From Socialism vs. Civilization, Boris L. Brasol
. . . it soon became apparent to the Bolsheviki that the peasants, who constitute an overwhelming majority of Russia’s population (about eighty per cent), were not among their stanch supporters. In the first place, at least seventy-five per cent of the peasants were landowners themselves and, therefore, Socialistic schemes appealed very little to them. The remainder of the peasant population (from twenty to twenty-five per cent) were labelled by the Bolsheviki as “peasant beggars.” It was to this class alone that the Bolsheviki looked for assistances. It was alleged that the “peasant beggars” were the only real peasant, because they along understood the proletarian spirit. As to the bulk of the peasantry, they were condemned by Mr. Trotzky and his followers as supporters and eulogists of the bourgeoisie.The policy of the Boshevistleaders was to put at variance these two groups of the farmer population.
In a recent pamphlet of Trotzky’s under the title, Struggle Against Hunger, the class of landowning and well-to-do- peasants or farmers is called “the advance-grad of the Russian bourgeoisie.” Trotzky confesses that “at present the well-to-do farmers are the mainenemies of the workmen and the laboring masses in the cities as well as of the village beggars.”1
1 Trotzky’s Stroggle Against Hunder, p. 24 (Moscow, 1918, book publishing firm, “Communist” Russian pamphlet.)
Trotzky also watated the “we will grab bread from the well-to-do farmers for the beggars’ benefit and we will exchange this bread for clothes, nails, agricultural machinery, for everything which is available in the city and which the village is in need of. The distribution will be carried out through committees of peasant beggars ; theywill take the bread from the well-to-do farmers and exchange it fro clothes, which wil be distributyed among them.” Moreover, Trotzky confessed that were a war to begin between the city and the village, it would mean the collapse of the revolution.
1 Compare ibid., pp. 26 and 28.
With all this . . . the Russian peasant . . . has sense enough to withhold his food-supplies, for the mere reason that in exchange for food he is unable to buy in the cities those articles which are needed in his household.
With all industries nationalized, with all shops robbed and looted, and with allbanks closed, the output of commodities has decreased to an enorous extent. Therefore, we can easily understand Mr. Trotzky’s indignation with regard to the withholding of food-supplies by the peasants ; but we can also easily guess why the Russian peasant pays very little, fiany, attention to Mr. Trzotsky’s indignation.
Owing to this attitude of the peasants,the food situation in the cities ent from bad to worse in Soviet Russia. People are now starving enmasse. The ratioing of food helps very little,since there is really nothing to ration. Trutzky himself made public the following wire despathces which were received during the spring and summer of 1918 by the Soviet Government :
Wire dispatch from the City of Sergiev-Possad ;
Give us brea ; otherwise we are lost.
Wire dispatch from the City of Briansk, dated May 30, 1918 :
At the Maltzoff and Briansk mills mortality is enormous, especially among children. There is a hunger-typhus in the county.
Wire dispatch from the City of Klin (thrity-seven miles to the south of Moscow) dated June 2, 1918 ;
Klin is entirely d eprived of bread for two weeks.
Wire dispatch from the City of Pavlov-Possad, dated May 21, 1918 :
The population is starving. There is no bread ; it is impossible to get it from anywhere
Wire dispatch from the City of Dorogobouj, dated June 3, 1918 :
Hunger is acuted Mass diseases are prevailing.1
1 Trotzky’s Struggle Against Hunger, pp. 4 and 5.
New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920, pages 138-9.
From Leon Trotsky, alias Bronstein by Winston S. Churchill
. . . I have before me an article that Leon Trotsky alias Bronstein had recently contributed . . . He has written this article from his exile in Turkey while supplicating England, France and Germany to admit him to the civilizations it has been—and still is—the object of his life to destroy. Russia—his own Red Russia—the Russia he had framed and fashioned to his heart's desire regardless of suffering, all his daring, all his writing, all his harangues, all his atrocities, all his achievements, have led only to this—that another 'comrade,' his subordinate in revolutionary rank, his inferior in wit, though not perhaps in crime, rules in his stead, while he, the once triumphant, sits disconsolate . . .But he must have been a difficult man to please. He did not like the Czar, so he murdered him and his family. He did not like the Imperial Government, so he blew it up. He did not like the Liberalism of Guchkov and Miliukov, so he overthrew them. He could not endure the Social Revolutionary moderation of Kerensky and Savinkov, so he seized their places. And when at last the Communist regime for which he had striven with might and main was established throughout the whole of Russia, when the dictatorship of the Proletariat was supreme, when the New Order of Society had passed from visions into reality, when the hateful culture and traditions of the individualist period had been eradicated, when the Secret Police had become the servants of the Third International, when in a word his Utopia had been achieved, he was still discontented. He still fumed, growled, snarled, bit and plotted. He had raised the poor against the rich. He had raised the penniless against the poor. He had raised the criminal against the penniless. All had fallen out as he had willed. But nevertheless the vices of human society required, it seemed, new scourgings. In the deepest depth he sought with desperate energy for a deeper. But—poor wretch—he had reached rock-bottom. Nothing lower than the Communist criminal class could be found. In vain he turned his gaze upon the wild beasts. The apes could not appreciate his eloquence. He could not mobilize the wolves, whose numbers had so notably increased during his administration. So the criminals he had installed stood together, and put him outside.
Hence these chatty newspaper articles. . . .
It is astonishing that a man of Trotsky’s intelligence should not be able to understand the well-marked dislike of civilized governments for the leading exponents of Communism. He writes as if it were due to mere narrow-minded prejudice against new ideas and rival political theories. But Communism is not only a creed. It is a plan of campaign. A Communist is not only the holder of certain opinions; he is the pledged adept of a well-thought-out means of enforcing them. The anatomy of discontent and revolution has been studied in every phase and aspect, and a veritable drill book prepared in a scientific spirit for subverting all existing institutions. The method of enforcement is as much a part of the Communist faith as the doctrine itself. At first the time-honored principles of Liberalism and Democracy are invoked to shelter the infant organism. Free speech, the right of public meeting, every form of lawful political agitation and constitutional right are paraded and asserted. Alliance is sought with every popular movement towards the left.
The creation of a mild Liberal or Socialist regime in some period of convulsion is the first milestone. But no sooner has this been created than it is to be overthrown. Collisions, if possible attended with bloodshed, are to be arranged between the agents of the New Government and the working people. Martyrs are to be manufactured. An apologetic attitude in the rules should be turned to profit. Pacific propaganda may be made the mask of hatreds never before manifested among men. No faith need be, indeed may be, kept with non-Communists. Every act of good will, of tolerance, of conciliation, of mercy, of magnanimity on the part of Governments or Statesmen is to be utilized for their ruin. Then when the time is ripe and the moment opportune, every form of lethal violence from mob revolt to private assassination must be used without stint or compunction. The citadel will be stormed under the banners of Liberty and Democracy; and once the apparatus of power is in the hands of the Brotherhood, all opposition, all contrary opinions must be extinguished by death. Democracy is but a tool to be used and afterwards broken; Liberty but a sentimental folly unworthy of the logician. The absolute rule of a self-chosen priesthood according to the dogmas it has learned by rote is to be imposed upon mankind without mitigation progressively forever. All this, set out in prosy textbooks, written also in blood in the history of several powerful nations, is the Communist’s faith and purpose. . . .
I wrote this passage nearly seven years ago; but is it not . . . exact . . ?
It is probable that Trotsky never comprehended the Marxian creed : but of its drill-book he was the incomparable master. He possessed in his nature all the qualities requisite for the art of civic destruction . . . No trace of compassion, no sense of human kinship, no apprehension of the spiritual, weakened his high and tireless capacity for action. . . . He found a wife who shared the Communist faith. She worked and plotted at his side. She shared his first exile to Siberia in the days of the Czar. She bore him children. She aided his escape. He deserted her. He found another kindred mind in a girl of good family who had been expelled from a school at Kharkov . . . Of his mother he writes in cold and chilling terms. His father—old Bronstein—died of typhus in 1920 at the age of 83. The triumphs of his son brought no comfort to this honest hard-working and believing Jew. Persecuted by the Reds because he was a bourgeois; by the Whites because he was Trotsky’s father, and deserted by his son, he was left to sink or swim in the Russian deluge, and swam on steadfastly to the end. What else was there for him to do?
Yet in Trotsky . . . there was an element of weakness especially serious from the Communist point of view. Trotsky was ambitious, and ambitious in quite a common worldly way. All the collectivism in the world could not rid him of . . egoism . . This led to trouble. Comrades became jealous. They became suspicious. At the head of the Russian Army, which he reconstructed amid indescribable difficulties and perils, Trotsky stood very near the vacant throne of the Romanovs.
The Communist formulas he had used with devastating effect upon others, were now no impediment to him. He discarded them as readily as he had discarded his wife, or his father, or his name. The Army must be remade; victory must be won; and Trotsky must do it and Trotsky profit from it. To what other purpose should revolutions be made? He used his exceptional prowess to the full. The officers and soldiers of the new model army were fed, clothed and treated better than anyone else in Russia. Officers of the old Czarist regime were wheedled back in thousands. ‘To the devil with politics—let us save Russia.’ The salute was reintroduced. The badges of rank and privilege were restored. The authority of commanders was re-established. The higher command found themselves treated by this Communist upstart with a deference they had never experienced from the Ministers of the Czar. The abandonment by the Allies of the Russian Loyalist cause crowned these measures with a victory easy but complete. In 1922 so great was the appreciation among the military for Trotsky’s personal attitude and system that he might well have been made Dictator of Russia by the armed forces, but for one fatal obstacle.
He was a Jew. He was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that. Hard fortune when you have deserted your family, repudiated your race, spat upon the religion of your fathers, and lapped Jew and Gentile in a common malignity, to be baulked of so great a prize for so narrow-minded a reason! And this disaster carried in its train a greater. In the wake of disappointment loomed catastrophe.
For meanwhile the comrades had not been idle. They too had heard the talk of the officers. They too saw the possibilities of a Russian Army reconstituted from its old elements. While Lenin lived the danger seemed remote. Lenin indeed regarded Trotsky as his political heir. He sought to protect him. But in 1924 Lenin died : and Trotsky, still busy with his army, still enjoying the day-to-day work of administering his department, still hailed with the acclamations which had last resounded for Nicholas II, turned to find a hard and toughly-wrought opposition organized against him.
Stalin, the Georgian, was a kind of General Secretary to the governing instrument. He managed the caucus and manipulated the innumerable committees. He gathered the wires together with patience and pulled them in accordance with a clearly-perceived design. When Trotsky advanced hopefully, confidently indeed, to accept the succession to Lenin, the party machine was found to be working in a different direction. In the purely political arena of Communist activities Trotsky was speedily outmaneuvered. He was accused on the strength of some of his voluminous writings of ‘Anti-Leninism.’ He does not seem to have understood that Lenin had replaced God in the Communist mind. He remained for some time under the impression that any such desirable substitution had been effected by Trotsky. He admitted his heresy and eagerly explained to the soldiers and workers the very cogent reason which had led him to it. His declarations were received with blank dismay. The Ogpu was set in motion. Officers known to be under an obligation to Trotsky were removed from their appointments. After a period of silent tension he was advised to take a holiday. This holiday after some interruptions still continues.
Stalin used his success to build a greater. The Politbureau, without the spell of Lenin, or the force of Trotsky, was in its turn purged of its remaining elements of strength. The politicians who had made the Revolution were dismissed and chastened and reduced to impotence by the party manager. The caucus swallowed the Cabinet, and with Stalin at its head became the present Government of Russia. Trotsky was marooned by the very mutineers he had led so hardily to seize the ship.
What will be his place in history? . . .
Great Contemporaries by The Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill
New York : Putnam's Sons, 1937, pages 167 - 173 .