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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2009
According to most historical accounts Trotsky's opinions from 1925 to 1927 represented a strange combination of Zinoviev's theoretical abstractions and an amalgam of mythical ‘Trotskyism’, the latter being understood in terms of the definition given by the triumvirs at the end of 1924. Trotsky is portrayed as believing that the success of socialism in Russia presupposed an economic union with socialist Europe. The theory of Permanent Revolution is taken as proof of the need for economic support from the Western proletariat. Because Trotsky's own estimate of the importance of Permanent Revolution does not fit this analysis it is disregarded. Early in 1925 Trotsky wrote that the theory's relevance was ‘wholly to the past’. It was a matter for party history. It provided no justification for ‘allusions and references to my allegedly “pessimistic” attitude’.
As indicated in the first pages of this study, the real origins of the debate with Stalin were of a more practical nature. In 1922–3 Trotsky had made his peace with the NEP on condition that the market be rendered compatible with socialism through primitive socialist accumulation. At the end of 1924 Bukharin ‘solved’ the problem of capital scarcity by denying its existence in the short run. Unaware of any contradiction Stalin then committed the party to rapid industrialization while failing to challenge Bukharin's conception of the smychka. For a time high taxes on the kulak were politically unacceptable.
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