Leon Trotsky

A landmark of sorts was reached a short while ago when Hugo Chavez became the first head of state to describe himself as a Trotskyist. For a while it seemed as if Trotsky’s memory had been consigned to the dust-bin of history after the fall of the Soviet Union, treasured only by isolated far-left groups cut off from the mainstream of political culture. Maybe the Venezuelan president is anticipating a revival of interest in the man whose influence was once felt everywhere from Vietnam to Merseyside.

Trotsky, after all, is a fascinating character, and it’s no wonder his career as a political leader has attracted so much attention. The Russian revolution was arguably the most important historical event of the twentieth century, and it was certainly the most important thing that happened so far as the socialist movement is concerned. Trotsky played a role almost as important as Lenin’s during the early years of the revolution, but he was always more flamboyant than Lenin. And he told his version of the story better than any of the participants: Trotsky’s brilliance as a writer won him the admiration of literary critics like George Steiner and Edmund Wilson.

His life had all the qualities of an epic novel, including a tragic death. The best account of Trotsky’s rise and fall was written by Isaac Deutscher. Verso, the publishing arm of Britain’s New Left Review, has recently brought out a new edition of his classic three-volume biography. Deutscher’s book is justly celebrated, but it may not win many new admirers for his hero. For one thing it’s very long (over 1,000 pages in total), but more importantly, it hinges on a view of the Russian revolution that’s hard to sustain in the light of the historical record.

From Revolution to Dictatorship

That view, put forward by Trotsky and his followers, was summed up well by Terry Eagleton in his book After Theory: “You could not build socialism in an economic backwater, encircled by stronger, politically hostile powers, among a mass of unskilled, illiterate workers and peasants without traditions of social organisation and democratic self-government. The attempt to do so called for the strong-armed measures of Stalinism, which ended up subverting the very socialism it was trying to construct.”

Broadly speaking, this is the argument still put forward by Trotsky’s remaining adherents. When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they intended to construct a socialist democracy based on popular power. But the dire conditions of civil war, foreign invasion and economic crisis forced them to take harsh repressive measures and pushed the Soviet government further and further away from its original agenda.

The degeneration of the revolution allowed a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy to take control of the ruling Bolshevik party. This in turn paved the way for Stalin to assume complete power and betray the ideals of Bolshevism. According to this view, things could only have panned out differently if revolution had spread to the rest of Europe.

There’s certainly no shortage of evidence that can be cited to back up this argument. Economic conditions in Soviet Russia at the time were dire, and the threat of violent counter-revolution was very real. But that doesn’t mean everything the Bolsheviks did during those years can be explained away as a grim necessity.

It seems clear, for example, that the young Soviet government never had any intention of establishing an economy based on industrial democracy, giving workers a direct say over production. Before the civil war had begun in earnest, Lenin came out strongly in favour of one-man management: “Large-scale machine industry – which is the material productive source and foundation of socialism – calls for absolute and strict unity of will …. today the Revolution demands, in the interests of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process.”

In other words, the Bolsheviks were not blown off course by factors beyond their control and forced to abandon plans for a democratic, participatory economic system: right from the start, Lenin rejected the view that it was essential to break down authoritarian structures of control in the workplace. One of his party comrades, Preobrazhensky, noted the danger of this approach in the first few months of the revolution: “The Party will soon have to decide to what degree the dictatorship of individuals will be extended from the railroads and other branches of the economy to the Party itself.” But the Soviet leadership brushed aside these criticisms, and steadily marginalised the factory committees that had emerged after the fall of Tsarism.

According to the dominant Bolshevik view, the economy would be “socialist” as long as industry was under state ownership and the state itself was a workers’ state. When another Bolshevik critic Osinsky insisted that “socialism and socialist organisation will be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all: something else will be set up – state capitalism”, Lenin retorted that this was nothing to worry about: “Economically, state capitalism is immeasurably superior to the present system of economy … the soviet power has nothing terrible to fear from it, for the soviet State is a state in which the power of the workers and the poor is assured.”

And how was the power of the workers assured? There’s no doubt that the Bolsheviks had strong popular support when they took power in 1917, especially in the urban areas of Russia. But long before Stalin took control in the mid 1920s, the link between the party and the working class had been broken. To be sure, it would have been unrealistic to expect the Bolsheviks to create a first-rate model of democratic socialism: the conditions in Russia at the time weren’t exactly promising for anyone trying to build a libertarian commune-state based on direct democracy.

That’s hardly the point though. The Bolsheviks failed to preserve any form of pluralism or accountability, and gradually cut themselves altogether from the class in whose name they ruled. Non-Bolshevik socialist groups were marginalised, harassed and finally banned altogether. This certainly can’t be excused simply by referring to the pressures of the civil war, since we are talking about socialists who were totally opposed to the White counter-revolutionaries: this was as true of the Anarchists as it was of the Mensheviks.

Nor was there much tolerance for dissent within the ranks of the Bolshevik party itself. Successive groups of Bolsheviks oppositionists put forward sharp and often well-founded criticisms of the dominant line (Left Communists, Democratic Centralists, the Workers’ Opposition). They were greeted with bitter hostility by the party leadership, and manipulative, anti-democratic tactics were frequently used to undermine support for their ideas.

Perhaps most damaging of all, the Soviet government unleashed a ruthless campaign of terror from the early months of 1918 to consolidate its position. The “Red Terror” was strongly defended by spokesmen for the regime, not least Trotsky himself, who notoriously dismissed the “vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the sanctity of human life”. But these repressive measures were strongly opposed at the time by socialists who had no desire to see the Whites win the civil war.

The Menshevik leader Julius Martov, writing in July 1918, referred to “the shooting of hundreds upon hundreds of people. Some were killed as counter-revolutionaries, others as speculators, and yet others as robbers. No court established whether those sentenced were really guilty, nobody can tell whether the person executed was really guilty of conspiracy, speculation or robbery, or whether someone ordered him killed in order to settle personal scores and satisfy a desire for revenge. How many innocent people have been killed like that all over Russia!”

Martov, it should be recalled, supported the Bolsheviks in the civil war against the Whites. He also warned that “bloodshed gives rise to more bloodshed. The political terror the Bolsheviks introduced in October has saturated the air above the fields of Russia with bloody fumes. The civil war is becoming ever more cruel, people are becoming ever more savage and bestial, and the great precepts of genuine humanity, which socialism always taught, are being increasingly forgotten.” Similar criticisms were advanced from within the ranks of the Bolshevik party – and dismissed with contempt by Lenin and Trotsky alike.

Many historians have argued that indiscriminate terror, far from helping the Bolsheviks to defeat the White counter-revolution, actually made things more difficult for them, by alienating people who were either sympathetic or indifferent. And the consequences for socialist democracy are surely obvious. When the political police are constantly on the look-out for “counter-revolution”, and the definition of a potential “counter-revolutionary” is very broad indeed, even the most confident workers will think twice before speaking their mind.

Most Russian workers and peasants leaned towards the Bolsheviks while the civil war lasted, if only as the lesser of two evils. But once the White armies had been defeated, discontent with the regime erupted. There were peasant revolts all over the countryside and a strike wave in the cities, especially Petrograd. Most famously, the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base, who had been the strongest supporters of Bolshevism in 1917, staged a mutiny and called for the restoration of workers’ democracy.

The Bolsheviks immediately claimed that the mutiny was inspired by White counter-revolution: this was a conscious lie. More credible, perhaps, is the argument that the mutiny risked encouraging a revival of the counter-revolution, whatever the intentions of the Kronstadt sailors. But things would never have reached that point if the Soviet government had responded earlier to pressure from below for a change of course. The mutineers put forward legitimate demands that came directly from the slogans of the Bolshevik party during the build-up to its seizure of power four years earlier. They were answered with brutal repression. The same methods were used to break the strikes in nearby Petrograd.

In the wake of Kronstadt, Lenin brought forward proposals for economic reform that he hoped would take the sting out of anti-government feeling in the countryside. But these reforms went hand-in-hand with a clampdown on political opposition. The non-Bolshevik groups still operating were banned outright, and factions within the Bolshevik party were also prohibited. In other words, while Lenin was still alive and politically active (and Trotsky held a leading position in the government), the Soviet system had become a centralised, one-party dictatorship.

Taking account of these facts, it’s hard to endorse the view (still defended by many Trotskyists) that nothing could have been done to halt the degeneration of the Russian revolution. There were different paths open to the Bolsheviks; these paths would have carried their own risks to be sure, but the outcome could hardly have been worse than it was. As one prominent Bolshevik, Karl Radek, warned in April 1918:

“If the Russian revolution were overthrown by violence on the part of the bourgeois counter-revolution, it would rise again like a phoenix; if however it lost its socialist character and thereby disappointed the working masses, the blow would have ten times more terrible consequences for the future of the Russian and the international revolution.”

The argument that the failure of the revolution was inevitable unless it spread to the rest of Europe can be turned on its head. What difference would it have made if there had been a socialist revolution in Germany - the country on which the Bolsheviks pinned their greatest hopes - any time between 1919 and 1923? Of course, a socialist Germany could have supplied Russia with economic aid (although its own economy would have been in a woeful state). The threat of foreign intervention might have receded.

But unless the Bolsheviks had been willing to ditch anti-democratic practices, the same problems would have arisen. Once you cut the ruling elite off from the people it claims to represent, it’s more or less inevitable that corruption will set in – no matter how high-minded those rulers may have been to start with.

Trotsky and the Opposition

If we only consider Trotsky’s career up to 1921, it would be hard to understand why his ideas continue to inspire left-wing organisations today. After all, he was often the most brazen advocate of authoritarian measures, even calling at one point for the militarization of labour. In defence of the latter policy, he put forward a startling argument for a self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist: “Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive.”

But as the Red bureaucracy tightened its grip on Soviet society, and Stalin emerged as the master of the party-state machine, Trotsky underwent an unlikely transformation and became the main advocate of liberalisation. His previous record made many people doubt his sincerity, but there’s no reason to believe that Trotsky launched his campaign against the bureaucracy from 1923 onwards with dishonourable motives.

His call for a new course, however, contained a basic contradiction. Trotsky wanted to restore freedom of discussion within the Bolshevik party, while preserving the one-party system. As many reform-minded Communists in Eastern Europe were to learn, you can’t have real freedom within the ruling party without granting the right to form opposition groups. Either the one-party state will suffocate political freedom altogether, or else it must give way to a genuine multi-party system.

Trotsky was held back in his struggle against the bureaucracy by his loyalty to the Bolshevik party. When he faced his opponents at the party congress in 1924, he made an extraordinary statement describing what it meant to be a loyal Bolshevik: “In the last analysis the party is always right, because the party is the sole historical instrument that the working class possesses for the solution of its fundamental tasks … no one can be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the party and through it since history has not created any other way to determine the correct position.”

In fairness, Trotsky ultimately rejected this outlook and chose to be “right against the party” rather than capitulate to Stalinism. But it was certainly a crippling view to carry while leading a political fight against Stalin, who knew better than anyone how to control the party apparatus. The only hope the opposition led by Trotsky had of winning lay in mobilisation outside the ranks of the ruling party. This would probably have been hopeless anyway: popular opposition to the degeneration of the revolution had already been defeated.

After his expulsion from the Bolshevik party, Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union and spent the rest of his life in exile, attacking the policies of the Soviet leadership and trying to organise an opposition current within international Communism. It was this period, above all, that gave to the heroic myth of Trotsky’s life. Hounded from country to country, he remained the fiercest enemy and critic of Stalin as the Soviet dictatorship followed a horrifying path towards mass slaughter.

When Stalin put the entire leadership of the old, pre-revolutionary Bolshevik party on trial, they were all accused of being “Trotskyite agents”. The prosecutors painted a fantastic picture of a network of spies orchestrated by Trotsky from exile, penetrating every layer of the Soviet system and doing everything in their power to sabotage its work. Trotsky himself was supposedly on the pay-roll of the Nazi dictatorship and had been in league with the forces of capitalism for years.

Having confessed to the most unlikely crimes, the defendants were taken out and shot. Countless more died in the Siberian labour camps, among them the remaining supporters of Trotsky who were all executed. Trotsky’s son, who had stayed away from politics, was another victim of the purges.

Trotsky penned countless articles attacking Stalin’s regime and calling for a return to the ideals of the October revolution. His view of Stalinism as a bureaucratic, authoritarian travesty of socialism was summarised in “The Revolution Betrayed”, which also outlined the changes that would be needed before the Soviet Union could call itself “socialist”:

“It is not a question of substituting one ruling clique for another, but of changing the very methods of administering the economy and guiding the culture of the country. Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy. A restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections, are necessary conditions for the further development of the country. This assumes a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks, and a resurrection of the trade unions. The bringing of democracy into industry means a radical revision of plans in the interests of the toilers.”

This was a big advance from the programme of the opposition in the mid 1920s: Trotsky now recognised the need for pluralism and called for the elimination of the Bolshevik monopoly of power. But it still left open the question of how “Soviet parties” could be defined. Ultimately the only formula a revolutionary government can rely on is this: anyone who tries to overthrow the system with force will be repressed, anyone who uses peaceful persuasion alone will be tolerated – even if they call for the restoration of capitalism. Anything else leaves the door open for anti-democratic policies.

When he had to trace the origins of the Stalinist regime, Trotsky argued that the early Soviet government had done what it had to do, and nothing more:

“Democracy had been narrowed in proportion as difficulties increased. In the beginning, the party had wished and hoped to preserve freedom of political struggle within the framework of the Soviets. The civil war introduced stern amendments into this calculation. The opposition parties were forbidden one after the other. This measure, obviously in conflict with the spirit of Soviet democracy, the leaders of Bolshevism regarded not as a principle, but as an episodic act of self-defense.”

As noted above, this view is difficult to square with the established facts. Trotsky’s view was perhaps distorted by the political circumstances he found himself in. After Lenin’s death, a state-sponsored cult had been established in his name. Lenin was celebrated as an infallible genius, and Stalin was presented as his model pupil (author of “The Foundations of Leninism” no less).

Trotsky countered this by presenting himself as the true Leninist. He insisted that the programme of the opposition would have met the approval of Lenin, who would have been appalled by the course followed under Stalin. In “The Revolution Betrayed”, Trotsky included many quotations from Lenin that were calculated to embarrass the regime by showing the gap between his ideas and Stalinist practice.

But this approach made it almost impossible to re-examine critically Lenin’s own record.

It’s generally recognised that there was a big difference between the Soviet Union under Lenin and under Stalin, a quantum leap in barbarism. Almost certainly Lenin would have disapproved of many features of Stalin’s dictatorship. But that doesn’t end the discussion. It’s fair to ask if the Bolsheviks helped pave the way for Stalin by creating a one-party state and repressing popular opposition.

Whether Trotsky would have been capable of asking tough questions in any circumstances is a moot point. To his dying day, he insisted that no other course was available. In an article published in 1938, he denounced anarchists and libertarian Marxists who recalled the brutal crushing of the Kronstadt revolt, in terms which suggested little tolerance for criticism: “These latter-day “Kronstadters” will also be crushed - true, without the use of arms since, fortunately, they do not have a fortress.”

Trotsky’s attempts to show that the sailors who revolted in 1921 had nothing in common with the revolutionary garrison of 1917 have not found favour with historians, and appear almost comical at times: “Those sailors who remained in “peaceful” Kronstadt until the beginning of 1921 … included a great percentage of completely demoralised elements, wearing showy bell-bottom pants and sporty haircuts.”

Challenging the Comintern

The Stalinist regime had placed itself at the head of the international Communist movement founded after WW1, and directed its policies from above. Naturally, Trotsky’s opposition to the ruling faction also challenged its international policies. These arguments spanned the entire political world, from Britain to China. But it’s best to concentrate on Germany, where Trotsky’s criticism of the official line probably show him at his best.

The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was confronted with the rise of Nazism from the mid 1920s. After the world economic recession hit Germany especially hard in 1929, the accession of Hitler to power seemed increasingly likely. The KPD had to decide whether or not it should co-operate with the Social Democrats (SPD) against the Nazi party.

Following the so-called “ultra-left” policy of the Communist International, decreed by Stalin, the KPD leadership insisted that no alliance of any sort was possible with the Social Democrats. In fact, between the SPD and the Nazis, the SPD was the greater of two evils – a party of “social Fascists”.

Trotsky argued that this policy was senseless. The SPD still commanded the loyalty of a big section of the German working class, many more than the Communists could boast. According to Trotsky, the KPD should offer to fight alongside the Social Democrats in defence of working-class organisation. This could start off taking the form of fighting unity in the streets against Nazi stormtroopers, and extend as far as joint strike action. At the same time, he argued, the Communists should remain strongly critical of the SPD leadership, and aim to win over its supporters for a socialist revolution.

This was not an easy argument to make. The hatred between the Communists and the Social Democrats was very real. Between 1918 and 1923, the SPD leaders had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of radical workers at the hands of right-wing army units. Their victims included Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the founders of the KPD. Trotsky was bitterly attacked for his views by official Communists in Germany and elsewhere. But it seems clear now that he was right.

The German labour movement never staged any effective resistance to the Nazi take-over, and the bitter divisions between its two main parties had a big part to play in that failure. There was one key moment when united action could have made a difference. In the summer of 1932, the SPD-led state government in Prussia was illegally disbanded by the right-wing national government. While the leadership capitulated without a struggle, many SPD activists wanted to fight, but didn’t really know how. The Communists could have offered their support, and sent their own experienced and well-armed combat units into the fray.

Instead, the KPD folded its arms and watched as the German elite removed a big obstacle in the way of dictatorship. The ease with which they disposed of the Prussian government gave the generals, businessmen and assorted schemers who brought Hitler to power the following year the confidence to act boldly. There’s no guarantee that a different Communist policy would have transformed the situation completely – the leadership of the SPD would have stood in the way of a real alliance and opposed extra-parliamentary forms of struggle against Nazism. But the unflinching sectarianism of the KPD made unity of any kind impossible.

The refusal of the Communists to even consider an alliance owed much to their self-confidence. During the years, months, weeks and days leading up to the victory of the Nazi party, the German Communists appeared blissfully certain that their own triumph was assured. They even suggested that it would be a good thing if Hitler took power, for his inevitable failure and collapse would simply pave the way for a Communist-led revolution.

Against this hollow rhetoric, Trotsky warned that the consequences of a Nazi victory would be very grim for the German working class. He predicted a ruthless terror against workers’ organisations that would crush the fighting spirit of the German movement for many years to come. Although he under-estimated the importance of Nazi racist ideology, Trotsky’s analysis of German fascism was often very perceptive and far-seeing.

It can’t be said with any certainty that if Trotsky’s advice had been followed, Hitler would not have been successful. Mass unemployment had already weakened the German workers’ movement – the general strike which defeated a right-wing putsch in 1920 could not have been repeated in 1933. But the resources of that movement were never used to combat Nazism at all. This came as a big surprise the Nazis themselves – they hated and feared the Communists more than anyone else, having received more than a few hidings at the hands of Red fighting squads. Even after Hitler became Chancellor, his party still nervously awaited a Communist fight-back that never came.

The Fourth International

The catastrophic defeat in Germany led Trotsky to conclude that the official Communist movement was totally bankrupt. From that point until his death, he tried to organise the fragments that had broken away from Moscow’s direction into a new movement, the “Fourth International”.

The conditions for such a movement were hardly promising. Between 1933 and 1940, the left was in retreat all over Europe. Right-wing authoritarian regimes came to power in Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe, and finally Spain. Then most of the continent fell under Nazi occupation. The existing organisations of the left, social democratic and communist, were struggling to maintain their position. It wasn’t like the years after WW1, when radicalised workers joined the new Communist International in huge numbers.

The experience of two left-radical leaders, both of whom worked with Trotsky before ultimately breaking with him, shows how difficult the task of founding a new movement was likely to be. Andres Nin helped form the Spanish POUM, which struggled to carve out a niche in a crowded political landscape that already included Socialists, Anarchists, and Communists. The POUM had a real base of support, especially in Catalonia. But Nin’s party was defeated long before General Franco crushed the Spanish Left as a whole. With the backing of Stalin, the Spanish Communists launched a ruthless purge in Republican areas that saw Nin tortured to death and countless party members imprisoned or executed.

Henk Sneevliet founded a non-Communist radical party in the Netherlands that gave the Dutch Communist Party a run for its money. Sneevliet himself was elected to the Dutch parliament. But his party was forced underground by the Nazi invasion of 1940. He organised a resistance network that helped to ignite a strike movement against the occupation. Sneevliet was eventually captured by the Nazis and hanged for his resistance work.

It seems likely that, even with the best possible approach on its part, the “Fourth International” could never have hoped to rival the official Communists. There wasn’t so much space to the left of social democracy that anti-Stalinist radicals could easily win support. Spain was one major exception, but there the non-Communist revolutionary left was headed by Anarchists, for whom Trotsky had nothing but contempt.

In any case, the Spanish example was snuffed out by Franco’s repression. Elsewhere, the Communists greatly benefited from the pressure for anti-fascist unity after Hitler’s accession to power (ironically, since the Communist line in Germany had been so disastrous). Much of the political capital they won this way was squandered in 1939 when Stalin made his notorious pact with Hitler. If there had been a strong anti-Stalinist left in Europe, that would have been the ideal moment to expose the Moscow-led parties.

But there was no such force, and when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union two years later, the Communists placed themselves at the head of resistance to the Nazi occupation of Europe. The brave role played by their activists all over the continent gave the Communists a huge boost, as did the massive contribution of the Red Army to the defeat of Hitler. The Communist movement came out of the war in a vastly stronger position, reaping most of the benefits of the radicalisation that swept Europe from 1943 onwards. For the next decade it was very difficult for non-Stalinist revolutionaries to establish any kind of a foothold at all, never mind win mass support.

The Bolshevik Model

These factors would have worked against the Fourth International, no matter what programme it adopted. But almost certainly, the model laid down by Trotsky for his followers made things a good deal worse than they might have been. Trotsky insisted that the Bolshevik – Leninist example of a revolutionary party showed the way for radical workers to organise themselves, and should be emulated. The success of the October revolution vindicated the ideas of party organisation put forward by Lenin at the turn of the century.

This was in line with the view promoted by Lenin himself in his pamphlet “‘Left-wing’ Communism: an infantile disorder”, which sought to distil the lessons of the Russian revolution for the new Communist International. Lenin put the emphasis on “iron

discipline” as a key factor in the victory of Bolshevism. When he drafted conditions for entry to the International, the Soviet leader was sure to include the following:

“Parties belonging to the Communist International must be organised on the principle of democratic centralism. In this period of acute civil war, the Communist parties can perform their duty only if they are organised in a most centralised manner, are marked by an iron discipline bordering on military discipline, and have strong and authoritative party centres invested with wide powers and enjoying the unanimous confidence of the membership.”

Again, the actual course of events in Russia raises questions about this view. After all, when Lenin returned to Russia after the fall of Tsarism and put forward his famous “April Theses” (calling for a second, socialist revolution), he was greeted with strong opposition from a big section of the Bolshevik party – especially in the leadership. He had to overcome this opposition gradually over the next few months. In promoting his view, Lenin recruited the support of socialists who had previously been expelled from the Bolshevik party, and those who had never been members (Trotsky belonged in the latter camp, only joining the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1917).

This was hardly an unqualified vindication of the approach taken by Lenin in the years before 1917 – the party he had built in that period dragged its feet when the opportunity to seize power presented itself, while many who had been unable to work with Lenin before found themselves in alliance with him. It has been argued by many, including Trotsky himself, that the October revolution could never have happened if Lenin had not returned to Russia in 1917. This may well be true (naturally, it’s impossible to prove either way). The Bolsheviks were the only organised political force capable of leading a second revolution, and it might have been impossible for anyone but Lenin to shift its policy in time.

But if it is true, it suggests that there was something wrong with the Bolshevik party. Lenin might have been run down by a tram a couple of months before the Tsar was overthrown. If the whole revolution hinged on the fact that he wasn’t so unlucky, then surely the Bolsheviks needed to be more flexible, less dependent on their leader.

Trotsky wrote a short pamphlet about the October revolution at the beginning of 1918. He made no attempt to present the Bolsheviks as the far-seeing vanguard of the revolution, always one step ahead of events. Instead, he painted a picture of the revolution as a defensive reaction to the threat of a counter-revolutionary coup, in which the Bolsheviks were carried along by pressure from below.

This analysis suited the political requirements of the time: the Bolsheviks were trying to refute the claim that theirs was a minority dictatorship, raised to power by an undemocratic coup. Quite apart from that, it was almost certainly closer to the truth than the view which came to be established. It’s very hard to look at the way the Bolsheviks actually functioned between the two revolutions and recognise a party “organised in a most centralised manner,” with “iron discipline bordering on military discipline.”

The Bolshevik party was anything but monolithic during those months, it contained different currents at all levels arguing for varying strategies. Even on the eve of the October revolution, two leading Bolsheviks, Zinoviev and Kamenev, publicly opposed the plan to seize power. The return to rigid centralism, which began soon after the Bolsheviks took power, went hand in hand with the broader decline of popular organisation and participation.

In “The Revolution Betrayed”, Trotsky insisted that it was impossible to imagine a party of socialist militants without factional divisions: “How could a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations?”

But the model that his followers have usually preferred, right up to the present day, is the tightly centralised party, governed by a strong, authoritative leadership that maintains iron discipline. Experience shows that this model tends to stifle creative thinking: far from encouraging “audacious iconoclasts”, many Trotskyist groups seem wedded to the “no one can be right against the party” school of thought. It also leads to fragmentation: when differences cannot be argued out openly within the party, organisational splits are bound to occur. Far from assuring “unity in action”, the Leninist model of organisation has tended to produce almost endless disunity.

Latter-day Trotskyists still base their practice closely on the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik party. But Trotsky himself suggested at times that some of the early habits of Bolshevism anticipated the bureaucratic regime of the future. In a biography of Stalin that was only published after his death, he wrote the following:

“The habits peculiar … to a political machine were already forming in the underground. The young revolutionary bureaucrat was already emerging as a type. The conditions of conspiracy, true enough, offered rather meagre scope for such formalities of democracy as elections, accountability and control. Yet undoubtedly the Committee men narrowed these limitations considerably more than necessity demanded. The were far more intransigent and severe with the revolutionary working men than with themselves, preferring to domineer, even on occasions that called imperatively for lending an attentive ear to the voice of the masses.”

The idealisation of the Bolshevik party and its role in the October revolution had other consequences. By exaggerating the extent to which the Bolsheviks had been able to determine the course of events in 1917, Trotsky encouraged the view that Bolshevik-type parties were all that was required to secure the triumph of revolution in other countries. Writing about Spain, for example, he insisted that the triumph of the Spanish Revolution would have been assured, if only the POUM had been as bold and decisive as the Bolshevik party. Ever since, there has been a tendency for Trotskyists to over-estimate the potential for revolutionary change, if only the correct leadership is present.

After Trotsky’s assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940, the Fourth International began to split into quarrelsome factions. Isolated from mass politics (with some rare exceptions, notably Bolivia and Sri Lanka), Trotskyist groups had little to anchor them and constant splits have been a feature of the movement’s history. Notoriously, different Trotskyist factions have often seemed to hate each other at least as much as they hate the class enemy. This atmosphere of poisonous factionalism and denunciation was hardly likely to assist Trotskyism in its search for a breakthrough.

Despite these problems, Trotskyism has remained a presence in the workers’ movement, albeit a marginal one in most countries. The movement has contained many gifted political thinkers (CLR James, Marcel Liebman, Ernest Mandel for example), and its activists deserve credit for helping to preserve the idea of a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism, even in the darkest days of the Cold War.

But as the radical left seeks to regroup and rebuild for the 21st century, it cannot expect to succeed by copying the example of Lenin and the Bolsheviks: that model was deeply flawed in its own time and place, and can certainly not be applied in societies that are radically different from Tsarist Russia. Wiping the slate clean is not to be advised, of course: there’s still plenty to learn from the socialist thinkers of the last century, and that includes Trotsky. But his strengths are more likely to be appreciated if his many flaws and errors are also acknowledged.