The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification - Chapter 5
accurately anticipated the Bolshevik dictatorship during the first three years of the October Revolution
which, as is well known, arrived in a blind alley, tearing the proletariat away from the peasantry, by
reason of which the Bolshevik party was compelled to make a long retreat."(Krasnaya Nov, No.2, 1923,
p.262.)
Before the N.E.P., "Trotskyism"reigned. Bolshevism began only with the New Economic Policy. It is
noteworthy that Martinov reasoned in exactly the same way about the revolution of 1905!
According to him, in October, November and December of 1905 — that is, in the period of the highest
upsurge of the revolution — "Trotskyism" reigned. The real Marxian policy began only after the
crushing of the Moscow insurrection — approximately, say, with the elections to the first State Duma.
Martinov now contrasts Bolshevism with "Trotskyism"along the self-same line according to which
twenty years ago he contrasted Menshevism with "Trotskyism."And these writings are passing for
Marxism and are being fed to the young "theoreticians"of the party.
30. In his Testament, Lenin refers to the trade union discussion not in order to represent it as a
controversy called forth by my widely publicized "underestimation of the peasantry."No. Lenin speaks of
this discussion as of a controversy over the People's Commissariat of Means and Communication, and he
chides me not for "underestimating the peasantry" but for a "disposition to be far too much attracted by
the purely administrative side of affairs. "I think that these words quite correctly characterize the root of
that controversy.
War Communism had exhausted itself. Agriculture and with it everything else had arrived in a blind
alley. Industry was disintegrating. The trade unions had become agitational and recruiting organizations
which increasingly lost their independence. The crisis of the trade unions was by no means a "crisis of
growth"; it was a crisis of the whole system of War Communism. There was no passage out of the blind
alley without the introduction of the N.E.P. Proposals sponsored by me to harness the trade union
apparatus to the administrative system of economic management (my "disposition to be far too much
attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs"), did not point the way out. But neither did the trade
union resolution presented by the "Ten"(Lenin, Zinoviev and others) because the trade unions as
defenders of the material and cultural interests of the working class and as a school of communism were
losing their ground under conditions of an economic impasse.
Under the blows of the Kronstadt uprising,[20] a new economic orientation of the party was effected,
which opened up altogether new perspectives for the trade unions as well. But it is significant that at the
Tenth Congress, at which the party unanimously approved the initial foundations of the N.E.P., the trade
union resolution was not in harmony with these foundations and retained all of its internal contradictions.
This became evident within a few months. The trade union resolution which was adopted by the Tenth
Congress had to be radically changed without waiting for the Eleventh Congress. The new resolution,
drafted by Lenin, which brought the work of the trade unions under the new conditions created by the
N.E.P., was unanimously adopted.
To study the trade union discussion without any relation to the question of the turn of our entire
economic policy at the time means even now, seven years later, not to understand the meaning of that
discussion. This lack of understanding is precisely the source of all efforts to foist the "underestimation
of the peasantry"upon me when, indeed, at the time of the trade union discussion, it was I who proposed
the slogan: Industry must turn its face to the village!
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937-st2/sf05.htm (5 of 20) [06/06/2002 15:06:23]