2. From the History of Bolshevism (Part One)¶
Core Argument¶
Here the author launches a sustained polemic against Monty Johnstone’s account of early Bolshevism, arguing that Johnstone’s presentation is a deliberate falsification designed to bolster the Stalinist myth of a monolithic Bolshevik Party and to portray Trotsky as a permanent outsider and alien political force. The core argument is that Johnstone’s arithmetic—that Trotsky worked with Lenin for only six years—is technically correct but politically meaningless, since those six years encompassed the October Revolution, the creation of the Red Army, the building of the Third International, and the reconstruction of the Soviet railway system. The author insists that Johnstone’s focus on the 1903-1917 period is a rhetorical trick, not a serious historical analysis.
The chapter dismantles Johnstone’s claim that the 1903 split at the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was a clear-cut division between Bolshevik centralisers and Menshevik anti-centralisers. Drawing on Lenin’s own writings, the author shows that Lenin himself repeatedly stated that the split was not over principles of organisation but over the composition of the Party’s central bodies and a single clause in the Party Rules. Lenin is quoted at length to demonstrate that he considered the differences unimportant, advocated for unity, and opposed expulsions. The author accuses Johnstone of cherry-picking from a truncated Stalinist edition of Lenin’s works to create a false impression, and contrasts this with the full Moscow edition, which reveals Lenin’s conciliatory stance.
The author further argues that Bolshevism and Menshevism did not crystallise as separate political tendencies until 1904, when the question of the liberal bourgeoisie emerged, and that the final organisational split did not occur until 1912. Johnstone’s claim that Trotsky was “formally outside both parties” from 1904 is shown to be logically incoherent if the Bolshevik Party did not exist as an independent entity until 1912. The author also notes that Lenin himself later repudiated the exaggerated formulation in What is to be Done? about trade union consciousness, a point Johnstone ignores. The chapter concludes by asserting that Johnstone’s distortions serve to prepare the ground for the main Stalinist slander: that Trotskyism is a hostile ideology distinct from Leninism. The real differences between Bolshevism and Menshevism, the author insists, were political, not organisational, and Trotsky broke with the Mensheviks in 1904 precisely over the attitude to the liberal bourgeoisie—a fact Johnstone suppresses.