Moscow Under Lenin Alfred Rosmer MOSCOW UNDER LENIN Translated by Ian H. Birchall Introduction by Tamara Deutscher 0 Monthly Review Press New York and London Copyright© 1971 by Pluto Press Ltd. Introduction © 1972 by Tamara Deutscher All Rights Reserved Originally published as Moscou sous Lenine by Editions Pierre Horay, Paris, France, copyright © 1953 by Pierre Horay, Flore. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: LC 72-81771 First Printing Monthly Review Press II6 West 14th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011 33/37 Moreland Street, London, E.C.1 Manufactured in the United States of America Contents Introduction by Tamara Deutscher vii Foreword 9 1920 Europe in 1920 14 2 The Journey to Moscow 18 3 May Day in Vienna 24 4 Masaryk's Czechoslovakia 27 5 Clara Zetkin. Shlyapnikov. Great demonstration at Berlin 28 6 From Stettin to Reva! (Tallinn) 32 7 Petrograd. Zinoviev 35 8 Moscow: at the Executive Committee of the Communist Inter- national. Sadoul/Radek/Bukharin 37 9 Trotsky 40 10 At the Kremlin: Lenin 43 11 Among the delegates to the II Congress of the Communist International 59 12 Radek speaks of Bakunin 63 13 Smolny; solemn opening session of the II Congress 65 14 The debates of the II Congress 68 15 Trotsky's closing speech presents the Manifesto 78 16 The Eastern Peoples at the Congress of Baku 86 17 The Russian Trade Unions 92 18 The Anarchists. Death and funeral of Kropotkin 97 19 Congress of the French Socialist Party: a majority for affiliation to the Communist International 102 20 The French Communist group in Moscow 105 21 'Trotsky's Train.' Wrangel. End of the Civil War 109 1921 The Trade-Union question provokes a great debate 116 2 The Kronstadt Rising 119 3 Lenin presents the New Economic Policy (NEP) to the III Congress of the Communist International 123 4 The Red International of Labour Unions holds its founding Congress 135 Vl CONTENTS 5 Balance-sheet of seventeen months in Russia 6 Return to Paris - a different world 1922 Return to Moscow; the United Front; Shlyapnikov and Cachin 146 2 World Economic Crisis. Lloyd George proposes a Conference. Cannes 154 3 The delegates of the three Internationals at Berlin l 56 4 Genoa and Rapallo 161 5 The Trial of the Social-Revolutionaries 163 6 Fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. IV Congress of the Communist International 167 7 The French Communist Party and its difficulties 172 8 Frossard resigns - Cachin remains 179 Poincare has the Ruhr occupied 192 2 Hamburg: Fusion of the Second International and the Vienna International l 99 3 Confusion in the leadership of the Communist International. Revolutionary situation in Germany 202 1924 Lenin's Death 213 Appendix I Lenin's Testament 214 II Fortunes of Lenin's Testament 215 III Lenin's last speech to the Communist International 216 Conclusion 219 Biographical Notes and Glossary 229 Index 249 Introduction by Tamara Deutscher How did it happen, how could it have been that the party of revolu tion which was to lead toward the liberation of man, toward a classless society, gradually sank into the mire of a totalitarian regime? Was Leninism responsible for Stalinism? Did Stalin continue what Lenin left off? It was to answer such questions that Alfred Rosmer set out to write Moscou Sous Lenine. Convinced that the past determines the present, that "in order to move forward one must find one's road of yesterday," Rosmer went back to the years 1920-1924, and retraced the events of the immediate post-revolutionary period of which he was one of the close witnesses. He spent most of these crucial years in Moscow, where he observed the changes of policy-and of mood-around the Russian Party and the parties of the Communist International. In his book he did not attempt to systematize his impressions, nor did he set out with any structure preconceived beyond alteration or revision. This did not mean, however, that he was easily swayed and carried in any direction by the slightest change of wind. On the contrary, Rosmer was a man of deep conviction. He remained a communist till the end of his life; this was why he could see-not without pain and even despair, but with a clear eye-how the new revolutionary state, trium phant and yet in mortal danger, battered on all sides by civil war and intervention, was in no position to bestow the promised liberty and freedom, but had first to find peace and bread; how the brilliant vision which inspired so many hearts and minds was becoming tarnished by the squalor and poverty. With others he listened anxi ously for the sounds of social unrest in the advanced West, hoping that it would provide the revolutionary dynamism, take the first workers' state in tow and pull it out of its backwardness. But this was not to be. Russia stood alone, in a hostile world. It was the desperate scramble for the necessities of survival that shaped her more than the great ideals for which she fought and bled herself white. Actual exis tence could not but conflict with the great ideal: "In Moscow, in 1920, we were facing reality," says Rosmer, and he reveals the reality honestly and without embellishment, but also without bitterness or resentment. He did not see himself as one whom God had failed; steadfast in his communist conviction, he had no fear of losing his "faith"; nor did he need another God. Vlll INTRODUCTION Rosmer's real name was Andre Alfred Griot. He was born in New York on August 23, 1877. His parents left France after the de feat of the Paris Commune of I 871 and so escaped the oppressive and revengeful regime that followed. Although they were not active Communards-they lived in a village on the Loire-they were in sympathy with the workers' revolt. Did they consider themselves as belonging to the working class? Hardly. The father was a hairdresser and exercised this metier all his life. When they returned to France, in 1884, a new salon was set up in a suburb of Paris. Andre Alfred went to school; at sixteen he got his first job; at eighteen he passed the civil service examinations and became a clerk of the Prefecture de la Seine and was employed in a Paris office, working there for sixteen long years. He was attracted by the literary and artistic life of the capital and divided his free time between painters' studios, exhibitions, galleries and those open bookstalls where one could browse through innumerable volumes without ever spending a sou. But above all else he was attracted by the theater. At the turn of the century Ibsen, the somber playwright from the North who exposed the hypocrisy and the prejudices of the respectable middle classes and, estranged, left his country, was the idol of the young. Curiously enough, it was not from The Enemy of the People, the fierce attack on the predatory money-grubbers, that Andre Alfred took his pseudonym, but from the murky and symbolic Rosmersholm. Professor Christian Gras, Rosmer's French biographer, suggested that the following lines of Ibsen appealed to him in a decisive manner: "Only individual effort is important; only individual effort is noble and fruitful." This is plaus ible, as at that time Andre Alfred moved in anarchist circles in which all ideas of collective action requiring discipline were spurned. One might have thought that he would have discarded this individualistic pseudonym when he moved politically from anarchism first to syndicalism, then to revolutionary syndicalism, until he came to accept Marxism as the wider world outlook, the richer revolutionary thought and mode of action. 1 But no matter what his political evolu tion, Ibsen's lines accorded well with Rosmer's personality: a sense of individual responsibility in all collective endeavor, the refusal to toe any line conflicting with his individual conscience, and his ability to stand alone, were characteristic of him till the end of his life. Nor did his intellectual honesty allow him to join any movement until he r. While parties recruited their members from among those who accepted a common political program, the syndicalists aimed at uniting all wage earners for political action; not dictatorship of the proletariat, but workers' control over pro duction and distribution was their aim. INTRODUCTION IX was deeply convinced that its aims and methods were identical with his. This was not easy. Rosmer was not a theoretician, and was formed less by funda mental doctrines learned from books than by the influence of his friends in action, by sharp arguments and debates-and by the every day realities of life to which he was particularly sensitive. The two men who marked him most profoundly and who most definitely molded his political personality were, in his younger years, Pierre Monatte, and later on, Leon Trotsky. Both were his closest personal friends to whom he was devoted body and soul. And yet he did not join the revolutionary syndicalists led by Monatte until he was ideologically ready to make this step; nor did he, in the late 1930s, join Trotsky in building the Fourth International, as he was uncon vinced that he could approve of Trotsky's move. His loyalty to the idea was stronger than his loyalty to friends-but both were uncom monly deep-rooted. The outbreak of the First World War put the belief in the international solidarity of the workers to the most severe test. Nearly all socialist parties of the warring nations overnight "suspended" the principle of class struggle and pledged to defend unconditionally their respective capitalist states, the abolition of which had hitherto been their professed aim. Against all odds, the revolutionary syndicalists of France, who now added the adjective "internationalists" to their appellation, remained true to their ideal. The bankruptcy of the Second Inter national only confirmed them in their deep distrust of, and thorough contempt for reformist socialists, laborites, parliamentarians, bread and-butter trade unionists, and for all political parties. And yet the betrayal of the European Left could not but depress their spirits. They soon found some moral support in their contacts with the Russian emigres, of whom quite a brilliant pleiade was then in Paris. Men whose names were to loom so large in the history of the Revo lution-Trotsky, Martov, Antonov-Ovseenko, Lunacharsky, Lozov sky-were collaborating on a militant socialist daily in the Russian language. Trotsky, whose links with the French were particularly close, consoled the somewhat dispirited Monatte: "All is lost? Oh, no! At the end of the war we shall have the revolution!"2 The one great event, however, which boosted the morale of the isolated, scanty, and harassed antimilitarist groups and gave them new wings was the Zimmerwald Conference. On September 5, 1915 2. Quoted in Christian Gras, Alfred Rosmer et le mouvement revolurionnaire inter- national (Paris: Fran~ois Maspero, 1971), p. rr4.