What would the Soviet Union have been like if Lenin’s successor were Trotsky?

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1. cka2nd says

   Read “The Revolution Betrayed” to get see how Trotsky thought some things could and should have been done. Stalin was not a fascist – an opportunist, thug, intellectual gnat, paranoic and dictatorial piece of s****, but not a fascist – and Trotsky was not a social democrat in either the nominally Marxist sense of the pre-World War I Second International and German SPD of Bebel and Kautsky, or the thoroughly bourgeois and officially non- or anti-Marxist social democratic and labor parties of today. I think Trotsky could have become the preeminent figure in the Soviet Communist Party but would not have been a dictator, even if he clashed harshly with Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, among others.

   Domestic Affairs:

   Instead of lurching from one half-assed “plan” to another, industrialization is actually planned and carried out much more efficiently. Agricultural collectivization is also carried out in a slower and less coercive way, especially since the Communist Party itself was so divided on if and how to do it. The likelihood of a famine goes way down.

   The ban on factions within the Communist Party is lifted. The last anarchist magazines are NOT shut down in 1927. Hopefully, political parties committed to the revolution are allowed to form and contest elections in the soviets, the unions and the government. No great purge trials, no purge of the officer corps of the military.

   International Affairs:

   The Chinese Communist Party breaks with Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) when the latter turn on the Chinese working class and peasantry, as they would simply because of the class nature of the KMT and the logic of the class struggle. By backing the peasantry’s seizure of the land, the CCP gains their support and, at the head of the small but strategically placed Chinese proletariat, conducts a successful revolution in or around 1927.

   If Hitler is still offered the chancellorship of Germany, instead of Stalin’s line at the time that the reformist German Social Democrats were “Social Fascists,” the communist and socialist sections of the working class would unite and not only prevent the rise of Hitler and Nazism but would overthrow the German bourgeois state.

   When the social, economic and political situations come to a head in Spain, the Spanish communists again support the peasantry instead of trying to hang on to their few petite bourgeois allies and another civil war/revolution is won.

   If World War II happens, it would probably be the USSR, Germany, China and Spain against the British, French and Japanese empires along with, my guess, Poland and a fascist Portugal. Although Mussolini might like to try expanding the Italian Empire, his options are limited and the Brits wouldn’t want him to spark another Balkan war by going after Albania.

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2. Werebear 5000 says

   Trotsky wasn't a bad guy, but he wasn't the man we think he is. He had the historical good fortune to wind up as Stalin's sworn enemy (oddly enough this same title did little for Hitler), and since its accepted that Stalin was bad, and since most people don't know anything else about Trotsky, its the next logical step to assume that Trotsky was good. However, Trotsky certainly had his crazy side. When the Soviets seized power, capital punishment in the army was immediately abolished. Trotsky changed this, and eventually came to advocate (successfully) many uses for the death penalty, from looters to retreating soldiers. This was necessary, as the Russian Civil War was a very desperate time for all involved, and Trotsky had to instill discipline into an army that had been formed a few months earlier from untrained factory workers. Also, although he was communist, and therefore atheist, in his writings he uses the word "history" when a religious person might use the word "god" or "providence." I personally think an obsession with ideas of destiny to be somewhat crazy. Someone also once said of Trotsky that "he strikes me as the kind of man who would die fighting for Russia–if there was a large enough crowd to see him do it." This view was echoed by many of Trotsky's contemporary's.

   I haven't really answered the question yet, so here goes: Trotsky was more a military man than Stalin was (Trotsky was head of the Red Army in 1918 and War Commissar after that) and as I stated earlier, he had the stomach to kill people for the greater good. This might have led to rapid plans to beef up the military at human expense, as were implemented by Stalin. Also, Trotsky advocated international socialism, as opposed to Stalin's "socialism in one country." This could have led to a much earlier Russian entry into WWII, as the extermination of socialists in other countries would have come as a great concern to Trotsky. Whether Russia would have done better because its commanders wouldn't have been wiped out in the Great Purge, or whether she would have done worse due to less industrialization, we will never know. All in all, things would have progressed very differently, and we can never know what would have happened. I think that Stalin had a very good record at the end of the day (won the greatest war in history, built a superpower, etc.) and it would have been tough for Trotsky to beat.

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