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Trotsky’s Report of the Siberian Delegation
Trotsky’s estrangement from the Mensheviks
On Substitutionism
For a Broad Mass Party
Again on Bolshevism and Jacobinism
IN SEPTEMBER 1903 the Menshevik leaders assembled in Geneva to decide their future action. They elected a shadow central committee to carry on the struggle against the Leninist committee. it consisted of Axelrod, Martov, Trotsky, Dan and Potresov. [1] (Except for Trotsky these men were to lead Menshevism to the end.)
The Mensheviks opened an all-out attack on Lenin’s ‘super centralism’. Martov wrote that a hyper-centralised party was bound to degenerate into a bureaucratic putschist organisation’ run by a leader and divorced from the masses. [2] Plekhanov, who broke with Lenin shortly after the Second Congress, went even further. In an article entitled ‘Centralism or Bonapartism’ he accused Lenin of Bonapartism, his concept of centralism being really that of a Bonaparte. He is ‘ready with a light heart to tear away from the party one category of comrades after another as they tear leaf after leaf from an artichoke.’ [3] Vera Zasulich went as far as to compare Lenin to Louis XIV. [4]
Trotsky did not lag behind. In fact he outdid Martov, Plekhanov and Zasulich in the harshness of his attack.
Almost immediately after the congress Trotsky wrote a report which was a bitter attack on Lenin:
The congress thought that it was doing creative work; it was only destructive, and capriciously destructive. For who could have supposed that the ‘Iskraist’ congress would pitilessly crush the editorial board of Iskra, that is, of the paper it had just recognised as the central organ of the party? What political astrologer could have foreseen that Comrades Martov and Lenin would intervene in the congress as the leaders of the two enemy factions?
It was like a thunderbolt from the blue. [This was largely] Comrade Lenin’s personal responsibility. At the Second Congress of Russian Social Democracy, this man, with all the energy and all the talent typical of him, acted as disorganiser ... Behind Lenin, during the second period of the Congress’s work, there was a new compact majority of hard Iskraists’, opposed to the soft Iskrists’. We, as delegates of the Siberian Union, were among the soft ones ...we do not think we have blemished our revolutionary record. [5]
The next day, comrades, we buried Iskra ... From then on, Iskra no longer existed. It could only be referred to in the past tense. [6]
Echoing Martov, Trotsky wrote that Lenin was impelled by a ‘yearning for power’ (Wille zur Macht) which led him to impose upon the party a ‘state of siege’:
The ‘state of siege’ on which Lenin insisted with such energy, requires ‘full powers’. The practice of organised distrust demands an iron hand. The system of Terror is crowned by a Robespierre. Comrade Lenin reviewed the members of the party in his mind, and reached the conclusion that this iron hand could only be himself. And he was right. The hegemony of social democracy in the struggle for emancipation meant, according to the ‘state of siege’, the hegemony of Lenin over social democracy. [7] ...
We have suffered a defeat, because fate decreed the victory not of centralism but of ego-centralism. [8]
(Trotsky had forgotten his own words at the congress that the party rules should be ‘the organised distrust of the party towards all its sections’.)
Like a modern-day Robespierre, he said:
... Lenin transformed the modest council into an all-powerful Committee of Public Safety, in order to take on himself the role of the Incorruptible. Everything which was in his way had to be swept aside. The perspective of the destruction of the Iskraist’ Montagne did not stop Comrade Lenin. It was simply a question of establishing, through the intermediary of the council, and without resistance, a ‘Republic of Virtue and Terror’. [9]
Like Robespierre, he said, Lenin was preparing the ground for reaction:
A grave danger threatens us at the present time; the inevitable and fast approaching collapse of Leninist ‘centralism’ ... will ... create disillusionment which may turn out to be fatal, not just for the Robespierres and the islands of centralism, but also for the idea of a single combat organisation in general. It is the ‘thermidorians’ of socialist opportunism who will then be masters of the situation. [10]
For the first time, Trotsky makes this significant analogy between Lenin and Robespierre, between the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins, to which in years to come and in different circumstances he would return. In a postscript, however, Trotsky added that he did not really intend to compare Lenin to Robespierre; Lenin was ‘a caricature of Robespierre’. [11]
Shortly after the congress Plekhanov, who had supported Lenin there, changed his mind. He announced that he could not bear to ‘fire on his comrades’, that ‘rather than have a split, it is better to put a bullet in one’s brain’. He decided to invite Martov, Axelrod, Zasulich and Potresov to join the editorial board of Iskra. Lenin resigned in disgust. The Mensheviks took over Iskra. But Plekhanov continued to be very hostile to Trotsky. He demanded of the editorial board that it would never again publish an article by Trotsky. He used as an excuse the fact that Trotsky’s attacked him in his Report of the Siberian Delegation. Plekhanov threatened to resign, claiming that he found it ‘morally repugnant’ to be responsible for a journal to which Trotsky contributed.
The Menshevik leadership was in a difficult position. Trotsky had just acted as a leading spokesman for them, while Plekhanov had sided with Lenin. However, it was thanks to Plekhanov that they had taken over Iskra. For a time the Menshevik leaders, above all Martov, tried to resist Plekhanov’s demand, but they then gave way. And so, in April 1904 Trotsky left the journal. [12]
This estrangement was accompanied by increasing political differences between Trotsky and all the Menshevik leaders. After the congress they showed an increasing inclination, in reaction to Lenin’s intransigence, to move rightwards to an alliance with the liberals.
On 8-9 February 1904 war broke out between Russia and Japan. An element in the outbreak was the government’s desire to foment war hysteria against revolutionary stirrings. Prime minister Plehve actually said: ‘We need a small victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.’ [13]
The liberals were very willing to play the Tsarist game. Their immediate reaction was patriotism. Their paper Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), suggested as a slogan: ‘Long live the army!’ When the Japanese demonstrated their superior fighting ability on both land and sea the liberals’ patriotism weakened somewhat, and they became mildly oppositional. This attitude sharpened after the Japanese were victorious at the battle of Liaoyang in July, when it became apparent that the Russians were not going to win the war, and that the government was clearly in a blind alley. Now the brave leaders of the gentry and the middle classes showed their mettle. Osvobozhdenie commented: ‘The occupation of Manchuria and the outlet to the sea were economically nonsensical for Russia.’ [14] Their attitude towards the war became defeatist. Defeat would weaken the Tsar and make the autocracy amenable to compromise. ‘The Japanese,’ said a Russian liberal, will not enter the Kremlin, but the Russians will’. [15]
Gaining confidence, the liberals started a campaign, using the local organs of self-government, the Zemstvos, as their platform. There they aired their grievances and planned a national conference of Zemstvo delegates. The conference took place in November, and was followed by banquets of liberal landlords, industrialists, professors, lawyers, doctors, economists, and others. Long-winded speeches were made, plans for constitutional reforms discussed, protests aired. The aim, however, was not to overthrow Tsarism, but to strike a bargain with it.
The Mensheviks were enthusiastic about these banquets. They called on the workers to back the liberals, bolster their courage and avoid extreme action, in case the liberals took fight.
Thus, in November 1904 the editors of Iskra sent a letter to all party organisations:
... within the limits of the struggle against absolutism, and particularly in its present phase, our attitude towards the liberal bourgeoisie is defined by the task of imbuing it with more courage and impelling it to join in those demands being put forward by the proletariat led by the Social Democracy. [16]
After making this statement, Axelrod suggested the following campaign tactics: efforts must be made
... to bring the masses into direct contact with the Zemstvo Assembly, to concentrate the demonstration before the actual premises where the Zemstvo assemblymen are in session. Some of the demonstrators penetrate into the session hall, and at a suitable moment, through the spokesman specially authorised for the purpose, they ask the permission of the assembly to read out a statement on behalf of the workers. If this is not granted, the spokesman enters a loud protest against the refusal of an Assembly which speaks in the name of the people to hear the voice of the people’s genuine representatives.
The executive committee must take measures in advance to ensure that the appearance of several thousand workers outside the building where the Zemstvo assemblymen are in session, and of several score or hundred in the building itself, shall not plunge the Zemstvoists into panic fear under the impact of which they might throw themselves under the shameful protection of the police and Cossacks, thus transforming a peaceful demonstration into an ugly fight and brutal battering, distorting its whole meaning. [17]
The spokesman of Menshevism, Martynov, in his pamphlet Two Dictatorships (1904), spelled out the reasoning behind this attitude in similar terms:
The coming revolution will be a revolution of the bourgeoisie; and that means that ... it will only, to a greater or lesser extent, secure the rule of all or some of the bourgeois classes ... If this is so, it is clear that the coming revolution can on no account assume political forms against the will of the whole of the bourgeoisie, as the latter will be the master of tomorrow. If so, then to follow the path of simply frightening the majority of the bourgeois elements would mean that the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat could lead to only one result – the restoration of absolutism in its original form.
The revolutionary goal, therefore, lay in ‘the more democratic "lower" section of society’s compelling the "higher" section to agree to lead the bourgeois revolution to its logical conclusion’. [18]
The Menshevik paper Iskra at the time viewed Russian society and the workers’ tasks as follows:
When looking at the arena of struggle in Russia, what do we see? Only two powers: Tsarist autocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie, the latter organised and of tremendous specific weight. The working masses are split and can do nothing; as an independent force we do not exist, and therefore our task consists in the support of the second force – the liberal bourgeoisie; we must encourage it, and on no account frighten it by putting forward the independent demands of the proletariat. [19]
Astonishingly, until the end of 1904, Trotsky’s attitude to the Mensheviks was at best ambivalent. In August 1904 he published a pamphlet of more than a hundred densely printed pages entitled Our Political Tasks. It was dedicated to ‘my dear teacher, Pavel Borisovich Axelrod’ and Trotsky again and again referred to himself as a Menshevik in it. Both this pamphlet and the previous Report of the Siberian Delegation, were published under the imprint of the party press, controlled at the time by the Mensheviks. The second pamphlet was even more strident than the first. Trotsky denounces Lenin as ‘hideous’, ‘dissolute’, ‘demagogic’, ‘maliciously and morally repugnant’, an ‘adroit statistician’, a ‘slovenly attorney’, ‘maliciously and morally repulsive’. Although at the time Trotsky was in the process of breaking his ties with the Mensheviks, on one question, that of Party structure, he was completely with them.
The pamphlet was to a large extent a polemic against Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Trotsky accuses Lenin of being heavily involved in rallying the revolutionary intelligentsia into a Marxist orthodoxy while looking down on the workers as passive objects for manipulation. He looks in a new light at the past of Russian Social Democracy: Iskra was not a progressive advance from ‘economism’.
The ‘economist’ period had been one of direct and exclusive struggle for influence over the proletarian masses, a struggle not against other democratic parties, but against the lack of culture of the proletariat itself and against the barbarism of Russian political conditions. The period of Iskra was, in its objective political meaning, the period of struggle for influence over the revolutionary intelligentsia. [20]
... The critique of ‘economism’, and of populist, terrorist and nationalist prejudices, took up the lion’s share of Iskra’s work. Iskra ... was not a political but a polemical paper ... In fighting against populism, terrorism and nationalism, Iskra showed the intelligentsia the road of struggle for the historic interests of the proletariat. What was directly incumbent upon Iskra was not the task of politically delimiting the proletariat, but of clarifying the intelligentsia about the historic interests of this class ...
It did not elaborate the tactical norms of autonomous proletarian politics ...it only showed the revolutionary intelligentsia the need for such autonomous politics. [21]
Iskra, he said, manipulated the proletariat:
The proletarian theory of political development cannot substitute for a politically developed proletariat. [22]
Furthermore, Trotsky argues, Lenin’s concept of the party was simply a continuation of the old Iskra tradition that saw the party as largely ‘a technical apparatus for the necessary diffusion of published literature’. Alas,
The apparatus, extremely well adapted to the distribution of revolutionary literature, proved completely unusable in the role of regulator of the living revolutionary energy of the masses. [23]
...Neglect of the tasks of autonomous activity of the proletariat [is] the heritage of the Iskra period. [24]
Separated from the workers, Trotsky says, looking down on them, Lenin and his supporters come to conclusions similar to those who argued that workers should be kept out of politics, that politics should be left to the liberals.
The group of ‘professional revolutionaries’ was not marching at the head of the conscious proletariat, it was acting (in so far as it acted) in the place of the proletariat. [25]
Although it was the antithesis of the ‘economists’ substitutionism’, Trotsky goes on to say, Lenin’s position shared with this a similar contempt for the working class. Both assumed that the workers were incapable of political action, were governed by purely immediate needs and a narrow outlook.
The political abdication of the ‘economists’, like the ‘political substitutionism’ of the opposites, are [sic] nothing but an attempt by the young Social Democratic Party to ‘cheat’ history ...
If the ‘economists’ are disarmed in the face of the enormity of their task, contenting themselves with the humble role of marching at the tail-end of history, the ‘politicos’ on the other hand, have resolved the problem by trying to transform history into their own tail. [26]
Lenin’s aim was the building of an ‘orthodox theocracy’, which ‘thinks for the proletariat, which substitutes itself politically for it.’ [27] ‘Long live the self-activity of the proletariat! Down with political substitutionism!’ wrote Trotsky. [28]
The self-activity of the working class would raise its consciousness to fulfil its historical needs:
Marxism teaches that the interests of the proletariat are determined by the objective conditions of its existence. These interests are so powerful and so inescapable that they finally oblige the proletariat to allow them into the realm of its consciousness, that is, to make the attainment of its objective interests its subjective concern. [29]
Lenin’s reliance on political substitutionism, says Trotsky, also affects the internal regime of the party:
In the internal politics of the party these methods lead ... to the party organisation ‘substituting’ itself for the party, the central committee substituting itself for the party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the central committee. [30]
What led the ‘Iskrists’ to substitutionism?
... how is it to be explained that the ‘substitutional’ method of thought – substituting for the proletariat – practised in the most varied forms ... throughout the whole period of Iskra, did not arouse self-criticism in the ranks of the Iskraists’ themselves? ... hanging over all Iskra’s work was the task of fighting for the proletariat, for its principles, for its final goal – in the milieu of the revolutionary intelligentsia. [31]
The answer to substitutionism, he said, is spontaneity:
... the development of bourgeois society leads the proletariat spontaneously to take shape politically; the objective tendencies of this process become clearest in revolutionary, that is Marxist, socialism. [32]
Trotsky completely missed the import of Lenin’s What is to be Done? He did not grasp the dialectics of the impact of capitalism on working class consciousness.
In Lenin’s view, as has been pointed out, capitalism tended to organise the proletariat for the class struggle. However, it also constantly disrupted the unity of the working class, creating centrifugal forces. The daily struggle for immediate economic demands constantly unites sections of the class, but this does not last; quite often, in fact, it prevents the unity of the class as a whole. The dialectical contradiction between the unifying and disruptive tendencies creates the need for a revolutionary party which embraces only a minority, perhaps a very small one, of the working class. Without such an organisation, with its clear ideological demarcation and discipline, the socialists will tall-end the class, with all the variety of views influencing it, with the great majority dominated by the prevailing ideas in society, in other words bourgeois ideas. There is nothing élitist, or substitutionist, in Lenin’s view of the revolutionary party.
The organisational alternative to Lenin’s substitutionism, in Trotsky’s eyes, was Axelrod’s plan for a ‘broadly based party’ modelled on the European Social Democratic Parties. The party must include not only the advanced section of the class, but workers with very different levels of consciousness:
... it is clear that our party will always form a series of concentric circles, from the centre outwards, increasing in number but decreasing in level of consciousness. The most conscious and therefore the most revolutionary elements will always be a ‘minority’ in our party. And this can only be explained by our faith in the fate of the working class as being social revolution, and revolutionary ideas as being those corresponding best to the historical movement of the proletariat. [33]
Compare this with Lenin’s formulation:
To argue that we are the party of a class in justification of organisational looseness, in justification of confusing organisation with disorganisation, [is to] forget the distinction between the vanguard and the whole of the masses gravitating towards it, to forget the vanguard’s constant duty of raising ever wider sections to its own advanced level, [it] means simply to deceive oneself, to shut one’s eyes to the immensity of our tasks, and to narrow down these tasks. [34]
The concept of centralism in Our Political Tasks is completely different from what Trotsky argued for at the Second Congress. Now he interpreted centralism to be a system of organisational ‘co-ordination’ (soglasovanie), not really of central leadership: ‘ ...the task which we have to carry out at the present decisive moment ... lies in taking all existing elements of organisation and uniting them in systematically centralised work, without dispersal or ...divergence.’ [35]
In fighting Lenin’s centralism, Trotsky really fought a straw man. He overlooked Lenin’s words of 1903, that the party’s ‘general staff must ‘really be backed by the good and conscious will of an army that follows and at the same time directs its general staff.’ [36] For Lenin, of course, centralism was a means to overcome sectionalism in the Party and the class, sectionalism being the spontaneous product of capitalism. Capitalism not only unites workers, but also divides them (by locality, industry, sex, race, and so on.)
Trotsky counterposes to Lenin’s concept of the party the views of Axelrod:
In the one case we have a party which thinks for the proletariat, which substitutes itself politically for it, and in the other we have a party which politically educates and mobilises the proletariat to exercise rational pressure on the will of all political groups and parties. These two systems give objectively quite different results. [37]
At the congress, Trotsky had rejected the charge of Jacobinism when the economists made it against Iskra. Now he turned the charge against Lenin. The final chapter of Our Political Tasks is entitled ‘Jacobinism and Social Democracy’. Trotsky hangs his argument on a quote from One Step forward, Two Steps Back: ‘A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organisation of the proletariat – a proletariat conscious of its class interest – is a revolutionary Social Democrat. [38]
Trotsky quotes these words of Lenin, and goes on to argue that Lenin did not distinguish between bourgeois revolutionary Jacobins and proletarian Social Democrats. Had Trotsky quoted Lenin’s next sentence, his argument would have collapsed. ‘A Girondist who sighs after professors and high-school students, who is afraid of the proletariat, and who yearns for the absolute value of democratic demands, is an opportunist’. [39]
Many years later Trotsky poked fun at his ‘super wisdom’ in arguing against Lenin
... that the French Revolution was a petty bourgeois revolution and ours is a proletarian revolution, that there was no need to return to the past, to the Jacobins, etc. ... There is no need to point out that Lenin had no worse an understanding than we did of the difference between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, between the sans culottes and industrial workers. Nevertheless he was completely right in following the thread of historical continuity from the Jacobins to Bolshevism. [40]
The analogy between the Jacobins and the Girondists on the one hand, and the revolutionary and opportunist wings of international socialism has been used very often. This was not of course to establish an equation between Jacobinism and revolutionary socialism. The analogy aimed to emphasise one thing, and one thing only: that the revolutionary socialists, like the Jacobins, were intransigent, while the opportunists, like the Girondists, took the path of moderation and compromise. Between the proletarian and bourgeois revolutions there are a number of common features. One has only to read Trotsky’s magnificent History of the Russian Revolution where again and again he refers to similarities with the French revolution. Many of the methods were similar, although the social content was radically different. It was not Lenin but Trotsky who was often inclined to go too far in using historical analogies, trying to extract from an analogy more than it could give. Lenin never forgot that analogies should be made within the strictest limits of the purposes they fit.
Using the analogy of Lenin and the Jacobins, however, Trotsky continues the assault. The French revolution, because of the limitations of the epoch, could establish only a bourgeois society. Jacobinism – that ‘maximum of radicalism of which bourgeois society has been capable’ – strove to perpetute a quasi-egalitarian climax of the revolution which was incompatible with historical development.
The Jacobins were utopians. They set themselves the task of ‘founding a republic based on reason and equality’. They wanted an egalitarian republic based on private property; a republic of reason and virtue, in the framework of the exploitation of one class by another. They straddled a gigantic contradiction, and called the blade of the guillotine to their aid.
The Jacobin’s dream was undermined by historical development:
History had to halt for the Jacobins to keep power. For every forward movement opposed to each other the various elements supporting them and thus undermined the revolutionary will at the head of which stood the Montagne. The Jacobins did not and could not believe that their ‘Truth’ would gain ground increasingly as time went on. Facts showed that everywhere, from all the crevices of society, come the intriguers, hypocrites, aristocrats and ‘moderates’. Those who yesterday were true patriots and real Jacobins today appeared hesitant. To preserve the high point of revolutionary élan by instituting the ‘state of siege’ and drawing the dividing lines with the guillotine was the tactic dictated to the Jacobins by their instinct for political preservation ...
The Jacobins’ philosophy was extremely idealistic:
They believed in the absolute strength of the Idea, of Truth. ‘I know only two parties,’ Maximilien Robespierre said in one of his last great speeches, on the 8th Thermidor, ‘that of good citizens, and that of bad’. Along with absolute faith in the metaphysical idea went total distrust towards real men. Suspicion’ was the inevitable method for serving Truth ...
To force reality the Jacobins resorted to terror:
The Jacobins inserted between themselves and moderation only the blade of the guillotine. The logic of the class movement was going against them, and they tried to behead it. It was folly; this was a many-headed hydra, and the heads devoted to the ideals of virtue and truth became increasingly rare. The Jacobins’ ‘purges’ weakened them. The guillotine was only the mechanical instrument of their political suicide, but this suicide was only the fatal way out of a hopeless historical situation. [41]
Lenin’s perception of the role of revolutionary Social Democracy, Trotsky argued, was no different from the Jacobins’ perception of their role. According to Trotsky, Lenin’s Jacobins would not have spared Marx:
There is no doubt that the whole of the international movement of the proletariat would have been accused of moderation before the revolutionary tribunal and Marx’s lion-like head would have been the first to fall under the guillotine. [42]
Instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, he said, what Lenin was striving for was a dictatorship over the proletariat. Dictatorship Over the Proletariat is the title of the last section of the final chapter of Our Political Tasks. [1*]
... the dictatorship over the proletariat means not the self-acting of the working class which has taken into its hands the destinies of society, but a ‘powerful commanding organisation’, ruling over the proletariat, and through it over society, thus securing presumably the transition to socialism. [43]
Trotsky counterposes to Lenin’s assumed aspiration to dictatorship over the proletariat a very libertarian’ – by which he means idealistic – image of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this he followed his own description of the proletarian dictatorship at the 1903 Congress. He writes:
The tasks of the new regime will be so complex that they can be solved only through the rivalry of various methods of economic and political reconstruction, by long ‘debates’, by way of a systematic struggle not only between the socialist and capitalist worlds, but also between many trends inside socialism, trends which will inevitably emerge as soon as the proletarian dictatorship poses tens and hundreds of new unsolved problems. No ‘strong authoritative organisation’ ... will be able to suppress these trends and controversies ... for it is only too clear that a proletariat capable of exercising its dictatorship over society will not tolerate any dictatorship over itself. [44]
The possibility that ‘trends inside socialism’ would come to reflect the clash of hostile class interests, and would even lead to a civil war which ‘night force the dictatorship of the proletariat to reson to extremely harsh measures, is ignored by Trotsky. Moreover the difficulties facing the dictatorship of the proletariat in a country where the proletariat is a minority of the population – and a small minority at that – are completely overlooked.
There is, however, an important element of truth in Trotsky’s writing on substitutionism. The danger of substitutionism is real, and is rooted in the same social, cultural and political conditions that make for the necessity for a revolutionary party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Trotsky himself so clearly explained many years later in the book he was engaged in writing when he was murdered:
Of course, there are dangers of one kind or another in the very process of stringently picking and choosing persons of advanced views and welding them into a tightly centralised organisation. But the roots of such dangers will never be found in the so-called ‘principle’ of centralism. Rather they should be sought in the lack of homogeneity and the backwardness of the toilers – that is, in the general social conditions which make imperative that very centripetal leadership of the class by its vanguard. [45]
One can avoid substitutionism without falling into the trap of tail-ending, if one leads the working class, relying on its advanced sections, without being so far ahead as to be beyond the horizon of these advanced sections. Lenin’s concept of the revolutionary party was of an organisation that leads the workers, not tames or strangles them.
In later years Trotsky was ruthless in his self-criticism of the stand he took in opposition to Lenin on the question of the party. His autobiography offers the following judgment:
My break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered ‘moral’ or even personal grounds. But this was merely on the surface. At bottom, the separation was of a political nature, and merely expressed itself in the realm of organisational methods. I thought of myself as a centralist, but there is no doubt that at that time I did not fully realise what an intense and imperious centralism the revolutionary party would need to lead millions of people in a war against the old order. [46]
1*. This subsection has been expurgated from the English edition without any explanation.
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1. Pisma Akselroda i Martova, page 1104.
2. Quoted in I Getzler, Martov: A political biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Melbourne 1967), page 85.
3. G.V. Plekhanov, Sochineniia, volume 13 (Petrograd 1923), page 88.
4. See J.L.H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (London 1963), page 141.
5. Trotsky, Report of the Siberian Delegation, pages 17-18.
6. Trotsky, Report of the Siberian Delegation, page 30.
7. Trotsky, Report of the Siberian Delegation, page 28.
8. Trotsky, Report of the Siberian Delegation, page 37.
9. Trotsky, Report of the Siberian Delegation, page 37.
10. Trotsky, Report of the Siberian Delegation, page 38.
11. Trotsky, Report of the Siberian Delegation, page 42.
12. Pisma Akselroda i Martova, pages 101-4 and 110-11.
13. Quoted in D.J. Dallin, The Rise of Russia in Asia (London 1950), page 79.
14. Quoted in Dallin, page 81.
15. Quoted in B. Pares, A History of Russia (London 1937), page 428.
16. T. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism (New York 1964), page 297.
17. Quoted in Lenin, Works, volume 7, pages 509-10.
18. A. Martynov, Dve Diktatury (Geneva 1904), pages 57-8.
19. Quoted in G. Zinoviev, Istoriia Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (Bolshevikov) (Moscow-Petrograd 1923), page 158.
20. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks (London, no date), page 26.
21. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, pages 28-9.
22. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 36.
23. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 43.
24. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 49.
25. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 56.
26. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, pages 75-7.
27. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, pages 51 and 72.
28. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 72.
29. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 74.
30. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 77.
31. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, pages 93-4.
32. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 123.
33. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 123.
34. Lenin, One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back, in Works, volume 7, page 261.
35. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, pages 116-7.
36. Lenin, Works, volume 7, page 118.
37. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 72.
38. Lenin, Works, volume 7, page 383.
39. Lenin, Works, volume 7, page 383.
40. Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1926-27 (New York 1980), page 263.
41. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 1222-4.
42. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, page 1222-4.
43. Trotsky, Nashi Politicheskye Zadachi (Geneva 1904), page 102.
44. Trotsky, Nashi Politicheskye Zadachi, page 105.
45. Trotsky, Stalin (London 1947), page 61.
46. Trotsky, My Life, page 162.
Last updated on 18 July 2009