Trotsky the subject of cultural events in Russia

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Trotsky the subject of cultural events in Russia
By Vladimir Volkov
24 March 2010

In recent months Leon Trotsky has been the subject of two cultural
events in Russia—an exhibition at the State Museum of Political
History in Saint Petersburg and a documentary film aired on
television. Each of these presentations contained interesting material
and provided a more objective evaluation of Trotsky’s historical role
than is typically found in Russia today. This is particularly true
when considered against the backdrop of the rampant nationalism
promoted by Vladimir Putin and his regime’s open efforts to
rehabilitate Joseph Stalin. Nonetheless, both the museum exhibition
and the film had definite limitations and provided a forum for the
repetition of old lies and slanders about Trotsky and the October
Revolution.

>From November 6 thru December 9 of last year Lion of the Revolution:
One Hundred Thirty Years Since the Birth of Lev Davidovich Trotsky was
open to visitors in the building that had served as the headquarters
of the Bolshevik Party in the spring of 1917.

During the Soviet era, this site, which had been the mansion of the
ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaia, housed the Museum of the Revolution.
At the time, its collection and displays were heavily influenced by
Stalinism, precluding any positive mention of Trotsky and his place in
the history of the Russian Revolution.

Although last winter’s exhibition was limited to a modest hall on the
periphery of the museum and it lasted only one month, its very name,
as well as the character of some of the displays, reflected a
sympathetic attitude towards an examination Trotsky’ life.

The official web site of the Russian Ministry of Culture, which
oversees the State Museum of Political History, stated in its
commentary about the exhibition: “A professional revolutionary and
political figure, Trotsky was one of the leaders of the October
insurrection of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd; he made no small
contribution to the establishment of the Soviet state and the creation
of the Red Army during the Civil War.”

The exhibition’s printed material contained the same lines and added,
“In the 1930s he was the most consistent and merciless exposer of
Stalinism.”

The theory of “permanent revolution,” it stated, was developed by
Trotsky during the period when he “returned to Russia in 1905 and
actively participated in the first Russian Revolution.” The essence of
this theory, it continued, “was expressed by him in the following way:
‘The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, develops on
the international arena and ends on the world arena.’”

A significant number of the displays included in the exhibition had
been preserved by the museum’s staff at their own personal risk. These
included photographs of the participants of the Second Congress of the
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903, a photograph of Trotsky
in a prison cell at the Petropavlovsk fortress, a lithograph by Iuri
Annenkov dated 1926, Trotsky’s pamphlet Our Political Tasks published
in 1906 in Geneva, and an engraving “In Memory of Trotsky” by the
Mexican artist Vladimir Kibalchich (1920-2005), son of the famous
revolutionary Victor Serge.

The museum also presented several original copies of letters and
articles by Leon Trotsky and his son, Leon Sedov, from the beginning
of the 1930s. In particular, there were letters addressed to the
cipher officer at the Soviet mission in Oslo, P. S. Kuroedov. These
documents were discovered by one of the former members of the Soviet
special services.

Among the displays one could see a kerchief given to delegates of the
First All-Union Teachers’ Congress in 1925. A large portrait of Lenin
was sewn into the middle of the kerchief, and on the corners there
were portraits of Marx, Engels and Kalinin. On the fourth corner there
had been a portrait of Trotsky, but it had been cut off and replaced
by a smaller piece of cloth.

One more item on display was a previously classified archival
document—a draft of an article for the newspaper Pravda about
Trotsky’s assassination with Stalin’s handwritten changes. The
headline, “Trotsky’s Inglorious Death,” had been changed by Stalin to
“Death of an International Spy.” A correction was made to the end of
the text as well. The last sentence had been crossed out: “One more
figure, an inveterate spy and agent, the cursed enemy of the workers,
has left the political arena of the capitalist world.” In its place it
was written that Trotsky “had become a victim of his own intrigues,
betrayals, treacheries and heinous crimes.”

However, despite its undoubted value as living testimony, on the whole
the exhibition’s material left an ambiguous impression. As the
museum’s press service noted, the task of the exhibition was “to
present various points of view about the personality of the
revolutionary: both the negative official Soviet evaluation and the
positive assessment, which is sometimes romanticized.”

In taking this stance, the argument was being made that a reproduction
of a large number of the old lies about Trotsky and attacks on him was
a necessary element of an “objective” account of history.
Unfortunately, the overall balance of the displays gave too much
emphasis to the “negative official Soviet evaluation,” especially
since this “evaluation” is already well known and has nothing to do
with the historical truth.

A prominent place, for example, was given to caricatures of Trotsky.
In one part of the hall there were satirical posters from the time of
the Civil War that were made by counter-revolutionary, anti-communist
White-Guard artists. On the opposite side of the hall were caricatures
from the time of the Moscow Trials in the mid-1930s, when Trotsky was
declared “enemy number one of the Soviet regime.”

The exhibition essentially returns to the appraisal that predominated
during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, when Trotsky’s partial
rehabilitation was accompanied by many of the old negative clichés
about his personality and the international revolutionary socialist
program that he embodied. In the Lion of the Revolution, the verbal
recognition of Trotsky’s historical role is more than compensated by
the overall negative visual impression created by the false charges
and vicious lies made against him.

Thus, it is difficult to agree with the claim made by Elena
Kostiusheva, deputy general director of the museum, that the
exhibition is a definite step forward in the development of “domestic
Trotsky studies.” Rather, it would be more accurate to say that Lion
of the Revolution was a symbolic gesture, the making of which was more
significant than its actual content.

The viewer is left with a similarly ambiguous impression of Trotsky
from the documentary film An Ice Axe for Trotsky: Chronicle of an Act
of Revenge, which was broadcast on the evening of March 4 on the main
state television channel, Rossia.

This 55-minute film, written by Irina Chernova and directed by Maksim
Faitelberg, markedly differs in a positive way from similar products
of recent years, such as the documentary film by Elena Chavchavadze,
Lev Trotsky: The Secret of World Revolution.

This latter film, which was shown at the beginning of 2007, depicted
Trotsky as the enemy of the Russian people and state par excellence.
Over the course of his life he was allegedly an agent of virtually
every imperialist government in the world and also served as a weapon
in the hands of the Jewish “bankers’ international.”

The trailer for Chavchadze’s film declares: “Lev Trotsky was one of
the most pernicious figures in the history of Russia in the 20th
century. His name is linked with the key events of the state’s
tragedy—the so-called proletarian revolution, the catastrophic
Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Civil War, the ‘Red Terror’ and the
plundering of the country.”

In contrast, the new film by Chernova and Faitelberg gives a more
sober account of the historical record. “Trotsky had a remarkable
biography. During the October days, Trotsky played a decisive role,
while Stalin was the man who slept through the revolution,” says the
narrator, Professor of History Oleg Budnitskii. “People followed
Trotsky in 1917 and in 1918 he created the Red Army,” he continues.

Another participant in the film, Andrei Sakharov, the director of the
Institute of Russian History, states, “The complete falsification of
history is contained in the Short Course of the History of the VKP(b).
Everyone who was close to Trotsky, starting with 1918, was shot.”

The film relates how the Dewey Commission, which investigated the
charges made against Trotsky during the Moscow Trials, unquestionably
proved that Stalin’s accusations were completely groundless and
established Trotsky’s innocence before world public opinion.

At the same time, the film repeatedly presents evaluations that are
borrowed from the stereotypical charges made against the October
Revolution and its leaders. For example, when the film deals with the
Stalinist genocide of the Old Bolsheviks, it adds the completely
unfounded commentary that “under Trotsky” the scale of the repressions
would have been no less. Budnitskii insists that the policy of the
“Red Terror” that was once launched by Trotsky against class enemies
had turned against himself.

When the film addresses the tragic fate of Trotsky’s children, who
were killed by Stalin, this is supplemented by the comment that
Trotsky justified the murder of the tsar and his children as
politically expedient. From this, apparently, it must follow that once
again “Trotsky’s methods” turned against him.

All these superficial “analogies,” using facts torn out of historical
context, lower the scientific value of the film and expose its hidden
secondary goal—to equate the dramatic episodes of the revolution with
the crimes of Stalinism and thereby to discredit the very idea of the
socialist transformation of society as an alternative to the violence
and oppression of the capitalist world order.

Nevertheless it is necessary to note the appearance of these more
sympathetic assessments of Trotsky within the framework of the Russian
cultural “mainstream.” How serious are the intentions of those behind
this? The answer is bound up with a more general evaluation of the
sociopolitical processes developing in contemporary Russia.

First of all, the decline in historical knowledge and the degeneration
of the social and political atmosphere that resulted from the
restoration of capitalism have created an objective demand for true
historical knowledge. People have become tired of endless fake
“exposés” and of light-minded speculation.

The “blank spots” in history that were mentioned so often in
journalism during the time of Gorbachev’s perestroika have not so much
been “filled in” over the two post-Soviet decades, as they have been
used as a reason to create a new school of historical falsification in
the service of a privileged layer of private property owners.

On the other hand, the growing conflict within the Russian ruling
elite, manifest in tensions between President Dmitri Medvedev and
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has ideological dimensions.

Putin’s rise to power was accompanied by a sharp shift in official
ideology and propaganda in the direction of Russian nationalism,
authoritarianism, and the rehabilitation of Stalinism. In contrast,
the liberals of the 1990s and their ideological descendants, who are
an influential voice in Medvedev’s entourage, base themselves on the
experience of the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, the exposure of the
crimes of Stalinism was used to discredit the socioeconomic
foundations of the Soviet Union and to advance a program of capitalist
reforms.

In those years in particular, these layers attempted to use the
criticism of Stalin made by Trotsky for their own goals. They
proceeded from the assumption that the masses would be able to adopt a
critical view of the theory of “socialism in one country,” but not
assimilate the genuine internationalist spirit of the October Revolution.

Similar calculations stand behind today’s attempts to tell part of the
truth about Trotsky. Layers of the liberal intelligentsia, who
discredited themselves in the past, are seeking sympathy among the
workers and flirting with episodes of heroic struggle for their own
interests. They hope to maintain the masses under their control with
carefully measured manipulation.

Only in a very remote and distorted form do these efforts reflect the
subterranean and ever growing interest in the history of the Russian
Revolution that among broad layers today.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/trot-m24.shtml

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