Suppressed Testament of Lenin - pt. 6

Author: Leon Trotsky
Website: RL Online
Department:
Page: 6   ( 15) pages

Summary: Six Words

Six Words

Citing the testimony of Karl Radek, Emil Ludwig borrows from him the following episode:

After the death of Lenin we sat together, nineteen members of the Central Committee, tensely waiting to learn what our lost leader would say to us from his grave. Lenin's widow gave us his letter. Stalin read it. No one stirred during the reading. When it came to Trotsky the words occurred: "His non-Bolshevik past is not accidental." At that point Trotsky interrupted the reading and asked: "What does it say there?" The sentence was repeated. Those were the only words spoken in that solemn moment.

And then in the character of analyst, and not narrator, Ludwig makes the following remark on his own account:

A terrible moment, when Trotsky's heart must have stopped beating; this phrase of six words essentially determined the course of his life.

How simple it seems to find a key to the riddles of history! These unctuous lines of Ludwig would doubtless have uncovered to me myself the very secret of my destiny if ... if this Radek-Ludwig story did not happen to be false from beginning to end, false in small things and great, in what matters and in what matters not.

To begin with, the testament was written by Lenin not two years before his death as our author confirms, but one year. It was dated January 4, 1923; Lenin died on January 21, 1924. His political life had broken off completely, in March 1923. Ludwig speaks as though the testament had never been published in full. As a matter of fact it has been reproduced dozens of times in all the languages of the world press. The first official reading of the testament in the Kremlin occurred, not at a session of the Central Committee, as Ludwig writes, but in the Council of Elders at the Thirteenth Congress of the party on May 22, 1924. It was not Stalin who read the testament, but Kamenev in his then position as permanent president of the central party bodies. And finally—most important—I did not interrupt the reading with an emotional exclamation, because of the absence of any motive whatever for such an act. Those words which Ludwig wrote down at the dictation of Radek are not in the text of the testament. They are an outright invention. Difficult as it may be to believe, this is the fact.

If Ludwig were not so careless about the factual basis of his psychological patterns, he might without difficulty have got possession of an exact text of the testament, established the necessary facts and dates, and thus avoided those wretched mistakes with which his work about the Kremlin and the Bolsheviks is unfortunately brimful.

The so-called testament was written at two periods, separated by an interval of ten days: December 25, 1922 and January 4, 1923. At first only two persons knew of the document: the stenographer, M. Volodicheva, who wrote it from dictation, and Lenin's wife, N. Krupskaya. As long as there remained a glimmer of hope for Lenin's recovery, Krupskaya left the document under lock and key. After Lenin's death, not long before the Thirteenth Congress, she handed the testament to the Secretariat of the Central Committee, in order that through the party Congress it should be brought to the attention of the party for whom it was destined.

At that time the party apparatus was semi-officially in the hands of the troika (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin)—as a matter of fact, already in the hands of Stalin. The troika decisively expressed themselves against reading the testament at the Congress—the motive not at all difficult to understand. Krupskaya insisted upon her wish. At this stage the dispute was going on behind the scenes. The question was transferred to a meeting of the Elders at the Congress—that is, the leaders of the provincial delegations. It was here that the oppositional members of the Central Committee first learned about the testament, I among them. After a decision had been adopted that nobody should make notes, Kamenev began to read the text aloud. The mood of the listeners was indeed tense in the highest degree. But so far as I can restore the picture from memory, I should say that those who already knew the contents of the document were incomparably the most anxious. The troika introduced, through one of its henchmen, a resolution previously agreed upon with the provincial leaders: the document should be read to each delegation separately in executive session; no one should dare to make notes; at the plenary session the testament must not be referred to. With the gentle insistence characteristic of her, Krupskaya argued that this was a direct violation of the will of Lenin, to whom you could not deny the right to bring his last advice to the attention of the party. But the members of the Council of Elders, bound by factional discipline, remained obdurate; the resolution of the troika was adopted by an overwhelming majority.

In order to grasp the significance of those mystical and mythical "six words" which are supposed to have decided my fate, it is necessary to recall certain preceding and accompanying circumstances. Already in the period of sharp disputes on the subject of the October Revolution certain "old Bolsheviks" from the Right Wing had more than once pointed out with vexation that Trotsky after all had not formerly been a Bolshevik. Lenin always stood up against these voices. Trotsky long ago understood that a union with the Mensheviks was impossible, he said, for example, on November 14, 1917—"and since then there has been no better Bolshevik." On Lenin's lips those words meant something.

Two years later, while explaining in a letter to the foreign Communists the conditions under which Bolshevism had developed, how there had been disagreements arid splits, Lenin pointed out that "at the decisive moment, at the moment when it seized the power and created the Soviet Republic, Bolshevism was united and drew to itself all the best elements in the currents of socialist thought that were nearest to it." No current closer to Bolshevism than that which I represented up to 1917 existed either in Russia or the West. My union with Lenin had been predetermined by the logic of ideas and the logic of events. At the decisive moment Bolshevism drew into its ranks "all the best elements" in the tendencies "that were nearest to it." Such was Lenin's appraisal of the situation. I have do reason to dispute him.

At the time of our two months' argument on the trade union question (winter of 1920-21), Stalin and Zinoviev had again attempted to put into circulation references to the non-Bolshevik past of Trotsky. In answer to this, the less restrained leaders of the opposite camp had reminded Zinoviev of his conduct during the period of the October insurrection. Thinking over from all sides on his death-bed how relations would crystallize in the party without him, Lenin could not but foresee that Stalin and Zinoviev would try to use my non-Bolshevik past in order to mobilize the old Bolsheviks against me. The testament tries, incidentally, to forestall this danger, too. Here is what it says immediately after its characterization of Stalin and Trotsky:

I will not further characterize the other members of the Central Committee as to their personal qualities. I will only remind you that the October episode of Zinoviev and Kamenev was not, of course, accidental, but that it ought as little to be used against them personally as the non-Bolshevism of Trotsky.

This remark that the October episode "was not accidental" pursues a perfectly definite goal: to warn the party that in critical circumstances Zinoviev and Kamenev may again reveal their lack of firmness. This warning stands, however, in no relation with the remark about Trotsky. In regard to him it is merely recommended not to use his non-Bolshevik past as an argument ad hominem . I therefore had no motive for putting the question which Radek attributes to me. Ludwig's guess that my heart "stopped beating" also falls to the ground. Least of all did the testament set out to make a guiding role in the party work difficult for me. As we shall see below, it pursued an exactly opposite aim.

The Mutual Relations of Stalin and Trotsky