Trotsky - Succession, Revolutionary Success, Civil War Hero, Death, Failure and End

Trotsky, A Civil War Hero?

From the beginning, the Bolshevik regime was engaged in a ‘desperate struggle for survival’.  Although the Bolsheviks held a ‘considerable majority’ in the Congress after the success of the coup d’etat which was ‘sufficient to confirm in office an exclusively Bolshevik government’, they were quick to realise that in order for the one-party government to maintain power it would have to do this ‘by means of political terror’.   Before 1917 their time had been dedicated to preparing for revolution, yet ‘little attention had been given’ to the details of how affairs would be organised once this revolution had been achieved.  At the time of his appointment in 1917 as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Trotsky said on what was required to be done was “to issue a few decrees, then shut up shop and go home”.  Yet Trotsky had merely shown signs of the fatal ‘high-handedness’ and ‘arrogance’ that contributed to his eventual downfall, as circumstances were not to allow such a relaxed approach to government.  The Bolsheviks faced not only the wrath of the Germans but also the internal threat of anti-Bolsheviks.  This ‘internal threat’ manifested itself in the form of the Russian Civil War fought between 1918 and 1920, in which the Bolsheviks (the Reds) were confronted by anti-Bolshevik forces (the Whites).  During the Civil War, Trotsky established himself as both a brilliant tactician and a motivator for the Red Army.  ‘The Red Army respected him’, for his frequent trips to the Front (via his notorious Iron Train) to boost the morale of the Troops coupled with his grand oratory worked to great effect.  Trotsky realised the importance of morale in an army’s willingness to fight and ability to perform, and his personal visits to the Troops reassured them of the Revolution they were fighting to protect.  At one point, Trotsky is documented to have ‘mounted a horse, rounded up the retreating troops and led them back into battle’, and another account of his Civil War exploits describes how he ‘persuaded dangerous bands of deserters from the Red Army to return to the Front against the Whites’.  Westwood says of the Civil War that ‘discipline and some degree of professionalism in the Red Army was restored largely due to the energy and persuasive oratory of Trotsky’and according to Figes, ‘he more than anyone had won the Civil War’.  Yet Trotsky’s methods were criticised even by those in the Bolshevik party.  Although in the eyes of many Trotsky was the ‘champion of militarisation’,  his use of ex-Tsarist officers ‘against bitter opposition from party members’ as military specialists in the campaign against the Whites saw a sharp decrease in his popularity in the party.  By the end of the Civil War, almost eighty-percent of the Red Army’s commanders were ex-Tsarist officers.  Many ‘Bolshevik military leaders detested him’, not least because ‘many of them harboured xenophobic’ attitudes towards his ‘Jewish intellectual looks’.  Trotsky’s actual contribution to the Civil War has also been called into question, where Kochan claims it was ‘the Bolshevik’s attitude to the land question which was probably the crucial factor in the civil war’, for the White generals could ‘offer nothing more than a return to a landlord economy’.  The Bolsheviks seemed like the lesser of two evils to the Russian peasants, and therefore they more were willing to support the Bolsheviks, despite the fact that given the condition of industry Lenin could not give ‘both land to the peasants and bread to the towns’.  Lynch believes that the reasons for the final victory of the Reds in the Civil War are not difficult to determine, and cannot be attributed to the skill of one man.  Lynch states that that White armies fought as ‘separate detachments’, and that apart from their obvious ‘desire to overthrow the Bolsheviks’ they were ‘not bound together by a single aim’.  The Bolsheviks had control of the central lines of communication and of the major cites in Russia (namely Moscow and Petrograd) and also control of the railways.  This allowed them a major tactical advantage over the Whites, and therefore the Red Army was triumphant in 1920.  Also, Trotsky’s handling of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk proved to be one of his ‘more notable failures’, the German response to his policy of “no peace, no war” being to ‘reopen hostilities’.  However, Trotsky had ‘attained the Status of a hero’ as a result of his Civil War exploits, a status which was soon to be forgotten.

Lenin’s Testament, Bureaucracy and the Threat of Stalinism

In the years leading up to his death in 1924, Lenin had fought a losing battle against ill health as well as the increasing bureaucracy within the party.  Lenin had made the same mistake as all the other party leaders by ‘underestimating Stalin’s potential power’ and his ambition to exercise it.  Stalin had been appointed as General Secretary in 1922, which unbeknown to Lenin had inadvertently ‘laid the foundations for the misfortunes which were to befall the party in later decades’.  It ‘was to prove a crucial appointment – one that enabled Stalin to come to power’.  Dismissed as “the most eminent mediocrity in the party” by Trotsky, Stalin now had the power to appoint and dismiss party members, therefore allowing him to ‘gradually place congenial party members in key posts’.  After Lenin’s death, Stalin was a ‘required ally’, as he had by that time ‘been able to install many of his own proteges in the Central Committee’.  However, Stalin’s rise to power could have been halted if either Trotsky or Lenin had acted earlier.  Lenin, for a man of ‘such intolerance…he proved remarkably tolerant of Stalin’s many sins’, such as his growing rudeness to himself and his brutal handling of the Georgian affair, as he believed he needed Stalin to ‘maintain unity in the Party’.  Lenin eventually came to realise the potential damage Stalin could cause, yet by then ‘it was already too late’.

“Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated unlimited authority in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.”

During the course of the Orgburo and the Secretariat alone appointed 10,000 provincial officials, most of them on ‘Stalin’s personal recommendation’.  Mistrusting formal intellectuals (like Trotsky), they were to become his ‘main supporters in the power struggle against Trotsky’.  Lenin and Trotsky had attempted to oppose Stalin’s increasing influence in the party, where in December 1922 Lenin asked Trotsky to form a ‘counter-bureaucratic bloc’, quite literally aimed at killing off the Party’s ever increasing reliance on a bureaucracy.  This, however, proved unsuccessful, and by 1924 ‘Stalin had amassed so much personal leverage that, irrespective of ability, he had much greater power than other leaders’ and the party bureaucracy (that was mainly loyal to Stalin) was still firmly in place.

Before his death, Lenin produced a Testament in which he reached the conclusion that ‘no one person was fit to succeed him’, and he based his hopes on the unlikely co-operation of Trotsky and Stalin.  Realising that there was now no chance of such co-leadership because of the clashing personalities of Trotsky’s ‘excessive self confidence and high handedness’ and Stalin’s ‘rudeness’, Lenin now openly denounced Stalin and recommended that he be relieved of his position in the Bolshevik party as General Secretary, hoping to have him replaced by a man who was ‘more patient, more loyal, more courteous, and more considerate of his comrades, less capricious’.  Lenin knew that ‘Trotsky’s pre-eminence in terms of sheer ability’ made him the most fit for leadership, but Lenin also realised that the ‘apparat tended to dislike him, partly because he was an upstart Menshevik, but mostly because he attacked bureaucratisation’.  Trotsky’s ‘arrogant brilliance’ earned him no favours from intellectuals of his own generation, ‘nor did the workers favour him’.  Yet Lenin would have chosen Trotsky as his successor over Stalin without question, especially due to the way Stalin had acted towards his wife, Krupskaya and his handling of the Georgian affair.  Trotsky also shared the view with Lenin of the Revolution as the beginning of World Revolution, and not Socialism in One Country.  He confided in Trotsky to oppose Stalin, and proposed that he did this in the defence of the ‘Georgians before the Central Committee against the prosecutors of Stalin and others in league with him’.  Lenin also personally made sure that Trotsky received a copy of his Testament in order to expose Stalin in front of the Central Committee.  Trotsky, however, was to fail to perform both these things, and in so continued to play Russia into the ‘iron hands’ of Stalin.

Lenin’s Death, Trotsky’s Failures and the Inevitability of a Stalinist State

By Lenin’s death in 1924, ‘Stalin had amassed so much personal leverage that, irrespective of ability, he had much greater power than other leaders’.  Yet Trotsky still had Lenin’s Testament behind him, which if presented Stalin's chances of succession would have been ruined.  He also had a mostly loyal Red Army behind him.  However, Trotsky ‘underestimated Stalin’s intelligence’ for the last time in a series of fatal decisions that would eventually see him exiled from Russia.  Before the Central Committee, Trotsky failed to defend the Georgians, the ‘penultimate occasion when he could have opposed Stalin with Lenin’s prestige behind him’.  Later, Lenin’s Testament was ‘neutralised by Trotsky’s acquiescence’ as it was agreed to keep the Testament a secret because ‘Stalin had improved’.  Trotsky agreed to this mainly because he did not wish to cause a split in the Party that might lead to Civil War, despite the fact he had the Red Army behind him due to his position as War Commissar, his status as a Civil War hero and the Army’s respect for him.  His main weapon against Stalin had therefore been ‘voluntarily sheathed’, and he would have to defy the Central Committee to resurrect the issue of Lenin’s Testament.  Trotsky also failed make an appearance at Lenin’s funeral, where Stalin ‘stood out as the first disciple of the late leader’, and in the process disassociating himself with Lenin in the eyes of the people and the Party.  With his unpopular views on ‘World Revolution’ in contrast to Stalin’s idea of ‘Socialism in One Country’, he appeared to be anti-Russian in his foreign interests, a view which was not much helped by his Menshevik background and reputation as a Jewish intellectual.  Trotsky had therefore failed to act in order to prevent Stalin achieving supreme power in Russia, and it was his lack of active opposition to Stalin that saw any chance of power he had slip away from him.

The ‘End’ of Trotsky

Trotsky had given up without a fight, his past as a revolutionary with Lenin and as a Civil War hero were thrown to the wind, as he ‘lacked the ability to lower himself to the drudgery of politics’ by his refusal to associate himself with the much loathed (by him, at least) bureaucracy.  Trotsky had allowed himself to be relieved of his position as Commissar for War in January 1925 without any resistance.  His pride and arrogance prevented him from posing any real opposition to Stalin, and he refused to associate himself with Kamenev and Zinoviev in a united opposition against party bureaucracy until 1926.  By the time that he, Kamenev and Zinoviev managed to find serious flaws in Stalin’s ‘inspirational’ plans by attributing international and domestic failures to Stalin's theory of 'Socialism in One Country', it was already too late.  The greatness of Stalin had already been indented on too many peoples minds for this to be seen as significant, and for this breach of discipline there was no resistance to all three being formally expelled from the party in December 1927.  Thus at the tenth anniversary of their glorious victory in 1917, Lenin's closest comrades-in-arms saw their role within the party come to an abrupt and disreputable end.  Stalin had used to his advantage the bureaucratic structure of the Bolshevik party and exploited his position to gain majority support and to shame and denounce his opposition.  Trotsky was discredited, a victim of his own intelligence and arrogance, perhaps the spiritual successor of Lenin but not the actual one.  It is therefore not surprising that Stalin became the successor of Lenin and the supreme ruler of Russia in 1929, and that Trotsky was formerly expelled from Russia in the same year.

Bibliography

1. Endurance and Endeavour: Russian History 1812-1992 Fourth Edition – J.N.Westwood, Oxford

2. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 - Orlando Figes, published by Pimlico

3. The Making of Modern Russia – Lional Kochan and Richard Abraham Second Edition, published by Penguin Books

4. Reactions and Revolutions: Russia 1881-1924 Second Edition – Michael Lynch, published by Hodder & Stoughton

5. Extracts from Lenin’s Testament

---