The Great Terror

Trotsky’s revolutionary record, from the time he had returned from abroad to become President of the St. Petersburg Soviet during the 1905 Revolution, was outstanding. His fame was European. In the Party, however, he was not as strong as his repute suggested. Right up to 1917, he had stayed clear of Lenin’s tightly organized Bolshevik group and operated, with a few sympathizers, as an independent revolutionary, though in some ways closer to the Mensheviks. His own group had merged with the Bolsheviks in June 1917, and he had played a decisive role in the seizure of power in November of that year. But he was regarded as an outsider by most of the Old Bolsheviks. And at the same time, he was lacking in the experience of intrigue which they had picked up in the long and obscure inner-Party struggles in which he had tried to operate as a conciliator. They also thought of him as arrogant. The respect he won by his gifts and intellect was wrung from them reluctantly. Although he had a number of devoted adherents, on the whole he repelled as much as he attracted. With Lenin’s partial support, he was undoubtedly the second man in the Party and State. With Lenin dead, he became vulnerable. But in spite of the weakness of his position, it had its strength. He had powerful backing, not only from many able Bolsheviks, but also from the students and younger Communists. The “Left” associated with Trotsky had opposed Lenin on the great issues of the early 1920s. By the New Economic Policy, Lenin had saved the country from collapse, and at the same time had kept the Party’s grip on power, but at the expense of large concessions to “capitalism”: the rich peasant proprietor and the profiteering “NEP-man” flourished. All this was repulsive, even sinful, to the purists. They were often not particularly devoted to Trotsky in person, but rather held to the views—dogmatic or principled, depending on how one looks at it—which Trotsky had come to personify in the early 1920s, as Bukharin had in 1918. When Stalin himself went “Left” in 1928, most of them ceased to support Trotsky in his opposition.

This group included Pyatakov, one of the six men named by Lenin in his Testament; Lenin saw him, with Bukharin, as the ablest of the younger men. Pyatakov, a tall dignified man with a long, straight beard and a high domed forehead, had started his political career as an anarchist, becoming a Bolshevik in 1910. During the Civil War, his brother had been shot by the Whites in the Ukraine, and he had only just escaped the same fate. His modesty and lack of personal ambition were admired as much as his ability.

Other leading “Trotskyites” were Krestinsky, member of the first Politburo and original senior Secretary of the Central Committee until the Left were removed from administrative power by Lenin; Rakovsky, the handsome Bulgarian veteran who had virtually founded the Balkan revolutionary movement; Preobrazhensky, the great theorist of the creation of industry on the basis of squeezing the funds out of the peasantry, who has been described as the true leader of the Left in 1923 and 1924;¹² and Radek, ugly and intelligent, who had come to the Bolsheviks from Rosa Luxemburg’s Polish Social Democratic Party and had also worked in the German Socialist Left. He had operated with great daring and skill in the revolutionary Berlin of 1919, where he had been imprisoned. But his element was very much that of underground intrigue and the political gamble, and as an able journalist, sharp and satirical. His image in the Party was that of an erratic, unreliable, and cynical talker rather than a serious politician.

Trotsky was, however, quite isolated in the Politburo itself. His greatest strength was his control of the War Commissariat. An old Trotskyite later took the view that Trotsky could have won in 1923 if he had held his base in the army and personally appealed to the Party workers in the great towns. Trotsky did not do so (this observer felt) because his victory would then have meant a sure split in the Central Committee, and he hoped to secure it by negotiation.¹³

But this was the wrong arena. Trotsky’s weaknesses as a politician were demonstrated:

… the great intellectual, the great administrator, the great orator lacked one quality essential—at any rate in the conditions of the Russian Revolution—to the great political leader. Trotsky could fire masses of men to acclaim and follow him. But he had no talent for leadership among equals. He could not establish his authority among colleagues by the modest arts of persuasion or by sympathetic attention to the views of men of lesser intellectual calibre than himself. He did not suffer fools, and he was accused of being unable to brook rivals.¹⁴

His hold on Party workers was dependent on great gestures and great speeches. A listener remarks: