But perhaps the question was quite clear to everyone at that time, and the solution universally accepted? On the contrary; Lenin’s stand at that period, that is, before April 4, 1917, when he first appeared on the Petrograd stage, was his own personal one, shared by no one else. Not one of those leaders of the party who were in Russia had any intention of making the dictatorship of the proletariat the social revolution the immediate6 object of his policy. A party conference which met on the eve of Lenin’s arrival and counted among its numbers about thirty Bolsheviks showed that none of them even imagined anything beyond democracy. No wonder the minutes of that conference are still kept a secret! Stalin was in favor of supporting the Provisional government of Guchkov and Miliukoff, and of merging7 the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. The same stand, or rather an even more opportunist one, was taken by Rykov, Kamenev, Molotov, Tomsky, Kalinin, and all the rest of the leaders and half-leaders of to-day. During the February revolution, Yaroslavsky, Ordzhonikidze, chairman Petrovsky of the Ukrainian Executive Committee, and others were publishing with the Mensheviks at Yakutsk a paper called The Social Democrat1, in which they expounded8 the most vulgar and provincial9 sort of opportunism. If those articles in the Yakutsk Social Democrat, edited by Yaroslavky, were to be reprinted to-day they would kill him as a political thinker, if such a death were possible for him. Such are the present guards of “Leninism.”
I realize, of course, that at various times in their lives they have repeated Lenin’s words and gestures after him. But the beginning of 1917 found them left to their own resources. The political situation was difficult. Here was their chance to show what they had learned in Lenin’s school and what they could do without Lenin. Let them name one of their number who arrived independently at the position achieved identically by Lenin in Geneva and by me in New York. They cannot name a single one. The Petrograd Pravda, which was edited by Stalin and Kamenev until Lenin’s arrival, will always remain a document of limited understanding, blindness, and opportunism. And yet the mass membership of the party, like the working class as a whole, was moving spontaneously toward the fight for power. There was no other path for either the party or the country.
In the years of reaction, one needed theoretical foresight10 in order to hold fast to the prospect11 of a permanent revolution. Probably nothing more than political sense was needed to advance the slogan of a fight for power in March, 1917. Not a single one of the present leaders revealed such a foresight or such a sense. Not one of them went beyond the point of view of the left petty bourgeois4 democrat in March, 1917. Not one of them stood the test of history.
I arrived in Petrograd a month after Lenin — it was exactly that long that I had been detained in Canada by Lloyd George. By that time, the situation in the party had changed substantially. Lenin had appealed to the masses against their sorry leaders. He had launched a systematic12 fight against “the old Bolsheviks who,” as he wrote in those days, “more than once have played a sorry part in the history of our party by repeating a formula, unintelligently learned, instead of studying the peculiar13 nature of the new and living reality.” Kamenev and Rykov tried to resist. Stalin silently stepped aside. Not one of his articles written about that period shows that Stalin made any attempt to estimate his previous policy and win his way to Lenin’s stand. He simply kept silent, because he had been too much compromised by his unfortunate leadership during the first month of the revolution: He preferred to withdraw into the background. He never made any public appearance to defend Lenin’s views; he merely stood back and waited. During the most responsible months of the theoretical and political preparation for the up rising, Stalin simply did not exist, in the political sense.
At the time of my arrival, there were in the country many Social Democratic organizations which included both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. This was the natural result of the stand that Stalin, as well as Kamenev and others, had taken, not only in the early stages of the revolution but also during the war although one must admit that Stalin’s position during the war was known to no one; to this rather important question he had never devoted14 a line. To-day the Communist International textbooks all over the world among the Communist Youths of Scandinavia and the Pioneers of Australia keep pounding it in that Trotsky made an attempt in 1912 to bring about the union of the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. But they never once mention the fact that in March, 1917, Stalin was advocating union with Tzereteli’s party, and that it was not until the middle of the year 1917 that Lenin was able to pull the party out of the morass15 into which its temporary leaders the epigones of to-day had driven it. The fact that not one of them understood the significance and direction of the revolution at its outset is now represented as a special dialectic profundity16, in contrast with the heresy17 of Trotskyism, which was audacious enough not only to understand the day before, but to foresee the day after as well.
When I told Kamenev on my arrival in Petrograd that nothing separated me from Lenin’s famous “April theses” that determined18 the new course of his party, the former’s only reply was, “I should say not!” Before formally joining the party, I took part in drafting the most important Bolshevist documents. It never entered any one’s head to ask if I had renounced19 “Trotskyism,” as I was asked thousands of times during the period of the epigone decline, by the Cachins, Th?lmanns, and others of the hangers-on of the October revolution. The only juxtaposition20 of Trotskyism and Leninism to be heard in those days was in the leading group of the party, where they accused LENIN of Trotskyism during the month of April. Kamenev did this openly and with much insistence21. Others did it more cautiously, behind the scenes. Many “old Bolsheviks” said to me after I arrived in Russia: “Now the celebration is on your street.” I had to argue that Lenin had not come over to my point of view, but had developed his own, and that the course of events, by substituting arithmetic for algebra22, had revealed the essential identity of our views. And that is what really happened.
At those first meetings of ours, and even more after the July days, Lenin gave one the sense of a terrific inner concentration under a surface of calm and “prosaic” simplicity23. The movement that had found its symbol in Kerensky seemed all-powerful in those days. Bolshevism seemed nothing more than an “insignificant group,” and officially it was being treated as such. The party itself did not realize the power it was to have on the day after, but Lenin was leading it firmly toward its greatest tasks. I harnessed myself to the work and helped him.
Two months before the October revolution, I wrote: “To us internationalism is not an abstract idea existing only to be betrayed on every opportune24 occasion (as it is to Tzereteli and Chernov), but is a real guiding and wholly practical principle. A lasting25, decisive success is inconceivable for us without a revolution in Europe.” At that time I could not yet place the name of Stalin, the philosopher of “socialism in a single country,” beside the names of Tzereteli and Chernov. I concluded my article with the words: “A permanent revolution versus26 a permanent slaughter27: that is the struggle, in which the stake is the future of man.” This was published in the central organ of our party on September 7, and later reissued as a separate pamphlet. Why did my present critics keep silent then about my heretical slogan of permanent revolution? Where were they? Some, like Stalin, were waiting cautiously, peering about them. Others, like Zinoviev, were hiding under the table. But the more important question is: How could Lenin have tolerated my heretical propaganda in silence? In questions of theory he recognized no such thing as indifference28 or indulgence; how did he happen to allow the preaching of “Trotskyism” in the central organ of the party? On November 1, 1917, at the meeting of the Petrograd committee (the minutes of this historical meeting — historical in every sense of the word — are still kept secret) Lenin said that after Trotsky had become convinced of the impossibility of union with the Mensheviks “there has been no better Bolshevik.” And in this he proved very clearly and not for the first time, either that it had not been the theory of permanent revolution that had separated us, but the narrower, though very important question of the attitude toward Menshevism.
Looking back, two years after the revolution, Lenin wrote: “At the moment when it seized the power and created the Soviet29 republic, Bolshevism drew to itself all the best elements in the currents of Socialist30 thought that were nearest to it.” Can there be even a shadow of a doubt that when he spoke31 so deliberately32 of the best representatives of the currents closest to Bolshevism, Lenin had foremost in mind what is now called the “historical Trotskyism”? For what was nearer to it than the current that I represented? And whom else could Lenin have had in mind? Perhaps Marcel Cachin? Or Th?lmann? To Lenin, when he surveyed the past development of the party as a whole, Trotskyism was no hostile and alien current of Socialist thought, but on the contrary the one that was closest to Bolshevism.
The actual course of the development of ideas in the party, as we can see, did not at all resemble the false caricature that the epigones, taking advantage of Lenin’s death and the tide of reaction, have been creating.
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1
democrat
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| n.民主主义者，民主人士；民主党党员 | |
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factions
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| 组织中的小派别，派系( faction的名词复数 ) | |
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dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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bourgeois
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| adj./n.追求物质享受的(人)；中产阶级分子 | |
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premises
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| n.建筑物，房屋 | |
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6
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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merging
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| 合并（分类） | |
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8
expounded
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| 论述，详细讲解( expound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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9
provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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10
foresight
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| n.先见之明，深谋远虑 | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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12
systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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13
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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14
devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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15
morass
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| n.沼泽，困境 | |
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profundity
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| n.渊博；深奥，深刻 | |
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17
heresy
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| n.异端邪说；异教 | |
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18
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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19
renounced
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| v.声明放弃( renounce的过去式和过去分词 )；宣布放弃；宣布与…决裂；宣布摒弃 | |
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20
juxtaposition
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| n.毗邻，并置，并列 | |
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21
insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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22
algebra
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| n.代数学 | |
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simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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opportune
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| adj.合适的，适当的 | |
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25
lasting
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| adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持 | |
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versus
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| prep.以…为对手，对；与…相比之下 | |
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slaughter
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| n.屠杀，屠宰；vt.屠杀，宰杀 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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Soviet
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| adj.苏联的，苏维埃的；n.苏维埃 | |
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30
socialist
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| n.社会主义者；adj.社会主义的 | |
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31
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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32
deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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