A book about Trotskyism, written in Moscow in 1972 and introduced now from within the tradition it sets out to bury, is an unusual object. Most of the volumes in this series are Soviet works on some other subject — philosophy, the war, the national question — against which a reader from the anti-Stalinist left has particular corrections to enter. Mikhail Basmanov's Contemporary Trotskyism is different. It is an attack on us: on Trotsky, on the Fourth International, on "permanent revolution," on the small revolutionary organisations that were growing across France, Latin America and beyond as it went to press. The whole apparatus of this series — the question of who is quoted and who is only characterised, the question of what a book cannot bring itself to say — was built for exactly this book. So it is worth stating the result at the outset, and stating it honestly, because the honest result is sharper than the easy one.
Contemporary Trotskyism was published in English by Progress in 1972, and its text is genuinely of that year — this is not one of the catalogue's disguised reprints. The latest Party congress it cites is the Twenty-Fourth (March–April 1971); its freshest periodical references run to 1971 (Workers' Press of June 1971, Sous le drapeau du Socialisme No. 55 of 1971). Nothing in it postdates the copyright line. Date the text, not the spine: 1972 is right.
The author signs as Mikhail Basmanov, C.Sc. (Hist.) — a Candidate of Historical Sciences — described on the colophon only as "the author of topical works on history, some of which were translated into other European languages." That is all the book will source about him, and it is all this introduction will assert; he went on to produce further volumes in the same line (Where Are the Trotskyites Leading the Youth?, 1973, and, with B. M. Leibzon, The Revolutionary Vanguard, 1977). He was, in short, a professional in this genre. And the genre had just received its instructions. In Kommunist No. 18 of 1971, Boris Ponomarev — Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, and chairman of the editorial commission behind Progress's later multi-volume International Working-Class Movement — directed cadres to expose Trotskyism's "kinship with open anti-Communism, with opportunism of right and 'left' persuasions," scare-quotes included in the directive itself (reported in Intercontinental Press, 24 January 1972). Basmanov cites Ponomarev's own edited volume, The International Revolutionary Movement of the Working Class, in his notes. Contemporary Trotskyism is that directive executed at book length.
Why a fresh anti-Trotsky book in 1972 at all, when the Left Opposition had been destroyed forty years earlier? Basmanov answers the question himself, and the answer is the most reliable thing in the book. "In the twenties and thirties," he writes, "Trotskyism was routed, both ideologically and organisationally … and for a long time it lingered in the backwaters of history. But now, since the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, the Trotskyites have begun to raise their heads." The image he reaches for is unlovely and revealing: "Like dried infusoria which revive in a drop of muddy water, the Trotskyites bestirred themselves at the first signs of petty-bourgeois 'ultra-Left' hostility towards communism." A book does not devote 70,000 words and several hundred footnotes to dried infusoria. The energy of the polemic is a measure of the thing it is answering — the real growth of the Fourth International and the far left among the students and workers of the post-1968 years. This is a defensive book about a revival, and its anxiety is its most candid witness.
The first instrument this series applies to a Soviet attack on an opponent is simple: does the author quote the opponent from the opponent's own works, so the reader can check him — or does he characterise, paraphrase and attribute doctrine with no verifiable source? On the drafted volumes of Ponomarev's International Working-Class Movement, the answer was damning. Volume 3 (1905–17) does not cite a single work by Trotsky even once; the doctrine put in his mouth sits inside quotation marks with no reference, while Luxemburg's Gesammelte Werke, Kautsky and Die Neue Zeit are cited scores of times. Opponents who are cited can be checked; opponents who are only characterised cannot.
Basmanov is not that book, and the difference must be reported plainly, because credibility on the hard findings depends on honesty here. Contemporary Trotskyism cites its subject copiously. Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution is quoted repeatedly and by name; so is his autobiography My Life; so is a 1938 passage from the Bulletin of the Opposition. More striking still, the book quarries the living Fourth International from its own press on almost every page — Quatrième Internationale, the American International Socialist Review, the British Fourth International and The Newsletter, the French Lutte ouvrière and Sous le drapeau du Socialisme, La Vérité, the Latin American Revista Marxista Latinoamericana, the European Marxist Review. Against twenty-six citations of Lenin's Collected Works, there are dozens upon dozens of citations of Trotskyist periodicals in five languages. Whatever else this is, it is not the IWCM procedure of doctrine-without-source. Basmanov read his enemies, or at least their journals.
But the citation test does not end at the footnote; it ends at the source. And chased to the source, Basmanov's citations do something the vol. 3 method never risked: they refute him. Two instances carry the point, and both are decisive because they turn on documents anyone can now read.
The first is The Permanent Revolution itself. Basmanov's central charge, returned to in every chapter, is that "permanent revolution" means leaping over the necessary stages of the revolution — that Trotsky "completely ignored the proposition on the development of the revolution in stages." To prove it he quotes the book: "It is nonsense to say that it is impossible in general to leap over stages. A living historical process always leaps." The quotation is roughly accurate to Trotsky's text (which reads, in the standard English, "It is nonsense to say that stages cannot in general be skipped. The living historical process always makes leaps over isolated 'stages'…"). What Basmanov does not tell his reader is that the second chapter of the very book he is citing is titled "The Permanent Revolution Is Not a 'Leap' by the Proletariat, but the Reconstruction of the Nation under the Leadership of the Proletariat," and that Trotsky wrote in it: "It is boring, and even embarrassing, let me confess, to cite quotations proving that I never even talked of a 'leap' from autocracy into Socialism." Basmanov has taken a passage about the unevenness of historical development in backward countries and pinned it to the exact caricature — the proletariat vaulting over the democratic revolution — that the book was written to demolish. He cites the refutation as though it were the offence.
What the theory actually says is contained in its concluding theses, which Basmanov never quotes. Thesis 9: "The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it." Thesis 10: "The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena." The argument is not that power cannot be taken in a single country — the workers of Russia took it — but that a socialist society cannot be completed in one country in isolation from the world economy. Basmanov systematically collapses completion into beginning, so that a theory about the international horizon of the revolution becomes a theory of "defeatism" and "lack of faith in the possibility of a proletarian victory in one country." The reader who takes his word for the doctrine has been sold the opposite of the doctrine.
The second instance is sharper still, and it is the book's signature. In Chapter III, Basmanov builds his most lurid indictment — that the Trotskyists actively want a nuclear war — around the Argentine Trotskyist Juan Posadas. He quotes Posadas holding that "the most destructive of wars will necessarily have the most progressive consequences," and that "Communist society could rapidly be constructed on the wreckage." Both phrases are footnoted to the International Socialist Review No. 4 of 1963, pages 132 and 134. That article is Farrell Dobbs and Joseph Hansen's "Reunification of the Fourth International" (ISR vol. 24 no. 4, Whole No. 165, Fall 1963) — the founding document of the reunified Fourth International, and precisely the text that explains why Posadas is not in it. Read the page Basmanov cites: "The differences with Posadas occur on two points… Posadas, in contrast, believes that a 'communist society' could rapidly be constructed on the wreckage." And the second phrase: Posadas "carries it to the absurd conclusion that the most destructive of wars will necessarily have the most progressive consequences." Basmanov has lifted both sentences from the Fourth International's own repudiation of Posadas, stripped the words "in contrast" and "carries it to the absurd conclusion," and presented the result as the view of "the Trotskyites." He has quoted the prosecution's brief and passed it off as the defendant's confession.
So the citation test on this book yields something better than a nil. Basmanov quotes; the quotation, checked, convicts him of the falsification his own tradition named. There is a supporting tell in his handling of Isaac Deutscher, whom he cites four or five times — but only ever to mine an admission against Trotsky ("Trotsky's attempts … proved unsuccessful," "political adventurism"), while denouncing Deutscher in the same book as an "anti-communist" and "bourgeois falsifier" wherever Deutscher praises his subject. The source is a witness when it hurts Trotsky and a slanderer when it does not.
The Stalinist case against Trotskyism is not an argument but an identity, assembled by equation: Trotskyism = objectively counter-revolutionary = agent of imperialism = anti-communism = handmaiden of the bourgeoisie. Basmanov builds it in the open, and the hinge on which each equation turns is a single adverb: objectively. Trotsky's views after October "objectively came very close to the arguments of imperialist reaction"; at the time of the insurrection he "took up a position which objectively helped the enemies of the revolution"; on the eve of war the Fourth International's line meant that "objectively this stand of the Trotskyites actually helped nazism." The device is borrowed from Lenin — Basmanov quotes his "In your objective role, you are a tool of imperialist provocation" against the Left Communists of 1918 — but in Lenin the charge is attached to a named policy in a dated dispute, and in Basmanov it becomes a universal solvent. Subjective intention is conceded and then declared irrelevant; whatever a Trotskyist believes he is doing, his "objective role" is to serve the enemy. Chapter V completes the identity by title alone — "How Bourgeois Propaganda Uses Trotskyism for Anti-Communist Aims" — and the book's last sentence states the programme without embarrassment: "The final defeat of Trotskyism will come all the more quicker the more energetically it is shown up to be the servant of imperialist reaction." The task is not to establish that Trotskyism serves imperialism but to show it up as doing so; the conclusion is the premise.
The amalgam also has a target of the moment. In 1972 the Sino-Soviet split was the central fact of Communist politics, and Basmanov folds Maoism into the indictment without quite arguing the connection: "In some ways the Chinese leaders have simply taken over certain Trotskyite doctrines; in others their views objectively coincide" — the adverb again — and both, "from their own peculiar positions and for their own selfish purposes, undermine the struggle against imperialism by fighting against the Communist parties." The equation Trotskyism ≈ Maoism was a useful one for a Soviet author of 1972, and it required overlooking a great deal, not least the Trotskyist movement's own sustained opposition to Peking's line; but its function is structural, not analytic. Everything hostile to the CPSU is drawn toward a single pole, and the poles are made to touch. This is what Ponomarev's directive meant by exposing Trotskyism's "kinship" with deviations of "right and 'left' persuasions": the various enemies are not analysed separately, they are consolidated into one.
There is a fine reflexive irony buried in Chapter V's own evidence. Basmanov offers, as proof that the bourgeoisie promoted Trotsky, the fact that "the big Berlin publishing house, Granat, obligingly published in a rush his book The Permanent Revolution in Russian in 1930" — a book, he adds, meant for illegal distribution inside the USSR. The detail he cannot see is that Trotsky's Permanent Revolution had to be printed abroad and smuggled in because it was banned at home. The censorship of the largest Marxist library on earth is here converted into evidence of its author's treason. That a book was unpublishable in the workers' state is offered as proof that its author served the bourgeoisie.
Which brings us to the reflexive point in its purest form, and to the correction that matters most. This is a book that calls Trotskyism the servant of imperialist reaction, written and published by the state that had physically exterminated the Trotskyists.
The test this series applies to a candid book is narrow and exact: error is admissible, but the category is not. A Soviet author may concede that a Bolshevik erred on a date or a vote; what never happens is that the classification turns inward — no one who stayed inside the Party is ever an "opportunist," an "agent," a "servant of reaction." Basmanov does not even reach the threshold of admitting error. In his account the CPSU is only ever the combatant of Trotskyism, never the subject of any charge; the labels flow one way. And the discriminator is not a matter of tone. It is a matter of an absence so total that it has to be counted to be believed.
Contemporary Trotskyism narrates the history of the Trotskyist movement across exactly the years 1936 to 1940 — the founding of the Fourth International near Paris in September 1938, the manifestos of 1940. Across all 70,000 words of it, the following names do not appear even once: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rakovsky, Pyatakov, Radek. The words "Moscow trial" do not appear. The word "execution" does not appear. The year 1936 figures only as the year "Trotsky again gathered together a small group of supporters" — not as the year of the first Moscow Trial, at which sixteen Old Bolsheviks were shot and Trotsky and his son were sentenced to death in absentia. The Great Terror, in which the entire surviving Left Opposition inside the USSR was killed, is not mentioned. Trotsky's own assassination in Mexico in August 1940 — by an agent of the state publishing this book — is not mentioned; the reader who knew nothing else would not learn from Basmanov that Trotsky died at all, still less how. Christian Rakovsky, who led the Opposition and was shot in 1941, is absent. A book that can quote Trotsky ordering, in 1938, that the USSR's policy "is the chief obstacle on the road to the liberation of backward and oppressed peoples" — and present it as wickedness — cannot register that 1938 was the year of the Bukharin trial, or that the man it quotes had by then had his co-thinkers, his secretaries and most of his family killed.
The killing was not confined to Soviet territory, and the reply corpus documents it in the movement's own contemporaneous voice. The International Executive Committee of the Fourth International, in Fourth International of June 1947, recorded that the Indochinese section had been "deprived by the criminal hands of Stalin's GPU of many of its leading elements, among them the heroic figure of comrade Ta-Thu-Thau" — the Vietnamese Trotskyist leader whose "Struggle" (Tranh Dau) group had been recognised in 1939 as the Vietnamese section of the International, and who was murdered in 1945 in the wake of the August revolution. The massacre is confirmed in Intercontinental Press of 9 April 1979 ("Trotskyists who opposed this were massacred by the VCP, including the popular Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau") and revisited on 23 September 1985. Basmanov's book calls this movement the agent of counter-revolution. The murders are its silence.
This is not a distortion to be argued over clause by clause. It is the constitutive fact of the book, and it is why the reflexivity test rather than any vocabulary count is the right instrument here. The category — "counter-revolutionary," "agent of imperialism" — is turned outward at a movement whose members the author's own state shot, and it can never be turned toward the shooting. A book that cannot name the Terror is in no position to adjudicate who served reaction.
Two smaller corrections belong beside the large one. On "socialism in one country," Basmanov treats permanent revolution as a denial that socialism could be built in the USSR and lets the matter rest with the assertion of Soviet success. The serious answer is not that the USSR failed to industrialise but that industrialisation was carried through by a privileged bureaucratic caste that had expropriated the working class politically — the argument Trotsky made in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), the standing counter-text to every Soviet self-portrait in this catalogue, and the book Basmanov's silence about the bureaucracy most conspicuously avoids. And on the pre-revolutionary record: Basmanov's Trotsky is built almost entirely out of quarrels with Lenin before 1917 — the 1910 postcard, the 1913 letter to Chkheidze, Lenin's epithet "Judas Trotsky" — while the years in which Trotsky organised the October insurrection and the Red Army are compressed to treachery or passed over. That method has a name, and Trotsky gave it one: The Stalin School of Falsification (1937), which is precisely the anatomy of how the epigones mined the old disputes and suppressed the record after 1917. It is the direct methodological reply to this book, and it was in print thirty-five years before it.
This series does not deal in blanket denunciation, and a reader told that everything here is worthless learns nothing. So it should be said that some of what Basmanov reports is real, and that he did not invent the disarray he describes. The Fourth International of the 1950s and 1960s was genuinely fractured; the very document he abuses over Posadas — the 1963 "Reunification" — exists because there had been a decade-long split, and the Posadas and Healy currents he lumps together with the reunified International were in fact its bitter opponents. The movement argued in public, in journals Basmanov could simply read, and its arguments were sometimes wild. An introduction that pretended the post-war Trotskyist movement was a model of unity would be doing to the reader what Basmanov does. It was not; it said so itself.
But the deepest thing the book proves is one it did not intend. To sustain 70,000 words and a bibliography in five languages, Basmanov had to document the reach of the thing he calls negligible. The "dried infusoria" turn out to publish theoretical reviews in French, English, Spanish and Italian; to hold congresses; to have sections in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, France, Britain, the United States; to be winning, as he complains, "some young people" who could not at first "distinguish the anti-revolutionary character of their pseudo-Left speeches." The Ponomarev apparatus did not commission a fresh, book-length, heavily documented attack in 1972 on a corpse. It commissioned it on a revival — and the book's own footnotes are the inventory of that revival. Read against the grain, Contemporary Trotskyism is a Soviet estimate, made in the year of its greatest anxiety, of how far the Fourth International had come back.
There is a final irony the book could not have known in 1972 but its reader can. The movement Basmanov damns as the hired agent of imperialism would, within a few years, produce the most rigorous Marxist anatomy of the Western Communist parties' drift into parliamentary reformism — Ernest Mandel's From Stalinism to Eurocommunism (1978), which traced the Italian, French and Spanish parties' abandonment of revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat back to the very theory of "socialism in one country" this book exists to defend. Moscow attacked Eurocommunism too, when it dared, but hollowly and from the right, unable to say that the disease was its own child. The Trotskyists Basmanov calls counter-revolutionary were the ones who diagnosed the counter-revolution inside Western Communism — and diagnosed it from the left. The tradition this book was commissioned to bury outlived it, and did the analysis the apparatus could not.
A reader who wants the other side of every claim in this book has, unusually, the primary texts to hand. On the theory Basmanov caricatures, Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution (1930) and Results and Prospects (1906) — and, on the international completion of the revolution he collapses into "defeatism," theses 9 and 10 of the former. On "socialism in one country" and the fate of the Soviet state, The Revolution Betrayed (1936). On the world movement whose official history Basmanov inverts, The Third International After Lenin (1928). And on the method of the book itself — the mining of old quarrels, the suppression of the record, the quotation cut at the turn — The Stalin School of Falsification (1937), which answers Basmanov's procedure more exactly than any refutation written since. For the contemporary movement he attacks, the reply is in the very journals he cites: the International Socialist Review's "Reunification of the Fourth International" (Fall 1963) will tell a reader in two pages what Basmanov spends a chapter concealing. And for the men and women the book cannot mention, the record kept by their own comrades — from Fourth International of June 1947 to Intercontinental Press across the 1970s and 1980s — is where the missing ending is written down.