TROTSKY
377
or even imagined.
An
observation by one of Trotsky's former col–
laborators, Max Shachtman, is worth quoting here:
The workers' power in Russia, even in the already attenuated
form of a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, stood as an
obstacle
in
the path of [capital] accumulation precisely be–
cause, on the one hand, genuine socialist accumulation was
impossible under conditions of an isolated and backward
country and, on the other hand, workers' power was in–
compatible with any other kind of accumulation. This power,
then, had to be shattered.
It had, that is, to be shattered by Stalin's totalitarian dictatorship,
which did indeed manage to impose a layer of industrialization on
Russia's backward economy but in doing so created a socio-political
structure profoundly in conflict with socialist values.
A more cogent criticism of Trotsky's course in the twenties con–
cerns his failure to speak out in behalf of a multi-party democracy
within the limits of "Soviet legality." In 1917, a few weeks before
the October revolution, when Trotsky was elected President of the
Petrograd Soviet, he had promised: "We shall conduct the work
of the Petrograd Soviet in a spirit of lawfulness and of full freedom
for all parties." Toward the end of his life Trotsky would write that
"Only when the civil war began, when the most decisive elements
of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries took part in the civil
war on the other side of the barricades, we prohibited them.
It
was
a military measure, not a permanent step." All recent political ex–
perience inclines us to suspect such arguments from necessity, so
badly abused have they been; and even if one grants some force
to Trotsky's claim one must also heed the careful documentation in
Leonard Schapiro'S
The Origin of the Communist Autocracy,
an
account of the repeated violations of democratic procedures by the
Bolshevik regime in the years between 1917 and 1922, a good many
of which could not be attributed to the pressures of the civil war.
In any case, Trotsky'S decision to limit himself during the factional
struggles of the twenties to a demand for democracy within the
Bolshevik party placed him in a severe contradiction. Democracy
within a ruling party, especially if it dominates a society in which
property has become the possession of the state, is finally impossible
unless it is extended beyond the limits of that party. Trotsky was
