Trotsky: The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star 1927-1940 Tony Cliff Bookmarks, London, 1993. Transcribed by Martin Fahlgren (July 2009) Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists Internet Archive Converted to ebook format June 2020 Cover photograph: Trotsky, from a photo with American Trotskyites Harry De Boer, James H. Bartlett and their spouses, April 5, 1940 Wikimedia Commons At the time of ebook conversion this title was out of print. Other works of Tony Cliff are available in hardcopy from: https://bookmarksbookshop.co.uk/ Contents Introduction 1. Stalin Turns to Forced Collectivisation Russia Enters a Deep Economic and Social Crisis The July 1928 Plenum of the Central Committee But Still Failure … Forced Labour In Conclusion 2. The Forced March of Industrialisation 3. Trotsky’s Reaction to the Five-Year Plan Trotsky on the Triangle of Party Forces: Left, Centre and Right Why Trotsky’s Predictions Proved Wrong Trotsky’s Attitude to Collectivisation and the Industrialisation Drive Trotsky’s Sharp Criticism of Stalin’s Management of the Economy The Shakhty Trial, the ‘Industrial Party’ Trial and the ‘Menshevik Centre’ Trial Entangled in Contradictions 4. Trotskyists in the USSR Trotskyists Active Among the Workers Deep Crisis in the Left Opposition Trotskyists in Prisons and Isolators An Interesting Episode Galloping Capitulation Ideological Split in the Trotskyist Camp Flying the Flag of Revolution 5. The Struggle Against the Nazis Trotsky on the ‘Third Period’ Trotsky and the ‘Third Period’ The ‘Red Referendum’ What is National Socialism? The Pause before the Deluge After 30 January 1933 Trotsky After the Victory of Hitler 6. The Trotskyist Movement in Germany The Right Opposition: the KPO The Leninbund A Third Obstacle to Trotskyism: the SAP KPD Immune to Trotskyism German Trotskyist Organisation in Permanent Crisis The Role of Stalinist Plants in the Trotskyist Movement Basic Weaknesses of the Trotskyists in Germany In Conclusion 7. Trotsky as Historian of the Russian Revolution 8. First Steps Towards a New International Effort to Break Out of Isolation Declaration of the Four Hopes Turn to Ashes Rightward Moving Centrists Trotskyists Pulled Into the London Bureau 9. Trotsky on France The Rise of the Popular Front Revolutionary Strikes Massive Growth of the Communist Party Trotsky’s Reaction to the June events The Wave Recedes Trotsky Draws the Balance Sheet of the Popular Front 10. The French Trotskyists The Rise of Mass Revolutionary Struggle The Trotskyists During the June ’36 days Footnote on the ‘French Turn’ 11. Trotsky and the Spanish Revolution Trotsky Proved Right The Trotskyist Organisation in Spain From Popular Front Election Victory to Fascist Uprising The Fascist Uprising The Birth of Dual Power The Fatal Role of the Popular Front The Liquidation of Workers’ Power The May Events Trotsky on the May Days Further Advance of the Counter-Revolution 12. Why the Fourth International Failed to Take Off Trotsky’s Optimism The Transitional Programme Organisational Measures Did Trotsky Have a Choice? 13. The Revolution Betrayed In Defence of Socialism The Theory of the ‘Degenerated Workers’ State’ Critique of Trotsky’s Position Russia’s Definition as a Workers’ State and the Marxist Theory of the State The Form of Property Considered Independent of the Relations of Production – a Metaphysical Abstraction The Russian Bureaucracy – a Gendarme Who Appears in the Process of Distribution? Stalinist Russia Becomes State Capitalist Stalin’s Satellites and the Definition of Russia as as Workers’ State What Prevented Trotsky from Renouncing the Theory that Russia was a Workers’ State? Toward the Denouément of the Stalinist Regime Post-Mortem of the Stalinist Regime 14. Nightmare: the Moscow Trials and the Mass Purges The Kirov Assassination The August 1936 Frame-Up Trial The Irrationality of the Trial Further Moscow trials The Trial of the Generals The Trial of the Twenty-One Elimination of the Old Bolsheviks The Historical Role of the Bloody Purges Trotsky Fights the Avalanche of Slander Trotsky’s Family Engulfed by the Purges 15. Sliding Towards the Second World War Headquarters of the Fourth International Transferred to the United States Courage Without Equal Trotsky’s Death The Legacy Acknowledgements Several people have helped in the writing of this book. A number of them helped in locating material: Panos Garganas, Volkhard Mosler, John Mullen, Jean Peltier, Knut Sand and Ahmed Shawki. A number of comrades translated various texts: Ersy Contogouris, Elana Dallas, Gareth Jenkins, Jake Hoban, Einde O’Callaghan and Mary Phillips. Many thanks are due to Chris Bambery, Alex Callinicos, Lindsey German, Chris Harman and John Rees for their advice and suggestions. Chanie Rosenberg deserves a special thanks for participating in the editing of the manuscript and for typing it. Thanks are due to John Molyneux and Donny Gluckstein for expert critical comments and most valuable stylistic suggestions, and Duncan Blackie for editing the book. Tony Cliff April 1993 Introduction Living hell THE PRESENT volume, the last in this political biography of Trotsky, covers the period between his banishment to Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan on 17 January 1928, and his assassination in Mexico on 20 August 1940. This period was the most tragic of his eventful, stormy life. It was a period of some thirteen years of deep darkness unbroken by a single shaft of light. When Trotsky stated in 1927 that ‘the vengeance of history is more powerful than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary’, he could not have had an inkling of the horrors this General Secretary would inflict on himself and his family. First Zina, his eldest daughter: she had tuberculosis, and had been given permission by the Soviet government to go to Germany for treatment. One of her two sons, Seva, was allowed to go with her, while another, a daughter of six or seven years, was kept as a hostage by Stalin. Her husband, Platon Volkov, was deported to a labour camp in Siberia. The death of her sister Nina, the persecution of her father, the deportation of her husband, and the difficulty of keeping herself and her two children alive, strained her mental balance. After undergoing several operations on her lungs, she had to be treated by psychologists. Her doctor reached the conclusion that to recover she should rejoin her family in Russia. But Stalin’s spite knew no bounds: she and Seva were deprived of Soviet citizenship. In desperation Zina committed suicide on 5 January 1933. She was 30 years old. Six days after Zina’s death Trotsky wrote an Open Letter to the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and government: Zina was too sick to be able to be active politically, and it was simply venomous cruelty that deprived her of Soviet citizenship and finally broke her spirit. She ‘did not choose that of her own will. She was driven to it by Stalin’. [1] Zina’s sister, Nina, had died live years earlier, on 9 January 1928. Nina’s husband, Man-Nevelson, was arrested and sent to a labour camp in Siberia. Nina, who was very active in the Opposition, was expelled from the party and kept from all work. Laid low by illness, she died of tuberculosis a few weeks later. She was 26 years old. The letter she wrote to her father from the hospital took 73 days to reach him, arriving after she died. She left two children who were cared for, together with Zina’s daughter, by her mother, Alexandra Sokolovskaia, Trotsky’s first wife. The third of Trotsky’s children was Leon Sedov, Lyova. He accompanied his father to banishment in Alma Ata, and then to exile in Turkey. He was forced to leave his wife and child behind. Leon Sedov was Trotsky’s right-hand man in the leadership of the Opposition. At the beginning of February 1938 he fell sick and went into a small private clinic run by some Russian émigré doctors in Paris. There the hand of the GPU caught up with him. He was poisoned and died on 16 February 1938, at the age of 32. Trotsky’s youngest child was Sergei. He was a scientist, a professor in the Institute of Technology, who shunned politics. Hence he did not wish to join his father in banishment or exile and he avoided all contact with his father. But ‘Genghiz Khan with a telephone’ did not spare him. In December 1934 he was imprisoned and then exiled to Vorkuta labour camp. The last news of him came in 1936 when he joined a hunger strike of Trotskyists in all the Pechora camps, which lasted 132 days. Finally, Alexandra Sokolovskaia: she was an active Oppositionist who had to take care of three of Trotsky’s grandchildren. In 1936 she was expelled from Leningrad, first to Tobolsk, and then to a remote settlement in Omsk Province. The grandchildren were given to an old aunt to look after, and were at fate’s mercy. She was shot in 1938, like all Trotsky’s four children the victims of Stalin. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered, and the working class movement has many, many other martyrs. But Trotsky’s position is unique. He was murdered not once, but again and again. His suffering and courage were unequalled. Prometheus was chained to a rock and the eagle picked into his liver but he never yielded or had any doubt about his stand. On 4 April 1935 Trotsky wrote in his diary: ‘[Stalin] is clever enough to realise that even today I would not change places with him.’ [2] Nothing relieved the agony, but still there was no self-pity, no pettiness; only a combination of clarity of thinking, passion and indomitable will. Stalin’s revenge on Trotsky’s supporters was also terrible.