Second Conference on Trotsky Held in Russia

This report was written by Marilyn Vogt-Downey, in consultation with Geoff Barr, on the December 1995 Conference of The International Committee for the Study of the Legacy of Leon Trotsky.

Second Conference on Trotsky Held in Russia

Midday in Leningrad

Leningrad airport is a remarkable place. Having left the plane the passenger enters a vast concourse in which clocks display the time is the world’s main cities. Remarkably they are all enjoying the midday sun at once. The airport is symbolic of the new Russia. New but not really working. The airport has the capacity of a major centre and the number of flights of a smallish British regional airport.

Our point in travelling to Russia was to attend the second conference of The International Committee for the Study of the Legacy of Leon Trotsky. It met in St Petersburg. The occasion was the 90 Anniversary of the 1905 Revolution. This was probably the first conference in the home of the great Russian revolutions to discuss seriously the work and ideas of Trotsky since the 1920s. It took place in the History Faculty of St Petersburg University on 4 December.

The St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, of which Leon Trotsky was a President and a key political leader, was established on October 13, 1905, as a product of massive worker rebellions. It survived for 50 days as a council of workers’ delegates and an incipient organ of a workers’ government before it was suppressed by the Tsar’s police. The idea for this conference originated with the Committee for the Study of Leon Trotsky’s Legacy (CSLTL) which was founded at the first conference on Trotsky in Russia held in November 1994 in Moscow. Also sponsoring the conference were the History Faculty of St. Petersburg and Scholars for Democracy and Socialism.

Addressing the conference were professors and political activists from Russia and abroad. V.V. Kalashnikov, a professor at St. Petersburg University and the co-chairperson of the Socialist Party of Toilers – one of several parties to have emerged from the ruins of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – made the opening remarks. He outlined the revolutionary nature of Soviets and went on to discuss some of the difficulties that the revolutionary regime faced in taking its programme forward. After a careful and critical outline of the problems faced by Revolutionary Russia in the 1920s he offered some useful remarks about more recent Russian history. In particular he dealt with the problems of an historic tendency for Russia to try to catch up with the West by using a strong state. Such a state undermines the possibilities for democracy. He discussed the rise of workers’ democracy from 1905 through the Russian revolution of 1917, its immediate aftermath and the subsequent repression of workers’ democracy to the present time. It is, however, noteworthy that Kalashnikov managed to cover this history without once mentioning Leon Trotsky. He thus ignored Trotsky’s role in the 1905 or October 1917 revolutions and his struggle in defence of workers’ democracy from 1923 as leader of the Left Opposition until his assassination by Stalin’s agent in 1940. It is precisely such selective, falsified, versions of history that have characterized the Stalin and post-Stalin periods in the Soviet Union and Russia that the CSLTL was established to correct.

Kalashnikov was followed in the morning by S.I. Patolov, a professor of history and department chair at the Russian Academy of Sciences speaking on “The Revolution of 1905 and the First Soviets in Russia“. Others in the morning session included N.V. Mikhailov, also a professor of history at the Russian Academy of Sciences speaking on “The Petersburg Workers and the Organization of Workers Councils 1905-1907,” and N.N. Smirnov a professor of history at St. Petersburg University on “Soviets and the Crisis of Power in 1993“. The sociologist M.P. Rubinchuk talked about ”Culture and the Soviets”, and Geoff Barr, Lecturer of Politics at the University of Exeter dealt with “An Old Story, Trotsky and Democracy: Soviets versus Parliaments.”

Serving as indispensable translators were Nikolai Preobrazhensky, a Marxist historian of the workers’ movement who lives in St. Petersburg; Rob Jones, a member of the Militant Labour Party who lives in Moscow; and Alexei Gusev, who also addressed the meeting. The morning session was meant to focus on historical aspects of the theme with the afternoon session devoted more to the relevance of the lessons of the 1905 revolution today.

About 70 people attended the morning session, most of them young students in the history faculty. Unfortunately, the audience shrank considerably to some 25 after the lunch break, seven of whom were international guests. Afternoon speakers included Alexei Gusev, candidate of historical sciences at Moscow State University and an International Co-ordinator of the CSLTL, who spoke on “L. Trotsky, the Trotskyists, and the Problem of Soviet Democracy: 1923-1940”. Gusev raised some interesting questions about the policies of the Trotskyist opposition from the early 1920s through to 1933. He pointed to the evolution of the opposition’s thinking under the pressure of events. Gusev argued that while Trotsky favoured party democracy he did not favour Soviet democracy in the period of the Left Opposition (1923-5). He suggested that the Trotskyists only favoured full Soviet democracy after 1933. This contribution led to vigorous debate. Some argued that Trotsky’s position was far more democratic than Gusev had suggested. Others thought that Gusev was accurate in his assessment and that there was no basis in the 1920s for Soviet democracy.

Hillel Ticktin, a Reader at the University of Glasgow spoke on “The Permanent Revolution of Leon Trotsky and Soviet Democracy”. He spoke of the rigour and persistence of Trotsky. He sharply outlined the theory of permanent revolution and related it to Marx’s ideas. The backwardness of the Soviet Union meant that a cultural revolution was needed before the kind of workers’ democracy envisaged by the Russian revolutionaries could work. Ticktin pointed especially to the international aspects of permanent revolution and argued that the Soviet Revolution was unsustainable without revolutions in the West.

Alexander Buzgalin, Professor of Economics at Moscow State University discussed “The Fate of Democracy on the Eve of the Twentieth Century”. He argued that the key question was workers’ self management. He pointed out that under both the New Economic Policy of the 1920s and under Gorbachev’s Perestroika there were struggles by workers to manage their own factories.

Geoffrey Caveney, a young political activist and student of Russian revolutionary history from Chicago spoke on “Trotsky, Youth, and the Call for ‘Stability’”; while Boris Tamarkin, a young St Petersburg student spoke on “Trotsky the Polemicist.” The latter speaker appeared at the conference unexpectedly with a very large collection of notes on works of Trotsky’s he had recently read while preparing his report.

The symposium was chaired throughout by Professor Mikhail Voyeikov, Economics Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow who is a key organiser of the CSLTL in Moscow. After the reports, time was allowed for discussion.

Perhaps these brief comments on some of the speakers give a flavour of the event. The Conference was the second in the series. The first took place just over a year before in Moscow and the shift to Leningrad was important. It marked an important anniversary and it put the name of Trotsky before many students in this city of over 5 million people.

Revolutionary tourism?

Just how much work remains to be done to revive the buried history and Trotsky’s role in it was apparent the next day. Some of those who attended the conference, led by Professor Voyeikov, set out to tour some of the historic sites of the 1905 revolution. The tourists arrived at the Technological Institute, where the plenary of the 1905 St. Petersburg soviet of workers deputies had been about to meet and – its executive committee with Trotsky as its president was meeting – when the building was surrounded by the Tsars police and they were all arrested on December 3, 1905. The uprising was defeated. What today’s visitors were to learn at the site was disappointing.

The only museum there – which was closed for due to renovations – is devoted to scientific achievements by scholars such as Mendeleyev who also worked in that building over the years. Although there was a wall that held pictures of apparently political importance, that wall was covered over, also due to renovation. No one at the Institute seemed to know which was the room the Executive Committee and Trotsky were meeting in when the police arrested them. The allegedly learned woman in charge claimed not to know who the presidents of the 1905 soviet were and would not credit Trotsky with any role in it. She finally assigned one of her lower-ranking assistants to guide the tourists in their search. They think that they managed to find the historic room but it was closed, unmarked and also under renovation. History in the former Soviet Union is still buried deeply, behind closed doors.

Plans

The International Committee for the Study of the Legacy of Leon Trotsky also met to take its work forward. It agreed that it will return to Moscow for a larger conference. This will meet from 22 to 24 November 1996. Its theme will be of considerable importance to academics and workers in Russia and the wider world. It will be on the subject “The Revolution Betrayed, 60 Years Later.” The focus will be on Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, published when Trotsky was in enforced exile. Trotsky’s scientific analysis of the degeneration of the Russian revolution and of Stalinism remains the most crucial expression of Marxist thought in the twentieth century, indispensable to understanding the evolution of the class struggle in our epoch, particularly in the former Soviet Union. The manuscript was not printed in book form in Russian until 1971 in France. There are now at least three, editions of this book available in Russian in Russia, none of them in large numbers.

The Committee will make a point of expanding its work among academics in Russia and in the wider world. Time was also given to discuss the programme of publications. The main focus will remain on publishing Trotsky’s work in Russian. The publication of The Case of Leon Trotsky in Russian is the next major project. The key papers of the 1994 Conference are also being prepared for publication in Russian. After some discussion it was also agreed to start a programme of publication of Trotsky’s writings in Ukrainian.

Those interested in the work of the Committee should contact the international Co-ordinators (help with funding for the publications programme is especially welcome):

The President is Pierre Brouè , Universite des Sciences Sociales de Grenoble, Grenoble FRANCE

Committee for the Study of Leon Trotsky’s Legacy, P.O. Box 1890, New York, NY 10009; tel: 718-636-5446 or e-mail: mvogt@igc.apc.org or fax: 212-807-1832

Alexei Gusev, Department of History, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

In Britain contact Hillel Ticktin, IREES, Glasgow University, Glasgow, G12, Scotland tel: 0141 339 8855 ext.4377

Also useful is: Professor Mikhail Voyeikov, Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ul. Krasikov 27, 117218 Moscow, Russia; Tel: 095-332-4525 (w) or 095-326-3497 (h)

Geoff Barr and Marilyn Vogt-Downey
(Written 9:03 PM Jan 29, 1996 by mvogt in igc:reg.ussr)