page 30 / permanentrevolution

1
In 1936 the Russian Communist paper, Pravda, wrote of
Stalin that he was the genius of the new world, the wis-
est man of the epoch, the great leader of communism.
Pravda, a paper that began its life seething with hatred
for authority and exposing the crimes of dictators was, by
the 1930s, spewing forth endless fawning articles about
the great leader. Communism had become a cult.
Stalin became the General Secretary of the Russian
Communist Party in 1922. At that time Lenin and Trot-
sky were both authoritative leaders of that organisation
and of the state it ruled. Lenin fell ill in 1923 and died
in early 1924. Trotsky commenced his opposition to Sta-
lin in 1923-24. In 1928 he was exiled, frst internally and
later from the country whose destiny he had so decisively
helped shape.
Stalin was the architect of a sweeping bureaucratic
counter-revolution in the 1920s. He was the butcher of
the Bolshevik Party in the 1930s and one of the most hid-
eous bureaucratic dictators of the twentieth century. In
the run up to World War Two Stalin used the theory of
socialism in one country as an excuse to back various
imperialist powers and subordinate the class struggle
in the countries of his temporary allies to his narrow
foreign policy needs. The result of this strategy was an
endless round of terrible, often bloody, defeats for the
world working class.
Stalin banned all independent, let alone radical, thought
and helped pave the road back to capitalism in Russia
less than 80 years after it was overthrown. Stalin was
responsible for untold human suffering. Pravdas syco-
phantic words about Stalin, which are typical of the vast
self-serving propaganda machine he created, will induce
nausea in any genuine militant.
The greatest historical event of the twentieth century,
the working class revolution in Russia in October 1917, was
Stalin was the gravedigger of the Russian
Revolution, as conscious agent of the
bureaucratic elite that stole power and bloodily
repressed opposition. But did Lenin and
Trotskys earlier suppression of party factions
fatally secure his passage to total power?
Mark Hoskisson argues that the anti-Stalinist
left has underestimated the signifcance of 1921
in sealing the fate of the revolution
THe Red JACOBInS
Thermidor and the
Russian Revolution
in 1921
History / Trotsky and Lenin
Summer 2010 / page 31
utterly and completely betrayed. Its legacy is the memory
of Stalins salt mines and gulags, his famines and bread
queues, his secret police and his murderous tyranny.
The left critique
On the Trotskyist left the received wisdom is that Sta-
lin began his counter-revolution in 1923-24 and that he
completed it in 1928. during this fve year period Trot-
skys Left Opposition fought and was defeated inside Rus-
sia. For the following fve years, according to Trotsky, it
remained possible to unseat Stalin through the reform
of both the Communist Party and the Soviet State. Only
with the victory of fascism in Germany in 1933 and the
refusal of the Russian Communist Party or any section
of the Communist International to recognise that Sta-
lins policy was to blame for Hitlers triumph, did Trotsky
argue that the political counter-revolution was complete
and the need for a new party and new revolution were
now on the agenda.
On the anarchist and libertarian left the view is that
the counter-revolution began more or less immediately
after the Bolsheviks took power. According to most anar-
chist historians it was underway when the Brest-Litovsk
peace treaty was signed in early 1918 and the Left Social
Revolutionaries (Left SRs) quit the government as a result.
It was in full swing in July 1918 when the Left SRs were
suppressed following an attempted rising against the Bol-
shevik government. The fnal and irreversible triumph of
the counter-revolution was the suppression of the Krons-
tadt Soviets rising in 1921, the key event of the counter-
revolution for anarchists.
The difference between the Trotskyist and anarchist
viewpoint is symptomatic of an ideological gulf between
anarchism and communism. This article does not share
the anarchist theoretical explanation of the counter-revo-
lution: namely that the Bolshevik Party was inherently
autocratic; that its functioning prior to the revolution
prefgured its later authoritarian actions; and that both
parties and states are an anathema in the working class
struggle for liberation.
Rather the Bolshevik Party was a key agency that helped
make the working class revolution possible; the workers
state was vital in the struggle to defend working class
power; and Bolshevisms descent into counter-revolution
marked a distinct break with, not a continuation of, its
fundamental character and policies in the period 1912
to 1920.
But do our differences with anarchism make the Trot-
skyist position and the movement that has held to this
position for over 80 years correct? Surely the debris of
the Trotskyist movement today as well as its history of
splits, manoeuvres and sharp practices, should prompt us
to at least ask the question: is there a connection between
the state it is in today and the lessons it has drawn regard-
ing the timing and character of the counter-revolution in
Russia? After all, despite the time that has elapsed since
1917, most of the groups calling themselves Trotskyist
model their internal regimes, their methods of organi-
sation and action on the lessons of Bolshevik history in
one way or another.
Trotskyist practice
The Trotskyist movement predicted, in its 1938 Transi-
tional Programme: As time goes on, their [the reformist
bureaucracys] desperate efforts to hold back the wheel of
history will demonstrate more clearly to the masses that
the crisis of the proletarian leadership, having become
the crisis in mankinds culture, can be resolved only by
the Fourth International.
1
There were certainly conjunctural and objective rea-
sons that prevented the Fourth International from grow-
ing to become such a leadership during and immediately
after the war.
2
But, even allowing for the impact of such
factors the prediction has never come near to being ful-
flled. Quite the opposite is the case. And in the absence of
mass infuence the revolutionary movement has spiralled
into decline, fragmenting along the way into hundreds
of antagonistic particles.
And throughout the history of that decline many wrong
practices found their way into that movement. Many of
the practices that took root in the movement were wrong.
And Trotsky himself, despite being driven to despair by the
manoeuvres and manipulations of his movement, toler-
ated them. He was fatally fawed in organisational matters.
His own lack of experience in building a mass revolution-
ary organisation his organisations in pre-revolutionary
Russia were small and he only joined the Bolshevik Party
two months before the October Revolution began to tell
as the 1930s wore on. He placed more and more weight
on the objective conditions of decaying capitalism
3
and
not enough on the diffcult task of transforming tiny,
marginalised and inexperienced circles of cadre into sub-
stantial revolutionary parties. Indeed, experiments in
party building in his movement (for example entryism
and exitism in relation to the mass reformist parties)
led to it having arguably less infuence when it formed
the Fourth International than it did in 1933 when it broke
with the Communist (Third) International.
His movement paid dearly for this after Trotskys assas-
sination by a Stalinist agent in 1940. As the movement split,
reformed and split again, we have had everything from
the bizarre personality cults (Healy, Posadas) through to
the competing sects who, while presenting a saner image,
have leaderships that will do almost anything to secure
their control of a campaign or movement regardless of the
negative impact of their actions on the wider class strug-
gle. Their struggle is, in the frst place, one to justify their
distinct existence and aggrandise their specifc grouping.
In other words they are, in the classical sense, sects.
Given then that the Trotskyist movement, born in 1923,
We have to ask . . . did the
degeneration of the Russian Revolution
begin with Lenin and Trotsky at the
helm, alongside Stalin?
page 32 / permanentrevolution
1
Theory / Trotsky and Thermidor
has failed, we have to ask: does the reason for this fail-
ure lie not only in the defeats and isolation of the 1930s,
but in its origins within the post-revolutionary Bolshe-
vik Party and the practices it inherited from the period
before it moved into opposition to the bureaucracy? did
the degeneration of the Russian Revolution begin with
Lenin and Trotsky at the helm, alongside Stalin?
Posing this question of course poses the old question,
did Lenin lead to Stalin?. To answer it properly we need
to refne it as follows: was Stalins fnal triumph made pos-
sible by Lenin and Trotskys actions in 1921 in the party
crisis of that year?
The answer is yes. The start of the bureaucratic counter-
revolution came in March 1921 not 1924. Trotskys frst
opposition struggle came three years too late to save both
the revolution and the party from the results of this the
protracted bureaucratic degeneration of both within the
framework of a degenerated workers state.
Thermidor
Throughout the entire period that Trotsky fought Sta-
lin as an oppositionist inside the Communist Party (albeit
as an expelled member for fve years) he insisted that no
counter-revolution had taken place. debates had taken
place within the opposition over this question with the
analogy of Thermidor being used. Thermidor is the term
for the start of the counter-revolution during the great
French Revolution of the eighteenth century.
Thermidor in France was a single event the arrest of
the Jacobin leaders including Robespierre and St Just on
27 July 1794 (ninth Thermidor in the revolutionary calen-
dar) followed by their execution on 28 July. This event put
an end to the Terror that Robespierre was conducting
against both the counter-revolution and opponents to
his left. Some of the most left wing Jacobins supported
Thermidor, only to be repressed in its aftermath.
Thermidor in France opened up a period of political reac-
tion against the extreme plebeian democracy of the early
period of the revolution, including a direct suppression
of local government democracy in Paris the epicentre
of the revolution. It culminated in the dissolution of the
revolutionary parliament, the Convention, in 1795 and
its replacement by the undemocratic directory. Follow-
ing a coup in 1799 (the 18 Brumaire 9 november) the
directory was overthrown by napoleon Bonaparte who
established frst a Consulate (a Triumvirate) and later the
empire, with himself as the emperor.
The events of France were studied closely by all Bol-
shevik oppositionists, looking for clues as to how Stalins
rise to power had occurred. But Trotskys view, up to his
1935 essay, The workers state, Thermidor and Bonapartism,
was that, despite the defeat of the Left Opposition, Ther-
midor had not occurred in the Soviet Union. It lay in the
future and would inevitably assume the character of capi-
talist reaction.
This view dictated the Left Oppositions line of march
in all party disputes in the 1920s. It consistently identifed
the right wing of the party led by Rykov and Bukharin
as the main danger, as the likely source of Thermidorian
reaction, because of its political line. That is, the right
argued for the prolonged continuation of Lenins new
economic Policy (neP) and, in particular, concessions to
the better off peasants (the kulaks).
Trotskys hostility to the continuation of neP caused
the Left Opposition to under-estimate the danger from
Stalin, from the apparatus, from within the party centre.
Stalin was described as centrist, capable of veering to the
left and the right. In the long term this posed a danger
to the revolution, but in the short term, Trotsky believed,
it meant that the centre would and could be allies of the
left against the right.
He accused the democratic Centralist Opposition
which by the mid-1920s favoured a new party of ultra-
leftism with regard to Stalin. Indeed he argued that the
proletarian wing of Stalinism would have to turn to the
Trotskyists, saying, the best elements of the current
apparatus will have to summon us to help. We forewarn
them of this.
4

The implication was that while the right was pro-capi-
talist, the centre could be won back or at least reformed
through the efforts of the Left Opposition. These efforts
would be directed at the proletarian core of the Rus-
sian party, as Trotsky referred to it in the 1920s. As late
as 1928, after the Left Opposition had been defeated, after
its protests at the 1927 tenth anniversary celebrations of
the revolution fzzled out like a damp frework, and after
Trotsky had been expelled and exiled, Trotsky argued
against the democratic Centralists and insisted the task
was still to win back and reform the party by allying with
its proletarian core:
To conquer this core, however, is to conquer the party.
This core does not consider itself and quite rightly either
dead or degenerated
5
. It is upon it, upon its tomorrow,
that we base our political line.
6

The reason for these illusions in the party core which
was actually far from being a revolutionary proletarian
core and the Stalinist centre was Trotskys belief that
Thermidor, and the Bonapartist dictatorship that would
follow it could only possibly come from without, from
capitalist restoration and reaction and from the right
wing of the party which has its chief support outside
the party. Thermidor could not come from within the
workers state itself. He explained this position as follows
in October 1928:
The conditions necessary for Thermidor to materialise
can develop in a comparatively short period of time. We
have already more than once called attention to the fact
that the victorious bourgeois counter-revolution must
take the form of fascism of Bonapartism, but absolutely
cannot take the form of bourgeois democracy . . . We thus
Trotskys hostility to the continuation of
NEP caused the Left Opposition to under-
estimate the danger from Stalin, from the
apparatus, from within the party centre
Summer 2010 / page 33
come to the conclusion that a victory of the right would
lead directly along the Thermidorian-Bonapartist road,
while a victory of the centrists would zig-zag along the
same road. Is there any real difference? As a fnal histori-
cal consequence there is no difference . . . But this is only
as a fnal historical consequence. At the present stage,
however, centrism refects on a much larger scale those
who have risen from the working class. The right has its
roots in the new property owners, chiefy the peasant pro-
prietors. It would be a very crude mistake, a democratic
Centralist type blurring of political distinctions, to ignore
the struggle of these two elements. The centrists do not
want to break openly with the workers. They fear this
break much more than the right, which above all does
not want to offend the property owners.
7
Trotsky in exile was a revolutionary, not a Thermidorian.
He favoured an independent intervention by the working
class into this struggle, as only such an intervention could
curb the excesses of the bureaucratic apparatus and re-
open the path to revolutionary progress. But the Opposi-
tion would nevertheless be in a tactical alliance with the
centre against the right. To exclude this likely line-up,
said Trotsky, would be sectarian and doctrinaire. And this
remained Trotskys operative position up until 1933.
He recognised that the signifcant proletarian core
was, after 1930, now to be found mainly in the Commu-
nist International (Comintern) and specifcally the Ger-
man party. The outcome of the struggle against fascism
in Germany would determine whether or not this core
could be won back to revolutionary socialism. But until
this was decided Trotsky still argued that an orientation
to the Cominterns proletarian core was crucial.
By 1932 the reality of the break in the revolutionary
tradition caused by Stalinism was clear to Trotsky and he
was combining an orientation to the Comintern with an
attempt to build the Left Opposition more as a party than
as an external faction. nevertheless, he continued to see the
Right Opposition as an enemy, possibly a more dangerous
enemy, even though within Russia itself it had been crushed
by Stalin and internationally had been expelled.
Trotskys understanding of Thermidor, an understand-
ing that he based his strategy towards frst the Russian
Party and then the Comintern on, was wrong. In 1935 he
publicly revised his position and accepted that Thermidor
was not external (social) counter-revolution. It was internal
(political) reaction. He elaborated his new understanding
in the book The Revolution Betrayed, in 1936.
In France the directory and later napoleon, emanating
as they did from Jacobinism itself, did not reintroduce
feudalism. And in Russia Stalin, a long standing Bolshe-
vik, did not reintroduce capitalism. But in both cases the
mass movements that made the revolutions were deprived
of political power by Thermidorian reaction.
Trotsky now argued that in Russia a new revolution was
required, as was a new party. The task of this revolution
was regime change and the reintroduction of genuine
soviet democracy (a political revolution). The new party
was to lead such a revolution and put socialism back on
the agenda by utilising the social conquests of the Octo-
ber Revolution to reform the Soviet economy from top
to bottom.
Trotsky also recognised that the Bonapartism that fol-
lowed Thermidor was in Russia a specifc form of dic-
tatorship, Soviet Bonapartism with Stalin as the Bona-
parte. His Bonapartism was made possible by his role as
chief gendarme. The backwardness of the Soviet economy
and the generalised want it created led to the growth of
bureaucracy. Trotsky used the analogy of a shop with too
few goods, When the lines are very long, it is necessary
to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the start-
ing point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It knows
who is to get something and who has to wait.
8
In order to
regulate the queue a gendarme was required. In stepped
the bureaucracy. This gendarme inevitably acquired its
own interests as an agency standing between classes. It
needed to be held together because otherwise class pres-
sures would rip it apart. It required a strong man to do
this. And Stalin was this man.
While this marked a major change of position by Trot-
sky relative to everything he had argued from 1923 on,
he insisted that despite his understanding of Thermidor
being wrong the Left Oppositions strategy reform, uti-
lisation of the party and its proletarian core and blocs
with the Stalinists had all, nevertheless been correct
right the way up to 1935. The years during which Sta-
lin had consolidated his counter-revolution had not seen
Trotsky make a single signifcant mistake. As he put it in
his 1935 essay:
We need only review accurately the gist of the contro-
versies of 1926-27 for the correctness of the position of the
Bolshevik Leninists [the Trotskyists] to emerge in all its
obviousness in the light of subsequent developments. As
early as 1927, the kulaks struck a blow at the bureaucracy
by refusing to supply it with bread, which they had man-
aged to concentrate in their hands. In 1928 an open split
took place in the bureaucracy. The right was for further
concessions to the kulak. The centrists, arming them-
selves with the ideas of the Left Opposition whom they
had smashed conjointly with the rights, found their sup-
port among the workers, routed the rights and took the
road of industrialisation and, subsequently, collectivisa-
tion. The basic social conquests of the October Revolution
were saved in the end at the cost of countless unneces-
sary sacrifces.
9
This is an argument saying that Stalin saved the basic
social conquests of October by stealing the ideas of the
left and battering the right hence the Left Opposition
was right all along to keep open the possibility of a deal
with Stalin despite now recognising that he was already
carrying through a newly understood brand of Thermi-
dor, namely bureaucratic political reaction. But it elects
Trotsky insisted that despite his
understanding of Thermidor being wrong
the Left Opposition had nevertheless
been correct right the way up to 1935
page 34 / permanentrevolution
1
Theory / Trotsky and Thermidor
to ignore the fact that the Left Oppositions search for a
bloc with Stalin even in 1928 meant disaster for Rus-
sia and the International.
Trotskys position meant that his struggle was always
hamstrung. Instead of espousing an open militant strug-
gle against Stalin, including through building new mass
organisations, Trotsky limited his strategy to reform. The
struggle consisted at frst of debates within the leading
bodies of the party, eventually within the whole party
and only in 1927 through peaceful protests at the tenth
anniversary celebrations of the revolution.
Only after all these avenues of protest were closed did
the struggle assume a more militant, but also desperate,
form via hunger strikes in the prisons. By then it was too
late Stalin had won.
This was a direct result of its failure to recognise that
a political counter-revolution had taken place under the
auspices of Stalin and the centre faction. In one article in
1928 Trotsky refers to his erstwhile allies against Stalin,
Zinoviev and Kamenev, as a pair of Sancho Panzas. Sadly
the don Quixote of the time, tilting at the windmills of
the Right, was Trotsky himself.
Trotsky does not draw this conclusion. Instead he refnes
his understanding of Thermidor into the essentially cor-
rect equation of political counter-revolution plus exclu-
sion of the masses from power plus the maintenance of
the social transformations introduced as a result of the
revolution. He also backdates the process to the point at
which he suffered his frst major defeat as an opponent
of the regime, 1924. He writes:
The smashing of the Left Opposition implied in the
most direct and immediate sense the transfer of power
from the hands of the revolutionary vanguard into the
hands of conservative elements among the bureaucracy
and the upper crust of the working class. The year 1924
that was the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor.
10
While the recognition of Stalin as the key agent in
the counter-revolution is a welcome revision by Trotsky,
his change of line in 1935 leaves too many questions
unanswered.
His new chronology is convenient. If Thermidor began
in 1924 then the quite weak character of the later strug-
gle against Stalin by the United Opposition (of Trotsky,
Zinoviev and Kamenev) can be explained by the pre-exist-
ing Thermidorian victories. Trotsky is excused of blame
for his failure to take the fght to Stalin from 1924 on.
But this excuse cannot conceal the real reason for the
weakness of the later struggle. The United Opposition
involved a pact with one of the most bureaucratic wings of
the party (Zinovievs Leningrad organisation). This repelled
many oppositionists and Trotsky ended up spending as
much time justifying his deal as he did fghting Stalin.
He weakened his own position through this pact though
at the time it ftted with his view of the centre (in this
case Zinoviev) coming over to the left.
In Trotskys revised understanding of Thermidor he
can distance himself from those who were his enemies
in the early 1920s (the right and the centre) and those
who later became his allies (Zinoviev).
The new position also holds out an olive branch to the
Workers Opposition and the democratic Centralists. With
both groupings dying in the gulags together with his own
supporters, Trotsky comes to agree with their line of call-
ing for a new revolution but he does so without conced-
ing to the earlier and more consistent oppositionists that
they were right at any previous stage of the struggle.
Last but not least Lenin died in early 1924. If Thermidor
began in that year then it began after Lenins death. He
cannot be implicated in any aspect of the degeneration
of the Russian Revolution. As Trotsky puts it:
A second stroke and then death, prevented him from
measuring forces with this internal reaction [the Stalin
faction].
11
So, although Trotskys revised understanding of Ther-
midor is neat and, in some aspects, correct, it leaves unan-
swered the cardinal question of the degeneration of the
Russian Revolution: how was Stalin able to accomplish
Thermidor in 1924?
In France the Robespierre faction had alienated itself
from the masses outside of a shrinking base in Paris and
from both the Jacobin left and right. no one came to the
town hall to defend Robespierre and St Just. The faction
fell to the Thermidorians because there was no one left to
support it. It could not win without the masses, or at least
a section of them. It could not win without the Jacobins,
or at least a section of them.
Was Trotsky or the Opposition in this position in 1924?
no he was still an infuential fgure and the opposition
had real support inside the party and the army. That is
why Stalin could defame it but could not repress it. It
was why, at the end of the 13th congress in 1924 Stalin
comments, following his victory over the opposition, that
the attitude towards those now coming back to the party
from the ranks of the opposition should be an exception-
ally comradely one. every measure must be taken to help
them come over to the basic core of the Party and work
jointly and in harmony with this core.
12
The political defeat of the Opposition at the 13th Con-
gress was a peaceful affair. no one was killed and Trotsky
was not expelled from the party or arrested. Of course
Stalin was lying through his teeth regarding his com-
radely offer. He was busy consolidating the rule of the
bureaucracy and Trotsky was a real obstacle and had to
be removed. But, not until three years later.
Indeed while Trotsky was relieved of his position as
Commissar for War, he carried on in high offce after the
13th congress. And within two years Trotsky was able to
launch a second factional struggle via the United Opposi-
tion. Robespierre, by contrast, was executed the day after
Thermidor!
Perhaps most importantly, if 1924 was the year of
The political defeat of the Opposition at
the 13th Congress was a peaceful affair.
No one was killed and Trotsky was not
expelled from the party or arrested
Summer 2010 / page 35
Thermidor then it is time to recognise that Trotsky was
implicated in carrying it through implicated by his refusal
to stigmatise the bureaucracy as the major enemy of the
working class and fght it by revolutionary means; impli-
cated by his tactical denunciation of his own interna-
tional supporters, eastman, Rosmer and Monatte; impli-
cated by his open and outright defence of the suppression
of party democracy with statements such as this at the
13th party Congress in May 1924:
. . . party democracy in no way implies freedom for
factional groupings, which are extremely dangerous for
the ruling party, since they always threaten to split or
divide the government and the state apparatus as a whole. I
believe this is undisputed and indisputable. And we unani-
mously agreed to cite the resolution of the Tenth Congress,
where Vladimir Ilyich personally defned both factions and
groupings and explained the political danger they entail
. . . it is suffcient as far as a statement for the record is
concerned to say that I have never recognised freedom
for groupings inside the party nor do I now recognise it
because under present historical conditions groupings
are merely another name for factions.
13
In other words, if 1924 was the year of Thermidor then
Trotsky was a Thermidorian.
The balance sheet of Bolshevism, 1917-21
To best understand the specifc character of the Soviet
Thermidor of March 1921 it is necessary to compare some
key moments in the evolution of the party between 1917
and 1920 with the events of 1921. This survey of Bolshe-
vism is far from being a complete or exhaustive balance
sheet. But it does illustrate the difference in the party
before and after 1921.
The Central Committee on the eve of the October insur-
rection in 1917, was confronted with the demand from
Lenin that it expel Zinoviev and Kamenev from the party
for publicising and criticising the partys plans for insur-
rection. What is remarkable about this event is that, at
its meeting on 20 October 1917, the Central Committee
refused to accede to Lenins demand. The charges against
Kamenev and Zinoviev were serious. Lenin called them
strike-breakers. The Central Committee did not approve of
their action but because it recognised the norm of public
debates between Bolsheviks, it restricted itself to accepting
Kamenevs resignation from the Committee and instruct-
ing both men to refrain from making any further public
statements on the dispute because of the sensitive nature
of the topic an armed rising.
This is hardly evidence, as the anarchists would have it,
of a party that is inherently authoritarian or simply the
pliant tool of one man. It is evidence of a party seething
with political life, will and energy in which decisions over
the fate of the revolution were debated amongst equals.
As Victor Serge commented:
They [Lenin and Trotsky] were only the frst among
comrades and they would have accorded a cold reception
to the dangerous imbecile who took it into his head to
place them above their comrades or above the party. The
life of the Politbureau and the Central Committee was
at all times collective. The party discussed, tendencies
appeared and disappeared and opposition elements, which
must not be confused with counter-revolutionists, agitated
unceasingly in broad daylight during the whole civil war
until 1921.
14
each major dispute followed this pattern. And this con-
founds the claims of the reformist opponents of Bolshevism,
especially the Mensheviks, that the Bolshevik coup of
October 1917 was in fact the start of a counter-revolution.
It wasnt. The Bolsheviks led a mass revolution. It had the
undisputed support of the majority of the working class.
The poor peasantry focked to support the revolution. The
revolution was both justifed and necessary.
Thermidor was not the refusal by the Bolshevik major-
ity to form a coalition government with other socialist
parties or the setting up of the Cheka in late 1917. Still
less was it the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in
January 1918.
The debate on the formation of a socialist coalition
after October 1917 is a good example of how the party
conducted itself in the state and internally. It followed
the pattern of the pre-revolutionary debates within the
Bolshevik Party, open, honest and fearless on the part
of all protagonists. Lenin frmly opposed any coalition
with the Mensheviks and the SRs (as distinct from the
Left SRs who had now split with their party and formed
a distinct group).
Kamenev, pursuing his pre-rising position of calling for
a government of all the socialist parties, refused a demand
from Lenin that he cease publicly arguing for his position.
In the cross-party talks demanded by the Menshevik-led
All Russian Union of Railway Workers (Vikzhel), which
the Bolshevik Central Committee fully participated in,
Kamenev was a key negotiator for the Bolsheviks despite
his open opposition to Lenins line of rejection of a broad
socialist coalition.
Perhaps though, Lenins rejection of a broad Soviet
government was an indication of his desire to establish
monolithic power for the Bolsheviks as early as november
1917? Such a view is commonly held by reformists but it
is fatly contradicted by one pertinent fact: it was not the
Bolsheviks who rejected a coalition, it was the Menshe-
viks and the Right SRs.
In the Vikzhel negotiations the Bolshevik position was
in favour of a coalition but only of one by parties that rec-
ognised the decision of the Second All Russian Congress
of Soviets to assume all power in the immediate after-
math of the 23 October rising by the Bolshevik-led Mili-
tary Revolutionary Committee. It is eminently reasonable,
then, to expect all parties represented within the Soviet
to comprise such a coalition government, especially as
The debate on the formation of a
socialist coalition after October 1917 is a
good example of how the party conducted
itself in the state and internally
page 36 / permanentrevolution
1
Theory / Trotsky and Thermidor
the Bolsheviks had a clear majority within the second
congress. A proposal for such a coalition was advanced
by the Bolshevik Party.
The Mensheviks and the SRs who had walked out of
the second congress and refused to recognise its legiti-
macy demanded as the pre-condition for any coalition
the absolute exclusion of the Bolsheviks. They made clear
that the Bolshevik leaders, and especially Lenin and Trot-
sky, would be put on trial for carrying out the revolution.
In short these reformists demanded that the revolution
be turned back and that the leaders of the working class
be put on trial.
As one account of the negotiations records regarding
the failure to create a coalition government:
More important, however, is at the frst two Vikzhel
plenary meetings and in the meeting of the Special Com-
mission on 30 October, the Mensheviks and the SRs stymied
all efforts at compromise by insisting that the Bolsheviks
be eliminated from the government altogether.
15
This position changed under pressure from the work-
ing class, but throughout the negotiations the reformists
demanded the exclusion of Lenin and Trotsky from any
socialist coalition government.
Lenin attacked the very idea of a coalition and fought
for his line in the party at one point threatening a split
if he lost but at no point did he propose that the struggle
between the conficting positions be suppressed within
the party. Indeed it was even conducted semi-publicly.
This was typical of the Bolshevik Party in this period. It
was also typical of the openness of political life in the
early days of the Soviet State.
Indeed the debate over the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty
which Lenin fought to get accepted against massive
opposition from within the party was an even more
poignant indication that Thermidor was a long way off.
The Left Communist faction, in alliance with the Left
SRs, fought to within an inch of victory to oppose the
peace, to wage a revolutionary defence of the country
and to appeal directly to the european workers for aid.
The leaders of the Left Communists included Bukharin
later a rightist demonstrating the fuidity that was
prevalent and acceptable amongst Bolshevik cadres in
the days before Thermidor. The Left published a paper
and organised their own fraction in the soviets.
And in the debate over the peace they were able to
put their own position forward to the working class. As
Rabinowitch recounts of one crucial Central Committee
meeting:
Lenin was prepared to go to the limit to keep the Left
Communists in the fold. early in this part of the meet-
ing, when Lomov asked Lenin if he would allow the left
to agitate against the peace, Lenin quickly answered yes.
Moreover, Lenin did not object when Sverdlov, near the
end of this discussion, tacitly accepted Uritskiis offer to
delay the resignations [of the left leaders] if he and his
colleagues were given full freedom to lobby and even vote
no to the treaty in the CeC [the executive committee of
the All Russian Soviet].
16

The Left SRs split with the government over Brest-Lito-
vsk. The Left Communists did not. The Left SRs eventually
engaged in a series of terrorist acts designed to wreck the
peace and staged an attempt on Lenins life in the sum-
mer of 1918. But even though there was repression of the
Left SRs in July 1918 and the launch of the Red Terror in
August, there is no real evidence of Thermidorian reac-
tion taking place in the organisations of the working class
and the party itself during these events.
The Left SRs had taken up arms. This was increasingly
true of white guard elements in the cities. The revolution
under attack defended itself with vigour. But terror and
the use of force are not inherently counter-revolution-
ary. Far from it, they are essential weapons of the revolu-
tion. Which is why we do not equate the Red Terror with
Thermidor. And nor did the working class itself which, in
August 1917, was ahead of the Bolshevik Party in calling
for the Red Terror as a means of defending the revolution.
For example, following the assassination of one of the key
leaders of the Petrograd Soviet, Volodarskii, on 20 June
1918, Rabinowitchs reports:
Also on the morning of 21 June a stream of worker
delegations showed up at Zinovievs offce in Smolny to
demand immediate repression as retaliation for Volodar-
skiis killing so that revolutionary leaders would not be
cut down one at a time.
17

In the civil war that followed the summer of 1918,
excesses, centralisation, inevitable curbs on the norms
of every day working class democracy occurred but all
such events were generally acknowledged as deviations
caused by exceptional circumstances. They commanded
support amongst key sections of the working class and
the poor peasantry which in its majority supported the
struggle against the White armies.
Most importantly, all measures taken by the government
and the party remained open to challenge by organised
groups within the party. For example, at the height of
the war the Military Opposition debated questions of Red
Army organisation and democracy, over partisan meth-
ods of waging war and over the role and appointment of
military specialists (former Tsarist offcers).
Stalin had a hand in these disputes, urging a more
pro-party line against what he considered to be Trotskys
bureaucratic approach which made the specialists more
important than the party. But in the period december
1918 through to the eighth Party Congress in 1919 a public
debate was conducted in which prominent party members
wrote scathing articles directed against Trotskys military
policy in the press. For example, an article published in
Pravda, the party paper, by A Kamenskii, accused Trotsky
not merely of being wrong on the military question but
of executing party cadres.
Trotsky was furious at this, demanded that Pravda cease
Even as late as 1920 the debates that
shook Bolshevism and divided the
leadership into warring factions were
still profoundly democratic
Summer 2010 / page 37
printing such critical articles and that the Central Com-
mittee exonerate him from the charges levelled. While
the Central Committee did exonerate Trotsky, declare its
agreement with Trotskys military policy and go on to
censure Kamenskii for basing his accusation on insinu-
ations rather than facts, its resolution explicitly left the
door open to a public debate on the policy issues:
The fact that the responsibility for the policy of the
War Ministry is shared by the entire party as a body natu-
rally does not remove the right of individual members to
subject this policy to criticism, either of principle or of a
purely practical nature.
18
As in the debates over peace in connection with Brest
Litovsk, so in the ones over war during the civil war. While
the Red Army was locked in combat with the Whites, the
Bolshevik Party maintained a healthy, vibrant democracy
in which groups came together, organised, fought, won,
lost, dissolved and regrouped without any decisive nega-
tive impact on the fate of the revolution.
even as late as 1920 when the bureaucracy of the party
had increased in both size and infuence the debates that
shook Bolshevism and divided the leadership into war-
ring factions over the issue of the militarisation of labour
(and later that year over the role of the trade unions in a
workers state) were still profoundly democratic. Arthur
Ransome was a frst hand witness inside Russia in early
1920 when the debate over the militarisation of labour
took place around theses originally drafted by Trotsky.
Ransome says: . . . the discussion was not limited to the
newspapers or to the commission. The issue was discussed
in Soviets and conferences of every kind all over the coun-
try.
19
Ransome was also witness to a debate between Radek
and Larin at a large conference of Communist Party mem-
bers in March 1920 on the same issue. After exhaustive,
comradely but ferce debate Radek won the day, but the
conference insisted on electing Larin as one of their del-
egates to the all-Russian conference despite his own ini-
tial resistance.
20
These debates refected not merely the
goodwill of the Bolshevik leaders. They refected the liv-
ing democratic spirit that had made the revolution in
the frst place.
Closing down party democracy
The question was how could this spirit be maintained
and then put to good use during the reconstruction
period that would follow the war, given the context of
the destruction of the working class itself as a result of
the huge efforts made to take the revolution forward and
win the civil war, and the consequent decline of its organs
of direct democracy.
Lenin and Trotsky both commented at various points
during the civil war and Red Terror that the erosion of the
democratic organs of the workers state meant that the dic-
tatorship of the proletariat had assumed the form of the
dictatorship of the party. This was far from desirable and
in the long term could not provide a model for the develop-
ment of a healthy workers state, let alone socialism.
The dictatorship of the party in the name of a class is
an absurdity from the point of view of the fundamental
revolutionary principle that the liberation of the work-
ing class shall be carried through by the class itself. Any
party has to be subordinate to the class not the other
way round. And under the rule of the working class sub-
ordinate has to mean accountable to the mass democratic
organs of the working class and capable of being recalled
(i.e. removed from offce as a government party) by those
organs.
To ensure that the route to such a goal could be kept
open it was absolutely essential that the party that had
been temporarily entrusted with stewardship on behalf of
the workers of the dictatorship of the proletariat, should
maintain the highest levels of internal democracy, keep
open the possibility of the renewal and change of lead-
ership, and be allowed to refect the moods and trends
of the working class so that as it revived that class could
once again exercise direct control of its fate through its
own recreated organs of democracy.
The most important lesson from this period of Soviet
history was that the partys democracy needed to be main-
tained above all else because this democracy was the last
vestige of the commune type state by 1921 and the last
active means of regenerating that commune type state.
By 1922 Lenin recognised that what existed in Russia
was not a workers state ruled by soviets but the same
Russian apparatus we took over from Tsarism, only superf-
cially anointed with the holy soviet oil.
21
Another observer
quoted by Anweiler refers to the soviets after 1918 as
silent walk-on players.
22
This was a million miles from
the state Lenin had both envisaged and tried to create in
1917 when he wrote State and Revolution as a libertarian
doctrinal birth certifcate as Marcel Liebman calls it,
for the Soviet state.
23
This being the case renewal via the soviets themselves
was not an option. It had to come from the one remaining
institution that still lived and breathed with revolution-
ary energy the party. That the party was still alive and
still capable of regenerating the revolution was demon-
strated by the formation of two powerful and infuential
oppositions in 1920 and 1921. The democratic Centralists,
led by V V Osinsky, and the Workers Opposition, led by
Kollontai and Shliapnikov. Both came into existence in
this period to fght the growing trend towards bureauc-
ratisation and centralisation and to fght the Bolshevik
leadership Lenin and Trotsky included who seemed
to favour this trend. Both oppositions commanded seri-
ous support in the party rank and fle and in the wider
working class.
Miasnikov, a determined Bolshevik and opponent of
bureaucratism, argued positions very similar to these
two oppositions throughout 1920 and 1921. He went on
That the party was still alive and still
capable of regenerating the revolution
was demonstrated by the formation of
two powerful and infuential oppositions
page 38 / permanentrevolution
1
Theory / Trotsky and Thermidor
to organise a clandestine group to oppose bureaucratism,
The Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party.
For this crime he was arrested by the GPU on 25 May
1923 and then exiled.
This action against Miasnikov was the logical result
of the positions taken in 1921 by Lenin and the party
leadership on party unity and the prohibition of fac-
tions in the party. It was living proof that Thermidor
had happened.
In the French Revolution the targets of Thermidor were
the radical Jacobin faction around Robespierre and St Just,
local democracy in the Paris city government and the
democratic parliament, the Convention.
In the Russian revolution by 1921, outside of Kronstadt,
no real Soviets existed. Local government too was utterly
tied to the rule of the local party organisations across the
whole country. Thermidor did not have to attack working
class democracy. But the Red Jacobins the representa-
tives of the legacy of October 1917 and the struggle to
build a commune type state and an economy run by the
workers rather than the party the Workers Opposition
and the democratic Centralists did exist.
How could their programme for reform of the state
be blocked? By a monolithic party that could crush all
opposition in the name of defending the socialist moth-
erland. The Soviet Thermidors specifc character was to
create such a party.
So you are saying Lenin led to Stalin!
Thermidor occurred in Russia in 1921. The political
counter-revolution took place inside the Bolshevik Party.
It was led by Lenin, supported by Trotsky and executed by
Stalin. The possibility of revolutionary advance through
the Bolshevik Party was eliminated.
Specifcally Thermidor comprised: the formal decisions
of the 10th Communist Party Congress banning factions
in the party; the suppression of the Kronstadt rising and
the excuses given for that suppression; the massive expan-
sion of the central apparatus of the party and its elevation
to a position of absolute control on all party matters and
increasingly many government ones too; and, on the back
of this bureaucratisation, the demonising and destruc-
tion through a system of expulsion and internal exile,
of the left Bolsheviks, the Workers Opposition and the
democratic Centralists in 1921 and then in 1923 through
the direct intervention of the GPU, the secret police, into
party political disputes with the police attack on Mias-
nikovs Workers Group.
The introduction of the new economic Policy (neP) by
Lenin, without any decision by a party or soviet congress
approving this policy, was the pretext for the carrying out
of these actions. Lenin wanted, as he put it, to ensure that
there was an orderly retreat (from war communism) as
many of the norms of capitalist economic activity were
reintroduced under neP.
The international context of this retreat was the ebbing
of the revolutionary wave in Western europe, after the end
of the Russian-Polish war in which Russia ended up effec-
tively losing. Lenin, who had tied the fate of the Russian
Revolution to the success of the international revolution,
was now determined to maintain the rule of the Bolshevik
Party to maintain its state power. His motivation seemed
honourable and understandable never give up.
But history is shaped by action not by the motivation
for such action. In 1917 Lenins action was to fght for
the party to put itself at the head of the revolution so as
to lead a class to victory. The effect was overwhelmingly
positive in demonstrating the historic viability of work-
ing class revolution and working class political rule. In
1921 Lenins actions created the conditions for a party
regime which could rule unchallenged from within or
without. On the back of this regime Stalins fast develop-
ing bureaucracy could thrive and prosper.
In the absence of any external checks on the Bolshe-
vik Partys apparatus via genuine soviets, internal checks
were of supreme importance for the fate of the revolu-
tion. Thermidor involved the fnal elimination of those
internal party checks and opened the door for Stalins rise
to power. Lenins ban on factions and demand for unity
of the party at the expense of any meaningful internal
political struggles was Stalins most powerful weapon
in the following decade. In the name of party unity he
completed the destruction of the party as a revolutionary
instrument. As Trotsky put it:
However, what was in its original design merely a nec-
essary concession to a diffcult situation, proved perfectly
suited to the taste of the bureaucracy, which had then begun
to approach the inner life of the party exclusively from
the viewpoint of convenience in administration.
24
The background to the action taken by the Bolshevik
leaders in 1921 was the objective development of the rev-
olution the famine in the country, the revolts by the
peasantry, the strikes and political unrest, the ebbing of
the revolutionary wave across europe, the crisis in the
institutions of both party and state.
But while objective factors are crucial, the subjective
factor, the human agency acting on and shaping the objec-
tive, is of enormous importance, particularly in a working
class revolution where the importance of consciousness
that is, awareness of what you are doing and why is so
pivotal. It represents that most fundamental of Marxist
precepts action. If everything is objectively determined
then we need not bother with action. But because it isnt
human action plays a pivotal role in history.
In this case the actions taken by Lenin, Trotsky and
Stalin resulted in a dramatic reversal for both the Russian
Revolution and the world revolutionary movement. The
fnal historical consequence of this, was the restoration
of capitalism in the 1990s.
It should not surprise us that those closest to making
The subjective factor, the human agency
acting on and shaping the objective,
is of enormous importance, particularly
in a working class revolution
Summer 2010 / page 39
the revolution were also those who arrested its further
development. In July 1794 the leaders of Thermidor, such
as Carnot, were veterans of revolutionary struggle. Car-
not had founded the revolutionary army and was on the
Committee of Public Safety with Robespierre.
In May 1649 Cromwell, who consistently refrained from
compromise with the monarchy and pushed aside those
who favoured such compromise, liquidated the left wing
Levellers saying of his former allies:
I tell you sir you have no other way to deal with these
men but to break them or they will break you . . . To be
broken and routed by such a despicable, contemptible
generation of men [is unthinkable].
25
In March 1921 it was Lenin, the architect in chief of the
October Revolution, who introduced the fateful resolu-
tion destroying meaningful democracy in the Bolshevik
Party, the resolution on party unity. The violence that
accompanied this political Thermidorian action was the
suppression of the Kronstadt rising. The promise of future
reaction was Lenins threats to oppositionists in the party
who chose to oppose the party line.
The oppositionists of the time the Workers Opposi-
tion and the democratic Centralists were not executed.
All out bureaucratic terror came later in the Russian case
during the 1930s when Stalin was consolidating his posi-
tion as the Soviet Bonaparte (Shliapnikov, for example, was
executed by Stalin in 1937). But the oppositions of 1921
were destroyed as effective groupings within the party,
as potential alternative leaderships, by administrative,
and even as early as 1923, by police means.
The ability of the party leadership to carry through
the isolation and destruction of an opposition with the
authority of the whole party behind it directly paved the
way for Stalin. The demonisation of opposition per se was
crucial in enabling him to exercise increasingly arbitrary
control over the party and destroy all later oppositions
that surfaced to the rule of his apparatus.
Stalins control of the apparatus had evolved since the
seventh congress of 1918. That congress where Brest-
Litovsk was debated was a high water mark of internal
democracy. In 1919 his power had started to develop, on
the back of decisions at the eighth congress, to create
Organisational and Political Bureaus. Initially these bod-
ies were seen as purely administrative arms of the Central
Committee. But they came, eventually, to replace that com-
mittee in terms of power and authority. decisions made
at the Orgburo and Politburo were routinely rubber
stamped by a hand-picked Central Committee.
In 1920, despite criticism by the democratic Centralists
of the drift towards bureaucratism and party rule, the
Secretariat the body that became Stalins key means of
controlling the party was given a permanent staff. Fol-
lowing the trade union debate the last genuine demo-
cratic debate of Bolshevism in the winter of 1920 at the
congress of 1921 the old Bolshevik Secretariat of Krestinksy,
Preobrazensky and Serebriakov was ousted (they were
thrown off the Central Committee too) and replaced by
Stalins men, Molotov, Yaroslavsky and Mikhailov.
Their elevation was accompanied by increased infu-
ence in the party as they now had a staff that had grown
from 30 when the Secretariat was set up in 1919, to 602
in 1921. It even had its own military detachment of 140.
And Stalin had control over the allocation of cadres to
areas of party work control that gave him the power to
shift men and women around as though they were chess
pieces. It also gave him the power to use party postings as
a bureaucratic weapon a form of exile for anyone who
proved recalcitrant.
On the eve of the 10th congress the Bolshevik Party
was primed for bureaucratic rule. despite his later regrets
Lenin furnished the apparatus with the means to achieve
this objective. In the frst battle with Trotskyism, Stalin
was able to use Lenin and the Tenth Congress to compro-
mise his new opponent, weaken him and isolate him.
When Preobrazhenskys 1923 Opposition, which Trotsky
really led, cited the democratism of pre-1921 Bolshevism
Stalin retorted:
What, indeed, does Preobrazhensky propose? He pro-
poses nothing more nor less than a reversion to Party life
on the lines of 1917-18. What distinguished the years
1917-18 in this respect? The fact that, at that time, we had
groups and factions in our Party, that there was an open
fght between the groups at that time, that the Party was
then passing through a critical period, during which its
fate hung in the balance.
Preobrazhensky is demanding that this state of affairs
in the Party, a state of affairs that was abolished by the
Tenth Congress, should be restored, at least partly. Can
the Party take this path? no, it cannot. Firstly, because
the restoration of Party life on the lines that existed in
1917-18, when there was no neP, does not, and cannot,
meet the Partys needs under the conditions prevailing
in 1923, when there is the neP. Secondly, because the
restoration of the former situation of factional struggle
would inevitably result in the disruption of Party unity,
especially now that Comrade Lenin is absent.
Preobrazhensky is inclined to depict the conditions
of internal Party life in 1917-18 as something desirable
and ideal. But we know of a great many dark sides of this
period of internal Party life, which caused the Party very
severe shocks.
26
And Trotsky could hardly disagree with a word of
this.
Lenins crisis in 1921
What then caused Thermidor in 1921?
In england in 1649 it was fear of the left mounting
an attack. In France in 1794 it was fear that the continu-
ation of the terror would lead to the mutual ruin of the
contending factions. In Russia in 1921 it was the fact that
In the frst battle with Trotskyism,
Stalin was able to use Lenin and the
Tenth Congress to compromise his new
opponent, weaken him and isolate him
page 40 / permanentrevolution
1
Theory / Trotsky and Thermidor
Lenin decided to switch from war communism to state
capitalism and retreat on all fronts, from revolution back
towards the idea of taking Russia through a capitalist
stage of development.
In taking such a dramatic step backwards Lenin was
accepting the need for Bolshevism to retreat, but did not
accept the need for Bolshevism to make itself account-
able. Retreat became entwined with the maintenance of
Bolshevik power despite the fact that what had withered
from 1917 was not the capitalist state machine but the
organs of the workers state.
For a long time debates have centred on whether or not
neP was a correct move and whether or not the criticisms
of the Workers Opposition and others were utopian given
the overriding need to get Russia operating economically
so that it could feed and clothe its people.
This is a fair assessment but also misses the point,
the central point of working class revolution: namely,
that such decisions need to be made by a working class
through its democratic state organs and not by a tiny
central committee faction acting on behalf of the work-
ing class. Victor Serge expressed the point brilliantly when
he wrote in an article called Centralisation and Jacobin-
ism around this time:
Centralisation. Agreed. But not of an authoritarian
type. We may have recourse to the latter from necessity
but never from principle. The only revolutionary form of
organisation is: free association, federation, co-ordination.
It does not exclude the centralisation of skills and infor-
mation; it excludes only the centralisation of power, that
is, of arbitrariness, of coercion, of abuse. It must spring
from the masses and not be sent down to them in order
to control them.
27
Lenin and his closest supporters, including Trotsky, in
the name of defending soviet power which was a mere
phrase chose centralisation from above. They introduced
neP it was not even subject to a party or soviet vote. In
doing so Lenin recognised the need to close down avenues
of democratic debate in the last body within the workers
state that allowed them the party because if such ave-
nues were left open enemies not only of Bolshevism but of
working class revolution would march down them.
Lenin knew that neP, with its free market and its encour-
agement of enterprise, posed such a danger. He knew that
it was a massive retreat. But he felt that the combination
of neP and a monolithic party could just about pull the
country through its crisis. Perhaps in the future the work-
ers could, in Lenins words, be trained to rule. At the
moment that option did not exist.
The programme of State and Revolution had already
been neutered by the demands of civil war. now the pro-
gramme of inner party democracy, the programme that had
forged the Bolshevik Party, enabled it to win leadership of
the workers, make a revolution and win a civil war was
about to be neutered too, not by objective forces but by the
Bolshevik leadership with Lenin in the vanguard.
Lenin, in his writings and speeches in this period,
was crystal clear. In the Party Crisis in January 1921
he summed up the preceding debate in the leadership over
the militarisation of labour and the role of the unions
by pointing to this and that mistake on all sides but by
arguing in relation to the Workers Opposition that its
positions represented a break with communism:
This is a clean break with communism and a transition
to syndicalism. It is, in essence, a repetition of Shliapnik-
ovs unionise the state slogan, and means transferring
the Supreme economic Council apparatus piecemeal to
the respective trade unions . . .
Communism says: The Communist Party, the vanguard
of the proletariat, leads the non-Party workers masses,
educating, preparing, teaching and training the masses
(school of communism) frst the workers and then the
peasants to enable them eventually to concentrate in
their hands the administration of the whole national
economy.
Syndicalism hands over to the mass of non-Party
workers, who are compartmentalised in the industries,
the management of their industries (the chief adminis-
trations and central boards), thereby making the Party
superfuous, and failing to carry on a sustained campaign
either in training the masses or in actually concentrat-
ing in their hands the management of the whole national
economy.
28
By describing party members as syndicalists and by
counterposing them to communism Lenin has made clear
there cannot be room for both. It was only a short step
from this description of the party crisis to resolving it by
banning such opposition altogether. In his opening speech
to the Tenth Congress this is exactly what Lenin did. In
his opening speech to the congress Lenin said:
You, comrades, cannot fail to be aware that all our
enemies and their name is legion in all their innu-
merable press organs abroad repeat, elaborate and mul-
tiply the same wild rumour that our bourgeois and petit
bourgeois enemies spread here inside the Soviet Republic,
namely: discussion means disputes; disputes mean discord;
discord means that the Communists have become weak;
press hard, seize the opportunity, take advantage of their
weakening. This has become the slogan of the hostile world.
We must not forget this for a moment. Our task now is to
show that, to whatever extent we have allowed ourselves
this luxury in the past, whether rightly or wrongly, we
must emerge from this situation in such a way that, hav-
ing properly examined the extraordinary abundance of
platforms, shades, slight shades and almost slight shades
of opinion, that have been formulated and discussed, we
at our Party Congress could say to ourselves: at all events,
whatever form the discussion has taken up to now, how-
ever much we have argued among ourselves and we are
confronted with so many enemies the task of the dicta-
torship of the proletariat in a peasant country is so vast
The survival of Bolshevik rule had
replaced the abolition of capitalism and
the withering away of the capitalist state
as the short term programme of the party
Summer 2010 / page 41
and diffcult that formal cohesion is far from enough.
(Your presence here at the Congress is a sign that we have
that much.) Our efforts should be more united and har-
monious than ever before; there should not be the slight-
est trace of factionalism whatever its manifestations
in the past. That we must not have on any account. That
is the only condition on which we shall accomplish the
immense tasks that confront us. I am sure that I express
the intention and frm resolve of all of you when I say: at
all events, the end of this Congress must fnd our Party
stronger, more harmonious, and more sincerely united
than ever before. (Applause)
29
This is not the Lenin of 1917. This is not the Lenin of
the revolution. This is a Lenin who, on the back of the
defeat of his Polish war and the receding prospects of
international revolution, had decided that only the party
united around his platform, by bureaucratic force if need
be, could maintain Bolshevik rule. And the survival of
Bolshevik rule had replaced the abolition of capitalism
and the withering away of the capitalist state as the short
term programme of the party. By July 1921, with neP well
underway, Lenin was explicit about this. Bolshevik rule
was what he was now fghting to preserve. Socialism was
something that would happen later:
We tell the peasants quite openly that they must choose
between the rule of the bourgeoisie and the rule of the
Bolsheviks in which case we shall make every possible
concession [to the free market and the peasantry] within
the limits of retaining power, and later we shall lead them
to socialism. everything else is deception and pure dema-
gogy. Ruthless war must be declared against this decep-
tion and demagogy.
30
Or to put it another way disagree with Bolshevik rule
and we will wage ruthless war on you as we have now
done to the Workers Opposition. The language is Thermi-
dorian, not revolutionary. The actions taken were utterly
destructive of all remaining revolutionary energy, will
and determination in the country. The revolution had
turned on itself.
What Lenin created in 1921 was party rule. And in
circumstances where all other parties had been made
illegal by that year, where all channels of political com-
munication were dominated by the state and where the
state organs could only operate on the say so of the party
the potential triumph of the Stalinist regime had received
a major boost. The fear of discussion, dispute and opposi-
tion that Lenin articulated in March 1921, that was repre-
sented by the crushing of Kronstadt and that in a matter
of months was transformed into the political persecution
of the Workers Opposition by Lenin, was a call on the
evolving bureaucracy to replace the weapon of criticism
within the party with the criticism of weapons.
Actually, it is best to let Lenin state what he felt needed
to be done with one of the leaders of the Workers Opposi-
tion, Shliapnikov following the debate:
Why is Shliapnikov not prosecuted for making such
statements? Are we seriously discussing discipline and
unity in an organised Party, or are we at a meeting of the
Kronstadt type? For his is a Kronstadt, anarchist type of
statement, to which the response is a gun.
31
And within less than two decades Lenins wish was
granted by Stalin all criticism of the leadership of the
party or state was dealt with by the gun. And the legacy
was a revolution destroyed by a parasitic bureaucracy, a
workers movement corrupted by the malpractice that for
Stalinism was the norm, the effcient means of getting
the job done, and a revolutionary tradition tainted by its
refusal to face up to the fact that Lenin, and Trotsky were
responsible for these world historic errors.
neP may well have been necessary in the circumstances
but it was an almighty concession to capitalism by a work-
ers state that no longer had the majority support of the
working class. It was a gamble and would only succeed if
the party could use it to regenerate soviet life and take it
back to the glory days of 1918 and to the precepts of The
State and Revolution.
The party now less than 50% working class in its com-
position chose the opposite path. It chose to close the
possibility of regeneration and open the door to bureau-
cratic degeneration, causing Serge to note:
The state of siege had now entered the party itself,
which was increasingly run from the top, by the Secre-
taries. We were at a loss to fnd a remedy for this bureau-
cratisation: we knew that the party had been invaded by
careerist, adventurist and mercenary elements who came
over in swarms to the side that had the power.
32
The secretaries all bowed before one man the general
secretary, Stalin who was in his all powerful position
courtesy of the decisions of the tenth congress.
In September 1927 Stalin demonstrated a better under-
standing of the signifcance of 1921 than Trotsky. during
a thoroughly ignorant, impudent and apolitical assault on
Trotsky in which he repeatedly labelled him as a down-
at-heel party aristocrat at the International Control Com-
mission of the Communist International, Stalin stated:
Trotsky tries to make it appear that the present regime
in the party, which is opposed by the entire opposition,
is something fundamentally different from the regime
that was established in the Party in Lenins time. He wants
to make it appear that he has no objection to the regime
established by Lenin after the Tenth Congress but that,
strictly speaking, he is fghting the present regime in the
party which, he claims, has nothing in common with
the regime established by Lenin. I assert that here Trot-
sky is uttering a plain untruth. I assert that the present
regime in the party is an exact expression of the regime
that was established in the party in Lenins time, at the
Tenth and eleventh Congresses of our party. I assert that
Trotsky is fghting the Leninist regime in the party, the
regime that was established in Lenins time, and under
Lenins guidance . . . What are the underlying principles
The secretaries all bowed before one man
the general secretary, Stalin who was
in his all powerful position courtesy of
the decisions of the tenth congress
page 42 / permanentrevolution
1
Theory / Trotsky and Thermidor
of that regime? . . . no factionalism whatsoever can be
permitted, and all factionalism must be abandoned on
pain of expulsion from the party. When was this regime
established? At the Tenth and eleventh Congress of our
Party, that is, in Lenins time.
33
And that was why Stalin was able to isolate Trotsky
with such terrible consequences for revolutionary social-
ism. His case was plausible because it was Lenin who set
up the regime and all later attempts to claim what Lenin
might or might not have said in the light of Stalins use
of this new prohibition on party democracy are utterly
irrelevant. What happened, happened.
Lenin and Trotsky rebel . . . too late
Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin justifed their actions of 1921
in very different terms to their forebears in the revolutions
of england and France. There was also another important
difference in how the three men reacted to the actions
they had authorised.
Lenin clearly, by the time of his frst illness in 1922,
regretted the consequence of his action. He tried to carry
out a campaign against Stalin, but was unable to partici-
pate in political life and had to rely on the good will of
others if his last struggle as it has been termed (against
the now blindingly obvious reactionary consequences of
1921) was to be carried into life.
But while this means he emerges with an element of
personal honour intact for his belated attempt to oust
Stalin, he is stained with political culpability for creating
the conditions that allowed Stalins rise in the frst place.
Lenin, in 1921, swung the party behind a fatal line. He
was never able to swing it away from this line.
Trotsky, in 1921, was semi-detached from daily life of
the Bolshevik Party leadership. His attention was focused
elsewhere on the army, on the railways, on the need for
organisation to counter the chaos of Russian society. As
Stalin never ceased reminding him Trotsky was an out-
sider in a party where being an insider, a member of the
old guard, counted for much.
It is possible that Trotsky was motivated to support
Thermidor in 1921 because he felt politically closer to
those tightening up society (Lenin and Stalin) than those
who stood frmly on the terrain of workers democracy
above all else (The Workers Opposition and the demo-
cratic Centralists). And this had the added advantage of
keeping him in with the old guard.
In addition, Trotskys whole experience in 1918-20 was
of leading the Red Army at the front and then pushing
through the militarisation of labour when the civil war
was won to aid economic reconstruction. It would have
been a natural progression for him to see the effective
militarisation of the party as a logical step to shore
up the political apparatus from the negative effects of
unleashing the market inside Russia.
But whatever his subjective motivation Trotsky, even
in 1936, defended the decision of the 10th Congress as a
necessary concession to a diffcult situation
34
The ban on factions meant that between 1921 and 1924
the expression of differences was driven beneath the sur-
face and became highly personalised. And as Trotsky began
to express differences with the old guard, especially after
Lenins death, Stalin hit back with his campaign against
Trotskyism. Trotsky was driven into opposition twice,
defeated twice and then cast into the wilderness of exile
from both his homeland and his party. His opposition to
Stalin in the 1930s was courageous, politically principled
but also, tragically, too late.
We identify ourselves politically with Trotsky not only
because of his many brilliant political insights but also
because he chose revolutionary honesty over bureaucratic
subservience. He revived the international revolutionary
left, however imperfectly, after his exile. But we can also
criticise him for his post-facto view that the start of Ther-
midor was at the point when he suffered his frst major
defeat 1924 rather than in 1921 when the party was
deprived of the means of renewing itself and its leader-
ship in a democratic and revolutionary fashion.
Stalin, in complete contrast to Lenin and Trotsky, saw
1921 as an opportunity to impose order. Stalin had long
believed that a socialist revolution was premature in Russia
(along with many other leading Bolsheviks). The chaos was a
product of Russias backwardness. The party had to become
the instrument to overcome that backwardness.
In 1921 Russia was plagued by social chaos, economic
dislocation and famine. The Communist Party and its
government, following the long civil war which brought
military victory, were isolated, lacking mass support and
deeply unpopular amongst sections of the population
which had previously been Bolshevik bastions, notably
Kronstadt. Outside Russia the prospect of international
revolution was receding.
These factors focused Stalins attention on the need for
order in the name of discipline. He recognised that the
state apparatus of repression which was supposedly a
temporary and emergency war measure could easily be
enmeshed with his own party apparatus. Thus fused this
bureaucracy could become a tool for stabilising society
and then wresting it out of backwardness.
Politically but only after Lenins death Stalin theoreti-
cally justifed his project under the banner of socialism
in one country. But it had little to do with socialism in
the sense of the economic emancipation of the working
class. It was principally a means of rapidly industrialis-
ing a backward peasant country while simultaneously
satisfying the bureaucracy that had arisen on the back
of the workers state.
Stalin never regretted executing the political counter-
revolution commencing in 1921. He triumphed as a result
of it and drove his country forward in terms of develop-
ment but backwards in terms of the revolution.
Whatever his subjective motivation Trotsky,
even in 1936, defended the decision of
the 10th Congress as a necessary
concession to a diffcult situation
Summer 2010 / page 43
Lenin and Trotsky whatever their later changes of
outlook and their regrets (and in Trotskys case his val-
iant struggle which led to his execution at Stalins hands)
made this triumph possible. To say otherwise is to indulge
in mysticism because it suggests Stalins triumph was
caused by purely objective factors and that the two most
signifcant and popular personalities of the revolution
may as well have not existed as far as his rise to power
is concerned.
Conclusion
Let me codify exactly what this article is saying so that
the precise elements of its revisionism are clear:
1
The Bolshevik Party led a successful working class revo-
lution in Russia commencing in October 1917
1
The ultimate fate of that revolution as Lenin always
recognised was tied up with the fate of the european-
wide revolution. International revolution had to come to
the aid of Russia or Russia would fall
1
By consolidating working class power through the early
months of 1918 and then through the civil war up to
1920, the Bolsheviks were rightly trying to keep the Rus-
sian Revolution alive and trying to use its continued exist-
ence as a means of rallying the international working
class to revolution
1
despite the inevitable erosion of everyday workers
democracy that was evident at times during the civil
war and that was a real threat to the revolution the
Bolshevik Party itself remained a fundamentally demo-
cratic organisation. Its survival as a democratic organisa-
tion was a pledge for the future of the revolution even
though the revolution was going through a stage of ter-
ror, one party rule and the growth of a dangerous level
of centralisation and bureaucratism in the state
1
The absence of soviets and any real vestiges of the
democracy that had been characteristic of the days
after October 1917 meant that the survival of party democ-
racy was vital for the future healthy development of the
revolution especially since, after the end of the war with
Poland, it became clear that the international revolution
was not on the short term agenda
1
The task of revolutionary Bolshevism in 1921 was there-
fore to preserve party democracy as a stepping stone
to reviving real soviet democracy
1
Instead of pursuing this road Lenin, supported by Trot-
sky, moved to curtail party democracy at the 1921 Tenth
Party Congress, specifcally identifying factions with coun-
ter-revolutionary dangers and therefore banning factions
within the party
1
From 1921 to 1923 Stalin was able to use his base within
the party apparatus to consolidate absolute control
over it and thereafter use that control to consolidate the
dictatorship of the bureaucracy. He was precisely able to
do this because of the decisions of the Tenth Party Con-
gress. This congress, not 1924, marked the beginning of
Thermidor
1
The Trotskyist lefts failure to confront this truth is a
fatal faw in its political dnA: its fundamental notion
of party organisation incorporates the Thermidorian
inheritance of 1921.
Our task is to rebuild a new revolutionary organisation
that recalls Bolshevisms heroic period. This was a time
when despite Tsarist repression, or the turmoil of revolu-
tion or even the daily crises of trying to win a civil war
with the whole imperialist world ranged against you, you
could still stand up at a party congress and say, comrades,
Lenin is talking rubbish lets organise a faction against
him and not get expelled for it.
ENDNOTES
1. The Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution, Leon Trotsky,
Pathfnder 1977, p113
2. See death Agony of the Fourth International, Irish Workers Group/
Workers Power, 1983, Chapters 1 and 2
3. Trotsky, The Transitional Programme, op cit, p113
4. Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-29) p264
5. Ibid, p274
6. Ibid, p293
7. Ibid, pp274-276
8. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Pathfnder 1974, p112
9. Leon Trotsky, Writings 1934-35, Pathfnder 1975, pp167-168
10. Ibid, p174
11. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op cit, p97
12. Stalin, On the Opposition, p104
13. Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1923-25,
pp155-156
14. Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, Pathfnder, 1973, p 22.
15. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, Indiana
University Press, 2008, p26
16. Ibid, p175
17. Ibid, p315
18. Francesco Benvenuti, The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 1918-
1922, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p85
19. A Ransome, The crisis in Russia 1920, Redwords 1982, p81
20. Ibid, pp45-55
21. Quoted in Oscar Anweiler, The Soviets, Pantheon Books, 1974,
p242
22. Ibid, p243
23. Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, Merlin Press, 1980,
p193
24. The Revolution Betrayed, op cit, pp96-97
25. Christopher Hill, Gods Englishmen, Penguin, 1972, p105
26. Stalin, On the Opposition, p36-37
27. Victor Serge, The Revolution in Danger, p105
28. V I Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 32, Lawrence and Wishart
(Progress Publishers) 1965, p43
29. V I Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 32, pp168-169
30. Lenin and Trotsky, Kronstadt, Pathfnder, 1979, p62
31. V I Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 32, p.206
32. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Oxford 1967, pp118-9
33. Stalin, On the Opposition, pp857-858
34. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op cit, p96