Trotzky and Stalin

...Some added: was not Trotzky a Menshevik in the first days of the revolution...

...He violently denounced Stalin and his followers as neglectful of the interests of the only reliable element of the Russian Communistic masses-the workmen-and as coming to unworthy compromises with the rich peasants, the Kulaki...

...He had not realized-he, the enemy of liberty -that a few years without any freedom of speech or of press may rapidly reduce a people to appalling losses of moral character...

...but at the bottom of their hearts, they knew and felt only this: let us gain six months...

...The cold, vulgar Georgian, now supreme at the Kremlin, reminds me of the Turkish viziers who were driving European diplomacy to despair on the shores of prewar Bosphorus...

...It was read by Stalin...

...But the awakening of the idea of liberty-this, and only this-has such power that no mercenary armies, no nets of spies, no Siberias, have the force to overcome it...

...Possibly this, and only this, is the hidden thought of politicians whom the hazards of a troubled period have turned into dictators...

...The Messianic imagination which gives such brilliant glamour to some Jewish brains might have tempted Trotzky to experiments...

...Through his coreligionist, the German Marx, he was thinking of himself...

...If they are coming so slowly and hesitatingly to feel again that freedom, after all, is the supreme necessity, it is because they have been dazzled by the idealistic hope that, through their sufferings, they were laying the foundations of a new world-and this appealed to the very nature of the Russian soul, which has a longing for suffering...

...Stalin was general secretary of the Russian Communist party, whose committee was composed of nineteen members...

...TROTZKY AND STALIN By CARLO SFORZA LENIN, when he lay dying, left to his party a "testament" in which he referred to the hatred that divided Trotzky and Stalin, expressed the opinion that the conflict might be very harmful to the party, and, defining Stalin as "too rough," recommended that he be dismissed from his post as general secretary of the Communist party in order to avoid a schism...

...they are entrenched in power with boastful words, but with trembling hearts...

...He said: The style of Marx is rich and magnificent, forceful and supple, a constant, admirable blend of irony and elegance...

...Human dignity needs freedom in order to live and assert itself...

...They think, I presume, that foreigners would be much nearer reality in pitying them...

...With less than twenty members, the post of general secretary was not a very important one...

...This-to remain in power at all costs-is the task of Stalin...

...Not from that could the regime be endangered...

...The group in power, be it Stalin's or Trotzky's is inspired only by a supreme necessity-to remain at the Kremlin, to govern the country...

...he did not realize that the suppression of freedom had destroyed the immediate force of intelligence...

...Trotzky was right in feeling that, but was wrong in thinking that the cure might be pure Leninism...

...An analogous phenomenon is taking place in Fascist Italy...

...that Stalin should want the reading, and that he tendered his resignation...

...He managed under varied pretexts, to have this number carried to forty-six, and afterward to seventy-one...

...Another error Trotzky made, even with regard to the few Communistic comrades who really cared for pure Bolshevism and who had maintained some individual critical power: to wage war upon the hated secretary of the Communist party, he chose as war cry the return to "pure" Leninism...

...Lenin's style is naked and simple, utilitarian and ascetic...

...Lenin and Trotzky yesterday, Stalin today, remain in power through the terror of their new Katorga...

...They know that among the many impossible things for them to do, the most impossible is to resign, or to allow themselves to be dismissed...

...after that, we'll see...

...Nothing but the manner in which he forged the weapon with which he succeeded in striking Trotzky indicates in Stalin a maneuvering skill to which the proud Trotzky would have been wise to show a little more attention...

...Violent theoretical discussions about Communistic doctrines, enthusiasm for Trotzky the orator or trust in the silent Stalin-all this would simply have meant the eternal going on of the old Russian mania for dogmatic, unreal fighting...

...But the beaten Stalin each time went back to his Kremlin room, and, without thinking of oratorical revenge, in his quiet Asiatic way knew how to offer, or "impose" lucrative appointments of Trotzky's friends, scattering them in the most distant parts of the country...

...Stalin's lay in silent oriental intrigue...

...The first struggles between Trotzky and Stalin began immediately after Lenin's death and went on without interruption until the expulsion of Trotzky from Russia in 1929...

...With more than seventy, it became all-important...

...Difficult as it is to find out, in an atmosphere of silence and terror, the trend of their feelings, one may at least safely admit, if only one is in touch with some currents of Russian thought, that the potential discontent in Russia, visible until a few months ago only among the peasants, is now growing also among the workmen...

...On Lenin's death the testament was read in the Politbureau...

...Shrewd Armenian, or Jewish, or Greek advisers dictated beautiful speeches or learned notes for them...

...If Stalin today seems to revert to the strictest formulas of pure Bolshevism, there is every reason to believe that he does so simply to show that Trotzky's accusations were unfounded...

...he allowed him to keep his place...

...in a free country like England or France he probably would have been able to recapture power...

...In one of his speeches in his days of power Trotzky made the inevitable comparison between Lenin and Marx...

...They used these speeches...

...Even now that it is Stalin who is all-powerful and that Trotzky is in exile, no one attributes to him the sort of genius generally ascribed to Trotzky...

...For this Trotzky's victor is probably more the right man in the right place than his defeated rival would have been...

...That is why he was wrong in despising Stalin and his coarse, oriental knavery...

...That alone should have given Trotzky food for thought...

...they went on speaking of the historical rights of the Ottoman empire...

...Trotzky, proud (or vain) in the same way that another gifted Socialist, Lassalle, had been proud (or vain) refused to attach any importance to Stalin's tactics...

...One feels certain that the word "ascetic" is there as an operatic bow to Lenin, but that the flowery attributes to Marx's style reveal what Trotzky is thinking of his own literary and intellectual temperament...

...The Chinese have a wonderful phrase to describe the weakness of certain types of so-called strong dictatorial governments: they are-so the picturesque idiom runs-riding a tiger...

...After torrents of blood, after mountains of propaganda-books pretending to prove that a new era, with new ideas, had come-the Russian nation rediscovers at last that the only safe basis for any progress is simply liberty...

...Trotzky's gifts were especially literary and oratorical...

...But the rare sincere thoughtful revolutionaries instinctively felt that if Stalin was compromising with the "sacred principles" it was only because it was a question of life and death, and that Trotzky would have done the same...

...Too many hatreds, too much spirit of revenge, are in the air...

...Pitiful expressions of the post-war neurasthenia, what really matters for the world is not what they say or do in their kinematic, artificial lives-but what their nations think...

...they feel them -and that is why they are not really in power...

...He forgot that in the new Russia he had helped to shape, the official spheres belonged to mechanized influences and that intelligence was considered as one of the suspicious remnants of the old individualistic world...

...In their oratorical duels Trotzky was constantly the victor...

...In this excessive appreciation of his own intellectual force lies what has been probably Trotzky's heaviest mistake...

...It is mere parliamentary strategy...

...Indeed, not only have the Russian workmen lately been asking for higher wages-and, as in so many other countries, have not got them-but they have also asked two most important moral things: the right to strike, and secret votes in the elections...

...Czarism was doomed when it identified itself with the Katorga, the tragic Russian word in which all the horrors of Siberian deportation are synthesized...

...Trotzky, then all-powerful, admired for his eloquence, praised as the Napoleon of the Red Army, made the mistake of despising Stalin, the ignorant and silent Asiatic from Tiflis...

...But if the czar's secret police did not save the lords of the old Russia, the Soviet's terroristic methods will not save the comrades of the Kremlin, no matter who they are...

...It is probable that the Bolshevik leaders sometimes wonder how it happens that they still provoke so much terror-feigned or real-in certain European quarters...