From the Dustbin of History
Howe, Irving
Anyone who follows, even from a distance, the discussions now taking place among political thinkers in the Soviet Union, and who also remembers something about the history of Russian radicalism,...
...In an introduction to the essay, Doctor of History Vitalii Startsev praised Trotsky's observations about Lenin and stressed that "Trotsky belongs entirely to Russian culture and Russian literature...
...They ignored Marx's basic tenet that Socialism presupposed a high level of material development...
...It's as if the writings of the long-forgotten critics of Bolshevism— the independent Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, the left-Menshevik (Social Democratic) leader Julian Martov, but also a politically distant philosopher like Nicolas Berdyaevhave taken on a second life...
...Berdyaev wrote that communism, "like every religion . . . carries with it an all-embracing relation to life, decides all its fundamental questions, and claims to give a meaning to everything . . .; it takes possession of the whole soul and calls forth enthusiasm and self-sacrifice...
...Further materials on and by Trotsky appeared in Rodina (No...
...What may surprise and even cause disquiet is that, with the advantage of retrospect, I reluctantly find some value in the remarks of Nicolas Berdyaev and Georgey P. Fedotov, not political friends at all but philosophical-religious thinkers...
...The second was Mao...
...From Report on the USSR, SEPTEMBER 15, 1989 186 • DISSENT...
...they were describing the communist political experience, showing how much it had unwittingly taken over from its declared antagonists...
...Perhaps the Soviet reformers and intellectuals interviewed in Stephen Cohen's absorbing book Voices of Glasnost actually took the trouble to look up these "obsolete" critics in the "special" library rooms that harbor their writings...
...Is it possible that Liu Binyan encountered the writings of Martov...
...Well, that dustbin has turned out to be quite commodious, and some unexpected guests now reside there, including tribunes of Bolshevism...
...Shortly after the Bolshevik seizure of power, Rosa Luxemburg wrote a series of articles for Spartacus Letters expressing her support for and criticism of the revolution...
...And who knows...
...He speaks from "the dustbin of history...
...His position at the time of 184 • DISSENT European Revolutions the revolution was weak, ambivalent, uncertain...
...Now I have always believed, and still do, that the reduction of politics to religion is a vulgarity...
...The name of Julian Martov, if remembered at all, has come to us through a once-famous quip of Leon Trotsky...
...His criticisms, still deep and strong, are alive today in the words of compatriots who may or may not know they are his inheritors...
...Jean Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution, Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922...
...In a way, the Menshevik position was arid...
...34) published excerpts from Leon Trotsky's biography of Stalin...
...He also argued against blaming all the cruelty of the Civil War on Trotsky, asserting that in fact Lenin held much more responsibility than Trotsky for it...
...The Mensheviks, especially Martov, said that to construct socialism it was not enough to know what was wrong with capitalism...
...But they gave some tacit credence to the Menshevik criticism, for they also knew that socialism could not be built in a peasant country like Russia...
...With Stalin there followed forced collectivization and industrialization, accompanied by the great terror and the murder of millions...
...Trotsky had no persuasive answer...
...But their criticisms of the Bolsheviks were prescient, and much of what they said can be heard today—whether repeated consciously or not— by Soviet thinkers...
...Yet, as the bourgeois parties foundered between February and October 1917, Martov ended by calling for a coalition socialist government, one that would presumably "complete the bourgeois revolution...
...Fedotov (I quote from Joseph Frank's Through the Russian Prism) saw in "revolutionary Marxism a Judeo-Christian apocalyptic sect" inspired in Russia by a "religious idea...
...New York Review of Books, January 19, 1989...
...Vanquished and powerless, Martov remains an appealing figure...
...To which Martov and others replied: Yes, you may be able to stay in power with your 240,000 members but only insofar as you approach and then exceed the repressive measures of the 130,000 landowners...
...The Mensheviks argued that a coup engineered by a disciplined minority party, even one with a mass following, could maintain itself in power only by establishing a dictatorship, what Martov, anticipating the nomenklatura, called the "Commissarocracy...
...As it was, the desperate policies of the Bolsheviks and then the mad terror of Stalin eventuated in the present crisis, where the Soviet Union, seventy years after the revolution, cannot even feed its population...
...The journal also carried an essay by Trotsky entitled "Natsional'noe v Lenine," which was first published in Pravda on April 23, 1920...
...Trotsky, with the arrogance of the victor, replied by consigning Martov to "the dustbin of history...
...q Reappraisal of Trotsky Argumenty i fakty (No...
...Anyone who has studied, lived through, or even grazed that experience will recognize an element of truth in what they say...
...Socialism depended upon conditions of plenty, under which "no one would have to purchase an improvement in his life at the price of another's...
...At a Congress of Soviets shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, Martov declared his criticisms and doubts regarding the Bolshevik course...
...Martov was a poor leader, he was limited intellectually by a touch of Marxist scholasticism, but he was an exemplary democratic socialist...
...Cambodia's Pol Pot was the third...
...he wrote that if 130,000 landowners had been able to govern Russia in the past, why could not the 240,000 members of the Bolshevik party govern it now...
...After the Bolsheviks seized power, he criticized their repressive policies severely, yet also supported them against the Whites in the Civil War...
...But what if the revolution did not come in the West—what then should Bolshevik Russia do...
...By 1921 Lenin shrewdly pulled back by introducing the New Economic Policy (NEP), which partly anticipated Gorbachev's perestroika...
...The Bolsheviks were of course contemptuous of this Menshevik "scholasticism...
...The Mensheviks, good orthodox Marxists that they were, believed that the order of the day for Russia was a "bourgeois revolution," since so backward a country was clearly not ripe for socialism...
...Dmitri Volkogonov, who is the author of a major study on Trotsky, complained that, thanks to Stalin, Trotskyism is still regarded as a subversive political tendency and not as an ideological course in the USSR...
...Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks corn* History is full of strange echoes, heartening reclamations...
...Here is the distinguished Chinese dissident Liu Binyan: Stalin was the first to ruin Socialism...
...The political differences sketched here now strike me as an instance of Marxist dogmatism...
...It was, I think, a clear case of a received formula clashing with the dynamic of history...
...Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions which have only to be applied, the practical realization of socialism . . . is something which lies hidden in the mists of the future...
...Her criticisms were of an elementary democratic kind...
...Martov, in his gloomiest forebodings, had not anticipated anything like this—you might say Stalin "overfulfilled" Martov's prophecy...
...The result was not true Socialism...
...Such a dictatorship, in a backward society, could only institutionalize backwardness, creating a grotesque "barracks socialism" ruled by what Milovan Djilas would call the "New Class...
...This was the first time any article by Trotsky had been published in the USSR since his exile in the late 1920s...
...In an introduction to the excerpts in Argumenty i fakty, Doctor of History Nikolai Vasetsky pointed out that, whatever the official attitude to Trotsky, he should be given due credit for his "undeviating struggle against Stalin's tyranny, against the regime of Stalin's personal power...
...had they been heeded by the Leninists, the world might have been saved incalculable grief and oceans of blood...
...Freedom [she wrote] for the supporters of the [Bolshevik or any other] government, only for the members of one party—no matter how numerous they may be—is not freedom at all...
...In his pamphlet "Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power...
...These men were not really Marxists at all...
...but that isn't quite what Fedotov and Berdyaev were doing...
...Bourgeois" or "socialist" revolution— as if these were utter opposites, forever closed off from one another...
...The need to maintain state power persuaded Lenin to push aside the materialist science of Marxism and attempt to establish Socialism in one backward country...
...By the late 1920s it was the "right" Bolshevik, Nikolai Bukharin, who realized that a stabilized NEP, or something like what we would today call a "mixed economy," was the correct path...
...But the actuality proved to be otherwise...
...He praised Trotsky for his criticism of Stalin, which, Volkogonov stressed, has great relevance for the present...
...The preconditions for a socialist economy—the concentration of industry, the predominance of a conscious, highly skilled and numerous proletariat, a peasantry that supported socialist production— were missing in Russia...
...SPRING • 1990 • 185 European Revolutions bined the economic liberalization of the NEP not with the political liberalization of glasnost but with a tightening of their dictatorship...
...This is the second work by Trotsky to be published in a Soviet periodical this year...
...Startsev also dismissed as absurd anti-Semitic attacks on Trotsky made by Russian nationalists...
...A last note...
...The conditions in each of the countries where these men came to power were not economically mature enough to build a Socialist society...
...He died in 1932, an exile in Germany...
...It would be interesting to know...
...What we possess in our program is nothing but a few main signposts indicating the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative at that...
...He remained in Russia until the end of 1920, a loyal opposition to Lenin (who didn't have much use for loyal oppositions...
...Anyone who follows, even from a distance, the discussions now taking place among political thinkers in the Soviet Union, and who also remembers something about the history of Russian radicalism, must be experiencing an uncanny feeling...
...The first was a series of Trotsky's articles published under the title Novyi kurs ["The New Course"], which appeared in Molodoi kommunist (No...
...The Russian masses were in upheaval, the workers striking, the peasants seizing the land, the soldiers drifting away from the army—and the Mensheviks, keepers of Marxism, knew that the revolution must not step beyond the bounds of a democratic republic with a capitalist economy and social reforms...
...That a socialist should cite these remarks with pleasure is no surprise...
...Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently...
...At first Lenin had an answer, a poor one...
...The cunning of history: Gorbachev would later look for advanced resources from . . . the capitalist West...
...Trotsky, in his "theory of permanent revolution," postulated that a triumphant revolutionary West would come to the aid of a beleaguered Bolshevik Russia...
...What might have enabled Russia to move into something resembling a modern democratic society would have been a republic with a mixed economy in which the peasants were allotted their plots of land, small industries allowed to remain in private hands but with proper social controls, and so on...
...they believed in the will to action...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
