6. The Rise of Stalinism¶
Core Argument¶
In The Rise of Stalinism, the author launches a sustained polemic against Monty Johnstone’s portrayal of Leon Trotsky, accusing him of systematic distortion through dishonest quotation methods. A central example is Johnstone’s citation of a fabricated 1930 passage from Gorky’s memoirs, which does not appear in the original 1924 edition; the genuine memoirs record Lenin denouncing slanders about his relations with Trotsky. This methodological malpractice is not incidental, but serves to obscure the historical record of the early Soviet period.
The trade union controversy of 1920-21 is examined in its proper context of War Communism, an emergency system of centralisation and quasi-military measures forced upon a ruined, isolated revolutionary state by civil war and foreign intervention. Production had collapsed catastrophically: iron ore fell to 1.6 per cent of 1913 levels, while the industrial workforce halved from three million to 1,240,000 by 1920. Against Johnstone’s insinuations, the author argues that the “militarisation of labour” was not Trotsky’s policy alone. Lenin and Trotsky spoke from a joint platform; their motion was defeated, with only their own votes in favour. On the railways, it was the Central Committee, not Trotsky, that decided to replace union officials. Crucially, Trotsky is presented as the first Bolshevik leader to advocate abandoning War Communism, proposing a grain tax in February 1920—a policy later adopted as the New Economic Policy. Lenin’s opposition to Trotsky’s original proposals is explained not as a defence of “free labour” against bureaucracy, but as fear of a split in the Party under pressure from petty-bourgeois peasant forces.
The text further argues that Johnstone misrepresents Trotsky by attributing to him positions actually held by Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership, such as the need for efficiency and concessions to specialists. Johnstone’s invocation of Deutscher is dismissed, as Deutscher also criticised Lenin. On the trade union question, the author asserts that Lenin dialectically insisted on union independence to check bureaucratic distortions in the workers’ state—a position Johnstone omits. This omission is no accident: it obscures the contrast with Stalin’s later suppression of union rights. The attack on Johnstone’s praise for Khrushchev’s 1956 “unmasking” of Stalin is withering, arguing that the bureaucracy remains intact, with no independent unions, no right to strike, and a police-state terror. The Soviet Union’s economic strength makes the denial of basic democratic rights a contradiction, as the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia proved. Finally, the Tenth Party Congress is re-examined: the ban on factions was directed at the Workers’ Opposition, not Trotsky, and was a response to peasant pressure and the Kronstadt uprising. Lenin’s own statements confirm Trotsky’s party loyalty.