Was Stalin a Good Communist?

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When I was a young college leftist back in the 1980s, occasionally I’d encounter people who would bring up the ghastly body counts of the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Older leftists assured me, however, that those people weren’t real communists, and that true communism had not yet been applied in any society anywhere. Even today, some unshakably deluded Marxists still say such things, and so the question is worth revisiting: was Stalin in particular, whose brutality preceded that of the others and established a paradigm for their behavior, perverting Bolshevism, or embodying it? Is inhuman violence intrinsic to leftism, or an accidental and unnecessary byproduct of it?

One illuminating way to approach this question is by examining the case of the first great, albeit inadvertent, Soviet dissident, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was an energetic Marxist himself who lost a power struggle with Stalin and was ultimately exiled from the Soviet Union. Even then, Stalin wouldn’t let his rival rest, but pursued him remorselessly and relentlessly across the globe, until finally a Stalinist apparatchik administered Soviet justice to Trotsky with an ice axe to his skull in Mexico in 1940.

Before the murder, however, with a fine eye for legal niceties, Stalin accused various Old Bolshevik leaders, his longtime comrades-in-arms, of carrying out plots against the Soviet people on behalf of the “fascist traitor” Trotsky, and had them tried and executed. In Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, historian Bertrand M. Patenaude notes that on June 11, 1937, Soviet authorities “announced they had uncovered a treasonous plot involving the Red Army command in a conspiracy with Nazi Germany, under the banner of Trotsky. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the outstanding civil war commander, and seven other top-ranking officers were tried in secret and executed the following day. This was the start of a massive purge of the army’s officer corps. Tens of thousands would perish, including a large majority of the civil war commanders.”

To Trotsky’s dismay, “friends and former comrades in the United States and Europe, without questioning Trotsky’s legal innocence in the trials, began to raise doubts about his moral right to challenge Stalin.” They noted that Lenin, whom both Stalin and Trotsky professed to revere, had “suppressed the rival socialist parties shortly after the Revolution,” and that Trotsky, as Lenin’s War Commissar, “seized as hostages the families of former czarist officers serving in the Red Army,” and was thus inconsistent when he “now condemned Stalin for threatening to execute the wives and children of the trial defendants.”

Critics of Trotsky brought up the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921, when Trotsky oversaw the brutal and bloody suppression of a revolt by Soviet sailors who had started to notice that the communism for which they had fought, which promised all sorts of free stuff  and justice for the working class, wasn’t even close to the communism they were experiencing under the rule of Lenin and Trotsky, which was a dictatorship indeed, but not one of the proletariat.

Trotsky complained: “One would think that the Kronstadt revolt occurred not seventeen years ago but only yesterday,” but it could have happened five hundred years ago and the principle would have been the same. A German ex-communist, Wendelin Thomas, called Trotsky a hypocrite. “That you should seek vindication, I regard as well and proper,” Thomas wrote to Trotsky, “that you should deny vindication to your political opponents I regard as good Bolshevism. You call to arms against the calumnies of the Russian state machine of 1937 but at the same time you attempt to excuse and justify the calumnies of the Russian state machine of 1921.”

Indeed. Trotsky deplored the calumnies of the Russian state machine in 1937 because he and his friends and allies were their target, when in 1921 he had been the one doing the targeting. Stalin’s brutality, including the ice axe in Trotsky’s skull, was good communism, which never allowed any room for dissent or the expression of opposing views. The leftists who claim today that true communism is a benign thing that would never indulge in the bloodthirstiness that we have seen every time Marxists have taken power are being either disingenuous or naïve. Violence against the foes, and perceived foes, of the regime is essential to leftist rule. If the left regains full power in the United States, we will see even more of it here than we have seen already.