38. Transition to the New Economic Policy & My Relations With Lenin¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Trotsky frames the final period of his collaboration with Lenin not as a chronicle of policy divergence, but as the seedbed of a subsequent historiographical war waged by the epigones—Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. The core argument is that the post-Lenin regime constructed a fraudulent narrative of perpetual struggle between two ‘principles’—Leninism and Trotskyism—by isolating rare disagreements, inflating polemical expressions, and resorting to outright invention. Trotsky contrasts this with his own practice of open disagreement and appeal to the party, whereas the epigones, disagreeing with Lenin far more often, either kept silent or, like Stalin, sulked in the countryside. The chapter’s narrative thrust is to reclaim the true history of the trade union dispute of 1920-21, which the epigones later twisted into evidence of Trotsky’s hostility to the peasantry and the New Economic Policy (NEP).
Trotsky’s key claim is that the roots of the discussion were the opposite of what was later alleged. He had proposed the abandonment of war communism as early as February 1920, submitting to the Central Committee a project to replace the food levy with a grain tax and restore commodity exchange—the basic propositions of the NEP a full year before its adoption. Lenin opposed this, and the proposal was rejected 11-4. Trotsky argues that his subsequent defence of militarising the trade unions flowed inexorably from the system of war communism that had been approved by the Ninth Congress; if industry was to be run by state order, the unions had no independent role. Lenin, with his political instinct, sensed the critical moment had arrived and moved to ease military pressure, while Trotsky, on purely economic grounds, demanded more intensive effort. The dispute was rendered moot by the Kronstadt uprising, after which Lenin shaped the first theses on the NEP, which Trotsky immediately endorsed as a renewal of his own earlier proposals.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical context of the civil war and the transport crisis of 1919-20, when engineer Lomonosov predicted the complete collapse of the railways. Trotsky’s emergency measures in transport, which brought military discipline to bear, yielded a pronounced success that Lenin himself remarked upon. The polemic is directed squarely at the epigones, whom Trotsky accuses of fabricating a history that the medieval apologists would envy. He deploys a devastating counter-evidence: a blank sheet of paper from July 1919, signed by Lenin, giving Trotsky an unlimited moral power of attorney to endorse any future order, even those carrying life or death. This is juxtaposed with Lenin’s ‘Testament’, which Stalin concealed, characterising Stalin as a disloyal man capable of abusing power. The chapter thus serves as both a vindication of Trotsky’s strategic foresight on the NEP and a bitter indictment of the methods used to erase his role in the revolution’s survival.