Next: Retreats and advances Up: `Dizzy with success' Previous: Right opportunism rears
The anti-Communists attack
All the anti-Party and counter-revolutionary elements tried to change the criticism of the excesses into a criticism of Stalin and the Party leadership. Alternately attacking the Leninist leadership with right-wing and `leftist' arguments, they tried to put forward anti-Communist positions.
During a meeting of the Timiryazev Agriculture Academy in Moscow, a man cried out, `Where was the CC during the excesses?' A Pravda editorial dated May 27 `condemned as `demagogy' all attempts to `discredit the Leninist leadership of the party' '.
553557
Ibid. , pp. 322--323.
A man named Mamaev, during a discussion period, wrote: `the question involuntarily arises --- whose head got dizzy? ... one should speak about one's own disease, not teach the lower party masses about it'. Mamaev denounced `the mass application of repressive measures to the middle and poor peasants'. The countryside would only be ready for collectivization when mechanization was possible. He then criticized the `comprehensive bureaucratisation' in the party and condemned the `artificial inflaming of the class struggle'. Mamaev was correctly denounced as `an agent of the kulaks within the party'.
554558
Ibid. , pp. 325--327.
Expelled from the Soviet Union, Trotsky systematically chose positions opposed to those taken by the Party. In February 1930, he denounced the accelerated collectivization and dekulakization as a `bureaucratic adventure'. Attempting to establish socialism in one country, based on the equipment of a backward peasant, is doomed to failure, he cried out. `In March, he condemned Stalin for failing to admit that the `utopian reactionary character of ``100 per cent collectivisation'' ' lay in `the compulsory organisation of huge collective farms without the technological basis that could alone insure their superiority over small ones' '. He asserted that the kolkhozy `will fall apart while waiting for the technical base'.
555559
Ibid. , pp. 327--328.
Trotsky's `leftist' criticisms were no longer distinguishable from those of the right opportunists.
Rakovsky, the main Trotskyist who remained in the Soviet Union, in internal exile, called for the overthrow of the `centrist leadership' headed by Stalin. The kolkhozians would explode and would constitute one front of the campaign against the socialist state. The kulak should not be discouraged from producing by limiting his means. Industrial products should be imported for the peasants and the Soviet industrialization program should be slowed down. Rakovsky recognized that his propositions resembled those of the right-wing, but `the distinction between ourselves and the Rights is the distinction between an army retreating in order and deserters fleeing from the battlefield'.
556560
Ibid. , pp. 335--336.
Next: Retreats and advances Up: `Dizzy with success' Previous: Right opportunism rears
Fri Aug 25 09:03:42 PDT 1995