The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification -- Introduction
Leon Trotsky's
The Stalin School of Falsification
Transcribed for the Trotsky Internet Archive, now a sub-archive of the Marxist writers' Internet Archive
by David Walters in 1997
Introduction
This Is A Book about liars and their lies. Yet it does not pursue a mere iconoclastic end. It aims to show
that the history of the Russian revolution has been falsified for the purpose of falsifying the basis of the
revolution itself. A return to the original basis and the ideals of the Bolsheviks in the first years of the
Soviet republic requires first of all that the true picture of the revolution be restored by removing the
thick encrustation of falsehoods which overlays it.
The history of man's development is also a history of the men who represent its social cross-currents, or
its succeeding periods. Indeed, it is sometimes easier to distinguish a segment of social development by
the men who prominently represent it than by any of its other marks. For, while men do make their own
history, a multitude of forces combine to produce the great man of each period and the agglomeration of
men not quite so great who compose the general staff. For a period of progress, history kneads its leaders
out of one batch of dough; for a period of reaction, a dough of very much different ingredients is used.
It is not, therefore, because the conflicts in the Soviet Union are due to a base rivalry for power of
individuals, but because the groups of individuals involved reflect the profound economic and political
changes of the last fifteen years, that the latter can be grasped in the most direct and, so to speak,
personal sense by an analysis of the former. Without the physical extermination or the moral destruction
of the men who won the revolution and its conquests, it would have been impossible for those who
succeeded them to reduce the revolution and its achievements to the low level attained almost a score of
years since the Bolshevik uprising.
The Bolshevik party of 1917, the one that led the revolution to victory, was the most unusual political
organization in the world. Strictly centralized and intolerant of the dilution of its principles, functioning
illegally under Czarism and therefore dispersed by repression to the far corners of Russia and all the
other countries of the earth, it nevertheless led a much richer and more democratic inner life than do most
parties today. Its vigorous internal discussions and disputes, often conducted by means of temporary
groupings, factions and their special periodicals, were not peremptorily settled by appeals to constituted
and sanctified authority, to say nothing of administrative repressions or bureaucratic measures against
minority opinion. The combination of party democracy and centralization enabled the party to live and
flourish even under Czarist reaction, to pass through the Revolution of 1905, the long years of reaction
and World War which followed, and finally to emerge victorious in the decisive conflict of November,
1917. The Bolshevik party before the Revolution of 1917 was the product of a process of selection. After
the tests it went through, there was little room in it for weaklings, dilettantes, adventurers and careerists.
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