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danger to socialism inherent in the strict party-dictatorship that they
established on the foundations of the October Revolution-a revolu–
tion made, as far too many people have forgotten, to give
all
power
to freely elected Soviets, not all power to the Bolshevik Party. Every
strengthening of the party-dictatorship, no matter by what means,
seemed both to Lenin and Trotsky to be a further guarantee of the
socialist integrity of the Soviet government. Trotsky relates that in
1922, at the eleventh Party Congress, Lenin nominated Stalin to the
post of General Secretary because of his idea that as an expert in
strong-arm tactics Stalin would succeed in dispersing the dissident
Bolshevik groupings. Only when it was too late did Lenin realize
what his willingness to profit by Stalin's peculiar talents had brought
him to, and before his death he broke all comradely and political
relations with him.
It must be said, furthermore, that Trotsky appears to have
drawn few far-reaching conclusions from the ruinous development
of the Revolution. This is shown by the off-hand way in which he
dismisses the criticism of the Bolshevik suppression of the Kronstadt
rebellion; also by his inadequate answer to the criticism that the
Bolshevik leaders made but few and feeble efforts to include in their
government socialist and revolutionary parties other than their own.
And the failure of the Left Opposition to defeat Stalinism he explains
away with the all-too-broad historical generalization that "a struggle
for power by the Left Opposition . . . was conceivable only under
the conditions of revolutionary upsurge. . . . But during the early
twenties and later there was no revolutionary upsurge in Russia, quite
the contrary. Under such circumstances it was out of the question to
launch a struggle for power." To my mind, this reasoning does not
go nearly far enough; it is much too general and abstract. The fact
is that even if objective conditions had been more favorable Trotsky
could not have hoped to succeed in his fight against the bureaucracy,
controlled by Stalin, so long as he shared its major political assump–
tions. He was organically tied to it by so many beliefs that it was
impossible for him to break through its discipline in order to appeal
to the masses against its abuse of power. After all, he too was above
all concerned with maintaining the unity of the Party against all
opponents, right or left, and with maintaining the dictatorship at
all costs.
Trotsky's dialectical skill served him well in exposing the fallacies
in the theory of socialism in one country. It can be argued, however,
that the theory of
one party in one country,
to which Trotsky is quite
