The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification - Chapter 5
Congress, summarizing the trade union discussion:
"The Workers' Opposition said: 'Lenin and Trotsky will unite.' Trotsky taking the floor replied: 'Whoever
does not understand that it is necessary to unite is going against the party; of course, we will unite
because we are party men.' I supported Trotsky. To be sure, Trotsky and I have differed. When more or
less equal groupings arise in the Central Committee, the party decides, and decides in such a way that we
unite according to the will and directives of the party. That is the announcement with which Trotsky and
I went to the Miners' Congress and have come here, i.e., to the Party Congress."(Ibid., p.132.)
Is that anything like the spiteful scribbling which is given out these days for a history of the trade union
discussion in one political textbook after another?
The thing becomes laughable when Bukharin incautiously proceeds to exploit the trade union discussion
as a weapon against "Trotskyism." Here is the way Lenin appraised Bukharin's position in that
discussion:
"Hitherto the 'chief' in the struggle has been Trotsky. But now Bukharin has left him way behind and
completely eclipsed' him. Bukharin has created a completely new situation in the struggle for he has
talked himself into a mistake a hundred times bigger than all the mistakes of Trotsky put together.
"How could Bukharin talk himself into this break with communism? We know all the softness of
comrade Bukharin, one of the characteristics for which you love him so, and can't help loving him. We
know that he is often jokingly called 'soft wax.' It seems that 'any unprincipled person,' any 'demagogue,'
can print on that soft wax anything he wants to. The harsh expression included in the quotation marks
was used by comrade Kamenev in the discussion of January 17. And he had a right to use it. But, of
course, it would never occur to Kamenev or to anybody else to explain what happened as unprincipled
demagogy-to reduce everything to that."(Ibid., p.35.)
THE THIRD CONGRESS OF THE COMINTERN
33. After all, was the trade union question the only question in the life of the party and the Soviet
Republic during the years of my collaboration with Lenin? In the same year, 1921, the year of the Tenth
Party Congress, occurred the Third World Congress of the Comintern, which played an enormous role in
the history of the international labor movement. At this Third Congress, a profound struggle unfolded
upon the fundamental questions of communist policies. That struggle was transferred into our Political
Bureau. I told something of it briefly at a session of the Political Bureau soon after the Fourteenth Party
Congress:
"There was danger at that time that the policy of the Comintern would follow the line of the March 1921
events[21] in Germany. That is, the attempt to create a revolutionary situation artificially-to 'galvanize'
the proletariat, as one of the German comrades expressed it. That mood was the prevailing one in the
Congress. Vladimir Ilyich came to the conclusion that, following this course, the International would
most certainly go to smash. Before the Congress I wrote my impression of the March events to comrade
Radek in a letter of which Vladimir Ilyich knew nothing. Considering the ticklish situation, and not
knowing the Opinion of Vladimir Ilyich and knowing that Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek were in general
for the German Left, I naturally did not express myself publicly but wrote a letter (in the form of theses)
to comrade Radek, asking him to give me his Opinion. Radek and I did not agree. Vladimir Ilyich beard
about this, sent for me, and characterized the situation in the Comintern as one involving the very
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937-st2/sf05.htm (7 of 20) [06/06/2002 15:06:23]