Will the Soviet bureaucracy ever clear Trotsky's name?

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SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1989 13 From March 3 to March 13 I was in Moscow as a member of a committee that went there to discuss with prominent anti-Stalinist intellectuals the prospects for clearing the name of Leon Trotsky and publishing his writings.

We also went to present to the government authorities a letter addressed to Gorbachev from Trotsky's grandson, Esteban (Seva) Volkov, and other surviving descendants that calls for Trotsky's exoneration and the publication of his work. We also presented a petition to the same effect from the U.S. Moscow Trials Campaign Committee, of which I am co-chair. [For more complete report on tour, see April 1989 issue of Socialist Action.] We presented the letter from Seva and the petition to Otto Latsis, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the deputy editor-in-chief of its theoretical magazine Kommunist.

Latsis told us that he regards the rehabilitation of Trotsky as inevitable, but that, because of political considerations, it will only come about as a result of a lengthy process. The publication of Trotsky's writing, he added, is a separate matter that can proceed independently of this rehabilitation. [See accompanying photo story.] Meeting with Medyedev We also saw Roy Medvedev, the historian who 20 years ago was expelled from the Communist Party for the publication in the West of his "Let History Judge," an analytical expose of Stalinism. Medvedev is now an influential figure, and his book will shortly be published in the Soviet Union.

He gave me the impression, as he does in his writing, of being an honest, learned, and independent man-but one who believes in measured reform handed down from above.

Medvedev stated that struggle around Trotsky's figure is just beginning, as his rehabilitation, unlike Bukharin's, is causing political problems. Nevertheless Deutscher's biography of Trotsky will be published with Otto Latsis speaks Otto Latsis, Central Committee member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and editor of Kommunist, its theoretical journal, met with our delegation and said he would bring our letters from the family of Leon Trotsky before the Central Committee of the CPSU.

The delegation asked Latsis for his opinion on the prospects for Trotsky's rehabilitation. He said, "As far as Trotsky being a spy, a murderer of Kirov, etc.—in these cases his rehabilitation is inevitable. But as far as political rehabilitation—this is something else." Latsis said that Trotsky's works must begin to be published independently of his rehabilitation.

When asked about recent Soviet articles on Trotsky, in particular a piece by General Dimitri Volkogonov that was filled with slanders against Trotsky, Latsis stated, "Even in Volkogonov's article there are some corrections from previous articles. Volkogonov reported facts on Trotsky's life which had been unpublished. This process will continue and we will get new information."

The "process" referred to by Latsis is tantamount to a second assassination of Leon Trotsky. The Soviet bureaucracy wants to ensure that Trotsky is "politically" dead before they allow his "rehabilitation." It is incapable of clearing Trotsky's name and restoring him to his rightful place in Soviet history.

That task is inseparable from the struggle to remove the parasitic bureaucracy and replace it with the direct rule of the Soviet masses through their own democratically elected councils. an introduction by Medvedev.

We heard from another source, Mikhail Marmer-Vilner, the husband of the granddaughter of Adolph Joffe, the Left Oppositionist and close friend of Trotsky, that at a public meeting Soviet historians present stated that Trotsky's "Literature and Revolution," "Revolutionary Portraits," and extracts from his biography of Stalin are scheduled to be published.

Evidently Trotsky's literary criticism and biographical studies are believed to be publishable now, but not his trenchant analysis and criticism of the growth of a privileged bureaucracy, to whose policies he was opposed. It is this to which Latsis and Medvedev were alluding when they spoke of the special problems connected with the rehabilitation of Trotsky.

It is easy to understand the authorities' hesitation about rehabilitating and publishing Trotsky in view of the intensity of anti-bureaucratic feeling that we observed. At a Congress of Peoples' Deputies electoral campaign meeting for Boris Yeltsin, the populist opponent of bureaucratic privilege who was demoted from his previous post, this feeling was manitestea. (see accompanying article by Ralph Schoenman on this meeting.] In view of this strong anti-bureaucratic feeling, Trotsky's rehabilitation must, as Medvedev phrased it, be "prepared." This is being done right now by such persons as General Dimitri Volkogonov, who is writing a biography of Stalin, for which purpose he has been granted use of archives to which no one else has been given access.

A second assassination Volkogonov has written in Pravda that the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky was purely personal and that Trotsky would have been just as bad as Stalin if he had won. Trotsky, he said, did not have "firm Marxist convictions" and attributed all the ills of Soviet society to a single person, Stalin.

The irony is that it is Volkogonov who writes in personal terms without social analysis; Trotsky always insisted that it was the isolation of a poor, backward country surrounded by capitalist enemies that produced the Soviet bureaucracy that was Stalin's social base.

Other articles in the Soviet press have been even more crass. An article in Sovietskaya Rossiia, for instance, attacked Trotsky with the ludicrous misrepresentations that Trotsky opposed anti-fascist struggle and worked to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union. It made use of anti-Semitic innuendo, giving his birthname, Bronstein, in parentheses, an old Stalinist trick to call attention to the Jewish origin of the person being written about.

Other newspapers made ill-disguised chauvinistic remarks about Trotsky such as "Trotsky is the man most alien to the Russian people and to Russian history."

This campaign might be called an attempt at a second assassination of Trotsky. Its purpose is to render him politically dead by the time he is finally rehabilitated.

When we raised the question of this campaign with Medvedev, his reply was that he disagrees with Volkogonov-although Medvedev has made clear that he does not accept Trotsky's political position-and that the official critics of Trotsky are ministering to anti-Semitism.

The reason that the authorities seem to be proceeding with plans to publish Trotsky, if only in selective, piecemeal fashion, is the great pressure from politically aware intellectuals that we observed.

Desire to read Trotsky Even those who are affected by the campaign against Trotsky share the desire to read Trotsky.

The young reporter from the Moscow News who interviewed us asked us one or two questions that echoed Volkogonov. He cited an article that appeared in Izvestia two or three days before that quoted Trotsky as opposing Lenin's New Economic Policy.

After Suzi Weissman, a member of our delegation, replied that actually Trotsky had been the first to propose a NEP, I made the point that one can prove anything by selective quotation and that this made more than ever necessary the publication Trotsky's works. He answered that he was in full agreement with us on this.

On a much less sophisticated political level, the woman who acted as our interpreter during the founding conference of the Moscow People's Front, which we attended, asked me a question that revealed the influence of Pamyat, the organization with pronounced anti-Semitic tendencies, although I don't think that she herself is anti-Semitic.

She described herself as one not knowledgeable about politics who had volunteered to interpret out of a desire to practice her English and to meet Americans. The question she asked was if it was true that Trotsky was a part of a secret Masonic conspiracy. * This question is obviously derived from Pamyat's charge that the Jews and the Masons are allied in a conspiracy against the Russian people. Yet she thought that Trotsky should be published.

In the maelstrom of competing ideas Trotskyism is bound to become a current that will grow in strength. Trotsky's perception of the direction in which the Soviet Union was going was remarkable in its prescience and must prove influential once people gain wide access to his work.

"A life-and-death need"

In "The Revolution Betrayed" Trotsky wrote:

"It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern by bureaucratic command—to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality....

"Under a nationalized economy quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers.... Behind the question of quality stands a more complicated and grandiose problem which may be compromised in the concept of independent, technical, and cultural creation.... Soviet democracy ... has become a life-and- death need of the country."

Superficially, this may seem to resemble much of what Gorbachev has been saying 50 years later, but this is a similarity of diagnosis, not of remedy. The Gorbachev reforms, coming from the top down, aim to streamline the bureaucracy, not to eliminate it as a specially privileged, self-perpetuating layer of the population.

This explains the halting and selfcontradictory character of the reforms, including the guaranteeing of one-third of the seats in the Congress of Peoples' Deputies to members of the party bureaucracy and the continuance of the one-party monopoly.

Bureaucratic reform must be bureaucratic in nature.

Trotsky, on the other hand, wrote: "Soviet democracy ... assumes revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of the Bolsheviks, and a resurrection of the trade unions."

He foresaw a political revolution that would retain the economic foundation of Soviet society, the nationalization of the means of production, but would completely renovate the political and cultural superstructure.

Such a renovation would affect every sphere of Soviet life, including the functioning of the economy, foreign policy, and policy toward the nationalities. Trotsky's ideas will help give direction to the widespread discontent among the masses of people. It is for this reason that the bureaucracy hates and fears them.

Carl Finamore/Socialist Action Roy Medvedev, prominent Soviet dissident and Marxist historian, met with our delegation and discussed the prospects for Trotsky's rehabilitation. He told us:

'In Stalin's time the god was Lenin, Stalin was his student, and the devil was Trotsky.... Trotsky and the Jews were blamed for the hardships of the revolution. People began to think that all the bad things from the revolution came because of Trotsky. All kinds of stories appeared.

"Today Trotsky has again been called the 'Demon of the Revolution' by people such as Volkogonov. The older generation who grew up on these tales cannot get free from the lies that Trotsky is the demon of the revolution, that because of him the revolution was not successful.

"But the real demon of the revolution is Stalin. The masses have heard nothing but lies about Trotsky for so long that the rehabilitation of Trotsky has many political problems.

"Today, with some of the articles on Trotsky, there's also an element of rehabilitation of Stalin: 'Stalin was a tyrant and repressed many people, but if Trotsky had come to power it would have been even worse.' This point of view is very widespread. I disagree with this view.

"The struggle around Trotsky is just beginning. In order to break free from these stereotypes we need time and preparation. It is more difficult to fight stories than real facts. But the struggle must start with the victory of historical

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Roy Medvedev speaks