Would the USSR have become the “Evil Empire” if Trotsky had taken over after Lenin?

Comments ( 8 )

1. justgoodfolk says

   Not a chance. This is a crucial point. Stalin betrayed the revolution.

   Before his death, Lenin formed a block with Trotsky to remove Stalin from office. Unfortunately, a series of strokes removed Lenin from political life until his death in 1924. From then on Trotsky led the struggle against Stalin and the emerging bureaucracy within the USSR. With the failure of revolution abroad, Stalin used his support within the apparatus to isolate and expel Trotsky from the Soviet Union.
   Once Stalin had defeated Trotsky's Left Opposition, he turned on all his opponents, including his allies on the Right. The victory of the apparatus was to culminate in the infamous Moscow Trials of 1936-38 where the 'Old Bolsheviks', including Trotsky, who led the October Revolution, were accused of counter-revolutionary activity, sabotage, murder, and collaboration with fascism.
   Most of the accused were subsequently broken by the secret police, the NKVD, forced to give to give false confessions about themselves and others, and then shot. By 1940, out of the members of Lenin's Central Committee of 1917, only Stalin remained. Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in August 1940.
   The Great Purge and Terror were launched by Stalin not because he was insane. On the contrary, it was a conscious, well-prepared course of action to safe-guard the rule of the bureaucracy. Stalin arrived at the decision to destroy the 'Old Bolsheviks' not later than the summer of 1934, and then began to prepare his operation – beginning with the murder of Kirov in December of that year.

   Trotsky explained Stalin's actions:
   'It is time, my listeners, it is high time, to recognise, finally, that a new aristocracy has been formed in the Soviet Union. The October Revolution proceeded under the banner of equality. The bureaucracy is the embodiment of monstrous inequality. The revolution destroyed the nobility. The bureaucracy creates a new gentry. The revolution destroyed titles and decorations. The new aristocracy produces marshals and generals. The new aristocracy absorbs an enormous part of the national income. Its position before the people is deceitful and false. Its leaders are forced to hide the reality, to deceive the masses, to cloak themselves, calling black white. The whole policy of the new aristocracy is a frame-up.' http://www.trotsky.net/trotsky_year/moscow_trials…
   Trotskyism represents the only true legitimate legacy of Marxism Leninism. Stalinism is the antithesis of principled Marxism in every aspect.

   One of the clearest rebuttals to those who claim that Stalinism is the natural outcome of Marxism and Bolshevism. In responding to anarchists, Mensheviks and other critics who were using Stalin's Moscow Trials as a pretense to attack Bolshevism, Trotsky presents the theoretical heritage which only the Fourth International was able to defend: “an analysis of the imperialist epoch as an epoch of wars and revolutions; of bourgeois democracy in the era of decaying capitalism; of the correlation between the general strike and the insurrection; of the role of party, soviets and trade unions in the period of proletarian revolution; in its theory of the soviet state, of the economy of transition, of fascism and Bonapartism in the epoch of imperialist decline, and finally in its analysis of the degeneration of the Bolshevik party itself and of the soviet state.” http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/stal-o2…

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2. Celia H says

   This begs so many questions – first of all, of course, an evil empire in whose eyes?

   There can be little doubt that Russia under Trotsky would have been very much stronger by the late 1930s, without the devastating effect of Stalin's irrational, paranoid purges and his fatal tendency to appoint the wrong people for the wrong reasons. I am not trying to misrepresent Trotsky as a democrat, which he was emphatically not, but pointing out that his greatest single attribute, contrasted with Stalin, was probably sanity.

   Given that Trotsky remained dedicated to international revolution to the end of his life, it's possible that he might have aided the German left effectively enough to defeat the Nazis. Even if they had been in power by 1936, he would certainly have intervened in support of the Spanish Republic, and given the state of the German and Italian armed forces at that point, it's possible that a dramatic object lesson might have decided Hitler against launching a European war.

   Where else might Trotsky's Russia have supported local revolutionary socialists, with sufficient effect to bring about regime change? Britain in 1931? France? India (remember The Great Game)? So many imponderables.

   What we can be sure of is that for every politician or millionaire who regarded Trotsky's Soviet Union as a crucible of evil, there would have been thousands of unemployed, workers, small farmers and poor peasants who would have looked to Russia as a source of inspiration and hope.

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3. meg says

   Stalin was an exceptionally bad leader like Hitler was, but we would probably still consider them an evil empire because much of what happen was due to fundamental differences and historical events.

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4. Neo Neocon says

   Its really hard to say. Alternative history is so difficult to guess because its shaped by so many unexpected things. Lenin wanted Trotsky to take over after his death, but Stalin made sure that didn't happen. Most historians and communists think that Trotsky would have probably led Russia into a quasi-socialist phase kinda like Sweden.

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5. retarded clown says

   Why don't you go live there.

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6. Agent Olivia Dunham says

   Probably- what evidence we have of Trotsky in a position of power indicates a disposition to violent suppression of dissent; Kronstadt being a case in point. If one looks at Stalin's factional position in the 1920's it is easy to see that large junks of it were taken from Trotsky. There is no reason to believe that Trotsky had any greater human qualities that would have mitigated against the totalitarianism implicit in his world view. In fact Trotsky would take great pleasure in sneering at such an idea.

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7. socialistpb says

   Trotsky in place of Stalin would have made little if any difference to the way the capitalist dictatorship in the USSR worked.

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8. DW says

   It would've been interesting to see if the USSR would've moved in a different direction without Stalin in control. Of course, if Stalin hadn't been in power, the Germans might've mowed the Russians down.

   Yeah but it was the FEAR of Stalin that drove the Russian troops like nothing else could have.

   Don't get me wrong – I KNOW that Stalin was EVERY BIT as bad as Hitler, in his own way. The ONLY reason that the Russians ended up fighting the Germans was because Hitler reneged on the NA Pact and invaded. I AM aware of history – WWII is one of my favorite historical eras.

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