N THE USSR, it is a time of press, letters from readers, the perestroika (restructuring) and Trotsky regular TV programs on the perglasnost (openness). You are estroika report obstacles to not supposed to be afraid of change, reticence on the part of the truth any more. That's offi- rehabilitated? the workers, a daily life that is cial. The authorities themselves not changing much, and someare putting up posters every- times even changing for the where saying "You must not be worse. afraid." Changes in agriculture and the
The press has become very in- IS GORBACHEV preparing to rehabilitate services are most likely to imteresting. Writers, film-makers prove daily life. But they are and historians are having a field Trotsky? Recently there has been slow because they are running day. This summer, researchers in speculation about this in the Western up against the passivity, the various fields who had been re- press, especially in France. Catherine past and the weight of the pudiated as "bourgeois" by Stal- bureaucracy. Appeals for initiain were rehabilitated. Verla commented on it in the September tive run up against fears that
In this atmosphere, it is the most natural thing in the world that among intellectuals and not only among them) a real determination is emerging to get back in touch with real history - the opposite of the official History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
An article in the September 10 issue of the Paris daily Libération announced that rehabilitation of Trotsky was a sure thing. The fact is that such things are still far from certainties. This was not a factual report but an interpretation of rumors, such as the one that Trotsky's grandson had been invited to Moscow (which he denied). But this impression developed against a real background of rapid changes in the cultural and political climate in the USSR.
A credibility test for glasnost
We do not of course expect any rehabilitation of Trotsky's ideas. But his re-appearance in the real history of the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s is inevitable. First of all, glasnost would not have much credibility if people speaking in its name continued to make historical assertions as dubious as claiming 2+2=5.
What is more, encouraged by the official line, the truth is continuing to be brought out by layers that will remain "Gorbachevite" if Gorbachev moves forward. In other words, layers that he no longer has the political means to repress.
But if the truth has to be accepted, the men in the Kremlin want it to serve a useful purpose. An immediate effect of a rehabilitation of Trotsky, Bukharin and the entire Bolshevik old guard would be a terrible blow to the oldest and most conservative wing of the bureaucracy, the one most reluctant to accept the present changes.
There are many signs of increasing tensions with those who have based their job security and prospects on lies. At least there was order in the past, they say, while glasnost is leading to anarchy. The police no longer International Viewpoint • September 28, 1987 know what they are supposed to do. Cops who beat up some hippies found themselves denounced by the new Social Initiative Clubs, which carried out their own inquiry and reported the results to the press. The overzealous cops now face a court case. Suddenly, no one wanted to clobber the Tatars this summer when they held a sit-in for 25 hours in Red Square.
Following the line of Ligachev, the regime's number two, complaints are increasing that criticism should not be carried too far. Pravda articles have stressed that not everything that happened under Stalin should be rejected. The debate is focusing more and more on the interpretation of the 1930s, the sudden halt of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and also the purge trials.
Some are trying to find a justification in the past for Stalinism, while others are trying to find one for their more radical critique, which is necessary for reforms.
The working class for the moment is in the wings. But it is there, and it is a powerful onlooker. Its scepticism about the reforms could turn tomorrow against Gorbachev. Cultural liberalization is not the essential thing for winning the workers. But they are not unaffected, especially by the invitations to "feel masters in their own sphere." Every day, features in the the pendulum can swing back. The end of the NEP, and the trials of the 1930s, still cast a shadow. In this context, a rehabilitation, not of Bukharin alone and still less of the ideas of Trotsky, but in a more diluted way of a certain "historical legacy" of the 1920s has its advantages for the rulers. Using this to praise Lenin and his flexibility would enable Gorbachev to justify his pragmatism. At the same time, it would undermine the historical legitimacy of its immediate opponents.
Millions persecuted as "Trotskyists"
For that purpose, it is necessary to to accentuate the criticism of Stalinism but without going to the point of accepting a plurality of political organizations. It is necessary to bring Stalin's opponents and victims out of nonhistory, to allow them to exist again, but not too vividly. They have to be kept in the past to be used selectively to justify the present.
Trotsky's ideas on "building socialism in one country" are not, in the short term, too worrying for the Kremlin, which will continue to try to represent them as leftist. It would not be very new either to select from his writings passages that make him look like an iron-fisted bogeyman.
Much more troublesome, to be sure, are Trotsky's analyses of the bureaucracy, of Stalin and of the revolution betrayed. They are little known by the new generations, and not too dangerous as long as criticism of bureaucracy remains controlled from above.
But millions of non-Trotskyists were persecuted for "Trotskyism" in the 1930s. One of the ideological foundations of the Stalinist state was the struggle against Trotskyism. Children of that generation do not know what Trotskyism is. They want to know.
Can they be kept much longer from finding out? Gorbachev, the sorcerer's apprentice, may not have any choice in the matter. *
28 issue of Rouge, the paper of the French section of the Fourth International.