Who is behind the ‘Trotskyist conspiracy?’

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S Front a couple of days ago [in November 2014], peaking at a meeting of his All-Russia People’s Vladimir Putin said, “Trotsky had this [saying]: the movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing. We need an ultimate aim.”

Eduard Bernstein’s proposition, misquoted and at­ tributed for some reason to Leon Trotsky, is prob­ ably the Russian president’s most common rhetorical standby. He has repeated it for many years to audienc­ es of journalists and functionaries while discussing social policy, construction delays at Olympics sites, or the dissatisfaction of the so-called creative class. “De­ mocracy is not anarchism and not Trotskyism,” Putin warned almost two years ago.

Putin’s anti-Trotskyist invectives do not depend on the context nor are they influenced by his audience, and much less are they veiled threats to the small po­ litical groups in Russia today who claim to be heirs of the Fourth International. Putin’s “Trotskyism” is of a different kind. Its causes are found not in the pres­ ent but in the past, buried deep in the political uncon­ scious of the last generation of the Soviet nomenkla­ tura.

The strange myth of the Trotskyist conspiracy, which emerged decades ago, in another age and a different country, has experienced a rebirth throughout Putin’s rule. Sensing, apparently, the president’s personal weakness for “Trotskyism,” obliging media and cor­ rupted experts have turned this Trotskyism into an integral part of the grand propaganda style.

Until he died, the indefatigable “Trotskyist” Boris Berezovsky spun his nasty web from London. Until he turned into a conservative patriot, the incendiary “Trotskyist” Eduard Limonov seduced young people with extremism. Camouflaged “Trotskyists” from the Bush and, later, the Obama administrations have con­ tinued to sow war and color revolutions. Unmasking “Trotskyists” has become such an important ritual that for good luck, as it were, the famous Dmitry Kise­ lyov decided to launch a new media resource by in­ voking it. So what is the history of this conspiracy? And what do Trotskyists have to do with it?

Conspiracy theories are always conservative by na­ ture. They do not offer an alternative assessment of events but, constantly tardy, chase behind them, in­ scribing them after the fact into their own pessimistic reading of history. Thus, in his “Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism” (1797), the Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel, a pioneer of modern conspiracy theory, situated the French Revolution, which had al­ ready taken place, in the catastrophic finale of a grand conspiracy of the Knights Templar against the Church and the Capetian dynasty.

Masonic conspiracy theories became truly powerful in the late 19th century, when the peak of the Masons’ power had already passed. Finally, the idea of a Jewish conspiracy acquired its final shape in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” fabricated by the tsarist secret police at the turn of the 20th century, when the power of Jewish finance capital had already been under­ mined by the rising power of industrial capital.

Conspiracy theories have always drawn energy from 10 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2015 this distorted link with reality, because the fewer conspirators one could observe in the real world, the more boldly one could endow them with incredible magical powers in the imaginary world.

In keeping with the reactive, belated nature of con­ spiracy theories, the myth of the Trotskyist conspir­ acy emerged in the Soviet Union when the Left Op­ position, Trotsky’s actual supporters, had long ago been destroyed. Unlike, however, the conspiracies of the past, generated by secret agents and mad men of letters, the foundations of the Trotskyist conspiracy were tidily laid by NKVD [the Stalinist secret police] investigators. The distorting mirror logic of the Great Terror dictated that, although the “Trotskyists” skill­ fully concealed themselves, and any person could prove to be one, the conspiracy must necessarily be exposed. An unwritten law of Stalinist socialism was that the truth will out, and this, of course, deprived the conspiracy theory of its telltale aura of mystery.

After Stalin’s death, when the Purges were a thing of the past, and Soviet society had begun to become in­ hibited and conservative, the conspiracy myth took on more familiar features. The stagnation period, with its general apathy, distrust, and societal depression, was an ideal breeding ground for the conspiracy theory. No one had seen any live Trotskyists long ago, and it was seemingly silly to denounce them, but everyone was well informed about the dangers of Trotskyism.

During meaningless classes on “Party history,” mil­ lions of Soviet university students learned about the enemies of socialism, the Trotskyists, who had been vanquished long ago in a showdown. Millions of cop­ ies of anti-Trotskyist books were published; by the 1970s, this literature had become a distinct genre with its own canon. Its distinguishing feature was a free-form Trotskyism completely emancipated from any connection with actual, historical Trotskyism.

In fact, the Trotskyism of Soviet propaganda was structurelessness incarnate, a misunderstanding. It was “lifeless schema, sophistry and metaphysics, un­ principled eclecticism, […] crude subjectivism, exag­ gerated individualism and voluntarism.” Unlike the classic monsters of conspiracy theory, the Masons and the Elders of Zion, the Trotskyists did not run the world. They were failed conspirators: they were always exposed, unless, through their own haste and impulsiveness, they managed to expose themselves.

In keeping with Stalinist socialist realism, their in­ ept evil deeds caused seizures of Homeric laughter among the people and the Party. And yet, recovering from each shameful defeat, they kept on trying. The Trotskyists had no clear plan for establishing global domination, but without a clear purpose, they were dangerous in their passionate desire to instill chaos in places where harmony, predictability, and order reigned.

In their work, these Trotskyists were guided by the crazed “theory of permanent revolution” (which had nothing in common, substantially, with Trotsky’s theo­ ry* except the name). Its essence is that the revolution should not have any geographical or time constraints. It has no aims, no end, and no meaning. It raises ques­ tions where all questions have long been solved. It in­ stills doubt where all doubts have been resolved long ety: it did not grow, like the “blood libel,” from the dark superstitions of the mob. It remained a night­ mare for only one segment, the ruling bureaucracy, which transmitted the myth of the senseless and mer­ ciless “permanent revolution” to future generations in Party training courses and KGB schools.

The Soviet theory of the Trotskyist conspiracy re­ flected the subconscious fear of ungovernability on the part of the governing class. Devoid of any person­ alities, the legend of Trotskyism was something like the “black swan” of “actually existing socialism.”

This, by the way, is its fundamental difference from the version of the Trotskyist conspiracy popular among some American conservatives. In America, it is merely one of many varieties of the “minority con­ spiracy,” a small group of people who have, allegedly, seized power and are implementing their anti-Chris­ tian, globalist ideas from the top down. The fact that the anti-Trotskyist conspiracy theory of the so-called paleo-conservatives has become popular in recent years among Kremlin experts and political scientists only goes to show that the old Soviet “Trotskyist con­ spiracy” has suffered a deficit in terms of its reproduc­ tion.

When he confuses Bernstein and Bronstein,** Vladi­ mir Putin, however, is not unfaithful to the Soviet anti-Trotskyist legend. Yes, “the goal is nothing, the movement is everything.” The chaos generated by the movement is inevitable, as inevitable as time itself. It moves inexorably toward “permanent revolution,” which cannot be completed and with which one can­ not negotiate.

In a recent interview, former Kremlin spinmeister Gleb Pavlovsky, while skillfully avoiding the issue of “Trotskyism,” nevertheless had this to say about Pu­ tin:

“He has frightened himself. Where should he go next? What next? This is a terrible problem in politics, the problem of the second step. He stepped beyond what he was ready for and got lost: where to go now? […] The gap between [the annexation of] Crimea and subsequent actions is quite noticeable. It is obvious that everything afterwards was an improvisation or reaction to other people’s actions. People who are afraid of the future forbid themselves from thinking about which path to choose. When you have not set achievable goals, you begin to oscillate between two poles: either you do nothing or you get sucked into a colossal conflict.”

The worst thing is that the specter of Trotskyism, as has happened with many other specters in history, is quite capable of materializing. The post-Soviet system has entered a period of crisis, in which the ruling elite has fewer and fewer chances to manage processes “manually.” For the Trotskyist nightmare of the elites to become a reality, there is no need for live Trotsky­ ists. The need for them arises only when hitherto si­ lent and long-suffering forces come to their senses and raise the question of their own aims. But that is a different story. n Ilya Budraitksis is a leader of Vpered (“Forward”), Russian section of the Fourth International, which par­ ticipated in the founding of the Russian Socialist Move­ ment (RSD).

*The theory of permanent revolution, first developed by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky as early as 1904, explained that in an underdeveloped country in the epoch of imperialism, the na­ tional capitalist class is inexorably tied to imperialist interests and thus unable to carry out the major historical tasks of the bourgeois revolution (political democracy, land reform, rights of oppressed nationalities, etc.). For that reason, the working class must lead a movement to take power into its own hands and to abolish capital­ ism—a socialist revolution.

**Leon Trotsky was born with the name Lev Bronstein.

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This is a slightly abridged and edited version of an ar­ ticle by UNIFOR union chief economist Jim Stanford. website: http://socialistaction.ca