Ukraine. Revolution. Trotsky
History is a whimsical being, and among historical figures there are such diverse characters with such twisted fates that there are not enough words to adequately describe them. Consider this one historical figure. Born in Yanivka, Kherson province, into a wealthy Jewish family, where Ukrainian was the language of everyday use, he started his literary attempts as a Ukrainian-speaking poet, then became a Russian political essayist and a radical revolutionary; he never served in the military but mustered an army starting from scratch, which made the entire world shake with fear; he instantly gained huge popularity among the common people and lost it as quickly, in a year or two; at the onset of his meteoric political career he first recognized Ukraine’s independence on behalf of Russia, then made colossal efforts to destroy this independence, and in his last years was an ardent advocate of Ukraine’s secession from the Soviet Union and of its right to independence and integrity.
At their rallies communists (without even realizing it) still sing the songs written on his orders — not for money, but for ideological reasons. His aphorisms are now part and parcel of the living language (e.g., “to gnaw the granite of sciences”). Each year we officially mark the holiday established by him, although under a totally different name now, February 23 [originally Red Army Day. – Ed.]. Also, today there are many millions of champions of his ideas across the world, and not only among proletarians, but also among highbrow intellectuals.
Leon Trotsky, a politician without whom one can hardly imagine the history of the world and of Ukraine in the first half of the 20th century.
BIOGRAPHY: AN OUTLINE
The future “Red Lion” (his real name being Leiba Bronstein) was born in the village of Yanivka near Kherson on November 7 (or October 26 Julian style), 1879, into a family of a wealthy landowner. He was educated at a Jewish primary school and later, at real (e.g., commercial) schools in Odesa and Mykolaiv.
Trotsky began his revolutionary activities at the age of 16. In January, 1898, he was arrested in the case of the South-Russian Workers’ Union and soon exiled to Eastern Siberia for a four-year term.
Two years later, he escaped from exile, emigrated to London, where he cooperated with the newspaper Iskra, and then became one of the Menshevik leaders. In February, 1905, Trotsky arrived in Kyiv, and as soon as in December that year he was arrested in Saint Petersburg, where he had headed the workers’ Soviet, created during the upheaval. Two years later he was exiled to Siberia for life. On his way there he managed to escape again. Later he was living in Vienna, Paris, and New York, fighting against Bolshevism from an even more leftist ideological platform.
In May, 1917, Trotsky returned to Russia from the US and soon joined the Bolshevik party. In September he again led the Petrograd Soviet, and was one of the leaders of the October upheaval. “On October 25 Trotsky, the brilliant and courageous tribune of the uprising, indefatigable and ardent advocate of the revolution, on behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee declared at the Petersburg Soviet, to the stormy applause of all present there, that ‘the Provisional Government no longer exists.’ And, as a living proof of the fact, Lenin, liberated from the underground by the new revolution, appears on the rostrum to get a standing ovation,” wrote one of the leading Bolshevik ideologists, Bukharin, in his book From the Collapse of Tsarism to the Fall of Bourgeoisie.
By the way, certain circles maintain that the October revolution was deliberately scheduled to coincide with Trotsky’s birthday. However, in the 19th century the Julian calendar lagged behind the Georgian one by 12 and not 13 days, so Leiba Bronstein’s birthday fell on October 26, whereas the revolt in Petersburg took place against October 25.
Afterwards Trotsky worked as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the first Bolshevik government, heading the Soviet delegation at the peace talks with the Central Powers in Brest-Litovsk, as People’s Commissar of Military Affairs and head of the Revolutionary Military Council (Revvoensoviet). Starting in the spring of 1918, Trotsky led the creation of the Red Army. Using reprisals, bribery, and ideology, he managed to draw more tsarist officers than the White Army.
By 1920 the Red Army was the largest military force in the world, comprising more than three million men and officers, thus the Revvoensovet authorized it to spread revolution to Western Europe. However, in late August of that very same year the Red formations suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the allied Polish-Ukrainian troops. Jozef Pilsudski destroyed Tukhachevsky’s Western Front on the Vistula, while Marko Bezruchko stopped Budenny’s First Cavalry Army at Zamost.
Trotsky was one of the ideologists and creators of the Red Terror. As early as in December 1917, addressing the Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) leaders, he declared the oncoming start of the mass terror actions against the enemies of the revolution: “You should know that no later than in a month, the terror will acquire its most powerful form, following the example of the great French revolutionaries. Not prison alone, but the guillotine will await our enemies.” The very notion of the Red Terror was formulated by Trotsky as “a weapon used against a class that, despite being doomed to destruction, does not wish to perish.”
Even while Lenin was still alive, Trotsky, one of his closest companions-in-arms in the years of the revolution, harshly criticized the leadership of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (CC RSDP(b)), which, in his opinion, had become overly bureaucratic and lost touch with the masses. These ideas found support among romantic students and certain groups in the party cadre, who yearned for a quick worldwide revolution.
After Lenin’s death, Trotsky was defeated in the struggle for power inside the leadership of the Russian communist party and Comintern, and step by step he was ousted from all his posts. Expelled from the party in November, 1927, he was exiled to Alma-Ata. Two years later he was forced to leave the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, virtually everyone in the USSR who was suspected of anti-Soviet sentiments, was accused of “Trotskyism,” usually in combination with some form of “counter-revolutionary activity.”
In emigration, Trotsky had to move from one place to another, and not of his own accord: Stalin demanded that Western governments not allow this “dangerous mutineer” reside on their territory. For fear of deterioration of relations with the USSR, Western governments gave in to Stalin’s demands, even though the activities of the Kremlin-controlled Comintern were subversive to the political stability of democratic states and the Soviet intelligence was stealing military and industrial secrets and introducing its moles into their power structures.
In 1938, when his supporters were purged from the Comintern parties, Trotsky founded the Fourth International for the promotion of the world revolution, “revival of the party,” and the liberation of the USSR from the grip of bureaucracy. And of course, for fighting against fascism. “Fascism is a form of desperation of petty bourgeois masses who drag a part of proletariat into the abyss with them. Desperation is known to set in when all the ways to salvation are blocked. Triple bankruptcy became a pre-requisite for the successes of fascism: that of democracy, of social-democracy, and of Comintern. All three bring nothing but despair to the masses, and thus promote the triumph of fascism,” wrote Trotsky, combining the traditional Marxist complaints about “petty bourgeoisie,” which is always to blame for everything, and a shrewd formula of “triple bankruptcy,” relevant to Continental European democracy. The only thing is that despair is only a pre-requisite for fascism (like any other form of totalitarianism), while fascism itself means a temporary rescue from despair — although at the cost of political and personal freedom.
As far back as in the mid-1930s Trotsky warned about a possible conspiracy between Stalin and Hitler. When this conspiracy became fact, and World War II broke out, Trotsky put forward the slogan of turning it into a civil war against fascism, Stalinism, and imperialism, and warned about Stalin preparing to stab Hitler in the back. In his turn, the Kremlin leader ordered Trotsky’s physical elimination a year before the war. The mission was entrusted to allegedly the best Soviet terrorist Pavel Sudoplatov, who had assassinated the head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Yevhen Konovalets. However, the assassin was not able to do the job at once. After a few unsuccessful attempts, including one involving a communist artist David Siqueiros (who personally fired a machine gun), Trotsky was lethally wounded by an NKVD secret agent Ramon Mercader in his house in a suburb of Mexico on August 20, 1940, and died on the next day.
This is his biography in a nutshell, and the violent end to his political career, at one of the most complicated moments of the 20th century history.
THE “RED LION” AS A FANATIC OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION
Over the recent years a lot of publications have appeared, first in Moscow and then in Kyiv, where Trotsky is depicted as just falling short of being the chief executor of the world Zionism’s plans to capture the entire world and enslave Slavic nations. The author of these lines tried to point out the ignorance of one of the “experts” who maintained that certain “Trotsky Army men,” on orders from the Zionist Bronstein, massacred Ukrainian students in Kruty in 1918. Trotsky actually created the Red Army several months after the battle of Kruty, and at the moment of the tragedy he was narkom of foreign affairs and not the war secretary. The Red forces at that time were run by genuine khokhols [derogatory Russian term for “Ukrainians.” – Ed.]: Dybenko, Krylenko, and Antonov-Ovsiienko. Moreover, whatever our take on Trotsky, it was him who acknowledged, on behalf of “Red” Russia and without agreement from the CC RSDP(b), the right of the Ukrainian People’s Republic to act as an independent subject on the international arena. This happened on December 28, 1917, and was in fact a virtual acknowledgement of independence of UNR even before this independence was proclaimed by its own leaders.
In response to this I got a newspaper page filled with barely printable invectives, but hardly any counter-evidence. A “scholarly” dispute instead of a serious discussion. Meanwhile, summing up real scholarly evidence one should note that Trotsky was a principled opponent of the policy of Russification and, unlike many Bolsheviks, had always acknowledged the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation with its age-long yearning for freedom.
However, the ultimate understanding of Ukraine as a distinct country, different from Russia, had taken shape sometime by the beginning of 1920. At that time he suggested that the CC RCP(b) considerably modify the policy of “military communism” in order to preserve their grip on power. According to his scheme, food requisitions were to be replaced by a proportional tax in kind, and farmers were to be supplied with goods depending on the amount of grain they would have turned in; in the central provinces, grain requisitions were to be amplified with compulsory plowing of land and collectivization of agriculture (which was to be given up in other regions). Please note that these more liberal measures were actually suggested for non-Russian areas (the Don Cossacks and Siberian Chaldons, the earliest white settlers in Siberia, who never identified themselves as Russian), whereas for “proper” Russian lands the virtual revival of the more habitual corvee was proposed. However, his fellow communists did not understand the Red Lion’s theoretical constructions, and the majority of the CC RCP(b), with Lenin at its head, voted against them, 11 to 4. Had Trotsky won in the CC, the transition to the NEP, during which famine disappeared for some time, would have begun a year earlier.
Here is one more instruction from Trotsky, dating back to the 1920s: in his opinion, all other ethnic residents of Ukraine had to show tolerance for the Ukrainian language and culture, know and respect them — first of all the ethnic Jews and Russians. This is what Trotsky himself wrote reminiscing those events:
“In 1923 at a party conference of the Bolshevik party of Ukraine I put forward a demand that a government official should be able to speak and write in the language of the indigenous population. How many ironic comments this provoked, especially from Jewish intellectuals who spoke and wrote in Russian, and would not learn Ukrainian!”
One should also mention that in the first half of 1920 Trotsky, who then led the Revvoensovet of the USSR, insisted on the urgency of Ukrainization of the Red Army in Soviet Ukraine.
Was Trotsky then an Ukrainophile? Yes and no. Here is a fragment of his article of 1920 concerning the Ukrainian question.
“Ukraine makes Anglo-French capitalists drool. French troops have landed in Odesa. General Petliura crawled out of his dark nook and requested the capitalist governments of England and France for as many troops as possible to be sent over to Ukraine, to help establish the regime of his Directorate. Petliura promised to pay the usurers of London and Paris with faithful services, i.e., the toil and property of the Ukrainian farmer. Thus, Petliura received money and munition from Anglo-French imperialists. He has started to muster his army.”
Each word here is a bold-faced lie, which was supposed to confuse the reader and inspire disgust for the leaders of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Firstly, Symon Petliura, a talented journalist and later member of the Secretariat General and Head Otaman, never was a general. Secondly, he never got anything from “Anglo-French imperialists” and, moreover, never wanted to serve them. That is exactly the reason for all the complications he personally (and the UNR) encountered in 1918-21. On top of that, the political and economic blockade by the Entente states, and their support of the White and Polish Armies against the Ukrainian forces in 1918-19, might have been a more powerful factor in the collapse of the UNR than the Bolshevik invasion.
But here is one curious detail: on Trotsky’s orders, more Red division, brigade, and regiment commanders were shot in Ukraine in 1918-21 than killed in combat. And another paradox: at the time when Ukraine was mostly subjugated, the very same Leon Trotsky became one of the main initiators and promoters of korenizatsiya [a policy of promoting the representatives of the titular nations on all levels of administrative and public life in their respective Republics. – Ed.] in the early 1920s; as mentioned above, he supported the idea of Ukrainization of the Red troops on the territory of the USSR, but the interference of Stalin frustrated his plan. It looks as if in the mind of this fanatic of the world revolution there existed some kind of perfect “Red Ukraine.” He wanted to fit the real Ukraine into the Procrustean bed of his ideal one way or another, so as to be able to glorify and exalt this Red Ukraine to the skies, and in this way make it into a sort of “showcase of victorious socialism,” a paragon which the popular masses of Central and Eastern European countries would like to follow.
While his activities for strengthening the Bolshevik regime objectively promoted the rise of Russian chauvinism, Trotsky also backed Lenin at the time, who in the last years of his life tried to fight this chauvinism (“I am ready to engage in mortal combat with Great Russian chauvinism.”) This is how Trostky evaluated Stalin’s suggestions to another party congress in 1923: “Stalin’s resolution on national issues is good for nothing. The insolent and brute power-state oppression is equated in it to the protest and rebuff on the part of small, weak, and backward nationalities.”
This gives rise to yet another paradox: starting from the 1930s, this Soviet exile and mastermind of the Fourth International started speaking of the urgency to revive a totally sovereign Ukraine as a state of workers and peasants, which was to secede from the Stalinist empire.
LONG LIVE INDEPENDENT WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ UKRAINE!
The “later” Trotsky was extremely critical of Stalinist national policy: “Bureaucracy has in fact transformed the Soviet Union into a new prison of nations. True enough, the national languages and national schools continue to exist: in this sphere, even the most powerful tyranny cannot turn the wheel of progress back. But the languages of nationalities are not a tool for their independent development; instead, they are a tool for a bureaucratic command over them.
“The governments of national republics are appointed by Moscow, of course — or, to be more precise, by Stalin. Yet amazingly, thirty of them (the governments of Union and autonomous republics. – Author) suddenly turn out to be composed of ‘enemies of the people’ and foreign spies. This accusation, which sounds too crude and ridiculous even when pronounced by Stalin and Vyshinsky, actually conceals the fact that officials, even those appointed by the Kremlin, had become dependent on their local conditions and sentiments, and gradually became infected by the spirit of opposition to Moscow’s stifling centralism. They start dreaming or speaking about the removal of the ‘beloved leader’ and the release from his grip. This is the true reason for the recent beheading of all the national republics of the USSR.”
This, according to Trotsky, was supplemented with the reborn Russian power-state chauvinism: “The official ideology of today’s Kremlin appeals to the heroic deeds of Prince Aleksandr Nevsky, the exploits of Suvorov’s or Kutuzov’s armies, closing its eyes to the fact that this ‘heroism’ was built on the slavery and ignorance of popular masses and that exactly for this reason the old Russian army was victorious only against even more backward Asiatic nations or debilitated and shabby transborder states of the West. However, collisions with the advanced countries of Europe have always shown the impotence of the valorous tsarist army.”
Russian chauvinism went hand in hand with anti-Semitism: “Bureaucratic centralism is inconceivable without chauvinism, and anti-Semitism has always been the line of the least resistance for chauvinism.”
Now let us look directly at the “change of landmarks” in Trotsky’s treatment of Ukraine. First comes a fragment of his article of 1937, written specially to cover the Ukrainian issue:
“The Ukrainian question, which many governments and many ‘socialists’ and ‘even’ communists have been trying to forget or shelve for good, has now again arisen, big as life and twice as ugly. The new aggravation of the Ukrainian question is very closely related to the degeneration of the Soviet Union and Comintern, the successes of fascism, and the approach of a new imperialist war.
“Crucified between four other states, Ukraine now occupies the same position in the fates of Europe which Poland used to occupy… The Ukrainian question is bound to play a colossal role in the life of Europe in the near future… Nowhere else have reprisals, purges, and oppression, and all manner of bureaucratic hooliganism acquired such a lethal scope as in Ukraine, in the struggle against the strong latent aspirations of Ukrainian masses for greater freedom and independence. Soviet Ukraine has become, for the totalitarian bureaucracy, an administrative part of the economic whole and of the USSR’s military base. However, Stalinist bureaucracy does build monuments to Shevchenko, but only to use such monuments as something weighing down on the Ukrainian nation, and forcing it to praise the Kremlin clique of rapists in the Ukrainian language.”
It seems as if Bandera, Lebed, and Shukhevych would sign under these words by Trotsky, let alone the shestydesiatnyky — a generation of writers of the 1960s…
All the above (and similar) articles can hardly be a reason for even a partial idealization of Trotsky, even with regard to his change of mind before his assassination. But one should note that on the lips of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or even the initiator of the perestroika Mikhail Gorbachev, such words would have been impossible, even if said for reasons of political conjuncture. Meanwhile, Trotsky was sincere, and who knows if his views on the Ukrainian question, one of the key geopolitical issues of World War II period, did not become another reason for Stalin to personally give orders to do away with him.
“Trotsky and the war” is a separate topic; I would like to mention here that he made quite a few shrewd observations concerning the possibility of an alliance between Stalin and Hitler, long before this alliance became fait accompli, as with the course of the future war and political maneuvers. For example, on September 2, 1939, he made two observations of crucial importance. First (long before the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was made public), that the “German-Soviet pact is a military alliance in the full sense of the word, because it serves the goals of an aggressive imperialistic war.” Second, that this alliance was not meant to last: two years later, Hitler would attack Stalin. A brilliant prophet? No, nothing of the kind. Trotsky was merely one of the creators of totalitarianism as such. Thus he understood the logic of the actions of both Bolshevik and Nazi leaders better than democratic analysts could.
And at the end of 1939 Trotsky warned the political elites of the West: “Immensely careless will be that international propaganda which will hurry to depict Hitler as a cornered maniac. It’s a far cry from that. A dynamic industry, technical genius, the spirit of discipline — he has it all; the terrible war machine of Germany is still to show what it is capable of. It is a matter of the fates of the country and the regime. The Polish government and the Czech semi-government are now in France. Who knows if the French government, together with those of Belgium, Holland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, will not have to seek refuge in Great Britain?”
Yet the main thing is — and it is worth repeating — that Trotsky was able to skillfully, constantly, and ceaselessly “undress” Stalin, showing the Bolsheviks’ true intentions to the world. Overcoming his own ideological prejudice, he was perhaps the first among the leftist thinkers to call the Stalinist regime totalitarian, albeit at the end of his life, and who remarked on his similarity to Hitler. Who could know that there wouldn’t come a day when Western governments would listen to one of the leaders of the October revolution?
Therefore, Trotsky had to be done away with, at all costs.
This was carried out, simply taking a bit longer than expected.
All in all, Leon Trotsky was a genius of organization and a brilliant political essayist. Yet he devoted his gift to the global totalitarian utopia, and there was a lot of blood on his hands. Nevertheless, he never was a Ukraine hater; this was the deadly sin of Trotsky’s main opponent, Stalin, and his team. Moreover, Trotsky knew Ukraine very well, and loved it in his own way, wishing to make it into a showcase of world socialism. He was not original in this desire: consider Mykola Skrypnyk, Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Yurii Kotsiubynsky, Vitalii Prymakov, Mykola Khvyliovy… The list of genuine Ukrainians, who likewise, in the name of their love for Ukraine, enthusiastically destroyed its freedom and independence, is still growing. Whether we like it or not, it is also a constituent part of Ukrainian history.
