8 Trotsky on Stalinism—The Surplus and the Machine

Few events capture the tragedy of the Russian Revolution more graphically than the terrible moment in August 1940 when an assassin, operating on instructions from Moscow, mortally wounded Leon Trotsky—the most iconic of anti-Stalinists—by driving an ice-climbing axe into his skull. On Trotsky’s desk, in the study where the murder took place, was the unfinished manuscript of a massive political biography titled Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence.

Charles Malamuth—the translator hired by Trotsky—prepared for publication an English-language version of the work, the first half of which was approved and checked by Trotsky before his death. The remaining portions were in various stages of completion and Malamuth connected these unfinished fragments, writing what he called “extensive interpolations,” which he says “in every case” were “set off from the author’s text by brackets.”1 Thus edited, the text was ready for publication in 1941, but held back from sale until 1946. There was concern that its publication would jeopardize the war-time alliance with Stalin’s Russia—exposing as it did the venal nature of Stalin’s rule and the horrifying consolidation of a dictatorial state. When finally published, it “provoked outrage” from mainstream communists, at the time almost entirely under the influence of Stalin.2 The book found few supporters even among anti-Stalinists. Rob Sewell says that in the preface to certain editions of the book, Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova, warned readers to distrust “phrases inserted throughout this book by Charles Malamuth,” saying that Malamuth was “a political opponent of Trotsky.”3

Now, thanks to the diligent work of Alan Woods, we have access to the complete manuscript—the appendix and first seven chapters revised by Trotsky before his death (all but the seventh chapter of the English translation were also checked by him), plus all of the unfinished fragments, including tens of thousands of new words not published by Malamuth. In addition, Woods has removed all of Malamuth’s many bracketed insertions. Woods emphasizes this point: “Every trace of Malamuth’s interference with the text has been expunged. Where this has created gaping holes in the text, I have added some ‘bridging’ passages, which are clearly indicated in square brackets.”4 The implication is that we can now, for the first time, gain unfiltered access to the evolving epistemology of one of the great figures of the twentieth century as he attempted to explain one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century—the rise to power of Stalin and the totalitarian system that was constructed on the bones of 1917.

A Voice from Beyond the Grave

Aware since the 1970s of the controversy surrounding this text, I did a detailed “parallel” reading of the two editions, setting out to discover the exact nature of antipathy toward Malamuth. My conclusion was, without question, that this antipathy was unwarranted. A careful comparison of the two editions makes it clear that if Malamuth did “filter” the words of Trotsky to his own ends, the filter deployed was rather porous. Woods says that Malamuth “describes the October Revolution as a ‘coup,’ which simply repeats the slanders of bourgeois critics,” and which “constitutes a gross distortion of the ideas of Trotsky.”5 Woods is undoubtedly correct on the latter point—Trotsky would never have referred to the October Revolution as a coup, and I did find two occasions, in his bracketed interpolations, where Malamuth uses the terms “coup” and “coup d’état” to describe the October 1917 events.6 Woods has quite rightly removed them from his edition. But—with the exception of one well-worked-over passage examined below—nothing else of substance in the Malamuth translation has been altered. The two editions are, without any question, more similar than different.

The similarity is partially acknowledged by Woods. The portion completed by Trotsky and the translation checked by him—almost half the manuscript—Woods reprints with only incidental changes. As to the half of the Malamuth translation not checked and approved by Trotsky, Woods states that “having examined every sentence of the second half of Stalin … I consider that in general Malamuth’s English translation is not all bad. Although it can hardly be considered a literary masterpiece, it is mostly a correct translation.”7 By Woods’s own admission, then, many tens of thousands of the English words published in his edition were translated by Malamuth, not by Woods—to the point that Malamuth really should be listed as co-translator of the book. More pertinent than this question of publication ethics, however, is the question of political orientation. Absent the phrases inserted by Malamuth, and with all the new material from Trotsky translated by Woods, the core epistemologies of the two editions are identical. Malamuth’s use of the word “coup” on two occasions may have been a trigger for the emotional responses of Trotsky’s supporters, but it was little more than that. I will suggest here that the controversy created by the publication of Stalin was caused not by Malamuth but by Trotsky. A significant—and to some, uncomfortable—evolution in his epistemology is clearly evident in both the Malamuth and the Woods–Malamuth translations.

Furthermore, reading both editions brings into focus another work—Boris Souvarine’s Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, published in French in 1935 and translated into English by C. L. R. James in 1939. Nathalie Babel (Isaac Babel’s daughter) called Souvarine’s Stalin “the first biography and historical study of Joseph Stalin.”8 Souvarine, born Boris Lifschitz, was a co-founder of the French Communist Party and, from May 1921 until January 1925, a resident in Moscow—where, writes Michel Surya, he “became a member of three of the leading bodies of the Comintern,” exerting what Surya describes as “considerable” influence over Communist Party leadership in the Soviet Union.9 For a position on one of those three bodies—secretary to the executive of the Communist International—he was nominated by Lenin himself, for whom Souvarine was, in Hella Mandt’s words, a “political protégé.”10 Trotsky refers to Souvarine’s work repeatedly throughout his own biography of Stalin, criticizing it on key points, but nonetheless describing it as “without doubt the most conscientiously researched work in its selection of facts, documents and quotations.”11 Souvarine was part of the earliest wave of anti-Stalinists, famously labelled “the first disenchanted by communism” by his biographer Jean Louis Panné. In 1924, Souvarine was expelled from the Communist International and therefore from the French party that he had helped to form just a few years earlier.12 However, he remained a committed activist of the Left, founding, in 1931, what Surya calls “one of the most remarkable journals to emerge from the extreme left between the wars, La Critique sociale.”13

So, in what way does Trotsky’s Stalin reveal a controversial evolution in the author’s epistemology? First, Trotsky emphasizes that to understand the class nature of the Soviet Union, one must not solely employ the concept of state ownership of the economy, the main criterion advanced in his well-known Revolution Betrayed. One must also, and in fact primarily, employ a more orthodox, historical-materialist concept—that of control of the surplus product. Second, Trotsky notes that Stalin’s rise needs, in part, to be understood in relation to the specific dynamics of the party machine so carefully constructed by Lenin. Both of these ideas are deeply embedded in the Souvarine text as well. At times, the reader of Stalin gets the impression that Souvarine is Trotsky’s unacknowledged interlocutor.

I argue in this chapter that the Stalin biography made Trotsky’s followers uncomfortable (it was essentially shunned for more than half a century), not because of the distortions introduced by Malamuth, but because of these two epistemological challenges to what was then historical-materialist orthodoxy. Furthermore, the epistemological evolution represented by these two ideas accompanied a willingness to interrogate and sometimes challenge other key aspects of the Leninist story, an interrogation that was pulling Trotsky the elder back toward positions he had held as Trotsky the youth. This honest questioning and scholarship by one of the key actors in the Russian revolutionary drama provides an indispensable resource for any serious student of that drama. It is important that the shunning be abandoned and that both editions of Trotsky’s last work—and Souvarine’s pathbreaking 1935 work with which Trotsky was engaging—be studied very seriously.

An Epistemology in Flux

Trotsky wrote Stalin while he was bending heaven and earth to hold his followers to the view that in spite of the Thermidor (what others called counter-revolution), about which he was so painfully aware, there remained something progressive about the Soviet Union, something worth defending. In his view, the Soviet Union remained (in the peculiar vernacular of the period) a “degenerated workers’ state.” However, he was more and more swimming in a milieu that found it increasingly difficult to apply the phrase “workers’ state” and the adjective “progressive” to a regime associated with the creation of famine, with forced labour camps, and with purges that together destroyed the lives of millions.

Certainly, Souvarine did not see the Soviet Union as in any sense progressive. In a postscript to the 1939 English translation of his book, he said that counter-revolution had resulted in “a nightmare.”

“The expropriation of the expropriators” has led to a sort of bureaucratic feudalism under which the proletariat and the peasantry, debased by officialdom and the mandarinate, have been reduced to a kind of serfdom. If the methods of production are not exactly capitalist, a term which in any case is indefinable, it is only because, for the majority of the Soviet pariahs, the system deserves rather the name of slavery.14

This was not the first time that the term feudal had been attached to the methods of Stalin. As the regime returned, in 1928, to forcible seizure of grain from the peasants and then began the horror of forced collectivization in late 1929, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, who were leading Bolsheviks, “accused the Party of pursuing a policy of military-feudal exploitation of the peasantry.”15 This charge was vehemently denied by Stalin in a long speech from which I have already cited extensively.16

Souvarine, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were not alone in trying to identify the mechanisms of exploitation in what was clearly a new, hierarchical, and class-ridden society. One of Trotsky’s closest friends and collaborators was Christian Rakovsky, who was exiled to the far north in the late 1920s. Rakovsky clung to the view that the Soviet Union had progressive “survivals,” but he saw clearly that it was dominated by a “great class of directors” for whom state ownership was, in fact, a kind of collectivized private property. Souvarine, in an important section of his book, takes Rakovsky quite seriously and quotes him extensively:

From Siberia, Rakovsky and his deported friends wrote as early as 1930: “From a workers’ State with bureaucratic deformations, as Lenin defined the form of our Government, we are developing into a bureaucratic State with proletarian-communist survivals. Under our very eyes has formed and is being formed a great class of directors, which has its internal subdivisions and which increases through calculated co-option and direct or indirect nominations (bureaucratic advancement or fictitious electoral system). The element which unites this original class is a form, also original, of private property, to wit, the State-power.” And they took their stand very pertinently on a phrase of Marx, “The bureaucracy possesses the State as private property.” Just as the Consulate was neither a republic nor a monarchy, the Secretariat is neither a democracy nor Tsarism, the consequence of a revolution which was neither socialist nor bourgeois.17

The English translation of Souvarine’s work was done by C. L. R. James while he was writing his masterpiece on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. At the time, James was a leading member of the US Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the most important of the political organizations that looked to Trotsky for leadership.18 In April 1939, he was part of a delegation from the SWP that travelled to Mexico to visit Trotsky in exile, an event principally known for the discussions with Trotsky that helped shape the way in which socialists relate to the struggle against racism.19 We have no evidence of any views on the trajectory of the Russian revolution expressed by James during that visit, but we do know that just a few months later, James was openly challenging Trotsky’s position on Russia. In an article provocatively titled “Russia—A Fascist State,” James wrote that the Soviet bureaucracy, while it does engage in the “planning” indispensable to a workers’ state, it does so in the manner of “any other capitalist class.” He said that the Soviet bureaucracy “plans in order to get as much surplus value as possible from the workers, it plans to preserve itself against other capitalist classes.”20

We also know that the woman who was soon to become James’s close collaborator was in Mexico at the same time. In 1938, Trotsky’s staff in Mexico was joined by the then twenty-eight-year-old Raya Dunayevskaya, who for a while served as Trotsky’s Russian language secretary.21 Her collaboration with Trotsky ended abruptly after the Hitler–Stalin pact of 1939.22 About that pact, she wrote in 1941:

Because we did not clearly understand the class nature of the present Soviet state, the Soviet Union’s integral participation in the Second Imperialist World War came as a monstrous surprise. The Red Army march on Poland, the bloody conquest of part of Finland and the peaceful conquest of the Baltic states proved that the Stalinized Red Army had no more connection with the spirit, purpose and content of October than has the Stalinist state, whose armed might it is. What an abhorrent relapse from the conquests of October are the Stalinist conquests!23

James and Dunayevskaya would go on to jointly develop the analysis that the Soviet Union under Stalin had degenerated into a form of state capitalism.

The point is that Trotsky’s Stalin was written at a time when many of his closest collaborators were recoiling from identification with the horrors of Stalinism and looking for new ways of analyzing the postrevolutionary developments. Trotsky did not formally change his characterization of Russia as a workers’ state, but without question, Stalin indicates a shift in certain of his fundamental points, specifically on two issues—the surplus and the machine.

Control of the Surplus Product

Mapping the different paths taken by Woods and Malamuth in the translation process reveals interesting bits of evidence as to editorial intention. As noted earlier, Woods believed that Malamuth had produced “mostly a correct translation,” and as a result, Woods copied hundreds of pages and thousands of paragraphs verbatim from Malamuth—not only from the first seven chapters and appendix approved and/or checked by Trotsky, but from all the other portions of the Malamuth text. However, on a very few occasions, Woods did make serious attempts to retranslate. One portion in particular stands out. The Malamuth edition quotes Trotsky as saying:

The Thermidor rested on a social foundation. It was a matter of bread, meat, living quarters, surplus, if possible, luxury….

The same social motivation is to be found in the Soviet Thermidor. It was first of all a matter of throwing off the Spartan limitations of the first period of the Revolution. But it was also a question of achieving increasing privileges for the bureaucracy. It was not a question of introducing a liberal economic régime. Concessions in that direction were temporary in character and lasted a considerably shorter time than had been originally intended. A liberal régime on the basis of private property means concentration of wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie, especially its higher-ups. The privileges of the bureaucracy have a different source of origin. The bureaucracy took for itself that part of the national income which it could secure either by the exercise of force or of its authority or by direct intervention in economic relations. In the matter of the national surplus product the bureaucracy and the petty bourgeoisie quickly changed from alliance to enmity. The control of the surplus product opened the bureaucracy’s road to power.24

The Woods translation makes roughly a dozen changes to this passage, including the following:

• “It was not a question of introducing a liberal economic régime” becomes “It was not a question of introducing a bourgeois economic regime”
• “Concessions in that direction were temporary in character” becomes “Concessions towards capitalism were temporary in character”25

The direction of these edits will seem minor to most. However, for those immersed in debates over “the Russian question” their direction is clear. Trotsky’s text, as translated by Malamuth, can give the impression that there was a new exploiting ruling class emerging within the Soviet Union. Woods is at pains to keep Trotsky “orthodox” and to indicate that what was emerging was a new bureaucratic caste, not a new exploitive ruling class. Such a subtle distinction is indispensable to maintaining a view that the counter-revolution was not yet completed, that a new ruling class had not yet emerged, that the Soviet Union remained a “degenerated workers’ state.”

In a bridging passage in the latter half of his translation, Woods provides a succinct summary of the orthodox position of Trotsky’s followers in the 1930s as it concerned the nature of the Soviet Union: “The restoration of limited free trading by the NEP [New Economic Policy] in 1921 was a retreat back to bourgeois expropriation. But in practice the freedom of trade was so limited that it did not undermine the foundations of the regime (the nationalization of the means of production), and the reins of government remained in the hands of the Russian Bolsheviks.”26 In other words, the foundation of the regime—what makes it “postcapitalist”—is the single criterion of “nationalization of the means of production.” An afterword to the text by Alan Woods reiterates the decisive, for him, role of this single criterion using the example of the Soviet defeat of Germany in World War II: “Only the colossal vitality of the nationalized planned economy … saved the Soviet Union.”27 This is unpersuasive. In 1812, as in 1945, Russia similarly repelled an invading army, one led by Napoleon and not Hitler. In 1812, as in 1945, we don’t have to look any further than the old category of patriotism to explain Russia’s victory.

That criterion—the nationalization of the means of production—was the key (often the sole) criterion by which to assess the class nature of the Soviet Union for Trotsky and his followers in the 1930s. The problem is that throughout Stalin, Trotsky hardly mentions this criterion. Where he does, he is equivocal:

The counter-revolution sets in when the spool of progressive social conquests begins to unwind. There seems no end to this unwinding. Yet some portion of the conquests of the revolution is always preserved. At any rate, the struggle against equality and the establishment of very deep social differentiations has, so far, neither been unable to eliminate the socialist consciousness of the masses nor the nationalisation of the means of production and the land, which are the basic socialist conquests of the revolution…. Thus, in spite of monstrous bureaucratic distortions, the class basis of the USSR remains proletarian. Although it undermines these achievements, the bureaucracy has not yet ventured to resort to the restoration of the private ownership of the means of production.28

His invocation of the continuing “socialist consciousness of the masses” was analyzed earlier, in chapter 5. If, as was argued in that chapter, there is little evidence of the continuing “socialist consciousness of the masses” in the 1930s, then indeed the only remaining criterion for claiming the continuation of socialism in the USSR would be nationalization of the means of production. Importantly, however, Trotsky concludes his point with the following caveat: “But let us bear in mind that the unwinding process has not yet been completed, and the future of Europe and the world during the next few decades has not yet been decided.”29 Trotsky then proceeds—in the paragraph that Woods so painstakingly revised from the Malamuth translation and throughout the book in other nonrevised sections—to suggest and develop a completely different criterion by which to assess the class nature of the Soviet Union—the control of the surplus product.

Trotsky asserts that “the substance of the Thermidor was, is and could not fail to be social in character. It stood for the crystallization of a new privileged stratum, the creation of a new substratum for the economically dominant class. There were two pretenders to this role: the petty bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy itself.”30 The petty (or petite) bourgeoisie (by this, he means primarily the so-called rich peasants) is clearly a class designation, but here he is putting the bureaucracy in the same category, which suggests that, in his thinking, it too was becoming a class.

In the latter half of Stalin, in notes that are slightly different versions of early material in the book, Trotsky writes: “Possession of the surplus produce opened the bureaucracy’s road to power.”31 Developing a class analysis on the basis of control of the surplus product is, of course, the essence of Marx’s method—and of historical materialism. However, Trotsky does not draw the conclusion that this control of the surplus product by a state elite results in a new class. Rather, he suggests that “the introduction of a liberal economic regime was out of the question…. A liberal regime based on private property means the concentration of wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie and its upper layers. But the privileges of the bureaucracy did not flow from the automatic development of the existing economic relations.”32 True enough. But students of capitalism are all too aware that while aspects of capitalism’s present might be “liberal,” there was nothing liberal about its origins in state-directed mercantilism and the completely illiberal trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Souvarine makes many of the same points that Trotsky does, but does not hesitate to conclude that the Soviet Union is no longer in any way progressive or that it constitutes some kind of a workers’ state. “So-called Soviet society rests on its own method of exploitation,” he writes, “of man by man, of the producer by the bureaucracy, of the technician by the political power.”

For the individual appropriation of surplus value is substituted a collective appropriation by the State, a deduction made for the parasitic consumption of functionaries. Stalin reckoned for 1933 about 8,000,000 functionaries and employees, whose precise income it is impossible to estimate. But official documentation leaves us no doubt: the bureaucracy takes an undue part of the produce, corresponding more or less to the old capitalist profit, of the subjugated classes, which it submits to an inexorable sweating system. There has thus been formed around the Party a new social category, interested in maintaining the established order, and perpetuating the State of which Lenin predicted the extinction with the disappearance of classes.33

Souvarine does not give the resulting class society an official designation. But if he will not say what it is, he is absolutely clear what it is not:

Stalin denies “State socialism” in the USSR on the ground that the means of production are collective property. But the appropriation of profit has an unquestionably private character, and it is this which matters. Private profit is apparent in the growing social inequality, which is more revolting in its arrant injustice than in the capitalist countries where it is diminishing, more intolerable in the terminology of hypocritical equalitarianism. No society, it is true, has ever existed without a hierarchy, without authority, without natural and artificial privileges. But the socialist dream of founding one has in Russia turned into a nightmare.34

His polemic here is directed against Stalin’s view of the “progressive” nature of the Soviet Union. It could equally be directed at Trotsky.

“With the Aid of an Impersonal Machine”

The second area where Trotsky is carving out new territory, challenging an orthodoxy he helped create, has to do with theorizing a link between the rise of Stalin and the history of and nature essential to the Leninist party machine of professional revolutionaries (or to use contemporary language, professional staff). Very early on in the text, he makes this explicit:

Stalin took possession of power, not with the aid of personal qualities, but with the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who created the machine, but the machine that created him. That machine, with its force and its authority, was the product of the prolonged and heroic struggle of the Bolshevik Party, which itself grew out of ideas. The machine was the bearer of the idea before it became an end in itself. Stalin headed the machine from the moment he cut off the umbilical cord that bound it to the idea and it became a thing unto itself. Lenin created the machine through constant association with the masses, if not by oral word, then by printed word, if not directly, then through the medium of his disciples. Stalin did not create the machine but took possession of it.35

He comes back to this idea frequently throughout the text. Calling Stalin by his frequently used party nickname “Koba,” Trotsky says the following:

• “Koba was protecting ‘the apparat’ [political machine] against pressure from below.”36
• “Koba preferred to have firm ground under his feet. He prized the apparatus more than the idea.”37
• “In all those instances when it is necessary for him to choose between the idea and the political machine, he invariably inclines toward the machine.”38
• “Pulling wires from behind the scenes, relying on the illegal apparatus. In that activity Stalin undoubtedly proved himself more apt than anyone else.”39

What Trotsky presents is a very strong claim that the party machine—disconnected from “the idea,” his shorthand for the theory and program of Russian social democracy, and without the hand of its creator, Lenin—becomes the perfect breeding ground for authoritarianism and dictatorship. Critically, he does not see this as an aberration emerging late in the party’s history, but as something embedded in its very nature, in that the “negative aspects of Bolshevism’s centripetal tendencies” were making themselves apparent as early as 1905 at the Third Congress of the Russian Social-Democracy.

The habits peculiar to a political machine were already forming in the underground. The young revolutionary bureaucrat was already emerging as a type. The conditions of conspiracy, true enough, offered rather meager scope for such of the formalities of democracy as electiveness, accountability and control. Yet, undoubtedly the committeemen narrowed these limitations considerably more than necessity demanded and were far more intransigent and severe with the revolutionary workingmen than with themselves, preferring to domineer even on occasions that called imperatively for lending an attentive ear to the voice of the masses.40

This is as scathing an indictment of the conservative tendencies of Leninist staff-driven centralism as any written by Luxemburg or Martov. Trotsky is, however, hesitant to draw too sweeping a conclusion:

In this connection it is rather tempting to draw the inference that future Stalinism was already rooted in Bolshevik centralism or, more sweepingly, in the underground hierarchy of professional revolutionists. But upon analysis that inference crumbles to dust, disclosing an astounding paucity of historical content. Of course, there are dangers of one kind or another in the very process of stringently picking and choosing persons of advanced views and welding them into a tightly centralized organization. But the roots of such dangers will never be found in the so-called “principle” of centralism; rather they should be sought in the lack of homogeneity and the backwardness of the toilers—that is, in the general social conditions which make imperative that very centripetal leadership of the class by its vanguard.41

Here, his logic becomes confusing. Cultural backwardness requires centralism in the formation of a party. That centralism creates a conservative apparatus that privileges the place of the full-time staff of professional revolutionaries and that becomes a petri dish for the creation of bureaucrats in the Stalin mould. The negative effects can be offset by “the idea” and the presence of Lenin. But without Lenin, “the idea” disappears, and the authoritarian bureaucrat (Stalin) comes to prominence. If all this is true, then what possible justification could there be for such austere, staff-driven centralism in the first place? The whole schema only works, apparently, if we have access to a Lenin—to one great individual. A political program that embeds into its schema the necessity for one great individual is, to say the least, unsatisfying.

At one point, Trotsky links this analysis to his first major work, the 1904 book cited earlier, a book he wrote that provided a scathing criticism of Leninist centralism.42 He says that the book “contains not a little that is immature and erroneous in my criticism of Lenin,” but that it does contain “pages which present a fairly accurate characterization of the cast of thought of the ‘committeemen’ of those days.”43 However, in the context of criticizing Souvarine for focusing too much on the conservative nature of the machine and the professional revolutionaries, he is much harder on this 1904 work, calling its approach “a logical reduction to absurdity.”44

In the recently published book by Boris Souvarine entitled Stalin, Stalin’s moral standing is deduced from his “belonging to the order of professional revolutionists.” Souvarine’s generalization in this case as in others is superficial and arbitrary…. He attempts to deduce the whole evolution of the Soviet Republic from certain original sins he attributes to the nature of Bolshevism—as if Bolshevism operated in an empty space or with an amorphous mass; as if Bolshevism were a demi-god of history which sculptures human material in its own image and likeness; and as if there were no interaction with the social environment.45

Trotsky says that Souvarine’s “mind is formalistic and utterly devoid of historical penetration and intuition. He does not see the phenomena in three dimensions,” only looking for “literary precedents and not the inherent laws of development.”46 Even a short examination of Souvarine’s impressive book shows that this is completely unfair. I have relied as much on Souvarine as on Trotsky for analysis and for concrete and material-historical (i.e., not formalistic) examples with which to sketch out the social and material foundations of war, revolution, and counter-revolution in the Soviet Union. Both Trotsky and Souvarine are indispensable in such a project, and both often take the same approach to key historical issues. Take just one example—the role played by Lenin in advancing the career of the future dictator, Joseph Stalin. Souvarine’s discussion of Stalin at the time of his 1912 co-optation onto the Central Committee is virtually identical to that of Trotsky:

The Mensheviks had excluded this “professional revolutionary,” the Bolsheviks advanced him. Unknown to the Party of which he was the instrument, he became one of the leaders solely by the decision of the other leaders. He was never elected; at all stages from the local and provincial committees in the Caucasus, up to the supreme All-Russian Committee he rose patiently and gradually in the hierarchy of the organisation without requiring the confidence of the masses or thinking of responsibility to them. He belonged exclusively to the “clandestine group of organisers” who imposed him on the organised. The Party knew nothing about him at the time of his nomination and was to remain in ignorance for a long time…. In contrast to a Trotsky, independently developed, ripened in dispute and in controversy with Plekhanov, Lenin, and Martov, and associated with the representatives of international socialism, Stalin was a product of the Party, grown up under its tutelage; but this was only a section of the Party which was itself incorporated in the directing organisation.47

Trotsky’s account of the same issue—Stalin’s rise in the ranks of the party—is as follows. At the Prague conference in 1912, “Stalin wanted to become a member of the Central Committee” and “Lenin deemed it necessary to have him elected to the Central Committee.” However, “Lenin … met with serious opposition. There was but one thing he could do: wait until the conference came to an end and then appeal to the small leading circle, which either relied on Lenin’s recommendation or shared his estimate of the candidate. Thus, Stalin for the first time came into the Central Committee through the back door.”48 The point to underline here is that it was a back door held open by Lenin.

Not only are Souvarine’s and Trotsky’s approaches to this issue more similar than different, but they both show that what is at stake is not centralism per se (organizing underground against autocracy imposed a kind of centralism on all political currents), but rather undemocratic and unaccountable centralism.

For Souvarine, who had come to the conclusion that the authoritarianism of the Stalin era had roots in the authoritarianism of the Lenin era, such an approach was straightforward. Trotsky, though, was writing as an orthodox Leninist, for whom the key organizing idea is the need for a centralized party of professional revolutionaries. For him to so clearly identify the party machine as the breeding ground for Stalinism was not straightforward. His antipathy toward Souvarine is explicable as antipathy toward the conclusions drawn by Souvarine—that it was the Leninist era that created the conditions for Stalinism. But it is not explicable as antipathy toward Souvarine’s analysis itself. In all key respects, Souvarine’s line of analysis parallels that of Trotsky. We have already seen that Trotsky was obliquely moving back toward his 1904 analysis of the limits of Leninism. Perhaps his antipathy toward Souvarine comes from the fact that Souvarine is not at all oblique about this analysis, but synthesizes the twenty-four-year-old Trotsky’s arguments clearly and without embellishment—an analysis that Trotsky, now an orthodox Leninist, would find uncomfortable. In the polemics against emergent Leninism in 1904, Souvarine says this:

The most violent, if not the most effective blows, were dealt by Trotsky in the pamphlet Our Political Tasks, in which he described Lenin as “head of the reactionary wing of our Party” and the “dull caricature of the tragic intransigence of Jacobinism.” Leninist methods, said Trotsky, would lead to a situation in which “the organisation of the Party takes the place of the Party itself, the Central Committee takes the place of the organisation, and finally the dictator takes the place of the Central Committee.” They would in the end impose on the Party the discipline first of the barracks, and then of the factory.49

Or, as Trotsky put it, “Rigour of organisation as opposed to our opportunism is simply another form of political stupidity.”50