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WSWS : History : 2005 SEP/WSWS Summer School

Lecture one: The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century

Part 1

By David North
29 August 2005

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This is first part of the lecture “The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century” delivered by World Socialist Web Site chairman David North at the Socialist Equality Party (US) and the WSWS summer school from August 14 to August 20, 2005, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The lecture was published in four parts. (See Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4).

Historical knowledge and class consciousness

Today we are beginning a week-long series of lectures on the subject of “Marxism, the October Revolution and the Historical Foundations of the Fourth International.” In the course of these lectures we intend to examine the historical events, theoretical controversies and political struggles out of which the Fourth International emerged. The central focus of these lectures will be on the first 40 years of the twentieth century. To some extent, this limitation is determined by the amount of time we have at our disposal. There is only so much that can be accomplished in one week, and to work through even the first four decades of the last century in just seven days is a rather ambitious undertaking. And yet there is a certain historical logic in our concentration on the period between 1900 and 1940.

By the time Leon Trotsky was assassinated in August 1940, all the major events that determined the essential political characteristics of the twentieth century had already occurred: The outbreak of World War I in August 1914; the conquest of political power by the Bolshevik Party in October 1917 and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union as the first socialist workers’ state; the emergence, in the aftermath of World War I, of the United States as the most powerful imperialist state; the failure of the German Revolution in 1923, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union; the defeat of the Left Opposition and the expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist Party and the Third International in 1927; the betrayal of the Chinese Revolution in 1926-27; the Wall Street crash of October 1929 and the beginning of the world capitalist depression; Hitler’s rise to power and the victory of fascism in Germany in January 1933; the Moscow Trials of 1936-38 and the campaign of political genocide against the socialist intelligentsia and working class in the USSR; the betrayal and defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1937-39 under the aegis of the Stalinist-led Popular Front; the outbreak of World War II in September 1939; and the beginning of the extermination of European Jewry.

When we say that it was during these four decades that the essential political characteristics of the twentieth century were defined, we mean this in the following sense: all the major political problems that were to confront the international working class during the post-World War II period could be understood only when examined through the prism of the strategic lessons of the major revolutionary and counter-revolutionary experiences of the pre-World War II era.

The analysis of the policies of social democratic parties after World War II required an understanding of the historical implications of the collapse of the Second International in August 1914; the nature of the Soviet Union, of the regimes established in eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II, and of the Maoist regime established in China in October 1949 could be comprehended only on the basis of a study of the October Revolution and the protracted degeneration of the first workers’ state; and answers to the problems of the great wave of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist revolutions that swept Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America after 1945 could be found only on the basis of a painstaking study of the political and theoretical controversies surrounding Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which he had initially formulated in 1905.

The relation between historical knowledge and political analysis and orientation found its most profound expression in the last decade of the Soviet Union. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, the Stalinist regime was in desperate crisis. The deterioration of the Soviet economy could no longer be concealed once oil prices, whose rapid rise during the 1970s had provided a short-term windfall, began to fall sharply. What measures were to be taken by the Kremlin to reverse the decline? Issues of policy immediately became entangled with unanswered questions of Soviet history.

For more than 60 years the Stalinist regime had been engaged in an unrelenting campaign of historical falsification. The citizens of the Soviet Union were largely ignorant of the facts of their own revolutionary history. The works of Trotsky and his co-thinkers had been censored and suppressed for decades. There existed not a single credible work of Soviet history. Each new edition of the official Soviet encyclopedia revised history in accordance with the political interests and instructions of the Kremlin. In the Soviet Union, as our late comrade Vadim Rogovin once noted, the past was as unpredictable as the future!

For those factions within the bureaucracy and privileged nomenklatura which favored the dismantling of the nationalized industry, the revival of private property, and the restoration of capitalism, the Soviet economic crisis was “proof” that socialism had failed and that the October Revolution was a catastrophic historical mistake from which all subsequent Soviet tragedies flowed inexorably. The economic prescriptions advanced by these pro-market forces were based on an interpretation of Soviet history that claimed that Stalinism was the inevitable outcome of the October Revolution.

The answer to the advocates of capitalist restoration could not be given simply on the basis of economics. Rather, the refutation of the pro-capitalist arguments demanded an examination of Soviet history, the demonstration that Stalinism was neither the necessary nor inevitable outcome of the October Revolution. It had to be shown that an alternative to Stalinism was not only theoretically conceivable, but also that such an alternative had actually existed in the form of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky.

What I am saying today is more or less what I told an audience of students and teachers in the Soviet Union, at the Historical Archival Institute of Moscow University, in November 1989. I began my lecture on the subject of “The Future of Socialism” by noting that “in order to discuss the future, it is necessary to dwell at considerable length on the past. Because how can one discuss socialism today without dealing with the many controversies that confront the socialist movement? And, of course, when we discuss the future of socialism, we are discussing the fate of the October Revolution—an event which is of world significance and which has had a profound effect on the working class of every country. Much of this past, particularly in the Soviet Union, is still shrouded in mystery and falsification.” [1]

There was at that time an immense interest in historical questions in the USSR. My own lecture, which was organized with less than 24 hours preparation in response to an impromptu invitation by the director of the Historical Archival Institute, attracted an audience of several hundred people. The publicity for the meeting was confined almost entirely to word of mouth. The news quickly got around that an American Trotskyist would be speaking at the Institute, and a large number of people turned up.

Though in the brief era of Glasnost it was not a complete novelty for a Trotskyist to speak publicly, a lecture by an American Trotskyist was still something of a sensation. The intellectual climate for such a lecture was extremely favorable. There was a hunger for historical truth. As Comrade Fred Williams recently noted in his review of Robert Service’s miserable Stalin biography, the Soviet journal Arguments and Facts, which had been a minor publication in the pre-Glasnost era, saw its circulation climb exponentially, to 33 million, on the basis of its publication of essays and long-suppressed documents related to Soviet history.

Frightened by the widespread and expanding interest in Marxism and Trotskyism, the bureaucracy sought to preempt this essential intellectual process of historical clarification, which would tend to encourage a resurgence of socialist political consciousness, by accelerating its movement toward the breakup of the USSR. The precise manner in which the bureaucracy orchestrated the dissolution of the USSR—the culmination of the Stalinist betrayal of the October Revolution foreseen by Trotsky more than a half-century earlier—is a subject that remains to be examined with the necessary detail. But what must be stressed is that a critical element in the dissolution of the USSR—whose catastrophic consequences for the people of the former Soviet Union have become all too clear—was ignorance of history. The burden of decades of historical falsification could not be overcome in time for the Soviet working class to orient itself politically, uphold its independent social interests, and oppose the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism.

There is a great lesson in this historical tragedy. Without a thorough knowledge of the historical experiences through which it has passed, the working class cannot defend even its most elementary social interests, let alone conduct a politically conscious struggle against the capitalist system.

Historical consciousness is an essential component of class consciousness. The words of Rosa Luxemburg are as relevant today as they were when written in early 1915, less than a year after the outbreak of World War I and the capitulation of the German Social Democratic Party to Prussian militarism and imperialism:

“Historical experience is [the working class’] only teacher. His Via Dolorosa to freedom is covered not only with unspeakable suffering, but with countless mistakes. The goal of his journey, his final liberation, depends entirely upon the proletariat, on whether it understands to learn from its own mistakes. Self-criticism, cruel, unsparing criticism that goes to the very root of the evil is life and breath for the proletarian movement. The catastrophe into which the world has thrust the socialist proletariat is an unexampled misfortune for humanity. But socialism is lost only if the international proletariat is unable to measure the depths of the catastrophe and refuses to understand the lessons that it teaches.”[2]

To be continued

Notes:
[1] The USSR.and Socialism: The Trotskyist Perspective (Detroit, 1990), pp. 1-2.
[2] The Junius Pamphlet (London, 1970), p. 7.