«GREAT SOVIET ENCYCLOPEDIA», 1947

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Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Hugo S. Cunningham and P.K. Volkov

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TROFONEVROZY -- TROCKIZM [Column 42]

[...]

TROTSKYISM. "Contemporary Trotskyism is not a political tendency in the working class, but [rather] an unprincipled, ideal-less band of wreckers, saboteurs, agents, spies, murdereres, a band of accursed enemies of the working class, acting for hire of intelligence organs of foreign governments." (Stalin, "On deficiencies of Party work in measures for the liquidation of Trotskyites and other double-dealers," 1937, p. 14).

In the past, T. was an anti-Leninist, opportunist tendency and a most dangerous agency of the imperialist bourgeoisie in the workers' movement, a vilest variety of Menshevism. T. was the most important group implanting centrism (cf).

In the course of struggling against the ACP(b) [All-union Communist Party (bolsheviks)], Trotskyism stopped being a political tendency in the working class and turned into the leading unit of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie, leading the struggle against Soviet power and the construction of socialism in the USSR, against Communism.

Trotsky always conducted a treasonable battle against Leninism, against the Party of Lenin and Stalin. At the 2nd Congress of the RSDRP (1903) Trotsky together with the Mensheviks struggled against the Bolsheviks. On the question of the 1-st paragraph of the charter of the party Trotsky defended the Menshevik formulation of Martov and heatedly came out against the formulation of Lenin, struggling for the founding of a monolithic, militant, clearly organized party. Trotsky, in essence, rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat. After the Second Congress of the party, Trotsky, together with the Mensheviks, in every possible way subverted Bolshevik party-solidarity , frustrated the decisions of the Congress, trying to seize the leading centers of the party and disorganize party work.

In the period of the Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution (1904-7) Trotsky slid into the position of “defensism”: he was against the defeat of the tsarist government, which led to the weakening of tsarism and the strengthening of the revolution. Trotsky, along with the Mensheviks, led the treasonous policy of curtailment of the Revolution of 1904-7. Trotsky led the fight against the Leninist theory of the socialist revolution. Denying the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, he denied the possibility of alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry. Thus Trotsky even denied the victory of the socialist revolution, the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Defending the counterrevolutionary Menshevik theory of “permanent revolution,” Trotsky did not believe in the strength and ability of the Russian proletariat and the revolutionary possibilities of a peasant movement; he claimed that the peasants were a class hostile to the proletariat.

In the years of the Stolypin reaction, Trotsky supported the Menshevik “liquidators,” aiming to dissolve the RSDRP [Russian Social-Democratic Revolutionary Party]. Being a “centrist,” Trotsky tried to reconcile and to unite the Bolsheviks and the liquidators on a liquidators’ platform. Characterizing the position of Trotsky, Lenin wrote: “Trotsky conducted himself like the worst sort of careerist and factionalist...he prattles on about the party, but conducts himself as the worst factionalist of all.” (Lenin Anthology XXV, page 38). In these very years Lenin called Trotsky “Judas-Trotsky.” In 1912 Trotsky organized the anti-Party "August bloc,” uniting all anti-Bolshevik groups and movements against Lenin and the Bolshevik party. Trotsky and the Trotskyites occupied on all fundamental questions the liquidators’ position, but concealed their liquidationism as conciliation. Exposed by Lenin and Stalin, the Trotskyite “August bloc” disintegrated under the blows of the Bolsheviks in 1913-14.

In the period of the First World War, Trotsky in all important questions of socialism and war led the struggle against Lenin and against the Bolshevik party. Trotskyites defended admitted social-chauvinists, called for the renunciation of the class struggle in time of war, supported the imperialist war, concealing their treason against the proletariat and socialism with “left” phraseology about the struggle with war, planning the deception of the working class. Slipping by means of deception into the ranks of the Bolshevik party in 1917 with the purpose of undermining and blasting it from within, Trotsky organized an antiparty counterrevolutionary group of Trotskyites, speaking out against the Bolshevik party and its leaders – Lenin and Stalin – on all fundamental questions of Marxism-Leninism and the revolution.

In the period of the preparation and carrying out of the October socialist revolution (April 1917 – 1918), Trotsky along with other traitors to the party –- Zinoviev, Kamanev, Rykov, Bukharin, Pyatakov –- tried by treacherous means to thwart the armed rebellion and turn the Bolshevik party from the path socialist revolution.

In February 1918 the Trotskyite-Bukharinite band of traitors wrecked the peace talks at Brest-Litovsk with Germany, aiming to place the as-yet unorganized Soviet Republic, lacking a strong army, under the deadly blow of German imperialism. The treason of Trotsky and Bukharin cost the Soviet state dearly. The new terms of peace were significantly more onerous than before. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania went to Germany. The Ukraine was turned into a German puppet state. The Soviet Republic was required to pay an indemnity to the Germans. Lenin noted that Bukharin and Trotsky “in [this] matter aided the German imperialists and hindered the growth and development of revolution in Germany” (Lenin, Collected Works, vol. XXII, p. 307).

In the years of the foreign military intervention and civil war (1918-20) Trotsky and the Trotskyites treacherously disorganized work in the Red Army, attempting to weaken its fighting power; as saboteurs, they disrupted the fighting successes of the Red Army, giving direct help to interventionists and bourgeois-landowner counterrevolutionaries.

In the period of transition to peacetime work on restoration of the nation’s economy (1921-1925) Trotsky at the head of all anti-Party elements led a bitter fight against the party of Lenin and its leaders Lenin and Stalin, who were successfully leading the Soviet country to socialism by way of the New Economic Policy. In 1923 the Trotskyites, attempting to split the party, demanded a party-wide debate, in which they were utterly defeated throughout the Soviet Union. The Thirteenth Party Conference and the Thirteenth Party Congress RKP(b) (1924) condemned the Trotskyite opposition as an openly-expressed petty-bourgeois deviation from Marxism, as revisionim of Leninism. In 1927 Trotsky in his slanderous article “The Lessons of October” attempted to replace Leninism with Trotskyism. Stalin demonstrated in his speeches that the ideological defeat of Trotsky was an indispensable condition to secure the further victorious movement towards socialism, and he rallied the party around the Central Committee for the struggle for the victory of socialism. In 1925 the Trotskyites came out against the teaching of Lenin and Stalin about the victory of socialism in the Soviet land, against the party course on the victorious construction of socialism in the USSR, against the socialist industrialization of the country. To the general party line, to the Stalinist plan of socialist industrialization of the country, the Trotskyites offered in opposition a bourgeois plan of enslavement of the USSR, converting the Soviet Union into a feeble agrarian appendage of the capitalist world, disarmed and deprived of a possibility for existence in conditions of capitalist encirclement. The Trotskyites tried to corrupt and break up the Bolshevik party after the death of Lenin, to infect it with their disbelief in the cause of victory of socialism in the USSR and to create a party of capitalist restoration.

In the years of struggle for socialist industrialization of the country (1926-29), the Trotskyites continued a treasonable struggle against the party of Lenin and Stalin. In 1926, Trotsky organized the anti-Party, counterrevolutionary Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc, developing subversive work against the Bolshevist Party and Soviet government. Under the leadership of Stalin, the Party of Bolsheviks ideologically smashed and organizationally crushed the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc. At the Fifteenth Congress of the ACP(b) (1927) the Trotskyites and Zinovievites were expelled from the Bolshevist Party for counterrevolutionary activity. "Being ideologically smashed by the Bolshevist Party, losing any base in the working class, the Trotskyites ceased to be a political tendency and turned into an unprincipled, careerist clique of political swindlers, into a band of political double-dealers." [History of the ACP(b), Short Course, pp. 285-286]. In 1929, Trotsky was deported from the territory of the USSR for anti-Soviet and counterrevolutionary activity. Overseas, he continued a treasonable struggle against the Party of Lenin and Stalin and the Soviet government.

In 1932-33, Trotskyites and Bukharinites organized the anti-Soviet "Right-Trotskyite bloc." Trials in 1936, 1937, and 1938 revealed, that Bukharinites and Trotskyites headed by Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov already from the first days of the Great October Socialist Revolution took part in a conspiracy against Lenin, against the Party of the Bolsheviks, against the Soviet government; long ago they had already formed one common band of the worst enemies of the people. They tried to break the Brest peace, together with "Left" SRs overthrow Soviet authority, arrest and kill V. I. Lenin, I. V. Stalin, Ya. M. Sverdlov, and form a new government of Trotskyites, Bukharinites, and "Left" SRs. They organized the despicable wounding of Lenin in the summer of 1918; prepared the anti-Soviet rebellion of "Left" SRs in the summer of 1918; deliberately aggravated disagreements in the Party in 1921, trying to loosen and overthrow from within the leadership of Lenin; they tried to overthrow the leadership of the Party during Lenin's illness and after his death. The Trotskyites and Bukharinites long before this moved into the service of foreign intelligence agencies, handed over state secrets and provided foreign intelligence agencies with espionage information; carried out wrecking, sabotage, explosions; organized despicable murders of Kirov, Menzhinsky, Kuybyshev, Gorki. Judicial proceedings revealed, that Trotsky-Bukharinite traitors, carrying out the will of their masters -- foreign bourgeois intelligence agencies, set as their goal the destruction of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state, the undermining of the defense of the country, the facilitation of foreign military intervention, preparation of the defeat of the Red Army, the partition of the USSR, the destruction of the gains of the workers and peasants and the restoration of capitalist slavery in the Soviet Union. For these monstrous crimes, according to the sentence of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the Bukharin-Trotskyite traitors were shot. The Soviet people approved the crushing of the counterrevolutionary "Right-Trotskyite Bloc" and rallied ever more closely around the Party of Lenin and Stalin. Trotsky was killed in 1940 by one of his [own] accomplices. Trotsky is the worst enemy of all toiling humanity, Trotskyites everywhere play the role of provocateurs and spies of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, trying to demoralize the Communist movement.


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