the outstanding Menshevik thinkers such as Dan, Martov, Nicolaevsky, Abramovich, Dallin and others, one would be hard-pressed to find what the big difference was between the Trotskyist critique and the Menshevik one. Dallin himself wrote as early as 1929, "Trotsky's analysis is very close to our own."
    "Lenin also stated that 'the new bourgeoisie' was 'arising from among our Soviet government employees.'" (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed., Vol. 29, p. 162. Quoted in Lin, Biao. Report to the Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party of China. English ed. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, April 14, 1969.)

    "A second, very serious blow to Mexico's left came when Trotsky and his Mexican followers disseminated the rumor that communists and Nazis had formed a coalition in Mexico to prepare a coup against the Cárdenas administration in the context of the approaching presidential elections. This rumor had first emerged in the U.S. Congress's Dies Investigative Committee, and it gained widespread popular attention on October 2, 1939, through a Ultimas Noticias newspaper article with the title 'Ofensiva Contra los Stali-Nazis.' It created a pro-Allied propaganda monster that, in the end, almost convinced Allied governments that its own propaganda were fact. In November 1939, the artist and sometimes Communist party member Diego Rivera reinforced existing fears when he stated that Mexico was already in the hands of the 'Communazis.' Right away, conservative Mexican anticommunist senators of Mexico's Congress jumped on Rivera's bandwagon and demanded the dissolution of the Mexican Communist Party and the denunciation of its members as traitors to the country. Against the background of the Soviet invasion of Finland, they argued 'that taking orders from Stalin and to agitate in such a manner as to be subversive in character and to undermine the framework of Mexican Governmental procedure' was un-Mexican!

    The debate received new fuel on April 13, 1940, this time during the German invasions of the Benelux countries and France. Again, Ultimas Noticias published an article about 'outstanding members of the Comintern in Mexico.' Quoting Diego Rivera, a German exile, and other confidential agents as sources, the article claimed that the Comintern's goal in Mexico was to foment a civil war through agitation, with the intention of distracting U.S. attention from Europe and, subsequently, preventing the United States from entering the European conflict. Most importantly, it claimed again that Russian and German agents were working together to start a revolt in Mexico."
    (Schuler, Friedrich. Mexico between Hitler and Roosevelt: Mexican Foreign Relations in the Age of Lázaro Cárdenas, 1934-1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1998. p. 144.)

    Might as well post this too for completeness;
    One need only read all 45 volumes of Lenin’s Collected Works as well as some of his other writings to see that he often criticized and vehemently denounced Trotsky. Those who seem to think Trotsky was the proper carrier of Lenin’s torch definitely need to read the following 10 postings in this regard. But first we should note Lenin’s compliments of Stalin.

    A few noteworthy instances are the following.

    In a 1913 article in the Social Democrat entitled The National Programme of the R.S.D.L.P. Lenin stated,
    “Why and how the national question has, at the present time, been bought to the fore...is shown in detail in the resolution itself. There is hardly any need to dwell on this in view of the clarity of the situation. This situation and the fundamentals of a national programme for Social-Democracy have recently been dealt with in Marxist theoretical literature (the most prominent place being taken by Stalin’s article.” He is referring to the writing by Stalin entitled Marxism and the National Question.


    At the 11th Congress of the R.C.P. (B) in 1922 Lenin was more flattering toward Stalin when he said, “It is terribly difficult to do this; we lack the men! But Preobrazhensky comes along and airily says that Stalin has jobs in two Commissariats. Who among us has not sinned in this way? who has not undertaking several duties at once? And how can we do otherwise? What can we do to preserve the Nationalities; to handle all the Turkestan, Caucasian, and other questions? These are all political questions! They have to be settled. These are questions that have engaged the attention of European states for hundreds of years, and only an infinitesimal number of them have been settled in democratic republics. We are settling them; and we need a man to whom the representatives of any of these nations can go and discuss their difficulties in all detail. Where can we find such a man? I don’t think Comrade Preobrazhensky could suggest any better candidate than Comrade Stalin.
    Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 33, page 315

    In a February 1913 letter to Gorky Lenin said in regard to Stalin, “We have a marvellous Georgian who has sat down to write a big article for Prosveshcheniye, for which he has collected all the Austrian and other materials.”
    Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 35, page 84.


    ************************************************** *************

    NOW WE CAN MOVE ON TO THE FIRST POST

    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY

    POST #1

    It is very important to note that the following statements about Trotsky’s ideas, tactics, and personality were made by Lenin, not Stalin.

    At the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P in 1903 Lenin said in the Third Speech in the Discussion on the Agrarian Programme,
    “Therein lies the fundamental difference between us and the liberals, whose talk about changes and reforms ‘pollutes’ the minds of the people. If we were to set forth in detail all the demands for the abolition of serf-ownership, we should fill whole volumes. That is why we mention only the more important forms and varieties of serfdom, and leave it to our committees in the various localities to draw up and advance their particular demands in development of the general programme. Trotsky’s remark to the effect that we cannot concern ourselves with local demand is wrong, for the question...is not only a local one.”

    At the same Congress Lenin made an extremely important and farsighted comment with respect to Trotsky’s theoretical wisdom. He stated,
    “To come to the main subject, I must say that Comrade Trotsky has completely misunderstood Comrade Plekhanov’s fundamental idea, and his arguments have therefore evaded the gist of the matter. He has spoken of intellectuals and workers, of the class point of view and of the mass movement, but he has failed to notice a basic question: does my formulation narrow or expand the concept of a Party member? If he had asked himself that question, he would have easily have seen that my formulation narrows this concept, while Martov’s expands it, for (to use Martov’s own correct expression) what distinguishes his concept is its ‘elasticity.’ And in the period of Party life that we are now passing through it is just this ‘elasticity’ that undoubtedly opens the door to all elements of confusion, vacillation, and opportunism. To refute this simple and obvious conclusion it has to be proved that there are no such elements; but it has not even occurred to Comrade Trotsky to do that. Nor can that be proved, for everyone knows that such elements exist in plenty, and they are to be found in the working class too....
    Comrade Trotsky completely misinterpreted the main idea of my book, What Is To Be Done? when he spoke about the Party not being a conspiratorial organization. He forgot that in my book I propose a number of various types of organizations, from the most secret and most exclusive to comparatively broad and ‘loose’ organizations. He forgot that the Party must be only the vanguard, the leader of the vast masses of the working class, the whole (or nearly the whole) of which works ‘under the control and direction’ of the Party organizations, but the whole of which does not and should not belong to a ‘party.’ Now let us see what conclusions Comrade Trotsky arrives at in consequence of his fundamental mistake. He had told us here that if rank after rank of workers were arrested, and all the workers were to declare that they did not belong to the Party, our Party would be a strange one indeed! Is it not the other way round? Is it not Comrade Trotsky’s argument that is strange? He regards as something sad that which a revolutionary with any experience at all would only rejoice at. If hundreds and thousands of workers who were arrested for taking part in strikes and demonstrations did not prove to be members of Party organizations, it would only show that we have good organizations, and that we are fulfilling our task of keeping a more or less limited circle of leaders secret and drawing the broadest possible masses into the movement.”

    In an article written in 1905 entitled “Social-Democracy and the Provisional Revolutionary Government” Lenin spoke of Parvus and said,
    “He openly advocated (unfortunately, together with the windbag Trotsky in a foreward to the latter’s bombastic pamphlet ‘Before the Ninth of January’) the idea of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship, the idea that it was the duty of Social-Democrats to take part in the provisional revolutionary government after the overthrow of the autocracy.”

    Later in the same article Lenin stated,
    “It would be extremely harmful to entertain any illusions on this score. If that windbag Trotsky now writes (unfortunately, side by side with Parvus) that a Father Gapon could appear only once,’ that ‘there is no room for a second Gapon,’ he does so simply because he is a windbag. If there were no room in Russia for a second Gapon, there would be no room for a truly ‘great’ consummated democratic revolution.”

    In a 1904 letter to Stasova, Lengnik, and others Lenin stated,
    A new pamphlet by Trotsky came out recently, under the editorship of *Iskra*, as was announced. This makes it the “Credo” as it were of the new Iskra. The pamphlet is a pack of brazen lies, a distortion of the facts.... The pamphlet is a slap in the face both for the present Editorial Board of the C.O. and for all Party workers. Reading a pamphlet of this kind you can see clearly that the “Minority” has indulged in so much lying and falsehood that it will be incapable of producing anything viable....”

    In a 1905 article entitled “Wrathful Impotence” Lenin stated,
    ‘We shall remind the reader that even Mr. Struve, who has often voiced sympathy in principle with Trotsky, Starover, Akimov, and Martynov, and with the new-Iskra trends in general and the new-Iskra Conference in particular--even Mr. Struve was in his time obliged to acknowledge that their stand is not quite a correct one, or rather quite an incorrect one.”

    At the 1907 Fifth Congress of the R.S.D.L.P Lenin stated,
    “A few words about Trotsky. He spoke on behalf of the ‘Centre,’ and expressed the views of the Bund. He fulminated against us for introducing our ‘unacceptable’ resolution. He threatened an outright split, the withdrawal of the Duma group, which is supposedly offended by our resolution. I emphasize these words. I urge you to reread our resolution.... When Trotsky stated: ‘Your unacceptable resolution prevents your right ideas being put into effect,’ I called out to him: ‘Give us your resolution!’ Trotsky replied: ‘No first withdraw yours.’ A fine position indeed for the ‘Centre’ to take, isn’t it? Because of our (in Trotsky’s opinion) mistake (‘tactlessness’) he punishes the whole Party.... Why did you not get your resolution passed, we shall be asked in the localities. Because the Centre (for whom Trotsky was speaking) took umbrage at it, and in a huff refused to set forth its own principles! That is a position based not on principle, but on the Centre’s lack of principle.”

    Speaking at the same Congress Lenin objected to Trotsky’s amendments to the Bolshevik resolution on the attitude towards bourgeois parties by saying,
    “It must be agreed that Trotsky’s amendment is not Menshevik, that it expresses the ‘very same,’ that is, bolshevik, idea. But Trotsky has expressed this idea in a way that is scarcely better (than the Menshevik--Ed.).... Trotsky’s insertion is redundant, for we are not fishing for unique cases in the resolution, but are laying down the basic line of Social-Democracy in the bourgeois Russian revolution.”

    While later discussing the same issue (the attitude the party should have toward bourgeois parties) Lenin said,
    “The question of the attitude of Social-Democracy towards bourgeois parties is one of those known as ‘general’ or ‘theoretical’ questions, i.e., such that are not directly connected with any definite practical task confronting the Party at a given moment. At theLondon Congress of the R.S.D.L.P, the Mensheviks and the Bundists conducted a fierce struggle against the inclusion of such questions in the agenda, and they were, unfortunately, supported in this by Trotsky, who does not belong to either side. The opportunistic wing of our Party (notice that that is the group with which Trotsky allied himself--Ed.) like that of other Social-Democratic parties, defended a ‘business-like’ or ‘practical’ agenda for the Congress. They shied away from ‘broad and general’ questions. They forgot that in the final analysis broad, principled politics are the only real, practical politics. They forgot that anybody who tackles partial problems without having previously settled general problems, will inevitably and at every step ‘come up against’ those general problems without himself realizing it. To come up against them blindly in every individual case means to doom one’s politics to the worst vacillation and lack of principle.”
    And it is quite clear to which philosophy Trotsky adhered.


    ************************************************** *************

    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY
    POST #2

    Our list of statements about Trotsky by Lenin continues:

    In 1909 Lenin wrote an article entitled “The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in our Revolution” and said the following,
    “As for Trotsky, whom Comrade Martov has involved in the controversy of third parties which he has organized...we positively cannot go into a full examination of his views here. A separate article of considerable length would be needed for this. By just touching upon Trotsky’s mistaken views, and quoting scraps of them, Comrade Martov only sows confusion in the mind of the reader.... Trotsky’s major mistake is that he ignores the bourgeois character of the revolution and has no clear conception of the transition from this revolution to the socialist revolution. This major mistake leads to those mistakes on side issues which Comrade Martov repeats when he quotes a couple of them with sympathy and approval. Not to leave matters in the confused state to which Comrade Martov has reduced them by his exposition, we shall at least expose the fallacy of those arguments of Trotsky which have won approval of Comrade Martov.”

    Later in the same article Lenin states,
    “Trotsky’s second statement quoted by Comrade Martov is wrong too. It is not true that ‘the whole question is, who will determine the government’s policy, who will constitute a homogeneous majority in it,’ and so forth. And it is particularly untrue when Comrade Martov uses it as an argument against the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Trotsky himself, in the course of his argument, concedes that ‘representatives of the democratic population will take part’ in the ‘workers’ government,’ i.e., concedes that there will be a government consisting of representatives of the proletariat AND the peasantry.
    On what terms the proletariat will take part in the government of the revolution is quite another question, and it is quite likely that on this question the Bolsheviks will disagree not only with Trotsky, but also with the Polish Social-Democrats.”
    Notice how Lenin does not consider Trotsky to be a bolshevik.

    And finally, Lenin also states in the same article,
    “In any case, Comrade Martov’s conclusion that the conference agreed with Trotsky, of all people, on the question of the relations between the proletariat and the peasantry in the struggle for power is an amazing contradiction of the facts, is an attempt to read into a word a meaning that was never discussed, not mentioned, and not even thought of at the conference.”

    In 1910 Lenin wrote several articles in which he said the following:
    Article= “Faction of Supporter of Otzovism and God-Building” in which he said,
    “The ‘point’ was that the Mensheviks (through the mouth of Trotsky in 1903-04) had to declare: the old Iskra and the new ones are poles apart.”

    Article= “Notes of a Publicist” in which he said,
    “With touching unanimity the liquidators and the otzovists are abusing the Bolsheviks up hill and down dale. The Bolsheviks are to blame, the Bolshevik Centre is to blame.... But the strongest abuse from Axelrod and Alexinsky only serves to screen their complete failure to understand the meaning and importance of Party unity. Trotsky’s resolution only differs outwardly from the ‘effusions’ of Axelrod and Alexinsky. It is drafted very ‘cautiously’ and lays claim to ‘above faction’ fairness. But what is its meaning? The ‘Bolshevik leaders’ are to blame for everything--this is the same ‘philosophy of history’ as that of Axelrod and Alexinsky....
    This question needs only to be put for one to see how hollow are the eloquent phrases in Trotsky’s resolution, to see how in reality they serve to defend the very position held by Axelrod and Co., and Alexinsky and Co.... In the very first words of his resolution Trotsky expressed the full spirit of the worst kind of conciliation, “conciliation” in inverted commas, or a sectarian and philistine conciliation....
    It is in this that the enormous difference lies between real partyism, which consists in purging the Party of liquidationism and otzovism, and the‘conciliation’ of Trotsky and Co., which actually renders the most faithful service to the liquidators and otzovists, and is therefore *an evil* that is all the more dangerous to the Party the more cunningly, artfully and rhetorically it cloaks itself with professedly pro-Party, professedly anti-factional declamations.”
    Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 16, pages 209-211

    Later Lenin stated, “The draft of this resolution was submitted to the Central Committee by myself, and the clause in question was altered by the plenum itself after the commission had finished its work; it was altered on the motion of Trotsky, against whom I fought without success.”
    Ibid. page 215

    And this was later followed by,
    “Here you have the material--little, but characteristic material--which makes it clear how empty Trotsky’s and Yonov’s phrases are.”

    Referring to Trotsky’s stance while discussing liquidationism Lenin says,
    “Of this we shall speak further on, where it be our task to demonstrate the utter superficiality of the view taken by Trotsky....”

    In another stinging indictment in the same article Lenin says,
    “Hence the ‘conciliatory’ efforts of Trotsky and Yonov are not ridiculous and miserable. These efforts can only be explained by a complete failure to understand what is taking place. They are harmless efforts now, for there is no one behind them except the sectarian diplomats abroad, except ignorance and lack of intelligence in some out-of-the-way places.”

    Continuing in the same vein, Lenin states,
    “The heinous crime of *spineless ‘conciliators’* like Yonov and Trotsky, who defend or justify these people, is that they are causing their ruin by making them more dependent on liquidationism....
    That this position of Yonov and Trotsky is wrong should have been obvious to them for the simple reason that it is refuted by facts.”

    In an article entitled “How certain Social-Democrats Inform the International About the State of Affairs in the R.S.D.L.P.” Lenin stated,
    “Yes, it is the ‘non-factional’ Comrade Trotsky, who has no compunction about openly advertising his faction’s propaganda sheet.”

    In an article written in 1910 entitled “An Open Letter to All Pro-Party Social-Democrats” Lenin said about Trotsky,
    “If Trotsky and similar advocates of the liquidators and otzovists declare this rapprochement ‘devoid of political content,’ such speeches testify only to Trotsky’s *entire lack of principle*, the real hostility of his policy to the policy of the actual (and not merely confined to promises) abolition of factions.”


    ************************************************** *************
    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY
    POST #3

    Our list of denunciations of Trotsky by Lenin continues:

    In a 1911 letter “To the Central Committee” Lenin said,
    “We resume our freedom of struggle against the liberals and *anarchists*, who are being encouraged by the leader of the ‘conciliators,’ Trotsky. The question of the money is for us a secondary matter, although of course we do not intend to hand over the money of the faction to the bloc of liquidators+anarchists+Trotsky, while in no way renouncing our right to expose before the international Social-Democratic movement this bloc, its financial ‘basis’ (the notorious Vperyodist ‘funds’ safeguarded from exposure by Trotsky and the Golosists).”

    Later Lenin says,
    “There has been a full development of what was already outlined quite clearly at the plenum (for instance, *the defence of the anarchist school, by Trotsky* + the Golosists). The bloc of liberals and anarchists with the aid of the conciliators is shamelessly destroying the remnants of the Party from outside and helping to demoralize it from within. The formalistic game of ‘inviting’ the Golosists and Trotskyists on to the central bodies is finally reducing to impotence the already weakened pro-Party elements.”


    In a 1911 article entitled “Historical Meaning of Inner-Party Struggle in Russia” Lenin commented,
    “The theory that the struggle between Bolshevism and Menshevism is a struggle for influence over an immature proletariat is not a new one. We have been encountering it since 1905 in innumerable books, pamphlets, and articles in the liberal press. Martov and Trotsky are putting before the German comrades *liberal views with a Marxist coating*....”
    Trotsky declares: ‘It is an illusion’ to imagine that Menshevism and Bolshevism ‘have struck deep roots in the depths of the proletariat.’ This is a specimen of the resonant but empty phrases of which our Trotsky is a master. The roots of the divergence between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks lie, not in the ‘depths of the proletariat,’ but in the economic content of the Russian revolution. By ignoring this content, Martov and Trotsky have deprived themselves of the possibility of understanding the historical meaning of the inner-Party struggle in Russia.”

    Later in the same article Lenin states,
    “For the same reason Trotsky’s argument that splits in the International Social-Democratic movement are caused by the ‘process of adaptation of the social-revolutionary class to the limited (narrow) conditions of parliamentarism,’ while in the Russian Social-Democratic movement they are caused by the adaptation of the intelligentsia to the proletariat, is *absolutely false*.
    Trotsky writes.... This truly ‘unrestrained’ phrase-mongering is merely the ‘ideological shadow’ of liberalism. Both Martov and Trotsky mix up different historical periods and compare Russia, which is going through her bourgeois revolution, with Europe, where these revolutions were completed long ago.”

    Subsequently Lenin says,
    “As regards boycotting the trade unions and the local self-government bodies, what Trotsky says is *absolutely untrue*. It is equally untrue to say that boycottism runs through the whole history of Bolshevism.... *Trotsky distorts Bolshevism*, because he has never been able to form any definite views on the role of the proletariat in the Russian bourgeois revolution.”

    In the same article Lenin said regarding Trotsky,
    “It is not true. And this untruth expresses, firstly, *Trotsky’s utter lack of theoretical understanding*. Trotsky has absolutely failed to understand why the plenum described both liquidationism and otzovism as a ‘manifestation of bourgeois influence on the proletariat’.
    Secondly, in practice, this untruth expresses the ‘policy’ of advertisement pursued by Trotsky’s faction. That Trotsky’s venture is an attempt to create a faction is now obvious to all, since Trotsky has removed the Central Committee’s representative from Pravda. In advertising his faction Trotsky does not hesitate to tell the Germans that the Party is falling to pieces, that both factions are falling to pieces and that he, Trotsky, alone, is saving the situation. Actually, we all see now--and the latest resolution adopted by the Trotskyists in the name of the Vienna Club, on November 26, 1910 proves this quite conclusively--that *Trotsky enjoys the confidence exclusively of the liquidators and the Vperyodists*.
    The extent of *Trotsky’s shamelessness* in belittling the Party and exalting himself before the Germans is shown, for instance, by the following. Trotsky writes that the ‘working masses’ in Russia consider that the ‘Social-Democratic Party stands outside their circle’ and he talks of ‘Social-Democrats without Social-Democracy.
    How could one expect Mr. Potresov and his friends to refrain from bestowing kisses on Trotsky for such statements?
    But these statements are refuted not only by the entire history of the revolution, but even by the results of the elections to the Third Duma from the workers’ curia....
    That is what Trotsky writes. But the facts are as follows....
    When Trotsky gives the German comrades a detailed account of the stupidity of ‘otzovism’ and describes this trend as a ‘crystallization’ of the boycottism characteristic of Bolshevism as a whole...the German reader certainly gets no idea how much subtle *perfidy* there is in such an exposition. Trotsky’s Jesuitical ‘reservation’ consists in omitting a small, very small ‘detail.’ He ‘forgot’ to mention that at an official meeting of its representatives held as far back as the spring of 1909, the Bolshevik faction repudiated and expelled the otzovists. But it is just this ‘detail’ that is inconvenient for Trotsky, who wants to talk of the ‘falling to pieces’ of the Bolshevik faction (and then of the Party as well) and not of the falling away of the non-Social-Democratic elements!....
    ...Trotsky, on the other hand, represents only his own personal vacillations and nothing more. In 1903 he as a Menshevik; he abandoned Menshevism in 1904, returned to the Mensheviks in 1905 and merely flaunted ultra- revolutionary phrases; in 1906 he left them again; at the end of 1906 he advocated electoral agreements with the Cadets (i.e., he was in once more with the Mensheviks); and the spring of 1907, at the London Congress, he said that he differed from Rosa Luxemburg on “individual shades of ideas rather than on political tendencies”. One day Trotsky *plagiarizes* from the ideological stock-in-trade of one faction; the next day he plagiarizes from that of another, and therefore declares himself to be standing above both factions. In theory Trotsky is on no point in agreement with either the liquidators or the otzovists, but in actual practice he is in entire agreement with both the Golosists and the Vperyodists.
    Therefore, when Trotsky tells the German comrades that he represents the ‘general Party tendency,’ I am obliged to declare that Trotsky represents only his own faction and enjoys a certain amount of confidence exclusively among the otzovists and the liquidators. The following facts prove the correctness of my statement.”

    After listing his facts and referring to ‘Trotsky’s anti-Party policy’ Lenin states,
    “Let the readers now judge for themselves whether Trotsky represents a ‘general Party,’ or a ‘general anti-Party’ trend in Russian Social-Democracy.”


    ************************************************** *************
    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY
    POST #4

    Our on-going expose of Lenin’s Opinion of Trotsky continues:

    In an article entitled “Letter to the Russian Collegium of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. Lenin attacked Trotsky by saying,
    “Trotsky’s call for ‘friendly’ collaboration by the Party with the Golos and Vperyod groups is *disgusting hypocrisy and phrase-mongering*. Everybody is aware that for the whole year since the Plenary Meeting the Golos and Vperyod groups have worked in a ‘friendly’ manner against the Party (and were secretly supported by Trotsky). Actually, it is only the Bolsheviks and Plekhanov’s group who have for a whole year carried out friendly Party work in the Central Organ. Trotsky’s attacks on the bloc of Bolsheviks and Plekhanov’s group are not new; what is new is the outcome of his resolution: the Vienna Club (read “Trotsky”) has organized a ‘general Party fund for the purpose of preparing and
    convening a conference of the RSDLP
    This indeed is new. It is a direct step towards a split. It is *a clear violation of Party legality* and the start of an adventure in which Trotsky will come to grief. This is obviously a split.... It is quite possible and probable that ‘certain’ Vperyod ‘funds’ will be made available to Trotsky. You will appreciate that this will only stress the adventurist character of his undertaking.
    It is clear that this undertaking violates Party legality, since not a word is said about the Central Committee, which alone can call the conference. In addition, Trotsky, having ousted the C.C. representative on Pravda in August 1910, himself *lost all trace of legality*, converting Pravda from an organ supported by the representative of the C.C. into a purely factional organ....
    Taking advantage of this, ‘violation of legality,’ Trotsky seeks an organisational split, creating ‘his own’ fund for ‘his own’ conference.”

    After this critique of Trotsky, Lenin really comes down solid on him by stating,
    “You will understand why I call Trotsky’s move an adventure; it is an adventure in every respect. It is an adventure in the ideological sense. *Trotsky groups all the enemies of Marxism*, he unites Potresov and Maximov, who detest the ‘Lenin-Plekhanov’ bloc, as they like to call it. *Trotsky unites all to whom ideological decay is dear*, *all who are not
    concerned with the defence of Marxism*; *all philistines* who do not understand the reasons for the struggle and who do not wish to learn, think, and discover the ideological roots of the divergence of views. At this time of confusion, disintegration, and wavering it is easy for Trotsky to become the ‘hero of the hour’ and *gather all the shabby elements around himself*. The more openly this attempt is made, the more spectacular will be the defeat.
    It is an adventure in the party-political sense. At present everything goes to show that the real unity of the Social-Democratic Party is possible only on the basis of a sincere and unswerving repudiation of liquidationism and otzovism. It is clear that Potresov and the Vperyod group have renounced neither the one nor the other. Trotsky unites them, basely deceiving himself, *deceiving the Party, and deceiving the proletariat*. In reality, Trotsky will achieve nothing more than the strengthening of Potresov’s and Maximov’s anti-Party groups. The collapse of this adventure is inevitable.”

    And Lenin concludes by saying,
    “Three slogans bring out the essence of the present situation within the Party:...
    3. Struggle against the splitting tactics and the *unprincipled adventurism of Trotsky* in banding Potresov and Maximov against Social-Democracy.”

    In a 1910 article entitled “The State of Affairs in the Party” Lenin again attacks Trotsky’s anti-Party stance by saying,
    “...Trotsky’s statement of November 26, 1910...completely distorts the essence of the matter. Martov’s article and Trotsky’s resolution conceal definite practical actions--actions directed against the Party....
    Trotsky’s resolution, which calls upon organizations inthe localities to prepare for a “general Party conference” independent of, and against, the Central Committee, expresses the very aim of the Golos group--to destroy the central bodies so detested by the liquidators, and with them, the Party as an organization. It is not enough to lay bare the anti-Party activities of Golos and Trotsky; they must be fought.

    In the same article Lenin states,
    “When Trotsky, in referring to the Meeting’s decisions on Pravda, fails to mention this fact, all one can say about it is that *he is deceiving the workers*. And this deception on the part of Trotsky is all the more *malicious*, since in August Trotsky removed the representative of the Central Committee from Pravda....
    Therefore, we declare, in the name of the Party as a whole, that Trotsky is pursuing an anti-Party policy....
    Trotsky is trying again and again to evade the question by passing it over in silence or by phrase-mongering; *for he is concerned to keep the readers and the Party ignorant of the truth*, namely that Potresov’s group, the group of sixteen, are absolutely independent of the Party, represent expressly distinct factions, are not only doing nothing to revive the illegal organization, but are obstructing its revival, and are not pursuing any Social-Democratic tactics. *Trotsky is concerned with keeping the Party ignorant of the truth*, namely, that the Golos group represent a faction abroad, similarly separated from the Party, and that they actually render service to the liquidators in Russia....
    Trotsky maintains silence on this undeniable truth, because *the truth is detrimental to the real aims of his policy*. The real aims, however, are becoming clearer and more obvious even to the least far-sighted Party members. They are” an anti-Party block of the Potresovs with the Vperyod group--a bloc which Trotsky supports and is organizing.”

    Lenin later states,
    “We must again explain the fundamentals of Marxism to these masses; the defence of Marxist theory is again on the order of the day. When Trotsky declares that the rapprochement between the pro-Party Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks is ‘devoid of political content’ and ‘unstable,’ he is thereby merely revealing *the depths of his own ignorance*, he is thereby demonstrating *his own complete emptiness*.”

    Lenin later follows this up with,
    “...Trotsky, who is in the habit of joining any group that happens to be in the majority at the moment....
    Trotsky’s policy is adventurism in the organisational sense; for, as we have already pointed out, it violates Party legality....”


    ************************************************** *************
    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY
    POST #5

    Our continuing revelation of Lenin’s Opinion of Trotsky proceeds apace:

    In a 1911 article entitled “Judas Trotsky’s Blush of Shame” Lenin states,
    “At the Plenary Meeting *Judas Trotsky* made a big show of fighting liquidationism and otzovism. He vowed and swore that he was true to the Party. He was given a subsidy....
    Judas expelled the representative of the Central Committee from Pravda and began to write liquidationist articles....
    And it is this Judas who beats his breast and loudly professes his loyalty to the Party, claiming that he did not grovel before the Vperyod group and the liquidators.
    Such is Judas Trotsky’s blush of shame.”

    In a leaflet published in 1911 entitled “Resolution Adopted by the Second Paris Group of the R.S.D.L.P. on the State of Affairs in the Party” Lenin addressed this same theme by saying,
    “People like Trotsky, with his inflated phrases about the R.S.D.L.P. and his *toadying* to the liquidators, who have nothing in common with the R.S.D.L.P., today represent ‘*the prevalent disease*.’ They are trying to build up a career for themselves by cheap sermons about ‘agreement’--agreement with all and sundry, right down to Mr. Potresov and the otzovists.... Actually they preach surrender to the liquidators who are building a Stolypin labour party.”

    And in the 1911 article entitled “From the Camp of the Stolypin Labour Party” Lenin revisits this issue by saying,
    “Hence it is clear that Trotsky and the ‘Trotskyites and conciliators’ like him are *more pernicious than any liquidators*; the convinced liquidators state their views bluntly, and it is easy for the workers to detect where they are wrong, whereas the *Trotskys deceive the workers*, *cover up the evil*, and make it impossible to expose the evil and to remedy it. *Whoever supports Trotsky’s puny group supports a policy of lying and of deceiving the workers*, a policy of shielding the liquidators. Full freedom of action for Potresov and Co. in Russia, and the shielding of their deeds by ‘revolutionary’ phrase-mongering abroad--there you have the essence of the policy of ‘Trotskyism’.”


    In an article entitled “The New Faction of Conciliators, or the Virtuous” Lenin stated,
    Trotsky expressed conciliationism more consistently than anyone else. He was probably the only one who attempted to give the trend a theoretical foundation, namely: factions and factionalism express the struggle of the intelligentsia “for influence over the immature proletariat”.... For a long time now, Trotsky--who at one moment has wavered more to the side of the Bolsheviks and at another more to that of the Mensheviks--has been persistently carrying on propaganda for an agreement (or compromise) between all and sundry factions.
    “But after it, every since the spring of 1910 Trotsky has been *deceiving the workers in a most unprincipled and shameless manner* by assuring them that the obstacles to unity were principally (if not wholly) of an organizational nature. This deceit is being continued in 1911 by the Paris conciliators; for to assert now that they organizational questions occupy the first place is sheer mockery of the truth. In reality, it is by no means the organizational question that is now in the forefront, but the question of the entire programme, the entire tactics and the whole character of the Party.... The conciliators call themselves Bolsheviks, in order to repeat, a year and a half later, *Trotsky’s errors* which the Bolsheviks had exposed. Well, is this not an abuse of established Party titles? Are we not obliged, after this, to let all and sundry know that the conciliators are not Bolsheviks at all, that they have nothing in common with Bolshevism, that they are simply inconsistent Trotskyites?
    The only difference between Trotsky and the conciliators in Paris is that the latter regard Trotsky as a factionalist and themselves as non-factionalist, whereas Trotsky holds the opposite view....
    Trotsky provides us with an abundance of instances of scheming to establish unprincipled “unity....
    Trotsky was merely revealing the plan of the liquidators whom he serves faithfully....”

    In a 1911 article on the same theme entitled “Trotsky’s Diplomacy and a certain Party Platform,” Lenin states,
    “Trotsky’s particular task is to conceal liquidationism by throwing dust in the eyes of the workers.
    It is impossible to argue with Trotsky on the merits of the issue, because *Trotsky holds no views whatever*. We can and should argue with confirmed liquidators and otzovists;; but it is no use arguing with a man whose game is to hide errors of both these trends; in his case the thing to do is to expose him as a *diplomat of the smallest caliber*.”

    In an article entitled “Fundamental Problems of the Election Campaign” Lenin states,
    “There is nothing more repugnant to the spirit of Marxism than phrase-mongering....”

    And later on he states,
    “But there is no point in imitating Trotsky’s inflated phrases.”

    In a 1912 pamphlet entitled “The Present Situation in the R.S.D.L.P. Lenin stated,“
    This is incredible, yet it is a fact. It will be useful for the Russian workers to know how *Trotsky and Co. are misleading our foreign comrades*.”

    In another 1912 pamphlet entitled “Can the Slogan ‘Freedom of Association’ Serve as a Basis for the Working-Class Movement Today?” Lenin responds by saying,
    “In the legal press, the liquidators headed by Trotsky argue that it can. They are doing all in their power to distort the true character of the workers’ movement. But those are hopeless efforts. The drowning of the liquidators are clutching at a straw to rescue their unjust cause.”

    In a 1912 pamphlet entitled “Platform of the Reformists and the Platform of the Revolutionary Social-Democrats” Lenin stated,
    “Look at the platform of the liquidators. Its liquidationist essence is artfully concealed by Trotsky’s revolutionary phrases.”
    “The revolutionary Social-Democrats have given their answer to these questions, which are more interesting and important than the *philistine-Trotskyist* attitude of uncertainty; will there be a revolution or not, who can tell?....
    Those, however, who preach to the masses their *vulgar, intellectualist, Bundist-Trotskyist scepticism*--’we don’t know whether there will be a revolution or not, but the current issue is reforms’--are already *corrupting the masses, preaching liberal utopias to them*.”

    In the 1912 pamphlet entitled “The Illegal Party and Legal Work” Lenin again referred to Trotsky by saying,
    “We have studied the ideas of liberal labour policy attired in Levitsky’s everyday clothes; it is not difficult to recognize them in *Trotsky’s gaudy apparel* as well.”

    In a letter to the Editor of Pravda in 1912 Lenin said,
    “I advise you to reply to Trotsky throught the post: ‘To Trotsky. We shall not reply to disruptive and slanderous letters.’ Trotsky’s dirty campaign against Pravda is one mass of lies and slander. The well-known Marxist and follower of Plekhanov, Rothstein, has written to us that he received Trotsky’s slanders and replied to him: I cannot complain of the Petersburg Pravda in any way. But this intriguer and liquidator goes onlying, right and left.
    P.S. It would be still better to reply in this way to Trotsky through the post: ‘To Trotsky. You are wasting your time sending us disruptive and slanderous letters....”

    In a 1913 article in Pravda Lenin really blistered Trotsky on the question of Party unity by saying,
    “It is amazing that after the question has been posed so clearly and squarely we come across Trotsky’s old, pompous but perfectly meaningless phrases in Luch No. 27 (113). Not a word on the substance of the matter! *Not the slightest attempt to cite precise facts and analyze them thoroughly!* Not a hint of the real terms of unity! Empty exclamations, high-flown words, and haughty sallies against opponents whom the author does not name, and impressively important assurances--that is *Trotsky’s total stock-in-trade*.
    That won’t do gentlemen.... The workers will not be intimidated or coaxed. They themselves will compare Luch and Pravda...and simply shrug off Trotsky’s verbiage....
    You cannot satisfy the workers with mere phrases, no matter how ‘conciliatory’ or honeyed.
    ‘Our historic factions, Bolshevism and Menshevism, are purely intellectualist formations in origin,’ wrote Trotsky. This is the *repetition of a liberal tale*....
    It is to the advantage of the liberals to pretend that this fundamental basis of the difference was introduced by ‘intellectuals.’ But *Trotsky merely disgraces himself by echoing a liberal tale*.

    In a 1913 article entitled “Notes of a Publicist” Lenin states,
    “Trotsky, doing faithful service to liquidators, assured himself and the naive ‘Europeans’ (lovers of Asiatic scandal-mongering) that the liquidators are ‘stronger’ in the legal movement. And this lie, too, is refuted by the facts.”

    Lenin again blasted Trotsky in an article published in 1914 entitled “Break-up of the ‘August’ Bloc” by stating,
    “Trotsky, however, has never had any ‘physiognomy’ at all; *the only thing he does have is a habit of changing sides*, of *skipping from the liberals to the Marxists and back again*, of mouthing scraps of catchwords and bombastic parrot phrases....
    Actually, under cover of high-sounding, empty, and obscure phrases that confuse the non-class-conscious workers, Trotsky is defending the liquidators....
    But *the liquidators and Trotsky...are the worst splitters*.”

    And in an article entitled “Ideological Struggle in Working-Class Movement” Lenin states,
    “People who (like the liquidators and Trotsky) ignore or falsify this twenty years’ history of the ideological struggle in the working-class movement do tremendous harm to the workers.”


    ************************************************** *************
    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY
    POST #6

    Our ongoing revelation of what Lenin thought of Trotsky proceeds on schedule.

    In a 1914 article named “Disruption of Unity” Lenin stated,
    “Trotsky’s ‘workers’ journal’ is Trotsky’s journal for workers, as there is not a trace in it of either workers’ initiative, or any connection with working-class organizations....
    The question arises: what has ‘chaos’ got to do with it? Everybody knows that *Trotsky is fond of high-sounding and empty phrases*.... If there is any ‘chaos’ anywhere, it is only in the heads of cranks who fail to understand this....
    And that fact proves that we right in calling Trotsky a representative of the ‘worst remnants of factionalism’. Although he claims to be non-factional, Trotsky is known to everybody who is in the least familiar with the working-class movement in Russia as the representative of ‘Trotsky’s faction’.
    Trotsky, however, possesses no ideological and political definiteness, for his patent for ‘non-factionalism’, as we shall soon see in greater detail,is merely a patent to flit freely to and fro, from one group to another.
    To sum up:
    (1) Trotsky does not explain, *nor does he understand, the historical significance of the ideological disagreements among the various Marxist trends and groups*, although these disagreements run through the twenty years’ history of Social-Democracy and concern the fundamental questions of the present day (as we shall show later on);
    (2) Trotsky fails to understand that the main specific features of group-division are nominal recognition of unity and actual disunity;
    (3) Under cover of ‘non-factionalism’ Trotsky is championing the interests of a group abroad which particularly lacks definite principles and has no basis in the working-class movement in Russia.
    All that glitters is not gold. *There is much glitter and sound in Trotsky’s phrases, but they are meaningless*....
    But joking apart (although joking is the only way of retorting mildly to Trotsky’s insufferable phrase-mongering). ‘Suicide’ is a mere empty phrase, mere ‘Trotskyism’....
    If our attitude towards liquidationism is wrong in theory, in principle, then Trotsky should say so straightforwardly, and state definitely, without equivocation, why he thinks it is wrong. But Trotsky has been evading this extremely important point for years....
    Trotsky is very fond of using, with the learned air of the expert, *pompous and high-sounding phrases* to explain historical phenomena in a way that is flattering to Trotsky. Since ‘numerous advanced workers’ become ‘active agents’ of a political and Party line which does not conform to Trotsky’s line, Trotsky settles the question unhesitatingly, out of hand: these advanced workers are ‘in a state of utter political bewilderment,’ whereas he, Trotsky, is evidently ‘in a state’ of political firmness and clarity, and keeps to the right line! And this very same Trotsky, beating his breast, fulminates against factionalism, parochialism, and the efforts of intellectuals to impose their will on the workers!”
    “Reading things like these, one cannot help asking oneself; *is it from a lunatic asylum that such voices come*?
    Trotsky is trying to disrupt the movement and cause a split.

    Later in the same article Lenin states,
    “Those who accused us of being splitters, of being unwilling or unable to get on with the liquidators, were themselves unable to get on with them. The August bloc proved to be a fiction and broke up.
    By concealing this break-up from his readers, *Trotsky is deceiving them*.”

    Still later, Lenin confronted a problem I have often encountered by stating,
    “*The reason why Trotsky avoids facts and concrete references is because they relentlessly refute all his angry outcries and pompous phrases*.... Is not this weapon borrowed from the arsenal of the period when Trotsky posed in all his splendor before audiences of high-school boys?”

    And finally, in the same article Lenin shatters Trotsky, his theory of Permanent Revolution, and his all consuming equivocating, with which I am thoroughly familiar, by saying,
    “Trotsky was an ardent Iskrist in 1901-03, and Ryazanov described his role at the Congress of 1903 as ‘Lenin’s cudgel.’ At the end of 1903, Trotsky was an ardent Menshevik, i.e., he deserted from the Iskrists to the Economists. He said that ‘between the old Iskra and the new lies a gulf’. In 1904-05, he deserted the Mensheviks and
    occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the Economist), now proclaiming his **absurdly Left permanent revolution theory**. In 1906-07, he approached the Bolsheviks, and in the spring of 1907 he declared that he was in agreement with Rosa Luxemburg.
    In the period of disintegration, after long ‘non-factional’ vacillation, he again went to the right, and in August 1912, he entered into a bloc with the liquidators. He has now deserted them again, although in substance he reiterates their shoddy ideas.”

    In another 1914 article entitled “Objective Data on the Strength of Various Trends” Lenin commented,
    “One of the greatest, if not the greatest, faults (or crimes against the working class) of the Narodniks and liquidators, as well as of the various groups of intellectuals such as the Vperyodists, Plekhanovites and Trotskyists, is their subjectivism. At every step they try to pass off their desires, their ‘views’, their appraisals of the situation and their ‘plans’, as the will of the workers, the needs of the working-class movement.”

    In a article published in 1914 entitled “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” Lenin stated,
    “**The obliging Trotsky is more dangerous than an enemy!** Trotsky could produce no proof, except ‘private conversations” (i.e., simply *gossip, on which Trotsky always subsists*), for classifying ‘Polish Marxists’ in general as supporters of every article by Rosa Luxemburg....
    Why did Trotsky withhold these facts from the readers of his journal? Only because it pays him to speculate on fomenting differences between the Polish and the Russian opponents of liquidationism and to *deceive the Russian workers* on the question of the programme.”

    And now comes another comment that blows off Trotsky’s doors.
    “**Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism**. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other. At the present moment he is in the company of the Bundists and the liquidators. And these gentlemen do not stand on ceremony where the Party is concerned.”

    In an article first published in 1917 Lenin noted that Trotsky made a number of errors by saying,
    “A number of Trotsky’s tactical and organizational errors spring from this fear....”

    Still later, Lenin confronted a problem I have often encountered by stating,
    “*The reason why Trotsky avoids facts and concrete references is because they relentlessly refute all his angry outcries and pompous phrases*.... Is not this weapon borrowed from the arsenal of the period when Trotsky posed in all his splendor before audiences of high-school boys?” It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany.... To help people that are unable to think for themselves, the Berne resolution made it clear that in all imperialist countries the proletariat must now desire the defeat of its own government. Bukvoyed and Trotsky preferred to avoid this truth....
    *Had Bukvoyed and Trotsky done a little thinking, they would have realized that they have adopted the viewpoint on the war held by governments and the bourgeoisie, i.e., that they cringe to the ‘political methodology of social-patriotism’, to use Trotsky’s pretentious language*.
    Whoever is in favour of the slogan of ‘neither victory nor defeat’ [Trotsky] is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing governments, of the present-day ruling classes....
    Those who stand for the ‘neither-victory-nor-defeat’ slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of international revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian, the only socialist task.”

    And in another 1915 article labeled “The State of Affairs in Russian Social-Democracy” Lenin comments,
    “Trotsky, who as always entirely disagrees with the social-chauvinists in principle, but agrees with them in everything in practice....”

    In the article entitled “Socialism and War” Lenin states,
    “In Russia, Trotsky, while rejecting this idea, also defends unity with the opportunist and chauvinist Nasha Zarya group.

    ************************************************** *************
    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY
    POST #7

    More on Lenin’s Opinion of Trotsky will now be presented.

    In 1915 article in the Social Democrat entitled “On the Two Lines in the Revolution” Lenin comments on Trotsky’s failure to realize the importance of the peasantry by saying,
    “This task is being wrongly tackled in Nashe Slovo by Trotsky, who is repeating his ‘original’ 1905 theory and refuses to give some thought to the reason why, in the course of ten years, life has been bypassing this splendid theory. From the Bolsheviks Trotsky’s original theory has borrowed their call for a decisive proletarian revolutionary struggle and for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, while from the Mensheviks it has borrowed ‘repudiation’ of the peasantry’s role. The peasantry, he asserts, are divided into strata, have become differentiated; their potential revolutionary role has dwindled more and more; in Russia a ‘national’ revolution is impossible; ‘we are living in the era of imperialism,’ says Trotsky, and ‘imperialism does not contrapose the bourgeois nation to the old regime, but the proletariat to the bourgeois nation.
    ...The length *Trotsky’s muddled thinking* goes to is evident from his phrase that by their resoluteness the proletariat will attract the ‘non-proletarian popular masses’ as well! Trotsky has not realized that if the proletariat induce the non-proletarian masses to confiscate the landed estates and overthrown the monarchy, then that will be the consummation of the ‘national bourgeois revolution’ in Russia; it will be a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry!.... This is such an obvious truth that not even the thousands of phrases in scores of Trotsky’s Paris articles will ‘refute’ it. *Trotsky is in fact helping the liberal-labour politicians* in Russia, who by ‘repudiation’ of the role of the peasantry understand a refusal to raise up the peasants for the revolution!”

    In a 1921 pamphlet entitled “The Trade Unions, the Present Situation and Trotsky’s Mistakes” Lenin drops a whole series of bombs on Trotsky’s theoretical analyses by saying,
    “My principal material is Comrade Trotsky’s pamphlet, The Role and Tasks of the Trade Unions. When I compare it with the theses he submitted to the Central Committee, and go over it very carefully, I am amazed at the number of *theoretical mistakes and glaring blunders* it contains. How could anyone starting a big Party discussion on this question produce *such a sorry excuse for a carefully thought out statement*? Let me go over the main points which, I think, contain the original *fundamental theoretical errors*.
    Trade unions are not just historically necessary; they are historically inevitable as an organization of the industrial proletariat, and, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, embrace nearly the whole of it. This is basic, but Comrade Trotsky keeps forgetting it; he neither appreciates it nor makes it his point of departure.... Within the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the trade unions stand, if I may say so, between the Party and the government. In the transition to socialism the dictatorship of the proletariat is inevitable, but it is not exercised by an organization which takes in all industrial workers. Why not?.... What happens is that the Party, shall we say, absorbs the vanguard of the proletariat, and this vanguard exercises the dictatorship of the proletariat.... But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organization embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organization taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class.... From this alone it is evident that there is something fundamentally wrong in principle when Comrade Trotsky points, in his first thesis, to ‘ideological confusion’, and speaks of a crisis as existing specifically and particularly in the trade unions.... *It is Trotsky who is in ‘ideological confusion’*, because in this key question of the trade unions’ role, from the standpoint of transition from capitalism to communism, he has lost sight of the fact that we have here a complex arrangement of cogwheels which cannot be a simple one; for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organization. It cannot work without a number of ‘transmission belts’ running from the vanguard to the mass of the advanced class, and from the latter to the mass of the working people.
    ...When I consider the role of the trade unions in production, I find that Trotsky’s basic mistake lies in his always dealing with it ‘in principle,’ as a matter of ‘general principle.’ All his theses are based on ‘general principle,’ an approach which is in itself fundamentally wrong.... In general, Comrade Trotsky’s great mistake, his mistake of principle, lies in the fact that by raising the question of ‘principle’ at this time he is dragging back the Party and the Soviet power. We have, thank heaven, done with principles and have gone on to practical business. We chatted about principles--rather more than we should have--at the Smolny.
    The actual differences, apart from those I have listed, really have nothing to do with general principles. I have had to enumerate my ‘differences’ with Comrade Trotsky because, with such a broad theme as ‘The Role and Tasks of the Trade Unions,’ **he has, I am quite sure, made a number of mistakes bearing on the very essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat**.
    ...I must say that had we made a detailed, even if small-scale, study of our own experience and practices, we should have managed to avoid the hundreds of quite unnecessary ‘differences’ and *errors of principle in which Comrade Trotsky’s pamphlet abounds*.
    ...While betraying this lack of thoughtfulness, Comrade Trotsky falls into error himself. He seems to say that in a workers’ state it is not the business of the trade unions to stand up for the material and spiritual interests of the working class. That is a mistake. Comrade Trotsky speaks of a ‘workers’ state.’ May I say that this is an abstraction. It was natural for us to write about a workers’ state in 1917; but it is now a patent error to say: ‘Since this is a workers’ state without any bourgeoisie, against whom then is the working class to be protected, and for what purpose?’ The point is that it is not quite a workers’ state. That is where Comrade Trotsky makes one of his main mistakes.... This will not do. For one thing, ours is not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state. And a lot depends on that.
    ...Well, is it right to say that in a state that has taken this shape in practice the trade unions have nothing to protect, or that we can do without them in protecting the material and spiritual interests of the massively organized proletariat? No, this reasoning is theoretically quite wrong. It takes us into the sphere of abstraction or an ideal we shall achieve in 15 or 20 years time, and I am not so sure that we shall have achieved it even by then.
    ...At any rate, see that you choose fewer slogans, like ‘industrial democracy,’ which contain nothing but confusion and are theoretically wrong. *Both Trotsky and Bukharin failed to think out this term theoretically and ended up in confusion*. ...I say: cast your vote against it, because it is confusion. Industry is indispensable, democracy is not. Industrial democracy breeds some utterly false ideas. The idea of one-man management was advocated only a little while ago. We must not make a mess of things and confuse people: how do you expect them to know when you want democracy, when one-man management, and when dictatorship. But on no account must we renounce dictatorship either....


    ************************************************** *************
    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY
    POST #8

    [LENIN’S VIGOROUS DENUNCIATION OF TROTSKY’S POSITION ON THE TRADE UNIONS CONTINUES--PART 2]

    But to go on. Since September we have been talking about switching from the principle of priority to that of equalization....
    ...Priority implies preference for one industry out of a group of vital industries because of its greater urgency. What does such preference entail? How great can it be? This is a difficult question.... And so if we are to raise this question of priority and equalization we must first of all give it some careful thought, but that is just what we fail to find in Comrade Trotsky’s work; *the further he goes in revising his original theses, the more mistakes he makes*. Here is what we find in his latest theses:.... This is *a real theoretical muddle. It is all wrong*....
    The fourth point is disciplinary courts. I hope Comrade Bukharin will not take offence if I say that without disciplinary courts the role of the trade unions in industry, ‘industrial democracy,’ is a mere trifle. But the fact it that there is nothing at all about this in your theses. *“Great grief!’ is therefore the only thing that can be said about Trotsky’s theses and Bukharin’s attitude, from the standpoint of principle, theory and practice*.
    I am confirmed in this conclusion when I say to myself: *yours is not a Marxist approach to the question.* This quite apart from the fact that there are a number of theoretical mistakes in the theses. It is not a Marxist approach to the evaluation of the ‘role and tasks of the trade unions,’ because such a broad subject cannot be tackled without giving thought to the peculiar political aspects of the present situation. After all, Comrade Bukharin and I did say in the resolution...on trade unions that politics is the most concentrated expression of economics.
    ...Comrade Trotsky says in his theses that on the question of workers’ democracy it remains for the Congress to ‘enter it unanimously in the record.’ That is not correct. There is more to it than an entry in the record; an entry in the record fixes what has been fully weighed and measured, whereas the question of industrial democracy is from having been fully weighed, tried and tested. Just think how the masses may interpret this slogan of ‘industrial democracy.’
    ...*Trotsky’s theses, whatever his intentions, do not tend to play up the best, but the worst in military experience*. It must be borne in mind that a political leader is responsible not only for his own policy but also for the acts of those he leads.
    ...The last thing I want to tell you about--something I called myself a fool for yesterday--is that I had altogether overlooked Comrade Rudzutak’s theses. His weak point is that he does not speak in ringing tones; he is not an impressive or eloquent speaker. He is liable to be overlooked. Unable to attend the meetings yesterday, I went through my material and found his leaflet called: ‘The Tasks of the Trade Unions in Production’. Let me read it to you, it is not long.... (Lenin then read Rudzutak’s pamphlet and says,--Ed.), I hope you see not why I called myself names. There you have a platform, and *it is much better than the one Comrade Trotsky wrote after a great deal of thinking*, and the one Comrade Bukharin wrote without any thinking at all. All of us members of the Central Committee who have been out of touch with the trade union movement for many years would profit from Comrade Rudzutak’s experience, and this also goes for Comrade Trotsky and Comrade Bukharin. The trade unions have adopted this platform.

    (Lenin concludes his article on the trade unions by saying--Ed.)

    The net result is that *there are a number of theoretical mistakes in Trotsky’s and Bukharin’s theses*: they contain a number of things that are wrong in principle. Politically, the whole approach to the matter is utterly tactless. *Comrade Trotsky’s ‘theses’ are politically harmful*. The sum and substance of his policy is bureaucratic harassment of the trade unions. Our Party Congress will, I am sure, condemn and reject it.”

    At the Second All-Russia Congress of Miners in 1921 Lenin wrote,
    “The morbid character of the question of the role and tasks of the trade unions is due to the fact that it took the form of a factional struggle much too soon. This vast, boundless question should not have been taken up in such haste, as it was done here, and *I put the chief blame on Comrade Trotsky for all this fumbling haste and precipitation*.
    To illustrate my point, and to proceed at once to the heart of the matter, let me read you the chief of Trotsky’s theses. (Lenin then reads Trotsky’s short statement--Ed.). I could quote many similar passages from Trotsky’s pamphlet. I ask, by way of factional statement: Is it becoming for such an influential person, such a prominent leader, to attack his Party comrades in this way? I am sure that 99% of the comrades, excepting those involved in the quarrel, will say that this should not be done.
    ...What sort of talk is this? Is it the right kind of language? Is it the right approach? I had earlier said that I might succeed in acting as a ‘buffer’ and staying out of the discussion, because it is harmful to fight with Trotsky--it does the Republic, the Party, and all of us a lot of harm--but when this pamphlet came out, I felt I had to speak up.
    ...Even if there is a spirit of hostility for the new men, one should not say a thing like that. *Trotsky accuses Lozovsky and Tomsky of bureaucratic practices. I would say the reverse is true*.
    ...Even the best workers make mistakes.... Comrade Trotsky says that Comrades Tomsky and Lozovsky--trade unionists both--are guilty of cultivating in their midst a spirit of hostility for the new men. *But this is monstrous. Only someone in the lunatic fringe can say a thing like that*.
    That is just why *Trotsky’s whole approach is wrong*. I could have analyzed any one of his theses, but it would take me hours, and you would all be bored to death. *Every thesis reveals the same thoroughly wrong approach*....


    ************************************************** *************
    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY
    POST #9

    LENIN’S EXPOSURE OF TROTSKY’S INADEQUACIES CONTINUES--THE TRADE UNIONS (Part 3)

    In another 1921 article on the same topic entitled “Once Again on the Trade Unions” Lenin states,
    “*Comrade Trotsky’s theses have landed him in a mess*. That part of them which is correct is not new and, what is more, turns against him. That which is new is all wrong. I have written out Comrade Trotsky’s correct propositions. They turn against him not only on the point in thesis 23 but on the others as well.
    ...Can it be denied that, even if Trotsky’s ‘new tasks and methods’ were as sound as they are in fact unsound, *his very approach would be damaging to himself, the Party, the trade union movement, the training of millions of trade union members and the Republic*?
    ...I decided there and then that policy lay at the root of the controversy, and that Comrade Trotsky, with his ‘shake-up’ policy against Comrade Tomsky, was entirely in the wrong.
    ...But ‘shake-up’ is a real ‘catchword’, not only in the sense that after being uttered by Comrade Trotsky at the Fifth All-Russia Conference of Trade Unions it has, you might say, ‘caught on’ throughout the Party and the trade unions. Unfortunately, it remains true even today in the much more profound sense that it alone epitomizes the whole spirit, the whole trend of the platform pamphlet entitled The Role and Tasks of the Trade Unions. Comrade Trotsky’s platform pamphlet is shot through with the spirit of the ‘shake-up-from-above’ policy.
    ...but after its publication we had to say: *Comrade Trotsky is essentially wrong on all his new points*.
    This is most evident from a comparison of his theses with Rudzutak’s which were adopted.... They are fuller and more correct than Trotsky’s, and *wherever the latter differs from Rudzutak, he is wrong*.
    ...The fourth point is that ‘industrial democracy’ is a term that lends itself to misinterpretation. It may be read as a repudiation of dictatorship and individual authority. It may be read as a suspension of ordinary democracy or a pretext for evading it. Both readings are harmful, and cannot be avoided without long special commentaries.
    ...Trotsky’s ‘production atmosphere’ is even wider of the mark, and Zinoviev had good reason to laugh at it.... Comrade Trotsky’s ‘production atmosphere’ has essentially the same meaning as production propaganda, but such expressions must be avoided when production propaganda is addressed to the workers at large. The term is an example of how not to carry it on among the masses.
    ...Defence or camouflage of the political mistake expressed in the shake-up policy, which runs through the whole of Trotsky’s platform pamphlet, and which, unless it is admitted and corrected, *leads to the collapse of the dictatorship of the proletariat*.
    ...That is where Zinoviev and myself, on the one hand, and Trotsky and Bukharin, on the other, actually stand on this question of politics and economics.
    I could not help smiling, therefore, when I read Comrade Trotsky’s objection in his speech.... Comrade Trotsky thought these words were ‘very much to the point.’ Actually, however, *they reveal a terrible confusion of ideas, a truly hopeless ‘ideological confusion*.’
    ...Comrade Trotsky’s political mistakes, aggravated by Comrade Bukharin, distract our Party’s attention from economic tasks and ‘production’ work, and, unfortunately, make us waste time on correcting them and arguing it out with the syndicalist deviation (which leads to the collapse of the dictatorship of the proletariat), objecting to the incorrect approach to the trade union movement (which leads to the collapse of the Soviet power), and debating general ‘theses’ instead of having a practical and business-like ‘economic’ discussion....
    Once again we find political mistakes distracting attention from economic tasks. I was against this ‘broad’ discussion, and I believed, and still do, that it was a mistake--a political mistake--on Comrade Trotsky’s part to disrupt the work of the trade union commission, which ought to have held a business-like discussion.
    *For Trotsky has made the Party waste time on a discussion of words and bad theses*....
    We who are breaking new ground must put in a long, persistent and patient effort to retrain men and change the old habits which have come down to us from capitalism, but this can only be done little by little. *Trotsky’s approach is quite wrong*. In his December 30th speech he exclaimed: ‘Do or do not our workers, Party and trade union functionaries have any production training? Yes or no? I say: No. This is a ridiculous approach. It is like asking whether a division has enough felt boots: Yes or no?
    It is safe to say that even ten years from now we shall have to admit that all our Party and trade union functionaries do not have enough production training....
    ...And it is this rule that Comrade Trotsky has broken by his theses and approach. *All his theses, his entire platform pamphlet, are so wrong that they have diverted the Party’s attention and resources from practical ‘production’ work to a lot of empty talk*.
    ...Trotsky’s mistake is ‘insufficient support for the school-of-communism idea’;....
    ...Whether you take it in the form it assumed at the Fifth All-Russia Conference of Trade Unions, or as it was presented and slanted by Trotsky himself in his platform pamphlet of December 25th, you will find that his whole approach is quite wrong and that he has gone off at a tangent. He has failed to understand that the trade unions can and must be viewed as a school both when raising the question of ‘Soviet trade-unionism,’ and when speaking of production propaganda in general.... On this last point, as it is presented in Trotsky’s platform pamphlet, the mistake lies in his failure to grasp that the trade unions are a school of technical and administrative management of production. ...the trade unions, whichever way you look at them, are a school. They are a school of unity, solidarity, management and administration, where you learn how to protect your interests. Instead of making an effort to comprehend and correct *Comrade Trotsky’s fundamental mistake*, Comrade Bukharin has produced a funny little amendment.
    ...let me say that Comrade Trotsky’s fundamental mistake is that he treats (rather maltreats) the questions he himself had brought up in his platform pamphlet as administrative ones, whereas they could be and ought to be viewed only from the administrative angle....
    The state is a sphere of coercion. *It would be madness to renounce coercion, especially in the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat*.... The Party is the leader, the vanguard of the proletariat, which rules directly. *It is not coercion but expulsion from the Party that is the specific means of influence and the means of purging and steeling the vanguard.* The trade unions are a reservoir of the state power, a school of communism and a school of management. The specific and cardinal thing in this sphere is not administration but the ‘ties’ ‘between the central state administration,’ ‘the national economy and the broad masses of the working people.
    The whole of Trotsky’s platform pamphlet betrays an incorrect approach to the problem and a misunderstanding of this relationship.
    This is essentially a political question. Because of the substance of the case--this concrete, particular ‘case’--*it is impossible to correct Trotsky’s mistake by means of eclectic little amendments and addenda*, as Bukharin has been trying to do, being moved undoubtedly by the most humane sentiments and intentions.
    *Trotsky and Bukharin have produced a hodgepodge of political mistakes in approach*, breaks in the middle of the transmission belts, and unwarranted and futile attacks on ‘administrative steerage.’ It is now clear where the ‘theoretical source of the mistake lies, since Bukharin has taken up that aspect of it with his example of the tumbler. His theoretical mistake lies in his substitution of eclecticism for dialectics. His eclectic approach has confused him and has landed him in syndicalism. **Trotsky’s mistake is one-track thinking, compulsiveness, exaggeration and obstinacy**.
    ...Incidentally, Comrade Trotsky says in his theses that ‘over the last period we have not made any headway towards the goal set forth in the Programme but have in fact retreated from it.’ That statement is unsupported, and, I think, wrong.
    ...And Trotsky has no one but himself to blame for having come out--after the November Plenary Meeting, which gave a clear-cut and theoretically correct solution--with a factional pamphlet on ‘the two trends’ and proposed a formulation in his thesis 41 which is wrong in economic terms.
    Today, January 25, it is exactly one month since Comrade Trotsky’s factional statement. It is now patent that this pronouncement, inappropriate in form and wrong in essence, has diverted the Party from its practical economic and production effort into rectifying political and theoretical mistakes. But it’s an ill wind, as the old saying goes.
    In this one month, Petrograd, Moscow and a number of provincial towns have shown that the Party responded to the discussion and *has rejected Comrade Trotsky’s wrong line by an overwhelming majority*. While there may have been some vacillation ‘at the top’ and ‘in the provinces’, in the committees and in the offices, the rank-and-file membership--*the mass of Party workers--came out solidly against this wrong line*.
    ...In any case, his January 23 announcement shows that the Party, without so much as mustering all its forces, and with only Petrograd, Moscow and a minority of the provincial towns going on record, has *corrected Comrade Trotsky’s mistake promptly and with determination*.
    The Party’s enemies had rejoiced too soon. They have not been able--and will never be able--to take advantage of some of the inevitable disagreements within the Party to inflict harm on it and on the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia.

    In a January 1921 article entitled The Party Crisis Lenin states,
    “The Central Committee sets up a trade union commission and elects Comrade Trotsky to it. He refuses to work on the commission, magnifying by this step alone his original mistake, which subsequently leads to factionalism....”



    ************************************************** *************
    LENIN DENOUNCES TROTSKY
    POST #10

    THIS POST IS OUR FINAL REVELATION OF LENIN’S CRITICISMS OF TROTSKY

    During a 1921 “Speech on the Trade Unions” Lenin stated,
    “Comrade Trotsky now laughs at my asking who started it all, and is surprised that I should reproach him for refusing to serve on the commission. I did it because this is very important Comrade Trotsky, very important, indeed; your refusal to serve on the trade union commission was *a violation of Central Committee discipline*.”

    In a 1922 article entitled “Reply to Remarks Concerning the Functions of the Deputy Chairmen of the Council of People’s Commisars” Lenin said,
    “Some of Trotsky’s remarks are likewise vague (for example, the ‘apprehensions’ in paragraph 4) and do not require an answer; other remarks made by him renew old disagreements, that we have repeatedly observed in the Political Bureau....
    As regards the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, *Comrade Trotsky is fundamentally wrong*....
    As regards the State Planning Commission, *Comrade Trotsky is not only absolutely wrong but is judging something on which he is amazingly ill-informed*.
    ...The second paper from Comrade Trotsky...contains, first, an extremely excited but profoundly erroneous ‘criticism’ of the Political Bureau decree on setting up a financial triumvirate....
    Secondly, this paper flings the same fundamentally wrong and intrinsically untrue accusations of academic method at the State Planning Commission, accusations which lead up to *the next incredibly uninformed statement by Comrade Trotsky*....”

    In a letter to Lyubimov written in 1909 Lenin stated,
    “As regards Trotsky, I must say that I shall be most vigorously opposed to helping him if he rejects (and he has already rejected it!) equality on the editorial board, proposed to him by a member of the C.C. Without a settlement of this question by the Executive Committee on the Bolshevik Centre, no steps to help Trotsky are permissible.”

    In a letter to Alexandra Kollontai written in 1917 Lenin really blasted Trotsky by saying,
    “Pleasant as it was to learn from you of the victory of N.Iv. and Pavlov in Novy Mir (I get this newspaper devilishly irregularly;...it was just as sad to read about the bloc between Trotsky and the Right for the struggle against N. Iv. *What a swine this Trotsky is*--Left phrases, and a bloc with the Right against the Zimmerwald Left!! He ought to be exposed (by you) if only in a brief letter to the Social-Democrat!”

    In another Letter to Kollontai written after August 1915 Lenin stated,
    “Roland-Holst, like Rakovsky...like Trotsky, in my opinion, are all the most harmful ‘Kautskians,’ in the sense that all of them in various forms are for unity with the opportunists, all in various forms *embellish* opportunism, all of them (in various way) preach eclecticism instead of revolutionary Marxism.”

    In an equally powerful letter to Inessa Armand written about the same time Lenin states,
    “...Trotsky arrived, and *this scoundrel* at once ganged up with the Right wing of Novy Mir against the Left Zimmerwaldist! That’s it!! *That’s Trotsky for you!! Always true to himself==twists, swindles, poses as a Left, helps the Right, so long as he can*....”

    In a 1911 article entitled “The State of Affairs of the Party” Lenin stated,
    What is the attitude of the other factions abroad? Trotsky, of course, is solidly behind the liquidators....
    There are Party people, and liquidators who have broken away and set up a separate group. Groups abroad, like those of Golos, Trotsky, the Bund, and Vperyod, want to cover up the break-away of the liquidators, help them to hide under the banner of the R.S.D.L.P., and help them to thwart the rebuilding of the R.S.D.L.P. It is our task at all costs to rebuff the liquidators and, despite their opposition, recreate the R.S.D.L.P....
    The ‘conciliators’ put their trust in Trotsky, who has clearly executed a full turn towards the liquidators....
    We Bolsheviks have resolved on no account to repeat the error of conciliationism today. This would mean slowing down the rebuilding of the R.S.D.S.P, and entangling it in a new game with the Golos people (or *their lackeys, like Trotsky*), the Vperyodists and so forth.”

    In 1911 Lenin stated in an article,
    “We know that there are people who, while recognizing the need to fight the liquidators, object to a complete break with them and continue (even now!) to speak of ‘conciliation’ or ‘agreement’. Among these people are not only *the ‘loyal servitors’ of Trotsky, whom very few people now take seriously*.”

    In a 1912 “Report on the Work of the International Socialist Bureau” Lenin stated,
    “I was no longer about able to talk to the Golos people and looked at Trotsky with disapproval, especially over the letter.”

    In a 1915 letter to Herman Gorter Lenin stated,
    “I congratulate you on your splendid attacks on opportunism and Kautsky. Trotsky’s principal mistake is that he does not attack this gang.”

    In a letter to Kamenev Lenin stated,
    “What is the purpose of our policy now, at this precise moment? To build the Party core not on *the cheap phrases of Trotsky and Co.* but on genuine ideological rapprochement between the Plekhanovites and the Bolsheviks.”

    In a March 1916 letter to Henriette Roland-Holst Lenin commented,
    “What are our differences with Trotsky? This must probably interest you. *In brief--he is a Kautskyite*, that is, he stands for unity with the Kautskyites in the International and with Chkheidze’s parliamentary group in Russia. We are absolutely against such unity.... Trotsky at present is against the Organizing Committee (Axelrod and Martov) but for unity with the Chkheidze Duma group!!
    We are decidedly against.”

    In a 1909 Letter to Zinoview Lenin stated,
    “As regards Pravda, have you read Trotsky’s letter to Inok? If you have, I hope it has convinced you that Trotsky behaves like a despicable careerist and factionalist of the Ryazanov-and-Co. type. Either equality on the editorial board, subordination to the CC and no one’s transfer to Paris except Trotsky’s (the scoundrel, he wants to ‘fix up’ the who rascally crew of Pravda at our expense!)--or break with this swindler and and exposure of him in the CO. He pays lip-service to the Party and behaves worse than any other of the factionalists.

    In a 1916 letter to Zinoviev Lenin said,
    “We had better deal with Trotsky in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata; he has to be dealt with at greater length.”

    In another letter to Zinoviev in the same year Lenin stated,
    “...It’s ghastly. I don’t know what to do. Yet something has still to be written about opportunism (I have 1/2 of it ready), about defeatism, and about Trotskyism (including the Duma group + P. S. D.).

    In a March 1916 article entitled The Peace Programme Lenin stated,
    “What about Trotsky? He is body and soul for self-determination, but in his case, too, it is an empty phrase, for he does not demand freedom of secession for nations oppressed by the ‘fatherland’ of the socialist of the given nationality; he is silent about the hypocrisy of Kautsky and his followers.’

    In a July 1916 article entitled The Discussion on Self-determination Summed Up Lenin stated,
    “No matter what the subjective ‘good’ intentions of Trotsky and Martov may be, teir evasiveness objectively supports Russian social-imperialism.”

    In a report to the 7th Congress of the R.C.P. (B.) Lenin stated,
    “What I predicted has come to pass; instead of the Brest peace we have a much more humiliating peace, and the blame for this rests upon those [e.g. Trotsky] who refused to accept the former peace.”



    COMMENTS BY TROTSKY ABOUT LENIN

    And we must certainly not forget the following opinions of Lenin expressed by Trotsky in a 1913 Letter to Chkeidze in which he stated,
    “The wretched squabbling systematically provoked by Lenin, that old hand at the game, that professional exploiter of all that is backward in the Russian labour movement, seems like a senseless obsession.... The entire edifice of Leninism Is built on lies and falsification and bears within itself the poisonous elements of its own decay.“



    WELL, THERE YOU HAVE IT LADIES AND GENTLEMAN; SPELLED OUT BY 10 POSTS IN ALL ITS GORY DETAIL.
    NOW YOU KNOW WHY TROTSKY WAS THE ONLY MAJOR LEADER NOT AT LENIN’S FUNERAL.
    NOW YOU KNOW WHY TROTSKY WAS NEVER SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED FOR THE POSITION OF GENERAL SECRETARY
    OF THE PARTY.
    NOW YOU KNOW WHY TROTSKY’S PROGRAM WAS SOLIDLY AND ROUNDLY REJECTED AT THE 13TH PARTY CONGRESS IN
    1924 AND THE 15TH PARTY CONGRESS IN 1927, THE LATTER BY A VOTE OF 740,000 T0 4,000.
    AND ABOVE ALL, NOW YOU KNOW WHY TROTSKYISM IS NOT MARXISM-LENINISM.
  2. Ismail
    Ismail
    Soviet Studies, vol. XXXVIII, no. 1, January 1986, 24-35.

    Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International
    By J. Arch Getty*

    Leon Trotsky's formal political break with the Bolshevik Party came in 1933 with his decision to renounce allegiance to the Third International (Comintern) and to form a Fourth International. The rupture had not come easily for him. Although the Bolshevik leadership had expelled him from the party in 1927 and exiled him from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky, for his part, had never formally split from the party or the Comintern. From the time of his exile to the 1933 break, pro-Trotsky communists ('Bolshevik-Leninists') had tried to work both within and outside the official parties of the Comintern in order to influence their policies in a Trotskyist direction and Trotsky had been reluctant to organise or sanction new Bolshevik-Leninist parties outside the framework of the Comintern. He had consistently maintained his allegiance to the Third International and expressed his willingness to defend the Soviet state and Bolshevik monopoly of power against internal and external class enemies.

    His four-year loyalty to the party that had exiled him was based in part on his fears of the dangers facing the Soviet government. Trotsky defined the Stalinist regime in this period not as a rightist or 'Thermidorean' counter-revolution but rather as a centrist political faction which 'zig-zagged' between left and right. He believed and feared that the zig-zagging and incompetence of Stalinist leadership could, however, produce a crisis in which the real political right (kulaks, nepmen, Whites, or even a man on horseback) could take advantage of the chaos and mount a genuine counter-revolution. In such circumstances, Trotsky would feel bound to support and defend even the Stalinist centrists from an attack from the right that could topple the Soviet state. He therefore resisted suggestions that he adopt the slogan 'overthrow Stalin' or organise a new political party which could split the Bolsheviks in a time of crisis.1

    When studying political actors and theorists it is always difficult to separate the subjective from the objective. Does a politician adopt a particular policy or stance as a result of subjective personal motivations or objective analysis? Treatments of most Bolshevik (and especially Stalinist) politicians have routinely stressed personal ambition as a determinant of political or theoretical pronouncements. But few of the hagiographical or scholarly works on Trotsky have questioned his intellectual integrity or asked critical questions about the personal motives behind his theoretical and political positions. Since Isaac Deutscher's pioneering biography, Trotsky has been 'the prophet outcast', a tragic hero whose personal and political life was shaped—often disastrously—by his objective theoretical views more than vice versa.2

    In particular, Trotsky's 1933 decision to form the Fourth International has been explained as a function of an objective economic, social, and political analysis of the situations in the Comintern and the USSR. Yet Trotsky's private writings and activities suggest that his changing theoretical evaluations of the USSR and the Bolshevik Party resulted at least in part from the vicissitudes of his tactical position and partisan hopes and not vice versa. Trotsky was a politician as well as a political analyst and one should not be surprised to discover that his private political activities continued in exile or, as with most politicians, influenced his public theoretical pronouncements.

    Formation of separate political organisations and renunciation of allegiance to the Comintern would have made Trotsky and his followers members of a separate, anti-Bolshevik political party and would have placed him and his partisans completely outside the pale of Bolshevik politics. Such a stance would doom any chance for him to return to the Moscow party leadership. With hindsight, for Trotsky to have harboured such hope seems naive and quixotic, but the uncertainties of the dynamic political and social crisis of 1929-32 made many things seem possible. Indeed, Trotsky believed in and hoped for the possibility of a return to the Moscow leadership and worked tirelessly for it. The collapse of his last hope for a recall to Moscow coincided with his decision to form the Fourth International.

    Using Trotsky's public writings of the 1930s most writers have agreed that Hitler's crushing of the German Communist Party (KPD) and workers' movement in February-March, 1933 led Trotsky finally to question his allegiance first to the KPD and then to the Comintern and its member parties.3 Trotsky was angry with the KPD and its Comintern masters for not forming a 'united front from above and below' with the German socialists (SPD) to block Hitler's victory. In March, he wrote a series of articles in which he called for the formation of a wholly new German Communist Party rather than the resuscitation of the KPD.4 Writing under the pseudonym 'G. Gurov', Trotsky suggested that the decision had been taken reluctantly.

    'Just as a doctor does not leave a patient who still has a breath of life, we had for our task the reform of the party as long as there was the least hope. But it would be criminal to tie oneself to a corpse.'4
    Although Trotsky now sanctioned the formation of a new non-Comintern party in Germany, he stopped short of renouncing loyalty to the Third International or Soviet Communist Party and refused to approve the creation of new communist parties anywhere except Germany. In reply to a rhetorical question about giving up on the Comintern as a whole, 'G. Gurov' waffled: 'In my opinion, it would be incorrect to give a rigid answer . . .'. He then suggested that the German disaster could serve as an object lesson that could shock other communist parties into reforming Comintern policy. 'The question has not been settled for the USSR, where proclamation of the slogan of the second party would be incorrect . . . It is not a question of the creation of the Fourth International but of salvaging the Third.'6 Again, on 9 April 1933, Trotsky maintained that 'we do not break with the Third International'. In response to a question on whether it was not inconsistent to break with the Comintern in Germany and not elsewhere, Trotsky minimised the issue as a matter of 'bookkeeping'. 'If, however, the Stalinist bureaucracy should bring the USSR to ruin . . . it will be necessary to build a Fourth International.'7

    For four months following a call for a new German communist party, Trotsky declined to extend his renunciation of the KPD to the Soviet or other communist parties. It was not until mid-July that he finally announced that one cannot remain 'captive to one's own formula' and that hope for Comintern reform was dead. In an article entitled 'It is Necessary to Build Communist Parties and an International Anew', he wrote that the Soviet Communist Party was no longer a party at all but merely 'an apparatus of domination in the hands of an uncontrolled bureaucracy'. There was, therefore, no party with which to break.8 Five days later, he wrote that 'the Bolshevik Party no longer exists' and that accordingly it was time to 'abandon the slogan of the reform of the CPSU'.9

    Apprehensive that he would now be widely regarded as an anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary, Trotsky still refused to call for a revolution in the Soviet Union. In his view, Soviet Russia was still a workers' state that 'can be regenerated . . . without a revolution'.10 It was not until 1 October 1933 that he asserted: 'No normal "constitutional" ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletariat only by force'. (emphasis Trotsky's). Still queasy about the implications of this position, he argued that such force would not be 'an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat but the removal of a malignant growth upon it'. He was advocating not 'measures of a civil war but rather the measures of a police character'.11

    Trotsky's October call for the use of force against the Soviet party regime was not qualitatively new. He was only dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's of his key July statements renouncing the Bolshevik party and denying its existence.12 If reform were impossible and if the Stalinist clique refused to abdicate power, then the July position already implied removing it by force. Trotsky's July renunciation of the Comintern and Bolshevik party and his simultaneous call for a new International comprise the chief watershed in the political activities of his exile.

    Why, after the mid-March articles on Germany did it take Trotsky four months to follow the clear logic of his position and break with the Comintern? His admiring biographer Isaac Deutscher found the delay 'illogical' but explained simply that 'the logic of his new venture soon got the better of Trotsky' in the monts that followed. Deutscher attributed Trotsky's peculiar hesitation on the matter to his longtime loyalty to the Comintern and his fear of Russian counterrevolution.13 While these factors were pertinent to the 1929-32 period, an explanation based on them does not fully account for the illogical four-month pause between breaking with the KPD and renouncing its Moscow Comintern policymakers. Did either rightist danger or Trotsky's loyalty to the Comintern decrease so dramatically after the March KPD disaster?

    Trotsky himself anticipated questions about the delay. He had written in April that a Fourth International would not be necessary until the Stalinist clique brought the USSR to ruin. Since he never claimed that any action on Stalin's part between March and July brought the USSR any closer to ruin than it already was, both the delay and the proposal of a Fourth International needed explaining. Indeed, on 27 July 1933, Trotsky admitted that logically the Comintern break should have come in April. First, he explained that a disagreement between himself and his 'German comrades' on the question of a new party had caused friction in the 'Left Opposition' and delayed the total break. Trotsky had had to convince his German followers of the necessity for a break. Second, he claimed that between March and July he had been waiting to see if the parties or leadership of the Comintern would 'wake up' and abruptly change their policies.14

    It is hard to weigh the importance of either these factors for Trotsky's unusual indecisiveness. It is true that the German Trotskyists with whom he corresponded resisted the notion of a new party, although Trotsky had not taken them seriously enough to consult with them beforehand and had never shown much reluctance to break with the small European leftist groups which defied him.15 The other explanation, that Trotsky waited four months for the Comintern quickly to admit the error of its ways, is even less convincing. No one had less reason than Trotsky to be optimistic about the Comintern and no one had so relentlessly documented its failures over the preceding decade. Trotsky could not have been so naive or ignorant of Comintern politics as to expect either a mea culpa from the Comintern Executive Committee or an independent, defiant policy from the member parties. It seems therefore that the lack of Comintern reform cannot explain the timing of the call for a Fourth International.

    Yet Trotsky's typically polemical, assertive, and self-justifying writings have led scholars to accept his version of the Fourth International decision and to ask few questions about his procrastination. The issue is of more than simple antiquarian or psychological interest since both published and archival documents suggest another side to Trotsky's life in the 1930s quite apart from his journalistic and editorial activities. Behind the scenes of his public reflections on the Comintern, Trotsky was trying both to organise illegal opposition groups in the USSR and to negotiate with Moscow for his legal return.

    Long before the 1933 disaster in Germany, Trotsky had tried to maintain contact with followers in the USSR. Since 1929 he had corresponded with those of his adherents who were in internal exile in Serbia or Central Asia.16 He had tried to smuggle copies of his Byullenten' oppozitsii into the Soviet Union, and through his son Lev Sedov (who lived in Berlin) had maintained contacts with tourists and Soviet officials travelling to and from the USSR. As it became clear that his letters to the Soviet Union were being screened and intercepted by the secret police, he switched to postcards, since he believed that they were scrutinised less carefully.17

    At the time of the Moscow show trials, Trotsky denied that he had any communications with the defendants since his exile in 1929. Yet it is now clear that in 1932 he sent secret personal letters to former leading oppositionists Karl Radek, G. Sokol'nikov, E. Preobrazhensky, and others. While the contents of these letters are unknown, it seems reasonable to believe that they involved an attempt to persuade the addressees to return to opposition.18

    We know considerably more, however, about another clandestine communication between Trotsky and his supporters in the USSR late in 1932. Sometime in October, E.S. Gol'tsman, a former Trotskyist and current Soviet official, met Sedov in Berlin and gave him a proposal from veteran Trotskyist Ivan Smirnov and other left oppositionists in the USSR for the formation of a united opposition bloc. The proposed bloc was to include Trotskyists, Zinovievists, members of the Lominadze group, and others. Sedov wrote to Trotsky relaying the proposal and Trotsky approved. 'The proposition of the bloc seems to me completely acceptable', Trotsky wrote, 'but it is a question of bloc, not merger'. 'How will the bloc manifest itself? For the moment, principally through reciprocal information. Our allies will keep us up to date on that which concerns the Soviet Union, and we will do the same thing on that which concerns the Comintern'.19 In his view, the bloc should exclude those who capitulated and recanted: capitulationist sentiment 'will be inexorably and pitilessly combatted by us'.20 Gol'tsman had relayed the opinion of those in the Soviet Union that participation in the bloc by the Right Opposition was desirable, and that formation of the bloc should be delayed until their participation could be secured. Trotsky reacted against this suggestion: 'The allies' opinion that one must wait until the rights can easily join does not have my approval . . . .' Trotsky was impatient with what he considered passivity on the part of the Right Opposition. 'One struggles against repression by anonymity and conspiracy, not by silence'.21 Sedov then replied that the bloc had been organized. 'It embraces the Zinovievists, the Sten-Lominadze group, and the Trotskyists (old "—")'22 'The Safarov-Tarkhanov group has not yet formally entered—they have a very extreme position; they will enter soon.'

    Ironically, back in the Soviet Union, the leaders of the bloc were being rounded up by the police at this precise moment. Ivan Smirnov and those around him (including the economist Preobrazhensky) had been arrested 'by accident'. It seems that a provocateur in their midst had denounced them on a separate matter. Moreover, Zinoviev and Kamenev had been arrested and deported for knowing about the oppositional Ryutin platform and not reporting it to the authorities. Although these events certainly disrupted the bloc, Sedov was not despondent. He was sure that the police had found no documents or 'Trotskyist literature' on Smirnov, and while 'the arrest of the "ancients is a great blow, the lower workers are safe'.23

    At about this time, Trotsky attempted to contact his 'lower workers' directly. During a brief stay in Copenhagen, he handed a letter to an English supporter named Harry Wicks who was to convey it to oppositionists in Russia. The letter began: 'I am not sure that you know my handwriting. If not, you will probably find someone who does'. Trotsky went on to call upon loyal oppositionists to become active: 'The comrades who sympathize with the Left Opposition are obliged to come out of their passive state at this time, maintaining, of course, all precautions'. (emphasis Trotsky's) He went on to give names and addresses of safe contacts in Berlin, Prague, and Istanbul to whom communications for Trotsky could be sent, and then concluded, 'I am certain that the menacing situation in which the Party finds itself will force all the comrades devoted to the revolution to gather actively about the Left Opposition'.24

    It is clear, then, that a united left oppositional bloc was formed in 1932. In Trotsky's opinion, the bloc existed only for the purposes of communication and exchange of information, and from the evidence, it is clear that Trotsky envisioned no secret 'terrorist' role for the bloc, as Moscow would charge four years later. There is also reason to believe that after the decapitation of the bloc (through the removal of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, and others), the organisation included mainly lower level, less prominent oppositionists: followers of Zinoviev, but not Zinoviev himself. Finally, it seems that Trotsky attempted to maintain direct contact with the allies'. The size and strength of the 1932 bloc cannot be determined and one does not know how threatening it was to the regime. In any case, events would show that both Trotskyists and Stalinists took it seriously.

    Aside from the bloc, Trotsky was pursuing another strategy in these months. During the autumn of 1932 he had written to his son Sedov that it would be strategically important to offer to 'cooperate with the regime in power' in order not to alienate potential supporters within the Stalin apparatus.25 In March 1933 Trotsky made a final attempt to 'cooperate' with Moscow by magnanimously offering to return to the Moscow leadership.

    Three days after his 'G. Gurov' article breaking with the KPD, Trotsky made his formal offer to return to the Politbureau leadership under certain conditions. He made his proposition in a remarkable secret letter sent to the Politbureau on 15 March.26 Trotsky's letter was based on his perception that economic catastrophe was overwhelming the party leadership which now needed the support and participation of all factions in order to rebuild the party and maintain power.

    'I consider it my duty to make one more attempt to appeal to the sense of responsibility of those who presently lead the Soviet state. You know conditions better than I. If the internal development [of the country] proceeds further on its present course, catastrophe is inevitable'.
    Trotsky referred to the Politbureau to his recent articles in his Byulleten' oppozitsii for his analysis. He cited Hitler's recent victory in Germany as evidence of the bankruptcy of Comintern policy and asserted that disasters like that had led to a 'loss of confidence in the leadership'. 'Chto nado sdelat'?' What was needed was a 'rebirth of the party organisation' in order to reestablish confidence, and the Left Opposition was willing to cooperate. Some of you will say, Trotsky mused, that the Left Opposition merely wants a path to power and is offering to cooperate only to get back inside the leadership. However, the question, Trotsky replied, is not power [!] for this or that faction but rather the survival of the workers' state and international revolution for many years.

    'Only open and honest cooperation between the historically produced fractions, fully transforming them into tendencies in the party and eventually dissolving into it, can in concrete conditions restore confidence in the leadership and resurrect the party'.
    Trotsky then promised that a returning Left Opposition would not persecute any party members who had opposed it in the past.

    After describing the conditions which demanded the return of the opposition, Trotsky made the remarkable offer. Alluding to the platform of the Left Opposition, he insisted,

    'Renunciation of this programme is of course out of the question . . . But concerning the manner of presenting and defending this programme before the Central Committee and the party, not to mention the manner of putting it into effect, there can and must be achieved a preliminary agreement with the goal of preventing shocks or splitting'.
    Trotsky thus proposed that the Left Opposition be allowed to return to the leadership as a 'tendency' within the party, and insisted that his group would not publicly renounce its critique and programme. He was, however, leaving the door open for a deal under which agitation for this programme could be held in abeyance for an indefinite period. Trotsky was willing to re-enter the leadership without the usual recantation but with the suggestion that for the sake of party unity he would refrain from criticism. This was a new proposal. Previously, he had demanded unlimited freedom of criticism for the opposition within the party, but now he was making oppositional criticism conditional on an 'agreement' to be worked out. The contradiction with Trotsky's previous conditions and demands explains the secrecy of the letter.28 Unlike his previous open letters to the Soviet leadership, this epistle was never released or published by Trotsky.29 He concluded the letter by informing the Politbureau that they were receiving the only copy of the document. This would leave the Politbureau 'free to choose the means' to begin discussions.

    The 12 March article 'KPD or New Party?' and the 15 March secret letter were interrelated. First, Trotsky may have thought that his call for a new party in Germany would put pressure on the Moscow leadership, which would conceivably opt to take Trotsky back rather than face a split in the Comintern. Second, the secret letter to the Politbureau also helps to explain why he wrote the 12 March article under a pseudonym. Pending a reply to his 15 March offer, Trotsky was not yet committed to the Fourth International and the pseudonym would allow him later to deny that he had broken with the Comintern parties. Such 'deniability' would have been important to him if Moscow had responded favourably to his offer to return. In such a case, Trotsky's restored position in the Moscow leadership would have been inconsistent with a call to break with the KPD and it would have been necessary to disavow 'G. Gurov'.

    Trotsky's delay in breaking with the other parties of the Comintern (including the Bolsheviks) can thus be partially explained. After March, he was waiting for Moscow to answer his secret letter before committing himself publicly to a Fourth International. As much as waiting for the Comintern to admit its mistakes and reform itself, Trotsky delayed his break with Moscow in order to keep his personal options open.

    A month and a half later, Trotsky despaired of receiving a reply from the Politbureau. On 10 May 1933 he set the Politbureau an angry coda to the March letter, which he entitled 'Explanation'.30 This short statement began by noting that the Politbureau had only replied to him with silence. He stressed again the danger facing the Bolshevik regime and pointedly warned that the regime could fall because of the mistakes committed by the Stalin faction. He then ominously served notice on the Politbureau that he now felt free to agitate among the lower ranks of the Stalinist bureaucracy. 'We are sending this document [the March letter plus the May explanation] to responsible workers in the belief that among the blind, the careerists, and the cowards, there are honest revolutionaries from whose eyes one cannot hide the real state of things . . . We call upon these honest revolutionaries to make contact with us. Seek and ye shall find'.

    The 10 May Explanation marked the end of Trotsky's attempts to return 'legally' to the Moscow leadership. The disaster in Germany, the clumsy economic policy of the apparatus, and finally Stalin's refusal to negotiate with him convinced Trotsky that any kind of cooperation with the Stalinist faction was impossible. But his 15 July article 'It is Necessary to Build Communist Parties and an International Anew' was still two months in the future. Why did he further delay his total break with the Bolsheviks and the Comintern?

    While simple indecision was certainly part of the answer, it may well have been that Trotsky felt that the 1932 bloc still offered possibilities short of a total break with the Comintern. As we have seen, Zinoviev and Kamenev had been expelled from the party and exiled in October 1932 for their knowledge of the Ryutin platform. In an article on their expulsion dated 19 October 1932, Trotsky had taken a generally soft, sympathetic, and conciliatory attitude toward the two leaders. (They were, after all, still members of the ephemeral bloc.) Their expulsion from the party and their lack of recantation still put them in Trotsky's camp, as he saw it.31

    Any hopes that Trotsky entertained about the viability of the bloc were shattered in May 1933. Fewer than 10 days after Trotsky appended his May 'Explanation' to the secret letter, he learned that Zinoviev and Kamenev had capitulated to Stalin, recanted their sins and repledged their loyalty to the Stalinist faction. Their departure from the opposition embittered Trotsky. In a 23 May article he described the two as pitiful, tragic, and subservient.32 On 6 July he rallied against them once again and denounced their capitulation in strong terms.33 The leaders (if not the lower workers) of the bloc were gone.

    Both of Trotsky's non-public strategies were now in ruins. The Politbureau had ignored his offer to return and the recantations of Zinoviev and Kamenev had decapitated the 1932 bloc. The options which Trotsky had sought to keep open were now closed and he could no longer hope for a return to Moscow in the near future. Nine days after his bitter article against Zinoviev, he penned the fateful 15 July article breaking with the mainstream Communist parties and the Comintern. There was no longer any point in remaining 'captive to one's own formula'. The party which one month before Trotsky had sought to rejoin 'no longer exists' and was now incapable of reform. It is almost as if Trotsky equated reform of the party with his return to it.

    There was more to Trotsky's life in exile than theorising and publishing. Taking the formation of the Fourth International as a case study, one can see that his partisan activities affected the nature and timing of his theoretical assertions. Indeed, the failure of Trotsky's secret political strategies was a major component in his decision to break with the Comintern and to go it alone. His conspiratorial machinations were not only factors in the decision, but they were important and perhaps better account for the four-month delay in breaking with Moscow than do his public explanations.

    It seems reasonable to suppose further that Trotsky's activities were grist to the mill of those hard-line Moscow politicians who favoured repression of the opposition. His activities could not but have provided political ammunition for those in the Kremlin who demanded stern measures. Trotsky's secret letters to followers in the Soviet Union, his organisation of the 1932 bloc, his formation of the Fourth International, his call for the overthrow of the party leadership by force, and his continued opposition to Comintern policies (particularly to the Popular Front) later made it easy for hard-liners to portray Trotsky as a devious and 'unprincipled' plotter who was scheming to return, forming conspiracies, and opposing communist parties both politically and organisationally.

    In looking back over Soviet history since 1933, Trotsky's activities and writings' might at first seem pointless and irrelevant. Indeed, there is considerable pathos in his actions and writings. After years in exile, he still wrote as if he were part of the leadership. In criticizing the first Five-Year Plan he often used the first person:

    '. . .we have not entered socialism. We have far from attained mastery of the methods of planned regulation. We are fulfilling only the first rough hypotheses, fulfilling them poorly, and with our headlights not yet on'.34
    With hindsight, his attempts to organise secret blocs and his offers to return to Moscow seem sad. Following Deutscher and others, Alec Nove observed 'how few were his followers, how politically ineffective, even meaningless, were his eloquent, if sometimes dogmatic words'.35

    But hindsight can be misleading. Bolshevik party history showed how quickly political fortunes could change. At the end of 1916 Lenin and his circle of expatriates must certainly have seemed dubious candidates to rule the Russian Empire, but war, social conflict, and political paralysis quickly changed the situation. The social and political upheavals of the 1930s combined with the fascist threat of war offered the possibility of a similarly fluid and dynamic situation. Stalin's removal and Trotsky's return did not seem so far-fetched to either of them.

    It seems that the Stalinists took the possibility quite seriously and never relaxed their pressure on Trotsky and Trotskyism. The Stalinist press constantly vilified Trotskyism as the 'vanguard of counterrevolution'. Trotsky's mail to the USSR was intercepted and his entourage was infiltrated by Stalinist agents.36 Secret police officer Yakov Blyumkin was shot simply for meeting Trotsky abroad.37 Later, in 1936, the 1932 bloc became the evidential base for the Moscow show trials and the massacre of Trotskyists in the Ezhov terror which accompanied them.38 In the Spanish Civil War, hard-pressed Spanish and Russian communists took the trouble to round up and shoot Trotskyists. The Soviet government put continuous pressure on the governments of Norway, Belgium, France, and Mexico in an attempt to deny Trotsky an exile sanctuary or base of operations.

    Finally, in 1940, with war on the horizon, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico. Stalin thus made sure that history would not repeat itself. In whatever crisis that might follow, there would be no brilliant exiled revolutionary personality to return home in a sealed train as Lenin had done in 1917.

    University of California, Riverside

    * The author is grateful for a research grant from the University of California, Riverside's Academic Senate Committee on Research.

    1 The Trotsky Papers (Exile Correspondence), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 10248, 4777 show Trotsky's discussions with his son on such questions. Robert H. McNeal, 'Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism' in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, (New York, 1977) pp. 30-52, analyses Trotsky's changing theoretical evaluation of Stalinism. See also the summary in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. Trotsky: 1929-1940, (New York, 1963) pp. 172-5.

    2 Most writers on Trotsky in exile have concentrated on his writings rather than his political activities. See Alec Nove, 'A Note on Trotsky and the "Left Opposition" 1929-31', Soviet Studies, Vol. 29, No 4, (October, 1977) pp. 576-89; Richard B. Day, 'Leon Trotsky on the Problems of the Smychka and Forced Collectivisation', Critique, No. 13, 1981, pp. 55-68; Warren Lerner, '"The Caged Lion"; Trotsky's Writings in Exile', Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. 10, (1977), pp. 198-203; Samuel Kassow, 'Trotsky and the Bullentin of the Opposition', Ibid., pp. 184-97; Siegfried Bahne, 'Trotsky on Stalin's Russia', Survey, No. 41, (1962), pp. 27-42. Exceptions includ Jean van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Cambridge, Mass., 1978 and Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. op. cit.

    3 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit. pp. 198-200; Michel Dreyfus, 'Trockij dall' opposizione di sinestra ai fondamenti di una nuova internazionale (1930-1935)', Ponte, Vol. 36, No. 11-12 (1980), pp. 1316-31; Jean van Heijenoort, 'How the Fourth International Was Conceived', in Joseph Hansen, et. al, Leon Trotsky: The Man and His Work, (New York, 1969), p. 62; George Breitman and Bev Scott, eds., Writings of Leon Trotsky [1933-34], (New York, 1975), p. 10 (hereafter WLT [1933-34]).

    4 'Tragediya nemetskogo proletariata', Byullenten' oppozitsii, (hereafter, BO) No. 34, pp. 7-11 (dated 14 March 1933); 'KPG ili novaya partiya?', Ibid., pp. 12-13 (dated 29 March 1933); 'Krushenie germanskoi kompartii i zadachi oppozitsii' Ibid., pp. 13-17 (dated 9 April 1933); 'KPD or New York? (I)', Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932-1933], New York, 1972 (hereafter WLT [1932-1933], pp. 137-9 (dated 12 March 1933: not the same article as 'KPG ili novaya partiya?' cited above).

    5 'KPD or New Party? (I)', WLT [1932-33], p. 137.

    6 Ibid., p. 138.

    7 BO, No. 34, p. 15.

    8 'Nuzhno stroit' zanovo kommunistcheskie partii i International', BO, No. 36-37, p. 21. (dated 15 July 1933).

    9 'Nel'zya bol'she ostavat' sya v odnom "Internationale" so Stalinym, Manuil'skim, Lozovskim, i Ko', BO, No. 36-37, p. 24. (dated 20 July 1933).

    10 Ibid.

    11 'Klassovaya priroda sovetskogo gosudarstava', BO, No. 36-37, pp. 1-12 (dated 1 October 1933) In the Moscow purge trials of 1936-38, Prosecutor Vyshinsky would quote from this article as evidence that Trotsky advocated the violent overthrow of the Soviet government.

    12 The editors of the Writings of Leon Trotsky see the 1 October article as a qualitative evolution in Trotsky's thinking, see WLT [1933-34], p. 10, Jean van Heijenoort, however, correctly notes that the 'perspective of reform was definitely abandoned' in July. ('How the Fourth International Was Conceived', op. cit. p. 62.)

    13 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit. pp. 205-7.

    14 'For New Communist Parties and the New International', WLT [1933-34], pp. 26-27 (dated 27 July 1933).

    15 See 'The German Decision Against a New Party', Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement (1929-1933), (New York, 1979). pp. 218-9 (dated 19 March 1933); 'We Must Have a Decision on Germany', Ibid., pp. 223-5 (dated 3 April 1933).

    16 Sedov's address book contained the exile addresses of Trotskyists in the USSR. Trotsky Papers, 15741. The Exile Correspondence section of the Trotsky Papers contains copies of such letters.

    17 See Trotsky's account of these difficult communications in The Dewey Commission, The Case of Leon Trotsky, (New York, 1937), pp. 128-32, 261-6, 271-3. This volume is the transcript of the 1937 Commission of Inquiry chaired by John Dewey which investigated the charges made against Trotsky at the 1933-37 Moscow show trials. Trotsky participated willingly in the inquiry.

    18 Trotsky Papers, 15821. Unlike virtually all Trotsky's other letters (including even the most sensitive) no copies of these remain the Trotsky Papers. It seems likely that they have been removed from the Papers at some time. Only the certified mail receipts remain. At his 1937 trial, Karl Radek testified that he had received a letter from Trotsky containing 'terrorist instructions', but we do not know whether this was the letter in question.

    19 Trotsky Papers, 13095 and 10107. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. See also Pierre Broue, 'Trotsky et le bloc des oppositions de 1932', Cahiers Leon Trotsky, No. 5, Jan.-Mar. 1980), pp. 5-37 for background on the bloc. Included in file 13095 is a 1937 note from Trotsky's secretary van Heijenoort which shows that Trotsky and Sedov were reminded of the bloc at the time of the 1937 Dewey Commission but withheld the matter from the inquiry.

    20 Trotsky was always bitterly opposed to those who capitulated to Stalin or who recanted their opposition. He wrote such persons off completely.

    21 Trotsky Papers, 13095. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. Alec Nove has shown that while there were some differences, Trotsky's ciritque of Stalin's industrialisation and collectivisation plans resembled that of Bukharin and the right. (Nove, 'A Note on Trotsky and the "Left Opposition"', op. cit. pp. 576-84). Indeed, Trotsky's spirited defence of the smychka and rural market relations, his criticism of the ultra-leftist campaign against the kulaks, and his advocacy of planning on the basis of 'real potentials' were similar to the strictures of Bukharin's 'Notes of an Economist'. See, for example, Trotsky's 'Problemy razvitiya SSSR', BO, No. 22, pp. 1-15 and 'Sovetskoe khozyaistvo v opasnosti', BO, No. 31, pp. 2-13. (For another view which sees continuity in Trotsky's critique from the 1920s to the 1930s see Day, 'Trotsky on the Problems of the Smychka'.) In the light of the apparent similarities between his and Bukharin's critiques, Trotsky was anxious to maintain the separate identity of the Left Opposition. He wrote in 1932 that although 'practical disagreements with the Right will hardly be revealed . . . it is intolerable to mix up the ranks and blunt the distinctions'. (WLT Supplement (1929-1933), p. 174). In a secret letter to his son about the 1932 bloc, he warned Sedov not to 'leave the field to the rights' (Trotsky Papers, 13095). Despite Trotsky's efforts, Moscow hard-liners were able to portray Trotsky as a scheming 'unprincipled' oppositionist and to denounce 'Left-Right' conspirators at the Moscow show trials.

    22 Trotsky Papers, 13095 (excision of word in original document). Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. Shortly thereafter, Trotsky wrote cryptically that 'As far as the illegal organisation of the Bolshevik-Leninists is concerned, only the first steps have been taken toward its reorganisation.' WLT [1932-33], p. 34.

    23 Trotsky Papers, 4782. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library.

    24 Trotsky Papers, 8114. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. See also The Case of Leon Trotsky, pp. 274-5. The editors of WLT claim that the letter was intended to help Wocks' credibility among Russian Trotskyists in London, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932], (New York, 1973), p. 328 but the archival copy contains a notation which shows that the letter's intended destination was the USSR.

    25 Trotsky Papers, 10248 and T-3485. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library.

    26 Trotsky Papers, T-3522. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. See also WLT [1932-33] p. 141-3.

    27 Hard-liners in the Moscow leadership must have noted and argued that Trotsky's proposal that his "fraction" retain is distinctive programme after readmission to the party ran counter to Lenin's famous 1921 ban on factions and factional platforms. ('On Party Unity', adopted at the X Congress in 1921).

    28 Without revealing his offer to Moscow, Trotsky wrote that 'mutual criticism . . . may have a different character depending on the extent to which it is consciously prepared by both sides and in what organisational framework it takes place'. ('Nuzhno chestnoe vnutripartiinoe soglashenie', BO, No. 34, p. 31, dated 30 March 1933). These crpytic remarks may have been published in order to prepare his followers for Moscow's possible acceptance of Trotsky's proposal to make criticism by the opposition conditional and restricted.

    29 For an example of the more common 'Open Letter', see Trotsky Papers, T-3423.

    30 Trotsky Papers, T-3522. Quoted by permission by the Houghton Library. On the last page of the July issue of Byullenten' oppozitsii, Trotsky referred vaguely to the 15 March letter to the Politbureau. While mentioning neither his offer to defer the opposition programme nor his May 'Explanation', Trotsky claimed somewhat inaccurately that the March letter simply repeated his long-standing offer to return to the Bolshevik party 'under conditions guaranteeing us the right to defend our views', see 'Pochtovyi yashchik', BO, No. 35, p. 22.

    31 'Stalintsky prinimayut mery', BO, No. 31, pp. 13-18 (dated 19 October 1932).

    32 'Zino'ev i Kamenev', BO, No. 35, pp. 23-24 (dated 23 May 1933).

    33 'Zinoviev on the Party Regime', WLT [1932-33]. p. 286 (dated 6 July 1933).

    34 'Sovetskoe khozyaistvo v opasnosti!', BO, No. 31, pp. 2-13 (dated 22 October 1932).

    35 Nove, 'A Note on Trotsky', op. cit., p. 589.

    36 Van Heijenoort (With Trotsky in Exile, pp. 93-102) maintains that Sedov's close assistant Mark Zborowski (allias 'Etienne') was a Stalinist agent. NKVD defector Alexander Orlov in testimony before a US Senate hearing, also denounced Zborowski and provided detailed information. See US Senate, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, Testimony of Alexander Orlov, Washington, D.C., 1962. Trotsky Papers, 15765 is a file on the suspected Stalinist agents in Trotsky's entourage.

    37 See Rex Winsbury, 'Jacob Blumkin in Russia, 1892-1929', History Today, Vol. 27, No. 11, 1977, pp. 712-18, and Deustcher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., pp. 84-8.

    38 See J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938, (New York, 1985), Chapter 5 for a discussion of how the 1932 bloc might have influenced Soviet party politics in 1936.
    "Trotsky arrived, and this scoundrel at once came to an understanding with the Right-wing of Novy Mir against the Left Zimmerwaldians! Just so! That is just like Trotsky! He is always equal to himself – twists, swindles, poses as a Left, helps the Right, so long as he can." (Lenin to Inessa Armand, February 1917.)

    "Trotsky, who only joined the Party just in time to take a prominent part in the October Revolution, represents liberal non-conformity as against die-hard Communism." (Russia, Official Report of the British Trades Union Delegation, London, 1925, p. 15).

    "The fact that this party subordinates the Soviets politically to its leaders has, in itself, abolished the Soviet system no more than the domination of the conservative majority has abolished the British parliamentary system."
    (Leon Trotsky. Stalinism and Bolshevism: Concerning the Historical and Theoretical Roots of the Fourth International. New York: Pioneer Publishers. 1937. p. 22.)

    "Generally speaking an international movement of the proletariat is possible only as between independent nations. What little republican internationalism there was in the years 1830-48 was grouped round the France that was to liberate Europe, and French chauvinism was thus raised to such a pitch that we are still hampered at every turn by France's mission as universal liberator and hence by its natural right to take the lead....

    So long as Poland remains partitioned and subjugated, therefore, there can be no development either of a powerful socialist party within the country itself or of genuine international intercourse between Poles other than the émigrés and the rest of the proletarian parties in Germany, etc."
    (Letter from Engels to Kautsky; 7 February 1882 in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 46, Moscow, 1992., pp. 191-195.)

    "In my opinion the colonies proper, i.e. the countries occupied by a European population–Canada, the Cape, Australia–will all become independent; on the other hand, the countries inhabited by a native population, which are simply subjugated–India, Algeria, the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions–must be taken over for the time being by the proletariat and led as rapidly as possible towards independence... But as to what social and political phases these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organisation, I think we today can advance only rather idle hypotheses. One thing alone is certain: the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing."
    (Letter from Frederich Engels to Karl Kautsky, 12 September 1882. Quoted in Kautsky, Karl. Socialism and Colonial Policy. Germany: 1907.)

    "... the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat."
    (Engels to Marx in London, 7 October 1858 in Marx and Engels, Works. Vol. 40. Moscow: 1929., p. 343.)

    "We all know who that internal enemy is. It is the capitalists, the landowners, the kulaks, and their offspring, who hate the government of the workers and working peasants-the peasants who do not suck the blood of their fellow-villagers.

    A wave of kulak revolts is sweeping across Russia. The kulak hates the Soviet government like poison and is prepared to strangle and massacre hundreds of thousands of workers. We know very well that if the kulaks were to gain the upper hand they would ruthlessly slaughter hundreds of thousands of workers, in alliance with the landowners and capitalists, restore back-breaking conditions for the workers, abolish the eight-hour day and hand back the mills and factories to the capitalists.

    That was the case in all earlier European revolutions when, as a result of the weakness of the workers, the kulaks succeeded in turning back from a republic to a monarchy, from a working people’s government to the despotism of the exploiters, the rich and the parasites. This happened before our very eyes in Latvia, Finland, the Ukraine and Georgia. Everywhere the avaricious, bloated and bestial kulaks joined hands with the landowners and capitalists against the workers and against the poor generally. Everywhere the kulaks wreaked their vengeance on the working class with incredible ferocity...

    There is no doubt about it. The kulaks are rabid foes of the Soviet government. Either the kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolts of the predatory kulak minority of the people against the working people’s government. There can be no middle course. Peace is out of the question: even if they have quarrelled, the kulak can easily come to terms with the landowner, the tsar and the priest, but with the working class never.

    That is why we call the fight against the kulaks the last, decisive fight. That does not mean there may not be many more kulak revolts, or that there may not be many more attacks on the Soviet government by foreign capitalism. The words, the last fight, imply that the last and most numerous of the exploiting classes has revolted against us in our country.

    The kulaks are the most brutal, callous and savage exploiters, who in the history of other countries have time and again restored the power of the landowners, tsars, priests and capitalists. The kulaks are more numerous than the landowners and capitalists. Nevertheless, they are a minority...

    Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! Hatred and contempt for the parties which defend them-the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and today's Left Socialist-Revolutionaries! The workers must crush the revolts of the kulaks with an iron hand, the kulaks who are forming an alliance with the foreign capitalists against the working people of their own country."
    ("Comrade Workers, Forward To The Last, Decisive Fight!" August 1918, in Lenin, V.I. Collected Works. Vol. 28. Moscow: 1965., pp. 53-57.)

    From Molotov Remembers:

    Chuev: Who was more severe, Lenin or Stalin?

    Molotov: Lenin, of course. He was severe. In some cases he was harsher than Stalin. Read his messages to Dzerzhinsky. He often resorted to extreme measures when necessary. He ordered the suppression of the Tambov uprising, that everything be burned to the ground. He would not have tolerated any opposition, even had it appeared. I recall how he reproached Stalin for his softness and liberalism. "What kind of a [class] dictatorship do we have? We have a milk-and-honey power, and not a dictatorship!"

    ... Here is a telegram from Lenin to a provincial food commissar in his native Simbirsk in 1919: "The starving workers of Petrograd and Moscow are complaining about your inefficient management.... I demand from your maximum energy, a no-holds-barred attitude to the job, and thorough assistance to the starving workers. If you fail, I will be forced to arrest the entire staff of your institutions and to bring them to trial.... You must immediately load and send off two trains of thirty cars each. Send a telegram when this is complete. If it is confirmed that, by four o'clock, you did not send the grain and made the peasants wait until morning, you will be shot. Sovnarkom Chairman, Lenin."

    "What do you think; were they all spies? Of course not. Then what happened to them? They were not properly prepared politically. There were also 'our people' who went over to them. . . . Because they were weak and unprepared and thought nothing would come of this, we lost a large number of capable people."
    (Stalin, Politburo stenogram October 11-12 1938. In Gregory, Paul R. "Watching Stalin Win." Hoover Digest #4, 2007.)

    "Inside the Party Stalin has put himself above all criticism and the State. It is impossible to displace him except by assassination. Every oppositionist becomes, ipso facto, a terrorist."
    (Leon Trotsky, statement from interview with William Randolph Heart's New York Evening Journal, January 26, 1937. Cited in Kahn, A. E., and M. Sayers. The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946., p. 234.)

    "Trotsky put the question in this way: the accession of Fascism to power in Germany had fundamentally changed the whole situation. It implied war in the near future, inevitable war, the more so that the situation was simultaneously becoming acute in the Far East. Trotsky had no doubt that this war would result in the defeat of the Soviet Union. This defeat, he wrote, will create favorable conditions for the accession to power of the bloc. . . ."
    (Karl Radek on Trotsky's 1933 letter to him. Cited in Kahn, A. E., and M. Sayers. The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946., pp. 239-40.)

    "Shortly before they left for Russia, Trotsky's emissaries, Konon Berman-Yurin and Fritz David, were summoned to special conferences with Trotsky himself. The meetings took place in Copenhagen toward the end of November 1932. Konon Berman-Yurin later stated:

    'I had two meetings with him [Trotsky]. First of all he began to sound me on my work in the past. Then Trotsky passed to Soviet affairs. Trotsky said: 'The principal question is the question of Stalin. Stalin must be physically destroyed.' He said that other methods of struggle were now ineffective. He said that for this purpose people were needed who would dare anything, who would agree to sacrifice themselves for this, as he expressed it, historic task. . . .

    In the evening we continued our conversation. I asked him how individual terrorism could be reconciled with Marxism. To this Trotsky replied: problems cannot be treated in a dogmatic way. He said that a situation had arisen in the Soviet Union which Marx could not have foreseen. Trotsky also said that in addition to Stalin it was necessary to assassinate Kaganovich and Voroshilov. . . .

    During the conversation he nervously paced up and down the room and spoke of Stalin with exceptional hatred. . . . He said that the terrorist act should, if possible, be timed to take place at a plenum or at the congress of the Comintern, so that the shot at Stalin would ring out in a large assembly.'"
    (Kahn, A. E., and M. Sayers. The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946., pp. 248-49.)

    "When President Benes visited me at Marrakesh in January 1944, he told me this story. In 1935 he had received an offer from Hitler to respect in all circumstances the integrity of Czechoslovakia in return for a guarantee that she would remain neutral in the event of a Franco-German war... In the autumn of 1936 a message from a high military source in Germany was conveyed to President Benes to the effect that if he wanted to take advantage of the Fuehrer's offer he had better be quick, because events would shortly take place in Russia rendering any help he could give to Germany insignificant.

    While Benes was pondering over this disturbing hint, he became aware that communications were passing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between important personages in Russia and the German Government. This was a part of the so-called military and old-guard Communist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin and introduce a new régime based on a pro-German policy. President Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless, but perhaps not needless, military and political purge in Soviet Russia, and the series of trials in January 1937, in which Vyshinsky, the Public Prosecutor, played so masterful a part." (Churchill, The Gathering Storm, pp. 224-225.)

    "At the Stockholm congress [of 1906] the Mensheviks argued in favor of municipalization of the land, which meant vesting it in locally elected councils to be administered for the benefit of the peasants. Lenin and the Bolsheviks proposed nationalization by vesting the land in the central government and, so they claimed, making it the property of all citizens. Argument raged around these two proposals.

    [...] In the congress Stalin bluntly condemned both municipalization and nationalization and proposed as a 'temporary' expedient what he called distributism, which meant seizing and sharing out the land directly among the peasants. This was what they wanted and this alone would win their support. Lenin and others attacked his proposal, but he stood his ground, maintaining that it was the obvious practical policy. He argued further that in fostering rural capitalism his proposal was in accordance with Marxist doctrine and a logical advance towards the socialist revolution. And in 1917 his policy, by then endorsed by Lenin, produced the slogan 'All land to the peasants,' which gained the party wide support on the land and was a major factor in its victory."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 56-57.)

    "Stalin, again using the name of Ivanovich, traveled to London to attend the Fifth Congress, which began on May 13, 1907.... Stalin observed Trotsky and clearly took an instant dislike to him... On his return from the Congress his only public reference to Trotsky was in the Baku Proletarian, in which he wrote that 'Trotsky displayed a 'beautiful irrelevance.''"
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 59-60.)

    Source cited is Sochineniya, Vol. 2, p. 52. Grey also notes that it can be translated as "beautiful extravagance" which is also used sarcastically.

    "Meanwhile at the end of January 1910 a further resolution of the Baku Committee, written by Stalin and distributed as a hand sheet... proposed urgently the transfer of the (leading) practical center to Russia, the publication of a national newspaper, produced in Russia with the proposed practical center providing its editorial board, and the organization of local papers in the most important party centers.... In mid-February 1912... Lenin had established a separate and independent Bolshevik party... Lenin had acted on Stalin's insistent demands that there should be an organizing center as well as a newspaper inside Russia. The Central Committee had set up a Russian bureau with the functions of supervising and revitalizing party groups throughout the country. Stalin had been appointed a member of the bureau."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 69-71.)

    Source cited on resolution is Stalin, Sochineniya, Vol. 2, pp. 198-99.

    "On April 22, 1912, the first issue of Pravda (The Truth) appeared with the editorial written by Stalin. The secretary of the editorial board was a young man named Vyacheslav Skriabin, later to be known as Molotov. The name of the new paper was deliberately taken from Trotsky's Pravda, published abroad, which had remained by far the most popular of the newspapers smuggled into Russia. It was a shrewd theft, for the new paper claimed many of Trotsky's readers, while controverting the policies he had been advocating. Trotsky protested angrily, and could do nothing but cease publication of his own paper."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 72-73.)

    "On March 12 [1917], the day of his return to Petrograd, the bureau considered the question of Stalin's admission to its membership.... Three days after his return he was elected to the bureau's Presidium with full voting rights and was appointed Bolshevik representative on the Executive Committee (Excom) of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' Deputies. With Kamenev he also took over Pravda... Stalin dominated the party during the three weeks until Lenin's return. Recognizing that Lenin's violent opposition to the war and to the provisional government would antagonize most party members and people outside the party, he pursued a moderate policy. He advocated limited support for the provisional government on the grounds that the bourgeois-democratic revolution was not yet complete and that there would be a period of years before conditions were ripe for the socialist revolution. It made no sense, therefore, to work to destroy the government at this stage.

    In his policy towards the war he was equally common-sensed, writing that 'when an army faces the enemy, it would be the most stupid policy to urge it to lay down arms and go home.' In response to the general demand among Social Democrats, he was even prepared to consider reunion with acceptable elements in the Menshevik party, and on his initiative the bureau agreed to convene a joint conference.

    Pravda reflected this policy of moderation. Articles received from Lenin were edited, and the abusive references to the provisional government and to the Mensheviks were toned down or cut. According to Shlyapnikov, jaundiced by his summary displacement, the 'editorial revolution was strongly criticized by Petrograd workers, some even demanding the expulsion of Stalin, Kamenev and Muranov from the party.'"
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 89-90.)

    Source cited on Stalin on war and the demands for his expulsion: A.G. Shlyanpikov, The Year 1917: Second Book (Moscow and Petrograd, 1923), p. 179, 183.

    "Dissenting from a proposal that revolution was possible 'on condition of a proletarian revolution in the West,' he [Stalin] said [at the Sixth Party Congress of August 1917] that 'the possibility is not excluded that Russia will be the country that blazes the trail to socialism.... It is necessary to give up the outworn idea that Europe alone can show us the way. There is a dogmatic Marxism and a creative Marxism. I stand on the ground of the latter.'"
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 95-96.)

    Source cited is Shestoi s'ezd RSDRP (b) August 1917 gode (Moscow, 1958), pp. 174-75.

    "At the meeting of the committee on October 17 (30) [1917], Trotsky advocated stern action against Kamenev and Zinoviev and branded them as traitors. He was not influenced by the fact that Kamenev was his brother-in-law; indeed, he was demonstrating that loyalty to the party stood far above personal relationships. Other members supported the case for severe punishment. It was Stalin who brought the note of moderation into the fury of the discussion... Kamenev and Zinoviev knew that they had acted irresponsibly, and they would not repeat their mistakes. Then it was decided to remove Kamenev from the editorial board of Pravda. This, too, was dropped, when Stalin resigned in protest and the committee refused to accept his resignation."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 97-98)

    "The Second Russian Congress of Soviets [of October 1917] had approved the new government... the Congress formally appointed Lenin's Council of People's Kommissars by decree, and then elected a Central Executive Committee of 101 members. The Bolsheviks won 62 seats on this committee, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had formed a separate party, 29 seats, and other parties 10.... Lenin thus succeeded nominally in basing his government on the three main classes—workers, peasants, and soldiers. But he had not yet met the demand in Sovnarkom, in the Central Executive Committee, and within his own party for a coalition of all socialist parties. Right-wing Bolsheviks in particular were determined to force a coalition with the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. Zinoviev, Rykov, Milyutin, Vladimir Nogin, and Lunacharsky, who had all opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power but, after its success, had accepted office in Sovnarkom, now resigned.

    They and Kamenev also were even prepared to consider a Menshevik proposal that Lenin and Trotsky should be excluded from any coalition government. The agitation continued until, with the approval of the majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee, a statement, signed by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, threatened the agitators with expulsion from the party.... Stalin... signed the statement warning the right-wing members, who were agitating for coalition, and he had rejected the Menshevik proposal that Lenin and Trotsky should be excluded from a coalition government."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 100-102.)

    "He was to support Lenin strongly during the party crisis over the peace treaty with Germany.... he stood firmly by the principle of national self-determination, although criticized by Bukharin and other members for yielding to the bourgeois nationalism of the small nations. A few weeks later at the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, he enunciated a change, stating that 'the right of self-determination [was the right] not of the bourgeoisie but of the toiling masses of a given nation. The principle of self-determination ought to be used as a means in the struggle for socialism, and it ought to be subordinated to the principles of socialism.' This change was all the more necessary because most of the small nations had installed governments which were non-socialist and anti-Bolshevik.... In May 1918, when opening a preparatory conference on the creation of a Tatar-Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Republic, he expressed this centralist policy on forthright terms. A sovereign, 'purely nationalist' form of autonomy would be disruptive and, indeed, anti-Soviet. The country needed 'a strong Russian-wide state authority, capable of quelling conclusively the enemies of socialism and of organizing a new communist economy.' The central authority should, therefore, exercise all functions of importance, leaving to the autonomous regions the administrative, political, and cultural functions which were regional in character.

    Stalin was a member of the commission set up to draft the first constitution, which was adopted in July 1918, creating the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. The form of federalism with national territorial units which he advocated was embodied in his draft article 11."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., p. 104.)

    Source cited for Stalin's speech on self-determination is: Stalin, Sochineniya, Vol. 4, pp. 31-32.
    Source cited for Stalin during the preparatory conference on the Bashkir-Tatar ASSR: Stalin, Sochineniya, Vol. 4, pp. 87-89.

    "On November 29, 1917, the Central Committee of the party had appointed a chetvërtka, or foursome, comprising Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Sverdlov, to exercise power in all emergency matters. According to Trotsky, this inner council became a troika, or threesome, because Sverdlov was too deeply involved in the work of the party secretariat to be available. Membership of this inner council and of Sovnarkom was for Stalin all the more demanding, because of Lenin's reliance on him. 'Lenin could not get along without Stalin for a single day,' Pestkovsky wrote. 'Probably for that reason our office in the Smolny was under the wing of Lenin. In the course of the day he would call Stalin out an endless number of times, or would appear in our office and lead him away. Most of the day Stalin spent with Lenin.'"
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., p. 105.)

    Source cited for Pestkovsky's words is: S. Pestkovsky, "Vospominaniya o rabote v Narkomnatse 1917-1919 gg.," Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya, No. 6 (June 1930), p. 128.

    "The German High Command knew that the Russian Army was demoralized, and that the new Soviet government would have to accept German terms of peace.

    The Soviet proposal for an armistice was quickly agreed to by the Germans, and signed at Brest-Litovsk on December 2 (1917). Negotiations for peace began in earnest on December 9. Trotsky then headed the Soviet delegation. He had come to make fullest use of revolutionary propaganda, and he fervently believed that revolution was imminent in Germany and elsewhere. At times he dominated the conference. His country in chaos, its Army mutinous and demoralized, and its new government desperately clinging to power, he was negotiating from a position of weakness against professional diplomats backed by a strong and victorious Army.

    Trotsky's furious sallies made no impression on his German opponents. They knew the weakness of his position. Suddenly, on January 18 (1918), they produced a map of eastern Europe, showing the new frontiers, which deprived Russia of extensive territories. The ultimatum enraged Trotsky. He swore that he would break off negotiations. Then, having received a telegram, signed 'Lenin-Stalin,' instructing him to return to Petrograd for discussions, he agreed to an adjournment until January 29. There is further evidence, cited by Trotsky himself, showing how closely Stalin stood to Lenin at this critical time. A certainly Dmitrievsky observed that "even Lenin at that period felt the need of Stalin to such an extent that, when communications came from Trotsky at Brest and an immediate decision had to be made, while Stalin was not in Moscow, Lenin would inform Trotsky: 'I would like first to consult with Stalin before replying to your question.' And only three days later Lenin would telegraph: 'Stalin has just arrived. I will consider it with him, and we will at once give you our joint answer.''

    Leaving Brest-Litovsk on January 6, Trotsky reached Petrograd. He now worked out his peace formula of 'no peace no war.' He would announce the end of the war and the demobilization of the Russian Army, while refusing to sign a treaty of peace. He was confident that the Germans would be unable to renew their offensive, because their troops would refuse to obey orders, and there would be revolution inside Germany. The formula would inspire the proletarians of Europe. He clung to the idea that revolution was imminent in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere.

    In Petrograd, Trotsky argued forcefully for his new approach. Lenin was unconvinced. Stalin stated bluntly that there was no evidence of immediate revolution in western Europe and that Trotsky's formula was not a policy. After heated debate in the Central Committee, the decision emerged that Trotsky should prolong the negotiations and, when faced with a showdown, apply his no-peace-no-war formula.

    The German delegation returned to Brest-Litovsk, determined to force an early peace. Their intention was first to sign a separate peace with the Ukrainian Rada, which would presumably compel Trotsky to come to terms. When the conference resumed on January 28, Trotsky vehemently rejected the separate Ukrainian peace. Again the Germans were unimpressed. With special ceremony on February 9, 1918, the treaty was signed by the Ukrainian representatives in Brest-Litovsk...

    The conference was nearing a crisis. Trotsky decided to make his announcement. On February 10 he delivered a scathing indictment of imperialism. The delegates, having heard it several times already, took it to be a face-saving preliminary to the acceptance of the German terms. Then he proclaimed his formula: 'We are removing our armies and our peoples from the war... but we feel ourselves compelled to refuse to sign they peace treaty.' He followed this statement with stirring appeals to the working masses of all countries to follow the example of Russia.

    The German and other delegations sat in silence, as Trotsky withdrew from the conference room. They were staggered by the preposterous declaration. On the same evening Trotsky returned to Petrograd with his delegation. He was delighted with his performance, and confident that the Germans would not dare to renew their offensive. To his colleagues he reported that he had won a diplomatic victory. Lenin, however, was far from persuaded. Six days later his fears proved well founded. The German government declared that the armistice would end on February 18, and on that day the German Army began advancing on a broad front.

    In Petrograd the Central Committee frantically debated what to do. Lenin made it clear from the start that peace negotiations must be renewed without delay. The no-peace-no-war formula had not only failed but had endangered the Soviet government and the Revolution. Trotsky stubbornly argued that they should wait on the German proletariat, who were surely on the point of revolution. Lenin finally won a bare majority of support from the Committee.

    A message was sent in the early hours of February 19, 1918, that under protest the Council of People's Kommissars accepted the German terms. The German reply came four days later. As Lenin had feared, the new peace terms were far harsher. The Central Committee reacted with fury. Bukharin shouted hysterically that they must fight, must wage a holy, revolutionary war to the last man, and most of those present echoed his demands.

    Lenin remained calm in the midst of this emotional outburst. When he spoke, he repeated the hard facts of their predicament. He demanded that the peace treaty be signed, and he added the dire threat that 'if this is not done I resign from the government!' The significance of his threat was hardly noticed, as the members continued their debate. Finally Lenin's demands were approved. Bukharin voted against them. Trotsky, unable to accept that his negotiations had failed or to realize the gravity of the situation, abstained. Stalin supported Lenin...

    After stormy meetings the Petrograd Soviet and the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets voted to accept the German peace conditions in order to save the Revolution....

    The Left Socialist Revolutionaries at once broke away from the coalition and campaigned for war against the imperialists. Within the party Bukharin and other prominent Bolsheviks were in revolt. Like the Left Socialist Revolutionaries they saw themselves as defenders of the Revolution. Their appeals for a holy revolutionary war aroused enthusiastic responses among ordinary members. Gradually, however, Lenin's arguments gained support until, at the time of the ratification of the peace treaty at the Seventh Party Congress on March 15, 1918, Bukharin's resolution for the rejection of the treaty found few supporters."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp 106-109.)

    Source for "the new Soviet government would have to accept German terms of peace...": "There is strong evidence that the Bolsheviks had been receiving secretly substantial fund from the German government primarily to support their policy of taking Russia out of the war. It is unlikely, however, that this German support influenced Lenin's decision to accept the German peace terms." (Grey) He then cites L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd ed. (London, 1970), pp. 177-79, 186n.
    Source for Dmitrievsky's words: L. Trotsky, Stalin (London, 1968), pp. 244, 248-49.
    Source for "We are removing our armies and our peoples from the war...": J. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace March 1918 (London, 1938), pp. 251-52.
    Source for Lenin threatening to resign: Ibid., p. 257.

    "Faced with the stark problems of the economy and the survival of the Soviet regime, Lenin and his colleagues at first thought that the system of war communism would provide the answer. Trotsky was a fanatic exponent of this view. His plan, first presented in Pravda in December 1919, was approved initially by the Central Committee, but many party members argued strenuously against it. The plan provided for 'the mobilization of the industrial proletariat, liability for labor service, militarization of economic life, and the use of military units for economic needs.' He insisted that labor must be subject to the same strict discipline as the Red Army... he set about imposing this discipline. The immediate result was an angry storm of protest and rebellion. The Third Red Army was on his orders re-designated 'The First Revolutionary Army of Labor' and assigned to labor duties in the Urals. The soldiers deserted. Peasants, infuriated by the take-over of their districts by labor armies, burned the crops as they were gathered.

    Trotsky came into direct conflict with the trade unions. He had plunged into the task of restoring the railway system, and, overruling the objections of the union, he had mobilized the railwaymen under army discipline. Then, again in the face of union opposition, he had set up his own transport authority, the Central Transport Committee, known as Tsektran. His highhanded treatment of this union and his threats that he would deal likewise with other unions infuriated unionist members of the party.

    Trotsky had provoked the conflict with the unions, but there was also growing opposition to the highhanded practice of the central party organs of disregarding democratic elections and making appointments to high offices. Dispute over these fundamental issues threatened to split the party. Lenin, supported by ten of the nineteen Central Committee members, including Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, proposed some moderating of party rule. Immediate abolition of Trotsky's hated Tsektran was to be a first step. Trotsky violently opposed such 'liberal' policies. He was supported by Bukharin, Dzerzhinsky, and the three members then in charge of the party Secretariat. The rift within the Central Committee could not be bridged, and it was decided to put the matter to the party at large. Zinoviev, the party leader in Petrograd, led the attack on Trotsky, whom he had always detested, condemning him as a dictator. The debate raged between the factions....

    The Tenth Party Congress, meeting from March 8 to 16 (1921)... approved the principles of the NEP after relatively little debate... Trotsky's proposals for rebuilding the economy by using the methods of war communism were heavily defeated. Lenin's resolutions on the trade unions and democratic centralism seemed to introduce a new spirit of reasonableness....

    Suddenly on the last day of the Congress, Lenin moved to new resolutions, one on 'Party Unity' and the other entitled 'The Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in Our Party.'... The second resolution rejected the trade-union claims to control industry as 'inconsistent with membership of the party.' The trade unions were, in fact, to be merged into the state machine and to function as the servants of the state. This was no more than Trotsky had advocated, but his handling of the proposal had caused angry opposition...

    Trotsky suffered an ignominious defeat at the Congress, and the campaign waged against him by Zinoviev, Stalin, and others seriously damaged his reputation. His plans... had been overwhelmingly rejected... Stalin played an unobtrusive part in the disputes which dominated the Tenth Congress. He was one of the Platform of Ten Supporting Lenin's proposals. He was evidently content to leave it to Zinoviev to launch the main attack on Trotsky in the pre-congress debate, but he was active in the campaign. In Pravda on January 5, 1921, he published an article entitled 'Our Differences,' which was his first polemical article against Trotsky. He argued that 'democratism' and the use of persuasion among the proletariat were essential now that the war was over and the party had to deal with the complex threats of economic collapse. It was an effective polemic, but moderate in tone and without the strident vigor of Zinoviev's attacks."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 144-145, 147-149.)

    Source for "the mobilization of the industrial proletariat...": W.H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917-21 (London, 1935), Vol. 2, p. 293.
    Source for 'Our Differences': L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd ed. (London, 1970), p. 214.

    "During 1921 Lenin's health began to fail. Cerebral arteriosclerosis was already obstructing the blood circulation and taking its toll. The small thick-set man whose driving energy had been inexhaustible was tiring easily. He became irascible, sensing perhaps that soon he would be unable to carry on... The Eleventh Party Congress was to meet towards the end of March 1922, and he prepared carefully. The sessions threatened to be stormy. Many members were critical of the dictatorship of the hierarchy and the suppression of party democracy. Indeed, in February 1922 a group of twenty-two members of the former Workers' Opposition, led by Shlyapnikov and Aleksandra Kollontai, went as far as to appeal to the Third Communist International. There was never any possibility that the International would censure the Russian party. But the action of the twenty-two members caused embarrassment to Lenin and his colleagues. In fact, they failed to appreciate that the mass of members were in sympathy with Shlyapnikov's group.

    The widespread discontent erupted at the congress. Lenin attended only the opening and closing sessions. He was infuriated by the criticisms made from the floor. In the past he had handled critics effectively, but now he showed his danger and made threats, and some members even laughed at him. Moreover, the congress defied him and the Central Committee in refusing to expel Shlyapnikov and Kollontai from the party. Otherwise the policies set out in Lenin's opening paper were endorsed. But on the important issue of the retention of the Party Control Commission, the Central Committee got its way only by falsifying the voting.

    [...] At the Congress, Molotov reported on behalf of the Secretariat. He claimed that as a result of the purge of the party, some 160,000 members had been expelled or forced to resign. 'Now,' he stated, 'those [opposition] currents and semi-formed factions do not exist.' The delegates were not impressed. Indeed, the sessions provided lively evidence that the spirit of the opposition was far from dead. There were numerous complaints about the clumsy bureaucracy and inefficiency of the Secretariat. Of all the organs of the Central Committee the Secretariat appeared to command least respect.

    On April 3, 1922, the day after the end of the Congress, it was announced that Stalin had been appointed to the new post of General Secretary. The function of the office was to co-ordinate the work of the complex party apparatus. But it was also intended that the Secretariat would examine the membership more closely and ensure that delegates to future congresses were more carefully chosen... Apparently no one, not even Lenin at this stage, paused to reflect that Stalin was now the only Bolshevik leader who was a member of the Central Committee, Politburo, Orgburo, and the Secretariat, the four closely interlinked organs which controlled every aspect of the party and of national life."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 157-159.)

    Source for "He was infuriated by the criticisms made from the floor": L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd ed. (London, 1970), p. 218.
    Source for Molotov's speech: R.C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1879-1929 (New York, 1973), p. 219.

    "In his speeches he was moderate and reasonable. He handled criticisms with apparent good humor, and even when attacking the opposition he was less savage than Lenin or Zinoviev. In Politburo meetings he sought to be agreeable. Writing of the first Politburo meeting that he attended and a time when the struggle between the three leaders [Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev] and Trotsky was tense, Bazhanov noted that 'Trotsky was the first to arrive for the session. The others were late, they were still plotting . . . . Next entered Zinoviev. He passed by Trotsky and both behaved as if they had not noticed one another. When Kamenev entered he greeted Trotsky with a slight nod. At last Stalin came in. He approached the table at which Trotsky was seated, greeted him in a most friendly manner and vigorously shook hands with him across the table.' It was during this time that, although in opposition to him, Trotsky described Stalin to his close friend and translator, Max Eastman, as 'a brave and sincere revolutionary.'"
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., p. 194.)

    Source for Bazhanov's words: B. Bazhanov, Stalin der Rote Diktator (Berlin, 1931), p. 13.
    Source for Trotsky's words to Eastman: Max Eastman, Since Lenin Died (London, 1925), p. 55.

    "The speech [by Stalin] sent a shock of horror through the party. It seemed impossible that any member, least of all a leading Bolshevik like Trotsky, could have written in such terms of Lenin [in 1913]. But Stalin's evidence was irrefutable... As the days passed, there was growing amazement that he issued no denials or answers to these attacks. On December 13, 1924, Pravda went so far as to publish an editorial note, stating that no communication had been received from Trotsky concerning the charges against him.

    The campaign against Trotsky, which had been going on for over a year, now reached its climax... He had never expected that his 'Lessons of October,' which he had written to set the record straight and to warn the party that it was on the wrong course, would loose such a hurricane of protest. Under the strain his health broke down. Doctors recommended a rest-spell in the Caucasus. He refused to leave his quarters in the Kremlin. Sick, solitary, and surrounded by hostility, he awaited the meeting of the Central Committee to be held January 17-20, 1925. He had written what is known as the letter of resignation in which, as in his speech to the Thirteenth Congress, he expressed his loyalty and submission to the party, but refused to make any confession of error.

    At the committee meeting Zinoviev and Kamenev showed eagerness to make the final kill. Supported by others, they demanded the expulsion of Trotsky not only from the committee and Politburo but from the party itself. This, the final sentence of excommunication, was opposed by Stalin. Reporting later to the Fourteenth Party Congress, he explained that 'we, the majority of the Central Committee . . . did not agree with Comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev because we realized that the policy of cutting off heads is fraught with major blood-letting—and they want blood—dangerous and contagious; today you cut off one head, tomorrow a second, then a third; who would remain in the party?' It was a fateful pronouncement.

    The only action taken against Trotsky at this meeting of the Central Committee was to remove him from office as president of the Revolutionary War Council and Kommissar for War. For some months he had held office only nominally. M.V. Frunze, one of his chief antagonists in the military, had been appointed Deputy Kommissar in the spring of 1924, and had virtually taken control. For the time being Trotsky remained a member of the Central Committee of the Politburo, but he was a member on sufferance. He had forfeited the support and prestige he had commanded in the party. His conduct had demoralized his few supporters. He was alone."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 204-205.)

    Source for Stalin's words on Trotsky: Stalin, Sochineniya, Vol. 7, pp. 379-80.

    "The Politburo was divided [over NEP]. Bukharin and the right-wing Bolsheviks argued in favor of maximum concessions to the peasantry. Bukharin went so far in an article in Pravda on April 14, 1925, as to declared to the peasants, 'Enrich yourselves, develop your farms, do not fear that you will be subjected to restrictions.' Later he was obliged to modify this statement and then to retract it completely....

    During the summer of 1925 the rivalry came into the open. Zinoviev and Kamenev had supported the right-wing pro-peasant policy so long as they felt secure in their places in the Politburo, but under attack from Stalin they adopted the radical left-wing position... Zinoviev pressed his attack against the right-wing further by arguing that NEP was not a development of true Leninism, but a 'strategic retreat' into capitalism....

    The Fourteenth Party Congress, which had been much delayed, was finally arranged to open on December 18, 1925.... The Congress opened quietly. Stalin delivered the main political report and did not mention the opposition. He acknowledged that the kulak was a danger, but warned against exaggerating it. Any policy which antagonized the peasantry would hinder the economic progress which, as all knew, was outstanding and encouraging."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 206, 208-209.)

    Source on Bukharin's "enrich yourself" words: Schapiro, p. 296.

    "On December 21, 1929, the nation celebrated Stalin's fiftieth birthday with unprecedented extravagance... It was the beginning of the Stalin cult, which developed on a phenomenal scale.

    The frenetic adulation was in part the enthusiastic work of the party machine in Moscow and of the party officials throughout the country. They were praising and ensuring that the people joined by praising their chief, the General Secretary of the party. They owed their positions to him and they knew how his authority could reach into the most distant corners of the party organization. But servility and self-interest were accompanied by genuine veneration...

    While accepting the need for the cult, however, Stalin probably took little active part in promoting it. The Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas, meeting him in 1945, formed the opinion that 'the deification of Stalin . . . was at least as much the work of Stalin's circle and the bureaucracy, who required such a leader, as it was his own doing.'

    Stalin was, in fact, not a vain, self-obsessed man who had to be surrounded by fawning and flattery. He detested this mass adulation of his position, and throughout his life he went to great lengths to avoid demonstrations in his honor. Indeed, he was to be seen in public only at party congresses and at ceremonial occasions on Red Square, when he was a remote figure standing on Lenin's mausoleum. He had the same lack of personal vanity as Peter the Great or Lenin....

    Stalin had not changed greatly. He had power and position, but showed no interest in possessions and luxuries. His tastes were simple and he lived austerely. In summer he wore a plain military tunic of linen and in winter a similar tunic of wool, and an overcoat that was some fifteen years old. He also had a short fur coat with squirrel on the inside and reindeer skin on the outside, which he started wearing soon after the Revolution and continued to wear with an old fur hat until his death. The presents, many of them valuable and even priceless works of craftsmanship, sent to him from all parts of the country and, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, from all over the world, embarrassed him. He felt that it would be wrong to make any personal use of such gifts. His daughter noted: 'He could not imagine why people would want to send him all these things.'"
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 233-35.)

    Source for Djilas quote: Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (London, 1962), p. 98.
    Source for "Indeed, he was to be seen in public only at party congresses and at ceremonial occasions...": Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Years to a Friend (London, 1969), pp. 211-12.
    Source on Stalin's daughters quote: "The flow of gifts became an avalanche in December 1950, when his seventieth birthday was celebrated. He had them all sent to a Museum of Gifts, opened in Moscow." (Grey) Alliluyeva, pp. 54-55, 215.

    "Although held now on the small island of Prinkipo by agreement with the Turkish government, Trotsky remained a threat. He was publishing Byuleten Oppozitsii (The Bulletin of the Opposition), which showed that up-to-date information was reaching him through his agents inside Russia. The Bullentin's criticisms and proposals were similar to those set up in Ryutin's platform, but the emphasis was on changing the party leadership and carried all the force of Trotsky's bitter personal hatred."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., p. 267.)

    "The foundations of GULAG had been laid in July 1918 by Lenin, who had ordered the setting up of the system, and within five years 355 camps had been established, containing more than 68,000 persons.... In January 1938 the Central Committee passed a resolution which heralded what was to be called the 'Great Change.' ... The new enemy was identified as the Communist-careerist. He had taken advantage of the purge to denounce his superiors and to gain promotion. He was guilty of spreading suspicion and undermining the party. A purge of careerists was launched. At the same time mass repression diminished and the rehabilitation of victimized party members began... Stalin could not maintain direct control over the purge. He was aware that the NKVD had arrested many people who were not guilty and that of the 7 to 14 million people serving sentences of forced labor in the GULAG camps many were innocent of any taint of disloyalty. They were inevitable sacrifices, inseparable from any campaign on this scale. But he resented this waste of human material. The aircraft designer Yakovlev recorded a conversation with him in 1940, in which Stalin exclaimed: 'Ezhov was a rat; in 1938 he killed many innocent people. We shot him for that!'

    Throughout these terrible years Stalin showed an extraordinary self-control and did not lose sight of his purpose. He knew what he was doing. He was convinced that the majority of the people liquidated were guilty in principle. And he acted with a cold merciless inhumanity. According to Medvedev, Stalin with Molotov signed during the years 1937-39 some 400 lists, containing the names of 44,000 people, authorizing their execution. Stalin could not have known or studied the cases of so many people, and he had to accept the advice of men who he disliked and distrusted like Ezhov. He would have acted, however, on the principle that such sacrifices were completely justified by the purpose being pursued."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 288-290.)

    Source for Yakovlev quote: "In quoting this remark, Medvedev adds the comment that 'Yakovlev seems to believe even today that Stalin did not know what Ezhov was doing behind his back.'" (Grey) A.S. Yakovlev, Tsel Zhizni (Moscow, 1966), p. 179; Medvedev, p. 293.
    Source for 400 lists claim: Ibid., p. 294. "The source of this information is not stated." (Grey)

    I noted this because of a guy who was inquiring to know "why the Soviets stopped advancing due to the Warsaw Uprising."

    "After advancing some 450 miles in five weeks, Rokossovsky's troops were fatigued and his front was suffering from the problems of overextended supply lines. At this time, moreover, the Germans in front of Warsaw were reinforced by three panzer divisions, rushed up from the south. In the first three weeks of August they delivered a counterattack, halting the Russian attempts to advance from their bridgeheads over the Vistula. Nearly six months were to pass before the Russians were ready to launch a major offensive from these positions.

    Rokossovsky's advance to the outskirts of Praga, the suburb of Warsaw on the opposite bank of the broad Vistula, made liberation seem at hand. Already on July 24, however, General T. Bor-Komorowski, commanding the Armya Krajowa (AK), the Polish underground army in Warsaw, had decided to order an uprising before the Red Army could reach the city. He was fanatically anti-Russian. He was determined that the Poles should liberate their own city and prepare the way for the London government to take power, excluding the Polish communists. For these reasons and also from stubborn pride he avoided all contact with Rokossovsky and the Russian High Command, refusing even to consider co-ordinating action with the Red Army.

    The people of Warsaw were, however, expecting Rokossovsky's forces to cross the river and come to their aid. Moscow radio had broadcast on July 29 the usual appeal, sent to occupied territories, for the people to rise against the enemy as the Russians approached. They were bewildered when no Russian crossing was attempted and the Russian guns fell silent.

    On August 1, Bor-Komorowski's underground army of 40,000 men attacked the Germans in the city. They were poorly armed and lacked supplies, but they fought bravely. The battle raged for sixty-three days, but the uprising was savagely crushed. Over 200,000 of the citys inhabitants were killed. The Germans expelled the 800,000 survivors and razed the city to the ground.

    The uprising and what Churchill called the 'Martyrdom of Warsaw' aroused controversy. The Allied leaders suspected that Stalin had ordered the Red Army to halt at the Vistula and that he was callously leaving the city to its fate. The London Poles actively fomented these suspicions in Britain and the United States. In fact, Rokossovsky's forces had been halted and were in no position to cross the river and liberate the city.

    Stalin considered the uprising ill timed and misconceived. He was opposed to co-operation with Bor-Komorowski and the AK, whose hatred of Russians was well known. He appreciated Rokossovski's military difficulties. But also at this time when he was actively creating a new pro-Russian regime which would displace the Polish government in London, he was concerned to foster cordial Russo-Polish relations. He was anxious, too, to avoid alienating his Western allies.

    On the capture of Lublin on July 23, a manifesto had proclaimed the formation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation...

    Soon after the start of the uprising, Churchill, misinterpreting Russian inactivity at the Vistula, sent a cable to Stalin, informing him that British planes were dropping supplies to the Poles and seeking assurances that Russian aid would soon reach them. Stalin's reply was noncommittal and suggested that the extent of the uprising had been grossly exaggerated. Under pressure from the London Poles, Churchill asked Eden on August 14 to send a message to Stalin through Molotov, urging him to give immediate help to the Warsaw Poles. Two days later Vyshinsky informed the U.S. ambassador that the Soviet government would not allow British or American aircraft to land on Soviet territory after dropping supplies in the Warsaw region, 'since the Soviet government does not wish to associate itself either directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw.' But on September 9 this decision was reversed. Moreover, from September 13 Soviet planes flew over Warsaw, bombing German positions and dropping supplies to the insurgents."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 398-99.)

    "On October 5, 1952, the Nineteenth Party Congress opened in Moscow. Stalin was present, but took no part in the proceedings except to deliver a short closing address. Molotov gave the opening speech, but Malenkov delivered the key report, which Stalin himself had always delivered since 1924, and this seemed to mark him clearly as the successor... In two of the resolutions, which seemed no more than formalities, he was signifying that the party was firmly established and no longer needed to rely on old traditions to the same degree. The party was renamed the Communist party of the Soviet Union and the words 'of Bolsheviks' dropped. After all, the title Bolsheviks, meaning 'Majority-ites,' was no longer relevant to a party which ruled supreme and unopposed... the Presidium was enlarged to twenty-five full members and twelve alternate members. His purpose in making this change was to bring younger members into the top leadership...

    Stalin himself resigned as General Secretary of the party, an office he had held since 1922, although he had not used the title since the 1930s. This did not, however, diminish his authority and full control. But at this time he seemed conscious of his failing strength and torn between securing the strong continuity of the party leadership, and at the same time clinging to power... he was determined to advance the new generation of professional Stalinist leaders... At the same time corrosive mistrust made him question the honesty and commitment of others, young and old. They would be seduced by power and position and forget the real purposes to be served. All his life he had been involved in the savage struggle for power and he trusted no one.

    At the Congress Stalin sat through the opening and Malenkov's report. All eyes were upon him. Their worshipful respect set him apart. He was a small gray-haired old man, failing in strength, and completely alone, isolated by their adulation and by the terrible power which he held."
    (Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 455-56.)

    From: http://web.archive.org/web/20010410000123/...91/warussr.html

    "England France and the USA... draw back and retreat, making concession after concession to the aggressors... without the leat attempt at resistance, and even with a certain amount of connivance... How is it?... The policy of non-intervention reveals an eagerness, a desire..not to hinder Germany say.. from embroiling herself in a war with the Soviet Union... One might think that the districts of Czechoslovakia were yielded to Germany as the price of an undertaking to launch war on the Soviet Union."
    (J.V.Stalin: Works; Vol 14; London; 1978; p. 363-367.)

    Sir Neville Henderson, British Ambassador in Berlin, reported to Lord Halifax (29th August 1939) a conversation with Hitler and Ribbentrtop:
    "Herr von Ribbentrop asked me whether I could guarantee that the PM could carry the country with him in policy of friendship with Germany.. Her Hitler asked whether England would be willing to accept an alliance with Germany. I said speaking personally, I did not exclude such a possibility."
    (Documents Concerning German-Polish Relations and the Outbreak of Hostilities between Great Britain and Germany on Sep 3rd, 1939'(Cmd.6106); London; 1939; p. 130.)

    "Only utter imbeciles would be capable of thinking that capitalist relations, that is to say, the private ownership of the means of production, including the land, can be reestablished in the USSR by peaceful methods and lead to the régime of bourgeois democracy. As a matter of fact, even if it were possible in general, capitalism could not be regenerated in Russia except as the result of a savage counter-revolutionary coup d’état which would cost ten times as many victims as the October Revolution and the civil war."
    (L. Trotsky, On the Kirov Assassination, December 1934)

    "I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect that by speaking in this way they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense." (Lenin, Speech delivered at a joint meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet, 14th May 1918, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 9.)

    "It would be ridiculous to think that it is possible to strengthen our Soviet-economic, trade-union and co-operative organisations, that it is possible to purge them of the dross of bureaucracy, without giving a sharp edge to the Party itself. There can be no doubt that bureaucratic elements exist not only in the economic and cooperative, trade-union and Soviet organisations, but in the organisations of the Party itself. Since the party is the guiding force of all these organisations, it is obvious that purging the Party is the essential condition for thoroughly revitalising and improving all the other organisations of the working class. Hence the slogan of purging the Party [is the] offensive of socialism against the elements of capitalism. "
    (Stalin, J.V. The Right Deviation in the C.P.S.U.(B.): Speech Delivered at the Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the C.P.S.U.(B.) in April 1929. Works, Vol. 14. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954.)

    "A second shortcoming. It consists in introducing administrative methods in the Party, in replacing the method of persuasion, which is of decisive importance for the Party, by the method of administration. This shortcoming is a danger no less serious than the first one. Why? Because it creates the danger of our Party organisations, which are independently acting organisations, being converted into mere bureaucratic institutions. If we take into account that we have not less than 60,000 of the most active officials distributed among all sorts of economic, co-operative and state institutions, where they are fighting bureaucracy, it must be admitted that some of them, while fighting bureaucracy in those institutions, sometimes become infected with bureaucracy themselves and carry that infection into the Party organisation. And this is not our fault, comrades, but our misfortune, for that process will continue to a greater or lesser degree as long as the state exists.

    And precisely because that process has some roots in life, we must arm ourselves for the struggle against this shortcoming, we must raise the activity of the mass of the Party membership, draw them into the decision of questions concerning our Party leadership, systematically implant inner-Party democracy and prevent the method of persuasion in our Party practice being replaced by the method of administration."
    (Stalin, J.V. The Fifteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.): December 2-19, 1927. Works, Vol. 10. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954.)

    From: http://www.oneparty.co.uk/index.html?http%...html/antib.html
    Stalin's Letters to Molotov was published by Yale University, USA, in 1995. Edited by Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, the letters cover the period between 1925 and 1936, a period in the former Soviet Union which saw the switch from the New Economic Policy to collectivisation of farming and Stalin's great leap forward in industrialisation.

    The book contains 276 pages, with a 63 page introduction by Lars T. Lih, which covers several themes, one of which is under the heading: Stalin's Antibureaucrat Scenario and deals with Stalin's views regarding the question of the soviet bureaucracy.

    Lars T. Lih is described in the foreword as a specialist on the 1920s of Soviet history, who has the view that Stalin's letters to Molotov throw new light on how Stalin went about running the state.

    Scholarly bourgeois writings on Stalin are not to be confused with the more crude, openly anti-Communist propaganda works, even if they share some similarities with the latter, and Lih's introduction certainly falls within the former category. In fact, this is so much so, that even the anti-Stalinist biographer of Stalin, R. Tucker, who provides the foreword to the book, argues and seems to agree with Lih's "reinterpretation" of Stalin on the basis of the letters, that Stalin "was neither the mediocrity that an old stereotype made him out to be, nor just a political boss and machine politician who rose to power by exploiting the authority to make appointments that he possessed as the party's central committee general secretary. Not that placement and replacement of cadres was a matter of small concern to him. But he was indefatigable in his striving to function as a leader". (P.10)

    This view is nothing new. Most of the serious bourgeois scholars on the subject reject the "mediocrity" view of Stalin, first promulgated by his rival, Trotsky. In his foreword Tucker depicts Stalin as someone motivated by one desire only, supreme power, a view which, in my understanding, is actually the opposite to the argument Lih is trying to establish. Where for Lih, Stalin has to share the responsibilities of leadership with the other leaders in the party, Tucker's view of Stalin is that he was solely interested in his own personal power.

    Lih argues from the letters that Stalin's intense involvement in the affairs of other countries belies the image of an isolationist leader interested only in 'socialism in one country'.This isolationist image was another view cultivated by Trotsky. Lih writes that "The letters show that Stalin did not make a rigid distinction between the interest of world revolution and the interest of the Soviet State. Both concerns are continually present in his outlook". (P.5-6)

    Lih argues that the letters "give us an unparalleled look at Stalin as leader", (P. 9) And for Lih, Stalin cannot be properly understood outside of the context of the "antibureaucrat scenario", which goes to show that the more serious, more honest bourgeois scholarship is even superior to some crude leftist propaganda. We must ask the question, what was, in fact, Stalin's antibureaucrat scenario, and did Stalin originate it? For Lih, the antibureaucrat scenario was both an outlook and an approach to governing. For instance he writes: "My argument, in brief, is as follows: Stalin had a conscious and coherent approach to governing that I shall call the antibureaucrat scenario" (P.10)

    For Lih the constructive side of the antibureaucrat scenario was that it allowed Stalin to use his undeniable leadership skills to get things done while maintaining politburo support. Lih explains that "the antibureaucrat scenario also defined governing as a continual struggle with class enemies of various types and hues". (P.10) In Lih's view, "the scenario thus gave expression to the angry and vindictive sides of Stalin's personality" (P.10)

    Interestingly, Lih argues that Stalin's antibureaucrat scenario pushed him perilously close to destroying the administrative apparatus. This is interesting because, according to Trotsky, Stalin's essential role was the defence of the bureaucracy. For Lih the details of the antibureaucrat scenario "can be found in Stalin's published speeches; the letters to Molotov reveal how the scenario guided him in his day-to-day work" (P.10). Lib argues that Stalin followed Lenin in recognising two important task of leadership, which consisted in the "selection of officials" and "checking up on fulfilment" of policy directives. He writes that for Stalin, "The main threat here is Russia's low level of culture, which forces the worker-peasant state to rely on many 'class-alien elements' in its government bureaucracy. As a result vigilance is one of the basic duties of each party member". ( P.11)

    Lih explains that "In order to understand the emotional power of this view, we have to recast it in the form of the dramatic anti-bureaucrat scenario that portrays well-intentioned but naive communists doing battle with sophisticated bureaucrats who try to fool and corrupt them"..

    Lenin's first opening shots in the struggle against the bureaucratic malady led him to propose the establishment of the Workers and Peasants Inspection. A decree of 7th February, 1920, created the Peoples' Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, called Rabkrin for short, with the brief to combat the dysfunctional aspects of bureaucracy which the new communist regime had partly inherited from Tsarist times. Stalin was made head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection in 1920. Lenin placed great importance on Rabkrin; Lih argues that "Lenin had ambitious plans for the Worker-Peasant Inspection and saw it as an instrument of mass participation in government". (P. 12)

    However, Rabkrin failed dismally in its designated role. The Workers' and Peasants' Inspection succumbed to the very disease which it had been established to reverse: i.e., the bureaucracy and intrigues in the state apparat. Nominally, Stalin was the head of Rabkrin when Lenin rounded on it, Stalin's supposed leadership of the Peoples' Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection has been used by Trotskyists to discredit him. For instance, former Trotskyist P. Black (Blick -- Ed.), writes that "The three years that followed were for Stalin one long chapter of disaster and political degeneration, a process which culminated in his political disgrace in the estimation of Lenin, and finally, the ultimate ignominy of the severance of all relations between himself and the founder of the Bolshevik party" (R. Black, Stalinism in Britain, P.18)

    Lenin had asked "Has Rabkrin carried out its task and done its duty? That is the main question. The reply to this must be negative". (Lenin, Vol. 33 Pp. 42-44) However, those who hurry to blame Stalin for the state of affairs in the Commissariat, should bear in mind Lars Lih's remark that "Although Stalin was nominally the head of the Workers-Peasant Inspection, his other duties during the civil war prevented him from giving much of his time to it", (P.12) R. Black tells us that "At the 11th Congress in the spring of 1922, Stalin was given added responsibility, that of General Secretary of the Party". (Black, Op. cit., P.22) And Lih fills in the picture when he explains that "Stalin left the Worker-Peasant Inspection in 1922 when he took over the post of General Secretary" (P.12)

    In other words, no one can take seriously the claim that Stalin was responsible for the failures of this particular office, which was established to fight bureaucracy. Appointed to run this department in early 1920, Stalin was away on other duties. Stalin's leadership of the commissariat was titular only. Rabkrin showed that the Bolsheviks were beginning to grapple with the Problem of Bureaucracy, and Lih argues that in the Stalin scenario of class conflict, the 'bureaucracy', especially those at the top, were cast in the role of class enemies, in other words, the enemies of the people and of the revolution in state and party offices.

    At the twelfth Party Congress in 1923, which was the last in Lenin's period, Stalin made a speech aimed at the bureaucrats, concerning Lenin's demand for an improvement of the machinery of government. Stalin had argued that Lenin "wanted to get to the point where the country contained not a single bigwig, no utter how highly placed, about which the man in the street could say 'that one is above control'." (P.13). Lih writes that "Years later, in the mid 1930s, a murderous version of this populist rhetoric dominated the mass media",.(P.13)

    This is the period of the "red terror" of bourgeois political histories the purging of the party and state of class-alien elements, referred to as the enemies of the people. Trotsky was one of those who condemned the purges, instead of the mistakes made. He also misinterpreted the nature of the purges in the state, party, cultural organs and military organisations, in a manner which bolstered his own views about Stalin. In Trotsky's views and the views of his supporters the purges were right-wing. However, even in Lars Lih's theory of Stalin's antibureaucrat scenario, it is easy to see that essentially the purges were directed against the right. Before the series of purges in the 1930s, Stalin in a speech to the Central Committee Plenum, in April 1929 had said:

    "Finally, the slogan of purging the Party. It would be absurd to think that it is possible to strengthen our Soviet and economic, trade union, and co-operative organisations. that it is possible to purge then of the evil of bureaucracy, without putting a fine edge on the Party itself. there can be no doubt that bureaucratic elements flourish not only in economic, co-operative, trade union, and Soviet organisations, but in the organisations of the Party itself. Since the Party is the controlling force of all these organisations, it is obvious that to purge the Party of undesirable elements is an essential condition for the reinvigoration and improvement of all the other working class organisations. Hence the slogan of purging the Party".

    In any case, the view that Stalin operated mentally within an intellectual framework based on his antibureaucrat scenario, in which the bureaucrats are cast as the class enemies, is certainly a consensus reached in the serious bourgeois scholarly literature. Serious research establishes the main political orientation of the purges, i.e., that they were directed against the right. This includes all those who formed an anti-Stalin alliance with the rightists. This became known as the bloc of rights and Trotskyites. According to Lih, the rationale for Stalin's particular version of the anti-bureaucrat scenario was that the enemies of the revolution, all those favoured by the former arrangement of society, have, quoting Stalin, " 'wormed their way into our plants and factories, into our government offices and trading organisations, into our railway and water transport enterprises, and principally, into our collective farms'" (P.13).

    Lih tells us that Stalin argued against those in the party leadership who "...thought that the class struggle was dying down, since the enemy had been defeated in open battle..." (P. 13) Lih argues that for Stalin, those who held this view had "...either degenerated or are two-faced; they must be driven out of the party and their smug philistine attitude replaced by revolutionary vigilance."(Pp.13-14) And, that Stalin's speeches on this matter "Give an idea of the emotions Stalin invested in the antibureaucrat scenario"(P.14).

    This is a very interesting remark, which lends more weight to the view that opposition to bureaucracy, or at least to the negative sides of bureaucracy, was deep-seated and, therefore, fundamental to Stalin's general outlook. This is a view which Lih holds very firmly, although he is not a Marxist-Leninist. To speak of the negative sides of bureaucracy is also to show that Stalin's approach to bureaucracy was not one-sided and anarchistic, This is confirmed by Lih, because "In spite of an increase in the violence and obsessiveness of the rhetoric the fundamental outlook remains the same: the system is basically good; problems arise from hostile individuals within the system and their ability to fool otherwise dedicated revolutionaries; only a united leadership devoid of wavering can combat bureaucrats" (P.14)

    Stalin was well aware of the problems of overcoming the negative side of bureaucracy. At the 15th Congress of the CPSU(B) in December, 1937, during the political report, Stalin observed "If we take into account that we have not less than 60,000 of the most active officials distributed among all sorts of economic, co-operative and state institutions, where they are fighting bureaucracy, it must be admitted that some of them, while fighting bureaucracy in those institutions, sometimes become infected with bureaucracy themselves and carry that infection into the Party organisation. And this is not our fault, comrades, but our misfortune, for the process will continue to a greater or lesser degree as long as the state exists". (J. V. Stalin, Vol. 10)

    Returning to Stalin and the question of governance, what is clear to Lih is that "selection of officials", and "checking up on fulfilment" summed up Stalin's approach to government. That is, it was not enough to select the right cadres for the tasks, but it was also necessary to ensure that the directives of the centre were fulfilled, For instance, in letter No.70, Molotov is praised by Stalin for the results of his visit to the Donbass, a mining region, which he made in 1930, because, Stalin wrote, "Your work on the Donbass turned out well. You have achieved a sample of Leninist checking up on fulfilment. If it is required, let me congratulate you on your success" (P.221). In fact, toward the end of 1930 Stalin proposed the setting up of a fulfilment commission, arguing that. "… without such an authoritative and rapidly acting commission, we will not be able to break through the walls of bureaucratism and (improve) the slipshod performance of our bureaucracies…" (P.15). However, Lih tells us "..this commissariat was actually set up in late 1930, but nothing came of it". (P. 15) And Lih remarks that "According to Stalin's antibureaucrat scenario, however, class motivated hostility is the main reason bureaucrats do not follow directives" (P. 15), the conclusion being "If conscious or unconscious sabotage is the problem, repression is bound to be part of the solution" (P. 15).

    Lih argues that selecting the right personnel went beyond choosing and promoting the most competent individual. There was, he says, a "moral dimension" involved. What was needed were officials who would regard the directives as their own and who could not be seduced by "bourgeois specialists". However, if such officials were not up to scratch, the moral dimension involved "could easily give rise to disappoint and vindictive anger" (P.16). Lih also examines the relation between the antibureaucrat scenario and Stalin the leader, concluding that "any politician trying to run an unwieldy bureaucracy is likely to develop some sort of antibureaucrat scenario". (P.16) He mentions Richard Neustadt's book, Presidential Power, which shows this process at work in the case of the U.S. Presidency. However, in Stalin's case "we have to add his position as top leader in a country undergoing a state-guided revolutionary transformation" (P.16). And also not forgetting that "Stalin had to run the country with officials whose trustworthiness was dubious and whose competence was perhaps even more dubious" (P.16).

    For Lih, this led to the obsession with the shuffling of personal and the intense suspicion of appointees, was built into the situation, so that "The antibureaucrat scenario reflected these structural realities". (P.16) This is an important observation to make. It undermines the view, held by some writers, that the purges under Stalin were irrational. In the perspective favoured by Lih, the purges were the class-based exasperation against those who were constantly undermining the smooth running of the government apparat. Stalin's hostility to the bureaucrats, and therefore his antibureaucrat scenario was the inevitable outcome of the hostility of sections of the bureaucracy to the aims of socialism itself. There seems little correspondence between this reality and the fanciful views encouraged by Trotskyism that the essential relation between the Stalinist

    leadership and the Soviet State bureaucracy was one of harmony, a view encouraged by Trotsky when be was trying to set himself up as the champion of the struggle against bureaucracy.

    In fact, contrary to the view of Trotskyists, the bureaucracy, or rather parts of it, had to be, in a sense, terrorised into compliance with the essential goals of socialism. The notion of the 'Stalinist bureaucracy', although a useful propaganda device for anti-Stalin theorists on the left, was a myth created by Trotsky. The reality was that the bureaucracy and the bourgeois specialists were no more pro-Stalin than they had been pro-Lenin. Lih argues that Stalin "…did not create his particular version of the antibureaucrat scenario in a vacuum, and so we have to consider Stalin as a Bolshevik". (P.16) Stalin's views about bureaucracy originated in the early days of the revolution, This is because even before the October Revolution, and after, the Bolsheviks had blamed the sabotage of the economy on both the capitalists and the bureaucrats (even though before the revolution this was in the interest of the rise of the Bolshevik party). At a later stage the workers began to blame the "Soviet bourgeoisie" for their problems-a term that Stalin was to employ in the situation he faced later. Lih explains that "Stalin could plausibly claim Lenin's authority for his scenario, since Lenin also viewed public administration as a dramatic struggle against the class enemy. (P.16)

    So Stalin's antibureaucrat scenario, or his particular version of it, was grounded in Bolshevik tradition, particularly in Lenin's view concerning the nefarious influence of bureaucrats on communists, thus "When Lenin insisted on the slogan "checking up on fulfilment" and the "selection of officials" in 1922, he emphasised that they were part of "the struggle between two irreconcilably hostile classes (that) appears to be going on in all government offices" (P.17). Clearly, Lenin definitely had an antibureaucrat scenario himself, taken over by Stalin, but there is not much in Lenin's post-revolutionary writings which goes beyond the understanding of bureaucracy in terms of routinism and bureaucratic red-tape although Lenin saw a link with the petty-bourgeois environment of the Soviet regime. Lenin's remark about the struggle between the two irreconcilably hostile classes that appears to be going on in the administrative organs, is very significant. Stalin was later to make this view his own.

    The important word here is the phrase "appears", which implies that Lenin had not yet got to the heart of the matter, and arguably did not because the problem was still too vague, because at this stage bureaucracy had yet to consolidate itself significantly. Lih argues that "The antibureaucrat scenario was thus derived from the experience that all the Bolshevik leaders had lived through" (P.17). It was this shared experience, he argues, which gave legitimacy to Stalin's views. The antibureaucrat scenario was an important element when Stalin attempted to obtain support from the other members of the politburo: and also in the mobilisation of the party ranks against the bureaucrats.

    "The letters show the use that Stalin made of the scenario whet exhorting his politburo colleagues". (P.17). Lih argues that "In spite of its links with Bolshevik political culture, the antibureaucrat scenario must also be considered from the point of view of Stalin as an individual", ( P.17)

    This was because, according to Lih, one of the preoccupation of Stalin which singled him out from the others, was the problem of how to control the state. "Stalin's antibureaucrat scenario arose out of his reflections on that problem". (P.19) The antibureaucrat scenario viewed government as a drama in which there is an eternal battle between good intentions which are continually undermined by the ill-will of saboteurs. To Lars Lih, this is a view which would particularly recommend itself to someone like Stalin who was "predisposed to see the world in angry, punitive terms" (P.17). But since he has already argued that Stalin's response in terms of views and actions reflected structural realities, there seems to reason to labour this point. At the end of the 1920s, the abandonment of NEP, and the problems engendered by the general offensive, for industrialisation and collectivisation, the attempt to modernise the Soviet Union in the shortest time possible, certainly would have made the question of bureaucracy seem more urgent. Consequently, according to Lih "The intensity of the emotions he invested in the scenario rose to a murderous pitch" (P.17).

    This is not surprising, since Yezhov, appointed head of the purge commission was notorious for his hatred of the bureaucrats. Stories are retold of how Yezhov took the precautionary measure of barricading himself at the NKVD before the mass purges started. The antibureaucrat scenario arose from real life, and not real life from the scenario, For Lih, the antibureaucrat scenario became an automatic response on the part of Stalin, because "…as soon as anything went wrong or otherwise irritated Stalin, the antibureaucrat scenario would come into play and Stalin would see his former comrades as infected by the class enemy, as a source of rot, and as an unclean spirit that had to be exercised" (P.59).

    The question which Lih raises is whether Stalin's response to bureaucracy was highly individualised, and therefore unnecessary, because later when the Soviet political leadership faced the problems of bureaucratic dysfunction, they reacted in a way different from that of Stalin, thus "Leonid Brezhnev confronted the same structural tensions Stalin faced but reacted quite differently". (P.59)

    But this was not surprising, since obviously the Soviet Union had changed. One of the reasons would be that, although certain features of the structural realities had remained essentially the same, the goals of the leadership was no longer the same. The revisionist agenda was not the same as Stalin's agenda, and Lih also argues that different people will interpret the same structural realities differently in their minds, and that for the source of Stalin's interpretation, individual psychology and political culture must be taken into account. In Lih's view "Stalin defined the problems he faced with the aid of the antibureaucrat scenario, he did not make this scenario up by himself: some version of the scenario, and even much of the imagery of infection, was canonical within Bolshevik political culture" ( p59).

    So much so in fact that, even when Rykov, who was regarded as a rightist, found it necessary to defend specialists, "...he had to admit that there were bad ones requiring police attention..." (Pp. 59-60) And, although others in the leadership shared or understood Stalin's concern about the role of the bureaucrats in undermining the decisions of the government, Lih argues that "…not every Bolshevik would invest the scenario with the same emotional intensity and so we must look at Stalin's own psychological makeup" ( P. 60).

    At this stage, the reader may wonder if Lars Lih is returning to the views of those bourgeois writers who, on the basis of the purges, put forward the "Stalin had gone mad" thesis. However, it seems fruitless to turn to Stalin's psychological makeup unless we include in this his political awareness. Perhaps it was lack of sufficient political awareness, in comparison to Stalin, which led his colleagues into not investing the antibureaucrat scenario with the same "emotional intensity" as Stalin.

    Lih's view is that "The antibureaucrat scenario provides an essential key to understand Stalin's outlook". (P.60) On the one side was the party, on the other the bureaucrats and the bourgeois specialists, and for Stalin "The bureaucracy represented the petty-bourgeoisie and, as such, provided a source of infection for the party officials" (P.60). This meant that Stalin "…interpreted the frustrations of his job as the result of sabotage, and therefore lashed out with murderous rage" (P.60). In other words, according to Lih, guided by the antibureaucrat scenario of Bolshevik political culture, Stalin sought and obtained be backing of his close colleagues to 'lash' out at real or perceived enemies. Lit also explains that "The antibureaucrat scenario also formed a bridge between the Stalin of the NEP and the Stalin of the general offensive". (P.60) This was because in both periods Stalin fought against those who undermined the policy directives of the centre, but in the period of the general offensive, the scenario was invested with even more "emotional intensity", or, put in another way "The cognitive framework stayed pretty much the same; the emotional intensity became much fiercer" (P.61).

    Thus for Lih, the antibureaucrat scenario unites three dimensions of Stalin's political leadership, i.e., Bolshevik political culture applied to a particular situation by a particular individual. Lih's view is that "most top executives will come up with some form of antibureaucrat scenario, but Stalin's version arose from the revolutionary experience of the Bolshevik party and its collective reflections on them". (P. 61) Perceiving the bureaucracy as a real or potential enemy, sabotaging the political or economic directives of the government was certainly not a view held by Stalin alone, and this explains why his colleagues to one degree or another found his arguments compelling enough. This in turn enabled him to mobilise sufficient support in the leadership and in the party, to strike against selected bureaucrats.

    Lars Lih's interpretation of Stalin on the basis of the letters to Molotov leads him to the a theory of Stalin's antibureaucrat scenario, a view radically at odds with some more well-known conceptions of Stalin in certain left circles, and no doubt part of his conclusions we cannot deny, which is that "The picture of Stalin that emerges from the letters will have a profound effect on a number of scholarly debates". (P.61) Lih should have said bourgeois scholarly debate, since Marxist-Leninists should be familiar with Stalin as an anti-bureaucrat, although Stalin against the Soviet bureaucracy is a theme unfamiliar to large sections of the Left.
    "Socialism means the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat has done all it could to abolish classes. But classes cannot be abolished at one stroke.

    And classes still remain and will remain in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship will become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat they will not disappear.

    Classes have remained, but in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat every class has undergone a change, and the relations between the classes have also changed. The class struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the proletariat; it merely assumes different forms."
    (Lenin, "Economics And Politics In The Era Of The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat," Pravda, 1919.)

    "... had I not been present in 1917 in St. Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place—on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring—of this I have not the slightest doubt."
    (Leon Trotsky, Trotsky's Diary in Exile, trans. Elena Zarudnaya (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 46.)

    "There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is—working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s own country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle, this, and only this, line, in every country without exception."
    (Lenin, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, 1917 in Collected Works, Vol. 24, Progress Publishers, 1964.)

    "I therefore hold the view that two nations in Europe have not only the right but even the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalistic: the Irish and the Poles. They are most internationalistic when they are genuinely nationalistic. The Poles understood this during all crises and have proved it on all the battlefields of the revolution. Deprive them of the prospect of restoring Poland or convince them that the new Poland will soon drop into their lap by herself, and it is all over with their interest in the European revolution."
    (Engels To Karl Kautsky, February 7, 1882 in Marx & Engels on the Irish Question. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971., p. 332.)

    “At the end of 1903, Trotsky was an ardent Menshevik, i.e., he deserted from the Iskrists to the Economists. He said that ‘between the old Iskra and the new lies a gulf’. In 1904-05, he deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the Economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.”
    (V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol. 20. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1977. p. 346.)

    “These comrades do not understand that the method of mass, disorderly arrests—if this can be considered a method, represents, in light of the new situation, only liabilities which diminish the authority of Soviet power. They do not understand that making arrests ought to be limited and carried out under strict control of appropriate organs. They do not understand that arrests must be directed solely against active enemies of Soviet power... They do not understand that is this kind of action took on a massive character to any extent, it could nullify the influence of our party in the countryside.”
    (J. Stalin. “Instruktsiia vsem patiino-sovetskin rabonikam i vsem organam OGPU i procuratury,” RGASPI. f. 17, op. 3, d. 922, Il. 50-55. Cited in J. Arch Getty. “‘Excesses Are Not Permitted’: Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s,” Russian Review, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), pp. 113-138.)

    "But the question arises: how is this task of smashing and uprooting the Japano-German Trotskyite agents to be carried out in practice? Does that mean that we must strike at and uproot, not only real Trotskyites, but also those who at some time or other wavered in the direction of Trotskyism and then, long ago, abandoned Trotskyism; not only those who are really Trotskyite wrecking agents, but also those who, at some time or other, had occasion to walk down a street through which some Trotskyite had passed? At all events, such voices were heard at this Plenum. Can such an interpretation of the resolution be regarded as correct? No, it cannot be regarded as correct. In this matter, as in all others, an individual, discriminate approach is required. You cannot measure everybody with the same yardstick.

    Such a wholesale approach can only hinder the fight against the real Trotskyite wreckers and spies.

    Among our responsible comrades there are a number of former Trotskyites who abandoned Trotskyism long ago and are fighting Trotskyism not less and perhaps more effectively than some of our respected comrades who have never wavered in the direction of Trotskyism. It would be foolish to cast a slur upon such comrades now.

    Among our comrades there are some who ideologically were always opposed to Trotskyism, but who, notwithstanding this, maintained personal connections with individual Trotskyites which they did not hesitate to dissolve as soon as the practical features of Trotskyism became clear to them. Of course, it would have been better had they broken off their personal friendly connections with individual Trotskyites at once, and not only after some delay.

    But it would be foolish to lump such comrades with the Trotskyites."
    (J.V. Stalin. "Speech in Reply to Debate," 5 March 1937. Collected Works, Vol. 14. Red Star Press Ltd., London, 1978.)

    "You see, we Marxists believe that a revolution will also take place in other countries. But it will take place only when the revolutionaries in those countries think it possible, or necessary. The export of revolution is nonsense. Every country will make its own revolution if it wants to, and if it does not want to, there will be no revolution. For example, our country wanted to make a revolution and made it, and now we are building a new, classless society.

    But to assert that we want to make a revolution in other countries, to interfere in their lives, means saying what is untrue, and what we have never advocated."
    (Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard. March 1, 1936. Works, Vol. 14. Red Star Press Ltd., London, 1978.)

    "a) proceeding from the law of uneven development under imperialism, Lenin, in his fundamental article, 'The United States of Europe Slogan,' drew the conclusion that the victory of socialism in individual capitalist countries is possible;

    b) by the victory of socialism in individual countries, Lenin means the seizure of power by the proletariat, the expropriation of the capitalists, and the organisation of socialist production; moreover, all these tasks are not an end in themselves, but a means of standing up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world, and helping the proletarians of all countries in their struggle against capitalism;"
    (J.V. Stalin. The Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the E.C.C.I., November 22-December 16, 1926.)

    "Ten or 20 years of correct relations with the peasantry, and victory on a world scale is assured (even if the proletarian revolutions, which are growing, are delayed); otherwise, 20-40 years of the torments of white guard terrorism"
    (Lenin. Vol. XXVI, p. 313).

    Trotsky in 1915 condemning Lenin:
    "'Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism.' From this the Sotsial-Demokrat draws the conclusion that the victory of socialism is possible in one country, and that therefore there is no reason to make the dictatorship of the proletariat in each separate country contingent upon the establishment of a United States of Europe.... That no country in its struggle must 'wait' for others, is an elementary thought which it is useful and necessary to reiterate in order that the idea of concurrent international action may not be replaced by the idea of temporising international inaction. Without waiting for the others, we begin and continue the struggle nationally, in the full confidence that our initiative will give an impetus to the struggle other countries; but if this should not occur, it would be hopeless to think — as historical experience and theoretical considerations testify—that, for example, a revolutionary Russia could hold out in the face of a conservative Europe, or that a socialist Germany could exist in isolation in a capitalist world. To accept the perspective of a social revolution within national bounds is to fall a prey to that very national narrow-mindedness which constitutes the essence of social-patriotism."
    (Trotsky, "Nashe Slovo" newspaper, 1915. Quoted in Trotsky, The Year 1917, Vol. III, Part I, pp. 89-90).

    Both from: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/.../1926/11/22.htm

    "To aim at building a nationally isolated socialist society means, in spite of all passing successes, to pull the productive forces backward even as compared with capitalism. To attempt, regardless of the geographical, cultural and historical conditions of the country’s development, which constitutes a part of the world unity, to realize a shut-off proportionality of all the branches of economy within a national framework, means to pursue a reactionary utopia. If the heralds and supporters of this theory nevertheless participate in the international revolutionary struggle (with what success is a different question) it is because, as hopeless eclectics, they mechanically combine abstract internationalism with reactionary utopian national socialism."
    (L. Trotsky. The Permanent Revolution, Introduction to the German Edition, 1931.)

    "We have always been accused of terrorism. This is a favourite accusation that is never absent from the columns of the press. We are accused of making terrorism a principle. To this we reply, 'You yourselves do not believe this slander.' The historian Aulard, who sent a letter to L’Humanité, writes, 'I have studied history and taught it. When I read that the Bolsheviks are freaks, monsters and scarecrows, I say that the same things were written about Robespierre and Danton. By no means do I compare these great men to the present Russians, nothing of the sort, there is absolutely no resemblance between them. But I say as a historian that you must not believe every rumour.' When a bourgeois historian begins speaking in this way we see that the lie being spread about us is fizzling out. We say that terror was thrust upon us. They forget that terror was provoked by the attack of the all-powerful Entente Is it not terror for the world’s fleet to blockade a starving country? Is it not terror for foreign representatives, relying on their so-called diplomatic immunity, to organise whiteguard insurrections? You must, after all, take something of a sober view of things. It must be realised that international imperialism has staked everything on suppressing the revolution, that it stops at nothing, and says, 'For one officer—one Communist, and we shall win.'

    And they are right. If we had attempted to influence these troops, brought into being by international banditry and brutalised by war—if we had attempted to influence them by words and persuasion or by any means other than terror, we would not have held out for even two months and we would have been fools. The terror was forced on us by the terror of the Entente, the terror of mighty world capitalism which has been throttling the workers and peasants, and is condemning them to death by starvation because they are fighting for their country’s freedom. Our every victory over this prime cause of and reason for the terror will inevitably and invariably mean that we shall be able to run the country without this method of persuasion and influence."
    (Lenin. Seventh All-Russia Congress Of Soviets, Dec. 5 1919.)

    "Stalin indeed looked forward to profiting from an Anglo-German conflict. In a letter of September 7 [1939] to Georgii Dimitrov, the head of the Communist International, Stalin wrote that 'we are not against' a war between capitalist states in which they 'would weaken each other.' Hitler, nolens volens [aka unwillingly], was on his way to destroying the capitalist system. Poland, Stalin added, was just another 'bourgeois fascist state,' and 'What would be wrong if in the destruction of Poland [as a bourgeois state] we spread the socialist system to new inhabitants in new territories?'"
    (Alfred Erich Senn. Lithuania 1940: Revolution from Above. New York: 2007. p. 21.)

    "But when Comrade Bukharin said there were people who were receiving salaries of 4,000 and they ought to be put up against a wall and shot, he was wrong. We have got to find such people. We have not very many posts where people get 4,000. We pick them up here and there. The whole point is that we have no experts, that is why we have got to enlist 1,000 people, first-class experts in their fields, who value their work, who like large-scale industry because they know that it means improvements in technology. When people here say that socialism can be won without learning from the bourgeoisie, I know this is the psychology of an inhabitant of Central Africa. The only socialism we can imagine is one based on all the lessons learned through large-scale capitalist culture. Socialism without postal and telegraph services, without machines is the emptiest of phrases. But it is impossible to sweep aside the bourgeois atmosphere and bourgeois habits all at once; it needs the kind of organisation on which all modern science and technology are based...

    When Bukharin said he could not see the principle, he was missing the point. Marx envisaged buying up the bourgeoisie as a class. He was writing about Britain, before Britain had imperialism, when a peaceful transition to socialism was possible—it certainly is not a reference to the earlier type of socialism. We are talking not about the bourgeoisie but about recruiting experts. I have given one example. One could cite thousands. It is simply a question of attracting people who can be attracted either by buying them with high salaries or by ideological organisation, because you can’t deny the fact that it is they who are receiving all the high wages...

    But if I say we are going to pay from 1,500 to 2,000 a month, that’s a step back... And when they say, when Bukharin says, this is no violation of principle, I say that here we have a violation of the principle of the Paris Commune. State capitalism is not money but social relations. If we pay 2,000 in accordance with the railway decree, that is state capitalism."
    (Lenin. Session of the All-Russia C.E.C., April 29 1918.)

    "Stalin and Kirov, along with other high-ranking party leaders, sought a restoration of the party apparatus through education, self-criticism, reorganization, and an attack on bureaucraticism at various levels. Stalin had said that the struggle was now for 'men's minds'; both he and Kirov claimed that the vast majority of the party's problems could be solved through political education....

    In the first place, virtually no evidence suggests that Kirov favored or advocated any specific policy line other than Stalin's General Line. One scholar has recently concluded that 'the problem exists of establishing to what extent the rise of Kirov and the new direction of Soviet policy were connected. As we have seen, they are often so interwoven that it is difficult to single out a line put forward by Kirov which is distinguishable from the official one.' The rumor that Kirov favored lenient treatment for dissidents, for example, is offset by opposite contemporary speculations... A contemporary article in Nicolaevsky's Sotsialisticheskii [Socialist herald] labeled Kirov a hard-liner. If Kirov was soft on the oppositionists, the opposition certainly did not know it.

    Certainly Kirov's public speeches do not reflect a moderate attitude toward members of the opposition. In his speech to the Seventeenth Congress, he ridiculed members of the opposition, questioning their 'humanity' and the sincerity of their recantations. He sharply denounced Trotsky's 'counterrevolutionary chatter' and applauded the services of the secret police, including their use of forced labor on canal construction projects. It was upon Kirov's motion that Stalin's speech was taken as the basis for the congress's resolution...

    Indeed, as one scholar has recently shown, Stalin had identified himself with more relaxed social and educational policies as early as 1931. Stalin made conciliatory gestures to the 'bourgeois specialists' and relaxed educational restrictions that had excluded sons and daughters of white-collar specialists. In May 1933, Stalin and Molotov ordered the release of half of all labor camp inmates whose infractions were connected with collectivization. The following summer, the political police (NKVD) were forbidden to pass death sentences without the sanction of the procurator of the USSR. The November 1934 plenum of the Central Committee abolished food rationing and approved new collective farm rules that guaranteed kolkhozniki the right to 'private plots' and personal livestock...

    The end of the violent class struggle in the countryside, the time for rallying supporters (the winning over of 'men's minds' in Stalin's Seventeenth Congress speech), political education, and a fight against bureaucratism had been parts of Stalin's analysis of the situation and are not attributable solely to Kirov. A 'policy of relaxation' was also perceived on the literary scene. At the Soviet Writers' Congress in August 1934, the venerable Maksim Gorky contrasted 'proletarian humanism' to vicious fascism. This, in the wake of the dissolution of the contentious Russian Association of Proletarian Workers (which, in the name of 'proletarian literature' had attacked writers considered too 'bourgeois'), seemed to augur a more tolerant attitude toward literature. Previously suppressed artists were now allowed to return and work within the new Union of Soviet Writers. Young Andrei Zhdanov presided over these affairs in the name of the party.

    If Stalin and Kirov were antagonists, it would be difficult to explain Kirov's continued rise. Stalin chose Kirov for the sensitive Leningrad party leadership position and trusted him with delicate 'trouble-shooter' missions to supervise critical harvests (like Kirov's journey to Central Asia in 1934). Kirov was elected to the Secretariat and Politburo in 1934, and Stalin wanted him to move to the Central Committee Secretariat in Moscow as soon as possible. Unless one is prepared to believe that Stalin did not control appointments to the Secretariat and Politburo (despite his alleged practice of manipulating ballots at congresses), one must assume that he and Kirov were allies.

    Much more probable than a Kirov-versus-Stalin scenario is one in which Stalin, Kirov, and Zhdanov collaborated to overhaul the party's educational curriculum. These efforts would eventually result in significant revisions in educational curricula and formed the foundation for the famous History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Short Course, in 1938. Such a collaboration would explain the thrust of Stalin's and Kirov's remarks at the Seventeenth Congress. Kirov's promotion to the Secretariat, and Stalin's wish for Kirov to take up his work in Moscow.

    More obvious than 'terror' in 1934-5 was the continuation of the Kirov-Stalin policy of socioeconomic relaxation combined with the activation and radicalization of party work. Although many of these social and political measures have been attributed to Kirov in opposition to Stalin, it is more likely that Stalin supported the new policies."
    (J. Arch Getty. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. pp. 92-95.)

    "Now it is this dialectic which the traitors, numbskulls, and pedants of the Second International could never grasp: the proletariat cannot conquer without winning over to its side the majority of the population. But to limit this winning over of the population to, or to make it conditional on, 'acquiring' a majority of votes in an election, while the bourgeoisie is in power is impracticable imbecility, or simply cheating the workers. In order to win over the majority of the population to its side the proletariat must first overthrow the bourgeoisie, and seize state power into its own hands; secondly it must introduce Soviet power, having smashed to bits the old state apparatus, whereby it immediately undermines the dominion, authority, and influence of the bourgeoisie and of the petty bourgeois compromisers among the non-proletarian labouring masses. It must, thirdly, complete the destruction of the influence of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeois compromisers among the majority of the non-proletarian labouring masses by the revolutionary fulfillment of their economic needs, at the expense of the exploiters."
    (Lenin, 1919. Collected Works Vol. XXIV, Russian Ed., p. 641.)

    Alt translation: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/dec/16.htm

    "The traitors, blockheads and pedants of the Second International..."

    "Lenin had at that date [January 20 1918] greater confidence in the imminent outbreak of the revolution in the West than, for example, Stalin. 'There is no sign of a revolutionary movement in the West . . .' Stalin said on 24 January, 'only a possibility. We cannot build on a possibility.' But these views did not prevent Stalin from staunchly supporting Lenin's peace policy in the following weeks."
    (Leonard Schapiro. The Origins of the Communist Autocracy. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1965. p. 100.)

    "The final argument, in which the great majority of the communist leaders supported Lenin, was that any system not based on a forcible campaign against the peasants would enable the latter to hold up the regime to ransom, and starve it into submission. By the beginning of 1920, however, free trade had found an advocate in Trotsky, His proposals, which apparently differed little from the New Economic Policy adopted the following year, were rejected in February 1920 by the Central Committee by eleven votes to four."
    (Leonard Schapiro. The Origins of the Communist Autocracy. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1965. p. 216.)

    Chairman Mao Zedong's Theory on the Division of the Three World and the Strategy of Forming an Alliance Against an opponent


    2000/11/17


    The 1970s witnessed significant changes in the international situation. The balance of military forces between the two super-powers of the Soviet Union and the United States developed in a way favorable to the former. While the U.S. strength was weakened and its status as a hegemonic power met with challenges as a result of its long years of overseas expansion, especially it was deeply bogged down in the war of aggression against Vietnam, the Soviet Union, by capitalizing this opportunity and intensifying its arms expansion, stretched its hands everywhere on the strength of its rapidly expanding military might. There emerged in the Soviet-U.S. rivalry a situation with the Soviet Union on the offensive and the United States on the defensive. In order to maintain its global hegemony, the U.S. made readjustments in its foreign policy and carries out a strategy of retrenchment in Asia and opened the door to Sino-U.S. relations with the aim of freeing itself from indo-China and concentrating its efforts in the defence of Europe which is its key area.


    To continuously promote the world situation so that it moves in a direction conducive to peace and stability and favorable to the people of various countries, Chairman Mao Zedong pointed out during his meeting with Henry Kissinger in 1973 that as long as we share the same goal, we will not do harm to you nor will you do harm to us and we should work together to counter Soviet hegemonism. We hope the United States would strengthen its cooperation with Europe and Japan and draw a parallel line linking the United States, Japan China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Europe. This is unity against the Soviet hegemonism or the "Strategy of forming an alliance against an opponent".


    In February 1974, Chairman Mao Zedong set forth his strategic thinking of the division of the three worlds. He observed, "In my view, the United States and the Soviet Union belong to the first world. The in-between Japan, Europe and Canada belong to the second world. The third world is very populous. Except Japan, Asia belongs to the third world. So does the whole of Africa and Latin America". At the 6th Special Session of the UN General Assembly held in April 1974, Deng Xiaoping expounded the strategic thinking of Mao Zedong on the division of the three worlds. He pointed out that after protracted trial of strength and struggles, the various types of political forces are currently undergoing drastic division and realignment. "From the perspective of the changes that have taken place in international relations, the world today in fact has three sides or three worlds in existence which are mutually related as well as contradictory. The United States and the Soviet Union belong to the first world. Developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions belong to the third world. And the developed countries in between the two belong to the second world". Deng Xiaoping also expressed that China was a socialist country, a developing nation, and it belonged to the third world. The Chinese Government and people firmly supported all the oppressed peoples and nations in their just struggles. He declared that China was not and would never be a super-power in the future.


    Mao Zedong's strategic thinking shed light on the fact that the two super-powers were then the main source of instability and turmoils in the world. Their acts of pursuing hegemonism, power politics, the big bullying the small, the strong bullying the week and the rich oppressing the poor gave rise to strong opposition and resentment by countries of the third world. As a member of the third world, China firmly supported the third world countries in their struggles against hegemonism and struggles waged by countries of the second world against interference and control by the super-powers. China was firmly opposed to the policy of expansionism pursued by the super-powers and carried out the policy of uniting with and struggling against the United States with emphasis on striking at Soviet hegemonism thus effectively restraining the expansionist forces of the Soviet Union.
    "After the October Revolution the Bolsheviks were able to read the Okhrana files. They discovered that [Roman] Malinovsky was a spy and on his return to Russia in 1918 he was arrested. At his trial Malinovsky admitted he had been a spy and commented: 'I am not asking for mercy! I know what is in store for me. I deserve it.' After a brief trial was found guilty and executed."
    (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSmalinovsky.htm)

    "On 14 June 1918 the Central Executive Committee resolved to 'exclude from its number the representatives of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (right and centre) and of the Mensheviks, and likewise to propose to all Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' deputies to banish representatives of these fractions from their midst... In a speech explaining the resolution the communist Sosnovsky argued that the socialist parties having lost all hope of winning over the masses in a constitutional way through Soviet elections, had now turned to open counter-revolution."
    (Leonard Schapiro. The Origins of the Communist Autocracy. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1965. p. 152.)

    "We do not only recognize, but we also give full support to the principle of self-determination, wherever it is directed against feudal, capitalist and imperialist states. But wherever the fiction of self-determination, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, becomes a weapon directed against the proletarian revolution, we have no occasion to treat this fiction differently from the other 'principles' of democracy perverted by capitalism."
    (L. Trotsky. Between Red and White, Chap. IX. 1922.)

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/ukraine.html

    Trotsky advocating an independent Ukraine in 1939. (Also some hilarious claims of "Great Russian chauvinism" by Stalin against Yugoslavia; being apologists for Titoism, etc. by those who published ze Trotsky writing)

    I always liked this bit:

    "Holtzman, one of the accused in the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial, made a confession that he had a long meeting with Trotsky in the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen. Trotsky clutches at this confession as a drowning man clutches at a straw and exclaims that the trials are a fake. Why? Because 'it so happens,' says Trotsky, 'that the Hotel Bristol was razed to its foundations in 1917. In 1932 this hotel existed only as a fond memory.' In other words, the OGPU (which Trotsky claimed to have dedicated to the accused in the minutest detail the content of their confessions) was so clumsy that it made Holtzman confess to meeting Trotsky in a hotel that did not exist. What nonsense! The facts are as follows:-

    Opposite the railway station there was no Hotel Bristol at the time of the meeting. Instead there stood at that time the Grand Central Hotel. In the same building of which the Grand Central Hotel formed part there was the Bristol Café. At that time it was also possible to gain entrance to the hotel through the Bristol Café. It is therefore very likely that Holtzman confused the Bristol Café with the Grand Central Hotel.

    Furthermore, in view of Trotsky's insistence that the confessions were dictated to the accused by the OGPU, the following remark of his is odd to say the least:

    'Holtzman apparently knew the Hotel Bristol through memories of his emigration long ago, that is why he named it.'

    In other words, when obliging the OGPU with a voluntary false confession, Holtzman was mistaken as to the name. In other words, the confessions were not dictated by the OGPU.

    If the OGPU were engaged in a frame-up, it would not have been at all difficult for it to find out the existence and name of the hotel."
    (Harpal Brar. Trotskyism or Leninism? London. 1993. p. 319.)

    "But hidden from public view, ugly changes were unfolding within the Central Committee. At another plenary session, called in December 1936, Ezhov once again held center stage, launching a new series of dramatic charges that involved more former opposition leaders. At the August trial Zinoviev and Kamenev had mentioned a 'reserve center' of terrorists that existed in addition to the 'basic center' of the Zinovievite-Trotskyite bloc. In the reserve group were Piatakov; Radek... Piatakov 'admitted' that in spring of 1931 he had met in Germany with Trotsky's son Sedov, who passed him a directive on terror in the Soviet Union. According to Ezhov, Piatakov told the police after his arrest that 'I, unfortunately, gave my agreement.' Here the stenographic record notes 'noise, movement in the hall.' Beria once more interrupted: 'Bastard!' Ezhov responded, 'Worse than a bastard.'

    Piatakov, he continued, then set up terrorist organizations through his Trotskyite friends but did not yet give them the order to act. That came only in 1935-36, 'more accurately at the beginning of 1936,' after which these groups tried to assassinate Molotov, Ordzhonikidze, and Kaganovich. There was also a plan to poison all the leaders of the government at a Kremlin banquet. 'You understand, comrades,' Ezhov went on, 'that I am speaking here only of those facts in the direct testimony [of the arrestees] and of confirmed facts.' Ominously, he announced that 'I assume that we have many, many undiscovered cases.'

    He then read a number of excerpts from prisoners' statements, in which they admitted causing accidents in military factories and on railroads... At this point a connection to Bukharin begun to surface... At that, Bukharin, present as a candidate member of the Central Committee, asked to speak; he was ignored. Ezhov continued that other sources had confirmed the testimony about knowledge by the Right of terrorist plans....

    Before turning to Bukharin's reply, let us consider the state of mind of the other Central Committee members at this point... To come to the decision that Ezhov was lying, those present... had to conclude that the testimony gathered by the police was false, which could only mean that those arrested, who had all served in high positions in the party for years, had been tortured. Such a possibility was as yet unthinkable: no precedent existed for torturing party members who had been in good standing until their arrests.... And striking at former oppositionists had little to do with the vast majority of the Central Committee in 1936, which had never resisted Stalin. Thus the cases of Piatakov, Sokol'nikov, Serebriakov, Bukharin, and others did not suggest that Stalin had a broader attack on the party in mind. For all these reasons, it would have been both psychologically safer and more logical to accept what the top leadership was saying. And who could know for sure that the confessions were false?

    In fact, not only staunch Stalinists but also Bukharin accepted the charges against many others, though of course not against themselves. Bukharin tried to play by Stalin's rules in defending himself to the Central Committee when he was allowed to speak, on the same day that Ezhov had presented his charges. The former rightist and 'favorite of the party,' as Lenin had called him, began on a personal note: 'Comrades, it is more than difficult for me to speak, for perhaps I am speaking for the last time before you.' He urged greater vigilance throughout the party and help for the 'corresponding organs,' that is, the police, in wiping out 'the bastard who is busy with wrecking acts.' He remarked that he was happy all this had surfaced before the coming war. 'Now we can win.'

    Beria then broke in to sneer, 'You would do better to say what your participation was in this affair. You say what you were doing there.'

    Bukharin replied that 'everything is a lie.' After meeting with Sokol'nikov at the time of the August trial, Stalin's aide Kaganovich had told Bukharin that the leadership believed he had nothing to do with the terrorist affairs. Then the procuracy had informed him that the investigation of his activities was closed. Kaganovich interrupted to say that decision had been juridical but that now the matter was political. Obviously, loose standards would apply in this kangaroo court.

    Bukharin, now adopting a somewhat pathetic tone, responded by saying, 'For God's sake, don't interrupt me.' He denied having political conversations with Sokol'nikov or the journalist Sosnovskii. He claimed he had never read the Riutin Memorandum. True, in 1928-29 he had 'conducted an oppositionist struggle against the party.' Yet neither at that time nor afterward had he 'one atom of a conception of platforms or [specific political] aims.' He asked plaintively, 'Do you really think that I'm that kind of person? Do you really think that I can have something in common with these diversionists, with these wreckers, with these scoundrels after 30 years of my life in the party and after everything? This is really some kind of madness.'

    Molotov: Kamenev and Zinoviev were also in the party for their whole lives.
    Bukharin: . . . Many people here know me.
    Molotov: It's hard to know a soul . . .
    Bukharin: Why didn't they [the wreckers] harm the party from the other end, to ruin a lot of honest people and get their hooks into them? Why, tell me? (Noise, movement in the hall). . . . How to defend oneself in such cases [against the testimony of others]? How to find a defense here?

    His specific counterthrusts were weak.... Bukharin confessed that he had talked frankly with Karl Radek, who, he agreed, was a traitor. Striking another pathetic note, he admitted having spoken to Radek only because he, Bukharin, was completely alone, and in those circumstances a person 'will be drawn to any warm place.' When Stalin asked Bukharin why people would lie about him, he replied that he did not know. Bukharin acknowledged that there had been a Right Center, which would have been unnecessary if it was Stalin's fictitious creation. But, Bukharin went on, he had not seen one of its key members for years and did not know another, one Iakovlev... All that Bukharin really counted on was his long service to the party and his personal honor; he asked people to take his word about his honesty over the testimony of numerous others. And he himself said that he had struggled in the late 1920s against pressure on the peasants. But by 1936 it appeared, correctly or not, that the policy, culminating in collectivization, had enabled industrialization to take off.

    Again, to accept Bukharin's words required any listener to reject Stalin and to think the worst of him. And yet Bukharin had accepted the gist of what Ezhov had said, including, especially, the need to hunt for enemies. Bukharin had recognized wrecking by Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others; he had acknowledged that there was a Right Center of opposition, and he had been the clear leader of the Right.... Finally Molotov mounted the rostrum to sum up the position of the leadership. Of all that he had heard from Bukharin and Rykov, he said, only one thing was correct: it was necessary to investigate the matter in the most attentive way... Bukharin was politically dead; in little more than a year, he was tried and executed.

    One more document from his case requires discussion: a letter he wrote to Stalin while in prison, dated December 10, 1937. In it he begged the Gensec to allow him either to work at some cultural task in Siberia or to emigrate to America, where he would be a faithful Soviet citizen and would 'beat Trotsky and company in the snout.' ...

    More important for understanding his fate and the course of the Terror was his admissions that some sort of 'conference' of his young followers had occurred in 1932. Apparently one of them had said in Bukharin's presence that he wished to kill Stalin. Bukharin now acknowledged that he had been 'two-faced' about his followers and had not informed the authorities of their discussions. He had believed at this time, he claimed, that he could lead them back to the party. As for the accusations that he was linked to foreign espionage services and had fostered terrorism, all that was false. But by this time Bukharin had lied repeatedly to Stalin and the whole Central Committee. Even though his behavior did not warrant the death penalty, Stalin had serious reason to distrust him."
    (Robert W. Thurston. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. pp. 36-42.)

    "It appears that in late 1936 Ordzhonikidze had wavered in his judgment of his longtime subordinate, Piatakov. In a speech Ordzhonikidze gave in early December, he departed from his notes to say that he had spent many sleepless nights wondering how wrecking could have occurred in the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. He asked Bukharin, ironically, what he thought of Piatakov and appeared to agree with the reply that it was hard to know when the latter was telling the truth and when he was speaking from 'tactical considerations.' According to Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, Ordzhonikidze met with Piatakov in prison at this point and asked him twice if his testimony was entirely voluntary. Upon receiving the answer that it was, Ordzhonikidze appeared shaken. If he had doubts about a man he had worked with and trusted for years, those in the CC who were more distant from Piatakov certainly felt surer of his guilt... the question for members of the party's elite would therefore have been not whether treason had existed but its present scope."
    (Robert W. Thurston. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. p. 46.)

    "According to a memorandum left by a delegate to the Eighteenth Party Congress, which opened in March 1939, Ezhov was still free then, though several of his top aides had been arrested. At a meeting of the Council of Elders, apparently an informal group of top delegates within the Central Committee, Stalin called Ezhov forward. The Gensec asked him who various arrested NKVDists were. Ezhov replied:

    'Joseph Vissarionovich! You know that it was I—I myself!—who disclosed their conspiracy! I came to you and reported it. . . .'

    Stalin didn't let him continue. 'Yes, yes, yes! When you felt you were about to be caught, then you came in a hurry. But what about before that? Were you organizing a conspiracy? Did you want to kill Stalin? Top officials of the NKVD are plotting, but you, supposedly, aren't involved. You think I don't see anything?! Do you remember who you sent on a certain date for duty with Stalin? Who? With revolvers? Why revolvers near Stalin? Why? To kill Stalin? And if I hadn't noticed? What then?!'

    Stalin went on to accuse Yezhov of working too feverishly, arresting many people who were innocent and covering up for others.

    Ezhov was arrested a few days later. Roy Medvedev reports that he was shot in July 1940, after being held in a prison for especially dangerous 'enemies of the people.' A recent Russian publication confirms that Ezhov was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940, 'for groundless repressions against the Soviet people.'"
    (Robert W. Thurston. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. pp. 116-117.)

    "More remarkable among the changes begun in late 1938, and incompatible with the idea that the population was to stay terrorized, is that the public now received broad notice of police misbehavior under Ezhov. Several open trials of NKVD men who had tortured victims during his tenure took place around the country... The last trial [in Leninsk-Kuznetsk] is particularly disturbing: the head of the city NKVD, another police officer, and a procurator had cooperated in 'exposing' a counterrevolutionary organization of children between the ages of ten and twelve. Placed in the dock themselves, the former enemy hunters could not produce a single fact in support of the charges they had pressed against the children. The court sentenced the procurator to five years and the two NKVDists to seven and ten years. There was no word on the fate of their victims."
    (Robert W. Thurston. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. p. 128.)

    "Speakers at the Eighteenth Party Congress, held in March 1939, consistently suggested that the struggle against internal enemies was largely over. Beria... spoke about this problem mostly in the past tense and pointedly stated that troubles in the economy could not be explained solely by reference to sabotage... Perhaps the most remarkable speech of the congress was Andrei Zhdanov's... The purges had allowed enemy elements inside the party to persecute honest members. Following his lead, the congress resolved to ban mass purges and to strengthen the rights of communists at all levels to criticize any party official....

    Of course, Stalin's words on the subject were the most important. At the Eighteenth Party Congress he indicated that internal subversion was largely a thing of the past and specifically noted that the punitive organs had turned their attention 'not to the interior of the country, but outside it, against external enemies.' Between the end of the congress in March 1939 and the German invasion in June 1941, he offered no more comments on spies and saboteurs. The official slogans for the May Day holiday in 1939 contained not a word about the NKVD or enemies but dwelt on the glories and responsibilities of the army, fleet, and border guards."
    (Robert W. Thurston. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. pp. 130-131.)

    "At the height of the Terror, however, some quite ordinary crimes were called sabotage or wrecking. One such case involved a collective farmer who got drunk at a party in 1937 and punched another guest. Because the victim happened to be a Stakhanovite (a model worker), the local procuracy brought a charge of counterrevolutionary terrorism against the farmer."
    (Robert W. Thurston. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. p. 138.)

    "In April 1935, before the Stakhanov movement complicated the picture even more, investigators at the Gorky auto factory found cases in which foremen signed any document put before them [due to an abundance of paperwork]... A different foreman approved an order brought to him to 'assemble a good wife on the conveyer.' Yet another authorized a worker to 'grind off his head.' In other instances foremen allowed workers to fill in the details of a job, including pay for it... because workers were happier when they could determine much of their own effort and pay."
    (Robert W. Thurston. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. p. 173.)

    “World imperialism cannot live side by side with a victorious advancing social revolution.”
    (Lenin, Works, Vol. XV, p. 175, Russian [old] ed.)

    "Yet it had always been Lloyd George's view that 'the way to prevent the spread of the revolutionary spirit was to embark at once on large schemes of social progress.'"
    (David Fromkin. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. New York: 2009. Holt Paperbacks. p. 388.)

    "In correspondence Dr Conquest has stated that it is not his opinion that 'Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it but put 'Soviet interest' other than feeding the starving first—thus consciously abetting it.'"
    (R.W. Davies & Stephen G. Wheatcroft. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. p. 441.)

    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,817112,00.html

    Monday, Oct. 20, 1952:
    But cold war, not cold peace, was still the order of the day in the Kremlin, where the Communist Party Congress met for the first time in 13 years. Molotov cried that U.S. "ruling circles" are "conducting preparations for unleashing a new world war"; Malenkov accused the U.S. of saddling "their junior partners, enslaving them, flogging them mercilessly," also "inspiring plots against their English and French allies" in their colonies. "The conflicts at present dividing the imperialist camp can lead to war."

    As for Russia, insisted Malenkov in a five-hour speech, it is friendly as can be: "Peaceful co-existence of capitalism and Communism is perfectly feasible. Export of revolution is rubbish." Any capitalist state that wanted it, cooed Malenkov, could have "lasting peace" with Russia.

    On the home front, Malenkov reported glowing economic progress. Russian industrial output had increased 13 times since 1929 and doubled since 1940. Statistics in percentages is an old Soviet trick, but this time Malenkov gave specific production figures too, which—insofar as they are to be trusted—show that Russia is turning out only 40% of current U.S. production, but nevertheless making considerable strides. His 1952 estimates: iron, 25 million tons; steel, 35 million tons; coal, 300 million tons.

    Then, having praised his party's performance, Malenkov proceeded to berate it. The detailed shortcomings: "Great waste and unproductive expenditure . . . inefficient and excessively long railway transportation . . . road transport still badly organized . . . laxness in raising labor productivity ... an acute housing shortage everywhere . . . defective goods." He warned the delegates that "nepotism had been rife" in the party. Even the writers and artists, a privileged caste, caught it: "Not enough good films, not enough satire."
  3. Ismail
    Ismail
    On claims on PCF collaboration with the Nazis post-invasion of France:

    "[Yvan] Avakoumovitch refers to a telegram sent by the Comintern on 20 July 1940 in which it expressed its approval of the political line formulated by the PCF and its efforts to organize the workers' unrest and to direct it against the Vichy government with the aim of hurting 'its patrons'. Avakoumovitch explains that the term 'patrons' was a code-name for the Germans."
    (David Wingeate Pike. "Between the Junes: The French Communists from the Collapse of France to the Invasion of Russia," Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 28, No. 3 (Jul., 1993). pp. 473-74.)

    "Complete and final victory on a world scale cannot be achieved in Russia alone; it can be achieved only when the proletariat is victorious in at least all the advanced countries, or, at all events, in some of the largest of the advanced countries. Only then shall we be able to say with absolute confidence that the cause of the proletariat has triumphed, that our first objective—the overthrow of capitalism—has been achieved.

    We have achieved this objective in one country, and this confronts us with a second task. Since Soviet power has been established, since the bourgeoisie has been overthrown in one country, the second task is to wage the struggle on a world scale, on a different plane, the struggle of the proletarian state surrounded by capitalist states.

    This situation is an entirely novel and difficult one.

    On the other hand, since the rule of the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, the main task is to organise the development of the country."
    (Lenin. Collected Works Vol. 29. 1970. p. 58.)

    "In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally—in this case I will be on the side of 'fascist' Brazil against 'democratic' Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a blow to British imperialism and will give an impulse to the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat. Truly, one must have an empty head to reduce world antagonisms and military conflicts to the struggle between fascism and democracy. Under all masks one must know how to distinguish exploiters, slave-owners, and robbers!"
    (Trotsky. Anti-Imperialist Struggle is Key to Liberation, interview with Mateo Fossa, September 1938.)

    A surprisingly great Trotsky quote.

    Not really about Marxism, but ja.

    "In 1988, several former UNITA members reported to the Portuguese newsweekly, Espresso, that UNITA's political elite all followed the precepts of Savimbi's Practical Guide for the Cadre, which was described as 'a manual of dialectical materialism and Marxism-Leninism with a distinct trait of Stalinism and Maoism.' The UNITA dissidents claimed that the Guide was taught in a room filled with Lenin and Mao Tse-Tung busts, where the anthem of the Communist International was sung every day.

    These former UNITA members denounced as fraudulent Savimbi's widely publicized pro-Western ideology and defense of democracy. They pointed out that there was a huge discrepancy between what UNITA claimed abroad as its objectives (i.e., negotiations with the MPLA, reconciliation, and coalition) and what the Guide taught. The Guide, said to be written by Savimbi, was considered a secret book accessible only to the political elite of UNITA."
    ("Jonas Savimbi, UNITA are 'terrorists' in Africans' eyes despite Washington's 'freedom fighter' toga for him," article by Shana Wills in USAfrica, 2002.)

    "It was impossible to know what he [Savimbi] really believed, if anything. He claimed to be a supporter of free markets, but observers noted the lack of any functioning businesses in UNITA territory and the leadership's control of all money... he continued to wear Mao-style headgear in the bush and made his lieutenants carry a book of dialectical materialist sayings called Practical Guide for the Cadre."
    (Tom Zoellner. The Heartless Stone: a Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire. New York: St. Martin's Press. 2006. p. 180.)

    The "Practical Guide" is also known as Guia Prático do Quadro.

    Also good article: http://africana.ru/science/Tokarev/Tokarev_2002_Sawimbi.htm

    "The great founders of socialism, Marx and Engels, having watched the development of the labour movement and the growth of the world socialist revolution for a number of decades saw clearly that the transition from capitalism to socialism would require prolonged birth-pangs, a long period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the break-up of all that belonged to the past, the ruthless destruction of all forms of capitalism, the co-operation of the workers of all countries, who would have to combine their efforts to ensure complete victory. And they said that at the end of the nineteenth century 'the Frenchman will begin it, and the German will finish it'—the Frenchman would begin it because in the course of decades of revolution he had acquired that intrepid initiative in revolutionary action that made him the vanguard of the socialist revolution."
    (Lenin. Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers' Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. January 1918.)

    "The idea of a revolutionary war gained ground rapidly among both the Girondists, the party of the upper middle class, and the Jacobins who represented the lower middle class and the artisans... [The French Revolutionary Wars were] preceded by a manifesto in which the French Government promised assistance to all nations that should revolt against their oppressors. This was later explained as being meant only to apply 'to those people who, after having acquired their liberty by conquest should demand the assistance of the republic.'"
    (A.L. Morton. A People's History of England. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1938. p. 337.)

    "Bukharin and Obolensky further advanced the criticism that Lenin's policy amounted to nothing more nor less than state capitalism; and that unless the masses exercised economic dictatorship, their political dictatorship would inevitably disappear. To this Lenin could reply that where the state embodied the interests and the will of the proletariat, economic control by the state meant economic control by the proletariat."
    (Leonard Schapiro. The Origins of the Communist Autocracy. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1965. p. 138.)

    "A work (in the form of questions and answers) by Joseph Vissarionovitch [Stalin] dating from September 1927: it deals with certain key problems of the science and art of politics... the internal relations of any nation are the result of a combination which is 'original' and (in a certain sense) unique: these relations must be understood and conceived in their originality and uniqueness if one wishes to dominate them and direct them. To be sure, the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is 'national'—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin. Yet the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to study accurately the combination of national forces which the international class [the proletariat] will have to lead and develop, in accordance with the international perspective and directives [i.e. those of the Comintern]... The accusations of nationalism are inept if they refer to the nucleus of the question. If one studies the majoritarians' [Bolsheviks'] struggle from 1902 up to 1917, one can see that its originality consisted in purging internationalism of every vague and purely ideological (in a pejorative sense) element, to give it a realistic political content.

    It is in the concept of hegemony that those exigencies which are national in character are knotted together; one can well understand how certain tendencies either do not mention such a concept, or merely skim over it. A class that is international in character has—in as much as it guides social strata which are narrowly national (intellectuals), and indeed frequently even less than national: particularistic and municipalistic (the peasants)—to 'nationalise' itself in a certain sense... That non-national concepts (i.e. ones that cannot be referred to each individual country) are erroneous can be seen ab absurdo: they have led to passivity and inertia... what is being awaited is an anachronistic and anti-natural form of 'Napoleonism' (since not all historical phases repeat themselves in the same form). The theoretical weaknesses of this modern form of the old mechanicism are masked by the general theory of permanent revolution, which is nothing but a generic forecast presented as a dogma, and which demolishes itself by not in fact coming true."
    (Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 1971. pp. 240-241.)

    "He met uncertainty with ambiguity. He staked out the middle ground without indicating the direction in which he might move. Events would dictate... The one certainty remained his belief, rooted in Leninism, of the inevitability of war.

    [....]

    In the parallel negotiations with the Anglo-French and the Germans during the summer of 1939, Stalin's dual aim was to avoid being drawn into a war that he believed inevitable, and to ensure that if and when he became involved it would be under the most favourable political and military circumstances....

    The Nazi-Soviet Pact did not, by contrast, involve a military alliance, and Stalin refused to conclude one with Germany over the following months. Its main advantages in Stalin's mind were to keep the Soviet Union out of the coming 'imperialist war' ... Given his assumption that the war in the West would be prolonged... Stalin envisaged gaining a necessary breathing space because 'only by 1943 could we meet the Germans on an equal footing.' ....

    The fall of France shattered his illusions of a stalemate...

    That Stalin was stupefied by the German attack in June 1941... [made him] the victim of self-deception based on a set of perfectly rational, if faulty, calculations. He was convinced that Hitler would never risk repeating the error of the Germans in the First World War of fighting on two fronts."
    (Alfred J. Rieber, "Stalin as foreign policy-maker: avoiding war, 1927-1953" in Stalin: A New History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. pp. 143, 146-147.)

    "Subsequently, an official statement from the FAI itself pointed out inadequacies of the militia in fighting the War against a modern army... 'We paid dearly for the loyalty to our ideas which we maintained for so long. Would the rebellious forces have been able to go from Sevilla to Badajoz and from Badajoz to the doors of Madrid, if we had not opposed for so long, and so bitterly, the organisation of the army which we needed to fight the enemy? Our militias, without firing practice, without military training, disordered, which held plenums and assemblies before going into battle, which discussed all orders, and often refused to comply with them, could not confront the formidable military apparatus which Germany and Italy provided to the Rebels...'"
    (Robert J. Alexander. The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War Volume I. London: Janus Publishing Company Limited. 1999. p. 186.)

    "The Germans went beyond the line where they were to have stopped under a Soviet-German understanding. They crossed the Western Bug and San and entered the Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia, annexed by Poland in 1921. . . The Soviet operation alarmed the Nazi command, General Nicolaus von Vormann, a member of Hitler’s Headquarters, recalls in his memoirs. The Headquarters debated whether to come to blows with the Red Army or to bide its time and retreat. In the end, it decided on the latter course."
    (Deborin, Grigory. Secrets of the Second World War. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1972. p. 43.)

    "Bukharin: ... one of the points on the agenda of this conference was the question of the Ryutin platform, and the conference approved this Ryutin platform... I fully agreed with this platform and I bear full responsibility for it. The Ryutin platform was approved on behalf of the Right centre. The essential points of the Ryutin platform were a 'palace coup,' terrorism, steering a course for a direct alliance with the Trotskyites....

    I must say, only I ask the Court not to understand it as a desire to mitigate the charges against me, that the political tendencies in this group were not entirely undifferentiated, that the Rights were not united with the Trotskyites: the Trotskyites counted on terrorism while the Rights put their hopes in an insurrectionary movement. The Rights urged the organization on to mass action."
    (People's Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R. Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" Heard Before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. Moscow: People's Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R. 1938. pp. 390-391.)

    "Finally, and politically most important, the platform threatened to carry the party leadership struggle outside the bounds of the ruling elite, the nomenklatura. The leftist opposition of the mid-1920s had attempted to do this as well by organizing public demonstrations and by agitating the rank and file of the party.

    [....]

    Although the Riutin Platform originated in the right wing of the Bolshevik Party, its specific criticisms of the Stalinist regime were in the early 1930s shared by the more leftist Leon Trotsky, who also had sought to organize political opposition 'from below.' ... Like the Riutin group, Trotsky believed that the Soviet Union in 1932 was in a period of extreme crisis provoked by Stalin's policies. Like them, he believed that the rapid pace of forced collectivization was a disaster... Along with the Riutinists, Trotsky called for a drastic change in economic course and democratization of the dictatorial regime within a party that suppressed all dissent. According to Trotsky, Stalin had brought the country to ruin.

    At the same time the Riutin group was forging its progammatic documents, Trotsky was attempting to activate his followers in the Soviet Union...

    Sometime in 1932 Trotsky sent a series of secret personal letters to his former followers Karl Radek, G.I. Sokolnikov, and Ye. Preobrazhensky and others in the Soviet Union. And at about the same time he sent a letter to his oppositionist colleagues in the Soviet Union by way of an English traveler...

    More concretely, in late 1932 Trotsky was actively trying to forge a new opposition coalition in which former oppositionists from both left and right would participate. From Berlin, Trotsky's son Lev Sedov maintained contact with veteran Trotskyist I. N. Smirnov in the Soviet Union... Shortly thereafter, Smirnov relayed word to Sedov that the bloc had been organized; Sedov wrote to his father that 'it embraces the Zinovievists, the Sten-Lominadze group, and the Trotskyists (old '—').' Trotsky promptly announced in his newspaper that the first steps toward an illegal organization of 'Bolshevik-Leninists' had been formed.

    Back in the Soviet Union, the authorities smashed Trotsky's bloc before it got off the ground. In connection with their roundup of suspected participants in the Riutin group, nearly all the leaders of the new bloc were pulled in for questioning. Many of them were expelled from the party and sentenced to prison or exile. Sedov wrote to his father that although 'the arrest of the 'ancients' is a great blow, the lower workers are safe.'"
    (J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1999. pp. 59-63.)

    "The village soviet lied to the district, and the district lied to the province, and the province lied to Moscow. Everything was apparently in order, so Moscow assigned grain production and delivery quotas to the provinces, and the provinces then assigned them to the districts. And our village was given a quota that it couldn't have fulfilled in ten years! ... It was clear that Moscow was basing its hopes on the Ukraine."
    (Vasily Grossman. Forever Flowing. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 1997. p. 149.)

    "Probably the most fundamental and basic 'source' on the plans of Stalin and the inner workings of Ezhov's NKVD is that by Alexander Orlov. The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes is his 'inside' account of the Great Purges. Orlov is the source of... the subsequent show trials and is the 'smoking gun' of the Kirov killing. Orlov was an NKVD operative in the organization's 'Foreign Department,' and one would therefore expect his information to be firsthand. However, during the entire period of the 'Great Purges,' Orov was an NKVD chief in Spain during the Civil War. He was in the Soviet Union only twice for briefly visits of a few days each, and his 'information' is based on corridor gossip he picked up among some of his NKVD friends during those brief visits. By his own admission, he knew little about what was happening in the Kremlin. He heard about the execution of Tukhachevskii on French radio.

    ... None of his information on the decisions and workings of the inner leadership can be considered firsthand primary source material...

    ... After Orlov defected to the United States, he worked for American intelligence, testifying before various congressional committees in the early 1950s... one might legitimately wonder whether his new friends, loyalties, and perspectives colored his account... the question of political bias only compounds the main problem with the Orlov source – the lack of proximity to events."
    (J. Arch Getty. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1985. pp. 211-212.)

    "The third objection to the theory that Stalin planned everything to create a climate of universal fear relates to the process of arrest itself. Except for a few well-publicized show trials in Moscow and in the localities, most arrests were carried out quietly and without publicity. The press in the period, while filled with editorials about maintaining vigilance, carried practically no lists or even mentions of those arrested. It is almost as if the authorities wanted to keep them a secret: hardly an effective plan to generate universal terror."
    (Alec Nove. The Stalin Phenomenon. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1993. p. 134.)

    Orwell in 1943:
    "The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No political strategy could offset that."
    (George Orwell. A Collection of Essays. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. 1981. pp. 203-204.)

    "Actually I've given a more sympathetic account of the POUM 'line' than I actually felt, because I always told them they were wrong and refused to join the party. But I had to put it as sympathetically as possible, because it has had no hearing in the capitalist press and nothing but libels in the left-wing press. Actually, considering the way things have gone in Spain, I think there was something in what they said, though no doubt their way of saying it was tiresome and provocative in the extreme."
    (George Orwell. George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920-1940 Vol. 1. Boston, Mass.: David R. Godine. 2000. p. 366.)

    "I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers. Even if I had the power, I would not wish to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs: I would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there."
    (George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 3. Boston: David R. Godine. 2000. p. 404.)

    "I had lunch with Negrin the other day... I still feel fairly sure that he is not the Russians' man, as he was credited with being during the civil war."
    (George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 4. Boston: Nonpareil Books. 2000. p. 77.)

    "The proceedings against Zinovyev and Kamenev, against Pyatakov and Radek, and against a group of military traitors (Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and others) prove that our enemies do not plan quietly 'to creep into socialism,' ... but they grab the most extreme, cruel, and filthy weapons for carrying on the struggle...

    Capitalist encirclement is a real fact, whose significance for the entire cause of socialist construction in the USSR must not be in the slightest degree underestimated."
    (Andrey Y. Vyshinsky, ed. The Law of the Soviet State. New York: Macmillan Co. 1948. p. 46.)

    An example of how the struggle against revisionism was often lost to people besides of Stalin in the late 40's.

    http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/docu...ic/peaceful.htm

    Manly.

    http://cpcml.ca/Tmld2010/100823-Falsificat...ginsofWWII.html

    Good read.

    "Among the obvious weaknesses, some are the following:

    [...]

    Character of Government Itself.—Based on the idea of a selfless society, the state here is constantly threatened with the fact that it cannot destroy the instincts of human nature toward self-interest. These are imbedded in the glandular, nervous, and physical organisms of men and are the resultant of the atavistic forces of centuries. If these instincts cannot be eradicated in a generation or two, this experiment must fail.

    [....]

    Revolt of Youth.—As time goes on, with betterment in living conditions, and growing distinctions in class and privileges, youth will probably revolt against these actualities which are contrary to what they had been led to believe communism would induce; and this may ironically result in radical youth espousing in revolt the conservative political doctrine of individualism and capitalistic opportunity.

    [...]

    The Menace of Possible Hitler Fascist Attack.—This menace very obviously is constantly in the forefront of the minds of this government. Hitler's plan, as outlined in Mein Kampf and subsequently elaborated upon in his Nuremberg speech, in which the grain fields of the Ukraine were specifically mentioned, the Drang nach Ostm, all point to this possibility."
    (Joseph E. Davies. Mission to Moscow. London: Victor Gollancz Limited. 1945. pp. 256-258.)

    He noted this on June 6, 1938.

    "We now know that on 20 April 1941, at a closed dinner at the Bolshoi Theater, Stalin... [r]effering to the fact that the American Communists had disaffiliated from the Comintern in order to avoid prosecution under the Voorhis Act... declared,

    'Dimitrov is losing his parties. That's not bad. On the contrary, it would be good to make the Com[munist] parties entirely independent instead of being sections of the CI. They must be transformed into national Com. parties under various names—Labor Party, Marxist Party, etc. The name doesn't matter. What is important is that they take root in their own people and concentrate on their own special tasks. The situation and tasks vary greatly from country to country, for instance in England and Germany, they are not at all the same. When the Com. parties get strong in this fashion, then you'll reestablish their international organization.'

    Stalin continued:

    'The [First] International was created in the days of Marx in anticipation of an early world revolution. The Comintern was created in the days of Lenin in a similar period. At present the national tasks for each country move into the forefront. But the status of Com. parties as sections of an international organization, subordinate to the Executive of the CI, is an obstacle.... Don't hold on to what was yesterday. Strictly take into account the newly created circumstances... Under present conditions, membership in the Comintern makes it easier for the bourgeoisie to persecute the Com. parties and accomplish its plan to isolate them from the masses in their own countries, while it hinders the Com. parties' independent development and task-solving as national parties.'"
    (Alexander Dallin & Fridrikh I. Firsov. Dimitrov and Stalin: 1934-1943. Hew Haven: Yale University Press. 2000. pp. 226-227.)

    "For a while in 1939 he [Yezhov] still retained the token position of Commissar of Water Transport but rarely attended meetings. When he did so he never intervened but spent his time making paper birds or planes, launching them into the air and then scrabbling under chairs to retrieve them. When the NKVD finally came to arrest him, he stood up, placed his gun on the table, and declared: 'How long have I been waiting for this!'"
    (D. Reynolds, W.F. Kimball and A.O. Chubarian. Allies at War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1994. p. xviii.)

    July 4, 1937:

    "Had a fine talk with Litvinov. I told him quite frankly the reactions in U.S. and western Europe to the purges; and to the executions of the Red Army generals; that it definitely was bad, and harmful to the outside reputation of the U.S.S.R. In my opinion it had shaken the confidence of France and England in the strength of the U.S.S.R. vis-*-vis Hitler.

    Litvinov was very frank. He stated that they had to 'make sure' through these purges that there was no treason left which could co-operate with Berlin or Tokyo; that some day the world would understand that what they had done was to protect their government from 'menacing treason.' In fact, he said they were doing the whole world a service in protecting themselves against the menace of Hitler and Nazi world domination, and thereby preserving the Soviet Union strong as a bulwark against the Nazi threat."
    (Joseph E. Davies. Mission to Moscow. London: Victor Gollancz Limited. 1945. p. 115.)

    "In April 1930, the peasants of the village Kisel in Ostrovskii raion, Leningrad Region, wrote Kalinin the following letter:

    'Our rural soviet chairman carried out collectivization by force. He yelled at anyone who did not agree to enter the collective farm, just like the old gendarmes. Whoever did not sign was led to the table by the arm and forced to sign. And whoever did not want to sign was told that his teeth would be knocked out and his hide pulled off.'

    Another peasant complained that he had been arrested for publicly reading Stalin's 'Dizziness from Success' to fellow peasants."
    (Lynne Viola. Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996. p. 94.)

    "We Jugoslavs have discarded classic deviations between revolutionary and evolutionary socialism. History has erased such a distinction. Life now pushes toward the evolutionary progress... I think that even in the United States there is a tendency toward socialism. A big change began with your New Deal and your economy retains many of its features. For example, state intervention in the economy is much larger."
    (Tito, quoted in Cyrus Leo Sulzberger. The Last of the Giants. New York: Macmillan. 1970. p. 270.)

    "Yugoslavian president and communist party leader Josip Tito visited Beijing in a sign of the early post-Mao leadership's interest in his decentralized type of 'market socialism'... Shortly after Tito's visit, the influential Guangming Daily newspaper ran an editorial arguing that workers should be paid bonuses for higher output or better work, while a meeting of provincial agriculture heads made similar arguments for rural labor."
    (William A. Joseph. Politics in China: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. p. 106.)

    "Tito made a state visit to Beijing, and in 1978, Hua Guofeng went to Belgrade, at which time the Chinese press heaped lavish praise on Yugoslavia's social and economic systems."
    (Melvin Gurtov and Byong-Moo Hwang. China Under Threat: The Politics of Strategy and Diplomacy. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. 1980. p. 255.)

    "We firmly believe that the heroic Yugoslav peoples will carry out Comrade Tito's behests, unite closely and forge victoriously ahead along the road of socialism, self-management and non-alignment, and that the friendship between our parties, countries and people will grow in strength and develop steadily."
    (Hua Guofeng, quoted in Beijing Review No. 19 Vol. 21, p. 11.)

    That same issue had as the banner of Hua's speech "Eternal Glory to Comrade Tito, a Great Marxist And an Outstanding Proletarian Revolutionary!"

    "I met with Comrade Tito just as an old soldier. We had a cordial talk and agreed to forget the past and look to the future. This is the attitude we adopted when we resumed relations with other East European parties and countries; we take the present as a fresh starting point from which to develop friendly, cooperative relations. Of course, it's still worthwhile to analyse events of the past. But I think the most important thing is that each party, whether it is big, small or medium, should respect the experience of the others and the choices they have made and refrain from criticizing the way the other parties and countries conduct their affairs. This should be our attitude not only towards parties in power but also towards those that are not in power. When we had talks with representatives of the Communist parties of France and Italy, we expressed this view that we should respect their experience and their choices. If they have made mistakes, it is up to them to correct them. Likewise, they should take the same attitude towards us, allowing us to make mistakes and correct them. Every country and every party has its own experience, which differs from that of the others in a thousand and one ways."
    (Deng Xiaoping. Fundamental Issues in Present-Day China. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. 1987. p. 186.)

    "A comparison of the policies of the Deng regime up to 1992 with those implemented by the Tito regime in Yugoslavia after 1948, when it broke with Stalin, shows many similarities. Indeed, the similarities are not coincidental. In 1981 the Deng regime began avidly studying Yugoslavia's bureaucratically-controlled system of atomised 'workers' self-management' and its post-1965 combination of state planning and markets. By 1984, the Deng regime had begun implementing a whole range of Titoist-style policies. These included allowing state industrial enterprises to keep up to 70% of their investment funds under their own control and to make their own decisions abut the bulk of what they would produce. Like the Tito regime, the Deng regime also allowed... the setting up of joint ventures between state-owned enterprises and foreign capitalist investors.

    Limited forms of workers' participation in enterprise management were also introduced. These took two forms. The first was annual workers' congresses (which were to review enterprise budgets and production plans, welfare and bonus funds, safety issues, wage systems and management structures and make recommandations on these to the higher levels of economic administration). The second was the authorisation of the election of factory managers by work collectives. However, as under the Titoist system of 'workers' self-management' such elections were not by secret ballot... such elections could easily be controlled by the bureaucracy."
    (Doug Lorimer. The Class Nature of the People's Republic of China. Chippendale: Resistance Books. 2004. pp. 19-20.)

    Deserves its own mention:

    "Like the Tito regime in Yugoslavia, the Deng regime in China in the 1980s allowed a considerable relaxation of Stalinist ideological control. As with the Tito regime, this relaxation extended to the official publication of anti-Stalinist Marxist literature. In 1984, for example, the Chinese CP's Institute of Marxism-Leninism began publishing writings by Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Mandel and Leon Trotsky."
    (Doug Lorimer. The Class Nature of the People's Republic of China. Chippendale: Resistance Books. 2004. p. 20.)

    "He [Goebbels] injected his propaganda into the Soviet Union initially by means of three 'black' transmitters disguised as Trotskyite, separatist, and nationalist. Eventually, despite the lack of receivers in the Soviet Union, he would have twenty-two official transmitters as well, broadcasting thirty-four daily bulletins in eighteen different languages. He had persuaded the communists Torgler, Kasper, and Albrecht, at a secret meeting in his ministry during May, to broadcast appeals to the enemy in authentic communist double-speak to overthrow the 'traitor' Stalin and set up workers' and soldiers' councils; Goebbels stopped them from calling for street demonstrations, in case nobody showed up. Hoping to use Ernst Thälmann too, Goebbels sent him reports on conditions in the Soviet Union; still in a concentration camp, 'Teddy' Thälmann disdained to collaborate (and was eventually shot.)"
    (David Irving. Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. London: Focal Point Publications. 1996. p 652.)

    "Revolutionary claims from the Anarchists and POUM were easily dismissed as ridiculous by PCE leaders because, by definition, the only authentic 'revolution' could be one declared and led by Communists. Initially, in the aftermath of the military coup and in the absence of any other information, party leaders assumed that only a breakdown in order had occurred. When local party and trade-union branches seized control in the Republican zone, this was seen, accordingly, as a temporary necessity that would be reversed when central government power was restored. Anything more than this was denounced as the actions of 'uncontrollables' amongst the ranks of the CNT. However, the PCE had to acknowledge, albeit grudgingly, that something more fundamental might be occurring when it became clear that local Communists were also participating in land and factory seizures in many areas. Faced on one hand with the need to support the popular front, and to respond to Comintern injunctions not to drive the middle classes into the hands of the Nationalists, and on the other hand with the desires of party of the rank and file of the party to seize the revolutionary opportunities that had opened up, the leadership of the party leadership prevaricated.

    Rather than following its own path, the PCE responded by adopting the compromise position taken by the left wing of the Socialist Party; to favour both the popular front and the revolution. Accordingly, the Communists did nothing to prevent party members from creating collectives, joining local committees or forming their own militias... In many respects it was natural for the PCE to take a particularly active role in the creation of new centralised institutions... There appears to have been no policy of Communist 'infiltration', as one was not needed. Communist ideology emphasised the importance of the state... they were not alone in this view – it was common to the Socialist and republican parties as well....

    Yet, at the same time the PCE leadership actually showed a marked reluctance to take decisive action, seeking clarification from Moscow on how exactly they were supposed to proceed. Partly this was another case of confusion over how to translate a general principle into concrete action. But mainly it was a concern on the part of the party leaders that the PCE lacked the strength to act alone and a fear that any precipitate blow against the POUM would wreck the popular front approach to the war. Instead, a low level conflict with the POUM, and to an extent the Anarchists, in Catalonia bubbled away fuelled by local rivalries, serious enough to lead to assassinations on all sides. In the end, it was this steadily growing tension, rather than a calculated strike delivered by the PCE on behalf of Moscow, which provided the background to the sudden eruption of open conflict in May 1937.

    During the deep political crisis that now engulfed the Republican camp, the leaders of the PCE were largely bereft of the advice of the Comintern and by no means clear about how best to proceed. At a series of meetings of the Politburo the underlying differences between them were exposed in debates about the party position. D*az (debilitated by the severe illness that was to dog the rest of his life) and Hernández cautioned against precipitate action that might alienate the Anarchists and urged continuing support of the Caballero government. This view was opposed by the Comintern delegates... However, what finally persuaded the Communist leadership openly to oppose Caballero was the support of the right faction of the PSOE, led by Negr*n, and the smaller republican parties for action. Caballero would no doubt have survived if his party had continued to back him... Negr*n then formed a new administration in which the number of Communist ministers was reduced to two.

    With the compromise period of the wartime Republic now brought to a close, harsh actions were taken against the POUM and CNT following the May events. Far from moving unilaterally to crush the proponents of a revolutionary approach to the war – including Caballero's faction of the PSOE – the Spanish Communists acted only in co-ordination with their Socialist and republican partners... Nor were Communist leaders uniformly enthusiasts for this course, despite the further urgings of Comintern for decisive action once contact was restored with Moscow. D*az and Hernández remained fearful for the future of Republican unity, arguing ineffectively for rapprochement with the CNT and POUM rather than confrontation, and afraid that the party risked alienating its own rank-and-file supporters who favored a revolutionary approach. In the event, the brutality [of the] Communist troops and police... owed far more to feeling on the ground than any dictates from Moscow."
    (Tim Rees & Andrew Thorpe. International Communism and the Communist International, 1919-43. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1998. pp. 153-155.)

    "Not all were willing to endorse the inquiry as Dewey. Albert Einstein... agreed that 'every accused,' including Trotsky, deserved 'the opportunity to prove his innocence.' But he was concerned about the paucity of competent jurists, and he refused to endorse the commission's effort on the ground that the hearing would merely serve as a grandstand for Trotsky: 'The question is raised because Trotsky is an extremely active and adroit politician, who might well search for an effective platform for the presentation and promulgation of his political goals in the public sphere. . . . I'm afraid that the only result would be Trotsky's own self-promotion without the possibility of a well-ground judgment.'"
    (Christopher Phelps. Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 2005. p. 153.)

    "Comrade Crispien does not regard the split like a Communist, but quite in the spirit of Kautsky... A revolution, as he sees it, can be made only if it does not worsen the workers’ conditions 'too much'. Is it permissible, in a Communist Party, to speak in a tone like this, I ask? This is the language of counter-revolution. The standard of living in Russia is undoubtedly lower than in Germany, and when we established the dictatorship, this led to the workers beginning to go more hungry and to their conditions becoming even worse. The workers’ victory cannot be achieved without sacrifices, without a temporary deterioration of their conditions. We must tell the workers the very opposite of what Crispien has said."
    (V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol. 31. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1970. p. 248.)

    "The persecution of Communists ['Stalinists,' or 'Cominformists'] in Yugoslavia that began in 1948-49 was probably one of the most massive persecution movements that Europe had yet witnessed, including those of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1940s, Germany in the 1930s, and the repression of Communists during the Nazi occupation. What happened in Yugoslavia was a truly immense phenomenon considering the number of inhabitants and the number of Communists. According to official sources that were long kept secret, the purges affected 16,371 people, 5,037 of whom were brought to trial and three-quarters of whom were sent to Goli Otok and Grgur. Independent analysis by Vladimir Dedijer suggests that between 31,000 and 32,000 people went through the Goli Otok camp alone. But even the most recent research has been unable to come up with a figure for the number of prisoners who died as victims of executions, exhaustion, hunger, epidemics, or even suicide—a solution chosen by many Communists to escape their cruel situation."
    (Stéphane Courtois & Mark Kramer (trans.). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. 1999. p. 425.)

    Orwell's anti-communism.

    "It is important to bear in mind what I said above: that Burnham's theory is only a variant—an American variant, and interesting because of its comprehensiveness—of the power worship now so prevalent among intellectuals. A more normal variant, at any rate in England, is Communism. If one examines the people who [have] some idea of what the Russian régime is like... they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige. These people look towards the USSR and see in it, or think they see, a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves. It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip."
    (George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 4. New Hampshire: David R. Godine. 1968. pp. 178-179.)

    "Unless the signs are very deceiving, the USSR is preparing for war against the western democracies. Indeed, as Burnham rightly says, the war is already happening in a desultory way. How soon it could break out into full-scale conflict is a difficult question, bringing in all kinds of military, economic and scientific problems on which the ordinary journalist or political observer has no data. But there is one point, very important to Burnham's argument, which can be profitably discussed, and that is the position of the Communist parties and the 'fellow-travellers' and the reliance placed on them by Russian strategy.

    Burnham lays great stress on the Communist tactic of 'infiltration'... a Communist is [in Burnham's view] psychologically quite different from an ordinary human being....

    No doubt, Burnham's description of the 'true Communist' holds good for a few hundred thousand or a few million fanatical, dehumanised people, mostly inside the USSR, who are the nucleus of the movement. It holds good for Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, etc and the more faithful of their agents abroad. But if there is one well-attested fact about the Communist parties of almost all countries, it is the rapid turnover in membership. People drift in, sometimes by scores of thousands at a time, and presently drift out again... Certainly every effort is made to induce in Communist Party members the totalitarian mentality that Burnham describes. In a few cases this succeeds permanently, in many others temporarily: still, it is possible to meet thinking people who have remained Communists for as much as ten years before resigning or being expelled, and who have not been intellectually crippled by the experience. In principle, the Communist Parties all over the world are quisling organisations, existing for the purpose of espionage and disruption, but they are not necessarily so efficient and dangerous as Burnham makes out....

    In left-wing circles there is the corresponding syllogism: Communism is opposed to capitalism; therefore it is progressive and democratic. This is stupid, but it can be accepted in good faith by people who will be capable of seeing through it sooner or later. The question is not whether the 'cryptos' and 'fellow-travellers' advance the interests of the USSR against those of the democracies. Obviously they do so. The real question is, how many of them would continue on the same lines if war were really imminent?

    [....]

    "I think he [James Burnham] is mainly right in his account of the way in which Communist propaganda works, and the difficulty of countering it, and he is certainly right in saying that one of the most important problems at this moment is to find a way of speaking to the Russian people over the heads of their rulers.... Burnham is not in favour of Stalin or Stalinism, and he has begun to find virtues in the capitalist democracy which he once considered moribund."
    (George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 4. New Hampshire: David R. Godine. 1968. pp. 318-319, 321, 325.)

    "From the point of view of the Russians and the Communists, Social Democracy is a deadly enemy, and to do them justice they have frequently admitted it. Even such controversial questions as the formation of a western union are irrelevant here. Even if we had no influence in Europe and made no attempt to interfere there, it would still be to the interest of the Russian Government to bring about the failure of the British Labour Government, if possible. The reason is clear enough. Social Democracy, unlike capitalism, offers an alternative to Communism, and if somewhere or other it can be made to work on a big scale—if it turns out that after all it is possible to introduce Socialism without secret police forces, mass deportations and so forth—then the excuse for dictatorship vanishes. With a Labour Government in office, relations with Russia, bad already, were bound to deteriorate.

    [....]

    If you do not like Communism you are a Red-baiter, a believer in Bolshevik atrocities, the nationalisation of women, Moscow Gold, and so on. Similarly, when Catholicism was almost as fashionable among the English intelligentsia as Communism is now, anyone who said that the Catholic Church was a sinister organisation and no friend to democracy was promptly accused of swallowing the worst follies of the No-Popery organisations, of looking under his bed lest Jesuits should be concealed there, of believing stories about babies' skeletons dug up from the floors of nunneries, and all the rest of it. But a few people stuck to their opinion, and I think it is safe to say that the Catholic Church is less fashionable now than it was then."
    (George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 4. New Hampshire: David R. Godine. 1968. p. 397, 399.)

    "My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism."
    (George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 4. New Hampshire: David R. Godine. 1968. p. 502.)

    "The transition from capitalism to Communism represents an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch has terminated, the exploiters will inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope will be converted into attempts at restoration."
    (V.I. Lenin. The Essentials of Lenin Vol. II. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 1947. p. 378.)

    "The annexed territories did not belong to the core of the Polish state and did have an anti-Polish national liberation movement. Before the war, five million Ukrainians lived in Poland as an oppressed minority....

    Compared to 1939, the Poland of 1945 was 20 percent smaller, but no matter how badly the war had hit German Pomerania and Silesia, the basic infrastructure there remained superior to that of the eastern Polish provinces lost to the USSR, and the three-hundred-mile-long Baltic Sea coast offered opportunities for new industries such as shipbuilding."
    (Constantine Pleshakov. There Is No Freedom Without Bread. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2009. pp. 30-31.)

    "Like our Democratic Cambodia, Yugoslavia is a non-aligned country which has adhered to the position of preserving independence. Friendship between our two countries is therefore based on the same principle. We have always esteemed and respected Comrade President Tito and the friendly Yugoslav people. Comrade President Tito and the Yugoslav people have always supported and helped us. We have sympathy for them and wish to express our thanks to Comrade President Tito and the friendly Yugoslav people."
    (Pol Pot, quoted in Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol. 8 No. 3, 1978. p. 413.)

    "Perhaps the authors believe that the interests of the world revolution forbid making any peace at all with imperialists? ... The incorrectness of this view (which was rejected, for example, by a majority of the Petrograd opponents of peace) is as clear as day. A socialist republic surrounded by imperialist powers could not, from this point of view, conclude any economic treaties, and could not exist at all, without flying to the moon.

    Perhaps the authors believe that the interests of the world revolution require that it should be given a push, and that such a push can be given only by war, never by peace, which might give the people the impression that imperialism was being 'legitimised'? Such a 'theory' would be completely at variance with Marxism, for Marxism has always been opposed to 'pushing' revolutions, which develop with the growing acuteness of the class antagonisms that engender revolutions. Such a theory would be tantamount to the view that armed uprising is a form of struggle which is obligatory always and under all conditions. Actually, however, the interests of the world revolution demand that Soviet power, having overthrown the bourgeoisie in our country, should help that revolution, but that it should choose a form of help which is commensurate with its own strength. To help the socialist revolution on an international scale by accepting the possibility of defeat of that revolution in one's own country is a view that does not follow even from the 'pushing' theory....

    Twist and turn them how you will, but you can find no logic in the authors' contentions. There are no sensible arguments to support the view that 'in the interests of the world revolution it is expedient to accept the possibility of losing Soviet power'."
    (V.I. Lenin. Selected Works Vol. 2. New York: International Publishers. 1967. pp. 521-523.)

    "To Kaganovich, Chubar. CC of the VKP(b), Moscow.

    I consider it necessary to sell oil to the Spaniards immediately on the most favorable terms for them, at a discounted price, if need be. If the Spaniards need grain and foodstuffs in general, we should sell all that to them on favorable terms...

    Stalin.
    No. 4
    18 August 1936"
    (R.W. Davies (Ed.). The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New York: Yale University Press. 2003. p. 327.)

    "After the defeat at Shire, the Derg abandoned all of Tigray to the rebels, and the EPRDF's expanding guerrilla alliance started the military and political manoeuvres that would end in the takeover of Addis Ababa two years later. The Soviet bloc was close to casting Mengistu adrift. No belated acts of liberalization would save him. For his part Meles Zenawi, barely known outside Tigray, began introducing himself to a wider world.

    An early encounter with the western press led to an observation that has dogged him ever since. He told an interviewer at the end of 1989 that the Soviet Union and other eastern bloc countries had never been truly socialist and added, 'The nearest any country comes to being socialist as far as we are concerned is Albania.' As Meles set off in 1990 on his first venture to the United States, his aspiration to the mantle of Enver Hoxha and to run Ethiopia on Albanian lines did not inspire much confidence.

    In Washington he met the veteran Ethiopia-watcher Paul Henze. Henze was as impressed by Meles as many foreigners have been in the years since, and he made detailed notes after two long conversations. Meles had to deal first with the Albanian connection. 'I have never been to Albania,' Meles told Henze. 'We do not have any Albanian contacts. We are not trying to imitate in Tigray anything the Albanians have done.'

    Meles was equally keen to reject the Marxist tag. 'We are not a Marxist-Leninist movement,' he said. 'We do have Marxists in our movement. I acknowledge that. I myself was a convinced Marxist when I was a student at [Addis Ababa University] in the early 1970s, and our movement was inspired by Marxism. But we learned that Marxism was not a good formula for resistance to the Derg and our fight for the future of Ethiopia.'

    As the EPRDF moved out of the countryside to take over the towns and the cities, it emerged into a post-communist world, and a rapid political make-over was needed. 'When we entered Addis Ababa, the whole Marxist-Leninist structure was being disgraced,' said General Tsadkan. 'We had to rationalize in terms of the existing political order . . . capitalism had become the order of the day. If we continued with our socialist ideas, we could only continue to breed poverty.'"
    (Peter Gill. Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. pp. 74-75.)

    "The proletariat needs the Party for the purpose of achieving and maintaining the dictatorship. The Party is an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

    But from this it follows that when classes disappear and the dictatorship of the proletariat withers away, the Party also will wither away."
    (J.V. Stalin. Works Vol. 6. Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow. 1953. pp. 188-189.)

    "We have achieved only the first, the lower phase, of communism. Even this first phase of communism, socialism, is far from being completed, it is built only in the rough.

    In our country the parasitic classes, i.e., all and sundry capitalists and little capitalists, have been liquidated. Thanks to this, the exploitation of man by man has been abolished. This is not only a gigantic step forward in the lives of the peoples of our country, but also a gigantic step forward along the road of emancipation of the whole of mankind.

    We, however, have not fully carried out the task of abolishing classes, although the working class of the U.S.S.R. which is in power is no longer a proletariat in the strict sense of the word, and the peasantry, the great bulk of which has joined the collective farms, is no longer the old peasantry.

    Both the two classes which exist in the U.S.S.R. are building socialism and come within the system of socialist economy. But although both are in the same system of socialist economy, the working class in its work is bound up with state socialist property (the property of the whole people), while the collective farm peasantry is bound up with cooperative and collective farm property which belongs to individual collective farms and to collective-farm and cooperative associations. This connection with different forms of socialist property primarily determines the different position of these classes. This also determine the somewhat different paths of further development of each of them.

    What is common in the development of these two classes is that both are developing in the direction of communism. As this proceeds the difference in their class positions will be gradually obliterated until here too the last remnants of class distinctions finally disappear.

    We cannot but realize that this is a long road."
    (V.M. Molotov. The Constitution of Socialism: Speech Delivered at the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of Soviets of the U.S.S.R., November 29, 1936. Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Workers in the U.S.S.R. 1937. pp. 28-29.)

    "But while religious sentiment experiences a revival, remnants of Albanian Marxism have made a few feeble efforts to show that their faith is not entirely dead. Latter-day Marxists showed their colors as recently as 1994, unfurling a national flag shorn of the Albanian eagle; they also tacked photos of Enver Hoxha onto obelisks in Korçë. One ambitious activist even affixed a large portrait of Lenin on the marquee of the Morava cinema."
    (Sabrina P. Ramet. Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1998. p. 226.)

    "The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries."
    (George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell Vol. III. New Hampshire: David R. Godine, Publisher. 2000. p. 374.)

    "It appears that already in the early 1930s Stalin was convinced that the oppositional leaders, who had given up their resistance against him, were involved in a widely ramified imperialist conspiracy. Starting in the summer of 1930, a number of prominent specialists in various state institutions – N.D. Kondrat'ev, Leonid Ramzin and others – were arrested on charges of sabotaging Russian finance, industry and agriculture on the orders of emigrant Russian capitalists and Western European governments, who were preparing an invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin's correspondence suggests that he believed in the accusations....

    And he directly linked the old oppositionists in the party to these cases. He wrote to Molotov that former leftist leader Piatakov was inspired by the plotters. He did not doubt that there existed a 'Rykov–Piatakov bloc,' allied with the 'Kondrat'ev–defeatist tendencies.'

    And that was not all. During 1930, Stalin received a report from Menzhinskii that chief of the general staff Tukhachevskii might be preparing a coup d'état. Thereupon Stalin wrote to his comrade Ordzhonikidze that he did not know whether to believe this. But there existed at least the possibility that the 'Kondrat'ev–Sukhanov–Bukharin party' aimed for 'a military dictatorship, if only they can get rid of the CC, of the kolkhozy and sovkhozy, of the bolshevik tempos of development of industry.' Fortunately, the leader convinced himself some time later that, as he wrote to Molotov, Tukhachevskii 'appeared 100% pure. That's very good.' Subsequently, the matter petered out. Nevertheless, strikingly, in 1930 we already have the fully developed concept of a bloc of rightists and leftists, in league with conspirators in the Red Army and bourgeois specialists, who again co-operated with the imperialist powers to prepare military intervention against the USSR. And all this appears not from statements for public consumption but from Stalin's private mail...

    In 1930, the authorities were informed that RSFSR Prime Minister Syrtsov was conspiring with First Secretary of the trans-Caucasian District Committee Lominadze. Stalin took this 'Left–Right bloc' seriously. He commented to Molotov about the 'anti-party (in essence right deviationist) little factional group' and added: 'They played at a takeover.' ...

    Stalin always suspected even his closest comrades of not recognising counter-revolutionary plots. In August 1932, for example, he complained to Kaganovich that Politburo member Stanislav Kosior failed to recognise that, through his 'direct agents' in the Ukrainian party, Polish leader Pilsudski was organising an espionage network."
    (Erik Van Ree. The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. 2002. pp. 118-119.)

    "Moscow, Sunday
    February 26 1956

    All night long I read the secret report of N. Khrushchev that he gave to us as he did the same with all other foreign delegations. The report rejects the figure and all the acts of the great Stalin.

    I understood the position of Khrushchev and his other companions against Stalin and his glorious acts during the meeting of the congress where Stalin's name wasn't mentioned even once for anything good, but I never thought at that time that they could ever come to this point.

    I shudder when I think how much the bourgeoisie and reactionaries will rejoice when they get this report in their hands, for I'm sure will they will launch a campaign of lies and who knows how much that will last. Tito should be very glad after reading this report, as I'm sure he has read it.

    What an incalculable damage for the Soviet Union and the socialist camp! What an embarrassing responsibility in front of history!

    I cannot put anything onto paper. It's too little to say: 'I am shocked'!"
    (Enver Hoxha. Ditar 1955-1957. Tiranë: 8 Nëntori. 1987. p. 125.)

    "... Stalin has given up the messianic faith in the immediacy and inevitability of a world revolution, fomented and perhaps actually helped by the Soviet Communist Party and its allies in other countries. He has banked all his hopes and resources on making a new social order within the U.S.S.R.; on holding it out, in the course of the next decade, as an Examplar which other communities will accept, or not, according to the upshot of the class struggle within their respective countries. Whether this decision will lead to the suppression of the Third International (we hope it will) depends on Stalin's power over the C.P.—which I think—is not so great as some people imagine."
    (Beatrice Webb to Arnold Toynbee, May 20, 1935 in Norman Mackenzie (Ed.). The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb: Volume 3, Pilgrimage 1912-1947. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2008. p. 406.)

    "In one of his confidential letters to Helmut Schmidt, Brezhnev wrote that 'for all the importance of economics ... the primacy in international affairs remains, as is well known, with politics.'" (In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent)

    http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/e...overthrown.html

    Interesting read.

    "Lady Paget hastened to declare that although she had met Rakovsky in Tokyo she had conducted no political conversations with him. It would indeed be ridiculous to think that Lady Paget would broadcast to the whole world that she is an agent of the Intelligence Service. That notorious Menshevik and godfather of Chernov's in the German Secret Police, Dan, went so far as to make the statement that he did not even know his friend Chernov."
    (The Communist International Vol. XV. 1938. p. 502.)

    "To Browder: Received Foster's telegram [which criticized Browder's views]. Please report which leading party comrades support his views. I am somewhat disturbed by the new theoretical, political, and tactical positions you are developing. Are you not going too far in adapting to the altered international situation, to the point of denying the theory and practice of class struggle and the necessity for the working class to have its own independent political party? Please reconsider all of this and report your thoughts."
    (Dimitrov to Browder, March 1944, quoted in Harvey Klehr & John Earl Haynes. The Soviet World of American Communism. New York: Vail-Ballou Press. 1998. p. 106.)

    "In fact, the effectiveness of workers' control varies... The collective was normally led by skilled and white collar workers (comprising some 80% of the membership of self-management organs by 1970), who were primarily concerned with issues of income and welfare, and left the bulk of production decisions to management. However, they retained rights of consultation over all choices, and an effective veto in cases of disagreement with the Director. Moreover, the operation of the BOALs [Basic Organization of Associated Labor] gave shop-floor workers considerable influence over low-level and organisational decisions. While there was clearly considerable leeway in the interpretation of collective preferences, the Director could not consistently implement decisions in opposition to the membership, and had to accept the general orientation favouring labour incomes and employment security."
    (Saul Estrin. Self-Management: Economic Theory and Yugoslav Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1983. p. 69.)

    "Each BOAL had nominal authority to make investment and hiring decisions and set production targets, prices, conditions of work, wages, and salaries and pursue alliances iwth other units of labor.

    ... At each level, enterprise plans were developed by technical specialists and administrators and were reviewed by pertinent councils or assemblies. Operating plans were discussed, negotiated, and integrated... Any unit of associated labor (BOAL, WOAL, COAL) could freely pursue international trade, arrange external financing, and establish links (e.g., joint ventures and licensing agreements) with foreign firms. Their autonomy was not total, however, because key decisions (e.g., production and investment decisions and managerial appointments) were also reviewed by municipal and communist party officials.

    The Yugoslav system was a model for similar experiments elsewhere, such as an industrial community system of producer co-ops tried in Peru in the 1970s."
    (Ralph B. Edfelt. Global Comparative Management: A Functional Approach. London: SAGE Publications. 2010. p. 165.)

    "Nevertheless, the growing tension with the Soviet Union and the rest of the Communist bloc brought about a patriotic surge of support within Yugoslavia for the new regime. Tito and the Communists had been losing popularity between 1945 and 1948 with a substantial part of the 94 per cent of the population who did not belong to the party. Now a majority of the people rallied behind them...

    Before long, however, they were to get an additional source of support, perhaps unexpectedly... Following the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform, the Truman administration took a decision to offer economic assistance which would help keep an independent Yugoslavia afloat. US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a communication with the American embassy in Belgrade in early 1949, said that it was in the 'obvious interest' of the United States that 'Titoism' should continue to exist as an 'erosive and disintegrating force' in the Soviet sphere. In November 1950, President Truman sent a letter to Congress in support of a Yugoslav Emergency Relief Act, making no mention of Yugoslavia's Communist political and economic structure, but using a strategic argument: 'The continued independence of Yugoslavia is of great importance to the security of the United States. We can help preserve the independence of a nation which is defying the savage threats of the Soviet imperialists, and keeping Soviet power out of Europe's most strategic areas. This is clearly in our national interest.'"
    (Archie Brown. The Rise and Fall of Communism. New York: HarperCollins. 2009. pp. 208-209.)

    A 1984 article:

    "In actual reality, of course, self-management – after a long period of increasing suffocation by the bureaucratic cancer – has already effectively been terminated. Reflecting on the circumstances of its demise, it is instructive to note that it was the West rather than the East which dealt the final blow...

    In a recent survey of Yugoslavia by the Financial Times, it was noted that 'Yugoslavia's protracted economic crisis, now in its fourth or fifth year, is beginning to change the political system.' ... as the commentaries in both The Times and the Financial Times noted last June, the country's acceptance of capitalist economic principles – exclusive reliance on monetary mechanisms – is seen as implying that 'the West is ahead ideologically' of the Soviet Union. This year, furthermore, Yugoslavia has agreed to move away from the barter trade with Comecon towards greater exchange with the West. Current agreements with the IMF and the World Bank show Yugoslavia's commitment to liberalize controls, which still cover over 80 per cent of all imports, to relax the terms under which foreign capital can invest, and to open (for the first time) the service sector to it as well. In return, the banks are promising patience and tolerance.

    However, it is obvious that this addiction to foreign loans, which the LCY leadership has acquired over the past decade or two, will have to be paid for by the Yugoslav working class."
    (Branka Magaš. The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up 1980-92. London: Verso. 1993. p. 97.)

    "The papers give – in all the Yugoslav languages – advance notice of new wage cuts and price increases. I read with interest that shipyard workers in Split will have their wages lowered by 40 per cent. Average wage cuts: 20-40 per cent. Average price increases: 30-100+ per cent. The prices of black bread, milk and cooking oil will be protected. The IMF has demanded a drastic cut in domestic consumption and the closure of loss-making enterprises. Hundreds of telexes arrive daily at the door of the Federal government in Belgrade protesting against wage cuts."
    (Ibid. p. 131.)

    http://books.google.com/books?id=nEpe4DvOZ...Trotsky&f=false

    On the "American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky" being a Trotskyist front.

    (Judy Kutulas. The Long War: The Intellectual People's Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930-1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1995. pp. 116-118.)

    "Aware that Munich had shattered Negr*n's last chance at salvation in a European war, and ever more determined to annihilate the Republican army, Franco gathered over thirty thousand fresh troops. To secure substantial deliveries of new German equipment with which to arm them, he made considerable concessions to the Third Reich in terms of increased participation in Spanish mainland and Spanish Moroccan mining enterprises. It was a surrender of Spanish sovereignty far beyond anything given by the Republic to the USSR. Franco's Foreign Minister, the Conde de Jordana, informed the German Ambassador of 'the firm intention of Nationalist Spain to continue to orient itself towards Germany politically and economically after the end of the war'."
    (Paul Preston. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 2007. p. 290.)

    "'Is the N.S.D.A.P. prepared to give guarantees that it will not encroach upon private property in land?'

    Answer: National Socialism recognizes private ownership in principle, and places it under State protection.

    The healthy admixture of small, medium-sized, and large concerns will be maintained in all departments of economic life, and therefore in agriculture.

    It follows, from the content and spirit of the whole Programme, clearly and irrefutably, that National Socialism, as the most convinced and consistent opponent of Marxism, most decisively repudiates its cardinal doctrine of 'the confiscation of all property,' a doctrine ruinous both to the nation and to its economic life, and also that National Socialism, as the keenest political adversary of the misguided international doctrine of Marxism, sees in a class of landowning farmers the best and surest foundation of the national State.

    But being also a determined opponent of all the great capitalists whose aim it is to mobilize for themselves all agricultural values, and to oust the farmers by means of taxation and interest on loans, National Socialism expressly demands the State protection of property in land against aggression by the banks and Stock Exchanges.

    We need a strong, healthy class of farmers, free from interest-slavery and taxation-Bolshevism."
    (Gottfried Feder. Hitler's Official Programme: And Its Fundamental Ideas. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. 1934. p. 48.)

    "Meanwhile, it is believed that illegal operations for abortion, which are severely punished by the criminal courts, have, in the USSR, almost entirely ceased to occur. Thus the paradoxical result has been obtained that in the USSR, where abortion is permitted under strict control, it is to-day far less frequently practised than it is in Germany and France where it is a criminal offence! 'In the Soviet Union,' declared Dr. Gens, the director of the department for abortion of the Moscow Institute for the Protection of Mothers and Infants, 'in spite of legalisation there are relatively few abortions: we are the country in which abortion is least practised.'"
    (Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? Vol. II. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1936. p. 832.)

    "I know that there are, of course, wiseacres with a high opinion of themselves and even calling themselves socialists, who assert that power should not have been taken until the revolution broke out in all countries. They do not realise that in saying this they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the working classes carry out a revolution on an international scale means that everyone will remain suspended in mid-air. This is senseless. Everyone knows the difficulties of a revolution. It may begin with brilliant success in one country and then go through agonising periods, since final victory is only possible on a world scale, and only by the joint efforts of the workers of all countries. Our task consists in being restrained and prudent, we must manoeuvre and retreat until we receive reinforcements. A change over to these tactics is inevitable, no matter how much they are mocked by so-called revolutionaries with no idea of what revolution means."
    Source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/14.htm

    A RevLeft post by me.

    Even if we assume that driving the Germans eastwards wasn't some conscious policy on at least a part of the British leadership, you haven't denied that the British, as I said, made things hard for the Soviets. The British preferred a victory of Franco over the Spanish Republic and used pseudo-"neutrality" to achieve this. The Soviets wished to enter into the negotiations over Czechoslovakia but were rebuffed. Various left-wing MPs pointed out at the time that the British Government under Chamberlain was pretty much pretending that the USSR didn't exist.

    As Molotov pointed out in 1939, "The decision to conclude a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Germany was adopted after military negotiations with France and Great Britain had reached an impasse... we could not but explore other possibilities of ensuring peace and eliminating the danger of war between Germany and the USSR. If the British and French Governments refused to reckon with this, that is their affair. It is our duty to think of the interests of the Soviet people, the interests of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—all the more because are firmly convinced that the interests of the USSR coincide with the fundamental interests of the peoples of other countries." (quoted in J.C. Johari, Soviet Diplomacy 1925-41, p. 43.)

    The Germans were the ones that invaded Poland. The USSR took advantage of this (and it was not morally wrong to do this) to regain lost territories.

    Still, it most certainly did mean that the Germans would, for the time being, not be marching eastwards. It should be noted that the Soviets offered the Polish Government various treaties in event of a German invasion of the country. The Polish Government rejected them. Stalin noted to Dimitrov (as noted by Geoffrey Roberts in Stalin's Wars and Alfred Erich Senn in his book on Lithuania, in-re Molotov-Ribbentrop negotiations) that this would be a nice opportunity to get rid of an anti-Soviet and "fascist state" along with the possibility of spreading "the socialist system to new inhabitants in new territories."

    The British and French rejected collective security agreements. It seems that after this occurred the Soviets basically were like "well then, you guys deal with Hitler."

    As Senn notes (p. 21 of Lithuania: Revolution From Above): "Stalin indeed looked forward to profiting from an Anglo-German conflict. In a letter of September 7 [1939] to Georgii Dimitrov, the head of the Communist International, Stalin wrote that 'we are not against' a war between capitalist states in which they 'would weaken each other.' Hitler, nolens volens [aka unwillingly], was on his way to destroying the capitalist system."

    Trotsky himself said near the end of his life that in the event of a war between Germany and the USSR that German soldiers would become infected "with a revolutionary spirit." The Soviets basically expected similar things to occur.

    I will note quote from Erik Van Ree's book The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, page 227:
    In May 1940, Lev Mekhlis, chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, told a conference in the Commissariat of Defence that his army might “come out as the initiator of the just war” against the capitalist world. In July of that year, Molotov told the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs that Lenin correctly predicted that “a second world war will allow us to take power in the whole of Europe.” The Kremlin supported Germany “just enough so as to prevent it from accepting peace proposals until the time when the hungering masses of the warring nations lose their illusions and rise up against their leaders.” Revolution in Germany would lead to reconciliation between the German and the French and British bourgeoisie, but “at that moment we’ll come to its aid, we’ll arrive with fresh forces, well prepared, and on the territory of Western Europe, I think somewhere near the Rhine, there will take place the decisive battle between the proletariat and the rotting bourgeoisie.”

    ... In April of [1941], the writer V. Vishnevskii wrote in his diary that, according to Voroshilov, the pact with Germany had been signed to set the imperialist powers against each other, adding: “we will cleverly incite them… and under the right conditions we will go over to the attack ourselves according to the Leninist formula.” Vishnevskii concluded that the time “of the ‘holy’ battles (according to an expression of Molotov in a recent talk) comes ever closer!”
    http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB19/05-01.htm

    It's already been shown before, but yeah.

    The source is, of course, not very nice, but yeah.

    "Many strategists, especially in Britain, have eagerly anticipated Andropov's wholesale adoption of the 'Hungarian model' of economic decentralization, which not only favored the consumer sector and admitted 'profitability' as a main economic performance standard, but began to align domestic prices with international market prices, in preparation for making the Hungarian currency convertable. Under its New Economic Mechanism, begun in 1968, Hungary went deeply into debt and joined the International Monetary Fund.

    Indeed, Andropov exhorted the party to study 'the experience of fraternal countries.' His concrete proposals for increasing the 'independence' of company managers and speeding up the introduction of labor- and resource-saving technologies were, however, drawn from policies stated by Brezhnev in the last three years. The difference is Andropov's stress that now they will actually be carried out. Soviet press articles on economic reform, evoke not only Hungary's example, but the 1965 and 1968 reforms designed by the late Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin. In those reforms (which were far less than fully implemented), the 'market economy' features were watered down in a compromise with a defense and heavy industry lobby in which Ustinov, now a major force on the Politburo, played a prominent role."
    (Douglas, Rachel. "Soviet leaders buttress the Politburo, debate economic failures and reforms." Executive Intelligence Review Vol. 9, no. 48 (1982): 44.)

    http://www.historycooperative.org/journals....5/goldman.html

    Good read.

    "Relying on the majority of the people and resolutely rebuffing the opportunist elements incapable of relinquishing the policy of compromise with the capitalists and landlords, the working class can defeat the reactionary, anti-popular forces, secure a firm majority in parliament, transform parliament from an instrument serving the class interests of the bourgeoisie into an instrument serving the working people, launch an extra-parliamentary mass struggle, smash the resistance of the reactionary forces and create the necessary conditions for peaceful realization of the socialist revolution."

    Source: http://www.marxists.org/history/internatio...60statement.htm

    "Our last, but most important and most difficult task, the one we have done least about, is economic development, the laying of economic foundations for the new, socialist edifice on the site of the demolished feudal edifice and the semi-demolished capitalist edifice. It is in this most important and most difficult task that we have sustained the greatest number of reverses and have made most mistakes. How could anyone expect that a task so new to the world could be begun without reverses and without mistakes! But we have begun it. We shall continue it. At this very moment we are, by our New Economic Policy, correcting a number of our mistakes. We are learning how to continue erecting the socialist edifice in a small-peasant country without committing such mistakes.

    The difficulties are immense. But we are accustomed to grappling with immense difficulties. Not for nothing do our enemies call us 'stone-hard' and exponents of a 'firm line policy'. But we have also learned, at least to some extent, another art that is essential in revolution, namely, flexibility, the ability to effect swift and sudden changes of tactics if changes in objective conditions demand them, and to choose another path for the achievement of our goal if the former path proves to be inexpedient or impossible at the given moment.

    Borne along on the crest of the wave of enthusiasm, rousing first the political enthusiasm and then the military enthusiasm of the people, we expected to accomplish economic tasks just as great as the political and military tasks we had accomplished by relying directly on this enthusiasm. We expected—or perhaps it would be truer to say that we presumed without having given it adequate consideration—to be able to organise the state production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a small-peasant country directly as ordered by the proletarian state. Experience has proved that we were wrong. It appears that a number of transitional stages were necessary—state capitalism and socialism—in order to prepare—to prepare by many years of effort—for the transition to communism. Not directly relying on enthusiasm, but aided by the enthusiasm engendered by the great revolution, and on the basis of personal interest, personal incentive and business principles, we must first set to work in this small peasant country to build solid gangways to socialism by way of state capitalism. Otherwise we shall never get to communism, we shall never bring scores of millions of people to communism. That is what experience, the objective course of the development of the revolution, has taught us.

    And we, who during these three or four years have learned a little to make abrupt changes of front (when abrupt changes of front are needed), have begun zealously, attentively and sedulously (although still not zealously, attentively and sedulously enough) to learn to make a new change of front, namely, the New Economic Policy... Under existing conditions, living as we are side by side with the capitalist (for the time being capitalist) West, there is no other way of progressing to communism. A wholesale merchant seems to be an economic type as remote from communism as heaven from earth. But that is one of the contradictions which, in actual life, lead from a small-peasant economy via state capitalism to socialism. Personal incentive will step up production; we must increase production first and foremost and at all costs... By persistent and assiduous study, by making practical experience the test of every step we take, by not fearing to alter over and over again what we have already begun, by correcting our mistakes and most carefully analysing their significance, we shall pass to the higher classes. We shall go through the whole 'course', although the present state of world economics and world politics has made that course much longer and much more difficult than we would have liked. No matter at what cost, no matter how severe the hardships of the transition period may be—despite disaster, famine and ruin—we shall not flinch; we shall triumphantly carry our cause to its goal."
    (V.I. Lenin. On State Capitalism During the Transition to Socialism. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1983. pp. 165-167.)

    Link: http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/14.htm

    "The decision to conclude a non-aggression pact between the U.S.S.R. and Germany was adopted after military negotiations with France and Great Britain had reached an impasse... we could not but explore other possibilities of ensuring peace and eliminating the danger of war between Germany and the U.S.S.R. If the British and French Governments refused to reckon with this, that is their affair. It is our duty to think of the interests of the Soviet people, the interests of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All the more because we are firmly convinced that the interests of the U.S.S.R. coincide with the fundamental interests of the peoples of other countries."
    (V.M. Molotov. The Meaning of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. New York: Workers Library Publishers, Inc. 1939. pp. 6-7.)

    "The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers - a relation naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity, - which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of state."
    (Karl Marx. Capital Vol. III.)

    "I have no illusions about our having only just entered the period of transition to socialism, about not yet having reached socialism...

    And so in our case now. We are far from having completed even the transitional period from capitalism to socialism. We have never cherished the hope that we could finish it without the aid of the international proletariat. We never had any illusions on that score, and we know how difficult is the road that leads from capitalism to socialism. But it is our duty to say that our Soviet Republic is a socialist republic because we have taken this road, and our words will not be empty words....

    A new state—the Republic of Soviets, the republic of the working people, of the exploited classes that are breaking down the old bourgeois barriers, now stands against the old bourgeois system. New state forms have been created, which make it possible to suppress the exploiters, to overcome the resistance of this insignificant handful who are still strong because of yesterday’s money-bags and yesterday’s store of knowledge. They—the professors, teachers and engineers—transform their knowledge into an instrument for the exploitation of the working people, saying they want their knowledge to serve the bourgeoisie, otherwise they refuse to work. But their power has been broken by the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, and a state is rising against them in which the people themselves freely elect their own representatives.

    It is precisely at the present time that we can say that we really have an organisation of power which clearly indicates the transition to the complete abolition of any power, of any state. This will be possible when every trace of exploitation has been abolished, that is, in socialist society."

    - V.I. Lenin, Third All-Russia Congress Of Soviets Of Workers’, Soldiers’ And Peasants’ Deputies, January 1918.

    "Quite apart from the symbolic implications of Hoxha's [split with the USSR], Khrushchev had always regarded Albania as a key member of the Warsaw Pact because of 'its superb strategic location on the Mediterranean Sea.' The rift with Yugoslavia in 1948 had eliminated the only other possible outlet for the Soviet navy in the region. To ensure that Albania could serve as a full-fledged 'military base on the Mediterranean Sea for all the socialist countries,' the Soviet Union had been providing extensive equipment and training to the Albanian army and navy. In particular, the Albanian navy had received a fleet of twelve modern attack submarines, which initially were under Soviet control but were gradually being transferred to Albanian jurisdiction. Khrushchev believed that the submarines would allow Albania to pose a 'serious threat to the operation of the NATO military bloc on the Mediterranean Sea,' and thus he was dismayed to find that Soviet efforts to establish a naval bulwark on the Mediterranean might all have been for naught.

    As soon as the rift with Albania emerged, the Soviet Union imposed strict economic sanctions, withdrew all Soviet technicians and military advisers, took back eight of the twelve submarines, dismantled Soviet naval facilities at the Albanian port of Vlona, and engaged in bitter polemical exchanges with the Albanian leadership. Khrushchev also ordered Soviet warships to conduct maneuvers along the Albanian coast, and he secretly encouraged pro-Moscow rivals of Hoxha to carry out a coup. The coup attempt was rebuffed, and the other means of coercion proved insufficient to get rid of Hoxha or to bring about a change of policy. In December 1961, Khrushchev broke diplomatic relations with Albania and excluded it from both the Warsaw Pact and CMEA. However, he was unwilling to undertake a full-scale invasion to bring Albania back within the Soviet orbit, not least because of the logistical problems and the likelihood of confronting stiff armed resistance."
    (Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert & Detlef Junker (Ed.). 1968: The World Transformed. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. pp. 117-119.)

    November 23rd, 1944:
    "The second Plenum of the Central Committee of the Albanian Communist Party was held in Berat and was marked by Yugoslav interference in Albanian internal affairs. The newly appointed Yugoslav representative, Colonel Velimir Stojnic, supported by his assistant, Nijaz Dizdarevic, was critical of Enver Hoxha's policies, particularly concerning the future of Kosovë and Dibër and his firm stand on the question of complete Albanian nationalist independence, free from Yugoslav control."
    (Owen Pearson. Albania in Occupation and War: From Fascism to Communism, 1940-1945. New York: St Martins Press. 2005. p. 411.)

    December 10, 1944:
    "In a letter to the Central Committee of the Albanian Communist Party, addressed to Koçi Xoxe, Mehmet Shehu described the leadership of the Party as 'a clique within the Party', and praised those who opposed Enver Hoxha at the second Plenum of the Central Committee at Berat on November 23rd, at which Shehu himself was not present. Shehu wrote that if, in the decisions reached there in favour of co-operation with Yugoslavia, 'the party had not made the turn which it is making, we would certainly be heading for disaster'."
    (Ibid. p. 418.)

    Islam in 1920's-30's Albania:

    "The links between the political authorities and the Islamic Community were especially close since Islam and the Islamic religious institutions were also used by the government for social control. As early as 1922, sermons (vaz) were used to persuade parents to send their children to school, and to strengthen national fraternity and loyalty to the government. Even in 1936, the official aim of the Islamic Community was to contribute by means of sermons and lectures to the strengthening of national fraternity and national feeling, as well as to advise Muslims to conform to progress and 'true civilisation'. Islam was particularly used in the context of the economic crisis. During Ramadan in 1931, for example, preachers had to address this problem, and Islamic charity was encouraged in order to help solve the social crisis. In 1937, the leaders of the Islamic Community called upon wealthy Muslims to give to the poor who were suffering from unemployment in order to show that there was no need for socialism and Bolshevism. Indeed, Islam was certainly considered by the Albanian political authorities as a tool against the diffusion of Communist ideas, which, at that time, were attractive especially for young people. The 'harmful nature' of Communism was denounced by Muslim clerics in numerous articles and booklets."
    (Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain (Ed.). Islam in Interwar Europe. New York: Columbia University Press. 2008. p. 130.)

    "Following an initial failure, two Yugoslav emissaries, Miladin Popovic and Dusan Mugosa, convinced representatives of three of Albania's communist groups to meet with them in Tirana at the beginning of November 1941. After six days—and twenty years of struggle—the fifteen communists present at this meeting elected a provisional central committee of seven and in so doing founded the Albanian Communist Party (ACP). The most controversial question regarding the founding of the ACP involves the level of Yugoslav participation. Official Albanian socialist historiography fails to mention the Yugoslavs at all, giving credit to the Albanian leadership, which was spurred into action by the need to resist the Italians and by the German invasion of the Soviet Union. At the other extreme some Yugoslav historians and émigré Albanians argue that the Yugoslavs were principally responsible...

    Mugosa himself has written, 'True, the movement was fragmented and lacked coordination. True we assisted in establishing proper discipline and cooperation among the various groups. Yet this should not be interpreted to mean that the Albanians could not accomplish this task themselves. They possessed capable leaders who would have, in time solved their administrative problems. We were invited to assist and did so.'"
    (Bernd J. Fischer. Albania at War, 1939-1945. Indiana: Purdue University Press. 1999. pp. 123-124.)

    After the Hungarian uprising Yugoslavia's relations with the USSR cooled significantly in the 1957-1960 period. It was during this time that Hoxha was able to come to the defense of Stalin at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania on February 13, 1957.

    "But it was Hoxha who in his speech to the Plenum of the Central Committee of the [Albanian Party of Labour] on February 13, 1957, took up the defense of Stalin. After having defended the Soviet Union for her action in suppressing the Hungarian revolt and denouncing Yugoslav 'revisionism,' he [Hoxha] declared that all campaigns which the imperialists and revisionists had started against Marxism-Leninism, against communism, were carried out under cover of struggles against 'Stalinism.'

    "A genuine misunderstanding within the ranks of the Comintern [in regard to fascism] also existed. First, it did not consider seriously the possibility that conclusions could be drawn from the Italian experience. This was seen somehow as an event unique to backward, peripheral societies, and not to advanced, 'democratic' ones. Second, the Comintern on the whole tended to equate any military/authoritarian regime with fascism. Third, its dim view of social democracy as 'social fascist' was by no means new. It had used the term as early as 1924, prior to Stalin's ascendancy, when describing social democracy's role in bringing about post-war capitalist stabilization in Germany, and in doing so it had cooperated with the right-wing paramilitary Frei Korps.

    Fourth, the German SPD was responsible for expelling KPD members from trade unions and killing 25 May Day demonstrators in Berlin, in 1929. Fifth, the Grand Coalition government headed by the Social Democratic Herman Müller was antagonistic towards the Soviet Union. Indeed, from a Soviet point of view the capitalist West had been hostile towards it since 1917, whatever the political hue of their governments. Sixth, while the Comintern's optimism about the rapid demise of Hitler was simplistic, this in part derived from an economism found in Marxism and Marx himself. Unemployment throughout the advanced capitalist countries had reached record levels, and few predicted that Hitler would be able to bring about a dramatic revival of the German economy...

    However, even if [Trotsky's] united front recommendations, 'from above and below' were in fact implemented by a KPD leadership, the difficulties in achieving cooperation need acknowledgement. The SPD leadership had a deep distrust of the KPD, and treated the occasion offer of cooperation with a good deal of cynicism... A final obstacle to unity lay in a sociological fact: the overwhelming bulk of SPD members were relatively well-paid and unionized, while the KPD consisted largely of the unemployed."
    (Jules Townshend. The Politics of Marxism: The Critical Debates. New York: Leicester University Press. 1996. pp. 117-118.)
  4. Bright Banana Beard
    Bright Banana Beard
    I really wanted to print this.
  5. Ismail
    Ismail
    I'll use this thread to put in more notes as I make them.
  6. Dzerzhinsky's Ghost
    Dzerzhinsky's Ghost
    Holy fucking shit! You we're not kidding when you said you have lots of quotes, many thanks comrade!
  7. Koba1917
    Koba1917
    *Bookmarks*
  8. Ismail
    Ismail
    "Bourgeois authors have been using up reams of paper praising competition, private enterprise, and all the other magnificent virtues and blessings of the capitalists and the capitalist system. Socialists have been accused of refusing to understand the importance of these virtues, and of ignoring 'human nature'. As a matter of fact, however, capitalism long ago replaced small, independent commodity production, under which competition could develop enterprise, energy and bold initiative to any considerable extent, by large- and very large-scale factory production, joint-stock companies, syndicates and other monopolies. Under such capitalism, competition means the incredibly brutal suppression of the enterprise, energy and bold initiative of the mass of the population, of its overwhelming majority, of ninety-nine out of every hundred toilers; it also means that competition is replaced by financial fraud, nepotism, servility on the upper rungs of the social latter.

    Far from extinguishing competition, socialism, on the contrary, for the first time creates the opportunity for employing it on a really wide and on a really mass scale, for actually drawing the majority of working people into a field of labour in which they can display their abilities, develop the capacities, and reveal those talents, so abundant among the people whom capitalism crushed, suppressed and strangled in thousands and millions....

    Only now is the opportunity created for the truly mass display of enterprise, competition and bold initiative. Every factory from which the capitalist has been ejected, or in which he as at least been curbed by genuine workers' control, every village from which the landowning exploiter has been smoked out and his land confiscated has only now become a field in which the working man can reveal his talents, unbend his back a little, rise to his full height, and feel that he is a human being. For the first time after centuries of working for others, of forced labour for the exploiter, it has become possible to work for oneself and moreover to employ all the achievements of modern technology and culture in one's work."
    (V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol. 26. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1977. p. 404, 407.)
  9. Ismail
    Ismail
    “In January 1920 [Trotsky] received a telegram from the Ukrainian Anarchist military leader Nestor Makhno, explaining why he, Makhno, was not willing to go to the Polish Front. While continuing ‘peace talks’ with Makhno, Trotsky maintained contact with the Revolutionary Military Committee through Stalin, to whom he cabled: ‘Do you think it would be possible to encircle Makhno right away and carry out a complete liquidation? It would probably be possible to destroy his artillery base if we sent some entirely reliable people there posing as anarchists. Makhno uses hardly any security measures, so we could most probably destroy his ammunition stores.’ Stalin replied: ‘The encirclement of Makhno was started a few days ago and will be accomplished by the ninth. The order [for him] to move against the Poles was issued with the intention of collecting extra material against Makhno.’”
    (Volkogonov, Dimitri. Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary. New York: Free Press. 1996. p. 158.)

    "The star of Liu Shaoqi was in the ascent during this period. Liu's leadership of the 'first line' gave him the authority to convene conferences, select speakers, and thus secure passage of the measures he supported. For example, in an expanded CC meeting of January 21-27, 1962 (the 'meeting of the 7,000' cadres), Liu Shaoqi presided and gave a speech (on the twenty-sixth) in which he reported that Hunan peasants had told him that the failure of the Leap was only 30 percent due to natural catastrophes and 70 percent due to 'human errors.'

    At the same time, Liu called for the following reforms: (1) immediate cessation of work on projects from which no 'economically relevant results' were expected; (2) shutting down enterprises that make no profit or operate on a loss; (3) reintroduction of free markets and higher prices for agricultural produce; and (4) use of the production team as the basic accounting unit. This conference was followed by the Xilou conference of the Politburo Standing Committee, which was held from February 21 to 26, 1966, and again chaired by Liu. At the meeting, Chen Yun submitted a report pointing to a deficit of two billion yuan. The report, which was accepted and distributed to local levels, justified retrenchment and increased reliance on local initiative to solve economic problems. At the Beidaiho Politburo Conference in August 1962, Liu Shaoqi again raised the questions to be discussed and dominated the meetings."
    (Dittmer, L. Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Rev Ed. England: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1998. p. 42.)

    "As for the influence exerted by the development of productive forces in capitalist society, we must not approach it from only one side. The development of the productive forces in capitalist society intensifies the bipolar differentiation, which results from the increasing imbalance between rich and poor. It sharpens class contradictions, while at the same time; it provides the monopolists with increasing possibilities to spend part of their high profits on soothing class contradictions."
    (Kim Jong Il, Socialism is a Science, 1994.)

    http://www1.lanic.utexas.edu/project/castr...19921205-1.html
    15. [Merlo] Do you consider Gorbachev a traitor?

    16. [Castro] History will pronounce the final judgment on him. I do not want
    to be Gorbachev's judge. I can only say that during the time I knew him, he
    behaved in a friendly manner toward me. He seemed to want to improve socialism,
    even if the final result was different. He wrote it in his book
    ``Perestroyka'' too, making it clear that he was not against socialism, indeed
    he wanted more socialism. It seems to me, however, that now there is less
    socialism than ever in the former USSR-and indeed the USSR does not even exist
    any more. Someone once said that the road to hell is paved with good
    intentions.

    17. [Merlo] What did you say to each other when you met here in Cuba in 1989?
    What did you foresee? Did you put him on his guard?

    18. [Castro] It is difficult to recommend anything to the leader of such an
    important country. Yes, I remember that I did give him one recommendation, an
    idea, an opinion. I told him that the USSR had to broaden its relations with
    all the political forces and to that end, I advised him to hold a meeting with
    the revolutionary, progressive, and democratic forces, and I think he accepted
    my suggestion. I also advised him to base the USSR's influence over other
    countries on the quality of ideas rather than on tradition or, worse, on
    hegemonic tendencies.... Gorbachev used to talk very frankly with me, he had a
    talent for communication. At least at the beginning. It was an excellent
    relationship. I believe he wanted to do good things. I never disputed his
    intentions; what I can dispute is the results of his action: a tragedy. The
    present single-pole world is not to anybody's liking, no one wants it.

    19. [Merlo] It is especially a problem for Cuba.

    20. [Castro] Our basic problems are the economic blockade and the
    disappearance of the socialist camp. Some 85 percent of our trade was with
    those countries and we had reasonable prices, let us say the right prices. The
    value of our sugar in fact, balanced the cost of the petroleum we got from the
    USSR. Our exports reached 80 billion [currency not stated] or just under. That
    trade has almost disappeared with the disappearance of the socialist countries.
    We have had to turn to new markets. We have lost imports, credit, and
    technology, and sought fuel, raw materials, and drugs elsewhere. Our sugar is
    no longer quoted at that price.... To this must be added the fact that we are
    under a severe economic blockade from the United States.

    23. [Merlo] What is your judgment of Moscow's current policy? There is talk
    there of possible new adjustments....

    24. [Castro] I do not want to judge Moscow this time either. I get different
    and sometimes contradictory reports. It is true that there is a large number of
    people who would like to put the brakes a little on the current policy, which
    is having disastrous social consequences. However, one cannot see-it is not
    clear what may happen. Over the next few days we will certainly get a clearer
    idea. I do not wish to go on speaking of this because I do not want to
    interfere in Moscow's internal matters.
    "I can't say that Gorbachev played a conscious part in the destruction of the Soviet Union, because I have no doubt that Gorbachev's aim was to struggle to perfect socialism."
    (Fidel Castro in: 'Guardian', 30 May 1992; p. 25).

    Do you think the Soviets are going to create
    opposition parties inside the Soviet Union? To
    think that is to delude yourself.

    --Fidel Castro, Havana Television Service in
    Spanish 0134 GMT 28 Feb 1988

    "By moving towards a market, we are not swerving from the road of socialism. What had collapsed [in Eastern Europe] was not socialism but Stalinism."
    (Mikhail S. Gorbachev: Report to 28th Congress, CPSU, in: Keesing's Record of World Events, Volume 36; p. 37,615).

    From Tito's Flawed Legacy, 1985:
    Chapter 7
    THE HOLY GRAIL OF SELF-MANAGEMENT

    THE GREATEST CLAIM the Titoists have made for world recognition is that they have found a third way, between communism and capitalism. What they call "self-management" purports to free the worker, on one side, from the hardships and insecurity of the free enterprise system and, on the other, from dominance by the Soviet-style state bureaucracy. If the experiment had worked, the Western world would have been forced to re-examine the economic laws governing the market economy. Instead, it turned into a cautionary tale: efforts to manage the market diverted the pressures of demand and supply into such anti-social practices as high inflation, black markets in currency and commodities, smuggling, speculation, almost ubiquitous corruption and massive moonlighting in working hours. "The world owed Yugoslavia a debt", said a thoughtful young Yugoslav, representing his country abroad, "for those who believe in worker-control, we have shown how not to do it."

    It is sometimes assumed that the 1948 rupture between Stalin and Tito exposed differences about how Communism should operate. This, as we saw in Chapter 4, reverses the order of events. The self-managing doctrine was initiated to fill the frightening ideological vacuum after Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Soviet bloc. Milovan Djilas, the brightest and, in those days, the most zealous of party theoreticians, plunged himself back into the Marxist -- Leninist texts, the only political literature he knew. In it he found the syndicalist concept of a free association of workers in Marx's earlier works and in a pamphlet by Lenin written just before the Bolshevik revolution 1

    It was after the imposition of the Soviet blockade and before the arrival of Western aid -- and so at a time when the Yugoslav people were near starvation -- that Djilas considered applying such a principle in Yugoslavia though he was unsure whether it would be wise to shift the responsibility for the catastrophe on to the workers' shoulders. His anxieties however were not shared by his two close associates, Kardelj and Kidrič, to whom he outlined his idea at a private meeting, in the unbugged privacy of his own car, parked outside his (later confiscated) villa. They seemed to approve in principle but favoured a few years' delay, and two days afterwards he was surprised to learn that work on the scheme would start at once.

    According to Kardelj's reminiscences, the concept of selfmanagement sprung spontaneously from the Partisan wartime practices, 2 but this, however, is unsubstantiated by any of the contemporary memoirs or despatches. On the contrary, at a time when the military aid was exclusively coming from the West, British and American liaison officers were surprised at the rigidly Stalinist line propagated by the political commissars attached to each Partisan unit.

    Work on the new system lasted from four to five months and it was Kardelj who decided that the projected self-managerial powers should be attributed to workers' councils, of the kind already set up in the bigger factories. A new bill was already in draft when the three associates nervously broke the news to their master. At first Tito hesitated and it was Kardelj who won him over by convincing him that the idea of self-management could be a propaganda coup, particularly effective in rehabilitating Yugoslavia internationally within the workers' movement. "Tito paced up and down as though completely wrapped up in his own thoughts. Suddenly he exclaimed: 'The factories belonging to the workers: something that has never been achieved!' And with these words the theories worked out by Kardelj and myself seemed to shed their complexity and to acquire a better prospect of being carried into effect." And indeed it was Tito himself who, a few weeks later, introduced the new self-management proposal to the National Assembly, taking the opportunity to announce that, as the Yugoslav workers would henceforward manage their own factories, the category of wage-earner was here and now abolished.

    Kardelj's belief in the propaganda value of self-management was to be amply justified. The Belgrade newspaper Politika was exaggerating when, immediately after Tito's death, it affirmed: "At one time it was written abroad that mankind would in future reckon its dates from the day Tito proclaimed the handing over of the factories to the workers: because he then went through the cosmos to absolute freedom for all men." But nonetheless the event did arouse international excitement, inspire countless books and monographs, and bring bevies of Western sociologists to Yugoslavia.

    On the other hand, Tito's exclamation, "the factories belonging to the workers!", though it did have a world-wide resonance, was in fact misleading. Under the self-management system Yugoslav factories, which were under public ownership, were never, then or later, handed over to their workers. Instead they were subject to a new legal framework which allowed the employees a share in some aspects of management. The means of production remained, as before, "socially owned", in other words, belonged to everybody and nobody, and were consequently at the disposal of whoever had the biggest political clout.

    Though the general concept of self-management seems to have come from Djilas, there can be no doubt whatever that it was Edvard Kardelj who was its implementer. From 1950 until his death in 1979, Kardelj kept the self-management system, through all its permutations, under his personal direction. Indeed it is only by taking a closer look at the limitations of the man that we can understand the unbridgeable gulf which developed between, on the one hand, the legal texts embodying the principles of selfmanagement and, on the other, the way management operated under one-party rule.

    Unlike his leader, Kardelj seems to have been singularly devoid of personal charm which may have been an advantage: it meant that, despite his seniority in the Party, Tito knew he would never be a rival and he could totally trust him. After the other members of Tito's advisory triumvirate were disgraced -- Djilas in 1954 and Ranković in 1966 -- Kardelj survived unchallenged as the second most important man in Yugoslavia. The contrast between the two men, whose partnership lasted for 40 years, was striking: Tito was a large, princely figure with strong exhibitionist inclinations; Kardelj was small, neat and inconspicuous, with a trim moustache, who, like his father before him, was trained to be a schoolmaster and all his life looked the part. Despite the eighteenyear age-gap between them, Kardelj's career in the Party went as far back as Tito's. In the mid-1920s, while Tito began his climb within the Communist-controlled trade-unions, Kardelj, still a schoolboy, was making his debut in the Communist youth movement. In the lax conditions of the time, he combined membership of an illegal and subversive party with a year's course in a teachers' training-school, which he completed in 1929. Nor did the authorities prevent the Ljubljana primary schools of the time from making wide use of a Marxist text-book he wrote for reading lessons. The police caught up with him after he had finished his training and he spent two years in prison for anti-régime agitation, and another two in Moscow, where he attended the Leninist school before becoming a full-time Comintern agent. He arrived in the Soviet Union with hardly any higher education and his mind was tabula rasa for the Marxist-Leninist imprint. Back in Ljubljana in 1933 he wrote an anti-bourgeois article "Trade and Merchants" for the schoolchildren's monthly Naš Rod (Our Generation).

    As soon as Stalin allowed the Yugoslav party to reconstitute itself on home ground, Kardelj was appointed by Tito both to the Central Committee and Politburo. By 1941 he was Tito's righthand man, and it was he who submitted the Politburo report to the first conference held in Yugoslavia by a purged and reconstituted party. When Moscow mobilized the Yugoslav Partisans, following the German attack on the USSR, Kardelj managed to combine the leadership of the Slovene Liberation Front (which at that time was promoting a separate Slovenia) with Vice-Presidency of the Yugoslav Central Committee.

    At the end of 1943, Deakin met Kardelj at the Partisan Headquarters in Bosnia and, he later remembered, Kardelj "appeared, deceptively, to be a typical bookish Marxist intellectual". Deakin, already fully committed to the Partisan cause, claimed that it was Kardelj's "skill and moral stature" as the leader of the Slovene resistance movement which had turned Slovenia into "the only genuine regional all-party united front". 3 The image of unity was sustained only by eliminating any Slovene resisters unwilling to submit to Communist orders (see Chapter 3).

    By the end of the war, when Titowas beginning to identify himself with Yugoslavia, Kardelj remained an unconditional Stalinist. And when, after the eruption over Trieste, Stalin had taken exception to Tito's protests that the Russians had let him down, it was Kardelj whom the Yugoslav Politburo chose to disassociate them from their leader's presumption. A dispatch to Moscow on 5 June 1945 from the Soviet Ambassador in Belgrade reveals the abjectness of his apology, which went so far as to suggest that the Soviet Union should annex Yugoslavia. It was published after the 1948 rupture and no Yugoslav has ever challenged the authenticity of the Ambassador's extraordinary report:

    Today I spoke to Kardelj, as you suggested ( Tito is not here). The communication made a serious impression on him. After some thought, he said he regarded our opinion of Tito's speech as correct. He also agreed that the Soviet Union could no longer tolerate similar statements. Naturally, in such difficult times for Yugoslavia, Kardelj said, open criticism of Tito's statement would have serious consequences for them and, for this reason, they would try to avoid similar statements. However, the Soviet Union would have the right to make open criticism should similar statements be repeated. Such criticism would benefit them. Kardelj asked me to convey to you fully his gratitude for this well-timed criticism. He said it would help them to improve their work.

    In an attempt to analyse (very carefully) the causes of the mistakes, Kardelj said that Tito had done great work in liquidating factionalism in the Yugoslav Communist Party and in organising the people's liberation struggle. But Tito was inclined to regard Yugoslavia as a self-sufficient unit, outside the general development of the proletarian revolution and socialism. Secondly, such a situation had arisen in the Yugoslav party, because, as an organisation, the Central Committee did not exist. We meet by chance and we make decisions by chance. In practice every one of us is left to himself. The style of work is bad and there is not enough co-ordination in our work, Kardelj said. We would like the Soviet Union to regard them as representatives of another country, capable of solving questions independently, but as representatives of one of the future Soviet Republics, and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: that is that our relations should be based on the prospect of Yugoslavia becoming, in the future, a constituent part of the USSR. For this reason, they would like us to criticise them frankly and openly and to give them advice which would direct the internal and foreign policies of Yugoslavia along the right path.

    The Soviet ambassador said he had warned the Yugoslavs they must recognize the fact that, under existing treaties and international obligations, Yugoslavia was at present an independent state with an independent party. But he reassured Kardelj: "We would never refuse advice, should you ask for it." 4

    Whether or not Kardelj took advantage of the offer is something we shall never know. But certainly in the postwar period his conduct was in accordance with the Stalinist model. Having, during the war, been principal advocate of a National Liberation Front, in which all the participating political parties were supposed to be equal, he then took the lead in liquidating the partners in the coalition government, in whipping up hatred for those who tried to organize opposition (see Chapter 4) and in providing the theoretical justification for one-party rule.

    Yet despite his actions and his writings, Kardelj has never forfeited the kindly image of himself in the West as a liberalizer and a moderating influence. In fact, in both word and deed, he showed that he believed not only that Marxism has revealed the absolute truth ("We Marxists know about the socio-historical roots of religion"), but also that all non-Marxists should be suppressed: during the civil war, by mass murder; afterwards, by selective incarceration. A natural gift for double-talk favoured this misconception. In defending the merits of Communism against Western-style democracy, he denounced the evils of the multiparty system as "monopolistic" and lauded "the pluralism" of one-party rule. In expounding the Marxist theory of the predetermined inevitability of the victory of Communism over capitalism, Khrushchev said it all in four words: "We will bury you!" Kardelj's approach was more oblique: "If we understand socialism, not as a perfect social ideal but as the process of the gradual transformation of social relations in conformity with the development of social ownership of the means of production, then the characteristic contestation in the world today is not between abstract socialism which is absolutely good and abstract capitalism which is absolutely bad, but between the concrete socialist system that is emerging and the concrete capitalist system which is breaking up." 5 In 1975, when Kardelj expressed this opinion, Yugoslavia was already living off Western loans.

    Sceptics might suppose that Kardelj used abstruse language to conceal his meaning. But Slovenes who knew him believe, on the contrary, that the style was the man. The turgid, jargon-ridden prose of his political pronouncements faithfully reflects a stunted mind. In ordinary life he spoke like everyone else.

    For Tito it was easy to see why Kardelj was the ideal choice as the man to develop and propagate the concept of self-management which was to make Yugoslavia and Titoism unique. A systematic account of all the laws and decrees, interpreting the doctrine, would fill hundreds of volumes and reveal very little about the Yugoslav economy. But in broad lines, the system developed in three main phases, covering three decades. The first, in the 1950s, allowed the workers' councils to share in the management of their factories, though the state held on to the main levers of economic power. The second, in the 1960s, represented a tentative move towards a market economy. The third, in the 1970s, marked a regress back to state-control, though, as we saw in the last chapter, the controls were now dispersed between the Federation's eight units.

    In the first phase, selected groups of workers, acting under Party guidance and control, were given the right to be informed and consulted by the management. The managers themselves were selected -- as they have been ever since -- by the Party network, on which they have always relied for their appointment and promotion. But the most important of the first set of reforms was not the trumpeted introduction of self-management, but the dismantling of the Central Plan, and the transfer of the authority previously exercised by the planners, not to the workers, but to the partycontrolled "people's committees". It was these which supervised the workers' councils, raised taxes, organized welfare, allocated investment and prevented political deviations.

    These committees functioned within a territorial unit which Kardelj designated as communes inspired, he claimed, by the example of the 1871 Paris commune. (Not that there was any evident connexion between the gang of revolutionaries who temporarily ran Paris after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and the newly installed Yugoslav committees, which Kardelj set up in the hope they would bolster the state's authority.)

    In installing his new system, Kardelj relied not only on the party but also on the organizations it controlled. Of these the most important were the all-embracing Front known during the war as the Movement for National Liberation and renamed in 1952 the "Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia" (referred to in the West as SAWPY), the trade unions, the Youth League, and the Veterans' Association. These selected candidates for office and fixed the elections.

    The fundamental weakness of the first phase of the system was that, having done away with coercive planning while still rejecting the guidance of the market's invisible hand, Kardelj had failed to provide any way of matching supply and demand. The communes competed against each other to build more and bigger plants and the rate of economic growth became the sole measurement of success. This produced a false dawn: most developing countries enjoy a spurt of industrial output during their initial take-off period of industrialization. (Dr John Moore of the Hoover Institution has noted a remarkable similarity between the Yugoslav and Soviet rates of growth during comparable periods of their development: in this respect, self-management seems to have made no difference.) 6

    And so the Yugoslav economy -- like Topsy -- just grew. The authorities, lacking any criteria for allocating capital, tried to satisfy everyone by the only available means of printing more money. And the first phase of self-management (like the other two) ended in a period of runaway inflation. The way was then open for a double act, with which the Yugoslavs were to become painfully familiar: on the domestic side, an indiscriminate monetary squeeze which, on the international side, opened the way for new credits from the IMF and Western governments.

    After this inauspicious start, Kardelj's system entered its second phase: this time in a series of liberalizing measures, he did make concessions to market forces: some prices were decontrolled, some subsidies phased out, and the exchange rate of the dinar brought closer (though never too close) to its real value on the international monetary market. Socialized firms were encouraged, within limits, to compete against each other and some of the country's light industry was opened up to foreign competition.

    The first to feel the pinch were city workers, who had previously benefited from highly subsidized food, energy, transport, housing and all basic necessities. And it was partly as compensation, that Kardelj conceded what has remained, from the point of view of the individual worker (though certainly not for the national economy), the system's most positive concession: the right they still retain to control the hiring and firing at their place of work. The most constructive innovation of the second phase of reforms was the recognition of the right of Yugoslav workers to seek jobs abroad. Unlike Kardelj's other initiatives this was a great creator of real wealth and also encouraged the independence and initiative of ordinary people. The concession was wrung out of the Communist leadership which was finding itself incapable of providing employment for the peasants coming in from the countryside. This process, common to all developing countries, had turned into a stampede as a consequence of their ill-judged policy of holding down food prices. The right to travel came while free-enterprise Europe was still short of labour; within a few years one in six of the whole Yugoslav workforce went West. The annual remittances of the emigrants' earnings was to make a vital contribution not only to the happiness of their own families but also to Yugoslavia's balance of payments. The newly granted freedom had however one grim side-effect: the mere threat of withholding passports, reportedly exercised against only a few thousand chosen victims (there are no official figures), was enough to tame most intellectuals. World travel was particularly necessary for the Yugoslav scientific community, deprived of the hard currency to buy equipment or journals. From then on, they rarely raised their voices against their political masters.

    Freedom of travel was not accompanied by freedom to invest and the few years of stunted liberalism were insufficient to turn Yugoslavia into a market economy. Executives were ordered to improve the competitiveness by responding to market signals but, as Samuel Brittan wrote (in relation, not to Yugoslavia, but to British nationalized industries): "To publish a set of rules asking the managers of a state enterprise to behave as if they were profit-maximizing entrepreneurs in competitive private industry ignores the actual personal motivation faced by these men. . . . You do not make a donkey into a zebra merely by painting stripes on its back." 7

    Though, during the 1960s, Kardelj was a great painter of stripes, neither he nor Tito really liked to have businessmen making money independently of Party patronage. Soon they were associating themselves with an anti-managerial campaign launched by the Party hard-liners against "the red bourgeoisie". When in 1968 Belgrade students, following Western examples, started demonstrating, Tito turned the tables and took the side of the demonstrators. The "techno-bureaucrats" (a category which included managers, bankers and almost everyone with technical skills) became enemy number one. Not that Kardelj himself ever favoured equality. Workers, he believed, should be paid according to performance, at least until the coming of Communism, when, as Lenin predicted, everybody would have everything they wanted. It was Praxis, the far-left movement, which espoused the egalitarian and implicitly anti-Titoist cause. In 1967 it founded its own periodical (later suppressed) and its members gradually came round to favouring more Western concepts of intellectual freedom. 8

    The slackening of Party control during the period of reforms produced two unsettling results which, between them, led to the third and final phase of the Kardelj system. By releasing the energies of local nationalism, it obstructed progress towards a competitive and open economy (see previous chapter) while, at the same time, it stimulated what came to be known as "consumerism": demands of Yugoslavs for standards of living appropriate in the much more productive West. Everybody wanted cars, colour TVs, high-fi radios, and holidays abroad. Shaken by the first challenge the leaders tried to buy off the second by distributing more money. 9 By January 1971, the economy was again sliding out of control and this time Tito publicly promised: "Stabilization will not be at the expense of the working class." In the long run, it could not be at anyone else's, but the time of reckoning was delayed by foreign borrowing until Tito and Kardelj were dead.

    Introduced in the 1970s, the third phase was primarily directed towards the control of the Party -- or rather of its cadres. For since 1948 the Yugoslav League of Communists had quadrupled in numbers and the two million members of what was supposed to be the vanguard of the proletariat had little in common with its rear. Workers were a small minority and the overwhelming majority of the two million belonged to professions for which membership was a precondition for employment or promotion: notably the administration, the judiciary, the media, the army, the police, and higher education.

    The final phase was introduced by Tito's directive to the Party cadres in 1972 (see previous chapter) which not only reaffirmed Party discipline but also reversed the liberalizing trends of the 1960s. The subsequent purge (by dismissal not death) affected businessmen as well as politicians: in Belgrade alone 50 managers of large enterprises lost their jobs.

    The Tito letter was a prelude to two voluminous, legally binding documents: first, the 1974 constitution (the fourth since the Communists took over) contained ten basic principles of several paragraphs each plus 406 articles and, as Kardelj boasted, was one of the longest in the world. The second, the Law of Associated Labour, had 671 articles and was so complex and obscure that no labourers could hope to understand it.

    The two texts, compiled by committees of Kardelj's disciples, are still in force -- or would be if they were enforceable. They guaranteed the rights of people in general, and of workers in particular, but negated this proposition by leaving the party above and beyond the law. They also specifically guaranteed the right to work, although by that time Yugoslavia was already becoming one of the countries with the highest rates of unemployment in Europe.

    It was in this final phase that Kardelj introduced the new delegate system: voters would elect not representatives to speak on their behalf but delegates to do their bidding (in practice, the bidding of the party). Such a change of name might seem meaningless as long as the candidates were, anyway, all selected by the Communist Party. But Kardelj informed the Party cadres that in future Party policy should be implemented "first and foremost at the delegate level". The main instruments Party control were the newly created "socio-political" organizations set up at each level of government. The committee system was generalized, so that, after Tito, leadership could be eliminated. Instead Kardelj introduced a system of permanent rotation, in which everybody changed jobs, in most cases every year, in others every two or four years, giving the whole political system the appearance of an Alice-in-Wonderland tea-party.

    In practice this meant that a small ruling élite, selected by Tito and later by his successors, was constantly changing jobs, making it impossible to establish personal responsibility for any decision. The relative importance of the different institutions depended on the place occupied at the time by the most influential politicians. "All essential functions in the Federation and the states are performed by at most a hundred-odd people" said Štipe Šuvar, a Croat Communist, in 1972. 10 Most recent references to the continuation of "horizontal rotation", as it is called, suggests that nothing has changed; although by now Štipe Šuvar is a leading figure in Croat policies and one of the happy hundred.

    One of the leading beneficiaries of "horizontal rotation" was Mika Špiljak. He was to become President of the Presidency and be received at the White House at the beginning of 1984. When I met him in 1981 he was top man in the Yugoslav trade-union movement. It was soon after the Solidarity explosion in Poland and as I was particularly interested in the relation between the Party and the trade unions, I had asked the authorities whether I could interview representatives of each.

    A member of the Secretariat of Information told me cheerfully that I could kill two birds with one stone: Špiljak was a senior member of both institutions. We met at offices far more luxurious than those of any British trade union and he assured me that, though the Yugoslav workers were disciplined enough to have accepted the nine per cent cut in real wages as a consequence of the present economic crisis, if this should happen again they would take industrial action. Adopting a bluff, plebeian manner, he sounded as if he were speaking for the work-force rather than as part of the ruling body. The year 1984 when he was President was the third in succession in which real wages had fallen behind prices by between nine and ten per cent; as in other Communist countries, the Yugoslav trade unions had served their role as transmission belts for party purposes.

    Just as on the labour front the Communists would not permit independent trade unions, so on the managerial front they were unwilling to lose their grip over production and distribution. In his third and last package of reforms, Kardelj set out to replace what he called "the blind forces of the market" by "social compacts": a nationwide network of deals in which compromise reached under Party auspices would replace competition.

    In the industrial sector Kardelj institutionalized cartels: delegates from a whole branch of industry were brought together and made to agree on deals covering wages, prices, investment plans, foreign trade and the distribution of the always scarce hard currency. 11 The compulsorily applied agreements tore to shreds the idea of workers being free to dispose of the fruits of their labour -- which had initially inspired the whole self-management dogma.

    In the finance system, too, entrepreneurial initiatives were eliminated. During the semi-liberal era bankers had been encouraged to use their commercial expertise and had consequently enriched both themselves and their institutions. Kardelj hit back by abolishing the banks. He had them replaced by what he called 'Financial Associations of Associated Labour' (the Yugoslavs still call them banks), which belonged to the enterprises which were also their chief borrowers. The banks, by another name, continued to be responsible for distributing credits and, operating under no commercial constraints, stayed the principal agents of inflation until the 1980s, when the IMF blew the whistle.

    Yet in this constitutional jungle Kardelj still went on advocating "scientific planning": the compacts were supposed to be coordinated into a collective national plan, elaborated from the bottom upward. Negotiations, at district, commune, republic and federal levels, now took up many millions of working hours. (A muchtravelled Belgrade economics professor said that conferences are now as much part of the life of Yugoslav workers as tea-breaks are for the British: a fair analogy, except that tea-breaks are shorter.) Even so, agreements on prospective One-Year and Five-Year Plans are rarely reached until several months after they are scheduled to start. No one minds, for, as Borba wrote on 16 July 1984, "the common characteristic of development of many if not all One-Year and Five-Year Plans of development is that during the past decades they are never realized."

    On the social side, in the various branches of welfare -education, health, social security, cultural facilities (including sport), public transport etc. -- social compacts were negotiated under tripartite "Communities of Interest", representing the people who used them, those who paid for them and those who operated them. In line with Kardelj's other institutions, the massive participation of the workers in committees and consultative bodies was largely a parade. Everyone knew that the real decisions were taken by a handful of political bosses in advance of the meetings so that on the days set for selecting delegates from the factories, the workers often contrived to arrive late, hoping their names would be left off the lists.

    In many cases, to avoid unpleasant confrontations, extravagant social compacts were signed which satisfied everybody but for which there were no resources. In 1983 it was calculated that the compacts signed in the previous year could have been honoured only by doubling the national income and by tripling the foreign debt.

    Far from reconciling conflicting interests the system exacerbated class divisions. The local workers objected to having money deducted from their pay-sheets while the providers of services -- teachers, doctors, nurses -- resented never being paid enough to keep up with inflation. Today, even in relatively prosperous and traditionally incorruptible Slovenia it is common for doctors to expect a tip. As in the capitalist world, when the economic situation deteriorated the first squeeze was on social services. And though, theoretically and according to the texts, the Yugoslavs still enjoy welfare on a Scandinavian level, in reality, as reported in a Zagreb newspaper, by 1983 these services had declined "to a beggar's level".

    Another central feature of the 1970s package was to break up Yugoslav industry into what Kardelj labelled "Basic Organization of Associated Labour": groups consisting of between 50 and 500 men, representing the smallest unit qualified to run separate accounts. 12 After the "big is beautiful" period of the 1960s, when the party dreamed of creating companies on the scale of General Motors and ordered the amalgamation of companies regardless of commercial criteria, the new industrial giants had begun to identify themselves with their own republics. Kardelj had then come round to believing that the smaller groups would be more closely linked with their own companies and so would manifest class, rather than national, solidarity. In practice, the decline of intra-federal trade continued (see previous chapter) and the integrity of the Yugoslav market, though constitutionally guaranteed, slid further away than ever. For the party, however, the dismantling of big business did have the advantage of providing large numbers of new managerial and clerical jobs and so creating another stratum of dependable cadres. Between 1977 and 1984 the figure of basic units rose from 10,000 to 29,661. The railway system alone was split up into 350 separate businesses.

    The way the system operated varied according to region. Bosnia went on treating its big firms as single entities and in 1983 a leading member of the Bosnian Chamber of Commerce told me that three-quarters of his Republic's investments were concentrated into ten big companies. In Croatia, on the other hand, where the local people tended to be more educated, each unit stood out for what it knew were its rights, introducing an element of blackmail against the management. Thus the petrochemical company INA, which had been compelled to take over a whole lot of questionable ventures, now found itself deprived both of its assets (legally allocated to the basic units) and of its authority.

    The consequences of managerial impotence were graphically described by INA's former marketing director, Djureković. Every subsidiary demanded additional jobs and investment capital, which the headquarters could neither afford nor refuse. Productivity was pitiful: as a result of local pressure, three oil refineries were built where one would have sufficed. In the refineries, which Djureković visited, Shell International employed an administrative staff of twelve or fifteen; for the same tasks in 1983 his own company was forced to take on several hundred. Djureković had given up and defected and, in the summer of 1983, a few weeks after visiting me in London and telling me INA's inside story, his corpse was found near his new home in Munich. 13 By this time, according to a British specialist on the Yugoslav economy, INA was losing one million dollars a day.

    By splitting up firms or, as his critics would say, "atomizing" Yugoslav industry, Kardelj assumed that he would bring the workers closer to the management. In practice, as the sociologist, Professor Neca Jovanov, was able to show, the allegedly selfmanaged firms, whatever their size, were effectively controlled by a tight little group he identified as the aktiv: "Five, six leading officials of enterprises gather: the director and his aides, the chairman of the workers' council, the secretary of the League of Communists organization, who is usually a supernumerary. There, mainly under the pressure of the management, a political position is formulated, which in fact amounts to a decision. At that meeting of the aktiv, the chairman of the workers' council is assigned the duty of getting it formally accepted by the workers' council; the secretary of the League of Communists fixes political support; the trade-union chairman sends it through the trade unions, the chairman of the Youth Organization does what he can. . . . In that way the entire self-management and political structure is officially mobilized to support the decisions of a group which from a sociological standpoint is outside the system and from the legal point of view, forbidden, but which exercises huge powers. . . ." 14

    An American geologist employed in one of the joint enterprises exploring off-shore oil asked to attend the meetings of his basic work unit to report back on how the self-management system worked. He informed his company that it functioned well as a downward system of communication, enabling the management to convey and explain their instructions to the work-force -- but seemed to lack any facility by which the worker could send his grievances or ideas upward to the management.

    Did Edvard Kardelj ever recognize the fiasco over which he presided? Looking back at the record of the three phases of his magnum opus I had initially had the impression of a man so blinkered by doctrine that he would never see what was really happening. Such an image fitted his wife Pepica, an uneducated Party member whom he met and married when they were in the same communist youth cell. Today, well in her seventies, Pepica continues to defend the Kardelj heritage and is still active in the Slovene communist party sternly repressing any liberalizing inclinations. She must be a lonely woman. Kardelj's only legitimate son had developed a strong antipathy towards his parents' style of life, had tried to make himself a university career, took to drink and, before he was thirty years old, had committed suicide.

    It seems that Kardelj himself, in the last years of his life, had come to perceive the corruption, incompetence and greed of the people to whom his one-party system had delivered the country. They were those whom Milovan Djilas had identified as "the new class", and according to Dr Eugene Pušić, Professor of sociology at Zagreb, by that time, Kardelj's and Djilas's views were very similar. Pušić had been a Party member since before the war, though it was only in the 1980s, by chance of circumstances, that he came to know Kardelj.

    The occasion was an international conference on selfmanagement which Pušić had organized. All the papers were written by academics but a proletarian image was needed and it had therefore been decided to have the meeting chaired by the head of the Yugoslav trade union movement. Just before it was due to start, Pušić had been urgently summoned to Belgrade. He took the overnight train and found himself in the marble-pillared union headquarters, confronted by men in what were supposed to be peak positions in Yugoslavia's "worker state", but sitting crestfallen and manifestly frightened. The previous day they had learnt that Kardelj, second in power only to Tito, had taken exception to the conference programme, and they needed Pušić to persuade him that no harm was meant. The professor was guided through intricate corridors to Kardelj's private office and, in no time at all, the ice was broken and the two men were sharing beer and sandwiches. Pušić was able to reassure Kardelj that the conference would enhance his reputation and they remained friends.

    The paper which had most offended Kardelj was written by a Slovene and Kardelj poured out his grievances against Slovene intellectuals who, he complained, treated him as a jumped-up schoolmaster and a tool of Belgrade. (This was typical of Yugoslav inter-ethnic jealousies: I had been assured by a Serb professor that Kardelj had invented his entire system exclusively for the benefit of the Slovenes.) Kardelj's distrust for his intellectual compatriots was not entirely new. In his reminiscences he had recalled that Stalin had warned him against the untrustworthiness of Slovene intellectuals and that his subsequent experience had shown him that Stalin had a point. 15

    Increasingly aware in his later life that power was in the hands of a corrupt and irresponsible minority, Kardelj began examining ways in which some elements of opposition and accountability could be introduced into the system.

    In the first edition of a new work on self-management, published in 1977, he suggested that conflicts of interest were inevitable in all societies, and the Yugoslav Communist Party should sometimes be ready to find itself in a minority and to adjust its policies accordingly. The idea so shocked the Party veterans that they appealed to Tito himself, and Kardelj, having stuck his neck out, sharply pulled it in again. The following year a corrected edition of the work was published: this made it clear that Kardelj was not suggesting that any individual could know better than the Party. All he had meant was that there might be differences between self-managed units; as these were all safely under Party control, the objections were withdrawn.

    Conveniently, Edvard Kardelj died the following year, and could be rehabilitated as an incarnation of self-management. On television, Tito paid a personal tribute to "my closest associate" and the Central Committee declared that Kardelj's work had been "built into the foundations of socialist consciousness and creativeness". Overlooking the final slip-up, the Committee declared that "for more than five decades, Comrade Kardelj confirmed the revolutionary and humanist character of the fight for socialism and for human happiness. For a long time to come, this vision of the future, of a great morning, will illuminate the Party in our struggle for achievements and aims of our revolution." 16 In 1984 it was announced that Kardelj's collected works would be published in 50 volumes over the next ten years.

    The lamentations of the Central Committee were parroted by Titoists in the West. In an obituary of Kardelj in the Journal of London's British-Yugoslav Society, Phyllis Auty expressed veneration for "a man who worked unremittingly all his life for his political ideas". She regretted that he had not had time to finish his autobiography (in the uncompleted version, Kardelj alleges British-Nazi collaboration against the Partisans in 1942) but argued: "It was more important for Yugoslavia that he could do his duty as a man of action and an exponent of the theory of Yugoslavia's new socialism." 17 Yugoslavia might be better off if Kardelj had stuck to school-teaching.

    The final phase of Kardelj's system coincided with the abundance of petrodollars. 18 By the time he and Tito died the Yugoslavs were living at eleven per cent above their national earnings, with foreign credits making up the difference. The fall when the money ran out, however, was much greater than eleven per cent, as by now the eight parts of the Yugoslav Federation had all developed export-dependent and largely autarchic industries and there had also been a sharp increase in interest-rates on hard currency loans. Between the years 1980 and 1984 real personal incomes were declared to have dropped on average by 30 per cent. A Slovene sociologist calculated that between 1982 and 1984 the number of hours of work required to buy cooking-oil or a pair of children's shoes had doubled. Figures for Yugoslavia's decline varied according to sources. According to the popular magazine Danas, 1 October 1983, the Yugoslav average income, reckoned in dollars or deutschmarks, had halved over six years. For many people, of course, life was less bleak than the statistics suggested: earnings in the grey or black sector do not show up in official charts. Though temporary difficulties were eased by foreign credits the Yugoslav economists, meeting at their annual conference in Opatija in November 1983, claimed that, in the long run, the hard currency loans, by postponing the necessary retrenchment and reform, had made things worse. Some of the investment did however have lasting value: many highways, bridges, irrigated fields and orchards and modern industrial plants could not have been built without Western capital and, even if Yugoslavia defaults, they cannot be taken away. The benefits for the West were more dubious. In Britain's case, orders from Yugoslavia in the 1970s did create additional jobs in its declining heavy industry but these were mainly paid for by the British tax-payer (in the form of long-term, unrepayable credits) and from his point of view, the money could have been more productively spent on Britain's own ageing infrastructure.

    But political priorities came first: after Tito's death, the IMF, the guiding light of Western governments and banks, gave Yugoslavia a three-year stand-by credit of 2.3 billion dollars: an unconditional sum bigger than anything previously offered to a developing country. It was intended to tide Yugoslavia over what was expected to be a painful three-year period of deflation: in fact it coincided with a time when prices were rising annually, from 30 to 60 per cent. The IMF error is easily explained: its staff were mostly trained in classical business schools and took a long time to understand why the orthodox policies of higher rates of interest and restrictive monetary policies failed to stabilize prices. They were unaware that in Yugoslavia, when credits dry up, the socialized firms stop paying their debts to each other. Dr Spasoje Medenica, a Federal Minister, calculated that the internal debt (including the outstanding bills, the overruns of investment costs and the credit obligations to the National Bank arising from the devaluation of the dinar) amounted in 1983, to 2,000 billion dinars: a figure representing one half of Yugoslavia's national income. According to Branko Ćolanović, the Chairman of Jugobanka of Belgrade in 1983, "Yugoslav enterprises are indebted to the banks and the banks to each other, and everyone is indebted to everyone else. We are excessively preoccupied with foreign currency and have neglected dinar insolvency." In these circumstances the persistent IMF clamour for "a positive rate of interest" i.e. one that is higher than the current rate of inflation, has predictably fallen on deaf ears.

    To prevent a financial breakdown, massive rescue operations worth several billion dollars each had to be put together in 1983 and again in 1984, by international institutions, capitalist governments and commercial banks, under the sponsorship of the US administration, relieving the Yugoslavs of the immediate obligation to repay the capital. But further help would certainly be required to enable the Yugoslavs even to continue paying the interest rate on existing obligations.

    "Stabilization" ever since 1956 has been a leitmotiv of Yugoslav official speeches always around the corner. After a journey through the country in 1983, I wrote to ask the IMF how they justified their continued endorsement of such manifestly unsuccessful policies. "Measures to enhance efficiency will continue to constitute essential elements in future IMF programmes with Yugoslavia", replied Mr Duncan Ripley, Division Chief for Central Europe. "And in this connexion, we are looking carefully at the recommendations of the Krajger Stabilization Commission."

    This Commission had assembled many of Yugoslavia's leading specialists (though some of the best refused to serve) and, in the summer of 1983, issued a number of recommendations favouring increased competition and more reliance on market criteria. It was shrugged off by the experts who said that the solutions had been known for twenty years. As the Commission's chairman, Sergej Krajger, commented: "Every single reform we recommend needs a market. But the operation of the market would only destroy the powers of the ruling body. And this is the Rubicon which those in office do not wish to cross." 19 They have not crossed it yet.

    Since 1968 the Yugoslavs have permitted partnerships between their own and capitalist firms hoping to profit from hard currency and know-how. But the rules have been highly restrictive and though in 1984 there were plans to relax them, Western firms were unlikely to feel secure in a country where multinational corporations are part of the official demonology.

    Struggling to meet their obligations and to preserve their creditworthiness, the Yugoslav officials are driving their factories "to export at any cost". Dumping in the technical meaning of the word is banned but, as in all Communist countries, there is no way of establishing fair prices. When the Yugoslavs offered a French company ships at one-third of the international price -- a sum which would barely cover the costs of the raw materials, it was the French trade unions which vetoed the deal.

    Avoiding the complications of joint enterprises and the rules and regulations of self-management, some businessmen simply buy whole production-lines in Yugoslav factories. In Dubrovnik I met a young executive from a Yorkshire textile firm which had ceased to produce its own ready-made clothes, these being available in Yugoslavia at less than half the British price. Their man in Dubrovnik dealt with six factories, scattered over Yugoslavia, some efficient, others less so. The company took no risks: they had retained the right to reject any delivery which failed to arrive on time or to meet required standards. All their man had to do was to negotiate satisfactory prices: these the Yugoslavs varied according to the client and the Yorkshireman was proud of having got better terms than his Arab and American competitors.

    The Russians also buy up the entire output of some of the factories, and one small cloth-manufacturer in a port near Dubrovnik was engaged exclusively, when I was there, in making overcoats for the Soviet army. In the trade figures this form of export is not listed separately but it is clear that both for the Russians and West Europeans Yugoslavia is now a reservoir of cheap labour.

    In examining how, after the initial industrial leap (characteristic, as we saw, of the first phase of development), Yugoslavia has now sunk back into this semi-colonial condition, we need to reassess the system itself. For, within the foreseeable future, Yugoslavia will remain up to its neck in debt, and as a Federal Minister, Mr Živorad Kovačević, told the Assembly, on 27 November 1984: "One thing is clear, if we do not free ourselves from this excessive indebtedness, there will be no further economic independence, or indeed any independence at all, for our country."

    A great deal of work has been and is being done, in Yugoslavia and abroad, on better and more honest ways of implementing the self-management system. The time has come to ask whether the principle itself is not so incompatible with the basic rules of commonsense and the norms of human behaviour that it never could have worked in the first place. This is not, of course, the popular view; nor indeed, inside Yugoslavia may such dangerous thoughts be expressed. Generations of Yugoslavs have been brought up to believe that self-management is inherently virtuous -- like kindness to animals in England -- and that it would be wicked to reject. Many of them, of course, know better, but dare not publicly say so. Further, self-management enjoys very widespread sympathy and support in the West. Many industrial countries are seeking and failing to find new ways to associate their workers more directly in their enterprises and are sympathetic to the Yugoslav Communists, who seem to be trying. Western leaders visiting Belgrade often pay public homage to selfmanagement principles. Thus in 1977, Conservative leader Mrs Margaret Thatcher made herself very welcome in Belgrade (at least in the official circles in which she moved) by saying that the Yugoslav system compared favourably with the socialism then being practised in Britain by the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. And when Mr Roy Jenkins, then Chairman of the EEC, was seeking to improve relations with Yugoslavia in the uncertain times just after Tito's death, he used his official visit to speak reverentially of Yugoslavia's "unique form of socialism": unique it was, but not in the way he meant.

    The fundamental error of the concept was that it relied on a non-existent work ethic. Kardelj and his disciples believed that man, having been alienated from the fruits of his labour, could be reconciled to life if the means of production were no longer in the hands of capitalist exploiters. If he had been brought up on Genesis instead of on Karl Marx, he would have known that man works "by the sweat of his brow" to live and does not live to work. Political zealots, creative artists and talented professionals may indeed find fulfilment in their work, but the ordinary run of people are less interested in what they produce than in what they consume and, as human beings, more concerned about what goes on outside the factory and outside working-hours. 20

    This is especially true in Yugoslavia, where people identify not with their work unit -- or in Kardelj's language, their Basic Organization of Associated Labour -- but rather with their family, their clan and perhaps also their native village. "Of all the areas of human interaction," wrote the anthropologist, Dr Andrej Simićof the University of California, after four years of field work in Yugoslav towns and villages, "family and kinship are the most compelling." He sees the survival of this tradition as something of a social blight: "I would like to suggest that the cultivation of social ties with kin and non-kin alike, can be said to constitute a Yugoslav national vice. The interest of interpersonal relations is an all-absorbing one, which frequently goes so far as to inhibit the rationalization of the country's administrative and economic foundations."

    Perhaps it does, but Simić might also have pointed to the positive benefits provided by the solidarity of the clan. This may be indeed a principal reason why newly urbanized Yugoslavia is almost entirely free of the shanty-towns and bidonvilles which disfigure the cities in most developing countries. If a Yugoslav peasant comes to town, he generally joins someone else from his family or his neighbourhood who got there before him. Hygiene and amenities may suffer and several generations including inlaws may be difficult to live with. But he does find not only a home but also a living and welcoming community. Further, the plan underpins Yugoslavia's highly inadequate social security, and most of the unemployed, now edging towards a million, live at home off their families.

    Even if Kardelj were right and workers did derive pride and self-respect from being managers, this does not mean that they would be any good at it. On the contrary, as every company executive in the West knows, the manager of a modern enterprise requires a rare combination of stamina, energy and skills, which is why the best business schools can be highly selective and their graduates command almost any salary. As Professor Harold Lydall writes: "An ordinary worker can no more take responsibility for management decisions than he can carry out a surgical operation, write a symphony or play in a champion football team." 21

    Not that Kardelj, with his school-masterish impatience with shirkers and slackers, ever overestimated the capacity of ordinary men and women. On the contrary, he clung right through his life to the conviction of Marx and Lenin that an uneducated labourer is inherently incapable of perceiving his own best interests and should therefore do as he is told. Over and over again, in his writings Kardelj condemns as "infantile" the "theory of spontaneity": that is the belief that workers should be free to do as they liked. In his last work Socialism and Democracy he calls again for "energetic action" against holders of the foolish opinion "that the working man self-manager can make competent decisions and secure his social progress by relying on his spontaneous and pragmatic reaction to everything around him." 22

    In theory the self-managed firms were supposed to function as independently-run businesses, providing the benefits of competition without the inequalities of capitalism. But if the workers were really going to depend on what they produced, they would be more interested in good management than in self-management. Under existing rules the employee has the right and obligation to see endless documents and accounts (and the Rank Xerox copyingmachines are worked more intensively in Yugoslavia than anywhere else) but records of meetings show that the only part of the management in which they are actively interested has been jobs, welfare and pay.

    Yugoslavia's relative poverty, compared to conditions in other Mediterranean countries, is sometimes attributed by Yugoslavs themselves to national character: the absence of any industrial tradition; the well-entrenched custom of bakshish or the longestablished preference for clerical over manual labour. This however is belied by the high reputation Yugoslav workers enjoy in Western Europe. It is only in their own country, where nothing belongs to anybody and no one is responsible for anything, that they tend to withhold labour or to redirect their energies into non-socialized activities.

    An executive from the US firm Dow Chemicals, working in a joint petrochemical enterprise in Croatia, recalled installing a factory in a new site, which included a large lake. In mid-morning the American asked why nobody was working: the answer was obvious, it was a beautiful day and the men had gone fishing.

    The enterprises themselves tend to be mini-welfare states. I have visited factories which had been ordered by their local commune to take on a fixed quota of additional labour every year. This applied regardless of whether the manpower was needed and in some cases where, for the lack of raw materials, the firms were running at only half capacity. The Slovene economist, Professor Aleksandar Bajt, has claimed that Yugoslav firms could rid themselves of one-third of their personnel without any damage to their production.

    It would be wrong, of course, to deduce from this that all the self-managed enterprises, through the length and breadth of Yugoslavia, are failures. On the contrary, there have been cases where a talented management, working in close harmony with the Party bosses, have managed to recruit a competent work-force and produced spectacular results. The Bosnian heavy engineering firm of Energo-Invest has won contracts in developing countries against sharp competition from Western bidders and the furniture-producing Slovenia firm of Gorenje has carved itself a substantial share in the highly competitive Western markets.

    The famous textile firm "First of May" in Eastern Serbia is a model of which its own workers are manifestly proud. Service on the premises includes crêches, hairdressers and a gymnasium, as well as a little museum, showing the factory in pre-war capitalist days when it was no more than a miserable little workshop, with haggard-looking labourers. Outside office-hours the staff have been encouraged to engage in constructive activities and have created themselves a fine garden, with fountains and band-stand, a sports stadium and an Olympic-size swimming pool. When I was there in 1979 the "First of May" had already received visits from 87 foreign delegations, including one headed by the Mayor of Glasgow. When a Soviet group arrived, I was told, they refused to believe that the workers themselves had volunteered their labour and stayed convinced they were being shown a Potemkin village.

    In seeking out examples of success in the socialized sector, I was sent by a Professor of Economics at the Belgrade University to visit a bright former student, now an entrepreneur and Party boss, Dušan Pašić. Pašić had indeed successfully transformed the previously backward Serbian township of Milanovac into a profitable agro-industrial complex. I found a successful company town, and Pašić a local boy who made good. After studying economics in Belgrade and joining the Party, he had set up a conglomerate employing several thousand. Most had land of their own in the neighbourhood and were pleased to work cheaply in their free time, particularly for the most profitable of his ventures, the manufacture of a local brand of eau de vie.

    For those coming from outside, Pašič provided housing on credit and whether they liked it or not, his workers were paid according to performance. All his materials were locally produced and 60 per cent of his output was exported to hard currency markets. When we met in the summer of 1983 he had just returned from a trip to England to sell locally made toys.

    But as the Belgrade professor had warned me, Pašič was the exception: in most cases the investors were party functionaries who did not stay to preside over the venture which they financed. And -- as a minimum of commonsense would have enabled Kardelj to perceive -- waste and extravagance were inevitable consequences of a system where those in charge of investment had neither the prospect of gain nor risks associated with failure. As Prime Minister Milka Planinc said in a TV interview on 29 November 1984: "In a healthy economy, if someone can't sell, he either reduces prices or goes under. This has not started happening here. . . ."

    A description of how the investment process works in Yugoslavia today was given to me by a leading Croat economist, often called in to advise the Croat Central Committee. As long as a project was under construction, he said, the man in charge was the dispenser of jobs, contracts and foreign currency, and enjoyed god-like stature. But, once it went into production the venture was socialized and the Kardelj self-management rules were applied: workers assumed the right to hire and fire, the enterprise had to finance both local and federal spending and the local bureaucrats could be counted on to strangle every initiative.

    Thus whereas private entrepreneurs would want the construction and equipping of the premises to be as short and cheap as possible, the Party-appointed investor would have an interest in making it as large, expensive and above all long-lasting as possible. Further, a senior manager, operating in the Yugosalv system, would aim to leave the project the moment production went on stream. He would then be free to seek a new project or to take advantage of the system of "horizontal rotation", entitling him to be town-mayor, bank manager or Party secretary, at whatever his appropriate rank.

    Despite the exceptions, most self-managed enterprises, as Dr Ljubo Sirc has pointed out, failed to earn enough even to finance the renewal of the existing fixed capital. 23 And an overwhelming majority of them relied on borrowed money not just as in the West for their capital investment but also for their daily operating costs. According to one Assembly delegate Momćilo Tomić, as much as 86 per cent of the working capital in Yugoslav industry has been on credit. Tomić informed the National Assembly that some 6,300 socially owned firms (out of a total of around 26,000) were at that time unable to meet their immediate obligatious. 24

    As a loss-making venture, the story of the rise and fall of the Macedonian nickel works, FENI, is exceptional only in the scale of the costs, of which over 80 per cent were in hard currency. Operations started in 1956, when reserves of nickel were discovered in the Macedonian mountains (though it turned out that only an infinitesimal proportion of ore contained sufficient nickel to be worth exploiting). The local bosses disliked living too far from town and the forge was therefore built 50 kilometres away, in a choice residential area near some of Macedonia's finest vineyards. Six years later, the Belgrade Institute of Economics recommended that the project be cancelled: the ore's nickel content was too low, transport too expensive and energy too dear. A Macedonian civil engineer promised to eat his doctor's diploma if the business proved a success. Notwithstanding these warnings, a forge with a capacity of 21,000 tons a year was built and by 1984 was producing 2,733 tons. The Macedonian authorities calculated that the losses to the community incurred by constructing and operating the nickel-works would be larger than those sustained by the unforgettable 1963 earthquake at Skopje, in which much of the city had been destroyed. But the local people went on resisting a closure and a compromise was reached: the mine and forge, at least temporarily would suspend production. The machine-room, hotel and computer department would carry on.

    Yugoslavia has survived such catastrophes partly because a good deal of economic activity remains in private hands. Just how much is hard to calculate. In farming, 85 per cent of the land is still privately owned, though it is the socialized fifteen per cent which received almost all the new investment and allocations of foreign currency. In Communist countries agriculture has always been the step-child and in Yugoslavia, as a result of the long postwar period of depressed prices, the countryside has been drained of labour and ten per cent of the arable land, including some very fertile regions in Vojvodina, are no longer being ploughed. Most of the fertile regions of the Danube and Sava valleys would be ideally suited for family farms, extending over a few hundred acres, but, ever since the Communists took over, for ideological reasons a ceiling of ten hectares has been placed on private holdings (though many farmers make private arrangements with their neighbours and cultivate far more). Kardelj's faith lived after him. In February 1984, some 200 of his disciples chose farming as the topic of their annual conference on "The Thoughts and Revolutionary Work of Edvard Kardelj": the first condition for raising output they resolved would be to socialize more land.

    In urban activities, according to the official 1981 census, there were 200,000 privately owned firms, employing an additional 100,000 workers. The figure is obviously far too low leaving out all those who prefer not to register their activities, and most economists agree that, in reality, half the income earned by working people comes from activities undertaken outside the jobs they hold in the socialized sector. 25

    A suggestion that private enterprise was becoming so important to the economy that it was bound to carve itself a corresponding political status, was put to me in 1980 by a Croat sociologist, Professor Dušan Bilandžić (who ironically noted that the man who repaired his TV earned more than he did and that some private farmers whom he knew were making fortunes). Some Western diplomats also argue that, little by little, private initiative will erode the Communist monopoly and change Yugoslavia into an open and plural society. A speaker at a party meeting in Serbia in June 1984 conceded that there were some two million Yugoslavs engaged in private activities and warned that these might be expected to exercise an undesirably right-wing influence. 26

    In practice, however, private firms are still publicly attacked as social parasites and only individuals with sufficient hard currency or connexions in high places can hope for a permit to set themselves up in business. Once they are launched however the absence of competition enables them to benefit from virtually monopolistic conditions; huge fortunes are made out of restaurants, hairdressing salons and bakeries. As there is no possibility of investing the gains productively, the new millionaires put their money into yachts, palaces and sometimes into monumental tombs for themselves and their families, and conspicuous consumption has given the private sector a bad name.

    But, as in other Communist countries, individually owned businesses exist only on sufferance, depending on political favours. To get the necessary materials or hard currency they are almost always compelled to involve themselves in black-market transactions. And, as the President of the Council for legal questions in Croatia pointed out: "From the constitutional point of view, the idea of private ownership is not recognized." 27

    A former mayor of Belgrade, Milojoko Drulović, once told me that at the top echelons, the Party has frequently recommended a less restrictive attitude towards private enterprise, recognizing that it is an essential prerequisite of providing services of which the Yugoslavs are otherwise deprived. But, he added, unfortunately if the entrepreneur is too successful the local cadres, activated either by dread of competition or by envy, may very probably tax him out of existence.

    A case could be made for tolerating inefficiency on the Feni level and forcing society to pay the costs of low productivity if this served the interest of a more equal and humane society. But with inflation built into the system, Yugoslavia is now divided not only into eight rival autarchies but also into two social categories, with an increasingly clear dividing-line between the haves and havenots. On the one side, those who keep their bank accounts in hard currency are getting richer; on the other, those who depend for their living on the ever-depreciating dinar are getting poorer. This growing gap has nothing to do with qualifications or performance: the rich may include unskilled manual workers and the poor, highly trained teachers or other specialists unable to sell their particular skills on the hard-currency market.

    Most of the savings of the several hundred thousand Yugoslavs employed in the West remain in Western banks (estimates of the total vary between 12 and 22 billion dollars). To induce them to bring their money home, the Yugoslav officials allow them to keep their repatriated accounts in hard currency, on which they receive alluring rates of interest. These are paid to them in dinars calculated according to the going exchange-rates. Many other Yugoslavs, though they have never been employed in the West at all, have found ways of accumulating dollars or deutschmarks and will repatriate them only if, besides favourable rates of interest, they are promised that there will be no investigation into the (almost certainly illegal) ways by which the money was acquired. In 1984 one and a half million bank accounts in Yugoslavia were in hard currency and, despite the régime's Marxist principles, many people lived quite cosily on the yield of their unearned income. The really rich (and there are now Yugoslavs who fit into this category) are inclined to invest the money they bring home principally in real estate in desirable residential areas, notably in the big cities or seaside resorts, and several hundred thousand dollars can secretly exchange hands for a crude cottage with a pocket handkerchief garden.

    In contemporary Yugoslavia those with resourcefulness, technical skills and/or hard currency -- provided they do not suffer from a surfeit of intellectual integrity -- can make themselves comfortable and forget that Kardelj ever existed. The real victims of the concoction that Kardelj called self-management are the working men and women on whose behalf the system was invented.

    Chapter 7 The Holy Grail of Self-Management
    1 M. Djilas, The Imperfect Society, London 1969.

    2 E. Kardelj, Reminiscences, London 1982.

    3 F. W. D. Deakin, The Embattled Mountain, London 1971.

    4 S. Clissold, ibid.

    5 E. Kardelj, Specialist Thought and Practice, Selections from Some of his Works, Belgrade April-May 1979.

    6 J. Moore, Growth with Self-Management, Stanford 1980.

    7 S. Brittan, The Role and Limits of Government, London 1983.

    8 L. Tadić, "Les habits neufs du President Tito", Autogestion, Paris 1976.

    9 A. Carter, ibid.

    10 H. Lydall, ibid.

    11 L. Tyson, The Yugoslav Economic System and its Performance in the 1970s, Berkeley 1982.

    12 H. Lydall, ibid.

    13 Djureković, interviewed in Londonjune 1983.

    14 N. Jovanov interviewed Nin 20 August 1978.

    15 E. Kardelj, ibid.

    16 J. B. Tito, "Four Decades of Close and Undisturbed Cooperation", TV broadcast, 10 February 1979 and reproduced in Socialist Thought and Practice, a Yugoslav monthly, April-May 1979.

    17 P. Auty in The Journal of the British Yugoslav Association, 1983 London.

    18 L. Tyson, ibid.

    19 Danas, Zagreb 2 August 1983.

    20 A. Simić, contribution to The Anthropological Quarterly, California April 1977.

    21 H. Lydall, ibid.

    22 E. Kardelj, Socialism and Democracy, London 1978.

    23 L. Sirc, The Yugoslav Economy under Self-Management, London 1979.

    24 Borba 3 January 1984.

    25 C. A. Zebot, Yugoslav Self-Management on Trial. Problems of Communism. August 1982 London.

    26 Novosti 5 September 1983 Belgrade.

    27 Novosti, 3 June 1984, Belgrade.
  10. Ismail
    Ismail
    From We Will Bury You, which are memoirs from a Czechoslovak General who left his country.

    Khrushchev speaking:
    Having dropped this bombshell he went on to let fall another. 'We
    must change our relationships with the West. The Socialist camp must
    have the chance of benefiting from the technical and industrial progress
    of Capitalism. This is an essential step towards the achievement of
    Socialism. Do not be blinded by ideology.
    'Socialist ideas,' he added in a passage I have never forgotten, 'can
    only triumph when the peoples of Eastern Europe eat like the delegates
    at this Congress. Love of Communism passes through the stomach.'
    He urged all the Communist countries to mobilize their technical and
    scientific cadres. 'Never mind whether or not they're good Marxists!' he
    shouted. 'We must give science a free hand to absorb as much as
    possible from the West. Any of you who despises or damns Capitalist
    engineering as a "bourgeois invention" is an idiot. It doesn't matter
    where the machine was made, only how it is used. For the last three
    days you've been claiming that Communist technology is the best. Well,
    you've been lying; Western technology is superior in most respects, and
    it's our duty as Communists to exploit it. For example, the Americans
    have the best combine harvesters in the world. Right, then let's buy
    them, and if they're coloured green we'll paint them red and make them
    work for Communism.'
    All this was like a gust of fresh air after the turgid nonsense we had
    heard from the other delegates. Finally, in a welcome reference to our
    own economic problems, he concluded: 'Workers and management
    must both be given more responsibility; only in this way can you en-
    courage productivity. You simply must improve living standards!
    Everyone must have a stake in growth improvement. It is the duty of the
    Party to understand this new idea, and to promote it. You must open the
    door to let in fresh winds, and you must see that they blow first of all
    through the Party.'
    The speech was frequently interrupted by applause, and we gave
    Khrushchev a standing ovation at the end.
    Hoxha and Albania:
    The defection of Albania in 1960 had been a bitter experience for the
    Soviet Communist Party. I had visited Tirana in 1958 as a guest of the
    Minister of Defence, Begir Balluku, and stayed for three weeks in that
    ugly modern town. There were tempting views of rugged blue
    mountains rising steeply to the north and east, but no chance of being
    allowed a closer look at that splendid scenery. All I could see from the
    window of the Minister's office was a tree which Khrushchev had
    planted a few months before; now it was dying.
    The political discussions I had with the Albanian military leaders -
    they had all been educated in the Soviet Union - hinted at disagreement
    between the Albanian and Soviet Parties over the 20th
    Party Congress and Khrushchev's attempts at a rapprochement with
    Yugoslavia. At our welcoming dinner, Balluku gave a speech in which
    he expressed doubt about the need for condemning Stalin so profoundly;
    he even offered us a toast to the early murder of Tito. The Albanians
    were obsessed with the idea of re-integrating the Albanian minority in
    the Yugoslav province of Kosovo.
    There were still plenty of Soviet advisers in Albania; indeed, there
    was a large Russian submarine base on the coast near Tirana. But it was
    obvious that Enver Hoxha, the Party First Secretary, enjoyed total
    personal power. His photograph and bust were prominent in every shop,
    school, cinema, and even church. By comparison, Stalin's personality
    cult seemed modest.
    There were other, and grimmer, resemblances between the two
    tyrants. While visiting a collective farm I asked my escort if the kulaks
    had caused any problems. I was thinking of Czechoslovakia where most
    of those who had owned their own farms were naturally unwilling to put
    their hearts into collectivization.
    'No,' answered my guide quite calmly. 'We killed them all.'
    In 1959, Enver Hoxha paid an official visit to Prague; I accompanied
    him on a week's hunting trip to the castle of Padrt. He was a cold,
    abstemious man who seldom spoke. He was a keen hunter, although no
    marksman. Nevertheless, he was inducted as a Hunter of St Hubert. The
    traditional ceremony involved him laying himself across the carcase of
    a deer he had allegedly shot and receiving three blows from the (lat of a
    sword across his ample buttocks.
    Hoxha was fairly outspoken in his criticisms of Soviet Party policy.
    When he returned to Tirana, he initiated various measures to put himself
    at a distance from the U.S.S.R. Among them was increased harrassment
    of Soviet advisers and their families, which by 1960 stretched
    Khrushchev's patience to breaking point. At the Political Consultative
    meeting in Moscow that year he interrupted a speech by Balluku, in
    wh i c h the l a t t e r was praising Soviet-Albanian friendship, and
    shouted:
    'Don't lie to us! Your agents provocateurs have been spitting in the
    faces of our advisers, chasing their children, and stealing food from
    the i r homes! Is this a demonstration of your love for the Soviet
    people?'
    Balluku rolled up his speech and left for Tirana without a word.
    Hoxha expelled the Russians from Albania, marched into the
    Adriatic base, and seized all the Soviet equipment there except the
    submarines, which had put to sea. The Soviet advisers were lucky to
    escape with their lives.
    It also talks about how concerned the Soviets were with pro-Chinese elements of the military and other things.

    "ALBANIA - 1984" BY BILL BLAND

    Some weeks ago I received, through the Albanian Embassy in Paris, an invitation to visit the People's Socialist Republic of Albania as the guest of the Committee for Cultural and Friendly Relations with Foreign Countries, and I set out from London on June 18th.

    Perhaps as punishment for going to Albania, the weekly plane from Belgrade has a check-in time of 5.40 a.m. The night porter at the hotel where I passed the night in Belgrade told me that he was really a priest, but worked during the week to augment his meagre income. When he handed me my passport at four o'clock in the morning, he asked me where I was bound so early. When I told him, he shook his head sadly and said: "An ungodly hour for an ungodly country!" "Maybe", I said, "but the only country I know where you can leave your wallet lying around and know that it will be there when you go back!"

    I was greeted warmly at Rinas by Theofan Nishku, in charge of relations with friendship societies abroad. Later in the day I met the Committee's new President, Jorgo Melica, who spoke highly of the Society's work and arranged a programme for my visit which met my every request. I visited Korça, Shkodra, Gjirokastra and Saranda, while Mr. Nishku himself was good enough to spend the whole of my last weekend with me at Durrës. My interpreter was a pleasant young school teacher named Viktor Ristani, while my driver, Hodo Meçe steered carefully past every child and chicken. He was extremely proud of his new Volvo, which he polished at every opportunity and was outraged when, visiting the construction site of the new power-station at Koman on the River Drin, it became spattered with mud.

    Albania is changing rapidly, and I noticed many new constructions since my last visit two years ago - from the new ornamental pond with its fountains opposite the Hotel Dajti in Tirana to the impressive Skanderbeg Museum in Kruja, which tells the story of Albania's national hero in a vivid and artistic way.

    In the Greek Minority Area

    One of the most interesting experiences of my tour was a visit to the Greek minority in the south. Our first stop here was the village of Goranxi, which lies in the shadow of Mali i Gjere (Wide Mountain). It forms part of the higher-type cooperative farms of Lower Dropull, which embraces 17 villages with a total population of 10,500. I was entertained with raki and llokume (the latter being Albanian "Turkish Delight") in the comfortable, beautifully-furnished home of Pano Tashi, a retired cooperative farmer, and his family. I recorded a long interview with Mr. Tashi. He asserted that the numbers of the Greek minority in Albania were nothing like the figure of 400,000 put forward by the Greek government, although - at 50,000 - it was in fact somewhat larger than the figure given to me on an earlier visit to the country. He ridiculed the stories being put forward by the Greek government to the effect that the Greek minority was "oppressed". He showed me copies of the Greek-language daily newspaper, "Llajko Vima" (The People's Voice); this is a specially prepared edition of the country's leading newspaper of the same name "Zëri i Popullit," it has a weekly literary supplement devoted entirely to poems and short stories by Greek-speaking writers. He also presented me with several books for adults and children published in the Greek language, and told me with evident pride of the Greek amateur dramatic societies and folk ensembles which flourished in the district, and described some of the films from Greece which he had seen in the past few months.

    I asked him about the educational system in the minority area, and he told me of the Greek teachers' training college in Gjirokastra from which his daughter-in-law had graduated before becoming a teacher in the village eight-year school. Here for the first three years education was conducted entirely in the Greek language; in the fourth year the child was taught the elements of Albanian grammar, and from the fifth year onwards education was carried out principally in Albanian, but with periods devoted to Greek language and literature. In this way the child became bilingual and was able to proceed to secondary or higher education (which is conducted in Albanian) and could undertake any occupation. In fact, I had already discovered in Tirana that members of the minority occupied some of the highest positions in the land - as, for example, the woman Vice-President of the People's Assembly, Vitori Çurri.

    As for the alleged "poverty" of the Greek community, he pointed out that Dropull was one of the richest areas of Albania, and said that out of the 190 families in the village, 122 had TV sets and 110 had washing-machines.

    Thus, he said, there was not the slightest discrimination against the minority, whose culture was encouraged in every way, and members of the Greek community had equal rights in every way with the majority. Asked to say a few final words, he declared that he would never forget that the British people were allies of the Albanian people in the war and he hoped that the two peoples would always remain friends.

    I was told that I was welcome to visit any other house in the village where someone was at home (all but pensioners and recent mothers being at work) to confirm what Mr. Nashi had told me, but I was completely satisfied with his sincerity and did not take advantage of the offer.

    In the next village - Dervician - I was shown over the new Palace of Culture with an art gallery, library, restaurant - not to mention a theatre, equipped with a revolving stage, seating 470. And this was in a village with a population of just under 2,000!

    The Penal System

    I had asked particularly for detailed information concerning the operation of the penal system in the PSR of Albania, which is the subject of much misinformation in the British press. In this connection Paskal Haxhi, a judge of the Supreme Court, was good enough to accord me two long interviews in which he answered all my questions fully and presented me with several books on the subject. When translated, these and all that Mr. Haxhi (himself, incidentally, a member of the Greek minority) told me will be the subject of an article on the subject in ALBANIAN LIFE.

    Among the most interesting facts which emerged was that the police in Albania have the duty of preventing or checking the commission of a crime, but have no power of arrest or of investigation. In the case of a suspected crime, they have power only to establish the identity of any persons they believe to be involved (including possible witnesses) and to report to an investigating magistrate, who alone may investigate and order an arrest.

    The amount of crime in Albania, particularly serious crime, is very small as a result, said Mr. Haxhi, of the elimination of many of the social causes of criminality and most cases of petty crime are dealt with outside the courts by public criticism, etc. During the whole of 1982, for example, only 111 people in the whole of Albania (7% of them women) were sentenced to some penalty for criminal offences, and the great majority of these penalties did not involve deprivation of liberty. Of sentences of detention, the majority were of re-education (which is the kernel of the penal system) in labour camps, and only very serious or repeated crimes were the subject of a prison sentence, for which Albania has two small prisons. He was adamant that there was no truth whatsoever in stories, largely circulated by politically hostile émigrés, that detainees were subject to inadequate diet or ill-treatment, which would obviously defeat the fundamental aim of re-education. Prisoners had the right of complaint to the Attorney-General's Office, and all complaints had to be investigated. Further, he - like other judges - visited labour camps and prisons regularly to investigate the progress of his "patients" and could order the cancellation of a remaining sentence where he was satisfied that re-education had been accomplished. It was interesting to discover that detainees in labour camps (but not in prisons) had the right to sexual relations with their wives or husbands during the two-monthly family visits, special accommodation being provided for this.

    The death sentence, Mr. Haxhi stated, was a temporary and extraordinary measure applied only in the case of extremely serious crimes such as treason and where it was considered that re-education was unlikely to be successful. No death sentences had been passed in Albania so far during 1984.

    Other Interviews

    Shortly after my arrival in the country, I was privileged to meet Ali Xhiku, the Dean of the Faculty of History and Linguistics at the University of Tirana, and Professor Shaban Demiraj, who holds the Chair in Albanian Language and Literature. They were delighted to hear from me that the University of London had been granted funds to open an Albanian Department and asked me to convey to Dr. Deletant the offer to help with the provision of books or in any other way. I had been working for some time on a biographical sketch of an Englishman, John Newport, who fought with Skanderbeg, and they arranged a further interview with specialists in this field to help me track down the source of a quotation from him which is cited in the "History of Albania". As a result it is now clear that the original source is not to be found in Albania and I have to search elsewhere.

    I met Vaso Pano, the Director of ALBTURIST, and discussed ways and means of finding a less expensive route for British tourists to reach Albania than by air via Yugoslavia, and one less exhausting than the long journey by coach. Of course, when the Yugoslavs have completed their section of the railway which will link the Albanian rail network with the rest of Europe, this will provide one possibility. The main stumbling block to a quick and relatively inexpensive tourist route from Britain to Albania (via Corfu, for example) is that the Greek government (which regards itself as still in a state of war with Albania) will not, as yet, permit travel to that country other than by air. Nevertheless, Mr. Pano welcomed the first tour to his country organised by the Albanian Society and assured me that he would do everything possible to make this visit an interesting one.

    I met two leaders of the Trade Unions of Albania -Qirjako Mino and Islam Bashari - and obtained from them much information on the trade union movement which is the subject of a separate article in this issue of ALBANIAN LIFE. They were also good enough to give me material, including badges, requested by the Museum of Labour History in London. They were extremely well-informed about the miners' strike in Britain, which has been fully reported in the Albanian media.

    Another interesting meeting was with Fuad Dushku, the Director of the Gallery of Arts in Tirana, with whom I had a long discussion on the principles of socialist realist art. He is arranging to send to the Society a set of specially-taken colour slides of representative paintings and sculptures exhibited in the gallery.

    My final meetings were with Hiqmet Arapi, Vice-Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, and with Estref Bega, Director of the Book Enterprise. With them I discussed ways and means of improving trade between our two countries. I had brought with me several suggestions from Ramsey Margolis of the Albania-General Trading Co. Ltd., (who, I discovered, is remembered throughout Albania as "the vegetarian") on ways of making Albanian products (especially books) more acceptable to the British market. They expressed pleasure at receiving these constructive suggestions and promised to pass them on to the appropriate quarters. I came away loaded with catalogues, and samples of most products - from chrome ore and postage stamps to jam and wine - will shortly be on their way to Mr. Margolis.

    Diversions

    My trip was by no means all work, however. I visited numerous art exhibitions, saw the visiting Greek folk song and dance ensemble on television and, on one free evening in Tirana, went to the cinema. I found all seats booked for the latest Albanian film "The Judgement", even though it was being screened simultaneously at several cinemas. I took myself off, therefore, to the little Agimi (Dawn) Cinema nearby, and saw an Italian film of Donizetti's opera "Lucia di Lammermoor". It was screened without subtitles, but with a synopsis in Albanian before each act. My ticket (there was only one price) cost 1 lek 50 qindarke - the equivalent of 15 English pence, and I could not but compare this with the £2.50 it would have cost me to see the same film in London.

    My ever-solicitous guide and mentor Viktor Ristani insisted that in view of my great age I should rest for four hours each afternoon. I pleaded that this was a waste of time. I reminded him that, because of our atrocious climate, the siesta was not an English custom. I quoted the old Lancashire proverb: "There's time enough to rest when you're under the sod". I told him that I was really only twenty-six and that my decrepit appearance was simply the result of a dissolute life. But all in vain! All this, he replied, made a siesta even more necessary! In consequence, I was free in the afternoons to wander around wherever we happened to be, searching for books, music, etc. to add to the Society's collection. On one of these trips I discovered a manual of names of Albanian and Illyrian origin and, finding that the name of "Viktor" was not among them, I informed him gravely that he was required to change this by December 1st to "Jaseminë". He seemed to find this shaka angleze (English joke) amusing.

    One of the great personal pleasures of my trip was to meet in person the sports commentator and novelist Skifter Këlliçi, whose novel "The Last Days of a Prime Minister" I had just finished translating into English. Another was to meet again Faik Zeneli, who had been my interpreter on my first visit to Albania in 1962, since when he has been Counsellor in Rome and later Ambassador to Tanzania; he is now a Party functionary in his beloved home town of Shkodra, from where he was good enough to escort me to the Perlat Rexhepi State Farm, the Koman dam and several museums.

    Reading back over what I have written, I realise that I shall be chided by my old Orkney friend John Broom for not having mentioned any negative features of life in Albania. The fact that I have to think hard to recall any such features of which I became aware is no doubt evidence that my overall impression was extremely favourable. But yes! Although food is plentiful and its distribution seems wholly adequate (there are food shops in almost every block open, on a shift system, from early morning till late at night) I found it difficult in the towns to buy soap powder. This may have been due to my not knowing precisely which type of shop sold it (a kinkaleri, which sells much more than trinkets, a "household goods" shop, a "various goods" shop, etc.). There seems to be no actual shortage of soap powder (at least, Albanian clothes appear spotlessly clean) and I eventually obtained a packet at one of those village stores which sell everything.

    Conclusion

    On my last evening in Albania I was the guest at a huge seven-course banquet kindly given in my honour by Mr. Melica, which even my capacious stomach could not accommodate.

    My final act before catching the plane back to "Christian civilisation" was to be interviewed by radio and television on my impressions of Albania. I replied:

    "My impressions are so many and varied that it is hard to summarise them in a few words.

    But long after I have left your shores some things will remain vividly in my mind:

    the huge dam under construction at Koman;

    the breathtaking beauty of the Albanian landscape;

    the gaily-painted playgrounds and the beautiful, healthy children playing in them;

    the warm friendliness and hospitality of the Albanian people to those who come to their country as friends and not as enemies;

    the blend of the aromas of linden trees and roasting coffee which for me will always symbolise Shkodra at six o' clock in the morning.

    But long after all these memories have begun to fade with the passage of time, I shall recall the party I had the privilege of attending in the south. It was given by young people and their teachers to celebrate the former's graduation. They were from Ksamil, where they and their parents have made the wilderness blossom with oranges and lemons. I noted that the girls would invite the boys to dance on equal terms with them - a little thing, but one which for me symbolises the liberation of women which has made such giant strides in Albania. I observed that their toasts to the Party of Labour and its leadership were spontaneous and sincere, and this should not surprise people who are aware of the doors now open to these young people which in the past stood firmly closed. For several hours after I was supposed to leave I stayed on to listen to the throb of Albania's over-powering folk music and to watch with the greatest pleasure as these young people laughed, sang and danced together. It seemed to me that here was embodied in real life the slogan which stands off the beach at Durrës:

    'Beautiful is the life we have created,

    but brighter still will be the future'"

    (reprinted from Albanian Life, n. 29, 2/1984)
  11. Ismail
    Ismail
    “The question of superior or more progressive right is historically specific. What is progressive and realistically realizable at any given time, hence a ‘superior right’, may not be so at another time. Further, rights tend to become transformed into their opposites. A progressive right at one time, advancing the productive forces and expanding all five types of rights for more people, may well develop into its opposite at a future time, and instead hinder the development of the productive forces and lead to the repression of most rights for most people. There can be no trans-historical evaluation of rights any more than there can be a trans-class evaluation.

    Engels, emphasizing my point, argues that not even slavery could be judged to be absolutely right or wrong either from the viewpoint of society as a whole or the slaves themselves. Engels argued that one point in historical development slavery was progressive, and hence a superior right:

    ‘It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and similar things in general terms, and to give vent to high moral indignation at such infamies. Unfortunately all that this conveys is only what everyone knows, namely, that these institutions of antiquity are no longer in accord with our present conditions and our sentiments, which these conditions determine.

    It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and thereby also Hellenism, the flowering of the ancient world. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science, without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, also no modern Europe. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognized. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism. . . . . Slavery was an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from whom the mass of the slaves was recruited, now at least saved their lives, instead of being killed as they had been before, or even roasted, as at a still earlier period.’

    In the same spirit nowhere do Marx and Engels condemn capitalism in universal and abstract terms, neither do they similarly praise or advocate socialism. On the contrary, Marx and Engels write positively of capitalism as a progressive system, at a historically specific point, and defend capitalist right over the previously dominant forms of right.

    ‘The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’.

    The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?’

    Engels goes on to argue that without capitalism and the historically specific predominance of capitalist right, socialism would not be a realistic historical possibility, i.e. socialist right is premised on the previous triumphs and achievements of capitalist right:

    ‘Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by modern industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and thereby to limit the labour-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general — both theoretical and practical — affairs of society. It is only now, therefore, that every ruling and exploiting class has become superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development, and it is only now, too, that it will be inexorably abolished, however much it may be in possession of ‘direct force.’

    In Lenin’s words: ‘Capitalism is evil compared with socialism. Capitalism is good compared with medievalism, compared with small production, compared with bureaucracy . . .’ In places, Lenin even expresses enthusiasm for the benefits of capitalism for the working class under pre-capitalist conditions:

    ‘In countries like Russia the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism. The working class is, therefore, most certainly interested in the broadest, freeist, and most rapid development of capitalism. . . The bourgeois revolution is precisely an upheaval that most resolutely sweeps away survivals of the past, survivals of the serf-owning system (which include not only the autocracy but the monarchy as well) . . .’”
    (Albert Szymanski. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books Ltd. 1984. pp. 11-13.)
  12. Comrade_Stalin
    Comrade_Stalin
    Here are some qoute I found on old VHS tape about World War 2

    "History knows no greater display of courage than that shown by the people of the Soviet Union."
    Henry L. Stimson: Secretary of War

    "We and our allies owe and acknowledge an everlasting debt of gratitude to the armies and people of the Soviet Union".
    Frank Knox: Secretary of the Navy

    "The gallantry and agressive fighting spirit of the Russian soldiers command the American army's admiration".
    George C. Marshall: Chief of Staff, U.S. Army

    "The scale of grandeur of the Russian effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history".
    General Douglas MacArthur: Commander in Chief Southwest Pacific Area.
  13. Ismail
    Ismail
    Nexhmije Hoxha (Enver's wife) being interviewed while in prison in the mid-90's:

    "Perhaps the abolition of religion was excessive,' the Widow finally admitted. 'But Enver had no wish to destroy churches and mosques. It was our Chinese allies, who were the only ones helping us financially and militarily, and the younger members of the Party who forced that on him. Enver and I only wanted Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Catholics to live peaceably side by side. And we were right. We wanted everyone to feel they were just Albanians. And see what is happening now in the Balkans as the result of religious and ethnic conflicts. History will prove us right. Capitalist propaganda described us as backward and introverted. On the contrary, you will come to realise that ours was a modern vision.'"
    (Riccardo Orizio. Talk of the Devil: Encounters With Seven Dictators. New York: Walker & Company. 2002. p. 102.)

    Enver Hoxha being interviewed in December 1984 by Prof. Paul Milliez, President of the Franco-Albanian Friendship Society (and also Hoxha's consulting physician):

    "As far as religion is concerned, we cannot permit in our country, among our people, a 'state' which assists foreigners like the Vatican, which is dependent on imperialism. On the other hand we have not compelled, nor do we compel, anyone by administrative measures to renounce his religious views. Religion is a question of personal conscience."
    (Quoted in Albanian Life Issue 32 No. 2. 1985. p. 32.)
  14. Sixiang
    Sixiang
    Right on. I do the same thing.
  15. Ismail
    Ismail
    In the 1949-1953 period Britain and the USA attempted to overthrow the Albanian government. One interesting result was a "show trial" held in Albania which actually had a sound basis in fact save a few exaggerations and errors, yet the rest of the world dismissed it as yet another "Stalinist" trial of no importance.

    "On October 10th [1951] [Kasem] Shehu and [Muhamet] Hoxha [no relation to the two leaders] were brought to trial in Tirana's 'November 17th' cinema together with Selim Daci and Iliaz Toptani from the first American drop the previous November and ten other men charged with invading Albania under British, Greek, Italian or Yugoslav sponsorship. The twelve-day trial was interlaced with crude political propaganda interjected at strategic intervals by the prosecuting lawyer as he attempted to show, incorrectly, that the actions of the five invading nations were closely coordinated. It was characterised, as usual in Stalinist trials, by the abject zombie-like demeanour of defendants, tortured into semi-insanity, vilifying American or British imperialism and their own roles as imperialism's lackeys.

    However... the information that emerges from the 1951 Tirana trial was, in the author's view, essentially accurate, at least as regards the four American-sponsored defendants. The dates, names and other details appearing in the transcript put out by the Albanian government in 1952 do not generally conflict with the facts provided by Albanian and American participants thirty-three years after the trial.

    The indictment by the public prosecutor, Sotir Qirjaqi, consisted of a long and extremely prejudicial statement....

    Although the Albanian authorities did all they could to publicise the trial, it received hardly a mention in the Western media. The alleged facts were so bizarre, the confessions so pathetic, the language of the prosecution so violent and extravagant that it all seemed like the usual Soviet lies....

    The operation was therefore well and truly blown... The names of almost all the trainees at the 'secret' school [in West Germany to train the anti-communist guerrillas] were mentioned during the trial, including some who had already escaped into Yugoslavia and others still being trained....

    Letters of complaint from the few survivors of the November 1950 mission began arriving at the Company 4000 [name of a front for guerrilla training] in Munich. Written in Yugoslavia and sent to Germany through the ordinary mail, they complained that nothing was being done to extricate them from the hands of the Yugoslav police or to help their families. One such letter, written by Rexh Berisha to Muhamet Hoxha, was even mentioned during the latter's trial as evidence of American-Yugoslav cooperation in the plot. Laci wrote to Rome, 'I urge you to help our members in Yugoslavia as soon as possible.'"
    (Nicolas Bethell. The Great Betrayal: The Untold Story of Kim Philby's Biggest Coup. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1984. pp. 174-177, 179.)
  16. Ismail
    Ismail
    November 1957 Moscow Conference:

    "Another aspect of Mao’s speech that drew immediate attention was his discussion of the internal struggle in the CPSU. When talking about unity, Mao inserted the following comment about the ouster of Molotov:

    'I endorsed the CPSU Central Committee’s solution on the Molotov question. That was a struggle of opposites. The facts prove that unity could not be achieved and that the two sides were mutually exclusive. The Molotov clique took the opportunity to attack at a time when Comrade Khrushchev was abroad and unprepared. However, even though they waged a surprise attack, our Comrade Khrushchev is no fool. He is a smart person who immediately mobilized his troops and waged a victorious counterattack. That struggle was one between two lines: one erroneous and one relatively correct. In the four or five years since Stalin’s death the situation has improved considerably in the Soviet Union in the sphere of both domestic policy and foreign policy. This indicates that the line represented by Comrade Khrushchev is correct and that opposition to his line is incorrect.'"
    (Zhihua Shen & Yafeng Xia. "Hidden Currents during the Honeymoon: Mao, Khrushchev, and the 1957 Moscow Conference," in Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 11, Number 4, Fall 2009, pp. 108-109.)
  17. Ismail
    Ismail
    "In June 1955 Nehru went to Moscow on an official visit during which he was accorded honours never before granted to a foreign non-Communist statesman. Hasty steps were taken to eliminate from Soviet textbooks and reference books the earlier, Stalinist, assessment of Nehru as a 'lackey of imperialism', and his book, The Discovery of India, full of non-Marxist ideas, was brought out in a Russian edition. He was also permitted the unprecedented honour of addressing a mass open-air meeting in Moscow. In talks with the Soviet leaders, he agreed to an increase in Soviet-Indian trade and the Russians undertook to construct a steel mill in India."
    (David Floyd. Mao Against Khrushchev: A Short History of the Sino-Soviet Conflict. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. 1963. p. 24.)

    "Under the heading 'Egypt' in the Soviet encyclopedia which was published in September 1952, was written:

    'On the night of 23 July 1952 a reactionary officers' group linked with the USA and headed by Gen. Najib seized power in Cairo. King Faruq was deposed on 26 July . . . the Regency Council and the government being controlled by Gen. Najib, who established a military dictatorship . . . The 1952 coup sharply aggravated Anglo-American differences concerning Egypt. After the coup, Najib began savage reprisals against the workers' movement, setting up drumhead courts martial.'

    The first Soviet attack on the military rulers came as a result of the Kafr-al-Dawwar incident. On the night of 12 August, there was a strike of 500 workers at the Misr Textile Works in Kafr al-Dawwar near Alexandria. On 13 August, early in the morning, troops arrived from Alexandria. In the exchange of fire between the demonstrators and the army, one policeman, two soldiers and four workers were killed and many others wounded. To contain the unrest, the new leaders authorized the arrest of 545 workers. The military rulers assumed that communists were responsible for inciting the workers... Najib said that his government intended to take the strongest measures against communism in Egypt. According to him, the regime had 'recently brought the total of interned communists up to about 200'.

    The Soviet press gave an accurate description of the events. It covered them under headlines like 'Shooting of strikers in Egypt' and 'Harsh suppression of the Egyptian textile workers' strike'. The Polish Press Agency concluded that the riots against the British under the Wafd government and the events in Kafr al-Dawwar had shown the potential strength of 'the Egyptian national movement'. The new rulers of Egypt and their 'hidden American-Nazi advisers', it said, were using bloody methods of terror against the workers.

    Soviet criticism of Egypt's new leaders continued even when the latter's social policy tried to improve the status of peasants through the laws of agrarian reform decreed on 9 September 1952... Soviet commentators criticized it and indicated that the prospect for significant change was very small. In a Radio Moscow survey of Egypt, Vinogradov, a political commentator, did analyse accurately the implications of the reform... He concluded that the reform did not address the situation of the landless peasants and smallholders because they could not pay for the smallest piece of land confiscated from the landowners."
    (Rami Ginat. The Soviet Union and Egypt: 1945-1955. London: Frank Cass & Co. LTD. 1993. pp. 157-158.)

    "For, from its 7th congress of April 1958, the Yugoslav party held that Communists 'should no longer be concerned primarily with questions relating to the overthrow of capitalism', that it was possible to achieve socialism without a revolution and that Communist parties need not enjoy a power monopoly in pursuit of socialism."
    (Geoffrey Stern. The Rise and Decline of International Communism. Aldershot: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. 1990. p. 177.)
  18. Ismail
    Ismail
    A fairly decent intro to the public ideological differences between the USSR and China in the Sino-Soviet split:

    "Moscow has revised traditional Leninist doctrine on certain key ideological issues: it posits a 'qualitative' (i.e., decisive) change in the nature and destructiveness of thermonuclear war and a resultant change in the nature of imperialism, whose 'sober circles' (e.g., President Kennedy) also realise this and therefore also wish to avoid such a war. Moscow therefore declares that war is no longer inevitable, and that there now exists a possibility of avoiding war before the final victory of socialism and therefore of achieving general and complete disarmament. . .

    Moscow has developed the doctrine of 'national democracy' as a transitional phase to socialism in underdeveloped countries and as the more progressive part of the 'zone of peace' (the non-aligned world); where it exists the national bourgeoisie, which there plays an 'objectively progressive' role, must be given political and economic aid. While not explicitly rejecting this view, Peking takes a much more pessimistic view of the national bourgeoisie and prefers to support Communist parties; it also demands that Soviet economic aid be given to China and not to such 'pro-imperialist' national bourgeois states as India.

    Moscow emphasises the desirability of the peaceful and parliamentary transition to socialism, particularly in Western Europe; Peking, while not rejecting it in principle, argues that it has never occurred and that revolutionary violence must be assumed to be probable and therefore must be prepared for.

    Moscow views the 'inevitable' world-wide victory of socialism as resulting primarily from peaceful and successful economic competition with capitalism, while Peking insists it can come only through revolutionary struggle. . .

    By mid-1963 the Chinese expanded their attack to include many of Khrushchev's main domestic policies: the denigration of Stalin and of the 'cult of the personality' and the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the 'all-peoples' state.' . . . .

    ... [the Chinese] declare that the Yugoslavs are imperialist agents and Khrushchev's attempt to reintegrate them into the international movement is another proof of his plot (with the 'U.S. imperialists') against Marxism-Leninism. The Russians reply that, while 'serious ideological differences' still exist with Belgrade, Yugoslavia is a socialist country and the differences with it are being gradually overcome.

    Finally, on issues of procedure the Chinese consistently maintain that controversial ideological issues should neither be discussed in public nor extended to inter-state relations. Moscow, on the other hand, until recently generally took the initiative in publicising the differences and in (unsuccessfully) applying organisational and economic pressure against Peking."
    (Griffith, William E. The Sino-Soviet Rift. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. 1964. pp. 20-23.)
  19. Ismail
    Ismail
    "For Marxist-Leninists and for all realistic men it is clear that, under conditions of the division of the world into two opposing systems, there can be no question of any economic, much less political, integration, because it is impossible to imagine one world in which socialism and capitalism are fused together. The world can only be one on a single social basis, either on the basis of capitalism or on that of socialism. There is not and there cannot be any intermediate way. The Yugoslav revisionists deem it possible to create a single world, integrated even today, because in their view the existence of two opposing systems, the socialist and the capitalist, is not something objective, conditioned by the laws of development of human society in the present epoch, but an artificial division into military-political blocs which, as the Program of the LCY states, 'has resulted in the economic division of the world' and 'hinders the process of world integration and the social progress of mankind.'

    But one knows that formerly the world was 'one.' There was one world system, that of capitalism. This 'unity' has been breached as a result of the triumph of the socialist revolution in Russia and in a good many other countries and by the creation of the world socialist system....

    According to N. Khrushchev's group, peaceful coexistence is 'the general line of foreign policy of the socialist countries'; it is 'the only correct road for solving all the current vital problems of human society.' Thus, according to him, all other tasks and all other problems must be subordinated to peaceful coexistence, namely, world revolution and the national liberation struggle, while the peoples must remain with their arms folded and wait for their national and social liberation through the implementation of the policy of peaceful coexistence....

    The anti-Marxist and revisionist conception of N. Khrushchev and his group regarding peaceful coexistence, such as the line of rapprochement with imperialism and of cessation of the struggle against it, is also closely bound to their opportunist preaching on the roads of transition to socialism... [alleging] that the possibility of the peaceful path grows from day to day, and, what is worse, it presents the peaceful path as a purely parliamentary one, as simply the winning of a majority in a bourgeois parliament, and totally neglects the fundamental teaching of Marxism-Leninism on the need to smash the bourgeois state machine and to replace it by organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

    N. Khrushchev's propagandists recently have gone so far as to present the state monopoly capitalism of capitalist countries as one of the principal factors in the overthrow of the monopolist bourgeoisie and as almost the first step toward socialism. Thus, in his closing speech at the international meeting of Marxist scholars in Moscow devoted to current problems of the capitalist world, transmitted by TASS in summarized form September 3, 1962, the director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences, A. Arzumanyan, said inter alia: 'At present, in the third state of the general crisis of capitalism, nationalization cannot be regarded as an ordinary reform. It is bound up with the revolutionary struggle for the liquidation of monopolies, for the overthrow of the power of the financial oligarchy. Through the correct policy of the working class, relying on an upsurge in the struggle of the broad popular masses, it may become a radical means of abolishing the domination of the monopolist bourgeoisie. The nationalization of industry and of the banks is now becoming the slogan of the antimonopolist coalition.' What is the difference between this concept and the well-known, fundamentally opportunist point of view in the Program of the LCY that 'specific forms of capitalist state relations can be the first step toward socialism,' that 'the ever growing impact of state-capitalist tendencies in the capitalist world is the most outstanding proof that mankind is entering every more deeply, in an uncontrollabe manner and in the most varied ways, into the epoch of socialism'? ....

    We cannot fail to recall in this connection that in his time V.I. Lenin harshly criticized the bourgeois reformist notion that state monopoly capitalism is a non-capitalist order, a step toward socialism, which is necessary to the opportunist and reformist denial of the inevitability of the socialist revolution and their embellishing of capitalism. V.I. Lenin emphatically stressed that 'steps toward greater monopolism and state control of production are inevitably followed by an increase in the exploitation of the working masses, the intensification of oppression, difficulty in resisting exploiters, and the strengthening of reaction and military despotism. Parallel with this, they result in an extraordinary increase in the profits of the big capitalists to the detriment of all other strata of the population.'"
    ("Modern Revisionists to the Aid of the Basic Strategy of American Imperialism," Zëri i Popullit, September 19 and 20, 1962. Quoted in William E. Griffith. Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. 1963. pp. 376-379.)
  20. Ismail
    Ismail
    "What self-respecting Communist country would admit the unpalatable truth of widespread unemployment—which is by definition impossible under a socialist system—or allow 300,000 of its experts and workers to seek employment abroad and even organize their temporary migration? With public ownership of the means of production, banks, commerce, etc. workers should not strike against themselves; but this allegedly socialist country reports some two hundred work stoppages per annum... can peasants not only own their land but privately import and operate tractors; can individuals run trading businesses, restaurants, and motels? Can a Communist country ever contemplate allowing foreign investments of risk capital and setting up partnership projects? Can a ruling Communist party admit that it has turned into a brake on social development instead of remaining the infallible vanguard and motor of advance toward full communism? Whatever the answers, all this has already happened or is happening in Yugoslavia."
    (Paul Lendvai. Eagles and Cobwebs: Nationalism and Communism in the Balkans. New York: Doubleday & Company, INC. 1969. p. 52, 54.)

    "If a traveler chooses to spend the end of April and the beginning of May in the Balkans and happens to cross from Bulgaria into Yugoslavia, he is invariably struck by an amazing contrast. In Sofia, or in the smaller towns and villages near the Yugoslav border, he sees red banners everywhere, slogans hailing the Soviet Union and Bulgaria marching shoulder to shoulder proudly toward communism. On the 1st of May he is confronted with columns of people bearing the traditional flags and pictures.

    There is quite a difference in the Yugoslav towns, particularly in the capital. To be sure, May Day is a public holiday, yet there is hardly any red or decoration of any color. At the most one sees here and there a solitary weather-beaten picture of the Holy Trinity of Communism displayed on the façades of party or union headquarters. When one reaches Belgrade, the picture changes even more dramatically. Instead of the apostles of revolution, with or without beards, the main boulevards are lined with huge billboards displaying such symbols of capitalism as General Motors or Ford, sprinkled with advertisements for Mercedes or Citroen and other leading motor companies. For the past few years, May Day has coincided with the Belgrade motor show and the 'masses' march to the fairground to admire and in some cases even to buy cars, rather than to imitate their fellow Communists in neighboring countries."
    (Ibid. p. 75.)

    "But how to explain the case of the Union Bank of Belgrade, one of the largest banks in the country, which holds one-fifth of the aggressive savings deposits? ... the governor of the Central Bank explained that... his proposal that a system of special reserves be held in securities of the Central Bank had been rejected by the bankers for fear of a 'disguised centralization of funds.' Another amusing and highly revealing story was reported in the same period. From this small Balkan country no fewer than two hundred firms submitted competitive bids to build a factory for Libya. Only one-third of those enterprises would suffice to carry out such construction in Yugoslavia itself.

    A few weeks later, many Yugoslav households and industries felt tangibly what J.K. Galbraith has called the 'natural inclination' of the modern corporation toward 'a brutal and anti-social egotism,' even under the conditions of socialist self-management. From one day to the next, the Electric Power Community, representing power companies in the different republics, cut off power for four hours, blaming shortages on the weather. An angry government hastened to make it clear, however, that the companies had given no advance warning and that for a considerable time the thermoelectric (coal using) plans had been working below optimal capacities. The power companies had deliberately kept the output of thermoelectric plants at low levels and overused hydroelectric power. Why? Simply because of prices and costs. Since water-generated electricity costs one-third to one-fifth as much to produce as thermal power, and since the rates charged to the customers are nevertheless the same, this meant a large—and unauthorized—profit for the electric companies. Furthermore the electric power system is not truly unified. As Borba, the leading Belgrade daily, pointedly remarked: 'Certain power communities behave in this field as if they owned it. Poor connections among the various regions, mutual bargaining and relations, which have nothing to do with real business relations, explain the curious fact that in some republics power supply has often been cut while at the same time there has been plenty of power in other republics.'"
    (Ibid. pp. 89-90.)

    "One hears Yugoslav Communists say things that would warm the heart of any 'free enterprise' advocate. State intervention? Must be cut to an absolute minimum. Price controls? Very undesirable—imposed temporarily for some vital goods, but to be removed as soon as possible. Taxes? Accepted with great reluctance and should not stifle efforts to maximize profits. Yet, one also catches, in addition to Adam Smith, echoes of every conceivable socialist idea—not just Marx, let alone Lenin, but the early socialists and syndicalists, Owen, even more Proudhon, plus a strong dose of anarchism or anarchosyndicalism."
    (Ibid. p. 92.)

    "The real changover actually started in 1954, when state financing was abolished and investment funds were separated from the state budget. Starting with the meager concession of being able to elect or dismiss the workers' councils, by the end of the fifties the enterprises planned their production independently, marketed their products, bought raw materials, decided on employment, made their own arrangements with foreign firms, and enjoyed increasing freedom in investing their capital and distributing their profits. Though projected bold reforms in 1961 were temporarily frustrated by bureaucracy, the enterprises could henceforth divide their net earnings independently once they had paid their federal and local taxes.

    Parallel reforms in 1953 to 1964 gradually introduced a working market mechanism with government control maintained through price and investment, fiscal and monetary policies. State administration was drastically reduced; the six republics and the communes (there are at present 517 such local administrative districts) were given increased powers in political and economic decisions. Ministries were abolished and only a few administrative state secretariats remain. Enterprises are no longer in any way subordinate to the central institutions; they form their own branch associations and set up business chambers to represent their interests.

    The constitutional reform of 1953 established a bicameral basis in local self-government and also at republican and federal levels, and the new Constitution of 1963 made the entire system even more complicated, with a corporate structure resembling in some ways Mussolini's Italy.... [with] a so-called Council of Producers elected on a vocational basis in enterprises, thus excluding self-employed peasants and artisans..."
    (Ibid. pp. 98-99.)

    "While other Communist governments let out only a trickle of tourists and for the time being at least would not even dream of allowing hundreds of thousands of their proud socialist citizens to be 'exploited' by foreign capitalists, the Yugoslavs are becoming more and more business-minded, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of migrants. The press and the officials freely admit that, given the existing domestic situation, they can see only blessings, such as fat remittances, acquisition of new skills, and a reduction in the amount of unconcealed unemployment. In fact, any slackening of demand in the West for foreign workers would be a severe loss. It is amusing, but also typical, that Yugoslav newspapers followed the 1966-67 recession in Germany with anxiety instead, as one might have expected, of being light-hearted about this confirmation of the 'inevitable doom of capitalism.'"
    (Ibid. p. 107.)

    "In short, the cooperatives that are based on voluntary association in the form of contracts with peasants resemble the cooperative ventures one would expect to find in the Scandinavian countries and have hardly anything in common with the collective farms of the Soviet Union or elsewhere in Eastern Europe."
    (Ibid. pp. 112-113.)
  21. Ismail
    Ismail
    "The three [Baltic] States had all gained their independence as a result of the disintegration of the Russian Empire. It was widely held in the Soviet Union that they had been 'snatched' (to use Zinoviev's word) from Russia with German aid, and maintained by the forces of the Entente, which had been active in suppressing the Communist regimes established in the winter of 1918-19 in the wake of German withdrawal. Relations between the Soviet Union and the three republics during the 1920s were cool, but on the whole, correct. There were some attempts at subversion, culminating in the abortive Communist coup in Estonia in 1924, but with the demise of the Comintern as a leading agent of Soviet foreign policy, the Soviet Union posed no immediate or evident threat to the integrity of the Baltic States. The resurgence of Germany in the 1930s altered the political scene in the Baltic area. In the event of conflict with Germany, the Soviet Union could not afford to have its front door opened by the defection of pro-German States on its very doorstep. This was clearly spelled out by Andrei Zhdanov to the VIIIth Congress of Soviets in November 1936. According to the Latvian chargé d'affaires, Zhdanov warned the governments of neighbouring States that if they drifted too far in the direction of Fascism 'they might feel the strength of the Soviet Union, and the window of the Soviet Union might well be widened'."
    (Martin McCauley (Ed.). Communist Power in Europe, 1944-1949. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. 1977. p. 22.)

    "As Stalin told the Latvian Foreign Minister, who was summoned in turn on 2 October [1939], the demands of the U.S.S.R. arose purely out of the wartime situation: the Soviet government had no desire to encroach upon the internal affairs of Latvia. He informed Munters with brutal frankness that a division of spheres of interest between the U.S.S.R. and Germany had already taken place, and that 'as far as Germany is concerned we could occupy you'."
    (Ibid. p. 25.)

    "During the period of the Winter War, the Soviet Union scrupulously observed the terms of the treaties with the Baltic States. Red Army troops were strictly disciplined and behaved with absolute correctness. Attempts by pro-Communist elements to establish contacts with Russian troops were discouraged, and access to Soviet embassies was officially denied. The Soviet government made no representations when large numbers of Latvian Communists were arrested in January 1940, and in no way interfered in the running of the affairs of the three countries. At the end of October [1939], Molotov denounced as malevolent talk the rumours of the imminent sovietisation of the Baltic States: in December, Stalin spoke with satisfaction of the smooth running of the treaty with Estonia and assured the visiting Estonian military delegation of the continued independence of their country."
    (Ibid. p. 26.)

    "There is evidence of Stalin's mistrust of native Communists. In October 1939, he told the Lithuanian Foreign Minister that it was no concern of the Soviet Union how the Lithuanian government dealt with its Communists; and, even more bluntly, he informed the Latvian Foreign Minister: 'There are no Communists outside Russia. What you have in Latvia are Trotsk[y]ists: if they cause you trouble, shoot them.' In the deportations of June 1941, not a few Party members found themselves in trains bound for the interior of the Socialist fatherland.

    Lacking instructions from Moscow, the local Communist Parties seemed to have played safe and followed the prevalent popular front line. The Lithuanian Communist Party programme of 1939 urged the mobilisation of all democratic forces to overthrow the Černius government, and the Party sought alliance with the Social Democrats. In common with the Parties of Latvia and Estonia, its programme issued in 1940 was democratic in tone rather than Communist. The governments which were established in June 1940 seemed to offer a genuine opportunity for a reintroduction of democratic liberties, and as such they gained the passive and even active support of many democrats and Socialists who had suffered under the old regimes. The authoritarian regimes which had been set up in the early 1930s in Latvia and Estonia and in 1926 in Lithuania had all shown signs of collapse before the outbreak of war in 1939. They had suppressed political liberties and had failed to replace them with anything other than poor imitations of Austrian Fascism. The percipient comment of the British Minister to Riga on the state of affairs in Latvia is equally applicable to Estonia and Lithuania. The Collapse of the Ulmanis regime, 'literally overnight':
    'left a political vacuum which, as the result of M. Ulmanis' totalitarianism, could be filled by no alternative middle-class organisation, and the swing to the left was therefore unduly abrupt, partly no doubt owing to the influence exercised by the USSR but also owing to the absence of any mobilisable political forces to challenge or correct those of the town workers.'
    The evidence available would suggest that considerable sections of the urban proletariat, including the Jewish and Russian minorities, supported the new order, whilst many democratic and left-wing intellectuals were prepared to give the new regimes a chance to fulfil their promises. The new governments, composed of left-wing democrats rather than Communists, did indeed appear to represent a fresh wind of change in an atmosphere which had become stagnant during the last years of the dictatorships. All-round wage increases were decreed in June, laws against hoarding and speculation were passed, whilst assurances were given to peasant landholders that their land would not be touched. The bastions of the old order were speedily demolished and replaced by new organisations. In Latvia, for example, the law of 26 June provided for the creation of workers' committees in factories employing more than twenty persons, whilst on 8 July a law establishing the politruk system in the army was passed. The Estonian trade unions, which had managed to preserve much of their independence during the Päts' regime, were taken over by the Communists on 20 June. The Kaitseliit guards were dissolved on 27 June, and replaced by a workers' militia under the direct control of the Communist-dominated Ministry of the Interior. Widespread purges of local government and the bureaucracy occurred in the last days of June and early July, with Communists installed in vital positions. Nevertheless, the lack of Party members in all three countries—and, quite possibly, Soviet mistrust of local Communists—meant that 'progressive elements' willing to serve the regime were used. In rural areas, there appears to have been less change, and appointees of the old regimes remained in office... The left-wing intellectuals who formed the governments of Latvia and Estonia remained in favour and high office until the purges of 1950, when they were accused of bourgeois nationalism and replaced by more reliable Soviet-trained Communists."
    (Ibid. pp. 29-31.)
  22. Ismail
    Ismail
    "A people which oppresses another cannot emancipate itself. The power which it uses to suppress the other finally always turns against itself."
    (Friedrich Engels, "A Polish Proclamation," Volkstaat, 11 June 1874.)
  23. El Chuncho
    El Chuncho
    Keep up the grand work, Ismail!
  24. Ismail
    Ismail
    "At the 18th Party Congress in March 1939, the events of the previous three years were criticized by Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov as having been accompanied by 'grave mistakes' and pathological suspicion that had most adversely affected the Party's work. Zhdanov, who gave one of the main political reports at the Congress, reprimanded the local Party organizations for 'stupid excess of zeal', citing instance after instance of faked evidence and presumption of guilt by association. The resolution voted by the Congress summed up the purges as both unjust and ineffective. Party rules adopted at this Congress made new provisions for members' rights of appeal against expulsion, as well as banning the practice of mass purges of membership."
    (Albert Szymanski. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books Ltd. 1984. p. 240.)

    "As the statistics on Old Bolshevik victims show, the vast majority of those executed were associated with Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, et al., rather than with Trotsky or Zinoviev... all the 1934 Central Committee members re-elected to the 1939 Central Committee were from the [pro-Stalin wing] of the Party, and none were from the right."
    (Ibid. p. 249.)

    "In June 1936, Stalin interrupted Ezhov at a Central Committee Plenum to complain about so many party members being expelled:

    EZHOV: Comrades, as a result of the verification of party documents, we expelled more than 200,000 members of the party.
    STALIN: [interrupts] Very many.
    EZHOV: Yes, very many. I will speak about this. . .
    STALIN: [interrupts] If we expelled 30,000. . . [inaudible remark], and 600 former Trotskyists and Zinovievists, it would be a bigger victory.
    EZHOV: More than 200,000 members were expelled. Part of this number of party members, as you know, have been arrested.

    At about this time, Stalin wrote a letter to regional party secretaries complaining about their excessive 'repression' of the rank and file. This led to a national movement to reinstate expelled party members, on the eve of the Great Terror."
    (J. Arch Getty & Roberta T. Manning (ed). Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 1993. pp. 50-51.)
  25. Ismail
    Ismail
    Item 6 of the resolution adopted at the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in November 1928:
    "The Party proclaims the solidarity of the revolutionary workers and peasants of the other nations of Yugoslavia, above all Serbia, with the Albanian national-revolutionary movement personified by the Kosovo Committee and calls upon the working class to extend comprehensive assistance to the struggle of the dismembered and suppressed Albanian people for an independent and unified Albania."
    (Desanka Pešić, "The Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the National Question of Albanians between the Two World Wars," in Filipović, Gordana (ed). Kosovo: Past and Present. Belgrade: Review of International Affairs. 1989. p. 95.)
  26. Ismail
    Ismail
    "The climax of the CPY's anti-Stalinism was reached at its Sixth Congress (1952), when the party changed its name to League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY), a symbolic return to Marx's League of Communists. In a report to the congress, Tito assailed the Soviet Union: the USSR was responsible for creating international tensions; it had transformed the once independent East Central European countries into 'mere colonies in the heart of Europe'; Stalin was pushing North Korea into 'an aggressive war'; it was imperative to revise the 'imperialist division' of Poland and Germany, which 'favored' the Soviet Union; in the USSR, 'the condition of workers was worse than in even the most reactionary capitalist country'; Stalin's extermination of non-Russian nations 'would make Hitler envious.' Every speaker at the congress competed with Tito in hurling hostile epithets at Stalin. Kardelj accused the USSR of imperialist ambitions on a worldwide scale and stated that the 'Soviet government undoubtedly bears the largest part of responsibility for the condition of the permanent cold war.' He scorned 'various naive pacifists in the West,' advocated the unification of Germany on the basis of free elections in both parts of the country, and hinted that Yugoslavia might formally join an anti-Soviet defense pact."
    (Drachkovitch, Milorad M (ed). East Central Europe: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. 1982. p. 355.)
  27. Ismail
    Ismail
    “Against the weapons of the Bolsheviks, weapons must be used in reprisal, and it would be a mistake to display weakness before murderers. . . . Fascism can triumph today because universal indignation at the infamies committed by the socialists and communists has obtained for it the sympathies of wide circles. . . . It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.”
    (Ludwig Von Mises. Liberalism: A Socio-Economic Exposition. Kansas City, MO: Sheed Andrews and McMeel. 1978. pp. 49-51.)
  28. GallowsBird
    GallowsBird
    This is a great resource Ismail!

    I probably haven't even got halfway through reading it all yet!
  29. Ismail
    Ismail
    Random stuff relating to the mass line (in Albanian vijës së masave, line of the masses):

    Stalin in 1937:

    "Thus it turns out that our experience alone, the experience of the leaders, is still by far inadequate for the guidance of our affairs. In order to guide correctly, the experience of the leaders must be supplemented by the experience of the Party masses, by the experience of the working class, by the experience of the toilers, by the experience of the so-called 'small people'.

    And when is this possible?

    It is possible only if the leaders are closely connected with the masses, if they are bound up with the Party masses, with the working class, with the peasantry, with the working intellectuals.

    Contacts with the masses, the strengthening of these contacts, readiness to listen to the voice of the masses—in this lie the strength and impregnability of Bolshevik leadership.

    It may be taken as a rule that so long as Bolsheviks keep contacts with the broad masses of the people, they will be invincible. And, contrariwise, it is sufficient for Bolsheviks to break away from the masses and lose contact with them, to become covered with bureaucratic rash, for them to lose all their strength and become converted into nonentities...

    I think that Bolsheviks remind us of Antaeus, the hero of Greek mythology. Like Antaeus, they are strong in keeping contact with their mother, with the masses, who bore them, fed them and educated them. And as long as they keep contact with their mother, with the people, they have every chance of remaining invincible.

    This is the key to the invincibility of Bolshevik leadership."
    (Joseph Stalin. Mastering Bolshevism. New York: Workers Library Publishers. 1937. pp. 56-57.)

    Stalin to Hoxha in their 1947 meeting:

    "To be able to lead, you must know the masses, and in order to know them, you must go down among the masses."
    (J.V. Stalin, quoted in Enver Hoxha. With Stalin: Memoirs. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1981. p. 86.)

    Mao in 1956 at his Speech to the Second Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China:

    "From the very beginning our Party has emulated the Soviet Union. The mass line, our political work, and [the theory of] the dictatorship of the proletariat have all been learned from the October Revolution. At that time, Lenin had focused on the mobilization of the masses, and on organizing the worker-peasant-soldier soviet, and so on. He did not rely on [doing things by] administrative decree. Rather, Lenin sent Party representatives to carry out political work."
    (Mao Zedong, quoted in Michael Y.M. Kau & John K. Leung (eds). The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949-1976 Volume II. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 1992. p. 185.)

    "We, on our part, stick to studying Marxism-Leninism and learning from the October Revolution. Marx has left us a great many writings, and so has Lenin. To rely on the masses, to follow the mass line—this is what we have learned from them."
    (Mao Zedong. Selected Works Vol. V. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. 1977. p. 342.)

    Hoxha at the 5th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania in 1966:

    "Marxism-Leninism is not a monopoly of a privileged few who 'have the brains' to understand it. It is the scientific ideology of the working class and the working masses, and only when its ideas are grasped by the broad working masses does it cease to be something abstract and is turned into a great material force for the revolutionary transformation of the world. The historic task of our Party is to continually deepen the ideological and cultural revolution and carry it through to the end by relying on the masses of workers, peasants, soldiers, cadres and the intelligentsia and drawing them actively into creative revolutionary activity."
    (Enver Hoxha. Selected Works Volume IV. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1982. pp. 179-180.)
  30. Omsk
    Omsk
    Thank you,Ismail,this information was of big assistance in a recent argument i took part in.I mostly used the quotes related to Trotsky and his anti-Leninism.
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