Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

At the central committee plenum in July 1926, Stalin claimed that hitherto he had ‘held a moderate, not openly inimical stand against Trotsky’ and ‘had kept to a moderate policy towards him’.⁴³ His close reading of Trotsky’s technical-economic writings of the mid-1920s – Towards Socialism or Capitalism? (1925); 8 Years: Results and Perspectives (1926); and Our New Tasks (1926) – suggests this might have been true. These works date from the period when Trotsky, having been forced to step down as war commissar in January 1925, was a member of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, which controlled Soviet industry.

Trotsky was sceptical about the New Economic Policy as a strategy for socialism but was a moderate critic compared to some hard-line leftists within the Bolshevik party. He believed that NEP’s revival of the market in agriculture had over-empowered the so-called kulaks or rich peasants. He also saw the danger of a capitalist restoration across the economy and thought that socialist industrialisation was being neglected. Stalin’s marking without comment of many passages in Trotsky’s writings indicates that he shared these concerns to some extent but he was more optimistic about NEP’s capacity to generate the resources necessary to pay for socialist industrialisation. He was also confident the party and the proletariat could continue to dominate the peasants, their much larger numbers notwithstanding.⁴⁴ However, when food supplies to the cities were threatened by peasant hoarding at the end of the 1920s, Stalin did not hesitate to abandon NEP and force through, at great human cost, accelerated industrialisation and the forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture. Many of Trotsky’s supporters hailed Stalin’s ‘left turn’ and supported his struggle against the so-called Right Opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin, who resisted the abandonment of NEP. Trotsky himself thought Stalin had gone too far too fast. He even began to think that ‘market socialism’ – the underpinning model of NEP – had some merits after all.⁴⁵

The biggest differences between Stalin and Trotsky concerned the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, which was a dispute about whether or not socialist construction at home should take priority over spreading the revolution abroad. Yet Trotsky was as committed as Stalin to building socialism in the USSR, and while Stalin de-prioritised world revolution, he didn’t abandon it. This was an important strategic difference but it did not constitute an unbridgeable ideological gulf. It was factional battles and the narcissism of small differences that escalated such disagreements into an existential struggle for the soul of the Bolshevik party.

Trotsky was expelled from the party and sent into exile at the end of the 1920s. To an extent, he was the author of his own misfortune.⁴⁶ It was Trotsky who launched the ‘history wars’ about who had done what during the revolution. In 1923 it was Trotsky who broke the unity of the Politburo leadership collective that had assumed control when Lenin was stricken by a series of strokes. As head of the Commission on State Industry, he proposed acceleration of socialist industrialisation and modification of NEP’s strategy of gradual economic growth based on peasant capitalism and small-scale private production. Piling the pressure onto his leadership colleagues, Trotsky organised a campaign within the party that accused the Politburo majority, headed by a triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, of constituting a ‘factional dictatorship’. It was this same campaign that led to the publication of The New Course by Pravda in December 1923. However, the matter was settled by a resounding victory for the triumvirate at the 13th party conference in January 1924.⁴⁷

Trotsky’s next move was an opportunistic and ill-advised alliance with Kamenev and Zinoviev, who, now much more left-wing than they were in 1917, had fallen out with Stalin over NEP and socialism in one country and wanted the party to adopt a more militant approach. Like Trotsky’s Left Opposition of 1923, the United Opposition of Kamenev, Trotsky and Zinoviev attempted to rally support within the party but was overwhelmed by the power and popularity of Stalin, at this time closely allied to Bukharin, a former Left Communist who had moved rightwards and emerged as the leading theorist of NEP as a gradualist political and economic strategy for socialism.⁴⁸

In October 1926 Trotsky was removed from the Politburo and a year later from the central committee, as were Kamenev and Zinoviev. In November 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and the rout was completed by the 15th party congress in December 1927, which excluded seventy-five oppositionists, including Kamenev, from its ranks. Those expulsions triggered a purge of the United Opposition’s grassroots activists.