New

 York,  April  2019  

 
Trotsky  and  Boris  Souvarine  Debate  
The  Soviet  Union  and  the  Communist  Movement  
 
By Dan La Botz

School of Labor Studies of the City University of New York

and Co-Editor of New Politics (newpol.org)

If we know of him at all, most of us know of Boris Souvarine (1895-1984) for his
monumental biography Staline, aperçu historique du bolchevisme, originally published in
France in 1935, later translated by C.L.R. James and published in English as Stalin: A
Critical Survey of Bolshevism in 1939. Some may also know Souvarine as a Cold War
anti-Communist who ended up supporting the United States war against Vietnam in
1968. However, if you were familiar with either one or both of those and know nothing
else about him, you will have a very limited picture of Souvarine who was a major figure
in the European Communist movement for ten years and a significant left intellectual on
the revolutionary left for another decade.

Souvarine was a founder of the French Communist Party, a leader of the Executive
Committee of the Communist International, a member of its Presidium Bureau, and a
significant figure in the Communist opposition of the mid-1920s. Leon Trotsky wrote to
Souvarine in 1929 asking him to become a collaborator with him.1 As Victor Serge
wrote, “Souvarine, despite his expulsion from the Comintern in 1924, was for some ten
years to be one of the most trenchant and perceptive brains of European Communism.”2
Writing in 1939, Franz Borkenau of the Frankfurt School, author of World Communism,
referred to him as “one of the most far-sighted men in the Cominern.”3 Yet by 1929
Souvarine would lock swords with Trotsky. To understand whay happened we should
consider the context of their debate.

The Context: Russian Economy, Foreign Policy, Democratic Rights

The mid- to late-1920s represent a transition period between the New Economic Policy of
state-regulated capitalist development and the beginnings of the collectivization of
agriculture and industrialization around 1929. In this period, the principal debates about
Russian domestic policy had to do with how to develop the Russian economy. Nikolai
                                                                                                               
1
Trotsky, Letter to Souvarine, Constantinople, April 25, 1929, in: Boris Souvarine, Una
controversia con Trotski (Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa (Mexico: 1983), edited and
introduction by Souvarine, pp. 21-22. Of course he wanted Souvarine to accept his
analysis and program.
2
Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, translated by Peter Sedgwick (New York:
Readers and Writers Publishing, 1984), p. 144.
3  Franks  Borkenau,  World  Communism    (Ann  Arbor:  University  of  Michigan  Press,  

1963  [1939],  p.  261.  

  1  
Bukharin and his allies, who came to be called the Right Opposition, wished to continue
the NEP, state tutelage of capitalist growth, indefinitely. Trotsky and his Left Opposition
wanted a struggle against the kulaks, the wealthy peasants, and a rapid pace of
industrialization, while seeking to expand the revolution abroad. Stalin, leader of the so-
called Center, first supported Bukharin, but later adopted Trotsky’s economic program
with a vengeance.4 Trotsky, joined in 1925 by Zinoviev and Kamenev in the United
Opposition, argued that democracy in the party was necessary in order to break the power
of the Center and the Right and pursue the policies that Trotsky advocated.

During the same period, there was also a debate about international issues. The
fundamental problem was the isolation of the Soviet Union after the waning of the
European revolutionary movement that had begun in 1918. Benito Mussolini rose to
prime minister of Italy in 1922 and the German revolution was defeated in 1923. While
there was at first general agreement on the policy of the united front with other left and
labor organizations, there was much debate about what that meant. From 1925 to 1927
there was an attempt to create an alliance between Soviet Union and a section of the
British labor movement through the Anglo-Russian Committee, but the General Council
of Trade Unions opposed it and it ended with the breaking of British-Soviet relations in
1927. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1920, was ordered by the
Comintern in the winter of 1923 to enter the nationalist Kuomintang Party (KMT), which
led in 1927 to the disastrous Shanghai massacre, where the KMT virtually destroyed the
CCP. While Stalin and Bukharin led the Comintern through this period, Trotsky opposed
their policies in Britain and China. In the summer of 1928 the Communist International
declared the world had entered a new revolutionary period, but that the Social Democrats
(and the Trotskyists) had become “social fascists” with whom no united front was
possible.

Finally, the third great debate of the era had to do with the question of democratic rights
in the Soviet Union, and by extension in the Communist International and in the various
Communist Parties. During the period of War Communism (1918-1920) the Communist
government had virtually eliminated all democratic rights—multi-party democracy, the
right to factions in the Communist Party, genuine elections in the soviets, the party, and
the trade unions, vote by secret ballot, and freedom of the press. All party factions
hesitated to extend democratic rights to the majority of the population, who were
peasants, or to non-party members, or even to the Communists of the working class for
fear that capitalist interests would enter into party and the soviets and undo the
revolution. Zinoviev’s Bolshevization campaign launched at the Fifth Comintern
Congress in the summer of 1924, became an anti-Trotskyist campaign, and in general
suppressed dissent. A few years later the United Opposition would call for democratic
rights in the party, soviets, and trade unions. The key question of the era was the
relationship between democratic rights, the dynamic of the various social classes and
interest groups, and a political program to save the Soviet Union and to build socialism.

                                                                                                               
4  Alec  Nove,  An  Economic  History  of  the  U.S.S.R.  (London:  Penguin,  1969),  pp.  119-­‐29,  

provides  a  useful  overview  of  the  economic  arguments.    

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Would the revolution survive if the workers and beyond them the people had democratic
rights?

What Was at Issue in the Trotsky-Souvarine Debates?

It was in late-1920s, that Boris Souvarine engaged in a series of sharp disputes with Leon
Trotsky about all of these issue. The questions they debated revolved around several of
the most important theoretical and practical issues: What had happened to the Russian
Revolution? What was the nature of the Soviet Union and what was the character of the
Russian Communist Party? What had become of the Communist International? What was
the correct approach to the reconstruction of revolutionary parties and of a new
revolutionary international? How should the leadership of such a new movement conduct
itself? Many of these were the questions that Victor Serge and Trotsky would debate ten
years later, though in changed circumstances.

Why should we revisit this debate from nearly a century ago? I think there are several
reasons. First, because their debate is an attempt to understand the nature of the Soviet
Union and the Communist International, which for seventy years played such a central
role in world history and became such a problematic issue for the socialist movement.
Second, but most important, because at the center of this debate is the question of the role
of democratic rights in the struggle for socialism. And, third, because it takes up the
perennial and therefore also contemporary question: How do we build or rebuild a
revolutionary socialist movement? Let me begin by introducing Souvarine.

Who Was Boris Souvarine?

Boris Souvarine (1895-1984) was born Boris Lifschitz to Russian Jewish parents in Kiev
in 1895. His parents, attracted by the “glow of the West, the land of liberty” moved to
Paris in 1897 and Souvarine was naturalized as a French citizen in 1906. His father was a
goldsmith, an “elite worker,” as his son later wrote, with a comfortable standard of living.
At the age of fourteen Souvarine followed him in the trade, though he later also worked
briefly in an aircraft plant. Souvarine “sympathized with socialist ideals” from 1910, part
because of the railroad workers strike that year. He read socialist publications, and
attended socialist meetings and joined protest demonstrations. He became an admirer of
French socialist leader Jean Jaurès after hearing him speak.

Conscripted into the French army in November 1913 due to an error on his birth
certificate (his birth date being given as 1893 and not the correct 1895), Souvarine fought
in the battle of the Marne and saw with his own eyes the horrors of war. In 1915, his
brother, who had also been mobilized, was killed, a loss that contributed to Souvarine’s
radicalization. While in the army, Souvarine studied and learned or relearned (though he
never seems to have perfected) the Russian language of his early childhood, a decision
that would be significant for his future political activity. He was permitted to leave the
army in 1916, at which time he took the pseudonym Souvarine from a Russian anarchist
character in Émile Zola’s Germinal.

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Souvarine joined the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (SFIO), the French
Socialist Party, and began in 1916 to write for Le Populaire, the pacifist newspaper of
Jean Longuet, the grandson of Karl Marx. It was the beginning of what would become a
lifelong career in journalism. Souvarine became part of the SFIO’s left-wing minority
and joined the Committee in Defense of International Socialism that opposed a “war to
the end.” A letter written by Souvarine “to our Swiss friends” brought him to the
attention of Lenin and immediately into a controversy with him. The SFIO and even its
left wing to which Souvarine belonged, had a “defencist” policy, so Lenin’s break with
the Socialist International and his call to turn the war into revolution shocked the young
French socialist. Though still, at that same time, Souvarine was attracted by the
Bolsheviks’ call for peace without annexations or indemnities.5

When the Russian Revolution of February 1917 occurred, Souvarine greeted it with joy
and became a correspondent for Gorky’s newspaper Novaya Zhizn, founded that year.
While strongly identifying with the Russian revolutionary movement, Souvarine had
reservations—much like those of Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg—about Lenin and the
Bolsheviks. Writing in the anarchist newpaper Ce qu’il faut dire (What Must Be Said), he
stated, “It is to be feared that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ might become the
dictatorship of Bolsheviks and their leader, which would be an unfortunate development
not only for the Russian working class but for the world.” Yet, only a few months later,
Souvaine would be completely won over by Lenin and by 1919 was writing pamphlets
that glorified the Bolsheviks, approved the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly,
supported the Soviet regime, and justified the red terror against the enemies of the
revolution.6

                                                                                                               
5
The biographical sketch above comes from a number of sources: Boris Souvarine,
Souvenirs sur Isaac Babel, Panaït Istrati, Pierre Pascal, suivi de Lettre à Alexandre
Soljenitsyne (Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici), pp. 133-34; Boris Souvarine, A contre-
courant: Écrits 1925-1939, Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, ed. (Paris : Denoël, 1985),
Introduction; No author, “Les vies de Boris Souvarine,” Critique sociale, available at:
http://www.critique-sociale.info/67/les-vies-de-boris-souvarine/; Andre Liebich, “Boris
Souvarine (1895-1984): A Biographical Portrait," in From Communism to Anti-
communism : photographs from the Boris Souvarine collection at the Graduate Institute,
Geneva (Genève : Graduate Institute, 2016), available at:
https://books.openedition.org/iheid/6455?lang=en; Jean-Louis Panné, “Souvarine
(Lifschitz), Boris, dit Varine,” in: Jean Maitron and Georges Haupt, Le Maitron:
Dictionnäire Biographique Mouvement Ouvrier, Mouvement Social (Paris, Editions
ouvrières, 1971,1990), available at: http://maitron-en-ligne.univ-
paris1.fr/spip.php?article131590; Jean-Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine: Le premier
désechanté du communisme (Paris: Robert Laffont), 1993).
6
Boris Souvarine, A contre-courant: Écrits 1925-1939, Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, ed.
(Paris : Denoël, 1985), Kindle Loc. 120-197.

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Souvarine and the Comintern

Souvarine first took up the cause of the International through the Committee for the
Resumption of International Relations (Comité pour la reprise des relations
internationales) and then through the Committee of the Third International, becoming
“one of the moving spirits of the organization.”7 In 1919, Souvarine was one of the most
vigorous advocates for the affiliation of the French socialists to the Comintern, and—
despite the fact that as part of a government crackdown on the left he had been convicted
on charges sedition and imprisoned—he was elected a co-president of the Tours Congress
of the SFIO. He wrote for the Congress the resolution that led to the creation of the
Communist Party in March of 1920. Still in prison, he was unable to attend the Second
Congress of the Communist International held in Moscow in July-August 1920. Once
free, however, Souvarine had begun to publish the Bulletin communiste that
unequivocally and wholeheartedly supported all of the decisions of the Comintern.8 As
Jeannine Verdès-Leroux writes, “Souvarine was perceived and described as an
intransigent and disturbing man, a man of the International and not a man of he [French
Communist] party.”9

After his release from prison, Souvarine went to Moscow for the Third Congress of the
Comintern held in June and July 1921 and, now a Comintern leader, he stayed on through
1922. He was elected to the Comintern Presidium Bureau, to its Executive Committee,
and to its International Secretariat. As one historian writes, “At a very young age,
Souvarine was thus the most prominent Frenchman in Moscow, aided, no doubt, by his
affinity with Russia, his knowledge of the Russian language, and his enthusiasm for the
new régime.”10 Zinoviev put Souvarine in charge of International Correspondence, the
Third International’s most important publication then printed in Berlin.11

Interested in understanding the views of revolutionary dissidents in Russia, upon his

arrival in Moscow for the Third Comintern Congress he made a visit to the Butyrka
prison to speak with anarchists being held there by the Soviet government and he later
met with Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, leaders of the Workers
Opposition, as well as talking with the independent-minded scholar David Riazanov, with
whom he also became friends. During the course of his stay in Rusia in the early 1920s,
Souvarine became a good friend of Nikolai Bukharin, worked closely with Zinoviev, and
collaborated with Trotsky.

                                                                                                               
7
Andre Liebich, “Boris Souvarine (1895-1984): available at:
https://books.openedition.org/iheid/6455?lang=en
8
Issues of the Bulletin communiste from 1920-1925 can be found in the Biliothèque
nationale de France, online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb34429127h/date The
journal appeared monthly except during 1924 when it appeared weekly.
9
Boris Souvarine, A contre-courant: Écrits 1925-1939, Kindle Loc. 278.
10
Andre Liebich, “Boris Souvarine (1895-1984), available at:
https://books.openedition.org/iheid/6455?lang=en
11
Boris Souvarine, Souvenirs, p. 108.

  5  
Loyal to the International and sympathetic to its left wing, Souvarine returned for a time
to France in 1923, where he “called for a general purge of reformists, arrivistes, etc.’
Quality, integrity were more important than quantity.”12 A strident left-winger, he found
himself embroiled in constant conflict with the French Party leadership.13

Reelected to the Presidium Bureau of the International in June 1923 Souvarine began to
come under attack from Zinoviev and he responded in kind. As the succession fight
heated up in the Comintern, Souvarine spoke out frankly to Zinoviev stating his disgust
with the situation, writing to him on February 6, 1924 that, “There are a good many
things that I believe are inadmissible both in the Russian Party and in Soviet life in
general.”14 And at an April 4, meeting of Federation of the Seine chapter of the
Communist Party-French Section of the Communist International (PC=SFIC), he stated,
“There is something rotten in the Party and in the International.”15 What he meant by
that, of course, was the bureaucratization of the party that Trotsky had described, the
persecution of Trotsky, and the suppression of internal debate, which would reach a
crescendo in Zinoviev’s Bolshevization campaign initiated in 1924.16

All of this tension worsened after Souvarine translated and in 1924 published in France
Trotsky’s book The New Course, writing a a preface praising him.17 The New Course was
Trotsky’s brilliant analysis and program for the Russian Communist Party; and it was
also his manifesto in his struggle against the other party leaders. It laid out his central
idea: “In the last analysis, the question will be resolved by two great factors of
international importance: the course of the revolution in Europe and the rapidity of our
economic development.”18 And to achieve those goals, Trotsky argued, it would be
necessary overcome bureaucratic tendencies and to democratize the party. At the Twelfth
Party Congress of April 1923, “Trotsky’s proposals were unanimously endorsed by the

                                                                                                               
12
David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals: 1914-1960 (New York:
Macmillan Company, 1964), p. 88.
13
Jules Humbert-Droz, De Lénine à Staline: Dix ans au service de l’internationale
communiste: 1921-1931 (Neuchatel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1971), p. 32 and passim.
Humbert-Droz, who was the member of the Comintern Executive responsible for the
Latin countries of Europe, has many references in his memoire to Souvarine’s on-going
conflicts with his own party.
14
Jean-Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine, p. 137.
15
Jean-Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine, p. 142.
16
Joel Geier, “Zinovievism and the degeneration of world Communism,” International
Socialist Review, #93, available at: https://isreview.org/issue/93/zinovievism-­‐and-­‐
degeneration-­‐world-­‐communism  
17
Boris Souvarine’s “Introduction de l’Éditeur” available at:
https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/livres/coursnouveau/cn1.html
18
Leon Trotsky, The New Course, Chapter 2, “The Social Compositon of the Party,”
available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/newcourse/ch02.htm

  6  
whole leadership.”19 Nevertheless, between 1924 and 1927, all of the top leaders resisted
the program they had initially adopted and the leadership began a campaign against
Trotsky. Souvarine came down on Trotsky’s side.

Jules-Humbert Droz, the member of the Comintern Executive responsible for the Latin
countries of Europe, makes clear the significance of Souvarine’s action:

Contrary to what had been done with the Workers Opposition, the International
did not publish the documents of the Trotskyist Opposition and the delegates [to
the Firth Congress] were never informed except by the most contradictory rumors
that circulated in the halls of the congress. Only Souvarine had made Trotsky’s
documents available, which led to a sharp attack and his exclusion from the
International.20

Still negotiating his relationship with the Comintern, Souavrine continued to edit the
Bulletin communiste. Of course, he published documents of Trotsky (5) though most (22)
were those of the majority. At the same time, thanks to a deal with Jules Humbert-Droz,
he was surprisingly allowed to take on a special project criticizing the bourgeois press for
the major Communist newspaper L’Humanité. His biographer Jean-Louis Panné asks,
“Did he dream of preserving the French party in order to offer it as a base of support for
Trotsky? Very likely, for he no longer believed in the virtues of the Bolshevik Party.”21

Souvarine attended the Thirteenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in May
1924, and though he had no right to speak there, since he was not a member of that party,
the chair, Karl Radek nevertheless allowed him to have the floor because he was a
leading figure in the Comintern. Souvarine denounced the campaign of “slanders and
lies” being waged against Trotsky. When he finished the majority delegates, furious at his
speech, shouted, “Shame! Shame on him.” Trotsky spoke afterwards but said not a word
on behalf of Souvarine, the only person who had spoken on his behalf.22 There was an
attempt by the French delegation at the Thirteenth Congress of the Russian Communist
Party to have Souvarine removed from his positions in the Comintern, but Radek argued
that since Souvarine held his positions by virtue of being French delegate to the
Communist International, the Russian Party Congress could do nothing, and the motion

                                                                                                               
19  Max  Shachtman,  “The  Struggle  for  the  New  Course,”  in:  Leon  Trotsky,  The  New  

Course  and  the  Struggle  for  the  New  Course  by  Max  Shachtman  (Ann  Arbor,  Michigan:  
The  University  of  Michigan  Press,  1965),  p.  147.  
20
Jules-Droz, De Lénine à Staline, p. 227. Humbert-Droz, a Right Communist who came
out against Trotsky (p. 265) was no admirer of Souvarine. As he wrote to his wife in
1924, “You know what my thoughts have been about Souvarine. A petty-bourgeois
intellectual who tends to become a big bourgeois and who has no place in a proletarian
party. The trouble is that serious elements like Rosmer and Monatte allow themselves to
be influenced by him and go along with his drift.” (p. 232)
21
Jean-Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine (Paris: Laffont, 1993), p. 139.
22
Jean-Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine (Paris: Laffont, 1993), p. 145.

  7  
was ruled out of order. A July meeting of a Comintern special commission on the
“Souvarine question” finally led to his exclusion from the international.23

Following the Fifth Congress of the Communist International at which Zinoviev and his
supporters defeated Trotsky, Souvarine was also expelled—theoretically temporarily—by
the French Communist Party, “accused him of being an authoritarian autocrat, infatuated
with himself.”24 Souvarine himself saw things differently, writing, “I was excluded from
the Communist Party and from the Third International in 1925, that is, after the death of
Lenin, under the accusation of indiscipline and non-conformism…”25 He attributed his
exclusion to having “opposed the campaign to denigrate Trotsky.”26 Excluded from his
own party, Souvraine now had no role in the International.

Surprisingly, after his exclusion, he stayed on in Soviet Russia, only finally leaving and
returning to France in early 1925. He explained to Zinoviev, “What I disapprove of is the
war being conducted against comrade Trotsky and those who are suspected, rightly or
wrongly of being Trotskyists….It is not that I have become a Trotskyist.” But, he added,
Trotsky’s idea must be very good, for the Central Committee had adopted the essential
ones.27 The principal idea of Trotsky that Souvarine supported was the democratization
of the party to make possible a struggle against the bureaucracy that stood in the way of
both international revolution and a more rapid industrialization.

Because Souvarine had been a leader in both the French Communist Party and in the
Communist International, and as one historian writes, “…his defection in 1924
precipitated a chain reaction.”28 One historian speculate s that the expulsion at the same
time of Souvarine’s popular revolutionary syndicalist allies, Alfred Rosmer and Pierre
Monatte, may have led as many as 100,000 militants to leave the party.29 The mass
resignations clearly reflected a more serious malaise in the Communist movement,. Some
who left gravitated to a number of small Communist Opposition groupings and
publications, among them a half-dozen Trotskyist groups.30

Souvarine and the Opposition

Rosmer and Monatte began to publish La Révolution prolétarienne, for which Souvaine
wrote anonymously using the pen name “a Communist.” In October 1925, Souvarine also

                                                                                                               
23
“Les vies de Boris Souvarine,” p. 5.
24
Andre Liebich, “Boris Souvarine (1895-1984), available at:
https://books.openedition.org/iheid/6455?lang=en
25
Boris Souvarine, Souvenirs, p. 56 and 109.
26
Boris Souvarine, Souvenirs, p. 109.
27
Jean-Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine (Paris: Laffont, 1993), p. 141.
28
David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals: 1914-1960 (New York:
Macmillan Company, 1964), p. 91.
29
According to Madeleine, a former secretary of the party, as reported by Panné, Boris
Souvarine, p. 156.
30
Pierre Broué, Trotsky (Paris: Fayard, 1988), p 641.

  8  
revived the Bulletin communiste, now as a revolutionary socialist, opposition journal. His
slogan was, “Excluded, but Communists.” In it he published the official documents of the
Communist International and Trotsky’s articles, but concentrated on analyzing
developments in the Soviet Union and in the French Communist Party.31 Small groups of
militants, a few hundred here and there, were leaving the party, creating enough pressure
that L’Humanité had to open up its columns to the dissidents. Souvarine dreamed of
recreating a real Communist Party. In December 1925, he wrote to ask the Comintern
Executive to reintegrate him, but it refused accusing him of being a factionalist engaged
in a counter-revolutionary campaign.32

In 1926 Souvarine obtained a copy of Lenin’s “Testament” and worked with Max
Eastman and Alfred Rosmer to see it published. As Eastman, then also a Trotskyist,
wrote, “I spent the best of two weeks—always in co-conspiracy with Souvarine—
composing and verifying it.”33 Souvaine also helped Eastman with his book Since Lenin
Died, which contained the text of the “Testament.” However, after it was published,
Trotsky denied that any such “Testament” existed and confessed to having violated party
discipline. In a public letter regarding the book, Trotsky accused Eastman of “pure
slander against the Central Committee.”34 As Eastman later wrote, he received “…the
news that their effort failed the Opposition led by Leon Trotsky had capitulated,
confessed they had done wrong to agitate against the Stalin regime, and promised never
to do it again.”35

It was at this time that Souvarine, having quit his job with L’Humanité, helped to found
the Marx Lenin Circle, bringing together a number of Communist oppositionists with the
goal of working to return the Communist International to “normality.”36 As his
biographer Jean-Louis Panné writes, “The history of the Circle is essentially that of the

                                                                                                               
31
Despite Souvarine’s expulsion from the Communist movement, David Riazanov
employed him in following years to work in France for the Marx-Engels Institute
acquiring documents dealing with socialist history, such as the papers of Gracchus
Babeuf.
32
Jean-Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine (Paris: Laffont, 1993), p. 161.
33
Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch (New York:
Random House, 1964), p. 452.
34
Leon Trotsky, “Letter on Eastman’s Book,” July 1, 1925, Inprecorr, 3 September,
1925, available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/07/lenin.htm. Trotsky
publicly retracted his condemnation of Eastman and his book three years later in “On
Max Eastman,” New International, Vol.1 No.4, November 1934. pp.125-126, available
at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/09/eastman.htm
35
Max Eastman, Love and Revolution, p. 453.
36
Anne Roche, Boris Souvarine et La Critique sociale (Paris: Éditions la Découverte,
1990), p. 33, available at: Bibliothèque Nationale Française – BNF Gallica, at:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4815168g/f45.image.texteImage

  9  
French Communist Opposition.”37 Among those who joined the Circle were a number of
younger leftists, such as Gérard Rosenthal and Pierre Naville, who, after the break
between Trotsky and Serge, would go off to found a new Trotskyist circle and to publish
La Verité.

Souvarine’s Writings 1925-1928

In his own analytical articles before 1929, Souvarine generally took positions in line with
those of Trotsky, arguing that the Opposition should base itself on the first four
Congresses of the Communist International. He expressed concerns about the impact of
the New Economic Policy (NEP) on the Soviet Union and also criticized the bureaucracy
and the lack of democracy, particularly the appointment or coopatation rather than the
election of Communist Party, Comintern, and Soviet government leaders and
representatives. He was a fierce critic of Zinoviev’s campaign of Bolshevization, which
he interpreted as a bureaucratization of the Communist International and the national
Communist parties leading to structures and practices comparable to the bureaucratic
Social Democratic parties. And he criticized the Communist Party’s growing repression
of critics and dissidents, which had driven the Russian opposition underground. In
articles in La Révolution prolétarienne written in August 1926, he praised Trotsky,
saying that all real Communists would rally to his program of industrialization and
democratization.38

Souvarine was also concerned about Moscow’s domination of other Communist Parties
and naturally most worried about his own French Communist Party. In 1927 in a
confidential “Letter to the Russian Opposition” circulated to his closest comrades
Souvarine strongly criticized Moscow’s financial subsidies to the national Communist
parties using France, which he knew best, as his principal example. He argued that
Moscow’s enormous financial subventions of millions of francs—more than twenty times
the value of members’ dues—had strengthened the International’s control over the party
and the party’s bureaucratic tendencies, leading to widespread corruption. Moscow, he
argued, gave its money to the favored leaders of party—who supported the dominant
Russin faction—which also ensured their subordination and loyalty to the Communist
International and to the Russian Communist Party. He argued that this in turn had
brought about the “intellectual decline and the moral abasement of our parties.”39

During the late 1920s, Souvarine’s articles became increasingly critical of the Rusian
Communist Party. In his article “On the Eve of the Storm: Where Is the Russian
Revolution Going?” published in 1926, Souvarine wrote, “Since the death of Lenin there
as been no debate in the party.” He believed, he wrote, that, “The bureuacracy can only
rule through a state of siege.”.” At that time, like Trotsky, he attributed the corruption of

                                                                                                               
37
Jean-Loius Panné, “Aux origins: le Cercle communiste démocratique,” in: Anne
Roche, Anne. Boris Souvarine et La Critique sociale (Paris: Éditions la Découverte,
1990), p. 35.
38
Boris Souvarine, A contre-courant: Kindle Loc. 1295-1865.
39
Boris Souvarine, A contre-courant: Écrits 1925-1939, Kindle Loc. 2646-2767.

  10  
the party to the growth of rich peasants and of a new small and large bourgeoisie
connected to the innumberable functionaries of a privileged elite who were party
proifteers. The principal answer to these problems he believed was “to accelerate
industrialization)…,” which was Trotsky’s program. He wrote prophetically it would turn
out: “The omnipotent fraction seems to want to provoke a civil war.”40

Souvarine’s essay “The Defeat of the Revolution,” published in La Révolution

prolétarienne at the end of November 1926, after the Fifteenth Congress of the Russian
Communist Party, reminds us of Victor Serge’s From Lenin to Stalin, which was
published a decade later. Souvarine described the moral and political degeneration of the
life of the Bolshevik Party, now run by “a small clan,” “an omnipotent fraction.” He
wrote that the opposition, “denied all right to exist, could only choose between
insurrection and submission. It submits, without giving up its opinions, to avoid shedding
blood.” Opposition members are forced to sign loyalty oaths to a party “where all
discussion is forbidden.” He concluded: “the balance is, there are only the defeated.”At
one time Souvarine wrote, the party could have attempted to regain its vigor by serving
the interests of the working class, but no longer. “Today there are new caste interests, of
the Soviet bureaucracy, opposed to those of the working class; one can no longer serve
the one without doing a disservice to the other.” He reported that when the opposition had
attempted to speak out, the party paper Pravda published dozens of statements calling for
crushing the splitters, creating “the atmosphere of a pogrom.” Souvarine notes that,
“These methods imitated Italian fascism.” Souvarine ended the essay placing his hope in
the working class, but after his description of the problems, particularly the “caste
interests” of the bureaucracy, the reader is not convinced that there is a way out.

A turning point in Souvarine’s view comes with his powerful essay, “Black October”
published in the Bulletin communiste of October-November 1927. The essay began by
describing the Soviet economy and class structure, noting that while pre-war levels of
production had been achieved. Still, excepting the elimination of the nobility, the balance,
that is rthe elative weight the of social classes, had not changed much, except for the
growth of the NEPmen, merchants, and the “monstruous” expansion of the bureaucracy.
He discussed the many problems of the economy, such as low productivity and low
quality and the generally chaotic character of it all. He noted a tendency toward the
restauration of the old social classes, except the aristocracy, which has been destroyed.

But the real subject of the essay was the “degeneration of Bolshevism.” He noted that,
“In the course of six years, the party has profoundly changed in its composition as well as
in its ideology.”41 His critique of the Communist Party represented a new analysis for
him and for the Opposition. As he wrote, “The Party forms a new privileged class…”42
The Party has “…a monopoly of political activity. The Party is not a fraction of the
proletariat: it is above. Its interests are not longer identified with those of the class. There

                                                                                                               
40
Boris Souvarine, A contre-courant: Écrits 1925-1939Kindle Loc. 1865-1993, The
italics are Sovarine’s
41
Boris Souvarine, A contre-courant, LOC 2391.
42
Ibid., LOC 2401

  11  
is the party, and there is the rest.”43 Souvarine’s analysis does not say so, but it suggests
that the future of the revolution and of the Communist movement must lied outside of
and against the party.

In “Black October,” Souvarine also argued that the Opposition shared responsibility with
the majority for developments in the Soviet Union. The Opposition’s structure was
identical with that of the majority:

The opposition, however, did not understand the transformation, and it also
remained foreign to the mass. It, too, entertained party fetishism. For a longtime
now it has been incapble of going back to its Communist origins, it has had, it too,
its aristocrats in the embassies and the superior economic or administrative
organs, its proletariat in the factories, its interior regime with leaders who are the
depositaries of all knowledge, of all authority, and it followers.44

Souvarine thought that Trotsky has made a mistake in asserting his loyalty to the party.
He quoted Trotsky speaking at the Thirteenth Congress in May of 1924,

None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly, the Party is
always right ... We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has
provided no other way of being in the right. The English have a saying 'My
country, right or wrong,' whether it is in the right or in the wrong, it is my
country. We have much better historical justification in saying whether it is right
or wrong in certain individual concrete cases, it is my party ... And if the Party
adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or
unjust, it is my Party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the
end.45

Souvarine went on to say, “Yes, on an abstract theoretical level. But if the historical
conditions of the time, of the social milieu, of the political culture have turned the party
into a sort of distinct social class?”46 Clearly, if this is the case, then one cannot base
one’s strategy on attempting to work within the party.

Souvarine believed that the Opposition should give up the use of the terms “Leninism”
and “Bolshevism.” He argued that “Leninism” had become a “new official ideology,” “a
dogma,” “a religion.” He declared that, “Within the complexus of Leninism there is a
particular poison: it’s immoralism…” By this, Souvarine meant an “ends justifies the
mans morality,” even though one has lost sight of the ends. And on this question of
Leninism, “the opposition has descended to the level of its adversaries.”47

                                                                                                               
43
Ibid., LOC 2406
44
Ibid., LOC 2412.
45
Ibid., LOC 2417, Souvarine gives a shortened version of Trotsky’s remarks, while I
have given the full quotation here.
46
Ibid., LOC 2417
47
Ibid., LOC 2465

  12  
Souvarine believed that the demand for democracy must apply not only to the party, but
also to the soviets and the labor unions. As he wrote,

For a long time [the Opposition] has only talked about “democracy in the party,”
and, given the distinction already understood between the Party and the
proletariat, this renders its demand indifferent to the masses. Until its last
‘platform,’ it did not understand this to include the labor unions or the soviets. It
has given the impression of only wanting to supplant the masters who hold power
and of not having dream of democracy to achieve this, an impression
unfortunately confirmed by the competition of a democrat such as Zinoviev.48

Toward the conclusion of “Black October,” Souvarine returned to his earlier point about
the character of the party, now expanding that analysis to take in the character of the
state, writing, “Just as the state, the instrument of the ruling classes, acquires little by
little distinct interests, so the dictatorship of the Soviet patriciate ends up finding in itself
its raison d’être, opposed to the progress of proletarian institutions.”49

His final point dealt with the policy of the Communists vis-à-vis the working class
movements. He wrote that the majority and the Opposition have rivaled each other in
“pseudo-leftism” and they think of “the united front as some clever ploy.”50 He criticized
the arrogance of the Opposition, writing, “It is the struggle of the international
Communist minority against the whole working class of two world on the pretext of
combatting its errors and its ‘leaders,’ as if the role of a vanguard (which is what it
pretends to be) it to fire upon the entire army.”51

Towards the end of the essay he wrote, “In all of this, the opposition and the majority
share responsibility. The greatest service to be rendered to them is to criticize them
mercilessly.”52 Still, he concluded, the Opposition was better than the majority because ot
is calls for democracy, for internationalism, for industrialization, for economic planning,
all with a working class character.53

Trotsky himself had beginning with The New Course made many similar criticisms of the
Soviet bureaucracy and the Communist Party, but Souvarine went farther when he asked,
“But if the historical conditions of the time, of the social milieu, of the political culture
have turned the party into a sort of distinct social class?” And pretty clearly he thought
that the answer was that it had and that therefore the party could not be the vehicle to
save socialism in the Soviet Union.

                                                                                                               
48
Ibid., LOC 2489
49
Ibid., LOC 2508
50
Ibid., LOC 2518
51
Ibid., LOC 2522
52
Ibid., LOC 2527
53
Ibid., LOC 2552

  13  
The Trotsky-Souvarine Controversy

Leon Trotsky recognized Souvarine as a part of the opposition, broadly speaking, and as
a talented person whom he wished to recruit to his camp.54 While Boris Souvarine had
long identified with Leon Trotsky’s political views, in the late 1920s their opinions began
to diverge, and in 1929 their differences led to sharp debate and finally a break between
the two men. A series of pointed letters between them, which is sometimes called the
Trotsky-Souvarine controversy, shows Souvarine developing a critique of Trotsky’s
views, methods, and leadership that anticipates Victor Serge’s critique by about a decade
later. We must put this controversy in context so that we don’t anachronistically bring to
it what the Soviet Union later became.

Trotsky’s Position Before 1929

Trotsky was the principal author of the platform of the Joint (or United) Opposition that
had been created in 1925 as a result of the merger of the Trotskyist Left Opposition with
the New Opposition group of Gregorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamanev. The United
Opposition platform, published in 1927, took the view that the struggle in the Soviet
Union was chiefly a fight of the working class against capitalism. As the Introduction to
the program said:

The capitalist element finds its primary expression in a class differentiation in the
country, and in a multiplication of private traders in the city. The upper levels in
the country and the bourgeois elements in the city are interweaving themselves
more and more closely with the various links of our state-economic apparatus.
And this apparatus not infrequently helps the new bourgeoisie to wrap up in a
statistical fog its successful effort to increase its share in the national income.55

Trotsky believed these forces found expression in the factions in the Communist Party
and saw the principal danger in the Right tendency within the Communist Party led by
Nikolai Bukharin, while seeing Stalin’s Center faction as representing a wavering centrist
group. The Stalin group, he wrote, “…moves in zigzags, accommodating itself to and
ingratiating itself with hostile elements.”56 Trotsky believed that the problem with role of
the soviets was capitalism: “The penetration of the Soviets by the lower kulak and ‘semi-
kulak’ elements and the town bourgeoisie, which began in 1925 and was partially stopped

                                                                                                               
54
Trotsky, Letter to Souvarine, Constantinople, April 25, 1929, in: Boris Souvarine, Una
controversia con Trotski (Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa (Mexico: 1983), edited and
introduction by Souvarine, pp. 21-22.
55
“Platform of the Joint Opposition” available at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm
56
Ibid.

  14  
by the attacks of the Opposition, is a very deep political process, to ignore or conceal
which would threaten the proletarian dictatorship with very dire consequences.”57

In the conclusion to the United Opposition Platform, of which he was the principal
author, Trotsky wrote:

In contending for a definite tempo of industrialization as the premise of our

socialist construction, in contending against the growth of the kulak and his
aspiration toward supremacy in the countryside, in contending for a timely
improvement of the living conditions of the workers, for democracy within the
party, the trade unions, and the Soviets—the Opposition contends not for ideas
which might bring about a separation of the working class from its party, but on
the contrary for a reinforcement of the foundations of a real unity in the All-Union
Communist party.58

Thus the United Opposition’s program can be summed up as industrialization plus

democratization. The commitment to remain in the party and to restrict the struggle
against Stalin principally to the parameters of the party frustrated the efforts of the United
Opposition, since Stalin controlled the leadership and the “Lenin Levy” of 1923-25 had
brought approximately 500,000 new members into the party, universally described as
largely apolitical, opportunistic, docile and easily manipulated. Under tremendous
pressure many of the United Opposition leaders of all sub-groups capitulated to Stalin.
When in November1927 the United Opposition attempted to actually take their case to
the workers they Stalinists organized the reception and they were jeered.

Stalin, however, had already taken control of the Communist Party and through the Party
of industry, agriculture, the soviets and the labor unions. All of this stifled the Opposition,
in large part because Stalin had adopted some of the Opposition’s positions, while leaders
of the United Opposition had capitulated and gone over to Stalin. Still Trotsky, as he
wrote in “The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition” (September 1929),
believed the situation was not hopeless.

The fact that the Soviet proletariat found it beyond its strength to prevent the
organizational crushing of the Opposition represented naturally a highly alarming
symptom. But on the other hand, Stalin found himself driven, simultaneously with
the crushing of the Left Opposition, to plagiarize partially from its program in all
fields, to direct his fire to the Right, and to convert an internal party maneuver
into a very sharp and prolonged zigzag to the left. This shows that despite
everything the proletariat still possesses powers to exert pressure and that the state
apparatus still remains dependent on it. Upon this cardinal fact the Russian

                                                                                                               
57
Chapter 5, “The Soviets,” of the “Platform of the Joint Opposition” available at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm
58
Chapter 12, “Against Opportunism—For the United of the Party” of the “Platform of
the Joint Opposition” available at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm

  15  
 Opposition must continue to base its own policy, which is the policy of reform
and not of revolution.59

Trotsky believed that Stalin and his centrist faction were despite themselves defending
the gains of the revolution. As he wrote:

But what is Soviet centrism defending? It is defending the social system that
originated from the political and economic expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It
defends this social system very poorly, very unskillfully, arousing distrust and
disillusionment among the proletariat (which does not unfortunately dispose of
the same experience as the British bourgeoisie). It weakens the dictatorship, helps
the forces of Thermidor, but because of the objective situation Stalinist centrism
nevertheless represents a proletarian and not an imperialist regime.60

The key element for Trotsky is that the state has nationalized private property, as he says,
“The most important means of production conquered by the proletariat on November 7,
1917 still remain in the hands of the workers’ state.”61

Against the Stalinist center, Trotsky called for democratization: “In the struggle against
Stalinist bureaucratism, which expresses and facilitates the pressure of enemy classes, the
Russian Opposition demands democracy in the party, the trade unions and the Soviets on
a proletarian basis,” he writes.62 Yet, Trotsky opposed the German Left Opposition leader
Hugo Urbahns who called for “freedom to organize” in the Soviet Union.

It is not a question of winning the “freedom to organize” against a hostile class

government, but of struggling for a regime under which the trade unions will
enjoy – within the framework of the dictatorship – the necessary freedom to
correct their own state by words and deeds….[Urbahns] would be absolutely
correct – on one trifling condition, namely: if one recognizes that Thermidor is
accomplished….But for the Opposition the struggle for party democracy has
meaning only on the basis of the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It would be Quixotic, not to say idiotic, to fight for democracy in a party which is
realizing the rule of a class hostile to us.63

Trotsky concluded his article this way:

It is necessary to adopt the position of the most resolute and unconditional

defense of the USSR against external dangers, which does not exclude, but, on the

                                                                                                               
59
“The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition (September 1929),” available at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/09/fi-b.htm
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.

  16  
 contrary, presupposes an irreconcilable struggle against Stalinism in time of war
even more so than in time of peace.

It is necessary to reject and condemn the program of struggle for “the freedom to
organize” and all other “freedoms” in the USSR – because this is the program of
bourgeois democracy. To this program of bourgeois democracy we must
counterpose the slogans and methods of proletarian democracy, whose aim, in the
struggle against bureaucratic centrism, is to regenerate and fortify the dictatorship
of the proletariat.64

The views expressed in these writings of Trotsky provide the immediate background to
his debate with Souvarine.

Trotsky and Souvarine Clash

At the time of their exchanges, Trotsky, who had been expelled from the Soviet
Communist Party in November of 1927 and subsequently deported from the Soviet
Union, was living in exile on the island of Prinkipo near Istanbul, while Souvarine was in
Paris. The controversy collection (104 pages) involves five short documents from Trotsky
and one very long letter (70 printed pages) from Souvarine.65 Let’s turn to the debate.

The international question was of supreme importance for Trotsky in this period. In 1928
while in internal exile in Alma Ata (Kazakhstan) he had written for the Sixth Congress of
the Communist International “The Draft Program of the Communist International: A
Criticism of Fundamentals,” later published as part of the book The Third International
after Lenin.66 As Trotsky wrote in the introduction, “…the Stalin group has taken off the
order of the day of our whole epoch, the very concept of the international socialist
revolution.”67 It is not surprising then that in his letter of April 25, 1929 to his “esteemed
comrade” Souvarine, Trotsky argued that the immediate central issues facing the
Communist movement were the problems of the Soviet Union’s international policies, the
Communist attitude toward the Chinese Revolution, and the Anglo-Russian Committee,
though he also fiercely criticized the German Communists Heinrich Brandler and August
Thalheimer, both of whom had been involved in the so-called Right Opposition identified
with Nikolai Bukharin, though at this point, Bukharin having been defeated in the Central

                                                                                                               
64
Ibid.
65
Souvarine, Una controversia con Trotski Souvarine’s long letter can be found in
French in Boris Souvarine, A contre-courant: Écrits 1925-1939, Jeannine Verdès-Leroux,
ed. (Paris : Denoël, 1985). An English version of Souvarine’s long letter can be found in
Revolutionary History, Vol. 11, No. 1 (titled "Trotsky and His Critics"), (Merlin Press,
2013). And Leon Trotsky, “A Letter to Souvarine can also be found here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/04/souvarine.htm
66
This draft program can be found at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/index.htm or in: Leon Trotsky, The
Third International after Lenin (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1936).
67
Trotsky, The Third International, p. x.

  17  
Committee in April 1929, the German oppositionists now gave lip service to support for
Stalin.

Some of the letter, however, dealt with the Soviet Union and particularly the questions of
agriculture and the peasantry. Trotsky declared that the key problem in Soviet Russia, the
problem that explained the tendency toward counter-revolution, was the issue of the
kulak.

The middle peasantry is a social protoplasm. It develops invariably and

uninterruptedly in two directions: toward capitalism—through the kulaks, and
toward socialism—through the semi-proletarians and the agricultural
laborers.…The problem of Thermidor and Bonapartism is at bottom the problem
of the kulak.68

He believed that the Soviet bureaucracy’s “duality” resulted from the fact that it
“zigzagged amidst the classes.” Trotsky’s believed that the Soviet Union would either
return to capitalism if the kulaks and other small and large capitalists became a factor in
the economy or toward socialism if industrialization, accompanied by a gradual
democratization, increased the weight of the working class in the society.

Trotsky called for a reorientation of the party by means of the “secret vote,” first in the
Communist Party, then afterwards in the labor unions, and then perhaps later in the
soviets.69 At least in these letters, Trotsky did not touch on the questions of the right to
organize factions within the Communist Party or the right to multi-party democracy,
which would also have required the right to freedom of the press, rights to assembly, and
to free speech.

In another letter to Souvarine on June 12, 1929, Trotsky again took up the issue of
Brandler and Thalheimer, declaring that whatever the complications in the German
situation:

…this in no way means that the democratic regime of the Communist Party
should assure citizenship rights to the opportunist tendency of Brandler.

One can’t consider democracy in the party as a thing in itself. We speak of

democracy based on determined revolutionary positions that exclude
Brandlerism.70

That is, Trotsky and his United Opposition supporters, who had been excluded from
“citizenship” in the Communist International, would also see the Right Opposition

                                                                                                               
68
Controversia, p. 19; and Leon Trotsky, “A Letter to Boris Souvarine,” April 25, 1929,
at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/04/souvarine.htm
69
Controversia, p. 20; and Leon Trotsky, “A Letter to Boris Souvarine,” April 25, 1929,
at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/04/souvarine.htm
70
Controversia, p. 27. Trotsky, “Letter to Boris Souvarine,” May 10, 1929.

  18  
excluded.71 Trotsky, however, had not called for the exclusion of the Stalinist Center,
since, as he had written, he believed under pressure from the working class the Center
defended the non-capitalist Soviet economic system72

In that period, Trotsky recognized that the weakness of “revolutionary Marxists” made it
impossible to build mass parties and had reduced them to creating an international
propaganda society. But he argued that “we, the vanguard of the vanguard,” with the
advantage of a more “mature” situation; “we are more ‘mature’ based on the experience
of Marx, Lenin, and others.” And he calls for the “greatest intransigence, even fiercer
than that of Lenin at the beginning of the imperialist war.” Yes, he says, the philistines
will call us “sectarian,” but real revolutionaries should see that as the greatest honor.73
Reading this letter, one feels that we see emerging, if not Trotsky’s full political analysis,
certainly the posture and attitude toward the left and labor that will characterize him and
his followers into the future.74

Souvarine’s Response

Souvarine’s response to Trotsky’s letters is a long, detailed, and complicated response in

which he challenges the latter’s views on the method of Marxist analysis, the character of
the Soviet economy, the strategy of the united front, the role of the international, and the
question of democracy in the Soviet Union, and Trotsky’s leadership.

Souvarine begins with a discussion of Marxism its relation to Bolshevism. He writes,

Bolshevism was Marxism simplified for use in a country in which classes were
well defined and in which the revolution was permanently on the agenda, On the
level of social science it represented an impoverished Marxism, whereas regards
practical activity it was in line with the needs of its time and place.75

                                                                                                               
71
Controversia, p. 27.
72  There is an additional irony here, which is that while Stalin and the Communist

Internantional had proclaimed the Social Democrats to be “social fascists” and refused
any alliance with them, Thalheimer’s and Brandler’s Communist Party Opposition (KPO)
would in June of 1932 call for a “united front” between Socialists and Communists, the
Socialist Workers Party (SAP) and the labor unions in Germany, which was Trotsky’s
position. Robert  J.  Alexander,  The  Right  Opposition:  The  Lovestoneites  and  the  
International  Communist  Opposition  of  the  1930s  (Westport,  Conn.:  Greenwood  
Press,  1981),  pp142-­‐43;  Trotsky,  “For  a  Workers  United  Front  Against  Fascism,”  
Dec.  1931,  available  at:      
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311208.htm  
73
Controversia, pp. 28-29.
74
Controversia, pp. 28-29.
75
Boris Souvarine, “Letter to Leon Trotsky,” Paris, June 8, 1929, Revolutionary
History, Vol. 11, No. 1 (titled "Trotsky and His Critics"), (Merlin Press, 2013), p. 13.

  19  
After Lenin’s death, wrote Souvarine, Bolshevism was even further simplified in what
came to be called “Leninism.” “Leninism is a mystique armed with deterministic
phraseology which lives in Lenin’s ashes after having choked off his flame…”76
Souvarine made clear that he thinks it is a mistake that Trotsky and the Opposition call
themselves “Leninist” or “Bolshevik,” given that the Stalinist Communist International
also uses those terms.

Useful for making the revolution, “Bolshevism showed itself not up to the task during the
period of peaceful reconstruction. The recovery of Russian production was undertaken by
means of a state capitalism in which a new social layer appropriated and consumer a
great part of the surplus value produced by the wage-earners.”77 Souvarine’s
characterization of the Soviet Union as state capitalist and dominated by a new social
layer is at odds with Trotsky’s view that the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state
though with bureaucratic deformations.

Souvarine contended that the Communist International’s extension of Bolshevism to

Europe and Asia had been a complete failure.

Bolshevism has failed outside Russia, and not only by ignoring the relationship of
forces. It has not grasped the nature of the epoch, it does not know how to analyze
the conditions of capitalism, has badly underestimated the ruling classes’ means
of resistance, has overestimated the consciousness and combativity of the
exploited classes, and has made the fatal mistake of wanting to create Communist
parties in its own image.

Souvarine listed the Comintern’s failures: Finland, Hungary, Bavaria, Bulgaria, Estonia,
and China. Oddly enough, he does not include Germany in his list. While as he had said
earlier he supported the Comintern’s first four Congresses, he opposed the manner in
which the Comintern had intervened in other Communist parties.

Souvarine criticized the Communist International for its attempt to manage revolutions in
a variety of nations, generally without sufficient knowledge and often overriding the local
political leadership. He criticized both the Stalinist majority and the Opposition, both of
which “want to impose a Russian leadership upon a Chinese movement.” Souvarine
argued that, on the contrary,

The revolution in China has to be Chinese, and the emancipation of the Chinese
workers will be the work of the Chinese workers themselves. The Socialist and
Communist parties of the world, the Internaationals and the Soviet state, must
provide them with help and solidarity, advice and discussion, but should not seek
to take over the movement.78

                                                                                                               
76
Ibid., p. 16.
77
Ibid. p. 13.
78
Boris Souvarine, “Letter to Leon Trotsky,” Paris, June 8, 1929, Revolutionary History,
pp. 43-44.

  20  
Souvarine then turned to Trotsky’s method of dealing with his critics, particularly his
tendency to directly and immediately identify political currents with social classes. If
someone raises and ideas that Trotsky thinks is “rightist” then the person represents the
capitalist class. “Do ideas have to be the rigorously automatic emanations of states, class
relations and shifts?” Souvarine accuses Trotsky of caricaturing his opponents, labeling
them on the “right” or “opportunist” or “centrist,” but in any case “capitalist” and usually
without providing an actual political analysis. Souvarine suggests that Trotsky used these
terms simply to dismiss for those who disagreed with him. To make his point Souvarine
looked at the history of the Russian socialist movement and showed that left and right are
often relative terms. In the debate over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, for example, he reminds
Trotsky that Bukharin was on the “left” and Lenin on the “right.” Did that, he asks, then
make Lenin a tool of German imperialism or of Russian reactionaries? Trotstky often
says that one is on one side of the barricades or the other, but then often crates three
positions—left, right, and center—which leads Souvarine to ask how there can be three-
sided barricades.79

It is not only Trotsky’s dismissive caricaturing of his opponents that Souvarine finds a
problem, but also the Russian leader’s view that he alone is capable of analyzing the
world situation. While respecting Trotsky unique abilities and experience, Souvarine
writes,

In the modern world there is no encyclopedic brain capable of taking in all of the
vital questions. Specialization, connected with general knowledge, becomes as
necessary in politics as in production. The advantage of having an international
collectivity is rightly to associate competences whose equivalent does not exist
inside one head alone.80

As an example of the problem’s generated by Trotsky’s intellectual hubris, Souvarine

points to his 1925 book Where is Britain Going?81 Souvarine argues that Trotsky failed to
understand the British economic situation, the consciousness of the working class, the
nature of the labor unions and their leaders and the relations between them. “You
believed that the British industrial crisis was opening up a revolutionary period. You
deceived yourselves.”82 Souvarine suggested that Trotsky had an overly mechanical
notion of how economic crisis would lead to changes in workers’ consciousness in
Britain. An economic crisis dos not lead automatically to a radicalized worker
consciousness and then to revolution.

                                                                                                               
79
Ibid., p. 18-28.
80
Ibid., p. 29.
81
Leon Trotsky, Where is Britain Going? available at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/wibg/index.htm
82
Boris Souvarine, “Letter to Leon Trotsky,” Paris, June 8, 1929, Revolutionary History,
pp. 32-33.

  21  
Souvarine ridiculed Trotsky for his tendency to simply denigrate and dismiss his political
opponents, rather than analyzing and criticizing their arguments. He writes that in
Trotsky’s motion on the Anglo-Russian Committee, which dealt with the Labour Party, “I
counted the words ‘traitors’ and ‘betrayal’ 25 times, without taking account of ‘felony,’
‘perfidy,’ and other expressions.”83 Souvarine relates this to the way that both the
Stalinist majority and the Trotskyists deal with the united front, not entering into an
alliance with other workers organizations and criticizing their views, but often simply
condemning their leadership. “You think it is sufficient to denounce the leaders in order
to win over their troops; the former are contemptuous of your insults, and the latter do not
want to hear them any more.”84

Turning to the question of the Soviet Union, Souvarine supported Trotsky’s call for
industrialization, but he disagreed fundamentally with what Trotsky described as the
basis of his entire economic and political analysis the kulak question, which was the
lynchpin of his theory at that moment. Souvarine wrote:

You write that "the middle peasantry is a social protoplasm; invariably and constantly
taking form in two directions: capitalist by means of the kulaks and socialist by
means of the semi-proletarians and laborers." It is an old Marxist hypothesis that
history has not confirmed. You write about this in too simple and absolute a manner.
In bourgeois countries, the concentration of capital and the proletarianization of labor
didn't take in the countryside the expected route. Statistics, economic science, and
experience testify to this. It has formed into small and medium rural property that
doesn't evolve in the capitalist direction with the kulaks nor in the socialist direction
with the semi-proletarians and laborers. Of course, it's not a question of claiming that
this kind of rural production will exist forever, but it is obvious that it can exist for a
certain stage of the evolution of humanity corresponding to a given technology and
market conditions.85

If the kulaks do not have the capitalist character that Trotsky attributes to them, then their
activity does not accounts for the Stalinist center’s zigzags. The kulaks then cannot
explain the nature of the Soviet Union or that of the Communist Party and its factions;
that is, Souvarine rejects the foundation of Trotsky’s analysis. If the kulaks are not
tending toward capitalism, then they are not responsible for the Stalinist center’s zig-
zags, then something else must account for the politics of Stalin.

Much of the long letter, about a third of it, deals with the question of democracy in the
revolutionary movement and in the revolutionary state. Souvarine derided Trotsky for
failing to consistently put forward a thoroughly democratic program:

You already asked for ‘inner-party democracy’ in 1923; three years later you
stammered out quite timid democratic demands in favour of the trade unions; then

                                                                                                               
83
Ibid., pp. 34-35.
84
Ibid.,, p. 33.
85
Controversia, p. 85.

  22  
 three years after that you advocated a secret ballot in the party and, to a lesser
extent, in the trade unions. But all these partial demands throw light on your
hesitations in confront the difficulty in its full extent….Unless you are thinking
about substituting purely and simply the dictatorship of one clan for that of
another, it would have been better to define, however approximately, the limits,
forms and extents of the dictatorship and what guarantees there are to protect the
citizens.86

Finally, Souvarine, disagreed with Trotsky’s desire to expel the German Right
Communists Brandler and Thalheimer. His statement is really a fundamentally different
conception about how to build a revolutionary party.

To make a provisional conclusion about Brandler and Thalheimer, I will oppose

my criterion to yours: given the state of the International, we must in every
country save what can be saved for the future of socialism and communism, and
to start off with this presupposes that we free the healthy young people from the
leaderhips, whether right or left of “Moscow,” and allow them to lead themselves,
to go beyond imperative outside instructions, to think out heir policies and to
gather together a real working-class élite for class activity.87

There is no doubt that in his letter, Souvarine had caricatured Trotsky in much the same
way as he accused Trotsky of caricaturing others, yet its political arguments were also
clear. Souvarine’s long letter to Trotsky, while rambling and anecdotal at times, was a
ferocious political critique that suggested that at a crucial moment in the history of the
Communist movement Trotsky had failed to understand what was happening in the
Soviet Union, could not explain the factionalism in the Communist International, and
misunderstood developments in other countries. It also represented an alternative political
analysis and strategy for the Communist movement, one that would broaden the
Communist leadership, expand democratic rights in the Soviet Union and the Party, and
attempt to engage in genuine alliances with other working class organizations. By
sending the letter, Souvarine was clearly breaking with Trotsky. Not surprisingly, Trotsky
responded with a short note reading Souvarine out of the movement, ending his short
dismissive letter with this remark: “Register a man overboard, continue with the business
of the day.”88

Following his long letter, Souvarine went on to write a book on the Soviet Union, La
Russie nue, originally published in 1929 under the name of Souvarine’s friend the

                                                                                                               
86
Boris Souvarine, “Letter to Leon Trotsky,” Paris, June 8, 1929, Revolutionary
History, p. 49.
87
Ibid., p. 75.
88
Leon Trotsky, Letter to Souvarine, July 3, 1929, Controversia, p. 101. And the
following month he would send a cold and disdainful note to Souvarine’s group, the
Marx and Lenin Circle. Leon Trotsky, Letter to the Marx and Lenin Circle, August 22,
1929, in: Leon  Trotsky,  Writings:  1929  (New  York:  Pathfinder  Press,  Inc.,  1975),  p.  
246.

  23  
novelist Panaït Istrati but then released a year later under Souvarine’s own name as
L’U.R.S.S. en 1930. Principally using Soviet sources, it is a combination of economic
statistics, case studies, and illustrative anecdotes, in the first 200 pages of which the
author painted a devastating picture of the Soviet bureaucracy’s exploitation of the
working class and of the workers’ own miserable and oppressive conditions. Then a long
sixty-page chapter titled “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” provided a detailed
description of how the bureaucratic dictatorship functioned, the bureaucracy claiming all
power for itself and denying any power to the workers.

Souvarine asserted that despite a Constitution that called for democracy, in reality the
Soviet Union was ruled by the Communist Party’s Secretariat, Political Bureau,
Organizational Bureau, and Control Commission.89 The Communists who controlled
those offices not only ran the party, but through the party also controlled the soviets and
the labor unions. Throughout the entire system, offices were filled by cooptation and
appointment, without elections. The will of the party was enforced by the secret police,
the GPU: “There does not exist in bourgeois society a police force as broad and
complete,” he wrote.90 Souvarine argued in The USSR in 1930 that the “state religion of
Leninism” was a “reactionary phenomenon representing the conservative interests of new
classes in formation, the ideology of an emerging bureaucratic autocracy the
consolidation of which will render the restoration of capitalism inevitable.”91 Souvarine,
it appeared, no longer saw the Communist Party as the locus for the struggle against
Stalin. He wrote, “There incontestably exist in the USSR several thousand communists in
intent some of them consciously so; but they are not for the most part in the Party.” They
were, he said, in internal exile in Siberia, Turkestan or the Artic Circle, in concentration
camps, or in prison, and while some remained in the party, they remained silent for fear
of repression.92 Like Trotsky, Souvarine still believed at this point that Thermidor would
lead to capitalism. Impressive as it is as an account of the Soviet Union in 1930, the book
failed to provide what one could call a political analysis, description, and theory of the
Soviet system as a whole.

In this period, Souvarine moved further from Soviet Communism. In 1930, the Marx
Lenin Circle, which he led, changed its name the Democratic Communist Circle (Cercle
communiste démocratique), a name that still identified it with the Communist tradition
rather than than that of social democracy, but clearly an opposition group. A year later,
Souvarine founded a new journal, La Critique social, bringing together a range of leftist
intellectuals and avant-garde thinkers; the journal defined itself as a Marxist journal,
based on the historic mission of the working class. Finally, in 1935 Souvarine published
his biography of Stalin, a process of that his biographers suggested was his way of
working himself out of the Communist movement.

                                                                                                               
89  Boris Souvarine, L’U.R.S.S. nue, presentation de Charles Jacquier (Paris: Éditions

Ivrea, 1997), pp. 203-04.  

90  Ibid., p. 210.  
91  Ibid., p. 49.  
92  Ibid.,  p.  199.  

  24  
Souvaraine Anti-Communist

In the late 1940s and 50s, Boris Souvarine broke with his earlier revolutionary socialist
critique of Stalinism and became pro-Western, pro-American,, and anti-Communist. In
the summer of 1948, Souvarine’s founded the journal Obserateur de deux Mondes
(Observer of Two Worlds), that is, observer of the capitalist and of the Communist
worlds. At the time Souvarine continued to be extremely critical of Stalin, the Soviet
Union, and the Communist Parties, but could also be critical, though less so, of the
capitalist countries. For example in one article for the new journal he pointed out the
imitations of American democracy where the two dominant parties tended to impose
themselves on the voters.93

Souvarine’s associate in founding the journal was Georges Albertini, sometimes called
the “éminence grise of anti-Communism,” a former Nazi collaborator. After the war,
Albertini was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, but had the luck to have as
his cellmate the wealthy Jewish armament manufacturer and banker Hippolyte Worms,
who would later help to bankroll Albertini’s subsequent enterprises. Emerging from
prison, Albertini repented his collaboration, became a Socialist, and even served as an
erstwhile consultant to the Communist Party. With Worms’ support, he began to publish
the Bulletin d’études et d’information de politique international (The Bulletin of Studies
and of Information on International Politics or BEIPI). Souvarine, an expert on the Soviet
Union, became a regular contributor. Souvarine also developed contacts with a wide
variety of political figures, many of them anti-Communists, from Irving Brown of the
AFL-CIO to Max Eastman, James Farrell, and James Burnham, as well as men like
Gordon Wasson of the Morgan Bank. During the Cold War years, Souvarine directed
much of his energy to criticizing French newspapers that he saw as leaning toward the
Communists or even collaborators with the Communists, and that was most of them. As
his biographer describes him, Souvarine became “The Sentinel of the Free World.”94

After 1935, Souvarine’s rightward movement was continuous. In 1968 he supported the
United States and its war in Vietnam, criticizing the Americans, however, for being too
restrained. The North Vietnamese government was the aggressor, he argued, and a
Communist government would only respect force.95 Souvarine criticized the American
Constitution because it constrained the power of the president and he looked back fondly

                                                                                                               
93
Boris Souvarine, “U.S.A. L’election presidentielle,” in: Boris Souvarine,L’Observteur
des deux Mondes et autres textes. (Langres, France: Éditions de la Différance, 1982),
pp. 36-38.
94
Panné, Boris Souvarine, p. 347.
95
“Vingt ans après,” Le Contrat social, July-Aug. 1965; “Les deux Guerres du Vietnam,”
Le Contrat social, May 1967; and “Cauchemar au Vietnam,” Le Contrat social, Jan.-
March 1968. See also Stephen Launay, “Boris Souvarine et la guerre due Vietnam, une
sociologie polémique,” Printemps, Summer, 1996, pp. 53 -59.

  25  
at the role of the bellicose General Douglas McArthur during the Korean War.
Souvarine’s position on the Vietnam War made clear that he had become a rightwing
ideologue.

Not surprisingly then, during the May 1968 events, Souvarine condemned the student
movement, referring to the young Maoists as “ignoramuses and beasts,” wrote that “the
Trotskyists are really Stalinists,” ridiculed the admirers of Castro and Che who had
mistaken Paris for the mountains and jungles of Latin America, and declared that the
anarchists, having given up the violent propaganda of the deed were incapable of scaring
even a timorous bourgeois but had “greatly helped to bring about the electoral victory of
the party of order [De Gaulle].” Happy with that outcome, still Souvarine scorned and
savaged the Fifth Republic, as weak as its predecessors, for having given into the demand
for a reform of university education.96

Discussion and Conclusion

Boris Souvarine, who had been a revolutionary from1918 to 1935 had by the 1950s
become an arch-reactionary; of that there is no doubt. Yet, it would be a mistake to
attempt to draw a straight line from his differences with the Communist Party in the mid-
1920s or with Trotsky in the late-1920s to his reactionary views during the Cold War.
Nothing in his positions of the 1920s and early 30s necessarily led to or could have
predicted his later views. Nor do his later opinions somehow erase the accuracy and the
usefulness of his earlier analyses. We will not find it helpful to talk about his “betrayal”
or to attribute this to his social class. Souvarine, once a revolutionary, should best be seen
as a victim of both Stalinism and capitalism; a revolutionary transformed into a
reactionary by the world forces that he had earlier attempt to fight: capitalism and
Stalinist Communism. He lost and so did the left.

Trotsky too was a victim, both figuratively and literally. Stalin drove him out of the
Soviet Union and the European capitalist countries denied him safe refuge, a man without
a haven until Mexico opened its doors. Trotsky found himself reduced to leading handful
of followers in a half-dozen countries. While Trotsky provided some brilliant political
analyses, particularly his analysis of the situation Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s,
his Fourth International proved to be a complete failure in his time, and, as his widow
Natalia argued, many of his followers became apologists for Stalin’s Soviet Union and its
conquest of Eastern Europe.97 With that in mind we should look back at this debate with
some sympathy for both parties.

                                                                                                               
96
B. Souvarine, “La guerre civile en France,” Le contrat social, Vol. 12, Nos. 2-3 (April-
Sept, 1968), pp. 95-101. Available at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, online at:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb344560781/date
97
Natalia Trotsky, “Letter of Resignation from the Fourth International,” The
Militant, Vol. 15 No. 23, 4 June 1951, p. 3, available at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedova-natalia/1951/05/09.htm

  26  
My argument here is that Souvarine made real contributions to a socialist analysis of the
events of his time. What were those? Firsts, his analysis in the 1920s, especially after
1926 when he began to break with Trotsky, was perceptive. He correctly identified many
of the problems of Soviet Communism, of the Communist International, and of the
Opposition and Trotsky. In retrospect, it is clear that Trotsky who had based on his
analysis of the Russian economy on the NEPmen and the kulaks had completely
misunderstood their role, particularly that of the kulaks.98 This meant that Trotsky also
misunderstood what was happening in Soviet society and was completely mistaken about
the rise of Stalin and what he called “the Center.” Stalin was not zigzagging between
capitalism and socialism; at first unconsciously and then consciously, he led and
embodied an emerging new force, the Soviet bureaucracy, that was fixated on
consolidating the power of the secretariat, controlling the party, and dominating the state.
That emerging force would become a new class with its own interests contrary to those of
the working class.

Trotsky’s initial analysis of developments in the Soviet Union in the New Course had
been brilliant, but by the late 1920s he failed to understand that the principal danger to
socialism came from Stalin not from the Right Opposition. Trotsky’s analysis utterly
disoriented and disarmed his own followers in Russia and around the world, all of which
would become much more serious once Stalin had completely established his hold on the
system by the late 1930s. Trotsky’s position made it impossible for him to consider,
much less enter into an alliance with Bukharin and the Right Opposition that might have
stopped Stalin and the rise of Stalinism. I think that mistake of Trotsky’s can be
compared to Stalin’s making impossible the alliance of Communists with the Social
Democrats, which could have stopped the rise of Hitler.

Secondly, Souvarine was right on the question of democracy. Trotsky had become
convinced that the fight had to be carried out within the Communist Party and not in the
Russian working class and society at large. Trotsky believed that only in the party could
one find real and potential revolutionaries. Souvarine, on the other hand, believed that the
party had changed since the Lenin levy of 1923-25, having become a party of peasants
dragooned into the working class, while many of the real Communists could be found not
in the party but in prison, in concentration camps, in Siberia and the Artic region of
Russia, or simply among the non-party members; and, yes, some remained in the party,
keeping their heads down, waiting for another day. Unlike Trotsky, Souvarine did not
believe that the democratization of the Soviet Union could come from the Party, that is

                                                                                                               
98
A number of modern historians agree with Souvarine over Trotsky. See for example
Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York; Pantheon, 1985), who
discusses just how elusive the identity of the kulak was and how the Communists
multiplied definitions of him without ever succeeding in getting a grip on him. (Chapter
5, “Who was the Kulak?”, pp. 121-41. And more to the point, see John Marot, The
October Revolution in Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History (Leiden:
Brill, 2012), Chapter 1, “The Peasant-Question and the Origins of Stalinism: Rethinking
the Destruction of the October Revoltion,” pp. 11-86, which absolutely agrees with
Souvarine’s position (though Souvarine is not discussed).

  27  
from the bureaucracy itself, but rather would have to come from the genuine Communists
many of whom he believed were no longer in the party. Simply extending the vote within
the party and other institutions would not suffice, not when there was no secret ballot and
any vote against the bureaucracy meant losing one’s job or perhaps imprisonment exile,
or even death. Souvarine would have agreed with Otto Urbahns that workers need “the
right to organize,” perhaps needed that right above all. And as Souvarine pointed out, the
right to organize implies freedom of the press and other rights, none of which existed in
the Soviet Union.

Third, Souvarine was right that “Leninism” and “Bolshevism” as understood by everyone
in the Communist movement were liabilities. While Lenin was a strategic and tactical
genius, the Bolshevik party he created for the conditions of the Tsarist autocracy was not
a model for a new society in Russia nor for other parties in other countries with other
conditions. Certainly not after the period of War Communism when militarism became
the model and workers were stripped of all democratic rights After Lenin died,
“Leninism” and “Bolshevism” became terms to justify the domination of the bureaucracy
and to provide ideological justification for a host of authoritarian practices. Those terms
rationalized Moscow’s domination over the International, the International’s domination
over the member parties, the member parties’ leaders domination over the members, and
the members’ domination over the working class organizations in which they
participated. And as both Souvarine and Victor Serge argued, Trotsky himself had
adopted a “degenerated Bolshevism” rife with authoritarian characteristics. If one really
admired the best of the Russian revolutionary tradition, one could not be a “Leninist” or a
“Bolshevik.”

Fourth, Souvarine was right that the Communist International’s modus operandi had been
a failure and that it represented a mistaken approach. All of the Communist
International’s interventions in the 1920s had led to failure, from Germany to China, in
large part because Moscow thought that it could impose its analysis, vision, and strategy
on the workers’ movements of other countries. Comintern leaders in the 1920s believed
that they knew what was best for other workers movements, often holding local leaders
and parties in contempt. By the 1930s things would degenerate further, with the
Communist International becoming a political arm of the Soviet Union’s bureaucracy and
a special tool of its foreign policy.

Finally, Souvarine was right about Trotsky role and his method. Trotsky’s hubris was
extraordinary. He appeared to believe that he alone knew what was best for the
Communist movement. As Trotsky himself would write in 1935:

I cannot say that I was indispensible to the October Revolution, but today my
work is absolutely indispensible--and this is not arrogance. The collapse of the
two Internationals, Socialist and Communist, has posed a problem which none of
their leaders was or is equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate
have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in

  28  
 dealing with it. There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming
a new generation with revolutionary method.99

Because he believed that he was the only one who knew what was best, he tended reject
genuine collaboration with people like Souvarine or later Victor Serge, Andrés Nin or
Henk Sneevliet, just as he rejected a political collaboration with other political groups.
Consequently Trotsky tended to have followers, not collaborators. Trotsky’s method of
argument with political opponents and even potential allies was all too often simply to
state that they were “on the other side of the barricades,” that they held rightwing ideas
and therefore represented the bourgeoisie in the Communist movement. Trotsky’s
followers often adopted the method as well, even exaggerating it, giving their
organizations the character of a sect. This is not to entirely deny Trotsky’s many
contributions through his life, but simply to recognize his limitations.

While Souvarine had many insights and described many of the problems of the Soviet
Union and the Communist movement in compelling ways, he never pulled together what
could be called a systematic analysis of the Soviet Union. The two main pieces of his
analysis—the political character of the bureaucracy and the economic system of state
capitalism—never amounted to a theory, but they anticipated and strongly resembled the
more complete analyses of Bruno Rizzi, Max Shachtman, David Rousset, and Tony
Cliff.100 Still, the socialist movement of today can profit from reading Souvarine of the
1925-1935 period both for their historical importance and because the lessons drawn
there have contemporary relevance for the building of a new socialist movement.

The conclusion that I draw from this debate is that Trotsky’s position made it impossible
for him to understand that the most dangerous threat to the socialist movement in Russia
in the late 1920s came not from Bukharin and the Right but from Stalin and the Center.
While this was not at all clear in the early 1920s, it had became clearer in the late 1920s,
though only in the 1930s would it become absolutely clear that Stalin and the
bureaucracy had evolved into a new social class hostile to both capitalism and socialism.
And out of the Soviet Union had emerged a new type of class society: bureaucratic
collectivism.

Trotsky’s position made it impossible for him to consider forging an alliance with
Bukharin and the Right to try to save the revolution from Stalinist counter-revolution and

                                                                                                               
99
Trotsky, Diary in Exile 1935 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), diary entry for March 25,
pp. 46-47.
100
Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World (New York: The Free Press, 1985
[1939]); Max Shachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State
(New York: The Donald Press, 1962); Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London:
Pluto Press, 1974); David Rousset, La société éclatée: De la première à la seconde
révolution mondiale (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1973)). The American Trotskyists’ debates
with Trotsky on “the Russian Question” can be found collected in The Fate of the
Russian Revolution, two vols. (London: Phoenix Press, 1998 and London: Workers
Liberty, 2015).

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the horrors that entailed. As he wrote, “…there cannot even be talk of a bloc between the
Left Opposition and the Right Opposition.”101 Yet the Trotskyist Left and the Bukharinist
Right might have united to fight to preserve as much democracy and as much of
socialism as it was possible to save in the 1920s, had they joined together in what Sam
Farber has called “a tactical bloc for ‘democratic survival’.”102 If such a bloc had been
created there might have been something like the continuation of the NEP, while awaiting
other developments. The Soviet state might have had to be reconstructed, it might even
have evolved into or been replaced by a capitalist state—though perhaps one with a
strong Communist Party and militant labor unions—but Stalinism would not have
cohered into a new class and society, and, we might imagine, perhaps Hitler might never
have come to power.

We should take from the Trotsky-Souvaraine debate a greater appreciation of the role of
democratic rights at every level of the socialist movement and in every attempt to build
socialism. Working class democracy should always entail the right to self-organization,
including the right to organize tendencies within the party. It means the right to multi-
party democracy, which must also mean freedom of the press. And, of course, it always
means above all the right to organize, to organize within in the working class, its unions
and its political parties, and within the society as a whole.
____________________
All translations from French and Spanish by the author. Thanks for their helpful
comments and useful criticism to those who read and commented on my draft, not all of
whom agree with my argument or my conclusions: Jean Batou, Bob Brenner, Sam
Farber, Barry Finger, Rust Gilbert, Michael Hirsch, John Marot, John Riddell, and Julia
Wrigley. I am also indebted to Suzi Weissman, whose work on Victor Serge has helped
me to better understand the kinds of questions posed when reading Souvarine. Of course,
I alone am responsible for the final product.

                                                                                                               
101  Leon  Trotsky,  “Tasks  of  the  Opposition,”  March  1929,  in:  Leon  Trotsky,  Writings:  

1929  (New  York:  Pathfinder  Press,  Inc.,  1975),  p.  86.  

102  Sam  Farber,  Before  Stalinism:  The  Rise  and  Fall  of  Soviet  Democracy  (London:  

Verso:  1990),  pp.  177    and  181.  

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