At present Miliukov, the Mensheviks and Thermidorians of all sorts—will willingly echo the cry “Remove Stalin.” Yet, it may still happen within a few months that Stalin may have to defend himself against Thermidorian pressure, and that we may have temporarily to support him…. This being so, the slogan “Down with Stalin” is ambiguous and should not be raised as a war cry at this moment.86
In his
Trotsky was always arguing that a “Thermidor” was being prepared, with the support of “petit-bourgeois elements.” Obsessed with comparisons with the French Revolution, he continually spoke of Thermidor and Brumaire. The parallels between Stalin and either the Directory or Napoleon are interesting, but the differences are so great that for purposes of practical politics they are not worth taking into account. Stalin’s regime—indeed, Lenin’s regime—had its own laws of development and potentialities. And when Stalin established his autocracy, it was comparable with other despotisms of the past, but hardly with those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Trotsky was attentive to the lessons of history, but they were not the lessons of Russian history. If instead of worrying about Barras and Bonaparte he had given some thought to Ivan the Terrible, it might have been more to the point.
Trotsky had objected to Lenin’s machine right up to 1917, but having then accepted it, had never again denounced it in principle or seen that Stalinism, or something like it, was its natural product. The furthest he went was to say that it was “rather tempting” to suggest that the Stalin system was “already rooted in Bolshevik centralism, or, more sweepingly, in the underground hierarchy of professional revolutionaries.”88
Since Stalinist historiography is so extravagantly unreliable, there has been a tendency for historians to accept Trotsky’s account of certain events. In the intrigues following Lenin’s death, he was by no means straightforward, but at once “devious and faint-hearted,” and his own account is “pathetic in its half-truths and attempts to gloss over the facts.”89 This is natural enough, and the only problem is why Trotsky’s virtually unsupported word should have been so widely accepted. Partly, no doubt, because his books, written under the comparatively critical eye of the West, were not so wildly and unashamedly falsified as their Stalinist competitors; partly because the Trotskyite tradition has trickled here and there into the mainstream of independent historical writing. But Trotsky had never failed in his duty to suppress or misrepresent facts in the interests of politics. And his general reliability on the period in question could have been considered in the light of his accusation that Stalin poisoned Lenin. There is no evidence whatever that this is true, and Trotsky himself only brought it up many years later—in 1939. The only serious point in favor of it is not evidential at all, but simply a consideration of
When people say that Trotsky had an attractive personality, they are speaking mainly of his public persona, his appearance before great meetings, his writings, his dignity. But even so, he repelled many who felt him to be full of vanity, on the one hand, and irresponsible, on the other, in the sense that he tended to make a bright or “brilliant” formulation and press it to the end regardless of danger.
Stalin’s colorless, short-view remarks carried more conviction. Their very drabness gave them a realism. In a period of comparatively down-to-earth problems, the great revolutionary (like the great “theoretician” Bukharin) did not feel at home. Whatever his aberrations, Trotsky had a good deal in him of the European Marxist tradition. As Russia lapsed into isolation, the Asian element he had before the Revolution denounced in the Bolsheviks came to the fore. A Soviet diplomat told Ciliga that the country was, after all, Asiatic: “The way of Gengis Khan and Stalin suits it better than the European civilization of Lev Davidovich.90
