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From The Militant, Vol. 18 No. 16, 19 April 1954.
Transcribed & marked up by Martin Fahlgren for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL) in 2012.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2012. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 .
One of the key political questions our time is the relation between Bolshevism (the theory and movement representing revolutionary Marxism in its modern form) and Stalinism (the theory and movement representing the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy). For different reasons, most spokesmen of capitalism and all spokesmen of Stalinism agree on the view that Stalinism is the logical and revolutionary continuation of Bolshevism.
The capitalists propagate this view because the identification of degenerate Stalinism with Bolshevism helps them to discredit the latter and to discourage revolutionary workers from taking the Bolshevik road. The Stalinists propagate it because it helps them to keep or win the allegiance of workers seeking a revolutionary Marxist policy and party.
Nevertheless this view of the s relation between Bolshevism and Stalinism is completely false, and has been refuted by the events of the last 30 years during which Stalinism destroyed the Bolshevik party, murdered the Bolsheviks, helped capitalism to prevent or crush proletarian revolutions in many countries and in general became a counter-revolutionary force in mortal opposition to Bolshevism.
We're not arguing the point here, merely stating it. (Readers not familiar with the question are referred to the writings of Leon Trotsky, especially his pamphlet, Stalinism and Bolshevism, which demonstrates that “Stalinism 'grew out' of Bolshevism, not logically, however, but dialectically; not as a revolutionary affirmation but as a Thermidorian negation. It is by no means the same.”)
His basic idea
The question is most pertinent when we consider Isaac Deutscher’s books on the Soviet Union, including his recent biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed. Because the basic idea that he too is trying to put across is that Stalinism is a logical and fundamentally revolutionary continuation of Bolshevism.
Objectively, as we have shown in reviews of his previous books, Deutscher is an apologist for Stalinism and an enemy of Bolshevism today by Trotskyism. By this we don't mean to charge him with being a Stalinist, or a crude apologist for Stalinism. Not at all.
Unlike the Stalinist hacks, he makes no attempt to conceal the many Stalinist crimes against the working class; he presented these crimes in detail in his biography of Stalin. Unlike the hacks, he does not deny Trotsky’s leading role in the Russian revolution; in fact, his avowed aim is to “restore” Trotsky to his proper place in the annals of the revolution, from which the Stalinists tried to expunge him; he pays tribute to Trotsky’s talents, etc., and even berates him for “belittling” his own role.
Occasional slips
On the whole, Deutscher’s writings show the marks of intensive research. He says his approach, “presupposing sympathy and understanding (of Trotsky), is, I trust, as free from denunciation as from apologetics.” He does not level any direct attacks on Bolshevism, which distinguishes him so sharply from most current historians of the Soviet Union that some reviewers have concluded he must be a “Leninist” or “Trotskyist.”
It is only on rare occasions that he slips and gives explicit expression to his real attitudes. (One glaring example is his identification of the dictatorship of the proletariat with totalitarianism, as in his criticism of Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution: “to advocate the proletarian dictatorship as the direct objective of revolution in Russia . . . need not necessarily have meant a monolithic state, but ... inevitably implied an approximation of it.”)
Distorts whole picture
The differences between Bolshevism and Stalinism are seldom flatly denied by Deutscher; in fact, he generally states them. But after doing so, he also generally proceeds to blur and minimize them. He achieves this by drawing analogies between the methods of Lenin and Trotsky on one side and of Stalin on the other, by presenting events and theories in such a way as to make it appear that Lenin and Trotsky (usually out of good motives) set the precedent for Stalin’s crimes, by giving his sharpest and final emphasis to the alleged similarities rather than to the differences between them.
The result is to distort the whole picture. It’s as if Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in a progressive and revolutionary civil war were cited as “precedent” and “justification” for McCarthy’s violations of civil liberties today.
Let us discuss only one of the many examples of such distortion that abound in The Prophet Armed — the question of “revolution by conquest.”
Polish war
In 1920 Poland invaded the Soviet Union as part of the general imperialist anti-Soviet crusade. The Red Army beat the Polish forces back to their own Borders. The question then arose: Should the Red Army pursue them to Warsaw, or stop at the frontier?
Lenin favored pursuit, first because only a decisive defeat would remove the Polish threat, second because he believed the Polish workers were preparing to make a revolution and would welcome the Red Army as an ally in overthrowing their rulers. Trotsky favored stopping, because such a policy would intensify anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiment and action inside Poland and because he believed that the Red Army’s entry, instead of speeding up revolutionary developments in Poland, would promote patriotism, chauvinism and anti-Soviet feeling. Stalin wavered between the two positions.
There was no question of principle involved in this dispute, only of military and political strategy and tactics. All the Bolsheviks believed that revolutions must be made by the workers in their own country, and that it was permissible under certain circumstances for the Red Army to set as an auxiliary for revolutionary workers in other countries.
Lenin’s policy was adopted, but because it was based on a wrong estimate of the situation inside Poland it proved disastrous, as he himself later admitted. The Polish reactionaries emerged strengthened, and the Red Army had to withdraw from Poland.
Ferment and fester
Now what does Deutscher say? “Although it had failed it was bound, to have a deep influence on the party’s outlook. The idea of revolution by conquest had been injected into the Bolshevik mind; and it went on to ferment and fester.” Result? “In 1945-6 and partly even in 1939-40 Stalin began where he, and in a sense he and Lenin, had left off in 1920-2t1.” And so he sees a “thread of unconscious historic continuity which led from Lenin’s hesitant and shame-faced essays in revolution by conquest to the revolutions contrived by Stalin the conqueror.”
Thus Deutscher, tearing events out of their context, puts on a par Lenin’s efforts to help a revolution that he believed was on the verge of breaking out, with Stalin’s expansionist policy, which was motivated in great part by a desire to crush and prevent the spread of genuine working class revolutions in other countries. Lenin’s attempts to help revolutionary workers overthrow their oppressors and Stalin’s' suppression of workers (by agreement with the imperialists) – these are essentially the same thing to Deutscher, who sees In the first a “precedent” and a “justification” for the second, although in their actual contexts they are opposites.
Deutscher does the same thing with the policies advocated by Trotsky during the controversies of 1920-1, mentioning but then ignoring the specific circumstances that motivated them, and reaching this conclusion: “A similar subtle thread connects Trotsky’s domestic policy of these years with the later practices of his antagonist. Both Trotsky and Lenin, appear, each in a different field, as Stalin’s unwitting inspirers and prompters.”
Thus Bolshevism is made responsible for its polar opposite and chief antagonist, Stalinism, and the real irreconcilability of the two is softened and obscured, at least in Deutscher’s pages.
“Dilemma”?
Along the way Deutscher also says: “Trotsky did not live to witness the momentous chapter which Stalin’s revolutionary conquest has since written in modern history. His attitude toward the early symptoms of the trend was inconclusive. He was for revolution and against conquest; but when revolution led to conquest and conquest promoted revolution, he was confronted with a dilemma which, from his viewpoint, admitted no satisfactory solution.” (Our emphasis.)
This is one of his more barefaced lies. There was no dilemma and nothing inconclusive about Trotsky’s attitude toward Stalinist expansionism in 1939-40. The Soviet state, he wrote, had the right to defend itself against imperialism, even to the point of occupying capitalist territory, and despite his opposition to Stalin’s policies, he remained a revolutionary defender of the Soviet Union to the end. For the countries seized, he advocated revolutionary working class action to transform them into independent workers states, and when they were incorporated into the Soviet Union by bureaucratic measures he favored defending them against capitalist restoration just like the test of the Soviet Union.
At the same time Trotsky continued to advocate the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy, condemning the methods used by Stalin to gain control of these countries as reactionary because they repelled the workers of the world and lowered instead of raised their revolutionary consciousness and initiative.
When Deutscher talks about a “dilemma” he is referring to the distinction Trotsky correctly made between the interests of the Soviet Union and the world revolution on one hand and those of the Soviet bureaucracy on the other. Deutscher thinks Trotsky was inconsistent because he did not give up his opposition to Stalinism after it began to execute its “revolutionary” conquests, which for Deutscher and others became the starting point for a re-evaluation of Stalinism as a fundamentally revolutionary force, now carrying out the program of Lenin and Trotsky in “unexpected ways.”
(It is this re-evaluation, by the way, that gives Deutscher so much prestige in the eyes of the Pabloites, who are re-evaluating Stalinism themselves, and it explains why they follow his revelations with bated breath and why they are now giving out with lyrical praise of The Prophet Armed.)
“No impartial author”
As Samasamajist, the Ceylon Trotskyist paper, remarked on March 4:
When Deutscher says that Stalin was for “revolutionary” conquest, “That’s the theme that will pay well. The Stalinists will not mind that. Nor will the imperialists — it helps their war plans. Deutscher gets publicity (and cash). And who suffers? Trotsky (Deutscher), who is now an armchair observer of events, is no impartial author. As we said, he says things that are suitable to both the imperialists and the Stalinists.”
(Some further remarks on Deutscher’s book will appear next week. )
Last updated: 21 March 2025