Springtime for Non-Person Trotsky? : Reassessment of the Pioneer De-Stalinizer Might Help Perestroika

Things are changing fast in the Soviet Union. In the era of glasnost even such former non-persons as Nikolai I. Bukharin, Lev B. Kamenev and Grigory E. Zinoviev, victims of the bloody Moscow show trials of 50 years ago, have been rehabilitated. Josef Stalin’s heavy-handed legacy is coming under attack from all sides--not only the forced collectivizations, the purges, the deportations of whole peoples, the pact with Adolf Hitler and the military blunders in the early years of World War II but also the whole edifice of Stalinist bureaucracy that still weighs like an incubus on Soviet society. What Nikita S. Khrushchev began 30 years ago and failed to complete, Mikhail S. Gorbachev is now determined to implement on a broader and more sweeping scale in order to get Russia moving again.

Yet one illustrious name is still missing from the ranks of those victimized and destroyed by Stalinism--the man who was arguably the pioneer of what we now call “de-Stalinization”--Leon Trotsky.

Hero of the Bolshevik revolution, co-founder of the Soviet state, its first foreign minister, architect of the Red Army and its supreme commander during the bloody civil war, Trotsky ended his life in Mexican exile with an ice pick in his skull, dispatched to his fathers by one of Stalin’s agents in 1940. During the previous decade he had been hounded, harassed and slandered by the Stalinists as an imperialist, a “fascist” and even a “Nazi agent,” as a symbol of malevolence, perfidy and treason. Ever since then he has been presented as the arch-criminal and heretic of Bolshevik political history in Soviet textbooks and popular literature.

Surely the time has finally come for the more enlightened and sophisticated incumbents of the Kremlin today to deflate this ridiculous caricature and present a more balanced account of Trotsky’s real achievements as well as his failings. Would not such an action help to demonstrate to the world that contemporary Soviet society has finally put behind it the dark, murderous obsessions of the Stalinist past?

The first tentative, halting signs of such a reassessment have indeed already occurred. Yet there is clearly serious resistance to such a step. What, then, is it about the ghost of Trotsky that still haunts the Kremlin and makes his case different from that of Bukharin or other outstanding Old Bolsheviks who were also killed by Stalin?

The official Soviet explanation used to stress Trotsky’s differences with Lenin before the revolution, his non-Bolshevik past, his underestimation of the peasantry, his lack of faith in “socialism in one country” and his oppositional intrigues, which allegedly led to collaboration with the enemies of Soviet Russia. This was always greatly exaggerated and today is hardly relevant.

The current line in Moscow would probably stress that Trotsky was no less authoritarian than Stalin, a “super-industrializer” who believed in the militarization of labor, the regimentation of consumption and a forced march to socialism. This Trotsky (who did exist, at least in the era of “war communism” during the early 1920s) is clearly an unattractive current model when compared to the more moderate, gradualist Bukharin who supported Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Gorbachev, it should be remembered, must inevitably revert back to the NEP precedent when seeking to justify in Marxist-Leninist terms a planning system that will allow for elements of a market socialism, economic decentralization, money incentives and private initiative.

But there is another Trotsky, that of “The Revolution Betrayed” (1937), whom Gorbachev might find a more congenial forerunner, even if many of his predictions have been falsified by events. That Trotsky lashed out at many of the afflictions that still plague contemporary Soviet society--the chronic lag in labor productivity, the shoddy quality of Soviet goods, the paucity of articles of consumption, the technology gap with the West, the lack of proper accounting and the largely fictitious production statistics. Like Gorbachev, his main target was the excessive privileges, corruption and inertia of an ossified bureaucracy that paralyzed economic initiative and creative innovation. As a revolutionary Marxist, Trotsky called for revolution in the political sphere to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore the hegemony of pure Bolshevism.

No one expects Gorbachev to do that. But perestroika has picked up some of the later Trotsky’s proposals in a more workable and practical form. The call for overhauling the party apparatus, making leaders electable and accountable, restoring a greater role to the largely defunct soviets (councils), encouraging more local initiative, more freedom of scientific criticism and artistic independence--these were all features of the original anti-Stalinist platform of the “Left Opposition” 50 years ago.

Trotsky was of course no civil libertarian any more than Gorbachev and his allies are today. What they mean by socialist democracy, pluralism and human rights is something quite different from its meaning in Western societies, though it also significantly departs from the Stalinist model of coercion and terror. Gorbachev has understood that “restructuring,” if it is to succeed, requires a modicum of truthfulness and a serious, self-critical analysis of past errors. A radical diagnosis and cure for the ills of Soviet society must involve a clean break from the Stalinist legacy.

It also means restoring to the Soviet people their political memory, which has been arbitrarily confiscated for 60 years. In that context, why not a springtime for Trotsky?