This concluding part of the chapter on Foreign Policy and the army deals with scenarios of what was likely to happen in the Second World War, which was clearly approaching at the time of writing. It was difficult to predict the course of the war. All that could be discerned was pointers, tendencies. We have the benefit of hindsight, which Trotsky did not have:
“To enumerate in advance all the factors of the coming dogfight of the nations would be a hopeless task. If such an a priori calculation were possible, conflicts of interest would always end in a peaceful bookkeeper’s bargain. In the bloody equation of war, there are too many unknown quantities.”
But Trotsky pointed to the advantages of Russia in the coming war, in a manner that is a commonplace and a cliché today. The sheer size and space of Russia is well known to all, as is the climate, as first Napoleon and then Hitler discovered to their cost. The considerable, and growing population is also a key index of strength for the USSR. This is contrasted with the fate of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, which was defeated very quickly:
“Foreign imperialism overthrew Soviet Hungary, though not, to be sure, without help from the lamentable government of Bela Kun, in a few days. Soviet Russia, cut off from the surrounding countries at the very start, struggled against intervention for three years.”
In some ways this underlined the exceptionalism inherent in Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country. It largely depended on the geography of Russia, and its demographics. It was inconceivable that such an illusion could arise in a Soviet Republic in Central Europe, as such a state would depend on the revolution spreading to threatening, neighbouring imperialist powers, pretty quickly, for its survival. It was only the sheer size and relative backwardness of the territory of the USSR that made the illusion of ‘socialism in one country’ possible. For objective reasons, it could not have developed in the more advanced parts of Europe, where the various more advanced countries were objectively interdependent. As Trotsky pointed out in concluding this section:
“The toilers have not the slightest interest in defending existing boundaries, especially in Europe – either under the command of their bourgeoisies, or, still less, in a revolutionary insurrection against them. The decline of Europe is caused by the very fact that it is economically split up among almost 40 quasi-national states which, with their customs, passports, money systems, and monstrous armies in defence of national particularism, have become a gigantic obstacle on the road of the economic and cultural development of mankind.”
So Trotsky talks about the question of economic development of the USSR:
“…nature and man are only the raw materials of war. To so-called military “potential” depends primarily upon the economic strength of the state. In this sphere, the advantages of the Soviet Union by comparison with the old Russia are enormous. The planned economy has up to this time, as we have said, given its greatest advantages from the military point of view. The industrialization of the outlying regions, especially Siberia, has given a wholly new value to the steppe and forest spaces. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union still remains a backward country. The low productivity of labour, the inadequate quality of the products, the weakness of the means of transport, are only to a certain degree compensated by space and natural riches and the numbers of the population. “
Trotsky’s point that military defeats do not necessarily lead to the overthrow of a social system is interesting and worth careful consideration:
“Military defeats, although they customarily entail great political changes, do not always of themselves lead to a disturbance of the economic foundations of society. A social regime which guarantees a higher development of riches and culture, cannot be overthrown by bayonets. On the contrary, the victors take over the institutions and customs of the conquered, if these are beyond them in evolution. Forms of property can be overthrown by military force only when they are sharply out of accord with the economic basis of the country.”
He concretises this by first analysing the possibilities flowing from a defeat of Nazi Germany:
“A defeat of Germany in a war against the Soviet Union would inevitably result in the crushing, not only of Hitler, but of the capitalist system. ….The instability of the present structure in Germany is conditioned by the fact that its productive forces have long ago outgrown the forms of capitalist property….”
And contrasting those with the USSR:
“…On the other hand, it is hardly to be doubted that a military defeat would also prove fatal, not only for the Soviet ruling stratum, but also for the social bases of the Soviet Union…. The instability of the Soviet regime … is due to the fact that its productive forces have far from grown up to the forms of socialist property. A military defeat threatens the social basis of the Soviet Union for the same reason that these bases require in peaceful times a bureaucracy and a monopoly of foreign trade – that is, because of their weakness.”
At the time, and in the context of speaking of military conquest of the USSR, from which the great threat always arose at that time from the Third Reich, this was obviously correct. However, Trotsky’s prediction of the likely course of events with the USSR is more contentious:
“Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism is incomparably more strong. If it is not paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution.”
As we know, this is not the way things worked out, at least in formal terms, after WWII. However, Trotsky was looking at matters from a standpoint where some of the greatest events of the 1930s were still in the future.
Stalin’s leadership put great store on the treaties that it had concluded with the imperialist world. Such as the Stalin-Laval pact. But Trotsky noted.
“Diplomatic agreements, as a certain chancellor with some reason once remarked, are only “scraps of paper.”
He was here speaking of Bethmann-Hollweg’s remarks in 1914 about Belgium’s ‘neutrality’. Hitler’s similar remarks about Munich were in the future when this was written:
“Not one of the treaties with the Soviet Union would survive the immediate threat of a social revolution in any part of Europe. Let the political crisis in Spain, to say nothing of France, enter a revolutionary phase, and the hope propounded by Lloyd George in savior-Hitler would irresistibly take possession of all bourgeois governments. On the other hand, if the unstable situation in Spain, France, Belgium, etc., should end in a triumph of the reaction, there would again remain not a trace of the Soviet pacts. And, finally, if the “scraps of paper” should preserve their validity during the first period of military operations, there is not a doubt that groupings of forces in the decisive phase of the war would be determined by factors of incomparably more powerful significance than the oaths of diplomats, perjurers as they are by profession.”
This is the real point: in 1936, the great events that paved the way for WWII were only just beginning. These were: the French working-class upsurge of 1936, that pushed the Social Democrat Blum into power at the head of a popular front that was supposed to be headed by the bourgeois Radicals Daladier and Herriot. It led to the greatest strike movement in French history, an incipient revolution, which the Stalinised Communist Party took control of and then squashed with the phrase “It is necessary to know when to end a strike” as pronounced by its leader Thorez.
The other was the Spanish Civil war, triggered by a fascist-military coup against a very tepid popular front government, that developed into a huge revolutionary upheaval, in which all state forces, including the GPU, played a counterrevolutionary role, suppressing the revolution by insisting on only preserving bourgeois democracy, and murdering its potential leaders. Which paved the way for Franco.
These two huge revolutionary events were not concluded at the time of writing. As to the likely outcome of the war, Trotsky’s most extreme prognosis was this:
“Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism is incomparably more strong. If it is not paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution.”
However, the other side of the prognosis was that there are two sides to every such situation. At least two sides:
“If we do not want to shut our eyes to the immense material preponderance of the capitalist world, nor the inevitable treachery of the imperialist ‘allies’, nor the inner contradictions of the Soviet regime, we are, on the one hand, in no degree inclined to overestimate the stability of the capitalist system, either in hostile or allied countries. Long before a war to exhaustion can measure the correlation of economic forces to the bottom, it will put to the test the relative stability of the regimes. All serious theoreticians of future slaughters of the people take into consideration the probability, and even the inevitability, of revolution among its results. … Hitler never misses a chance to reinforce his “love of peace” with a reference to the inevitability of a new Bolshevik storm in case of a war in the West….”
And all was not lost in terms of a war between the Third Reich and the USSR:
“The very possibility of a rule of the Nazis over the German people was created by the unbearable tenseness of social antagonisms in Germany. These antagonisms have not been removed, and not even weakened, but only suppressed, by the lid of fascism. A war will bring them to the surface. Hitler has far less chances than had Wilhelm II of carrying a war to victory. Only a timely revolution, by saving Germany from war, could save her from a new defeat.
Trotsky’s prognosis was a new wave of revolutions in the model of the aftermath of WWI:
“If the revolution does not prevent war, then war will help the revolution. Second births are commonly easier than first. In the new war, it will not be necessary to wait a whole two years and a half for the first insurrection. Once it is begun, moreover, the revolution will not this time stop half way. The fate of the Soviet Union will be decided in the long run not on the maps of the general staffs, but on the map of the class struggle. Only the European proletariat, implacably opposing its bourgeoisie, and in the same camp with them the “friends of peace”, can protect the Soviet Union from destruction, or from an ‘allied’ stab in the back. Even a military defeat of the Soviet Union would be only a short episode, in case of a victory of the proletariat in other countries. And on the other hand, no military victory can save the inheritance of the October revolution, if imperialism holds out in the rest of the world.”
With hindsight, this outcome eventually did take place, but not until the end of the 1980s. Something that was not anticipated by Trotsky unfolded instead after the second world war. Revolutions did take place during and after WWII, but they did not bear a great deal of resemblance to the revolutionary wave at the end of WWI. The class-conscious proletariat was constrained by the new labour bureaucracy that Trotsky had been analysing in The Revolution Betrayed, but a number of social revolutions did take place under the banner of the bureaucracy after the war. The Stalinist labour bureaucracy proved to be less brittle than Trotsky anticipated, and capable of extending its sphere of influence through military victory over Nazi Germany, of creating workers states with similar deformations to the USSR, as satellites. This happened in both Eastern Europe (excluding Yugoslavia) and the Northern half of Korea. In the latter the USSR withdrew soon afterwards but left an allied ‘Communist’ government in power when they left.
Not only that, but in some colonial and semi-colonial countries, insurgent ‘communist’ guerilla movements, who had relocated their supporters outside the city proletariat, proved capable of taking power in armed struggle against weak semi-colonial bourgeois regimes allied with imperialism, and again, creating workers states with similar bureaucratic deformations to the USSR. First in Yugoslavia and Albania, then in China, and Indochina, these kind of peasant-guerilla led social revolutions happened after WWII. All the countries involved were oppressed, semi-colonial countries – none (except for the conquered Eastern part of Germany) were imperialist countries. Cuba also took a similar position, and a workers’ state was established by a peasant-guerilla movement that only adopted formal ‘communist’ politics after it was forced to expropriate the national bourgeoisie to defend itself against the threat of overthrow.
No victorious proletarian revolutions took place in imperialist countries after WWII. Revolutionary situations occurred in France and Italy, and also semi-colonial Greece after the war, but the authority of the official Communist movement, whose overall world strategy was class collaboration, not revolution, was able to head off independent proletarian revolutions. In some places they did this by murdering would be proletarian revolutionaries. Trotsky was murdered during the war of course. But in some other places where proletarian revolutionary upheavals actually took place in places where Stalinism was strong, they murdered Trotskyists. Notably in Greece and Vietnam. There is a list of martyred Greek Trotskyists – 14 names – on the Marxist Internet Archive. The murder of Ta Thu Thau in Vietnam is documented in a Spartacist Pamphlet from the 1970s: Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam.
So, what can we say in hindsight? When Trotsky wrote:
“And on the other hand, no military victory can save the inheritance of the October revolution, if imperialism holds out in the rest of the world.”
He was right. But his timing was wrong, by a matter of approximately 50 years or so. But as many have pointed out, 50 years is not a long time in the history of the class struggle. He anticipated the question: “either the world revolution or the collapse of the workers state” as to be decided by the Second World War. In fact, it was not resolved for another 45 years or so after the war, until 1989-92, in a negative manner.
We now live in the world derived from that. Only two workers states remain – those of Cuba and North Korea. And we live in a different, post-Soviet world, where large section of the world used to be ‘socialist’ in conventional terms, and yet the capitalism that now exists there is considered problematic by the imperialist ruling classes of the world. So, we have a new conflict between imperialism and those ex-workers states, reflecting the fact that the bourgeoisie still fears that communism could rise again. But for that we new a world revolutionary banner, a new communist international.
