Trotsky, Stalin, and China

In Moscow, the events in China set off a major foreign relations debate as the United Opposition, which had been quiet since late 1926, coalesced around an attack on the policy of Stalin and Bukharin.^[66] Trotsky and Zinoviev led the Opposition, the membership of which included leading Bolsheviks like Radek, economists such as Sokolnikov, Preobrazhenskii, and Georgi Piatakov, and prominent representatives of Soviet policy abroad including Kamenev, Rakovskii, Krestinskii, and Ioffe. As provost of Sun Yat-sen University, Radek had access through Chinese students there to information on the situation in China. And thus informed, he criticized Stalin and Bukharin for their China policy—or their lack of one, as he put it—in an open debate at the Communist Academy a month before the Shanghai massacre. There he predicted that Chiang Kai-shek would turn on the CPC and betray the Chinese Revolution at the first opportunity.^[67] Following the debacle in Shanghai, eighty-four party members—and eventually hundreds—signed a declaration identifying themselves with the now vastly expanded United Opposition and submitted it to the Politburo.^[68] Zinoviev made an unauthorized speech censuring Bukharin and Stalin, and Trotsky forced a debate before the Eighth ECCI Plenum (18-30 May) at which he criticized their China policy in two vehement speeches.^[69] Trotsky, a candidate member of the ECCI, appeared as a nonvoting delegate. Zinoviev, president of the ECCI little more than six months earlier, was excluded from the meeting. The struggle between the Opposition and the Central Committee majority continued throughout the summer and peaked in October-November. As it did so, the three members of the Opposition who held diplomatic posts in Europe conferred in Berlin. Kamenev and Rakovskii advocated direct action and mass demonstrations against the Central Committee majority; Krestinskii favored continued maneuvering within the party leadership. In an act of protest against the majority, Ioffe committed suicide.

The Opposition issued its indictment in a series of manifestos beginning in May and continuing until the Fifteenth Party Congress the following December and beyond. Although it centered on "the Chinese question," the indictment included the whole package of economic and foreign policies

with which Stalin and Bukharin had identified themselves since the inception of "temporary capitalist stabilization" and "socialism in one country." They were attacked for their optimism and complacency, their belief that relations with the capitalist world were stabilized, their pursuit of "peaceful coexistence," their efforts to extend and consolidate "the breathing space," their failure to warn the workers of the world of the danger of imminent war with the imperialist powers, and their neglect of the task of sabotaging the war effort of the (prospective) interventionists. Criticizing the basic principles of the Stalin-Bukharin foreign policy, the Opposition charged the duumvirate with bringing the world revolutionary process to the brink of disaster with their "united front" strategy. This had failed not only in China but also in England, where the working class had reacted with passive indifference to the break in relations with the USSR. Russia, they charged, had lost the support of the international working class by sacrificing their interests to a foreign relations of power politics and maneuver with the capitalist states.

Rakovskii was both a leading member of the United Opposition and polpred in Paris. From the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 to the Fifteenth Congress in December 1927, he consistently articulated the Opposition position in the intraparty debate: The breathing space was not being extended; capitalism and socialism could not coexist peacefully any better in 1927 than they could in 1917; the foreign policy that Stalin conducted was "fundamentally wrong." Because Stalin had rejected the imperatives of the world revolutionary process (at least for the near term), the international working class had lost faith in the Socialist Republic, and "the Soviet Union had ceased to represent an ideological danger for the capitalist states." Not surprisingly, Rakovskii concluded, the capitalist press feared not Stalin but the Opposition.^[70]

Rakovskii had adopted a conciliatory stance in the debt settlement negotiations with France in 1926. Trotsky had too, hoping for access to European technology and capital. Stalin was publicly pledged to autarky. The war scare crisis turned the settlement with France into a point of contention in the leadership struggle, and both sides shifted positions.^[71] Seeking a way out of the crisis into which their confrontationist response to the reversals in China, Britain, and Poland had led them, Stalin and the Politburo openly committed themselves to "buying" peaceful relations with Europe, and with France in particular. Trotsky then made their inconsistency an issue. The foreign policy of the USSR, he charged, had been distorted by the doctrine of "socialism in one country." In 1926, Stalin and Bukharin had disregarded "our world economic ties and our economy's dependence on the world market" and had failed to obtain an agreement with France at a time when the French were in a position of weakness

(owing to financial crisis and governmental instability) and when the USSR could have bargained from a position of strength within world politics (because of the advancing revolution in China). Then, pressured by the war scare a year later, Trotsky continued, Bukharin and Stalin undertook what Trotsky called "super-hasty, exceptional measures to revive the negotiations," with France which resulted only in a tougher stance in Paris and "an intensification of pressure against us."^[72] Countering Trotsky's attack, Stalin cited Rakovskii's support for a prompt debt settlement, and Trotsky responded by writing Rakovskii in Paris asking him to keep in mind that the policy he advocated in Paris had become an issue in the intraparty struggle.^[73] Rakovskii was caught in a three-way conflict between his duties as polpred , his loyalty to the Opposition, and the desire of the Poincaré government to get rid of him. He could not have been unhappy about leaving his post in Paris.

The primary target of the Opposition attack was the China policy with which Stalin and Bukharin had openly identified themselves since the Seventh ECCI Plenum, and which had suffered such disastrous reversals.^[74] The exchanges between Stalin and Trotsky over the tactics of revolution to be used in China are best known as the beginnings of a prolonged doctrinal dispute that their followers and supporters sustained for decades. Long after the battle for control of the Communist International and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been decided, that dispute remained at the heart of the battle for leadership of the international Communist movement. However, the intraparty China debate also constituted a significant event in the history of early Soviet foreign relations. There was a long-standing agreement among the Bolsheviks not to inject foreign relations into the party struggles among themselves, nor to dispute openly regarding foreign policy within the ranks of the Comintern.^[75] This convention was broken in 1927 as the debate over China became the most visible feature of a wide-ranging intra-Bolshevik conflict.

Ignoring the norms of foreign policy formation and openly criticizing the policy of the Politburo during a time of war danger left the United Opposition open to charges of disloyalty. To such charges Trotsky replied that, as was the case with Georges Clemenceau in France in 1917, critics of a government could become the most effective fighters against the enemy— suggesting thereby that in the event of a direct military threat to the USSR, it might become necessary to oppose the Stalin-Bukharin leadership and take over direction of the war. With these words, which came to be known as his "Clemenceau thesis,"^[76] Trotsky at last put himself forward openly as the political alternative to Stalin. Neither previously nor thereafter was the confrontation between the two men more direct. The climax came at a joint plenum of the Central Control Commission and the Central

Committee held between 24 July and 8 August. There Stalin exploited the war scare to defeat the Opposition. Previously he had been the member of the collective leadership who most denigrated the seriousness of the war threat. Now he spoke of "the real and actual threat of a new war," "not a matter of some vague and immaterial 'danger.'" He ridiculed and denounced the Opposition for their "attacks on the Party" and for their "cowardice" and "desertion" in the face of danger from without.^[77]

All the Opposition's criticism was then summed up in a lengthy political platform,^[78] which the thirteen members of the Opposition on the Central Committee submitted to the Politburo in September for discussion at the impending Fifteenth Party Congress. The Central Committee majority defied party rules, however, and refused to have it distributed to the party membership. When members of the Opposition attempted to reproduce it themselves, utilizing three or four typewriters,^[79] the OGPU seized this "secret printing press," as they called it, and credited themselves with having exposed "an Opposition plot." Stalin ridiculed Zinoviev for having predicted the outbreak of war, at first for the spring and then for the autumn, and he characterized the Opposition as "hysterics."^[80] When Trotsky and Zinoviev attempted—unsuccessfully—to organize worker support in Leningrad and Moscow during the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, the OGPU suppressed them and recommended that the leadership of the Opposition be eliminated "at one stroke."^[81] In mid-November, Trotsky and Zinoviev were charged with organizing counterrevolutionary demonstrations and expelled from the party.^[82] The United Opposition split. In December, Zinoviev and Kamenev conceded to the majority leadership, leaving the followers of Trotsky alone in opposition. With Trotsky unable to participate, Rakovskii acted as spokesman for the Opposition at the Fifteenth Party Congress.^[83] The delegates there passed a resolution making opposition incompatible with party membership, thus beginning what has been called "the complete ideological disarmament" of party members with heterodox views.^[84] Rakovskii and seventy-five other Trotskyists were expelled from the party. And when these measures did not fully subdue the Opposition, Stalin submitted to the Central Committee proposals that in effect made opposition an unequivocal political crime. Persons holding Opposition views were to be regarded as accomplices of internal and external enemies and to be sentenced as "spies" by administrative decree of the OGPU.^[85] Although the Politburo as a whole did not completely agree with Stalin regarding the specific police measures and punishments to be used against the Opposition, it did agree to the principle that the OGPU would be employed in suppressing it.