Stalin-Trotsky story

Know any Stalin-Trotsky stories?

According to the one I heard, Stalin once received a telegram from the exiled Trotsky. The version I got didn’t put a precise date on the event, but I imagine it would have been around the period of the Moscow trials and the war in Spain, when the struggle against Trotsky-fascism was at its height. Trotsky was in exile in Mexico, and was agitating for the political overthrow of what he called the “Stalinist caste”, a bureaucratic stratum which had grown like a parasite on the body of the workers’ state. Many of his followers had been exiled to Siberia, imprisoned, or shot, while others had capitulated to Stalin, either by choice or after being exposed to the high pressure salesmanship of the GPU/NKVD. And yet to many, in Russia and world wide, Trotsky remained a powerful symbol of the original internationalist, insurrectionist heart of the Bolshevik party.

The telegram had perhaps, for security reasons, been placed in an envelope and delivered to Stalin’s desk in the Kremlin, by an obsequious NKVD official, who may or may not have known its contents.

We don’t know whether Stalin had slept well the night before and was feeling his bluff genial self, looking forward to a day of puffing on the old pipeweed, a bit of dialectical materialist theory, and a few good deeds for the children of the proletariat and peasantry. Or whether he had woken up in a bit of a mood and was being assailed by one of his strange paranoiac fantasies, in which he was cast in the character of a Byzantine despot, universally feared and profoundly hated, surrounded by treacherous yes-men who would betray him at the first sign of weakness, pursued at every turn by dark conspiracies and murderous plots, and thus ready at all moments to strike out against the plotters before they struck out at him.

If the envelope contained any indication to Stalin that it was indeed from Trotsky, Stalin would certainly have torn it open with pounding heart and racing mind. But imagine his sheer disbelief, his confused uncertainty, and then his untrammelled joy, upon making out the short message it contained:

To The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
The Kremlin,
Moscow

From Leon Trotsky

Mexico…..193….

Dear comrade Stalin:

You are the great leader of the world proletariat. You are the theoretician of the socialist revolution. You are the true heir of Lenin and of Bolshevism.

Trotsky

This was certainly a moment of extraordinary elation for Joseph D. After all, he had always had doubts about his being truly worthy of Lenin’s mantle. He had long felt that the other Old Bolsheviks, especially those Jew intellectuals, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky, and that other professor, Bukharin, had looked down on him and mocked his rather rudimentary grasp of Marxist theory. Especially Trotsky, the upstart, the outsider, the Menshevik. The days around October 1917 when Trotsky was not only been admitted into the party but almost immediately promoted to the rank of Lenin’s right hand man, had not been forgotten; and neither had the period after 1923 when Trotsky first began to throw in his lot with the ‘Oppositionists’ in the party, the so-called left wing.

Now all that suddenly lost its power to rancour. Stalin had preserved the workers’ state far better than Trotsky could ever have done, with his rootless cosmopolitan dreams of world wide revolution. And now he, Joseph D, the lowly activist from Georgia, was leading the Soviet Union towards a new epoch of history, towards socialism itself. And finally, after years of bitter polemic, after torrents of frightful slander and abuse, Trotsky too had capitulated. Trotsky had recognised the truth. Not because – as was regrettably the case with some of the others – Stalin’s prison-guards and hit-men were holding a gun to his head and the heads of his family (well, at least not every day), but because the great Marxist theoretician Trotsky had come to recognise that he had been deeply mistaken, and that Stalin had been proved right. Stalin wanted to believe this so strongly that he almost succeeded in expelling from his thoughts the notion that this whole business was a trap, and was at the very least a sinister attempt by Trotsky to fuck with his mind.

This news was of such historic significance that Stalin decided to call a mass rally in Red Square in order to announce it to the proletarians of the Soviet Union and of the world entire. Stalin, surrounded by the eminent dignitaries of the USSR, standing in a high podium festooned with red flags, read the letter out himself to a vast throng of Communist Party members, and non-party delegates from factories and collective farms all over the country. After the Father of the Peoples read out Trotsky’s words of abject capitulation, there was a moment of stunned silence, hastily broken by watchful KGB men who took it upon themselves to be in the vanguard of tumultuous cheering and applause.

When several tidal waves of approbation had finally subsided, there was again a moment of silence; and Stalin, ever the upholder of workers’ democracy, asked the assembled multitude if anyone, any rank and file party member or non-party comrade, would like to make a contribution to the debate. Again silence, the silence of utter dread.

And yet from the massed ranks in Red Square, a single hand went up. It was the hand of a delegate from the autonomous Jewish republic of Birobijan, socialism’s solution to the Jewish question within the USSR.

To recall: “In 1928 Stalin set aside an area of 14,000 square miles in the remote, sparsely populated Biro-Bidzhanskii District of the Soviet Far East for resettlement of Jews. In 1934 the area was officially declared the Jewish Autonomous Region – with the promise that, when Jews numbered at least 100,000 or accounted for a majority of the region’s population, it would become a Soviet republic. Yiddish, as the language of the secular Jewish proletariat, was an official language of the JAR, and in 1936 Stalin decreed the territory the centre of Jewish culture within the Soviet Union” (Jewish Quarterly no 198, summer 2005).

Be that as it may, this delegate was a probably a tailor by trade, and his name was probably Cohen or Goldstein, or some Russified version thereof.

“Comrade Stalin, I have a very small nuance which I would like to express”. Stalin, overjoyed that this simple worker was displaying the courage to speak his mind in the spirit of open proletarian debate, beckoned the tailor to ascend the podium so that he could use the modern electric microphones which had previously amplified Stalin’s opening speech.

The tailor put his wire-framed reading glasses over his ethnically characteristic nose and politely accepted the telegram from Stalin’s own hand.

"Yes, comrade Stalin, a small nuance. The telegram should read as follows:

You are the great leader of the world proletariat? You are the theoretician of the socialist revolution? You are the true heir of Lenin and of Bolshevism?"

Again the silence of utter dread.