Ironically, as Stalin carried out his will as regards purges and control over the political machinery in Spain, he lost interest in the outcome of the actual war. Ehrenburg tells us that though the Soviet authorities expressed great indignation at Fascist and Nazi intervention in Spain, as soon as it became evident that the Republicans were fighting a losing battle, this interest became a mere formality. Ehrenburg’s own dispatches, sometimes sent with considerable risk, were cut, altered, or simply thrown into the wastepaper basket.80
Many Spaniards who managed to escape the final debacle made their way to Moscow-150 in a single boat.81 About 6,000, including 2,000 children, is the figure given.82 They found themselves facing a different danger.
This wave of political refugees of the Left had been preceded by others. After the defeat of the Socialist rising in Vienna in 1934, several hundred members of the Socialist defense organization Schutzbund took refuge in Russia. They were welcomed as heroes, and marched past in a body in the Red Square to applause and congratulations. By mid-1937, they had been arrested and sent to camps “almost without exception.”83 Some of their dependents, with children to feed and no source of income (having been fired from their jobs), went in 1938 to the German Embassy, now controlled by the Nazis, in an attempt to get back to their homes. The Nazis put them up in the Embassy building and escorted them to the Soviet Registration Office for Foreigners to get permission to go back. Apparently, some succeeded.
The Austrians were, in the main, non-Communists. While, like them, the Spanish Republican rank and file was gradually deported to Central Asia and elsewhere, the leadership of the Spanish Communist Party became involved in the more political Purge that had long been sweeping the Comintern apparatus and the foreign Parties based in Moscow. Soon General González (El Campesino), after a long wrangle with a Comintern commission, was digging in the Moscow Metro, preparatory to being sent to a northern labor camp; and the General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, Diaz, had died in dubious circumstances. They were known casualties. In all, by 1948, only 1,500 of the 6,000 are reported to have survived.84
THE TROTSKY MURDER
Abroad, one major piece of unfinished business remained. Rakovsky had remarked in his last plea that “even beyond the Mexican meridian Trotsky will not escape that complete, final, shameful ignominy which we all are undergoing here.” But this prediction had not yet been fulfilled in a literal sense.
Since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky—from Turkey, Norway, and finally Mexico—had loomed hugely in the Stalinist mythology as a diabolical figure, sunk in the morass of Nazi intelligence and finally responsible for the whole vast plot whose subordinate branches were continually being uprooted in Russia by a vigilant NKVD. In reality, he was trying to organize a political movement on a world scale. Odd sects of the Communist movement joined his Fourth International. But in the USSR itself, his influence was practically nil. He was a figure offstage in all the events we have recounted. His main participation in Soviet affairs was simply as a commentator and analyst from outside. In his Bulletin of the Opposition, he presented his ideas of the current situation in the country, and made recommendations for correct action by anti-Stalinist Communists.
For all his vigor and polemical skill, his ideas are notable mainly for two things. First, a total lack of solicitude for the non-Communist victims of the regime: no sympathy whatever was expended, for example, on the dead of the collectivization famine. Second, an unbelievable ineptitude in political judgment. It is natural that there should hang about Trotsky the glamor of a lost cause. This is a normal historical sentimentalism, reminding one of Scottish feelings about Bonnie Prince Charlie, entertained by many who would admit when it came to it that there is a vast difference between their hero fleeing persecuted through the Western Isles and the certainly unpleasant results of an actual Jacobite restoration.
To attribute too much political virtue, or political intelligence, to Trotsky, as Malcolm Muggeridge has done, on account of his “vivacious pen” or even of the combination of “an independent mind … courage, high spirits and unshakeable resolution,” seems a similarly romantic view.85 Muggeridge gives the impression of a “rebel” against all tyranny. But this needs to be very severely qualified. During the period when Trotsky held power, he was, whatever his personal magnetism, a ruthless imposer of the Party’s will who firmly crushed the democratic opposition within the Party and fully supported the rules which in 1921 gave the ruling group total authority. And the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion was as much his personal battle honor as the seizure of power had been. He was the leading figure among the doctrinaire Leftist Bolsheviks who were finding it hard to stomach Lenin’s concessions to the peasantry, and preferred a far more rigorous regime, even before Stalin came round to the same view. Trotsky might have carried out such policies less crudely than Stalin. But he would have used, as ever, as much violence as he thought necessary—and that would not have been a small amount.
But more destructive still to the image of the “good old rebel” was his attitude to the Stalin regime. Even when in exile during the 1930s, Trotsky was not by any means a forthright revolutionary out to destroy a tyranny. His attitude was rather that of a “loyal opposition.” In 1931, he published his key manifesto, “The Problems of the Development of the U.S.S.R.” This accepted the main lines of Stalin’s program, defined Stalinist Russia as “a proletarian State,” and simply quarrelled with Stalin about which “phase” of evolution toward Socialism had been attained. Trotsky stood, in fact, not for the destruction of the Stalinist system but for its takeover and patching up by an alternative group of leaders.
In the autumn of 1932, Trotsky wrote in a letter to his son:
At present Miliukov, the Mensheviks and Thermidorians of all sorts—will willingly echo the cry “Remove Stalin.” Yet, it may still happen within a few months that Stalin may have to defend himself against Thermidorian pressure, and that we may have temporarily to support him…. This being so, the slogan “Down with Stalin” is ambiguous and should not be raised as a war cry at this moment.86
In his Bulletin, Trotsky wrote, “If the bureaucratic equilibrium in the U.S.S.R. were to be upset at present, this would almost certainly benefit the forces of counterrevolution.”87
Trotsky was always arguing that a “Thermidor” was being prepared, with the support of “petit-bourgeois elements.” Obsessed with comparisons with the French Revolution, he continually spoke of Thermidor and Brumaire. The parallels between Stalin and either the Directory or Napoleon are interesting, but the differences are so great that for purposes of practical politics they are not worth taking into account. Stalin’s regime—indeed, Lenin’s regime—had its own laws of development and potentialities. And when Stalin established his autocracy, it was comparable with other despotisms of the past, but hardly with those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Trotsky was attentive to the lessons of history, but they were not the lessons of Russian history. If instead of worrying about Barras and Bonaparte he had given some thought to Ivan the Terrible, it might have been more to the point.