The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification -- Chapter 9
always being posed behind the backs of the Oppositionists, with insinuations, with filthy implications,
with rude, dishonest and purely Stalinist distortions of the Opposition's platform and of the revolutionary
biographies of the Oppositionists, who are being pictured as the enemies of the revolution, as the enemies
of the party -- all this in order to arouse a wild reaction on the part of the duped audience, on the part of
the raw young party members with whom you are artificially loading the party ranks; so that you will
later have the opportunity to say, "Now look! We are ready to be patient, but the masses are insisting."
This is the specific strategy of Stalin, you yourselves are to a greater or lesser degree the organizers of
this campaign, and when the backwash engulfs you, you say, "The party demands it, and I can do nothing
about it. . . .
The second rebuke launched by comrade Ordjonikidze against me is a political rebuke of a more general
nature. He says that my comparison with the Great French Revolution precisely expresses my
"pessimism." Trotsky, you see, thinks the revolution has perished. If I thought the revolution had
perished, why should I struggle against you? On this issue you are never consistent. If I do not believe in
the construction of socialism, as you assert, why should I propose to "plunder the peasant" as you
likewise assert? Is it perhaps out of my personal hostility toward the peasant? If I do not believe in the
revolution, why should I engage in a struggle? It would then be best to swim with the tide. Please, try to
understand this! Whoever thinks that the revolution has already perished anyway, would not engage in a
struggle. Comrades, you have once again failed to put two and two together.
The October Revolution has not perished. I never said it has. I do not believe it has. But I did say that it is
possible to ruin the October Revolution, if one really undertakes to do so-and that you have already
accomplished a few things to that end. Your entire thinking on this question, comrade Ordjonikidze, is
not dialectical but formal. You ignore the question of the conflict of living forces, the question of the
party. Your thinking is utterly permeated with fatalism. You differentiate between optimism and
pessimism as if they were two immutable categories independent of conditions and politics. According to
your way of thinking, one can be only either an "optimist" or a "pessimist," i.e., either think that the
revolution has completely perished or that it will not perish under any circumstances no matter what we
did. The
one and the other are false. Has not the revolution already passed through a number of ups and downs?
Didn't we have a stupendous upswing in the period of the October overturn, and didn't we hang
suspended by a hair in the period of the Brest-Litovsk peace? Recall to your minds what Lenin said
during the struggle against the Left Communists -- that it is extremely difficult to control the automobile
of power in the epoch of revolution, because it is necessary to keep making sharp turns all the time.
Brest-Litovsk was a retreat. The N.E.P., after the Kronstadt uprising, was a retreat. And did not each
wave of retreat engender in its turn opportunist moods? It is clear as noonday that when these movements
of retreat and of downward swings in the revolution are pro- longed for a year, or two and three years,
they engender a more profound drop in the moods of the masses and of the party as well. Comrade
Ordjonikidze, you are a native Caucasian and you know that a road that leads up the mountain, does not
go straight upward, but winds and zigzags, and often after a steep rise, it is necessary to descend two or
three versts [A Russian measure, app. 2/3 of a mile.] in order then to resume the upward march -- but the
road itself leads nevertheless up the mountain. While making a partial downward descent, I must keep
aware that the road will turn and again mount upwards. But if I, for the sake of "optimism," altogether
ignore these upward and downward zigzags, then my wagon will fly off into the abyss on one of the
turns. I say that at the present time your road leads to the right and downwards. The danger lies in the
fact that you do not see this, i.e., that you shut your eyes to it. And it is dangerous to ride up the mountain
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937-st2/sf09.htm (16 of 21) [06/06/2002 15:07:02]