A Letter to Joseph Hansen [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 5 January 1940, Trotsky responds to Joseph Hansen on the question of party unity and the political character of the Soviet invasion of Finland. The letter opens with a pointed defence of Trotsky’s own conduct during the factional struggle inside the American Socialist Workers Party. Trotsky insists that his correspondence with James P. Cannon and with Wright demonstrates a consistent desire to preserve organisational unity despite sharp differences. He cites two quotations—his own statement that the Bolshevik wing should remain disciplined even as a minority, and Cannon’s agreement—as decisive proof against any charge of factional irresponsibility.
The bulk of the letter is a polemic against the “petty-bourgeois opposition” over the Finnish question. Trotsky poses the issue as a matter of principle: is there a difference between Finland and Poland? His answer is no. He argues that the Red Army’s intervention in Poland was accompanied by civil war, and that the Menshevik press—well-informed through ties with the Bund and PPS émigrés—openly reported a revolutionary wave accompanying the Red Army’s advance into Poland and Romania. Trotsky then applies this analysis to Finland. The Kremlin’s creation of the Kuusinen government, he contends, was intended to supplement military invasion with civil war. He cites reports of a Finnish Red Army being formed, of poor farmers’ “enthusiasm” in occupied regions, and of large landholdings being confiscated. For Trotsky, these are the beginnings of civil war.
The letter does not deny that the civil war in Finland was weak and dependent on the Red Army’s advance. Trotsky concedes that popular “enthusiasm” was insufficient to produce independent insurrections under Mannerheim’s repression, and that the Red Army’s retreat halted the embryonic civil war. But he insists that this does not invalidate the general strategic line. If the imperialists effectively defend Finnish capitalism, civil war becomes impossible for the time being; if the Red Army penetrates more successfully, civil war will inevitably accompany invasion. The opposition’s error, Trotsky charges, is to substitute a “conjunctural and impressionistic policy” for a principled one—judging events by immediate military episodes rather than by the underlying class dynamics.
Trotsky adds a crucial qualification in parentheses: the civil war in Finland, as in Poland, would have a “limited, semi-stifled nature” and could in a later stage turn into a civil war between the Finnish masses and the Moscow bureaucracy. He insists that he warns the masses of this openly, but refuses to collapse the first stage into the second. The letter thus defends a dialectical method: analysing the process as it actually unfolds, without either denying the reality of civil war or ignoring its bureaucratic degeneration.