Glasnost doesn't apply to role of Leon Trotsky

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10 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 1987 The following is a statement by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International dated Nov. 6, 1987. It is reprinted from the Nov. 23, 1987, issue of International Viewpoint magazine.

Mikhail Gorbachev's speech on Nov. 2, 1987, on the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution contained serious accusations against Leon Trotsky, who was chair of the Petrograd Soviet at the time of the revolution, chair of its Revolutionary Military Committee, responsible for the technical organization of the October 1917 insurrection, founder and leader of the Red Army, leading member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the USSR and of the Council of the People's Commissars for many years.

Of course, we do not challenge anybody's right to make an extremely critical judgment on the theoretical conceptions, the political opinions, and the organizational behavior of Leon Trotsky at different periods of his life. History will make the final judgment in this respect. No one—not even Stalin-could prevent this debate from taking place.

Stalin school of falsification Gorbachev's judgment on Leon Trotsky, however, uses well-known methods (curtailed quotations, untruths, and accusations flung out without a shadow of proof, etc.) from the school of historical falsification founded by Stalin.

These methods become obvious as soon as the statements are contrasted with the relevant documents.

Gorbachev says, "Trotsky... displayed excessive pretensions to top leadership in the party, thus fully confirming Lenin's opinion of him as an excessively self-assured politician who always vacillated and cheated."

This is obviously a reference-although not explicit, and we understand why not—to Lenin's letters to the 12th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, considered to be the testament of the founder of Bolshevism. Gorbachev refers to the same document in his judgment on Bukharin.

This testament, while it does reproach Trotsky for "excessive self-assurance and excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work," does not contain any of the other judgments evoked by Gorbachev. In fact, if one member of the party leadership could be accused • by Lenin of having "excessive pretensions to top leadership" and "vacillating and cheating, " it is Joseph Stalin himself, whom the testament proposed should be removed from his post of General Secretary.

Not only does Gorbachev hide this incontestable truth—he who considers, and this says everything, that Leninism triumphed in the party under the leadership of Stalin- but he also passes over the testament's judgment of Trotsky ("the most capable man in the central committee"). He thus makes totally incomprehensible the proposals made by Lenin to Trotsky in his last letters of a joint political fight at the 10th Congress of the Soviets and at the 12th Congress of the party.

Gorbachev adds, "Trotskyism was a political current whose ideologists took cover behind leftist pseudorevolutionary rhetoric, and in effect assumed a defeatist posture."

Accused of defeatism

This excommunication is pronounced without a single example of a "defeatist" position of Trotsky and Trotskyists. There is a very simple reason for this: there is none.

Was it "defeatist" to propose in 1923 a new course of democratization of the party and state, in terms which Gorbachev himself seems to be using in his present campaign for "democratization and glasnost in the USSR?

Was it "defeatist" to propose in 1923 a gradual industrialization of the Soviet Union which would have made it possible to spread over 10 years the effort of "socialist accumulation" that the country had to make in a rushed and bloody way (forced collectivization) between 1928 and 1933, at the cost of immense sacrifices inflicted on the population and terrible social and political tensions?

Was it "defeatist" to sound a warning in 1930 [after being exiled by Stalin] about the mortal danger represented by the rise of Nazism in Germany for the German working class, the USSR and for the world proletariat?

Was it "defeatist" to call insistently on the German Communist Party (KPD), the Communist International, and the workers to prevent Hitler from taking power through a correct united-front policy from top to bottom between the German Communist Party, the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD), and the trade unions?

Was it "defeatist" to denounce the terrible consequences of the 1937 purges for weakening the Red Army's capacity for action? To warn against Stalin's criminal confidence in the non-aggression pact signed with Hitler's Germany in 1939, which explains the lack of political and military preparation of the USSR for the Wehrmachts' invasion on June 22, 1941?

Gorbachev concluded, "It was essential to disprove Trotskyism before the whole people, and to lay bare its anti-socialist essence."

Once again an excommunication without being able to cite a single "anti-socialist" act or idea of Leon Trotsky. And for good reason: Trotsky remained until the last day of his life, despite everything, faithful to his convictions as a revolutionary Marxist, as a communist. Just as, despite everything, he maintained his position of unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism.

On the subject of Stalinist repression, Gorbachev states: "There are still attempts to turn away from painful matters in our history, to hush them up, to make right to judge on the basis of evidence and not on the basis of "truths" revealed by an official commission? Do they not have the right to see all the documents which support the different judgments on Trotsky and Stalin and the other party leaders in the period concerned?

Judge for themselves

If Gorbachev and the leadership of the Soviet CP are so sure that their positions are right, let them allow the mass publication of the works of leaders of the Bolshevik Party such as Trotsky, Bukharin, Preobrazhensky, and others! Let them give Soviet citizens the right of access to their own history!

Let them have the courage to accept a public debate in the USSR between historians of the October Revolution and of the Soviet state from the entire world! Let them publish for all their citizens Khrushchev's report to the 20th Congress, a report that to this day has remained "secret" in the USSR!

As the Soviet historian Yuri Afanasyev stated, "We are entirely dependent on the past, because it is on this past that our society, all its structures and ourselves were formed."

So, without glasnost the glasnost on the present!