Leon Trotsky by Paul Le Blanc

Author:Paul Le Blanc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Destruction of the Soviet Oppositionists

In 1937 small groups of dissident Communist heroes and heroines, the men and women of the Left Opposition, waged their final struggle against the bureaucratic and murderous authoritarianism of the Stalin regime in the USSR, and for the original ideals of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

‘When you can no longer serve the cause to which you have dedicated your life – you should give it your death.’ These were the words of Adolf Joffe, one of Trotsky’s close friends and co-thinkers who had committed suicide as a protest against Stalinism in 1927. His young wife Maria, who had been in the apartment of the Trotsky family when the GPU had come, herself ended up in internal exile in 1929. As the situation of the condemned Oppositionists worsened by degrees, she held out, and when it became the horrific ‘one long night’ that she describes in her memoir of the late 1930s, she was one of the few who somehow survived to tell what happened. She was sustained by the core belief: ‘It is possible to sacrifice your life, but the honour of a person, of a revolutionary – never.’29

These self-described Bolshevik-Leninists fiercely embraced and defended the revolutionary internationalism, working-class democracy and uncompromising integrity which they felt had animated the party of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the Revolution of 1917, in which many of them had been active participants. Some were younger than that. Adolf Joffe’s daughter Nadezhda was twenty-one years old when she plunged into the struggle. ‘After my father’s death and Trotsky’s exile, we developed the Oppositional work with particular force’, she recalled. ‘In one of his pre-revolutionary articles, Lenin wrote: “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand”’, she reflected. ‘That is what it was like for us. We were going in a tight group along the edge of a precipice, which was not only deep but fatal for many of those who went.’30 Like her step-mother, she was arrested in 1929.

As the Stalin regime seemed to be making a ‘left’ turn, particularly in the direction of rapid industrialization, and some prominent Left Oppositionists were beginning to break ranks, those not prepared to recant circulated the harsh ditty: ‘If you miss your family and your teapot too, write a letter to the GPU.’ Victor Serge later explained that ‘the vocation of defeated revolutionists in a totalitarian state is a hard one. Many abandon you when they see the game is lost. Others, whose personal courage and devotion are above question, think it best to maneuver to adapt themselves to the circumstances.’ Christian Rakovsky and two other prominent Oppositionists circulated a declaration meant to rally those among the arrested dissidents who were not inclined to capitulate, yet as Trotsky later commented, ‘the ideological life of the Opposition seethed like a cauldron at that time.’ Historian Isabelle Longuet notes that some Oppositionists

attacked [the Rakovsky declaration] for not being critical enough of the capitulators and

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