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Stalin School of Falsification -- Introduction representatives, have been ousted. The heads of Russia's famous delegation to the Genoa Conference in 1922 were Chicherin, Rakovsky, Preobrazhensky. The last two are today in prison. Rakovsky was the Soviet ambassador to London and Paris. Kamenev was chairman of the Russian delegation to London before him; then he was ambassador to Italy; now he is a dishonored corpse. Piatakov and Budu Mdivani headed the Soviet Trade Mission to Paris at different times; the former has been shot and the latter is in prison on charges that mean execution. Also imprisoned are Ufimtsev, the head of the Trade Bureau in Vienna; Yuri Kotsiubinsky, who signed the Russo-Polish Treaty of Riga in March, 1921, for the Ukrainian Soviets, and who was later secretary of the Soviet legations in Vienna and Warsaw; Shliapnikov, who was Krassin's deputy in 1924 when the latter was ambassador to Paris; Sokolnikov, who signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in 1918 for the Bolsheviks, became ambassador to London years later, and who was Assistant Commissar of Foreign Affairs when he was arrested for "treasonable relations "with Germany and Japan; exiled to Orenburg is Leonid Gerchik, formerly head of the Trade Mission to Persia. One of Russia's most brilliant foreign representatives, A. A. Joffe, first ambassador to Germany, then to China, was driven to suicide in 1927 by Stalinist persecutions; his exiled wife, Maria Joffe, committed suicide in 1935 in Siberia. Who took the places of these men? Instead of Kamenev, Rakovsky and Sokolnikov in London, Stalin has Maisky, a former minister of the counter-revolutionary "Samara Government" which the Czechoslovak mercenaries established against the Bolsheviks during the civil war. Instead of Rakovsky or Shliapnikov in Paris, Stalin has the old Menshevik, Potemkin. The place once occupied by Joffe in Berlin was taken by Khinchuk, the anti-Bolshevik chairman of the Moscow Council under Kerensky. Where the executed Serebriakov once represented the Soviet Union as head of the Amtorg in New York, it is now represented in Washington by Troyanovsky, ex-member of the Menshevik Central Committee who, as its spokesman, denounced Lenin and Trotsky as German agents in the Constituent Assembly in 1918.... What has happened in the last decade of the Soviet Union's evolution is that the "thin layer" of the Old Guard, virtually all of whom fought the Stalinist reaction at one time or another, was finally exterminated physically, or itself succumbed to the virus of degeneration. The oft-repeated recantations, and the increasingly humiliating genuflections to Stalin, availed them little in the end; they only contributed to the destruction of their moral fiber as revolutionists and facilitated their destruction and replacement by the ruthless Juggernaut of the bureaucracy. Whatever the final level to which they humbled or felt obliged to humble themselves, however wretchedly they behaved as capitulators who clung convulsively to a party membership card which no longer meant anything, they symbolized, and many of them even represented, poorly or well, a different epoch, a different tradition, a different ideology than that of the new ruling caste which could not, and would not, assimilate the old into the new. The period of social and political reaction represented by Stalin needed new and different men from those who had represented, to any important extent, the period of social and political progress. The Stalin bureaucracy which has concentrated all power in its hands is, for the time being, the triumphant bearer of a political counter-revolution, which, while it has already infringed upon the socio-economic foundations of the new state, namely, the nationalized means of production and exchange -- has not yet replaced them with other foundations -- namely, private property in the means of production and exchange. The political counter-revolution has thus far mainly affected the political super-structure of the state. If its retrogressive force is not to affect fundamentally the economic sub-structure, that is, if the nationalized means of production and exchange are to be preserved and strengthened and developed systematically in the direction of a socialist economy, the new super-structure must be changed. In a word, the political power must be restored to the proletarian http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937-st2/sf01.htm (10 of 11) [06/06/2002 15:05:49]
Stalin School of Falsification -- Introduction masses by overthrowing the bureaucratic machine. Because of the very methods with which it rules, the bureaucracy has left no legal and peaceful way open for its removal. This is the background of the conclusion arrived at by the author of this book in his latest work, The Revolution Betrayed: "The revolution which the bureaucracy is preparing against itself will not be social, like the October Revolution of 1917. It is not a question this time of changing the economic foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property with other forms. History has known elsewhere not only social revolutions which substituted the bourgeois for the feudal regime, but also political revolutions which, with out destroying the economic foundations of society, swept out an old ruling upper crust (1880 and 1848 in France, February, 1917 in Russia, etc.). The overthrow of the Bonapartist caste will, of course, have deep social consequences, but in itself it will be confined within the limits of political revolution." (P.288.) It is a political revolution that will not be led by the Old Guard or against it because, with few exceptions, it is no longer a factor in Soviet society and politics; what has not been wiped out physically, has deteriorated to the point where it cannot fight and need not be fought against. The revolution will not be led by or against the Bolshevik Party; it no longer exists as a political party or a living organism -- it is now a Soviet myth. The revolution will be directed against the new political party that took form in the period of the Soviet reaction, the party of the Stalinist bureaucratic machine. It will be composed of the advanced elements of the new generation in Russia, for the old is burned out. And because the soldiers of the proletarian revolutionary party, which even now exists and is growing in the Soviet Union, will have to have the truth as one of their principal weapons, because they will gain strength largely to the extent that they are able to break through the thick barrage of lies manufactured by the Stalin School of Falsification for the last fifteen years -- the contents of the present volume are of immeasurable importance. Outlawed, imprisoned, hounded, slandered as German spies, the Bolsheviks in 1917 ended by reaching the best elements of the workers and peasants with the truth and with their ideas. Even more fiercely persecuted and calumniated today, the proletarian revolutionists two decades later will also end by being vindicated by the Russian masses. For falsehood is the weapon of reaction and truth the weapon of socialism. In the historic struggle between the two, socialism is invincible. MAX SHACHTMAN New York, May 1, 1937. Return to Index Page — Next Chapter The Leon Trotsky Archive The Marxist writers' Archives http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937-st2/sf01.htm (11 of 11) [06/06/2002 15:05:49]
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