This chapter from Vadim Rogovin’s work “Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR” argues that Stalinism was not the logical outcome of Bolshevism but its Thermidorian negation. We are publishing this as a supplementary text to the lecture given by Katja Rippert to the Socialist Equality Party (US) 2025 Summer School and encourage our readers to purchase the full volume by Rogovin, as well as his other works on the Left Opposition, through Mehring Books.
In reading today’s philippics against Bolshevism, one is involuntarily struck by the laziness and lack of independent thought displayed by their authors. Indeed, over the last fifty years, they have not come up with a single new argument, or advanced a single new demonstration of proof! One and the same myths pass from one work to another. They play one and the same “trump cards.” Of course, repeating a lie one thousand times does not make it true. However, a lie transmitted by today’s means of mass communication has the power to affect actively the consciousness of the masses. This effect is reinforced when a one-way flood of information arises after long years of banning the discussion of certain historical questions. That is what happened during the years of “perestroika” and “reform,” when hackneyed arguments in the West, expressing the incorrigibility and epigonism of reactionary thought, were transplanted to Soviet soil.
The difficulty in refuting anti-communist falsifications is connected with the fact that, despite an abundance of works crammed with Marxist phraseology, the development of the Marxist tradition was interrupted in the USSR from the beginning of the 1930s. A genuinely Marxist criticism of anti-communism was also cut short. And given the existence of the “iron curtain,” Trotsky’s arguments were simply unknown to several generations of Soviet people.
Even after Stalin’s death, the attacks on “Trotskyism” continued to come from two directions. On the one hand, from semi-official Soviet historical literature, which interpreted “Trotskyism” as an anti-Leninist and anti-party current. On the other hand, from “tamizdat,” which was penetrating the USSR ever more widely. These were products of the reactionary wing of Western Sovietology (the so-called “totalitarian school”), proceeding from the idea of the USSR’s “unbroken” historical development, from the idea that Trotsky and Lenin had paved the way for Stalinism. The thinking of Soviet intellectuals became hopelessly entangled in these untrue postulates, all the more so since in the Soviet Union, as before, the strictest ban on becoming familiar with the works of Trotsky and “Trotskyists” was still in effect.
Driven only by conservative incentives aimed at self-preservation, and ignorant in the area of Marxism (which did not exclude a search for “appropriate” quotations from the “classics” to “lay a foundation” for each new zigzag in their politics), the ruling clique in the USSR retained the Stalinist version of the inner-party struggle, although in a slightly more proper form. They displayed cowardice when it came to making public even the purely factual side of these pages of history.
Foreseeing the complex ways that the process would take of cleansing Marxist thought from the layers deposited by the Stalinist school of falsification, Trotsky wrote in 1937:
“Reactionary epochs lower the general ideological level of the movement, throwing political thought backwards to stages which have already been passed long ago. The task of the avant-garde in these conditions consists primarily in not allowing oneself to be carried along by the general reverse current — one must be able to swim against the stream. If an unfavorable relationship of forces does not allow one to hold on to political positions seized earlier, then one must at least hold on to ideological positions, for in them is expressed the experience of the past which has been dearly paid for.”
In a polemic against the many critics of Bolshevism, Trotsky noted that their favorite device was the method of making historical analogies and juxtapositions. Much like the Stalinists called fascism and social-democracy twins, the liberals declared fascism and Bolshevism to be twins. On the opposite political wing, similar devices were used by Hitler and Mussolini, who declared that liberalism, social-democracy, and Bolshevism are only different variations of one and the same evil.
The “method of twins” found its base of support in identifying the forms of activity associated with reaction and revolution, which was always characteristic of moralizing philistines. This device lived as a parasite on several actual historical facts. “Certain common features among the tendencies grouped together above are beyond doubt,” wrote Trotsky. “… Fighting armies are always more or less symmetrical, and if there was nothing in common in their methods of fighting, then they could not inflict blows upon one another.”
An even more complex task was explaining why the thesis of Stalinism as the legitimate product of Bolshevism had received such wide circulation. In defense of this thesis there was unanimity between Stalinists, fascists, liberals, Mensheviks, anarchists, and several left-wing doctrinaires calling themselves Marxists.
If one were to set aside the Stalinists, then it would not be difficult to become convinced that, for all the remaining adherents to the “method of twins,” a shared trait was the approximation, or even the identification, of Stalinism and Trotskyism. Agreement existed on this question for political tendencies which had major differences on other questions, such as conservatives, liberals, social-democrats, and fascists. “If the Stalinists cannot join this ‘Popular Front,’” Trotsky noted sarcastically, “then it is only because they happen to be occupied with exterminating Trotskyists.”
In developing this thought, Trotsky turned to the defenders of the “theory of twins” with the following questions: “You say that Marxism is inherently flawed, and that Stalinism is its legitimate offspring? But why is it that we, revolutionary Marxists, are locked in mortal combat with Stalinism throughout the world? Why does the Stalinist gang see in Trotskyism its main enemy? Why is it that whenever anyone draws close to our views or our system of activity (Durruti, Andrés Nin, Landau and others), this forces the gangsters of Stalinism to resort to bloody reprisals?”
Trotsky stressed that, not very long before, a significant part of the capitalist press had not identified but counterposed Trotskyism and Stalinism, seeing the first as “revolutionary romanticism,” and the second as “realistic politics.” By means of this juxtaposition, bourgeois philistines justified the alliance of their governments with a Stalinist regime which had broken with the doctrine of world revolution. “The French League of the Rights of Man, which fulminated against the amoralism of Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 when they severed the military alliance with France, rushed to conceal the crimes of Stalin in 1936 in the interests of a French-Soviet pact… Only a year ago, these gentlemen… were by no means saying that Stalinism and Trotskyism are one and the same thing. They openly stood for Stalin, for his realism, for his justice system and for his Yagoda… Until the moment Tukhachevsky, Yakir and others were executed, the grand bourgeoisie of the democratic countries observed the extermination of revolutionaries in the USSR not without pleasure, although it was concealed beneath a certain squeamishness.” Only the execution of the generals alarmed these political circles by forcing them to realize that the far-going degeneration of the political regime in the Soviet Union objectively strengthened the positions of Germany and Japan on the world arena.
Only after this, the bourgeois philistines returned to arguments that the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism was only the clash of personal ambitions, or in the best case, the struggle of two “shadings” within Bolshevism. Such an interpretation was connected with the reaction to Stalin’s crimes on the part of liberals and social-democrats, whom the October Revolution had almost forced to lose faith in their ideas. “The moral gangrene of the Soviet bureaucracy seems to them to be the rehabilitation of liberalism. Hackneyed commandments are dragged out into the light; ‘Every dictatorship contains within itself the seeds of its own decomposition’; ‘only democracy guarantees the development of the individual’, and so forth.” Such a juxtaposition of democracy and dictatorship served to condemn socialism in the name of the bourgeois regime. The theoretical bankruptcy of such arguments is revealed in the fact that “the loathsomeness of Stalinism as a historical reality is juxtaposed to democracy as an ahistorical abstraction. But democracy has also had its history, in which there has been no shortfall of loathsomeness. To characterize the Soviet bureaucracy, we borrow the terms ‘Thermidor’ and ‘Bonapartism’ from the history of bourgeois democracy, for — let this become known to belated liberal doctrinaires — democracy appeared on this earth by no means in a democratic way.
More concrete were the arguments of those doctrinaires who considered themselves Marxists but who counterposed their positions in a hostile way to Bolshevism. “’We always predicted this,’ they say. ‘Beginning with the ban on other socialist parties, with the crushing of the anarchists, with the establishment of the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks in the Soviets, the October Revolution could not help but arrive at a dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Stalinism is the continuation and, at the same time, the bankruptcy of Leninism.’”
In such statements, Trotsky emphasized, there is a virtual identification of three closely connected, but independent, historical phenomena — Bolshevism, the October Revolution, and the Soviet Union. As a result of such an identification, a complex and contradictory social reality is replaced by one of its elements, logically abstracted — “pure” Bolshevism.
Meanwhile, Bolshevism itself “saw itself as one of the factors of history, its ‘conscious’ factor — very important, but not decisive.” The conquest of power did not turn the Bolshevik Party into an omnipotent master and demiurge of the historical process. Having received the chance to influence the development of society with a power that had not been available before, the party at the same time was itself subjected to the heightened influence from all of its other elements. Under the direct blows of hostile forces, it could be stripped of power. Having held on to power, it might degenerate internally. In repeatedly pointing to both of these dangers, Lenin stressed that the bureaucratization of the Soviet regime was capable of leading to the degeneration of the workers’ state which had emerged from the October Revolution. This dialectic of the historical process was not understood by those who tried to find in the decay of the Stalinist bureaucracy an overwhelming argument against Bolshevism. From the fact that the October Revolution, at a definite stage of its development, led to the triumph of the bureaucracy with its system of the knout, predation, and falsifications, they drew a false conclusion: one cannot fight against Stalinism without rejecting Bolshevism.
Of course, Trotsky said in reply to such arguments, Stalinism in a formal sense grew out of Bolshevism. The Moscow bureaucracy lived as a parasite on such circumstances, and for the sake of deceiving the masses, continued to call itself the Bolshevik Party and used old Bolshevik symbols. These methods of camouflage were taken seriously by those apostates of Bolshevism who replaced essence with appearance and thereby rendered the greatest service to the Stalinist regime.
In actuality, as Trotsky underscored, Stalinism “grew” out of Bolshevism “not logically, but dialectically: not as a revolutionary confirmation, but as a Thermidorian negation... Today’s ‘purge’ draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line, but a whole river of blood. The extermination of the entire older generation of Bolsheviks, a significant part of the middle generation which participated in the civil war, and that part of the youth which seriously accepted the Bolshevik traditions, shows not only the political, but the literally physical incompatibility of Stalinism and Bolshevism. How can one not see this?”
Trotsky considered the derivation of Stalinism from Bolshevism or from Marxism a particular case of deriving counter-revolution from revolution, which is characteristic of liberal-conservative and reformist thought. This method has speculated on the fact that revolutions in which the class divisions of society are maintained have always given birth to counter-revolution. “Does this not show, asks the moralizer, that there is some kind of inherent flaw in the revolutionary method? So far, neither liberals nor reformists have been able, however, to invent more ‘economical’ methods. But if it is not easy to rationalize in deed the living historical process, it is, however, not hard at all to rationalistically interpret the succession of its waves, logically deriving Stalinism from ‘state socialism,’ fascism from Marxism, reaction from revolution, in short, antithesis from thesis.”
Some of the rationalists, as Trotsky emphasized, used more concrete arguments, deriving Stalinism not from Bolshevism as a whole, but from the political methods used by the latter in extreme historical conditions: from the ban on other political parties, supplemented by the ban on factions within the ruling party itself. The use of these forced measures, which did not flow from the theory of Bolshevism, signaled the greatest danger, as was clear to the Bolsheviks from the very beginning. Keeping well in mind the temporary character of these measures, the Bolsheviks used them in a historical situation that was characterized by the weakness of the Soviet state, which had been established in a backward and exhausted country, and was surrounded on all sides by enemies. “If the revolution had been victorious, if only in Germany, the necessity of banning other Soviet parties (i.e., which until 1921 were part of the Soviets – V. R.) would have immediately fallen away.”
As soon as the domestic and international situation of the USSR became stabilized and stronger, the Left Opposition demanded the widening of party and Soviet democracy. It was precisely for this sake that it entered into irreconcilable battle with the ruling faction headed by Stalin. Emerging victorious in this struggle, the Bonapartist clique crushed all democratic elements and institutions, replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the bureaucracy, and virtually strangled the Bolshevik Party itself.
The question of the fate of democracy was closely linked with the question of the fate of the state, around which the anarchists constructed their arguments. Seeing in Stalinism the organic product, not only of Bolshevism and Marxism, but mainly of “state socialism,” they pointed to indisputable historical facts: one branch of “state socialism” — social-democracy — came to power in a number of countries and preserved the capitalist organization of society; another branch, which was in power in the USSR, not only preserved a strictly centralized state, but gave birth to a new caste of privileged people.
Trotsky felt that in the arguments of the anarchists, seen from a broad historical point of view, one could discover a grain of truth. Marxists are completely in agreement with anarchists that the removal of the state as an apparatus of compulsion is the final goal of the communist transformation of society. It is precisely Marxism which points to the ways and methods which will allow mankind to free itself from the straightjacket of the state. To attain this goal, mankind must rise to an immeasurably higher cultural level than now.
During the heroic epoch of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks fought hand in hand with the revolutionary anarchists. The Bolshevik Party included many of them in its ranks. Trotsky recalled that he had often discussed with Lenin the question of granting anarchists opportunities for conducting their stateless experiments — in various regions of the country and with the agreement of the local population. But the circumstances of the Civil War, of the economic and military blockade, and of economic ruination left little room for social experiments of this kind. The same circumstances caused the Bolsheviks to use force, frequently in the harshest forms. However, given all this, one cannot help but see a radical difference between the Bolshevik regime and the regime of Stalinism which replaced it. The Bolshevik regime acted as a weapon in the overthrow of social relations, which served the interests of the broadest popular masses. The Thermidorian overthrow which was made by Stalinism led to the restructuring of these new and still unstable social relations, in the interests of a privileged minority. It was precisely this that explained the monopolization of the system of compulsion by the Stalinist bureaucracy, which used it in such forms and on a scale that surpassed by far the excesses of the Civil War of 1918–1920. If Bolshevism had tried to establish a state without a bureaucracy, or a state of the “Commune type,” then Stalin “had created a state of the self-enriching bureaucracy, of the ‘GPU type.’”
Correspondingly, the social types of the objects of repression differed radically at various stages of the development of the Soviet state. Whereas in the first post-revolutionary years, they were open enemies of the October Revolution which had stripped them of their class and property privileges, in the years of the Great Terror, the spearhead of the repressions was aimed at the communist opponents of Stalin’s regime.
Trotsky also thought that the identification of Stalinism with Bolshevism and Marxism was wrong because the Stalinist bureaucracy did not possess a fully formulated political doctrine and a strict ideological system. “Its ‘ideology’ is fully permeated with police subjectivism, its practice is the empiricism of naked violence… Stalin revises Marx and Lenin not with the pen of his theoreticians, but with the jackboots of the GPU.” The hostility of Stalinism to any serious theory flowed from the existence of the social interests of the caste of usurpers, and this caste could give neither themselves nor others an account of their actual social role.
The contradictory nature of the social position of the ruling layer in the USSR consisted in the following: having broken with Marxist doctrine, it was forced at the same time to adapt to the social heritage of the October Revolution which had not been fully liquidated. Meanwhile the confrontation between the Bonapartist bureaucracy and the adherents of Bolshevism assumed ever more the character of class warfare. These hostile political forces spoke as the bearers of opposed social interests. The victory of the defenders of Bolshevik principles over the caste of thugs would have brought a moral and political renaissance to the Soviet regime. For this not to happen, the ruling clique carried out the mass extermination of those who were dissatisfied on a scale which virtually signified a new civil war.
Western liberals, who were repeating assurances that the Bolshevik Party was a new version of Tsarism, did not want to see this dialectic of the social struggle. In adopting this position, they were closing their eyes to such “minor details” as the elimination of the monarchy, nobility, and gentry, the expropriation of capital, etc. “If the Stalinist bureaucracy even manages to destroy the economic foundations of the new society,” wrote Trotsky with foresight, “the experience of a planned economy conducted under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party will enter forever into history as the greatest school for all mankind.”
The correctness of Trotsky’s views on the relationship between Bolshevism and Stalinism becomes strikingly clear if one compares his writings with a work which the anti-communists of all stripes have studied for many decades — Arthur Koestler’s book Darkness at Noon. Its author, who had renounced communism at the end of the 1930s, seemed to be justifying his own renegacy when he tried to persuade the reader (through the words of his main hero, Rubashov) that “the whole activity of the so-called opposition had been senile chatter, because the whole generation of the old guard was just as worn out as he himself…, that an active, organized opposition to No. 1 (Stalin) had never existed; that it had all only been talk, impotent playing with fire.”
Giving a highly approximate history of the inner party struggle in the VKP(b) (as can be seen from the quote above), Koestler, who had been an inveterate Stalinist in the past, nevertheless had a certain conception of the ideological positions of the oppositionists. His Rubashov was keenly aware of the radical difference between the Stalinist and Bolshevik regimes; under the latter “discussions in the Central Committee and at the congresses had been on a level never before attained in history by a political body.” He condemned many aspects of Stalin’s politics — the omnipotence of the dictator, mass terror, and forced collectivization, in which “we sent about ten million people to do forced labor in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East (the number of people victimized in the anti-kulak campaign is exaggerated by Koestler at least two times over, but in the given instance, this does not have major significance — V. R.).”
During the investigation, Rubashov was placed in a face-to-face confrontation with the son of his old friend, Kiefer, during which the son, according to Rubashov, conveyed his thoughts with unusual precision. “My father considered that, one day, the cup would overflow and the Party would depose him or force him to resign; and that the opposition must propagate this idea… Rubashov laughed at my father, and repeated that he was a fool and a Don Quixote… One could hope for nothing from the Party either, for No. 1 held all the threads in his hand, and had made the Party bureaucracy his accomplice who would stand and fall with him, and he knew it.”
This dialogue marvelously mixes together the views of true Trotskyists and the renegade arguments of capitulators (to whom Rubashov belonged; before his arrest he repeatedly renounced his oppositional views).
Rubashov’s answer to the question asked by the investigator Gletkin was clearly “Trotskyist” in character:
“If you think sabotage is a mere fiction, what, in your opinion, are the real causes of the unsatisfactory state of our industry?”
“Too low piece-work rates, slave-driving, and barbaric disciplinary measures…”
In virtual agreement with this conclusion, Gletkin unfolded a chain of sophistries before Rubashov, trying to prove that the way out of this enchanted circle might be in finding scapegoats. “Experience teaches,” said Gletkin, “that the masses must be given a simple, easily grasped explanation for all difficult and complicated processes… If one told the people in my village that they were still slow and backward in spite of the revolution and the factories, it would have no effect on them. If one tells them that they are heroes of labor, more efficient than the Americans, and that the only evil comes from devils and saboteurs, that at least has some effect.”
Somewhat surprisingly, these arguments were persuasive to Rubashov, who had earlier muttered to himself that Gletkin was a “Neanderthaler.” “Rubashov continually reminded himself that the Gletkins were continuing the cause begun by the old intelligentsia. That their earlier ideas had not degenerated, although they sounded absolutely inhuman in the mouths of the Neanderthalers.” He also virtually endorsed Gletkin’s views that “any day now international capitalism may start a war against our country, and the slightest vacillation among the toiling masses will lead to innumerable catastrophes. The party... must become a united monolith, which is welded together by iron discipline and selfless devotion to the Leadership.” Such arguments were typical of Molotov, who found in them the justification for his criminal activity during the years of the Great Purge (see Chapter 20). But they were profoundly alien to genuine Bolsheviks, as one can judge from the statements made not only by Trotskyists, but from those made by the non-returners who did not belong to them, but expressed the ideological positions of their own social and political milieu.
While he was in prison, Rubashov created a “law of the relative maturity of the masses.” Proceeding from this “law,” he convinced himself that “a simplified and endlessly repeated idea makes its way more easily into the popular consciousness — what is today declared correct, must shine with blinding whiteness; what is today declared wrong, must be as black as pitch; right now the masses needed cartoon-like literature.” This disparaging conception of the masses led Rubashov to acknowledge the correctness of Stalin’s propaganda methods; the latter’s speeches “consisted of questions and answers, in which events were presented in the simplest logic that the masses found irrefutable.”
In these sophistries Koestler completely ignored the difference between leading the masses and enslaving them or crushing them. The theory which he ascribed to the Bolsheviks was based on a condescending attitude toward the masses, whereas genuine Bolshevik theory was based on trusting the masses and finding support among them. The Bolshevik view of the relationship between the party and the masses was most fully outlined in Trotsky’s work Their Morals and Ours. “The liberation of the workers can only be the cause of the workers themselves,” Trotsky stated here. “There is therefore no greater crime than to deceive the masses, to pass off defeats as victories, and friends as enemies, to buy leaders, to fabricate legends, and to stage frame-up trials, — in short, to do what the Stalinists are doing. These means can serve only one end: to prolong the domination of a clique which has already been condemned by history.”
Stating that the minority of the population acts as the active force in the revolution, Trotsky added that the success of the revolution becomes possible only when this minority “finds more or less support, or at least friendly neutrality, on the part of the majority. The succession of various stages of the revolution, much like the transition from revolution to counter-revolution, is determined immediately by the changing political relationship between the minority and the majority, between the avant-garde and the class.”
Noting that idealizing the masses was always foreign to the Bolsheviks, Trotsky wrote: “The masses, of course, are by no means without sin… We have seen them in various conditions, at various stages, and in the greatest historical shocks. We have observed their strong and weak sides. The strong sides—decisiveness, selflessness and heroism—always found the clearest expression when the revolution was on the upswing. During this period the Bolsheviks stood at the head of the masses. Then another historical chapter approached, when the weak sides of the oppressed were revealed: heterogeneity, insufficient culture, narrowness of vision. The masses became tired of the tension, became disillusioned, lost faith in themselves and—cleared the way for a new aristocracy. In this period, the Bolsheviks (“Trotskyists”) ended up isolated from the masses.”
“With these great events,” continued Trotsky, “the ‘Trotskyists’ studied the rhythm of history, i.e., the dialectic of the class struggle. They studied and, it seems, to a certain degree learned to subordinate their subjective plans and programs to this objective rhythm. They learned not to fall into despair because the laws of history do not depend on our individual tastes or bow down to our moral criteria… They learned not to fear the most powerful enemies, if their might contradicts the demands of historical development. They are able to swim against the current with profound assurance that a new historical flood of powerful force will carry them to that shore. Not all will arrive there, many will drown. But to participate in this movement with open eyes and with tense will—only this can give the highest moral satisfaction to a thinking human being!”
Trotsky concretized these theoretical ideas in a critical analysis of the historical legends created around various episodes in the revolution. Among these legends being widely circulated in the 1930s, the legend of the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 occupied a leading place.