Harding, N. CrossRef Google Scholar. Khrustalev-Nosar, G. Petersburg, 45— Knei-Paz, B. LeBlanc, P. Lenin, V. Marx, K. McLellan ed. Marot, J. McKean, R. Miliband, R. Pipes, R. Read, C. Smith, S. Swain, G. After Stalin maneuvered them out of positions of authority, Kamenev and Zinoviev threw in their lot with Trotsky in This Joint Opposition, never the most robust alliance, did not hold.
Stalin, wielding his power like a club, expelled Trotsky and his followers from the party in late In that book is this remarkable description of Stalin, by then the sole ruler of the Soviet Union. He is gifted with practicality, a strong will, and persistence in carrying out his aims.
His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive. His work of compilation, The Foundations of Leninism, in which he made an attempt to pay tribute to the theoretical traditions of the party, is full of sophomoric errors. His ignorance of foreign languages compels him to follow the political life of other countries at second-hand.
His mind is stubbornly empirical and devoid of creative imagination. To the leading group of the party in the wide circles he was not known at all he always seemed a man destined to play second and third fiddle. And the fact that today he is playing first is not so much a summing up of the man as it is of this transitional period of political backsliding in the country.
With his opponents removed, Stalin enacted the collectivization of agriculture and state-directed industrialization, programs once championed by the Left Opposition, but now brutally implemented with a staggering toll of lives. Thus, Stalinism, the counterrevolutionary system and ideology Stalin represented, preoccupied him. In this form of totalitarianism, a bureaucracy, a privileged caste, at the top of which Stalin perched like an absolute monarch, lorded it over the working class.
As late as , he thought, however, the Soviet system could be reformed by working through the structures of the Communist Party. The Left Opposition might dislodge Stalin from within without directly challenging state power. Trotsky held to this position until Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January Germany was a country with a modern urban, industrial society he had long regarded as vital to the prospects for socialism.
The Soviet leadership had tied the hands of the German Communist Party and hindered a united front against the Nazi Party by construing moderate socialists as the real threat. After Hitler took power, Trotsky concluded that reform of the Stalin regime had to be abandoned. Ousting Stalin by working through the channels of the Communist Party was no longer possible.
This much more radical perspective culminated in his The Revolution Betrayed. Proletarian revolt would have to topple Stalin and the bureaucracy.
This revolution, Trotsky made clear, would resemble the European upheavals of and more than the October Revolution. It would be a political revolution, not a social one. Collective ownership and control of the means of production e. Still, much could be salvaged from the damage done by Stalinism. He called for free elections, freedom of criticism, and freedom of the press. While the Communist Party would benefit most from this open atmosphere, it would no longer possess a monopoly on power.
As long as political parties did not try to restore capitalism, they could operate, recruit, and compete for power. Trotsky imagined a restored involvement of workers in economic policy. Science and the arts might flourish once more. Credit: Gunther Schenk. Stalin not only hunted Trotsky but anyone close to him from country to country.
Klement was kidnapped, presumably by GPU agents. They seized him and left his food on the table untouched. A few weeks after he vanished, a body, missing its head and legs, washed up on the Seine. It was not enough to just kill Klement; decapitation and dismemberment were required to incite extra terror.
Despite a difficult relationship with his father, Leon worked tirelessly for him in Paris. When Sedov checked himself into a private clinic in Paris run by Russian emigres complaining of an appendicitis, the Soviets knew. He died there under mysterious circumstances in February , five months before Klement disappeared.
To this day, the cause of death has not been conclusively determined. In a moving tribute to his son, Trotsky told of the terrible grief he and Natalia felt. That did not save him. He vanished and, it is believed, was shot in October Kirov was gunned down in December Likely, Stalin himself was responsible for the assassination.
The murder gave him the pretext for systematically and publicly purging the Communist Party. Old Bolsheviks, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, stood accused of conspiring against the Soviet government. Following their death sentences, several successor trials ensued through It would be wrong to assert that the dispute between the Bolshevik party activists and the oppositionists, who were by that time justifiably labeled "Leftists," was fabricated, or that Trotsky, Zinov'ev and Kamenev specifically joined together for the purpose of defending a left-wing rather than right-wing position by chance.
The sincerity of Trotsky's position cannot be doubted: he had always been on the left wing of the revolutionary spectrum. But the historian attempting to explain why the "rightists" Zinov'ev and Kamenev -who had opposed the Bolshevik uprising in October of - later turned up in the Left Opposition of Trotsky, while Bukharin - the former leader of the Left Communists and a supporter of the revolutionary war - was head of the right wing of the party which at that time included Stalin as well , runs into enormous difficulties.
The opposition formed in criticized the Soviet government's domestic policies on a whole series of issues. In the main, however, the opposition came out against the private economy, i. Piatakov in a "Draft resolution on the economic question" referred to the "growing economic influence of the kulak and the establishment of a union of the middle-level peasant seredniak with private capitalistic elements.
If an individual peasant economy in the countryside gave rise to a prosperous peasantry, while a collective peasant economy resulted in an impoverished peasantry, then it was necessary to eliminate the individual peasant economy. And although the opposition did not openly call for this, beginning in Stalin took the demands of the oppositionists to their logical end. By itself, however, a platform based on domestic policy was not enough.
As in , a foreign policy issue was needed as its pivotal point. Originally, the opposition attempted to unleash debate on the subject of the general strike in England. But the documents distributed by the opposition on this issue, and signed by prominent party members, were so badly written as to be incomprehensible, and the affair on the whole turned out to be most unfortunate and even ridiculous.
They then attempted to formulate their differences with the government on issues relating to the Komintern. It is possible that nothing would have come of these efforts to find a foreign policy platform issue, but then at last the revolution in China, long under preparation, began. This event was more than adequate for the opposition: the revolution in China became the pivotal issue of the conflict.
Everything followed the pattern of , with Lenin's place occupied by Stalin, and Trotsky in Bukharin's position. Like the Left Communists in , the Left Opposition convinced the party masses that Soviet government policy with regard to the Chinese revolution would lead directly to the revolution's defeat.
Finally, just as Lenin had done in his time, Stalin sacrificed a revolution abroad, in China in this case, for the sake of a truce analogous to that brought about by the Brest- Litovsk treaty: the Chinese revolution did suffer defeat, but time was gained, and the first serious conflict with Japan broke out only in 1 There is not adequate space here to analyze the real and imaginary differences between the domestic and foreign policy stands of Stalin's government and Trotsky's opposition.
It is sufficient to indicate that Stalin resolved the developing problem more gracefully than Lenin had a decade earlier: having only begun to expel the oppositionists from the party, Stalin succeeded in obtaining their agreement to capitulate and cease their factional activities.
In addition, he went even further in the realization of his new program than had the oppositionists -he did not merely limit the Nepman's options, but abolished NEP altogether as such; he did not stop with the imposition of restrictive measures against the peasantry, but implemented forced collectivization.
As a result, his victory over the opposition was absolute: politically and ideologically the opposition was destroyed.
Their physical destruction would come somewhat later. A multi-volume Trotsky collection is currently being published in Germany. In the 's and early 's Pathfinder Press in New York came out with a collection of Trotsky's works encompassing the period To this brief list may be added three Trotsky biographies: J.
Biographies of Trotsky are beginning to be published in Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union a small biographical brochure on Trotsky has been written by the historian V. Startscv, and Hungarian historian Miklos Kun is currently working on a Trotsky biography. Dokumenty arkhiva L. Trolskogo, 4 vols Benson, Vermont: Chalidze, ; P. On the seventy-third day of Soviet power in Pctrograd, Lenin solemnly declared to Arthur Ransome, a British correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, that the fundamental goal of the Russian revolution had already been achieved: the Bolsheviks had held out for one day longer than the Paris Commune, and the fall of Soviet power now would not be terrible, since its most important contribution to the worldwide communist movement had already been made.
When Trotsky asked Lenin in what would happen if the Germans attacked and took Moscow, Lenin answered : "We will retreat farther, to the cast, to the Urals [ We will form a Ural-Kuznctskii republic, supported by coal-based industry and Kuznetsk coal, and that portion of the Moscow and Petrograd workers that we could bring with us. If necessary, we will go even farther to the east, beyond the Urals. We will go all the way to Kamchatka, but we will hold out.
Trotsky, O Lenine. In the article "Uroki Oktiabria," published as an introduction to the first part of Trotsky's book, Moscow, , and re-published in the book, Ob "Urokakh Oktiabria" Leningrad: Rabochcc. In Trotsky's opinion, however, "the plan could not be carried out in the name of the Pctrograd Soviet, since the organization of the Soviet, which had not yet been bolshcvizcd, as it should have been, was not conducive to this: the Military- Revolutionary Committee did not yet exist.
Trotsky was not the only one to remark on the adventuristic character of Lenin's appeal. Nogin stated that this was a call "to a repetition of the July [] events," i.
On the whole, the Central Committee of the party rejected Lenin's proposal ibid: The former were destroyed by Lenin as a competing party on July ; the latter, who were members of his own organization the Bolshevik Party , he did not subject to rcpressioas; the incident with the Left Communists was consigned to oblivion. Only one Left Communist was persecuted for a short time: Dzerzhinskii, head of the VChK, was suspended from work, but only because his participation in the assassination of the German Ambassador, Count Wilhclm von Mirbach, was obvious to Lenin.
But since the murder itself, and the fact that it was committed by a Left SR, la. Blumkin, were quite advantageous to Lenin, Dzerzhinskii was soon reinstated in his former position, and Blumkin was accepted into the RKP b and returned to his work in Dzerzhiaskii's agency, where he made a brilliant career for himself in counter intelligence until his execution in November for his tics with Trotsky.
For more detailed discussion of this affair, sec Iu. In this sense, the murders of Karl Licbknccht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January were quite advantageous for Lenin.
While there is no evidence to suggest that Lenin had anything to do with their deaths, it is possible that another prominent Bolshevik leader, Karl Radek, was involved in the murders.
The initial preparations for the attempt on the lives of Licbkncchl and Luxemburg were apparently made in the first half of December In Anton Fischer, the deputy military commandant of Berlin, stated in a written deposition that his department had maintained surveillance over the two Spartacus leaders so as "not to allow them to conduct agitational and organizational activities. In the course of the investigation into this incident, roughly six witnesses stated that a reward in the amount of , marks had been offered for the murders of Licbknccht and Luxemburg.
This prize was promised by Philipp Schcidcmann - a prominent German Social Democrat who was head of the government from February through June of , and his close friend Gcorg Sklarz - a businessman who had become wealthy during the war trading in arms for the German army Sebastian Haffner, Eine Deutsche Revolution Rowohll [n.
J: ; Revoliuisiia v Germanii The investigation begun in showed that Sklarz, a collaborator of Parvus's, planned the attempt on Licbknccht and Luxemburg, apparently in collusion with Parvus and Schcidcmann, and that Sklarz was to have paid a reward of 50, XX marks for each of the Spartacus leaders sec the Government Archive of the FRG, R , folder 1 , The Sklarz Case.
It is true that Radck's name is not mentioned in the Sklarz materials, but it surfaces in connection with the January assassinations of Licbknccht and Luxemburg.
Karl Licbknccht's brother Theodore devoted his life to the investigation of these murders. Theodore Licbknccht, a German Social Democrat, came to the conclusion that Karl Radek was definitely involved in the murders. The materials he collected in the course of his investigation perished during a bombing raid on Germany in November of Archives of the International Iastitutc of Social History in Amsterdam, Theodore Licbknccht collection, folder 10, diary notations in German by T.
But in , Boris I. Nicolacvsky, the famous Russian emigre historian and archivist, wrote Theodore Licbknccht a letter asking about Karl Moore, a secret collaborator with the German government among the Social Democrats. Nicolaevsky to T. Licbknccht dated 15 December , in German. In response, Theodore Licbknccht told Nicolacvsky about his conclusions concerning the role of Radek in the deaths of his brother and Rosa Luxemburg.
The correspondence between Licbknccht. However, there is an allusion to this correspondence in a letter from Nicolaesvsky to a third person. That meeting never took place, and Theodore felt that Radck had betrayed Karl. Nicolaevsky to R. In a letter to the Italian socialist A. Balabanova collection , Nicolaevsky spelled out what precisely Karl Licbknccht had found out about Radck: "Especially frequently now I recall my past conversations with Theodore Licbknccht, who indicated to me that Radek betrayed Karl [Licbknccht].
On the eve of Karl Liebknecht's arrest he met Theodore on the street and on the way said that he had received information regarding Radck's tics with military circles, and coasidcrcd him a traitor. They made arrangements to meet the next day, at which time Karl was to have recounted the details - but that night Karl Licbknccht was arrested and killed.
All through the next years Theodore gathered evidence, and told me that he was convinced of the accuracy of his brother's suspicioas [ He assured me that the same conclusion regarding Radck had also been reached by Karl Licbknccht, who had a conversation on this subject with Theodore at their last meeting.
Karl, in Theodore's words, was completely crushed by information he had received then from someone - from whom Theodore did not know. Souvarinc, letter from Nicolaevsky to B. Souvarinc dated 1 1 April
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