[D66] The darker the night...

[A.O.]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/trotskyproject/the-most-dangerous-man-in-the-world/posts/2487433

Paul Le Blanc
8 minuten ·

Here is the presentation I gave at the Havana conference.

THE DARKER THE NIGHT, THE BRIGHTER THE STAR: TROTSKY AND THE STRUGGLE
AGAINST STALINISM

“The darker the night, the brighter the star,” the title of the final
volume of Tony Cliff’s biography of Leon Trotsky, was taken from another
book – The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Friedrich
Schlotterbeck, a young working-class Communist in Germany when Adolf
Hitler took power in 1933. His 1947 memoir on resistance to Nazi tyranny
recounts the heroism and horrific destruction of comrades, friends, and
family members who remained committed to socialist and communist ideals.

But Trotsky has told us: “No one, not excluding Hitler, has dealt
socialism such deadly blows as Stalin. This is hardly astonishing since
Hitler has attacked the working class organizations from without, while
Stalin does it from within. Hitler assaults Marxism. Stalin not only
assaults but prostitutes it. Not a single principle has remained
unpolluted, not a single idea unsullied. The very names of socialism and
communism have been cruelly compromised … Socialism signifies a pure and
limpid social system which is accommodated to the self-government of the
toilers. Stalin’s regime is based on a conspiracy of the rulers against
the ruled. Socialism implies an uninterrupted growth of universal
equality. Stalin has erected a system of revolting privileges. Socialism
has as its goal the all-sided flowering of individual personality. When
and where has man’s personality been so degraded as in the U.S.S.R.?
Socialism would have no value apart from the unselfish, honest and
humane relations between human beings. The Stalin regime has permeated
social and personal relationships with lies, careerism and treachery.”
So wrote Trotsky in 1937. And those animated by such beliefs in Soviet
Russia were repressed no less ruthlessly than the German Communists had
been.

The Left Oppositionists that Trotsky led persisted in their struggle
after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, and they were rounded up and
sent to Siberian prison camps. “When you can no longer serve the cause
to which you have dedicated your life – you should give it your death.”
These were the words of Adolf Joffe, one of Trotsky’s close comrades who
had committed suicide as a protest against Stalinism in 1927. His young
wife Maria was arrested in 1929. As the situation of the condemned
Oppositionists worsened by degrees, she held out, and when it became the
horrific “one long night” that she describes in her memoir, she was one
of the few who somehow survived to tell what happened. She was sustained
by the core belief: “It is possible to sacrifice your life, but the
honor of a person, of a revolutionary – never.”

Pressures to give in were intense, when capitulation could mean freedom,
while remaining in Opposition meant never-ending jail and exile. By
1934, Trotsky’s close comrade Christian Rakovsky himself was ready to
capitulate, his views later recounted by Maria’s step-daughter, Nadezhda
Joffe, in whom he confided and whom he won over: “His basic thoughts
were that we had to return to the party in any way possible. He felt
that there was undoubtedly a layer in the party which shared our views
at heart, but had not decided to voice their agreement. And we could
become a kind of common sense core and be able to accomplish something.
Left in isolation, he said, they would strangle us like chickens.”

Some imprisoned male Oppositionists who rejected this logic made three
toasts on New Year's Day: “The first toast was to our courageous and
long-suffering wives and women comrades, who were sharing our fate. We
drank our second toast to the world proletarian revolution. Our third
was to our people's freedom and our own liberation from prison.”
Instead, they would soon be transferred to the deadly Siberian labor
camps into which hundreds of thousands of victims of the 1935-39 purges
were sent as Stalinist repression tightened throughout the country.
Arrested while in Moscow in 1936, Secretary of the Palestinian Communist
Party Joseph Berger later remembered the Left Oppositionists he met
during his own ordeal: “While the great majority had ‘capitulated,’
there remained a hard core of uncompromising Trotskyists, most of them
in prisons and camps. They and their families had all been rounded up in
the preceding months and concentrated in three large camps -- Kolyma,
Vorkuta, and Norilsk.... The majority were experienced revolutionaries
who had … joined the Opposition in the early twenties.... Purists, they
feared contamination of their doctrine above all else in the world....
When I accused the Trotskyists of sectarianism, they said what mattered
was ‘to keep the banner unsullied.’”

Another survivor's account recalls “the Orthodox Trotskyists” of the
Vorkuta labor camp who “were determined to remain faithful to their
platform and their leaders. … Even though they were in prison, they
continued to consider themselves Communists; as for Stalin and his
supporters, ‘the apparatus men,’ they were characterized as renegades
from communism.” Along with their supporters and sympathizers, they
numbered in the thousands in this area. As word spread of Stalin's show
trials designed to frame and execute the Old Bolshevik leaders, and as
conditions at the camp deteriorated, “the entire group of ‘Orthodox’
Trotskyists” came together. The eyewitness remembers the speech of
Socrates Gevorkian: “It is now evident that the group of Stalinist
adventurers have completed their counter-revolutionary coup d'etat in
our country. All the progressive conquests of our revolution are in
mortal danger. Not twilight shadows but those of the deep black night
envelop our country. . . . No compromise is possible with the Stalinist
traitors and hangmen of the revolution. But before destroying us, Stalin
will try to humiliate us as much as he can. . . . We are left with only
one means of struggle in this unequal battle: the hunger strike. . . .’
The great majority of prisoners, regardless of political orientation,
followed this lead.”

Lasting from October 1936 to March 1937, the 132-day hunger strike was
powerfully effective and forced the camp officials to give in to the
strikers’ demands. But then, Maria Joffe was told by an Oppositionist
who had survived, “everything suddenly came to an end.” In 1938 the
Trotskyists of Vorkuta were marched out in batches – men, women,
children over the age of twelve – into the surrounding arctic wasteland.
“Their names were checked against a list and then, group by group, they
were called out and machine-gunned,” writes Joseph Berger. “Some
struggled, shouted slogans and fought the guards to the last.” According
to a witness, as one group of about a hundred was led out of the camp to
be shot, “the condemned sang the ‘Internationale’ joined by the voices
of hundreds of prisoners remaining in camp.”

This expanded into what Maria Joffe calls “the complete destruction of
the October and Civil War generation, ‘infected by Trotskyist heresy …’”
The so-called “Trotskyist heresy” analyzed how a profoundly democratic
workers and peasants revolution, inspired by the deepest socialist
idealism, could turn into one of the worst tyrannies in human history.
Trotsky’s analysis clearly emerges from the fundamental analysis of Karl
Marx eighty years earlier. It is also inseparable from the basics of
Trotsky’s own theory of permanent revolution.

[In the presentation I was going to give, I intended to discuss
Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR, his theory of permanent revolution, and
the program of the Left Opposition. But this has already been discussed
in the presentation by Eric Toussaint and can be found in the longer
version of this talk that I’ve already handed out to you. In the
interest of saving time, given the extra time it is taking to translate,
I will cut that out of these remarks. I want to conclude with a comment
about the meaning of it all – the so-called “heresy” and the program for
which these wonderful comrades struggled and gave their lives.]

The relevance of this for today brings us back to this talk’s title.
When we look up at night, the blackness of the universe is vividly
punctuated by the stars, whose glow has traveled light-years for us to
see. Even though some of those stars no longer exist, we see them
shining from where we are. And their wondrous illumination may help us
find our way in the dark terrain of our own times.