Table Of ContentMoscow Under Lenin
Alfred Rosmer
MOSCOW
UNDER
LENIN
Translated by Ian H. Birchall
Introduction by
Tamara Deutscher
0
Monthly Review Press
New York and London
Copyright© 1971 by Pluto Press Ltd.
Introduction © 1972 by Tamara Deutscher
All Rights Reserved
Originally published as Moscou sous Lenine
by Editions Pierre Horay, Paris, France,
copyright © 1953 by Pierre Horay, Flore.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: LC 72-81771
First Printing
Monthly Review Press
II6 West 14th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011
33/37 Moreland Street, London, E.C.1
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction by Tamara Deutscher vii
Foreword 9
1920
Europe in 1920 14
2 The Journey to Moscow 18
3 May Day in Vienna 24
4 Masaryk's Czechoslovakia 27
5 Clara Zetkin. Shlyapnikov. Great demonstration at Berlin 28
6 From Stettin to Reva! (Tallinn) 32
7 Petrograd. Zinoviev 35
8 Moscow: at the Executive Committee of the Communist Inter-
national. Sadoul/Radek/Bukharin 37
9 Trotsky 40
10 At the Kremlin: Lenin 43
11 Among the delegates to the II Congress of the Communist
International 59
12 Radek speaks of Bakunin 63
13 Smolny; solemn opening session of the II Congress 65
14 The debates of the II Congress 68
15 Trotsky's closing speech presents the Manifesto 78
16 The Eastern Peoples at the Congress of Baku 86
17 The Russian Trade Unions 92
18 The Anarchists. Death and funeral of Kropotkin 97
19 Congress of the French Socialist Party: a majority for affiliation
to the Communist International 102
20 The French Communist group in Moscow 105
21 'Trotsky's Train.' Wrangel. End of the Civil War 109
1921
The Trade-Union question provokes a great debate 116
2 The Kronstadt Rising 119
3 Lenin presents the New Economic Policy (NEP) to the III
Congress of the Communist International 123
4 The Red International of Labour Unions holds its founding
Congress 135
Vl CONTENTS
5 Balance-sheet of seventeen months in Russia
6 Return to Paris - a different world
1922
Return to Moscow; the United Front; Shlyapnikov and Cachin 146
2 World Economic Crisis. Lloyd George proposes a Conference.
Cannes 154
3 The delegates of the three Internationals at Berlin l 56
4 Genoa and Rapallo 161
5 The Trial of the Social-Revolutionaries 163
6 Fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. IV Congress of the
Communist International 167
7 The French Communist Party and its difficulties 172
8 Frossard resigns - Cachin remains 179
Poincare has the Ruhr occupied 192
2 Hamburg: Fusion of the Second International and the Vienna
International l 99
3 Confusion in the leadership of the Communist International.
Revolutionary situation in Germany 202
1924
Lenin's Death 213
Appendix
I Lenin's Testament 214
II Fortunes of Lenin's Testament 215
III Lenin's last speech to the Communist International 216
Conclusion 219
Biographical Notes and Glossary 229
Index 249
Introduction
by Tamara Deutscher
How did it happen, how could it have been that the party of revolu
tion which was to lead toward the liberation of man, toward a classless
society, gradually sank into the mire of a totalitarian regime? Was
Leninism responsible for Stalinism? Did Stalin continue what Lenin
left off? It was to answer such questions that Alfred Rosmer set out
to write Moscou Sous Lenine. Convinced that the past determines the
present, that "in order to move forward one must find one's road of
yesterday," Rosmer went back to the years 1920-1924, and retraced
the events of the immediate post-revolutionary period of which he
was one of the close witnesses.
He spent most of these crucial years in Moscow, where he
observed the changes of policy-and of mood-around the Russian
Party and the parties of the Communist International. In his book he
did not attempt to systematize his impressions, nor did he set out
with any structure preconceived beyond alteration or revision. This
did not mean, however, that he was easily swayed and carried in any
direction by the slightest change of wind. On the contrary, Rosmer
was a man of deep conviction. He remained a communist till the end
of his life; this was why he could see-not without pain and even
despair, but with a clear eye-how the new revolutionary state, trium
phant and yet in mortal danger, battered on all sides by civil war and
intervention, was in no position to bestow the promised liberty and
freedom, but had first to find peace and bread; how the brilliant
vision which inspired so many hearts and minds was becoming
tarnished by the squalor and poverty. With others he listened anxi
ously for the sounds of social unrest in the advanced West, hoping
that it would provide the revolutionary dynamism, take the first
workers' state in tow and pull it out of its backwardness. But this was
not to be.
Russia stood alone, in a hostile world. It was the desperate
scramble for the necessities of survival that shaped her more than the
great ideals for which she fought and bled herself white. Actual exis
tence could not but conflict with the great ideal: "In Moscow, in
1920, we were facing reality," says Rosmer, and he reveals the reality
honestly and without embellishment, but also without bitterness or
resentment. He did not see himself as one whom God had failed;
steadfast in his communist conviction, he had no fear of losing his
"faith"; nor did he need another God.
Vlll INTRODUCTION
Rosmer's real name was Andre Alfred Griot. He was born in
New York on August 23, 1877. His parents left France after the de
feat of the Paris Commune of I 871 and so escaped the oppressive and
revengeful regime that followed. Although they were not active
Communards-they lived in a village on the Loire-they were in
sympathy with the workers' revolt. Did they consider themselves as
belonging to the working class? Hardly. The father was a hairdresser
and exercised this metier all his life. When they returned to France,
in 1884, a new salon was set up in a suburb of Paris. Andre Alfred
went to school; at sixteen he got his first job; at eighteen he passed the
civil service examinations and became a clerk of the Prefecture de
la Seine and was employed in a Paris office, working there for sixteen
long years.
He was attracted by the literary and artistic life of the capital
and divided his free time between painters' studios, exhibitions,
galleries and those open bookstalls where one could browse through
innumerable volumes without ever spending a sou. But above all else
he was attracted by the theater. At the turn of the century Ibsen, the
somber playwright from the North who exposed the hypocrisy and
the prejudices of the respectable middle classes and, estranged, left
his country, was the idol of the young. Curiously enough, it was not
from The Enemy of the People, the fierce attack on the predatory
money-grubbers, that Andre Alfred took his pseudonym, but from
the murky and symbolic Rosmersholm. Professor Christian Gras,
Rosmer's French biographer, suggested that the following lines of
Ibsen appealed to him in a decisive manner: "Only individual effort is
important; only individual effort is noble and fruitful." This is plaus
ible, as at that time Andre Alfred moved in anarchist circles in which
all ideas of collective action requiring discipline were spurned.
One might have thought that he would have discarded this
individualistic pseudonym when he moved politically from anarchism
first to syndicalism, then to revolutionary syndicalism, until he came
to accept Marxism as the wider world outlook, the richer revolutionary
thought and mode of action. 1 But no matter what his political evolu
tion, Ibsen's lines accorded well with Rosmer's personality: a sense
of individual responsibility in all collective endeavor, the refusal to
toe any line conflicting with his individual conscience, and his ability
to stand alone, were characteristic of him till the end of his life. Nor
did his intellectual honesty allow him to join any movement until he
r. While parties recruited their members from among those who accepted a
common political program, the syndicalists aimed at uniting all wage earners for
political action; not dictatorship of the proletariat, but workers' control over pro
duction and distribution was their aim.
INTRODUCTION IX
was deeply convinced that its aims and methods were identical with
his. This was not easy.
Rosmer was not a theoretician, and was formed less by funda
mental doctrines learned from books than by the influence of his
friends in action, by sharp arguments and debates-and by the every
day realities of life to which he was particularly sensitive. The two
men who marked him most profoundly and who most definitely
molded his political personality were, in his younger years, Pierre
Monatte, and later on, Leon Trotsky. Both were his closest personal
friends to whom he was devoted body and soul. And yet he did not
join the revolutionary syndicalists led by Monatte until he was
ideologically ready to make this step; nor did he, in the late 1930s,
join Trotsky in building the Fourth International, as he was uncon
vinced that he could approve of Trotsky's move. His loyalty to the
idea was stronger than his loyalty to friends-but both were uncom
monly deep-rooted.
The outbreak of the First World War put the belief in the
international solidarity of the workers to the most severe test. Nearly
all socialist parties of the warring nations overnight "suspended"
the principle of class struggle and pledged to defend unconditionally
their respective capitalist states, the abolition of which had hitherto
been their professed aim.
Against all odds, the revolutionary syndicalists of France, who
now added the adjective "internationalists" to their appellation,
remained true to their ideal. The bankruptcy of the Second Inter
national only confirmed them in their deep distrust of, and thorough
contempt for reformist socialists, laborites, parliamentarians, bread
and-butter trade unionists, and for all political parties. And yet the
betrayal of the European Left could not but depress their spirits.
They soon found some moral support in their contacts with the
Russian emigres, of whom quite a brilliant pleiade was then in Paris.
Men whose names were to loom so large in the history of the Revo
lution-Trotsky, Martov, Antonov-Ovseenko, Lunacharsky, Lozov
sky-were collaborating on a militant socialist daily in the Russian
language. Trotsky, whose links with the French were particularly
close, consoled the somewhat dispirited Monatte: "All is lost? Oh,
no! At the end of the war we shall have the revolution!"2
The one great event, however, which boosted the morale of the
isolated, scanty, and harassed antimilitarist groups and gave them
new wings was the Zimmerwald Conference. On September 5, 1915
2. Quoted in Christian Gras, Alfred Rosmer et le mouvement revolurionnaire inter-
national (Paris: Fran~ois Maspero, 1971), p. rr4.
