28. ‘Trotskyism’ in 1917¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 28: ‘Trotskyism’ in 1917¶
This chapter mounts a direct historical challenge to the official Stalinist narrative that posits an irreconcilable antagonism between Trotskyism and Leninism. Trotsky argues that the supposed gulf was a retrospective fabrication by the epigones who, after Lenin’s death and amid a rising tide of reaction, rewrote party history to legitimise their own ascendancy.
The core of the argument rests on a striking claim: that in March 1917, writing independently in New York while Lenin composed his Letters from Afar in Geneva, Trotsky arrived at an identical analysis of the Russian revolution’s class forces and strategic perspectives. On every principal question—attitude toward the peasantry, the bourgeoisie, the Provisional Government, the war, and world revolution—their views were “completely identical.” Trotsky presents this as a “chemically pure experiment” in political convergence, untainted by prior consultation.
The polemical thrust is directed squarely at the Stalinist leadership. Trotsky insists that Lenin’s April Theses represented a position shared by no one else in the Bolshevik leadership at the time. A party conference held on the eve of Lenin’s return, attended by some thirty Bolsheviks, revealed that none imagined anything beyond bourgeois democracy. Trotsky names names: Stalin advocated supporting the Provisional Government of Guchkov and Milyukov and merging Bolsheviks with Mensheviks; Kamenev, Rykov, Molotov, Tomsky, Kalinin, and others took the same or worse positions. The Petrograd Pravda edited by Stalin and Kamenev before Lenin’s arrival stands as a “document of limited understanding, blindness, and opportunism.” Yaroslavsky and Ordzhonikidze were publishing a paper with Mensheviks in Yakutsk expounding “the most vulgar and provincial sort of opportunism.”
Trotsky draws on the historical record of 1917 to substantiate his case. He notes that upon his arrival in Petrograd, Kamenev’s only response to Trotsky’s agreement with the April Theses was “I should say not!”—suggesting the convergence was obvious to contemporaries. More pointedly, during April 1917, the leading group of the party accused Lenin of Trotskyism, not the reverse. Kamenev did so openly; others more discreetly. Many “old Bolsheviks” told Trotsky that “the celebration is on your street,” to which he responded that Lenin had developed his own position, and events had revealed the essential identity of their views.
The chapter draws on Lenin’s own retrospective judgment: in November 1917, Lenin declared that after Trotsky became convinced of the impossibility of union with the Mensheviks, “there has been no better Bolshevik.” Two years after the revolution, Lenin wrote that Bolshevism had drawn to itself “all the best elements in the currents of Socialist thought that were nearest to it.” Trotsky asks rhetorically whom else Lenin could have meant—Marcel Cachin? Thälmann?—and concludes that for Lenin, surveying the party’s development as a whole, Trotskyism was not a hostile current but the one “closest to Bolshevism.”
The theoretical context is the theory of permanent revolution, which Trotsky had developed during the 1905 revolution and which he argues was vindicated by 1917. He cites his own article published in the party’s central organ on 7 September 1917, which concluded with the formulation: “A permanent revolution versus a permanent slaughter: that is the struggle, in which the stake is the future of man.” He challenges his present critics to explain why they remained silent about this “heretical” slogan at the time, and why Lenin tolerated it—the answer being that it was not heretical at all.
The chapter functions as a sustained indictment of the Stalinist leadership’s political bankruptcy in 1917, contrasting their opportunism and confusion with the clarity of Lenin and Trotsky. It is a defence of Trotsky’s revolutionary credentials against the charge that his position was fundamentally alien to Leninism, and a demonstration that the official history is a falsification serving the political needs of the epigones.