3. From Five-Year Plan to the Purges¶
Core Argument¶
After the 1927-28 crisis vindicated the Left Opposition's warnings, Stalin abruptly reversed his pro-kulak policy, removed the Right Opposition leaders, and lurched in an ultra-left direction. Trotsky argued that without the Left Opposition's criticism, Stalin's policy would have restored capitalism. Forced collectivisation, executed at gunpoint and lacking necessary industrial machinery, was an economic adventure: collective farms rose from 1.7 per cent in 1929 to 89.6 per cent in 1936, but approximately seven million died in the 1931-33 famine and agricultural output collapsed. Industry saw breakneck expansion—1,500 large enterprises built during the first Five-Year Plan, new industrial sectors established, unemployment abolished—yet the regime introduced piecework and Stakhanovite shock brigades, which Trotsky condemned as capitalist methods. Real wages rose during the second plan but remained below 1928 levels, while the bureaucracy's privileges grew enormously through special shops, hospitals and multiple salaries; the party maximum was abolished in 1932. Trotsky calculated the Soviet bureaucracy at 20-25 million people, distinguishing a ruling caste of around 500,000, but refused to label this parasitic stratum a new social class.
Exiled, Trotsky organised the international Left Opposition to defend Bolshevism and analyse Stalinism. He argued the USSR remained a proletarian state whose basic revolutionary gains were intact, despite bureaucratic degeneration, and must be defended unconditionally. Until 1933, the Left Opposition fought to reform the Communist Party from within. The catastrophe in Germany, where the Comintern's 'Social Fascism' policy split the working class and delivered it to Hitler, forced Trotsky to re-evaluate. The German events of 1923 demonstrated negatively what the Russian Revolution demonstrated positively: the decisive role of leadership. Stalin, increasingly sceptical of international revolution, developed 'socialism in one country', marking a turn from revolutionary internationalism. The Comintern was reduced to a tool of Moscow's foreign policy. Trotsky concluded the Comintern was politically dead after Hitler's victory and called for new parties.
The Popular Front policy, adopted at the Comintern's 1935 Congress, was class collaboration that Lenin had always opposed. In Spain, workers rose against Franco's coup in 1936 and took power, but Stalin, terrified a successful Spanish revolution would undermine his bureaucracy, used the GPU to destroy the POUM and CNT, ensuring Franco's victory. Stalin responded by launching the Purge trials. The assassination of Kirov in 1934, a provocation organised by Stalin, provided the pretext. Trotsky described the trials as a "one-sided civil war" against the working-class vanguard. The old Bolshevik generation was exterminated: of 139 Central Committee members elected at the 17th Congress, 110 were arrested; only two Central Committee members from October 1917 survived. The Red Army was decimated—20,000-35,000 officers liquidated between 1937 and 1938, including 90 per cent of generals. Confessions were extracted under torture; Khrushchev later confirmed Stalin instructed investigators to "beat, beat and, once again, beat." At Vorkuta, Trotskyists organised an unprecedented hunger strike lasting over four months, winning concessions before being taken into the tundra and shot, singing the Internationale as they were led away. The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 confirmed Trotsky's warnings. After the Nazi invasion in 1941, Communist Parties mobilised to support the 'Democracies', but when they could have taken power in France, Italy and Belgium, they entered coalition governments, saved capitalism, and were then expelled, opening the Cold War.