The Lessons of May Day¶
Core Argument¶
In this article from May 1922, Leon Trotsky draws on the unprecedented scale of the May Day demonstrations in Moscow, Petrograd, Kharkov, and Kiev to extract the strategic political lessons of the moment. The demonstrations, which astonished even their organisers and hostile foreign observers alike, are presented as a direct and spontaneous response to the Genoa Conference, which had just concluded. Trotsky argues that Genoa laid bare the fundamental contradiction between Soviet Russia and the capitalist world, and that the working masses grasped this with instinctive clarity. The enthusiasm and revolutionary self-confidence on display, he insists, refuted the slanders of the White Guard and ‘socialist’ émigré press in Berlin, which depicted the Russian working class as sunk in pessimism and hostility to the Soviet regime.
Trotsky acknowledges that discontent and exhaustion exist, particularly during the ‘weekdays’ of the revolution, when the grinding difficulties of economic reconstruction and the slow tempo of the European revolution breed disorientation. But he argues that major events—the Czechoslovak mutiny, the military interventions, and now Genoa—invariably reveal the profound unity of the working class and its deep bond with Soviet power. He draws a polemical contrast with tsarism: the initial phase of the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War temporarily strengthened the old regime, but only until the masses assimilated the new facts, after which the regime collapsed. Why, then, has the opposite occurred for the Soviet republic? Because, Trotsky contends, the Soviet state is a historically progressive force, and the toiling masses recognise it as their own. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who called on workers not to march, were revealed as an insignificant magnitude within Russia’s borders.
Yet Trotsky immediately turns this into a warning. The Mensheviks and SRs are impotent at home, but on an international scale they serve as the ‘transmitting political mechanism’ of a still-mighty bourgeois order, whose driving force is the Paris, London, and New York stock markets. The case of Georgia is cited: the Mensheviks, under Vandervelde’s leadership, demanded its restoration, while the reactionary French politician Barthou held a Wrangel detachment in reserve for an invasion of the Caucasus, all driven by the stock market’s greed for oil. The magnificent May Day movement expressed both the revolutionary power of the republic and the power of the dangers surrounding it. There are no open fronts, but Soviet Russia remains a beleaguered fortress. The lesson is clear: pride in strength must not abate vigilance by an iota.