The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification - Chapter 5
More consistent falsifiers attempt to represent the matter as if I were opposed to the N.E.P. But
irrefutable facts and documents prove that as early as the time of the Ninth Congress I raised time and
again the question of the necessity to pass from the food levy to taxes and, within certain limits, to the
commodity forms of circulation.
Only the rejection of these proposals, in the face of a continuing decline of economy, compelled me to
seek a way out, along the opposite road, i.e., along the road of rigid management and closer inclusion of
the trade unions — not as mass organizations but as administrative machinery — into the system of
economic management under War Communism. The transition to the N.E.P. not only met with no
objections on my part, but, on the contrary, corresponded entirely with all the conclusions I had drawn
from my own experience in economic management and administration. Such is the actual content of the
so-called trade union discussion.
The volume of my Collected Works devoted to this period has not been published by the State Publishers
precisely because that book does not leave a stone unturned in exposing the legend created around the
trade union discussion.
31. To believe the present party historians and theoreticians, you might think that the first six years of the
revolution were entirely filled with disagreements about Brest-Litovsk and the trade unions. All the rest
has disappeared: the preparation of the October insurrection, the insurrection itself, the creation of the
government, the creation of the Red Army, the civil war, the four congresses of the Comintern, all the
writings on communist propaganda, the work in the sphere of leadership of the foreign communist parties
and our own. Of all this work, in which upon all fundamental questions, I was in complete accord with
Lenin, there remain, according to the present historians, only two moments: Brest-Litovsk and the trade
unions.
32. Stalin and his lackeys have worked hardest over the effort to picture the trade union discussion as my
"bitter"struggle against Lenin.
Here is what I said at the height of this discussion at our fraction in the Miners' Congress, January 26,
1921:
"Comrade Shliapnikov in speaking here-perhaps I express his thought a little crudely-said: 'Don't believe
in this disagreement between Trotsky and Lenin. They will unite just the same and the struggle will be
waged only against us!' He says: 'Don't believe.' I don't know what this means about believing or not
believing. Of course, we may unite. We may dispute in deciding any very important question but the
controversy only pushes our thoughts in the direction of 'unification'."(Trotsky, Concluding Speech,
Second All-Russian Congress of Miners, Jan.26, 1921.)
Here is another passage from my speech which Lenin quoted in his pamphlet:
"During the sharpest polemic concerning comrade Tomsky, I always said what is absolutely clear to me,
that the leaders in our trade unions can be only people with the greatest experience, with the authority
that comrade Tomsky possesses. I said that at the meeting of our fraction during the Fifth Trade Union
Congress. I said it again the other day at Zimin's Theater. An ideological struggle in the party does not
imply mutual repulsion. It implies rather influence mutually exerted."(Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, Pt.
1, p.7l.)
And here is what Lenin said on this self-same question in his concluding speech at the Tenth Party
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