Written: 1956. Speech to the Seattle branch of the Socialist Workers Party 1956
Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Suppressed Facts Behind the Khrushchev Revelations." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp 328-339). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Comrade Chairman and Comrades: Sixteen years ago last Tuesday, in a quiet, book lined study near Mexico City, a great man was sitting at his desk, writing and talking to a supposed friend, helping him with an article. He had known this man, the new husband of one of his faithful secretaries, for many months.
Suddenly, the younger man pulled an ice-axe out from under his coat and plunged it into the brain of the man at the desk. The older man toppled over in a pool of blood as his guards and secretaries rushed into the office and grabbed the assassin.
One of the guards, a young man by the name of Joseph Hansen, overcome with rage and sorrow, began to choke the murderer. But the dying man came to consciousness and said, clearly, “Don’t kill him, Joe. Let him live to tell the truth; let him live to expose Stalin.”
A few hours later the great man died. The titanic figure of Leon Trotsky, world revolutionary, uncompromising fighter for Marxism and Leninism, fearless opponent of all betrayers of the working class, a harried, persecuted and slandered exile—Leon Trotsky was no more.
World Stalinism rejoiced. The monster in the Kremlin, the most sinister figure in all mankind, rejoiced. And they hoped, and stated, that Trotskyism would be no more, because, you see, it was only a personality cult
That was 16 years ago. Three years ago, another man died: Joseph Stalin, the instigator of Trotsky’s murder. Stalin was absolute head of an absolute state machine that governed one fifth of the world’s peoples. He was also the absolute head of scores of Communist Parties around the world whose membership and supporters numbered millions of people. He was the most powerful individual in the entire world. He was never loved, but he was respected, worshipped, admired, adored, and idolized by the Communist workers and peasants whose parties he dominated. He had every reason to expect that his niche in history and in the minds and hearts of men was firmly secured; he was a God even before he died, and how much higher can anyone climb?
Yet only three years later, the legend of the man who was God lies smashed and shattered, dissolved into countless ugly fragments by the power of the realized ideas and principles represented by Trotsky. For it was the force of world revolution that produced the Khrushchev speech and that disposed of the Stalin myth once and for all.
As Trotsky tirelessly explained over the years, it was the ebb-tide of world revolution that created Stalinism and it would be the upsurge and inevitable renewal of world revolution that would sweep it aside. Stalinism rose on defeats, produced defeats, and would in its turn be defeated only by working class victory, by the upsurge of the masses.
So Trotskyism emerges doubly vindicated: First, as the only analysis that correctly characterized and described the terrible bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state, that revealed the origin of the bureaucracy and forecast its doom at the hands of the Russian masses. And second, as the ideological expression of world rebellion and revolt—a basic reality today.
The Russian proletariat is now 50 million strong, powerful, and armed with the ideas of Lenin which couldn’t be completely withheld from them. But the force that gave them the impetus to move, to make demands upon the bureaucracy, to assert themselves collectively was the tremendous confidence given them by the magnificent revolution in China, the friendly workers states in Eastern Europe, the volcanic revolts of the colonial masses. From being an isolated workers state encircled by imperialism, they are now surrounded by allies and supporters, and world imperialism is on the defensive.
For 30 years Trotsky counseled the Russian working class and collective farmers to overthrow the bureaucracy. He firmly insisted that they would; that they must; that life would help them do it. Today, they are in the process of doing exactly that, and what more overwhelming triumph can there be for
Trotskyism, revolutionary socialism, lives and thrives today in the aims and aspirations of the Russian working class, the mighty colonial masses, the European proletariat and the vanguard of class-conscious American workers. In every country where oppressed human beings rise against their exploiters and tread the road toward socialism, there Trotskyism lives and Stalinism, the theory of socialism in only one country, dies.
Frank Jacson, Trotsky’s assassin, never did get around to revealing the truth, though the facts about his life as a Stalinist have been unearthed by others. Today, however, an equally sinister henchman and co-criminal of Stalin’s, Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, has come forward with part of the truth, because the new stage of the Russian Revolution has forced him to.
Khrushchev’s speech was truly a remarkable one, both for what it said and what it ignored; what it revealed, what it suppressed, and what it confused. The speech is stunning in its revelations and shattering in its implications. It is little wonder that the ranks of honest Communist Party members and sympathizers the world over are shocked, bewildered, angry, demoralized, or numb. And, though this may sound strange to some of you, we Trotskyists understand and sympathize with their reactions.
We understand only too well the confusion and stupefaction of sincere communists when they confront the hard fact that in the supposedly glorious land of socialism, the most brutal dictatorship of all time held sway. We understand how easy it is to throw up one’s hands in disillusionment and disgust and say: Marx and Lenin were wrong, they never foresaw this, socialism is a delusion, the capitalists were right about the Soviet Union being a prison camp for the masses, the victorious Bolshevik revolution produced only torture chambers and dungeons for the proletariat.
We understand these reactions because we have been fighting against them, as one-sided, for 30 years. Only orthodox Trotskyists have consistently defended the progressive, working class foundations of the Soviet Union at the same time that we struggled against the corrupt, nationalist bureaucracy. Trotskyism proved that the fight for socialism is the fight against Stalinism and that Stalinism represents not the product and heir of Bolshevism but its betrayer and antithesis. Revolution no more produces Stalinism than unionism inevitably produces Dave Beckism. Under certain historical circumstances, however, these reversions do occur and it is our job to understand them and thus prevent them.
Stalinism is the anti-Leninist politics of the bureaucracy in Russia. The bureaucracy is a huge upper crust of millions of officials, administrators, and specialists, who live like emperors while the masses slave six days a week, live in crowded and tiny apartments, and barely earn enough for food and clothing if they can find them. This bureaucracy was the social base of the Stalinist faction in the Communist Party which finally crushed the Bolshevik faction and inaugurated a stifling dictatorship over the entire country. The Stalinist ideology justifies the bureaucracy’s rule over the working class.
Only within the framework of this materialist explanation of social relations in the Soviet Union can Khrushchev’s speech be understood for what it is and for what it isn’t. Only Trotsky’s analysis of the origin and development of the bureaucracy explains why Khrushchev left out so much. Let us review that analysis and examine Khrushchev’s speech in the light of it.
1. The Truth: Lenin and Trotsky together fought Stalin as the representative of a reactionary and potentially fatal ideology that was a product of Russian backwardness and hostile capitalist encirclement.
Khrushchev: Stresses that Stalin was too powerful as an individual and treated Lenin cavalierly. He omits Lenin’s bloc with Trotsky and the existence of a growing bureaucracy. He lies in saying that Lenin’s will, which repudiated Stalin, was made known to and rejected by the party, when in fact the bureaucracy suppressed it. He acknowledges Stalin’s obscurity, but says untruthfully that Stalin played a great role in the revolution and civil war.
The Pattern: Khrushchev attempts to make Stalin a Leninist and describes Lenin’s fight against him as personal and secondary. The existence of the bureaucracy and Trotsky’s bloc with Lenin are hidden.
2. The Truth: After Lenin’s death, Stalin and the bureaucracy used terror to crush the broadly supported Leninist wing of the party, the Left Opposition led by Trotsky.
Khrushchev: Admits mass repression of “honest, non-Trotskyist communists.”(Why? Stalin’s neurosis.) But he says there were no repressive measures against the Trotskyists who were “politically isolated through patient ideological explanations.”He insistently calls Trotsky and others “enemies of Leninism,”but gives no reasons why. He lies about the Left Opposition’s program of party and government democracy, industrialization, and collectivization of agriculture, taking special pains not to mention that the bureaucracy eventually adopted the Opposition’s economic platform, though their implementation was bureaucratically distorted and steeped in terror.
The Pattern: “Stalin is a Leninist. Trotsky was an anti- Leninist, but no political threat. No bureaucracy exists.”
3. The Truth: By the late ’20s, the Trotskyists had been smashed as an internal force. However, they continued to fight outside the USSR where their success in leading strikes and revolutions and in exposing Stalin’s betrayals posed a political danger to the hegemony of the bureaucracy. In 1933, in the most criminal betrayal of all history, the Stalinists surrendered the German working class to Hitler without a fight. Trotsky declared the Third International dead as a revolutionary force and called for formation of the Fourth International. Meanwhile, opposition kept surfacing in the USSR because the people were being robbed of progress and liberty—gainsaying the claim that socialism had been established. To isolate the Trotskyists in every country and to quell internal unrest, Stalin launched the 1936-38 Moscow Trials. The trials were an abomination, an attack, not on enemies of the people, but on the people themselves by their enemy Stalin.
Khrushchev: He confirms that in 1934 the terror was accelerated to pave the way for the Moscow Trials: out of 139 Central Committee members elected at the 17th Congress, 70% were shot; out of 1,966 delegates to the congress, 1,108 were arrested and imprisoned. He concedes that the trials were unnecessary because Trotskyism was already defeated internally and the Trotskyists were not terrorists. He admits that the trials were frame-ups, where the only evidence was from confessions extracted by torture. He grants that the trials were contradictory to claims that socialism had been achieved. But since socialism did indeed hold sway, the frame-ups were just an anomaly. He confirms the mass repression in 1937 in which entire peoples were deported—for no reason!! These fictitious anti-Soviet centers and nefarious plots were invented to make it seem that the trials had a legitimate cause.
The Pattern: “The terror was all a terrible mistake, since socialism was secure and there were no enemies of the people.”
4. The Truth: The continuing oppression reflected the desperation of a regime in constant crisis, hated and unnecessary, clinging to its special interests, compelled to destroy all opposition and all potential opposition. As Trotsky observed in The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936, Stalin felt persecuted because he was—ruthless terror inevitably breeds terrorism and plots. The economy and culture were advancing, giving the people confidence to resist the bureaucracy. Trotsky warned of the danger that would result from Stalin’s purge of the army and sounded the alarm over the imminence of fascist attack. He attributed the Stalin cult to the bureaucracy’s need for an all-wise, infallible Emperor to justify the terror that preserves their positions.
Khrushchev: He says the personality cult “just developed” because Stalin was vain instead of modest. He claims there was no collective leadership in place between 1935-48 because there were no party congresses. This is a lie. The bureaucracy collectively led and approved and needed the cult: it was the price of their privileges. Khrushchev discloses that the army was beheaded and that Stalin ignored repeated warnings of fascist attack. He describes Stalin’s fear and cowardice, stupefaction and despair in the wake of terrible military defeats due to lack of arms and stupid and vicious tactical decisions. He shows Stalin to be a reactionary Utopian psychologically.
The Pattern: Khrushchev won’t reveal that Stalin’s reactionary Utopianism was expressed politically in peaceful co-existence with imperialism, the theory of socialism in one country, and asinine trust in pacts with fascists. Stalinist class collaboration, the politics of the bureaucracy, is what brought the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse in World War II, to be saved only by the people fighting for their nationalized property forms—not for Stalin.
5. The Truth: The Soviet victory against Nazi Germany was a miracle of heroism by the Russian people despite unconscionable Stalinist betrayal. But while they were fighting for collectivism against capitalism, what were the Communist Parties of the West forced to do? To aid the capitalists against the militants in the working class! Stalin decreed a big patriotic whoop-de-doo, support for anti-strike pledges, and suppression of the Negro struggle. In turn, Roosevelt understood and treasured Stalinism and rewarded it: Trotsky’s biography was suppressed; Hollywood glamorized the bureaucracy in Mission to Moscow; the Trotskyist-led teamsters union in Minnesota was smashed; and Socialist Workers Party leaders were convicted of subversion in the Smith Act trials.
Khrushchev: Commends the people for winning the war and confirms Stalin was an obstacle. But makes no mention of Stalin’s international policies, which sucked the masses into support of the American imperialist colossus. Khrushchev never mentions Stalin’s post-war sell-out pacts with the imperialists to contain world revolution. He says Stalin’s maniacal egotism is what caused the rift with Yugoslavia, rather than political opposition to Yugoslavia’s independent road to socialism.
The Pattern: Khrushchev wants us to believe that Stalin the man was going mad, but that Stalinist politics are evidently good since they are never mentioned. In fact, it is Stalinist politics that are mad. The bureaucrats are jettisoning the man but they are desperately clinging to the only kind of politics that can maintain them.
6. Khrushchev: Pleads ignorance, helplessness and fear as the reasons for the collective leadership’s lack of intervention against Stalin’s plots. Moreover, he claims the people were hypnotized and blindly supported Stalin. Since Stalin died, however, the collective leadership has been a model of democratic and loving and tolerant stewardship. And poor Stalin believed all his crimes to have been done in the best interests of the USSR: “in this lies the whole tragedy.”
The Truth: If the people were hypnotized, bloody repression would not have been necessary. The bureaucrats never intervened because they were hand-picked henchmen of Stalin who owed their careers and privileges and country estates to him and his regime. They knew full well what was going on. And this benevolent collective leadership has already produced tanks and corpses in East Germany; broken strikes in Poznan, Hungary; purged half the parties of Eastern Europe; continued the flagrant persecution of Jews and other minorities; and only grudgingly granted concessions on living standards, working conditions and political liberties.
There is nothing tragic about a traitor being treacherous; the only tragedy lies in the fact that so many millions of honest socialists believed the lies about Stalin by Stalin.
Let’s add up the plusses and minuses of the Khrushchev speech and summarize the main pattern and purpose of his speech.
The force of the new stage of the Russian Revolution— started by the revolts in Vorkuta and other Soviet labor camps, the 1953 workers uprising in East Germany, and the mass strikes and protests in Poznan this year—has pushed Khrushchev into a terrific new concession, following the previous concessions on more and better food, more and better services, longer maternity leave, legalization of abortions, a shorter work week, higher wages, etc. To save themselves, the bureaucracy must sharply disassociate themselves from the hated tyrant Stalin. They must prove that the huge chamber of horrors was his fault alone, and that they are and will be men of a different stripe.
They seek to prove that Stalin’s interests were not theirs, that they do not represent a huge parasite caste that benefited from the Stalin cult. By deliberately smashing the monster they themselves created, they hope to escape all responsibility for him.
But in replacing the hero cult with a Super-Villain cult, they expose themselves fatally. Because they can’t explain why the cult arose. Or why it lasted so long. Or who it rested on.
These answers would indict all of them as a grouping alien to Marxism, born of reaction, representing the ideas of a minority caste seeking bourgeois privileges against the interests of the working class. They can’t explain the why’s because they would thereby confirm Trotskyism.
They can’t explain the relation of Stalin’s world politics to his tyranny. Because their fate rests on these same counterrevolutionary politics of class collaboration and betrayal and wholesale murder of revolutionaries. To show how Stalinism denies political reality would be Trotskyism. To show how tyranny within led to the strangulation of the Communist Parties without, replacing genuine revolutionary leaders with obedient fools, would confirm Trotskyism. To show how Stalin played with revolutions as he played with his armies, sacrificing them in his diplomatic maneuvers with imperialism, would prove the validity of Trotskyism.
So they must continue to state like idiots that the Stalin cult existed in Russia alone, and was caused by Stalin alone, and nobody else and nothing else is involved. There was no social reason, no material basis, no political results and no ideological effects. They must expose their own existence in a dream world.
Khrushchev must repeat like a parrot that Stalin played a progressive role in the ’20s, “building socialism.”For if he confesses that Stalin was nothing but a terrible obstacle to socialism from the beginning, he admits that Trotsky was right. So he repeats the slanders about Trotsky, and it is on these vicious lies about Trotskyism that his whole case rests!
He cannot disclose that there were leaders who intervened against Stalin’s policies, because they were the leaders of the Left Opposition whom Khrushchev and Co. helped murder. Every time he develops his case against Stalin, he runs smack up against the ideas of Trotskyism, and retreats in terror. This leads anybody willing to analyze the situation (in the calm and objective fashion that Khrushchev says can now be employed) to the conclusion that the present regime is merely Stalinism sans Stalin, a “bad regime of dishonest men.”
He lies and ignores the first ten years, when Stalin led a political counter-revolution against the heritage of Bolshevism. He can’t show how the bureaucratic waste, mismanagement, corruption and ignorance was as much an obstacle to building socialism as it was to defending the country against Hitler. Though he grants that the people won the war, he cannot admit they also are responsible for the industrial achievements and economic progress and “building socialism.”Because if the people did this all by themselves, they not only don’t need Stalin, they don’t need the oligarchy. Khrushchev knows this, but he’s damned if he’s going to say it. He’s not crazy!
He tells just enough to condemn Stalin explicitly, but himself only implicitly for his failure to condemn Stalinism, the internal and international class betrayal politics of the bureaucracy. He won’t, because his own privileges are bound up with Stalinism.
All his other policies push the Stalinist program hard: peaceful transition and class peace, which, translated into Americanese, mean capitalist prosperity, Democratic Party control of the working class and Negro people, and Reutherite hegemony over the labor unions.
As long as the national Communist Parties are on this kind of insane line, Khrushchev is in. As long as these policies are approved by the Russian workers, Khrushchev is in. So he must prolong the frame-up of Trotsky and keep his ideas from the Russian masses, for they are Khrushchev’s nemesis.
The Khrushchev speech suppressed more facts than it revealed, and only the masses will finally force the whole story out of the bag, and reveal the true depths and fantastic heights of this most gigantic hoax and frame-up in all history.
Now that the first death blow has been dealt to Stalinism as a social phenomenon, the only way to help ease it completely off the map and at the same time to promote the socialist future, is the Trotskyist way of class struggle against Wall Street and against the agents of Wall Street in the Kremlin. For the only way real socialism can be obtained is to resist Stalinist degeneration and overthrow capitalism in its main industrial centers so that productivity can reach truly socialist heights. And conversely, the only way to fight this parasitic growth of Stalinism on the working class movements is to impel forward the class struggle and socialist consciousness.
Back to Lenin, is our slogan; back to Lenin up and down the line. And that means Trotskyism, international socialism, and the end of the bureaucracy.