History

Trotsky’s account of bureaucracy has become the default lens through which much of the Left has come to understand Stalinism. He treats the bureaucracy as the central cause of the revolution's degeneration, but does his account of its class basis and relationship to Soviet society still hold up? Indeed, the historian Robert McNeal (1977, 32) already noted in 1977 Trotsky’s “somewhat fantastic perception of the USSR in the late twenties and early Thirties,” which often served as the basis of his interpretations of the Stalinist state. Much has changed since Trotsky was writing, and new historical research into the inner workings of the Soviet system gives us good reason to be sceptical of Trotsky’s interpretation of Stalinism.

Trotsky’s hatred of the bureaucracy ran deep. Stalinism, Trotsky reasoned, did not have an organic base in the working class. It was purely a creature of the bureaucracy. Trotsky, however, is careful not to let his own animus subsume the theoretical point; Stalin was not the creator of the bureaucracy, but merely a personification of these tendencies, as the revolution had exhausted itself, leaving an opening for the bureaucratic takeover. In describing Trotsky’s characterization of the nature of Stalinism, Twiss (189, 2014) writes that:

Unlike the right and the left wings, the centrist tendency had no roots in the fundamental classes of Soviet society. Rather, [Stalinism’s] strength was to be found in the apparatuses of the party, the state, the economic institutions, and the mass organisations, which combined constituted an enormous ‘layer of “administrators”

He attributed his own political downfall to Stalin’s bureaucratic manipulation rather than to any kind of expression of meritocratic advancement or democratic sentiment within the Party. As General Secretary, Trotsky believed that Stalin used his position to build a network of loyal officials within the Party apparatus, allowing him to consolidate power and marginalize opponents through control over these appointments. In actuality, historian James Harris, working from archival evidence, argues that Stalin did not usurp power but won the support of Party officialdom through normal channels of intra-party democracy. Trotsky’s account of bureaucratic manipulation may have provided a less politically humiliating explanation for his defeat, but there is no evidence to suggest that the General Secretary’s office, despite certain advantages, possessed the autonomous, all-encompassing power often attributed to it by sections of the anti-Stalinist left, given the institutional constraints of the position. Historian James Harris (2005, 79) writes [emphasis mine]:

Some have argued that Stalin tipped the weight of the Central Committee in his favour by excluding his opponents from it and appointing his supporters. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that Stalin could control the slates of Central Committee members up for election at the Party congresses in the 1920s, or overtly manipulate its expansion in his favor. Rather, it appears as though Stalin largely carried the Central Committee on the basis of his policies and, in time, on the concrete results they brought … Stalin nevertheless placed greater emphasis on the support he had in the broader Party membership: ‘In 1927,’ he observed, ‘720,000 Party members voted for the Central Committee line. That is, the backbone of the Party voted for us

Trotsky had derided his political defeat as bureaucratic manipulation, but it is probably more accurately described as being outmaneuvered in a political struggle by a rival whose ideas and policies had greater resonance with the intended audience. A number of scholars have noted that Trotsky's single-mindedness and intransigence undermined his ability to build coalitions and navigate the cutthroat arena of Soviet politics. Trotsky, Carr (1958, 152) writes, “had no political instinct in the narrower sense, no feeling for a situation, no sensitive touch for the levers of power.” Kotkin (2014), too, reiterated Carr’s finding, largely critical of Trotsky's merits as a political operator in his monumental biography on Stalin. It’s also worth noting the extent to which Trotsky's understanding of bureaucracy was shaped by his own dwindling political prospects and alienation from the political system he played a central role in founding. Initially, from 1917-1922, Trotsky's conception of bureaucracy was centred around inefficiency and the need to restructure the Soviet economy. This was hardly unique to Trotsky, as Lenin, Stalin, and other leading Bolsheviks offered similar organizational critiques of Soviet bureaucracy, yet these earlier alternate Soviet conceptions have been overshadowed by Trotsky's later interpretation, which has come to dominate Left discussions of the Soviet bureaucratic question.

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