Trotsky, ‘wie er eigentlich gewesen’

Extract

TROTSKY'S REPEATED FAILURE AS A POLITICAL PROPHET DOES not seem to have damaged his reputation among his devoted followers. The very pivot of Trotsky's faith – that socialism in one country is doomed to failure unless supported by revolution in other countries – has been proved palpably wrong. The only reason why ‘socialist’ countries like the Soviet Union or Poland, for example, survive at all is that they are able to bolster their own inefficient systems by vast loans and imports of food and technology from states where a free economy exists. In The Revolution Betrayed, in 1937, Trotsky foretold that a defeat of Germany by the Soviet Union would result in the crushing not only of Hider, ‘but of the capitalist system’; while in the Soviet Union one of two things would happen. The first possibility was that a revolutionary party would take over which would restore freedom in the trade unions and the Soviets, as well as the liberty of Soviet parties. It would purge the apparatus, abolish all privileges and limit inequality of payment to the minimum. It was a belated conversion to freedom by Trotsky. In 1921 the sailors and garrison of Kronstadt had risen and called for every one of these reforms. They were not only mown down as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ with Trotsky's full support, and under his overall command, but his action was unequivocally justified by him years later in exile, on the grounds that failure to crush Kronstadt in 1921 would have opened the gates to ‘counterrevolution’ – in plain words, would have put an end to communist monopoly of power. The second hypothetical future of a Soviet Union victorious in a war against Germany, according to Trotsky, was the victory of a bourgeois party, which would restore private property. Of course, all political prophets go wrong more often than not. But this particular failure reveals two characteristic weaknesses of Trotsky's power of analysis.