TROTSKY
375
In only one way could Trotsky possibly have wrested power,
and this was through a military coup taking advantage of his
popularity in the army. But such a coup would have contributed to
the acceleration of the very authoritarian decline he was now op–
posing; and in any case, he was too much a man of ideological
rigor, too much a man devoted to his own sense of historical place
and honor, to succumb to the smallness of a bonapartist adventure.
In a bitterly ironic turn of events, he was suffering from the vindica–
tion of his own theory of permanent revolution, by means of which
he had predicted that a proletarian revolution in a backward country
would, if it continued to suffer isolation, find itself in an historical
limbo. Only, as it happened, neither he nor anyone else could pre–
dict how terrible that limbo would be.
The programs advanced by Trotsky during these years are far
too complex, and far too deeply imbedded in the historical context
of the time, to allow for easy summary. In general, however, at least
three major themes can be noted. To cope with the economic crisis
in which Soviet Russia found itself during the early and middle
twenties-what Trotsky described as the problem of "the scissors,"
the two blades of which, moving farther apart from one another,
were the rising prices of industrial goods and the declining prices of
agricultural products-the Trotskyist opposition put forward an
elaborate plan for the reorganization of the economy. The goals of
this plan included strengthening the "socialist" industrial sector,
raising the productivity of labor, supporting the poorer peasants
against the new
kulaks
who had sprung up in the countryside since
the NEP, improving the living standards of the workers and drawing
them into a more active role in economic life. What was needed, wrote
Trotsky, was "a
socialist
accumulation of capital," an harmonious
development of the various departments of industrial production, and
toward this end "Soviet democracy has become an
economic
neces–
sity." Together with his economic program, Trotsky concentrated
on the problems of democracy within the Bolshevik party and the
state-dominated institutions of social life:
Free discussion within the party has in fact disappeared; the
party's social mind has been choked off. In these times the
broad masses of the party do not nominate and elect the
provincial committees and the Central Committee. . . . On
