9 A Movement’s Dirty Linen

Some two decades before the young Souvarine became a protégé of Lenin, a young Trotsky had played that same role. In 1902, after his first escape from exile, the twenty-three-year-old Trotsky arrived in London, and his first destination was the apartment of Lenin and Nadyezhda Krupskaya.1 Krupskaya and Lenin had a long political and personal partnership, beginning in the 1890s, that would last until Lenin’s death in 1924. By contrast, this first moment in the comradeship between Trotsky and Lenin would last less than a year. In 1903, when Lenin created the Bolsheviks from a split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP), Trotsky sided with Lenin’s Menshevik opponents, soon to separate from them as well, and, until 1917, took a “non-factional” position, arguing for the building of a united Left in Russia.

This divide between Trotsky and Lenin was bridged in July 1917, symbolized by the merger between the four-thousand-strong Inter-District Committee (or Mezhraionka, the non-factional group Trotsky had joined after arriving in Russia) and the now mass Bolshevik Party. From that point forward, Trotsky saw himself as both a Bolshevik and a Leninist, and after Lenin’s death, while he prosecuted his long battle against Stalin, Trotsky’s followers proudly took the name “Bolshevik-Leninist,” a name proposed to them by Zinoviev when he, Kamenev, and Krupskaya were briefly part of what was called the United Opposition.2 This claim to orthodox Leninism did not prevent Trotsky, in the pages of Stalin, from engaging in a deeply honest and at times highly critical analysis of the Russian Revolution and the role in that revolution played by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

One key issue was the Bolsheviks’ use of criminal and often violent methods by which to raise money. This approach to fundraising was rooted in the defeat of the 1905 revolution (the story of which will be detailed in chapter 10), which was also, not coincidentally, the moment when the figure of Joseph Stalin first indistinctly emerged onto the pages of history, under the alias of Ivanovich.

The “Muddy Wave” of Bolshevik Expropriations

In April 1906, in the wake of the suppression of the 1905 revolution, at a party unification congress held in Stockholm, Ivanovich (Stalin) declared, “We are on the eve of a new explosion…. On that all of us are agreed.” In 1907, Lenin repeated this prediction: “Ahead is a new, an even more menacing … revolutionary crisis.” As Trotsky notes: “This conclusion proved erroneous. Although the revolution was still strong enough to leave its impress on the arena of Tsarist pseudo-parliamentarism, it was already broken.” Stalin and Lenin’s mistake led inexorably to deep problems. It was the basis for advancing a “policy of attack,” which “became increasingly the policy of guerrilla clashes and scattered blows. The land was widely inundated with so-called ‘expropriations’—armed raids on banks, treasuries, and other repositories of money.”3

The story of these expropriations is one of the most depressing narratives in the history of the Russian Left. Armed actions had an honourable enough origin as actions of self-defence against tsarist reaction. As Souvarine writes, in the reaction against the 1905 revolution, “the authorities shot rebels in the army and the navy without mercy, crushed rural rioting by punitive expeditions on a considerable scale.”4 This state terror was opposed by the “drujiny—fighting squads of the various revolutionary parties.” However, the armed actions of these fighting squads were being carried out not in the context of a rising tide of mass action, but in a context of retreat, decline, demoralization, and mass passivity. In other words, as the mass movement retreated, small bands of armed rebels tried, for a while, to continue to attack in a futile attempt to substitute for the mass action of the now passive peasants and workers. In Souvarine’s words, “the boyeviki (armed militants, sharpshooters, guerrillas) turned to the offensive…. Murderous attacks on policemen, Cossacks and government agents, armed expropriations of public and private funds began to multiply.”5 An attempt by an armed minority to substitute for the now demoralized working class and peasantry degenerated into actions of common criminals:

The flying squads were mixed up with mischievous elements which were not disinterested but indisciplined and operating on their own account. Signs of degeneration, cases of common assault, acts of terrorism against the inhabitants, soon threw great discredit on the movement. Robbers and bandits, who made it their business to hold the population to ransom rather than to annoy the authorities made the “war of the partisans” suspect. It became difficult to distinguish between “ex’es” of all sorts and various forms of brigandage.6

Souvarine quotes Rosa Luxemburg characterizing these “innumerable thefts and robberies on private persons,” which “passed like a muddy wave over this period of depression when the revolution was temporarily on the defensive.”7

This was all a departure from Russian social-democratic policy. The same 1906 Stockholm Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party where Ivanovich / Stalin made his entrance into party history voted against the use of armed terrorism.8 The party subsequently divided into warring camps, with one half of the schism, the Mensheviks, holding to that position and the other half, the Bolsheviks, abandoning it.

A disproportionate percentage of the expropriations took place in the Caucasus, which includes Stalin’s native Georgia. Between 1904 and 1908, the Bolsheviks had “a large share” in the 1,150 “acts of terrorism” (to use Souvarine’s phrase) committed in the Caucasus.9 However—returning to an issue broached in chapter 6—in that region the Bolsheviks were simultaneously responsible for only a risible share of political activists. The Georgian Bolshevik Filipp Makharadze admitted “in bitter terms” that “at the beginning of 1905 the Social-Democratic organization … underwent a schism,” and in the Caucasus, “the directing organs of the Party passed entirely into Menshevik hands. This circumstance made the rally of the masses to the Menshevik position inevitable.”10 The weakness of the Bolsheviks in Georgia was underlined by the 1906 Stockholm unification congress. Tiflis, the main city of Georgia, elected eleven delegates to the conference—ten Mensheviks and only one Bolshevik, Stalin, travelling under the alias Ivanovich.11 This puts the armed actions of the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus in an even worse light. They were not solely the substitution of a left-wing minority in the context of passivity of the mass movement. They were also armed actions being carried out by a minority within that minority, activists with no mass base in the area in which they were operating.

Bolshevik political isolation in the city notwithstanding, Tiflis was the location for the most spectacular—and most notorious—of the Bolshevik expropriations. On 23 June 1907, ten members of a Bolshevik armed group hurled bombs at a government mail coach. As Isaac Levine describes it: “When the smoke had cleared away, an appalling scene was revealed. Around the central Pushkin Park scores of bodies were swimming in pools of blood. Many were writhing in pain. The harvest totalled fifty dead and wounded.”12 The bombers escaped with 341,000 rubles, roughly equivalent (in 2015) to USD$10 million.13 As Souvarine wrote: “The Tiflis affair exploded (the word is justified) like a bomb”; it took place just three weeks after the closing of the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, held in 1907 in London, where the delegates had voted unanimously to disband all fighting squads associated with the party.14

For years, this bombing and other unsavoury fundraising activities undermined the reputation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the eyes of the international Left. One of their more distasteful undertakings involved assigning two young male members to seduce two sisters, heirs to the fortune of a wealthy supporter, N. P. Schmidt, who had died in 1907. The goal, which was achieved, was to redirect the sisters’ inherited fortune into Bolshevik coffers.15 At one point, proceeds from a variety of these unsavoury activities were handed over to “three German social democrats, Franz Mehring, Klara Zetkin and Karl Kautsky, as trustees.”16 This occurred at a plenum of the Central Committee, held at the beginning of 1910, which, in the words of Nikolai Popov, author of the official “high Stalinist” history of the Communist Party, “was dominated by the influence of those who favoured union” between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.17 At that plenum, it was decided that “all factional centres were charged to transfer their funds to the general party treasury.”18

In response, Lenin convened what he called a “conference” of the entire party in Prague in 1912. In a clever fictionalized biography of Krupskaya, Jane Casey writes that in January of that year, “spies and thugs were flocking in droves to Ilyich’s [Lenin’s] all-Russian Party Conference.”19 Leaving aside Casey’s unflattering characterization of the delegates, she is certainly wrong as to the quantity. It was a “conference” in name only and attended by very few, although the exact number varies in different reports. Robert Williams puts the number at fourteen, “twelve Leninists and two Mensheviks”; Trotsky claims it was fifteen.20 Popov lists, besides Lenin and Krupskaya, thirteen delegates: one was a representative of the Mensheviks, two were police spies, and the rest were virtually unknown but loyal Leninists.21 James White says eighteen attended, sixteen Bolsheviks and two Mensheviks—and by his account, three of the eighteen were police spies.22 The RSDRP aspired to be a party for the entire Russian empire. However, there were no representatives present from any of the oppressed nations that made up that empire. All the delegates were from Russia proper. According to Abraham Ascher, the conference delegates “at best represented one-fifth of the membership of the Social Democratic movement.”23 This tiny gathering called itself the “Sixth All-Russia Conference” of the RSDRP and met in session for twelve days, passing almost two dozen resolutions.24

One resolution characterized the vast majority of those who were not in attendance as “liquidators” and declared them outside the party. Twenty percent of the party, in other words, had, through a bureaucratic manoeuvre, expelled the other 80 percent.

A subsequent resolution, titled “Property in the Hands of the Former Trustee, and Financial Reports,” argued in essence that: a) the German trustees (represented by Klara Zetkin) were holding funds and trying to determine to which wing of the party they should be delivered; b) with the exclusion from membership of the 80 percent, the 20 percent now constituted the entire social democratic movement; and, c) therefore there was now only one party to which the funds could be returned (the party of the 20 percent). With this syllogism in hand, they passed the resolution, which instructed “the Central Committee to take all measures immediately to obtain the property of the Party from Comrade Zetkin.”25 That obtaining control of these funds was the goal of the 1912 conference was made fairly evident the following month. Lenin travelled to Berlin, met with Kautsky, and “demanded the money held by the trustees. Failing in this, Lenin began legal proceedings.” In May 1912, he was still pursuing the matter, seeking counsel from his legal representative. “‘I myself was a lawyer,’ mused Lenin. ‘I studied French law and German law, regulating arbitration court relations. I have no doubt that Zetkin is completely wrong.’”26

It has been widely assumed that Stalin was a key player in the criminal activities that generated the funds in dispute, although it is something about which Stalin always remained silent. Trotsky, bizarrely, calls this a mysterious “romantic period” in Stalin’s life.27 Others saw it more negatively. According to Trotsky:

On the eighteenth of March, 1918—that is, a few months after the founding of the Soviet regime—the Menshevik leader, Iulii Martov, wrote in his Moscow newspaper: “That the Caucasian Bolsheviks attached themselves to all sorts of daring enterprises of an expropriatory kind should be well known to the same citizen Stalin, who in his time was expelled from his Party organization for having something to do with expropriation.” Stalin deemed it necessary to have Martov brought before the judgment of the revolutionary tribunal.28

Whatever the exact nature of Stalin’s role, it was during this complicated, distasteful period of robberies and criminal activity that he first entered the leadership of the party.

Martov Versus Lenin

In 1911, Iulii Martov penned an explosive pamphlet titled Saviours or Destroyers? that documents the recourse by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to criminal activities to finance their operations.29 In the pamphlet, Martov deals with the aforementioned 1907 Tiflis robbery, which, as we saw, injured and killed numerous innocent bystanders. “All those arrested in this connection were more or less well-known Bolsheviks.” Their participation in these activities was against party policy, and they were thus expelled and “barred from membership of any other party organ.”30 These criminal activities continued, however, and Martov decided to publish the complete record because “the methods by which it [the Leninist group] maintains its supremacy in underground circles and which it is seeking to impose on the overt workers’ movement are introducing confusion and dissension into the latter.”31

The pamphlet was not well received. Clara Zetkin called it “grubby.”32 In 1914, Lenin published a lengthy journal article, “The Bourgeois Intelligentsia’s Methods of Struggle Against the Workers,” in response to a second charge from Martov—that a senior Bolshevik, Roman Malinovsky, was in fact a police agent. Referring to the earlier scandal, Lenin commented: “When Martov, in collaboration with and on the responsibility of Dan, wrote the special libellous pamphlet, Saviours or Destroyers, even the mild and cautious Kautsky … called it ‘disgusting.’”33 More precisely, Kautsky condemned it as the “washing of dirty linen in public.”34 Lenin linked the first scandal (exposing the Bolsheviks’ “fund-raising methods”) to the second (claims that Malinovsky was a police agent), drawing general conclusions. “Scandal-mongering,” he said, was the characteristic method not just of Martov, but of an entire “social stratum” of what he called “intellectualists.” “Every social stratum has its own way of life, its own habits and inclinations,” he wrote.35

As it turned out, the charge of scandalmongering was spurious, at least as it concerns Malinovsky. In the spring of 1917, the provisional government opened the tsarist-era secret police files, which clearly documented Malinovsky’s long-standing role as a police agent infiltrating Lenin’s inner circles. Lenin’s attitude toward Malinovsky, in the words of R. C. Elwood, “changed abruptly,” a considerable understatement given that the new information led to Malinovsky’s execution “before a Soviet firing squad in the early morning hours of 6 November 1918.”36

Lenin was actually wrong on all matters of substance. Martov and the Mensheviks were correct not only about Malinovsky, but also about the Bolsheviks’ criminal activities. In later years, many who had, with high emotion, distanced themselves from Martov’s 1911 exposé began to change their minds. Kautsky, for one, “much later, told the Menshevik Boris Nicolaevsky that his scathing assessment had been mistaken.”37 In fact, from the very beginning, while Martov’s pamphlet might have been attacked because it was seen to be in poor taste, it could not be challenged as to its factual basis. Souvarine writes that “the sincerity and truthfulness of his [Martov’s] testimony cannot be contested” and that “other sources provide details and facts which confirm his allegations.”38

The “airing of dirty linen” is always controversial in the heat of the political moment. For historians reflecting back on events and developing analyses of an arc of history, all dirty linen, controversial or not, must be brought into the light of day and examined. Trotsky does not shy away from this: he openly deals with the prehistory of Bolshevism brought to light by Martov in 1911, as well as with the practice of Bolsheviks once they were in power.

Adventurism, Staff, and the Political Volunteer

Trotsky says that at the time of the Tiflis bank robbery, Lenin’s support for criminal activities was opposed by “the majority of the Bolshevik faction.”39 He provides little insight as to why Lenin would lead in such a damaging direction, except to say that in the case of the Tiflis expropriation, he “could not resist the temptation.” Trotsky does not pass judgment on the period, except to say that the robbery “contained in it a goodly element of adventurism, which as a rule was foreign to Lenin’s politics.”40 This is a very understated, almost muted, critique of events that were, in their time, controversial and destructive.

Trotsky wasn’t always so understated in his critiques. At the peak of the controversy in 1910, while travelling to the Eighth World Congress of the Second International in Copenhagen, Trotsky told Lenin that in a forthcoming article in the main newspaper of the German Social Democratic Party, he had criticized the Bolsheviks on the issue of expropriations. Trotsky knew that, as he put it in his autobiography, “the most prickly question in the article was that of so-called ‘expropriations.’ After the defeat of the revolution, armed ‘expropriations’ and terrorist acts inevitably tended to disorganize the revolutionary party itself.” The article, which was to appear that morning, led to what Trotsky characterized as the “sharpest conflict with Lenin in my whole life.” Lenin tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to send a telegraph asking that the article be pulled. Plekhanov sought to bring Trotsky to trial. In the end, the affair blew over. In 1929, Trotsky repudiated his 1910 position, saying that “as a matter of fact, the article was not right.”41 But as I have outlined here, by 1940, he was more willing to portray the whole expropriations episode in a negative light, as he had in 1910.

Trotsky said little else about the money question. “Prior to the Constitutional Manifesto of 1905,” he writes, “the revolutionary movement was financed principally by the liberal bourgeoisie and by the radical intellectuals. That was true also in the case of the Bolsheviks, whom the liberal opposition then regarded as merely somewhat bolder revolutionary democrats.”42 It is Souvarine who links the decline in funds from these sources after the defeat of 1905 to the increasing dependence on criminal activity: “Party subscriptions were insignificant…. The revolutionary profession, extended to a Party, or at all events to its officials, required more funds, and the ‘ex’es’ were the main source of supply for the Bolshevik Centre.”43

According to Souvarine, “the money question was disastrous.”44 The Tiflis episode and the whole era of Bolshevik fundraising through crime was representative of “the eternal and disgusting question of cash,” which had “acquired so much importance for international Bolshevism.”45 He links the addiction to criminal enterprise to more than adventurism, arguing that it was tied directly to Lenin’s commitment to maintaining a party machine staffed by what Lenin called “professional revolutionaries”: the “money question,” then, was “the invariable corollary of the idea of professional revolutionaries.”46

Raising funds played out differently for the Mensheviks, whose activists were “very rarely supported by the party”: each “had to earn his living as best he could.”47 To use contemporary language, the Bolsheviks were like a staff-driven NGO, while the Mensheviks were more like a coalition run by political volunteers.48 To finance their activities, the Mensheviks relied largely “on the infinitesimal subscriptions” (dues) from their members. In the period of reaction after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, these subscriptions declined drastically for both parties. Despite this decline, the Bolsheviks were able “to maintain a legion of militants, to send emissaries to all quarters, to found journals, to distribute pamphlets.”49

These resources also facilitated the inflation of Bolshevik presence at party congresses. Souvarine writes that one participant in these expropriations “relates in his memoirs that his group paid to the Bolshevik Central Committee 60,000 roubles; 40,000 roubles to the Regional Committee, providing, among other things, for the publication of three newspapers; and in addition subsidised the journeys of delegates (certainly Bolsheviks) to the London Congress.”50 The cost of attending this 1907 congress in London was, of course, a huge burden for anyone coming from the difficult conditions prevailing in Russia during the years of reaction after the suppression of the 1905 revolution. There are conflicting accounts as to the relative size of the party’s component parts at that congress. Souvarine says that in 1907, at the time of the Fifth Congress, the Mensheviks had more members than the Bolsheviks—43,000 compared to 33,000.51 Later research indicates that Souvarine has the poles reversed: J. L. H. Keep writes that at the time of that congress, the party’s total membership was in excess of 148,000, of which 46,000 were Bolsheviks, 38,000 were Mensheviks, 25,000 were part of the Polish section, another 25,000 were part of the Jewish Bund, and 13,000 were from Latvia.52 By either set of figures, the Bolsheviks were far from a majority in the party, yet unlike the congress in 1906, they were usually able to win majorities. In 1911, Martov claimed that this capacity “was due solely to their command of secret financial resources.”53 The Bolsheviks were much more staff-oriented than other portions of the party, and staff did play a large role at the Fifth Congress. Souvarine says that “the statistics state” that the 312 delegates included “56 ‘professional revolutionaries’ and 118 delegates ‘living at the expense of the Party.’”54

At one level, the entire drama here is simply grotesque. On the big questions of the day (such as opposition to imperialist war), Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Iulii Martov were in complete agreement, but they nonetheless engaged, for years, in the most extreme polemics, one against the other. Revulsion at the criminal exploits of Bolshevik armed bands certainly fuelled the emotion behind these divisions. It all came to a head in the summer of 1914, when a special conference of the Second International was scheduled. Pavel Axelrod and Rosa Luxemburg, writes Martov, “were charged with drawing up a manifesto on the necessity of unity, directed against the splitting policies of the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s faction was thus completely isolated.”55 As Ruth Fischer notes, Luxemburg and Axelrod were perfectly aware that Lenin’s group would not countenance a forced unity with the rest of the Russian Left and that the “unification would have meant, in effect, the expulsion of the Bolsheviks from the International.”56 This sordid piece of history is rarely mentioned in discussions of either Lenin or Luxemburg. According to Martov, “the World War, breaking out after a few weeks, brought the unity effort thus begun to an end.”57 With the outbreak of war and the subsequent revolution and counter-revolution, squabbles that would otherwise have been inconsequential and forgotten (except, of course, for the victims of the robberies, seductions, and related activity) now became part of the prehistory of one of the big stories of the twentieth century.

Trotsky does not shrink from confronting this sordid history. The machine built by Lenin was, in part, rooted in the “muddy wave of expropriations,” a key by-product of which was the emergence into leadership of Joseph Stalin.

The Muck of Ages I: Orientalist Discourse

The youthful collaborators Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, while still in their twenties, were realists about the human material with which their hoped-for new world would be created, as is clear from their writing in The German Ideology:

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.58

Some of that “muck of ages”—prejudices and stereotypes inherited from the society in which they lived—sullied the work of the young men who penned this warning. Marx’s eleven theses on Feuerbach—written in 1845, when Marx was not yet thirty—contain many brilliant observations (most famously the last: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”). Yet in the first thesis—in which Marx criticizes Feuerbach for conceiving material reality only in the form of objects, rather than subjectively—he argues that, in The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach “regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish [schmutzig-jüdischen] form of appearance.”59 This latter portion of the first of the theses is cited with far less frequency than the well-known portion that precedes it. The words appeared in a manuscript never published in Marx’s lifetime, and we can only speculate about whether he would have retained the expression “dirty-Jewish” in a version of the “Theses on Feuerbach” intended for publication. However, this is not the only occasion where Marx uses what Abigail Bakan calls “highly problematic formulations.” Regardless of “the common assumptions of the period,” Bakan argues, “the generalization of ethnic stereotypes is hardly an inspiration for contemporary activists.”60 A complete appreciation of the theses and of the legacy of Marx and Engels demands that we confront both the insights into social life that they offer and the insights into the prejudices of nineteenth-century European society—prejudices from which Marx was not immune.61

The “muck of ages” also sullies, to varying degrees, some of the literature from the Russian Revolution, even before the rise of Stalin and Stalinism. Let’s be clear: Lenin, Trotsky, and the key representatives of the Russian Left were far in advance of their contemporaries on many key issues. While many of their liberal contemporaries, for instance, were buried in this or that apology for the “progressive” nature of imperialism, the year before the outbreak of the Great War, Lenin prophetically wrote a passionate condemnation of “backward Europe” and a hymn of praise to “advanced Asia.” He argues that in Europe, “the commanding bourgeoisie, fearing the growth and increasing strength of the proletariat, comes out in support of everything backward, moribund and medieval.” As an example of “this decay of the entire European bourgeoisie,” he cites “the support it is lending to reaction in Asia.” He goes on to contrast this with Asia, where, he says, “a mighty democratic movement” is emerging. “Hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light and freedom,” all while “‘advanced’ Europe … is plundering China and helping the foes of democracy, the foes of freedom in China!”62 Leon Trotsky is famously identified with the related theories of Uneven and Combined Development, and Permanent Revolution.63 Both theories focus on areas of the world that most of his contemporaries regarded as “backward”—Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in particular. Trotsky argued that, quite to the contrary, these areas of the world were the key to human progress, since they were the likely arenas for mass movements against imperialism, war, and capitalism. Given the horrors that transpired in the twentieth century—two world wars, the rise of fascism, and European and American military debacles in Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere—and given the anticolonial movements that reshaped world politics, in particular after World War II, we can now see that Lenin and Trotsky were both on the right side of history in their analyses.

However, being progressive in policy orientation was not always reflected in their choice of language or argument. Whatever their merits (and they have many), the biographies of Stalin by Trotsky and, to a lesser extent, Souvarine occasionally resort to a casual discourse in the category of what Edward Said would call Orientalism.64 Although they employ this discourse rarely, each occurrence is jarring and offensive to modern readers. On the very first page of his biography of Stalin, Trotsky writes: “The late Leonid Krassin … was the first, if I am not mistaken, to call Stalin an ‘Asiatic.’” Trotsky does show an awareness of the problematic nature of the use of this word and tries to excuse its use:

He [Krassin] had in mind no problematical racial attributes, but rather that blending of grit, shrewdness, craftiness and cruelty which has been considered characteristic of the statesmen of Asia. Bukharin subsequently simplified the appellation, calling Stalin “Genghis Khan,” manifestly in order to draw attention to his cruelty, which has developed into brutality. Stalin himself, in conversation with a Japanese journalist, once called himself an “Asiatic.”65

But this “essentialist” digression is no justification at all. Both the use of the word “Asiatic” and the essentialist apology with which its use is excused are offensive on their face.

Elsewhere, Trotsky uses Orientalist discourse without qualification. Explaining why Stalin wrote so little in the public press, Trotsky says: “Sluggishness and inordinate cautiousness, utter lack of literary resourcefulness, and, finally, extreme Oriental laziness combined to make Stalin’s pen rather unproductive.”66 Describing generations of Russian occupation of Stalin’s homeland Georgia, Trotsky writes that “in two centuries the Petersburg bureaucracy could not replace the old Asiatic barbarism with a European culture.” Georgia’s “semifeudal social structure was based on a low level of economic development and was therefore distinguished by the traits of Asiatic patriarchy, not excluding Asiatic cruelty.”67 Even worse, he goes on to speculate about “southern” and “northern” personality types:

In the countries of the Mediterranean Sea, in the Balkans, in Italy, in Spain, in addition to the so-called Southern type, which is characterized by a combination of lazy shiftlessness and explosive irascibility, one meets cold natures, in whom phlegm is combined with stubbornness and slyness. The first type prevails; the second augments it as an exception. It would seem as if each national group is doled out its due share of basic character elements, yet these are less happily distributed under the southern than under the northern sun.

Again, he tries to draw back from this offensive approach, saying: “We must not venture too far afield into the unprofitable region of national metaphysics.”68 But the damage has already been done.

Let us turn to Souvarine. He speaks of Stalin’s “oriental dexterity in intrigue, unscrupulousness, lack of sensitiveness in personal relations, and scorn of men and of human life,” his predisposition to “a typical Oriental method of avoiding a definite decision,” and “his oriental method of dividing in order to rule.”69 This use of a casual Orientalist discourse casts its shadow into post–World War II scholarship as well: even the esteemed Isaac Deutscher, in his own political biography of Stalin, writes of “a relative eclipse of European Russia in favour of the backward Asiatic and semi-Asiatic periphery.”70

Again, this casual Orientalist discourse occurs very infrequently in Trotsky’s writings. In the magnificent work of his youth—his history of the 1905 revolution—the term “Asian despotism” occurs twice: “Tsarism represents an intermediate form between European absolutism and Asian despotism, being, possibly, closer to the latter of these two,” and, similarly, “our autocracy, placed between European absolutism and Asian despotism, had many features resembling the latter.”71 This use of “Asian” to form a contrast with “European,” in an attempt to make generalizations about aspects of the underlying political economy, parallels Deutscher’s use of the term. Tamás Krausz also treats the term in this fashion, saying, without other comment, that “Trotsky placed Russian tsarism after 1907 somewhere between European absolutism and Asiatic despotism.”72 In Trotsky’s three-volume history of the Russian Revolution, his use of “Asiatic” is infrequent and has a similar tenor.73

Not all in the Russian socialist movement were as restrained in the use of an Orientalist discourse. One of those who showed less restraint was Vladimir Lenin, the man to whom both Trotsky and Souvarine had once looked for inspiration. A casual use of Orientalist discourse is prevalent throughout Lenin’s writings.

Sometimes, as with Trotsky, Lenin’s use of Orientalist terms is clearly intended as a literary shorthand to contrast feudalism with capitalism, autocracy with democracy. In 1905, he wrote: “The democratic reforms in the political system, and the social and economic reforms that have become a necessity for Russia … will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European, and not Asiatic, development of capitalism.”74 And two years later he referred to the necessity of “a ‘clearing’ of the medieval agrarian relationships and regulations, partly feudal and partly Asiatic.”75 Not only do these references remain offensive, despite their innocuous function, but they are exceptions to his usual practice, described quite accurately by Bertram Wolfe, who says that “the word ‘Asiatic’ was frequently used as a term of opprobrium concerning Russia’s past and institutions.”76 This is such a pervasive and little appreciated literary device in Lenin’s work that it is worth providing examples from two decades of his writing:

• 1894—“Asiatic abuse of human dignity”77
• 1897—“from autocratic and semi-Asiatic Russia to cultured, free and civilised England”;78 “Asiatic backwardness”79
• 1901—“Asiatic-barbarian”80
• 1902—“Asiatic reaction”;81 “the Asiatically barbarous way in which the many-million-strong peasantry is dying out”82
• 1905—“Asiatic bondage”;83 “the accursed heritage of serf-ownership, Asiatic barbarism, and human degradation”;84 “all the infamy, viciousness, Asiatic barbarity, violence, and exploitation that pervade the whole social and political system of Russia”;85 “wildly Asiatic … autocracy”;86 “all the savagery of the Asiatic”;87 “with us despotism is Asiatically virginal”;88 “the Asiatic conservatism of the autocracy”;89 “in Russia purely capitalist antagonisms are very very much overshadowed by the antagonisms between ‘culture’ and Asiatic barbarism, Europeanism and Tartarism, capitalism and feudalism”90
• 1906—“Asiatic despotism”;91 “the accursed Asiatic canker and serfdom which is poisoning Russia”;92 “a ruthless mass struggle against Asiatic despotism and feudal landlordism”;93 “the clumsy, dull-witted and Asiatically corrupt Russian officials”94
• 1907—“Asiatic despotism”;95 “Asiatic semi-decay”96
• 1908—“the most backward farming methods and of all that Asiatic barbarism which is called patriarchal rural life”97
• 1911—“an ability to conceal … Asiatic ‘practices’ behind glib phrases, external appearances, poses and gestures made to look ‘European’”;98 “an absolutism impregnated with Asiatic barbarity”99
• 1913—“slave, Asiatic, tsarist Russia”;100 “hardened, Asiatic philistinism”;101 “lovers of Asiatic scandal-mongering”;102 “Asiatic primitiveness”;103 “bureaucracy and Asiatic barbarism”104
• 1914—“what a great difference there is between Vandervelde, the true European, who attaches no importance to Asiatic gullibility or rule-of-thumb methods but collects the facts, and the Russian, liquidationist and liberal-bourgeois windbags, who pose as ‘Europeans’!”105

Suddenly, in 1914, Lenin’s use of an Orientalist discourse virtually disappears from his writings. One of his last uses of the term “Asiatic” displays, for the first time, the kind of qualification as to its use that we saw earlier in Trotsky’s writing: “Knowing full well that there is much in the relationships and frontiers created or fixed by this class that is un-European and anti-European (we would say Asiatic if this did not sound undeservedly slighting to the Japanese and Chinese), the Cadets, nevertheless, accept them as the utmost limit.”106 That this was written in a journal article on the right of nations to self-determination is highly significant. Building solidarity between the Great Russian Left and the nations of Asia oppressed by Great Russian imperialism would be made more difficult by using “Asiatic” as a literary device to signify backwardness in contrast to “European” to signify progress and civilization. With the outbreak of war that same year, Lenin distinguished himself and his section of the Left with an insistence on the importance of the right of national self-determination, which might well explain the abandonment of his earlier practice. But for twenty years, he relentlessly used the term “Asiatic” in a completely Orientalist fashion. If the use of Orientalist discourse is an issue when reading Trotsky and Souvarine in the twenty-first century, it is a much more serious issue when reading Lenin.

Lenin, Trotsky, and Souvarine must of course be put in their context. All were part of a Left that paid a heavy price for its willingness to combat racism and prejudice within Eurasia. But that Left also suffered, as did most European ideologies at the time, from an unexamined modernist prejudice that, with little reflection, equated Europe with civilization and progress and Asia with barbarism and backwardness. It is a warning to the modern reader to avoid any inclination to put any of these authors on a pedestal and treat their writings as holy writ. They were all taking on difficult and important work, but they were doing so with all the strengths and weaknesses of the culture of which they were a part.

“An Old Buggy with a Leaky Roof, That’s Lost Its Wheels”

Trotksy’s Stalin, in its honest grappling with the legacy of Lenin and the rise of Stalin, can help us in the task of putting things in their proper context, and of not putting any one individual on a pedestal. There is no essential difference between the 1941 and 2016 translations of the book, the first by Malamuth and the second by Woods (the latter incorporating virtually unaltered the bulk of Malamuth’s work). Certainly, the two places where Malamuth uses the word “coup” to describe the Bolshevik seizure of power would annoy followers of Leon Trotsky. But these in no way define the essence of the text. The “hue and cry” over Malamuth is a distraction. The high emotions associated with this unfinished classic have to do with the uncomfortable challenge to 1930s orthodoxy, a challenge clearly evident in Trotsky’s loyal but highly critical treatment of the Leninist machine, and in his emphasis on control of the surplus product as a key criterion by which to assess the class nature of the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s epistemology was in flux, and that posed a huge challenge to those who had been trained in his writings from the early 1930s.

Woods, in his 2016 work, fully accepts the inherited prejudice against Malamuth, repeating some of the claims made against him, but then concludes that Malamuth’s translation is “not all bad” and in fact “is mostly a correct translation.” He uses tens of thousands of words from Malamuth’s translated text in his own translation, but he leaves Malamuth’s name out of the credits. We need to move beyond this old factional squabble and get to the substance of the analysis.

In spite of his protestations to the contrary, Trotsky was being influenced by a younger generation—certainly including Souvarine, and probably also including James and Dunayevskaya—leading to his emphases on the surplus and the machine, notable departures from his previous writings. As a true intellectual, his ideas were evolving. We will never know where that evolution would have taken him, since he became one of the counter-revolution’s millions of victims, stopped dead by a cowardly Stalinist assassin. But we need no longer be stopped from engaging with the text because of prejudice over the role of Malamuth. Woods, his unfortunate treatment of Malamuth aside, has done us a service by making the whole text available for study and reflection in the context of the centennial of the Russian Revolution. Both Trotsky and Souvarine wrote serious classic texts grappling with the horror of Stalinism, texts that are an important resource for new generations of scholars and activists in the twenty-first century.

One of Souvarine’s best friends was the famous communist poet Isaac Babel, who we encountered in chapter 6. In the early 1920s, Babel was one of the most famous literary figures in Russia, but, by the end of the decade, he had become persona non grata. Cynthia Ozick says that “Babel’s publications grew fewer and fewer. He was charged with ‘silence’—the sin of Soviet unproductivity.”107 In 1939, he mysteriously disappeared, and “his name was not officially heard again until 1954,” his daughter writes.108 “As we now know, his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria’s private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad.”109 The execution was carried out the following day, “and his body was thrown into a communal grave.”110 Babel’s fate mirrored that of the revolution itself, a metaphor for the tragic analyses outlined by Trotsky and Souvarine.

In 1932—before the worst of the forced collectivization famine hit in 1933; before the expulsion of tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) from Leningrad in 1934; before the Great Terror of 1937–38—Babel, having been away for three years, returned to Paris, where his wife and daughter lived. There, he visited his friend Yuri Annenkov and spoke of his concern for the future:

“I have a family: a wife and daughter,” said Babel. “I love them and have to provide for them. Under no circumstances do I want them to return to Sovietland. They must remain here in freedom. But what about myself? … Should I return to our proletarian revolution? Revolution indeed! It’s disappeared! The proletariat? It flew off, like an old buggy with a leaky roof, that’s lost its wheels.”

“Now, dear brother,” he continued, “it’s the Central Committees that are pushing forward—they’ll be more effective. They don’t need wheels—they have machine guns instead. All the rest is clear and needs no further commentary.”111