Trotsky and Conciliationism¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter examines Trotsky’s prolonged commitment to reconciling the Bolsheviks and the left wing of Menshevism, particularly the tendency represented by Martov. The core argument is that Trotsky’s conciliationism—his belief that revolutionary unity could be achieved by bridging the gap between Lenin’s faction and the left Mensheviks—constituted a fundamental error on the question of party organisation, even though his political positions were broadly close to Bolshevism. The chapter insists that Lenin’s famous denunciations of ‘Trotskyism’ during this period referred specifically to this organisational conciliationism, not to Trotsky’s political programme, and that Lenin’s harsh polemics were partly a tactical device to discipline conciliatory tendencies within his own Bolshevik leadership.
The text draws heavily on memoir evidence, particularly from Lunacharsky and Krupskaya, to illustrate the depth of conciliationist sentiment. Lunacharsky recalls Lenin himself dreaming of a bloc with Martov as late as 1917, while Krupskaya notes that even loyal Bolsheviks like Innokenty began to incline toward conciliation. The chapter provides concrete evidence of the strength of this tendency: at a 1908 meeting of the Proletary editorial board, Kamenev and Zinoviev proposed closing down Proletary and making Trotsky’s Vienna Pravda the official organ of the RSDLP Central Committee—a motion passed against Lenin’s opposition. The minutes of this meeting, published in 1934 to discredit Zinoviev and Kamenev before their execution, were later suppressed. Other prominent Bolshevik conciliators included Rozhkov, Nogin, Tomsky, and Rykov.
The chapter situates Trotsky’s error within a broader theoretical and historical context. It draws a parallel with Rosa Luxemburg, who also rejected what she saw as mechanical centralism in Lenin’s organisational ideas, overreacting against the bureaucratic machine of the German SPD. Trotsky, similarly, was repelled by the narrowness of Bolshevik ‘committeemen’ who reduced political questions to organisational formulae—exemplified by the St. Petersburg committee’s demand that the Soviet dissolve itself when it refused party leadership. This led Trotsky to judge Bolshevism by its caricature rather than by Lenin himself. The chapter argues that Trotsky’s conciliationism stemmed from a ‘social-revolutionary fatalism’—an underestimation of the need for ideological selection and political case-hardening—which he later acknowledged as mistaken.
The polemical thrust is directed against two targets. First, the Stalinist bureaucracy, which deliberately exaggerated the Lenin-Trotsky disagreements after Lenin’s death to blacken Trotsky’s name, suppressing the fact that Lenin himself declared in November 1917 that ‘Trotsky long ago said that a union was impossible… and from that time there has been no better Bolshevik’. Second, the chapter attacks the ‘philistine mentality’ of Bolshevik conciliators like Kamenev, who prided themselves on ‘practical politics’ and contempt for principle, mistaking Lenin’s principled intransigence for sectarianism. The chapter concludes that Trotsky’s mistake was that of a sincere revolutionary, and that the actual experience of 1917 dissolved the old disagreements.