592
LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
many of Trotsky's utterances at length to show that Trotsky from 1906 to
1937 had consistently repeated one idea: without the revolution in the
advanced countries, proletarian power in Russia is doomed to collapse.
But the author explains Trotsky's mistakes not by his failure to grasp
autonomous functions of political structures but by his "underestimation
of the internal forces of Russian socialism." Trotsky expected the chal–
lenge of foreign commodities on the Soviet market - wrongly, since
Stalin "correctly" established the state monopoly of the foreign trade. The
success of the Five Year Plans demonstrated Trotsky's mistakes. Stalin
proved effectively that socialism may be built in an isolated cou · ..;ry, al–
though not yet its higher stage, not as a society without state, money and
commodities. This success did not run against Lenin's predictions since
Lenin himself departed from traditional Bolshevik tenets in his last writ–
ings on this crucial point. Stalin was "correct" when he proclaimed in
1935 that the socialism has already been built in the main and the class
antagonism has been abolished, and although Mr. Johnstone does not
deny that this achieyement was carried through in a rather undemocratic
manner he blames Trotsky for not having understood that "for a cer–
tain period (which may be quite prolonged) an uneasy and antagonistic
coexistence of a socialist economy and an undemocratic, unsocialist
superstructure is possible." Let us not worry: the imperfect superstruc–
ture will soon match up the perfect economic basis. And Trotsky again
was wrong when predicting the return of the Soviet state to bourgeois
principles. Nothing of the sort happened and since Stalin's death "the
most negative features of Stalinism spotlighted by Trotsky have been
dismantled."
I think the debate is sectarian and not historical because all the
disputants argue each with other about which policy was "correct" in
a given moment in Russia. They do not explain what "correct" means
but certainly it is not synonymous with "efficient" or "successfuL" These
last terms deal with the relation between ends and means, they do not
involve any value judgments or commitment; we may ask about the
efficiency of the policy of Hitler in 1932 in the same way as we ask about
Lenin's policy in 1917; but probably the participants in the debate
would not talk about "correctness" in the first case. When they
say that in a certain situation Trotsky'S (or Stalin's) conduct was "cor–
rect" or "mistaken," they mean that they praise or blame him from
the standpoint of aims they share. They act as if they are giving advice
to Trotsky in 1923 or to Stalin in 1929. Consequently, no one can par–
ticipate in the discussion who does not share their value judgments and
ideological allegiances. But allegiances are not clearly articulated and
words like "correct" blur the fact that the proper aim of the discussion
is not to understand the events or the motives of historical figures but
