2. Stalin, Man of Steel

Georgi Plekhanov was a famous figure among Russian revolutionaries. A veteran Marxist theoretician, he fled Russia for a second time in 1880 and formed the first Russian Marxist organization, the Emancipation of Labor Group, in Geneva, Switzerland. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who would eventually emerge as a leader of the proletarian revolution across the world, was just 10 years old at the time.

Undoubtedly, Plekhanov had a major influence on the young Lenin, who later said no one would ever become a true Communist and in good conscience call himself one without studying all of Plekhanov's philosophical works.

More often than not, as a revolution develops, it pushes the revolutionaries themselves into obsolescence. In 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Plekhanov, who had agreed with Lenin on many things, later ended up siding with the Mensheviks.

Plekhanov, the revolutionary mentor who had thrown in his lot with the Mensheviks, mocked the Bolsheviks for being unwilling to abandon their stance, calling them “obdurate rocks.”

Lenin happily wore that intended insult as a badge of honor. One young Bolshevik took as his revolutionary alias the name Kamenev, which means “like a rock” in Russian. Another Bolshevik revolutionary named Josif Djugashvili picked an even tougher pseudonym. He became known as Stalin, Russian for “steel.”

The Bolsheviks responded to challenges in every kind of way.

Naturally, a name does not invariably square with the true nature of its bearer. Kamenev, for example, proved to be not as tough as a rock. Stalin, on the other hand, went on to punch a permanent mark on 20th century world politics and the international communist movement with his fist of iron and will of steel. In recent years, Russia has declassified documents relating to the Chinese revolution. According to these documents, between 1923 and 1927, the politburo of the Soviet Communist Party held a total of 122 meetings to discuss matters in the Chinese revolution. Some 738 decisions were made in those meetings as the Russians micro-managed the Chinese revolutionaries, providing them with their lines, guiding thoughts and policies.

Stalin, the man of steel, paid close attention to the Chinese revolution. He made a famous and powerful observation on the subject, one that the Chinese Communists repeatedly quoted: “Armed revolution fights armed counter-revolution. This is a particular feature of the Chinese revolution and one of its strengths.”

Unfortunately, Stalin made that statement in 1926 and by “armed revolution” he was not referring to the Chinese Red Army, which had yet to be born at that time: He was taking about the Northern Expedition under the command of Chiang Kai-shek as he crushed the warlord forces of northern China.

Stalin's observation was prompted by the actions of the KMT.

On November 30, 1926, the Comintern convened its Seventh Plenary Session in Moscow. The KMT, as a Comintern sympathizer, dispatched a representative, Shao Lizi, to address the meeting. The Northern Expedition undertaken was making rapid progress through China, and Moscow newspapers were already comparing the capture of Hanyang by the Guangdong Force with the historic Wuchang Uprising¹² of 1911.

Shao proclaimed passionately into the microphone that the Kuomintang “will most certainly accomplish its historic mission under the leadership of the Comintern.” He followed up with these important words: “We are convinced that unless we have armed forces the revolution cannot succeed. The situation in China has proved this to be true.”

Shao's speech was short, but this sentence left a deep impression on Stalin.

Later that day, Stalin presided at a session on China where he gave a speech, “The Prospects of the Revolution in China.” On the matter of the revolutionary forces and the revolutionary army, he expanded on Shao's idea:

“In China armed revolution fights armed counter-revolution. This is a particular feature of the Chinese revolution and one of its strengths. Therein lies the unique significance of the revolutionary army in China.”

A famous observation was born.

The Comintern was a master of language. Stalin was a master of language. When he defined class war as an act “to rob the robbers” and described a stagnant state of the revolution as “a low ebb between two high tides,” his deft manipulation of words into concise combinations established concepts that would require thousands of words to explain today. Though the content was identical, Stalin's phrase “armed revolution fights armed counter-revolution” was a million times more precise, to the point and powerful than Shao's “unless we have armed forces the revolution cannot succeed.”

A casual reference in Shao's speech, drawing on 30 years of KMT military endeavors and armed riots, made Stalin sit up and listen. The post-Sun KMT was enjoying the best days in its history, marching triumphantly north with the help of the Comintern and the Chinese Communists. Stalin's “armed revolution” reference was meant as praise for the KMT's Northern Expedition.

Neither Stalin nor Shao imagined the Chinese Communists would actualize their observations about violence in the revolution, making it their own maxim as they staged one armed riot after another against the Kuomintang regime.

Just as Sun Yat-sen never expected to see the birth of a Red regime in China, nor did Stalin believe the Chinese Communists could one day seize power.

His hopes for the Chinese revolution rested with the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek.

Stalin favored Chiang because he was convinced that Chiang was a Jacobin of the Chinese revolution. Under this “Chinese Robespierre,” Stalin believed, the future regime of the country could make the transition to socialism.

If Stalin had such high expectations for the KMT and Chiang, what did he make of the Chinese Communists at the time?

At the Seventh Enlarged Comintern Plenary Session in Moscow, Stalin made this observation:

“Some people say that the Chinese Communists should withdraw from the KMT. That would be wrong, comrades. The withdrawal of the Chinese Communists from the Kuomintang at the present time would be a profound mistake. The whole course, character and prospects of the Chinese revolution undoubtedly point in favor of the Chinese Communists remaining in the Kuomintang and intensifying their work inside it.”

Sun Yat-sen believed “the communist organization and the Soviet system cannot be adopted in China, since China does not have the conditions to make this adoption a success.” Stalin was certain that the Chinese Communists could not exist independently of the KMT, nor could they accomplish the great revolution in China all by themselves.

Pavel Mif, who would later empower Wang Ming, argued for the establishment of peasant Soviets in the Chinese countryside. For that idea he was taken to task by Stalin, who said he was wrong on two counts:

One, the Chinese could not abandon the industrial centers and form Soviets in the countryside, and;

Two, forming Soviets in China's industrial centers was not an urgent matter.

Stalin did not believe the countryside could become revolutionary bases for China, not to mention the idea of “encircling the cities from the rural areas.”

Stalin's observation that “Some people say that the Chinese Communists should withdraw from the KMT,” was a reference to Leon Trotsky, a major player in the Russian revolution.

On the death of Lenin on January 21, 1924, Stalin's first move on that sad day was to dictate a telegram: “Convey this message to Comrade Trotsky. Comrade Lenin passed away at 6:50, January 21. Cause of death: shutdown of the respiratory system. Stalin.”

Some Soviet Union leaders went on to describe Trotsky as “one of the leaders of the October Revolution” or “one of the important participants.” But Trotsky never needed “one of the” to confirm his place in history. In September 1917, on the eve of the October Revolution, he was chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. By the time the revolution broke out he occupied an even more important position as chairman of the revolutionary military committee in Petrograd. In the movie Lenin in October, we are shown how the leadership continues to work, giving out orders to the fighters at the Smolny, even as Vasily Zaytsev keeps busy moving Lenin, his true identity concealed, from one hiding place to another. The movie depicts Stalin as the leader in the Smolny action when in fact it was Trotsky.

Sometimes vindication comes from the opposing side. David Anin, an idealist historian, said of the Russian Revolution that one could say with considerable certainty that the Bolsheviks succeeded in their revolution first and foremost because of the relentless radicalism of Lenin and the fierce agitation of Trotsky.

How tragic for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that a fair appraisal had to come from their enemy.

So, in post-revolution Russia, Trotsky secured all the important positions, becoming a member of the people's army and navy committee and chairman of the revolutionary military committee. Stalin, by contrast, was merely appointed member of the people's ethnic affairs committee. Trotsky was called “Father of the Red Army,” and his portrait hung alongside Lenin's. In a letter to the representatives' conference dictated by Lenin on December 23, 1922, he called Trotsky “the most capable man on the Central Committee.”

Trotsky had a position in history that is hard to erase.

As a man Trotsky was acutely aware of that position.

And he never minced his words.

On April 6, 1927, Stalin made this remark at a meeting of supporters in Moscow, “Chiang Kai-shek may not sympathize with the revolution, but he is the commander-in-chief of the Chinese army forces. He will not achieve anything beyond fighting imperialism.” “For this reason, they are to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then flung away.”

Just six days later, on April 12, 1927, Chiang launched the “Shanghai Massacre,”a counter-revolutionary coup against Chinese Communists in Shanghai, also referred to as the April 12th Incident¹³. Trotsky mocked Stalin and his policy of exploiting the Chinese bourgeoisie. Within just a few days of Stalin telling people to squeeze the lemon, the “squeezed-out lemon” had turned the tables, seizing power over government and the armed forces.

Stalin was furious about Chiang's betrayal. In May 1927, he wrote to the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on behalf of the Comintern. He was uncompromising: “The time has come for action. The bad guys must be punished. If the KMT do not learn to be Jacobins for the revolution, they will be cast away by the people and the revolution.”

The timing could not have been more awkward. Moscow was getting ready for its May Day parade and they had just completed building a float sporting a huge statue of Chiang. Moreover, Stalin had just sent Chiang a signed photo of himself.

Now he realized that “the bad guys” were not “Jacobins for the revolution.”

Trotsky was extraordinarily calm about this betrayal, summing things up in one sentence: “It was not their own class they betrayed, but our illusion.”

The failure of the Chinese revolution set off fierce debate in the Soviet Union.

In the early days of the KMT-CPC cooperation, Slepak, who served as intelligence chief in the Comintern's Far East operations, had warned against the danger of first seeing Wu Peifu as particularly good and then seeing Chiang as a Jacobin for the Chinese revolution. “Do not put the party in a tight spot, where it has to go from bowing to one general to saluting another,” he said. “Even if the Kuomintang is currently the best and most revolutionary of the political factions, it does not mean we should be the tail [that it wags].”

But Stalin would not admit any mistake in the way he had been steering the Chinese revolution.

Addressing the eighth executive committee of the Comintern in May 1927, Stalin maintained that the CPC Central Committee had correctly executed the line handed down to them by the International. After the revolution failed, he reversed his position and accused the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China of disobeying the International and making an opportunistic mistake. On July 9, 1927, he wrote to Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikolai Bukharin, “We have no real communist party in China, or a solid communist party in China.” “For an entire year the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China lived off the KMT and enjoyed the freedom to work and organize, but they did no work to speak of.” That, he argued, was “the reason why directives from the Comintern were not executed.”

Stalin had forgotten his own statement of May 13, 1927: “It is impossible to replace the armed forces with the Red Army. The reason is simple; nothing can replace the armed forces for the time being.” On May 30, he issued an “urgent command” to the central leadership of the Chinese Communists, ordering them to “immediately start building 8 to 10 divisions consisting of Communists, factory workers and peasants… to form (it is not too late to do so) dependable troops” to replace “the current army” that was turning on them, and to punish Chiang Kai-shek. At the time the Chinese Communists had insufficient resources to build even a single division.

Stalin forgot how he had rejected the Chinese Communists' proposal to build an army and how all military assistance had been directed to the KMT instead.

In the aftermath of the Zhongshan Warship Incident¹⁴ of March 20, 1926 (Chiang's coup against Communists), Chen Duxiu had considered the possibility of “an independent army to fight Chiang Kai-shek.” When a shipment of Soviet arms arrived in Guangzhou, Chen immediately sent Peng Shuzhi over to meet with Comintern representatives on behalf of the CPC Central Committee, asking them to authorize a reallocation of 5,000 guns from the shipment intended for Chiang and Li Jishen, to arm the peasants of Guangdong Province. Borodin, the Russian advisor to China whom Stalin trusted, refused, saying the Chinese Communists should give everything they had to support Chiang and the Northern Expedition.

On February 25, 1927, a second attempt by Shanghai workers to mount an armed revolution failed. Albrecht, a Comintern representative, wrote to Moscow and called the situation in Shanghai “very good.” “The strike may well be the sign of an imminent uprising,” he said, but “there is no money, and money is urgently needed. Fifty thousand yuan ought to be enough to buy arms.” Moscow provided nothing and objected to the idea of the CPC continuing to stage armed rebellions in China.

Stalin was even less prepared for Chiang's betrayal than the Chinese Communists.

When, in April 1927, the CPC Central Committee informed Moscow of Chiang's counter-revolutionary coup in Shanghai, Stalin's first reaction was to cable Chiang's advisor Borodin asking for confirmation of the facts and to see whether “possible concessions to Chiang might save the cooperation and prevent him from shifting allegiance towards the imperialists.”

But it was too late to expect the Chinese Communists to whip up a strong army of their own overnight so as to take on the KMT.

Stalin seemed to have forgotten his own scornful words: “We have no real communist party in China, or a solid communist party in China.”

Nikolai Bukharin, chairman of the Comintern Executive Committee, blamed the failed Chinese revolution solely on the Chinese Communists. “If the directives of the Communist International had been implemented, if the Agrarian Revolutionary War¹⁵ had not been impeded, if the arming of the workers and peasants had been vigorously carried out, if reliable troops had been gathered together, if the masses had been presented with a clear policy, if the directive about democratizing the Kuomintang had been applied as it ought, the situation would not be so serious for Wuhan.” The emphasis on all six ifs was made by Bukharin.

Putting a spin on mistakes, claiming credit for wins and blaming others for failurer.... With Stalin in the driving seat, this became standard practice for the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern.

That is why Victor Serge, a Trotskyist, made Bukharin blush when he said, “… can we not sum it up in just one single if? If the petit-bourgeoisie had not been what it always is.”

As a matter of fact, it was Trotsky who was the first to warn about Chiang. At a time when the Soviet and Comintern leadership viewed Chiang as “a Jacobin” for China's small and middle bourgeoisie, Trotsky raised the possibility that Chiang might instead well prove to “a Bonaparte” for the high bourgeoisie.

He was aware of Chiang's true colors very early in the game.

In 1923, Chiang led a “Dr. Sun Yat-sen delegation” on a visit to the Soviet Union. At a Comintern summit on November 25, Chiang passionately addressed his audience about the KMT's “vision for a world revolution.”

He described Russia as the headquarters of world revolution, and as such should help China complete its revolution. Once the revolutions were won in Germany and China, he theorized, these countries would form an alliance with Russia to fight capitalism around the world. “With the scientific power of the Germans, successful revolution in China and the revolutionary spirit and agricultural products of Russian comrades, it won't be too hard for us to complete the world revolution and wipe capitalism off the face of the earth.”

He concluded: “We hope, within three to five years to complete phase one of the Chinese revolution - the phase of national revolution. And then we can quickly proceed to phase two, spreading the communist message. By then, in the Chinese view, it will be easy to achieve communism.”

The enthusiastic audience cheered this speech. Grigory Zinoviev, chairman of the Comintern Executive Committee, asked Chiang to “convey to the Kuomintang and to Comrade Sun Yat-sen in particular, the warm, fraternal regards of the Comintern.”

In that hand-holding, kumbaya moment, the 44-year-old Trotsky sat alone and disengaged.

He put off meeting with Chiang until the Chinese delegation was about to go home, citing “health problems.” When they finally did meet, the revolutionary zealot Trotsky uttered not a word about world revolution.

Chiang, by contrast, had looked forward to meeting Trotsky, the father of the Russian Red Army, a passionate revolutionary, a fierce orator, and even a ruthless conspirator. An opportunity to meet the man who embodied all these things filled Chiang with nervous anticipation.

But when Chiang respectfully asked for his opinions, Trotsky pretended not to understand the China question very well. He could not offer the Chinese delegation any good advice, he told Chiang, and he was not sure that China could embrace socialist revolution. As for assisting the Chinese revolution, he had as yet to give the matter his full consideration.

Chiang shared with him Sun's idea: to launch military campaigns simultaneously from southern China and Mongolia in the north in a pincer movement against China's northern warlords.

Sun did not say who would lead the campaign in Mongolia. Chiang was not explicit either. But there was the implicit hope that it would be the Red Army under the command of Trotsky. After all, why not lead an army across Mongolia into China when Trotsky had considered the possibility of sending cavalry across Afghanistan to start a revolution in India?

But this time, Trotsky, though far from averse to risk taking, showed caution. He made it very clear to Chiang that for the Soviet Union to send troops to back up Sun in China was not possible. He had said on a previous occasion that if all Sun cared about was military, then in the eyes of the Chinese workers, peasants, artisans and merchants, he would seem not different from Zhang Zuolin or Wu Peifu in the north. He would be just another warlord, and the revolution would never be a success. Far from providing endorsement, Trotsky poured cold water on Chiang's hopes. Without a powerful revolutionary party that had a clearly defined agenda and did targeted publicity, he said, “You will achieve nothing even if we send you loads of money and military aid.” Chiang was profoundly upset and quite shaken by those words.

For whatever reason, Trotsky was wary of Chiang, China's celebrity revolutionary leader, the very first time they met.

And neither the Chinese nor the Russian press carried news of their meeting.

And the question of the Chinese revolution later became a focal point in debates among Soviet Bolsheviks about world revolution and the prospect of building socialism in a particular country. After 1925, Stalin and Bukharin bitterly clashed with Trotsky and Zinoviev on this issue.

The outspoken Trotsky and the more diplomatic Zinoviev both ended up crushed. In October 1926, they were expelled from the politburo. At the seventh enlarged session of the Comintern's executive committee a month later, Zinoviev was relieved of his post of Comintern chairman. Bukharin became Comintern's first secretary which, in organizational terms, effectively put Stalin in the top spot as the leader of the Comintern and of world revolution.

Trotsky, whom Lenin in his last years of failing health courted to join his fight against bureaucratism, ended up being labeled an “anti-Leninist,” an “assassin, a saboteur, a spy and a murderer” for decades. The Chinese Communists adopted that label for him too, and the chairman of the Soviet power during the October Revolution was denied a just assessment until long after the turbulent years were gone, fading away like clouds over the horizon.

The new edition of The History of the Communist Party of China, published in 2002 by the CPC History Press, has this to say about the man: “Trotsky made some observations that were correct or almost correct about the class status of the Chiang Kai-shek faction and the Wang Jingwei faction, about how they would eventually turn against the revolution, and about Stalin's mistake in handling the Chinese revolution.… Trotsky thought Stalin should be held responsible for the failure of the Chinese revolution.”

Such a reversal of opinion did not come easily.

A footnote in the 1952 edition of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Volume I) says, “The Trotsky clique started out as an anti-Lenin faction in the Russian workers movement and turned into an anti-revolutionary gang. Concerning the evolution of these traitors, Comrade Stalin observed in 1937, ‘In the past, about seven or eight years ago, Trotskyism was a working-class political faction that was, obviously, an anti-Lenin faction and therefore an extremely erroneous political faction. But it was a political faction nevertheless.…Today's Trotskyism is not a working-class political faction. Instead it is a gang of unprincipled and mindless murderers, spies, saboteurs and assassins.’” Basically, it was a full repeat of the Soviet Union's opinion.

The 1991 edition of the Selected Works (“On Strategies for Resisting Japanese Imperialism”) was revised to show a much more guarded tone: “After the Russian Revolution, Trotsky (1879-1940) worked in various positions, including chairman of the revolutionary committee. Following Lenin's death, he opposed Lenin's theory and path regarding how to build socialism in the Soviet Union. He was expelled from the party in November 1927. Trotsky committed many separatist and damaging actions against the international communist movement.”

Trotsky's posthumous reputation continued to improve in China and, in 1999, he earned this footnote in Volume 6 of Selected Writings of Mao Zedong: “Trotsky (1879-1940) was a member of the politburo of the Bolsheviks and chairman of the Petrograd Soviet during the October Revolution. He was on the foreign affairs commission, army and navy commission, chairman of the revolutionary military committee and a member of the executive committee of Comintern. In October 1926, at a plenary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, he was stripped of his title as a politburo member. In January the following year, the executive committee of the Comintern ousted him as an executive member. He was expelled from the party in November and then from the Soviet Union in January 1927. He was assassinated in Mexico in August 1940.” Most of the footnote is now factual.

Trotsky was a controversial historical figure of great talent. He made a better call on China in the revolution than did Stalin. But was he one hundred percent right about everything? Even though he feigned ignorance about the Chinese revolution when he met with Chiang, he was very interested indeed about developments here. Later on, he published Questions of the Chinese Revolution. But does that mean he had figured out all the questions?

To give him his due, Trotsky was the first to warn about Chiang and, after Chiang had betrayed the revolution, the first to argue that the next to watch out was Wang Jingwei in Wuhan. To be able to do so was remarkable. But then again, he did not believe that the Chinese revolution should be divided into the democratic stage and the socialist stage. If the Chinese revolution was not carried out under the dictatorship of the proletariat, he argued, it would never succeed. The primary target in the Chinese revolution was imperialism. However, the Chinese national bourgeoisie shared a common interest with the imperialists. The fact that the comprador bourgeoisie had no unresolvable differences with the national bourgeoisie did not help either. As a result, no united front could ever be possible.

Trotsky was sharp as a knife, but he was also on the far left.

As such, he was trapped in self-contradiction. He recognized the weakness of the Chinese bourgeoisie, yet failed to see the weakness of China's proletariat. As a result, he underestimated the peasants' role in China's revolution, concluding that the movement could surge only alongside a surging workers' movement, and that the Red regime could not survive in the backward rural areas when the urban proletariat was forced onto the defensive.

Trotsky believed that sloganizing about the Soviets was correct only as long as the Great Revolution (1924-1927) had not suffered complete defeat. The Chinese Communists should have organized Soviets when the revolution was at its height, he argued. For them to advocate setting up Soviet organizations at a time when the revolution had failed and was at a low ebb came all too late. The proletariat could only engage in covert activity and it was impossible to organize Soviets by covert means. Moreover, they could never form a Soviet in the rural areas where they now took refuge after losing the urban working class.

Trotsky objected to the idea of launching democratic revolution first in China, and he rebuffed the idea of a united front. He did not recognize the revolutionary potential of the peasants or the role that the countryside could play as a revolutionary base. Basically he did not believe that the Chinese Communists could one day seize power by securing the villages first.

So great was Trotsky's self-confidence, he believed himself to be the sole repository of truth after the death of Lenin.

Yet truth is not for one person alone to monopolize.

Having mocked Stalin, Trotsky went on to mock the Chinese Communists who brought their armed insurgency to the countryside.

Whereas Stalin kept adjusting his view on the Chinese revolution, moving ever closer to reality, Trotsky started to slide further away from his original correct judgment.

Perhaps wisdom and errors will always be intertwined in history, eternally inextricable.