The CONVERSATION website published an article in 2023 that paralleled Vladimir Putin 2022 “invasion of Ukraine” and Lenin/Stalin invasion of Poland in 1920… It is ludicrous and erroneous. It’s probably deliberate to belittle Putin and destroy Lenin at the same time. Yes, the Bolsheviks made mistakes, especially in trying to annex Poland into Russia, but Putin did not make a mistake... 

Russia’s disastrous decision to invade Poland in 1920 has parallels with Putin’s rhetoric over Ukraine

Peter Whitewood (the CONVERSATION)

Meanwhile, Trotsky, sometimes blamed for advocating this Poland invasion caper, understood the working class struggle.

And hence, with regard to technology above all else, we must ask ourselves: is it only an instrument of class oppression? It is enough to ask such a question to be able to answer at once: no, technology is a basic conquest of mankind. … The machine strangles the wage-slave. But the wage-slave can only be freed through the machine. Herein lies the root of the whole question.

              —Leon Trotsky, “Culture and Socialism” (1927)

This was nearly one hundred years ago — and this “class oppression” as if we were living in a confortable hell, in now under the strong grip of Artificial Intelligence… AI is smart, incisive, can create art beyond our imagination in a few seconds and can work non-stop… 

So, what about Trotsky?

According to the story in circulation in "academic folklore" as well as in accounts repeated for political generations by Trotskyist militants, in 1939-40 the Trotskyist movement debated the “class nature” of Stalinist Russia.

In the folklore, Trotsky staunchly defended the position that Russia remained a degenerated workers’ state, and would so remain as long as the economy was still nationalised. Shachtman, Burnham, and their associates, the minority, taking their ideas from the Italian Bruno Rizzi, defended the idea that Russia was not a degenerated workers’ state, but a new form of class society.

After the debate, the movement split into two irreconcilable streams, whose divergences thereafter widened until they wound up on different sides in the great divide of the Cold War: the “orthodox Trotskyists” on the side of the Stalinist bloc, and the heretical Shachtmanites either “neutral” or (for Shachtman himself in the 1960s) actively on the side of US imperialism.

With few variations, this account is common. Even the respectworthy Marxist scholar Hal Draper gives such an account, and an extremely “vulgar” version of it too, with a preposterous story about what Trotsky was doing in 1939-40: http://archive.workersliberty.org/wlmags/wl57/rizzi.htm.

The standard account is a gross misrepresentation. If there was a debate on that it was a matter of Trotsky elaborating, with himself, speeches for both sides. His main opponent, Max Shachtman, was still a workers’ statist. James Burnham, who thought Russia a class-exploitative system, was silent.

The “innocent” explanation for this misrepresentation is that, over the years, the story of the two post-Trotsky Trotskyisms has been telescoped, simplified, and condensed, so that the later-emerging divisions that can be said to be rooted in 1939-40 are projected back and the whole story is more neatly tied up. That may well be the explanation for the standard account appearing even in the memoirs of Al Glotzer, who was very old and by then thought the 1917 revolution should never have happened.

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… the misrepresentations in the popular account of Bolshevism are not innocent, and nor are those in the prevailing account of 1939-40. In any case it results in a hiding, elimination even, of Trotsky's real thinking on Russia, and of the evolution of his ideas on Stalinism. What happened then?

In August 1939 Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, erstwhile greatest enemies, signed a pact of non-aggression. In fact it was far more than that. In secret clauses, Stalin undertook to provide Germany with raw materials. As Trotsky put it, Stalin enlisted as Hitler’s “quartermaster” for the Second World War.

The cartoonist David Low summed it up in the Evening Standard of 20 September 1939, presenting Hitler and Stalin both in military uniform and bowing to each other. “The scum of the earth, I believe?” “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?”

b. The pact was the bugle-call for war, freeing Hitler to act without fear that Russia would attack him. On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany in defence of their Polish ally. The long-expected and greatly-feared new world war had started. It was not quite 21 years on from the end of the First World War, in November 1918.

It seemed to Trotsky to be only the second in a likely series of world wars that would, he came to think, be the “grave of civilisation”, unless the working class seized power in the advanced countries. That view proved to be wrong; but in 1939 it was not an unreasonable one.

c. On 17 September, Stalin invaded Poland from the east. On 19 September the Russian Stalinist and German Nazi armies met each other not as enemies but as close collaborators who in alliance had just “made their bones”, the first of World War Two, by carving up Poland.

d. On 24 September Stalin demanded that Estonia concede military bases to the USSR, or face invasion. Estonia agreed. In October, Stalin would make the same demand on the other Baltic states, Latvia and Lithuania, and force their agreement too.

e. On 12 October Stalin started making territorial demands on Finland. Finland would not agree to what Stalin wanted, and on 30 November Russia invaded Finland. Finland was on paper greatly outmatched, a David against an army of Goliaths, but incompetence, bungling, and disarray in the Russian army, whose top leaders and organisers had been slaughtered by Stalin in 1937, allowed the Finns to inflict defeats on the Russians and prolong their resistance.

There was serious talk of British and French forces landing in Finland to fight “Hitler’s quartermaster” [RUSSIA]. As the world war got going, it looked as if the Hitler-Stalin pact might become a lasting partnership in a long war.

On 12 March 1940, the Finnish war ended. Finland ceded territory to the USSR.

f. On 9 April 1940, Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark, in part to forestall planned British landings in Norway.

g. On 9 May 1940, the German armies attacked Luxemburg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. In the First World War, the Germans invading France through Belgium had been stopped before they could reach Paris, and a terrible war of trench-fighting stalemate settled in for four years. In May 1940 the Germans broke through completely, conquering France. By June the German armies and their allies had control of the whole of Europe, barring Switzerland and a few countries on the margins: Sweden, Britain and Ireland, and Yugoslavia and Greece, which Germany would conquer in 1941.

Stalin’s pact with Hitler had led within nine months to Russia being left “alone” in Europe with an immensely strengthened Germany.

h. The Stalinist world movement, which for five years before late 1939 had advocated an alliance of “the democracies”, including Russia, for war against Hitler, swung behind the Hitler-Stalin alliance after a short period of confusion. Raucously, the Stalinist parties denounced the British and French “warmongers” and demanded peace — on Hitler’s terms. As for Poland? “Poland no longer exists”.

In Britain, Stalinists, the Independent Labour Party, pacifists, and others launched a “make peace with Hitler” campaign that at first got a lot of labour movement support. After the fall of France and the Nazi seizure of western Europe, much of that support fell away. But the Communist Party continued the “peace” campaign until Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941.

In Mexico, the Stalinists denounced the “Jewish Trotskyists”. In France, on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Russia, the Communist Party was negotiating with the German occupation forces for permission to publish a legal daily paper.

In western Europe, a notable current emerged that saw the Nazis as progressive — in “unifying” Europe, for example. Some of them, the French Neo-Socialists for example, collaborated with the occupying forces on that basis. That is a current that is largely forgotten now. One reason for this is that it is overshadowed in history by the enormous number of socialists — including most “Trotskyists” — who for decades adopted a similar approach to Stalinism and its spreading tide after 1944.

Natalia Sedova-Trotsky would say about this approach, in 1951: “In 1932 and 1933, the Stalinists, in order to justify their shameless capitulation to Hitlerism, declared that it would matter little if the Fascists came to power because socialism would come after and through the rule of Fascism. Only dehumanised brutes without a shred of socialist thought or spirit could have argued this way.

“Now, notwithstanding the revolutionary aims which animate you [the ‘orthodox Trotskyists’], you maintain that the despotic Stalinist reaction which has triumphed in Eastern Europe is one of the roads through which socialism will eventually come…”

HITLER HAD THUS DECIDED TO INVADE RUSSIA… Some released secret documents seem to indicate that the ALLIES, while fighting Germany, discreetly convinced Hitler that invading Russia was a “good idea”. For the Allies, this would divert German troops to an Eastern front, lightening the load on the West, AND at the same time, destroy Russia which the Americans had wanted to do since 1917.

27 million dead Russians later, one does not forget….

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So, what about Putin?

The article in the CONVERSATION concludes:

Bolshevik fears of international conspiracies were not unique to the Soviet-Polish war. “Capitalist encirclement” was a deeply rooted conviction stemming from the international isolation of the 1917 Revolution. But the humiliating defeat to Poland in August 1920 – and the way the Bolsheviks explained this in conspiratorial terms – amplified an instinct to see “anti-Soviet blocs” everywhere.

Soviet military intelligence went on to write continuous inaccurate reports to this effect throughout the 1920s. And before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Stalin – behind closed doors – identified a coalition of Poland and the Baltic States, backed by Britain and France, as the central threat to Soviet security.

Putin, of course, is not a Bolshevik and how much he believes his own propaganda is hard to determine. And while Poland received relatively little support in 1920, the same cannot be said of Ukraine today. But echoes in Putin’s rhetoric and Russian propaganda of an older Soviet worldview – exaggerating interventionist blocs encircling Russia while refusing to recognise the agency of Ukraine – precisely how Lenin once saw Poland – are hard to ignore.

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GUS:

PRESENTLY, RUSSIA is winning an existential war against more than 30 Western countries, including the USA. It could be said that Trump wants “peace” to prevent Russia gaining more “Ukrainian” territory — which, as an aside, used to be Russian lands, until 1922 for the Donbass and Odessa — and until 1954 for Crimea…

This war was PROVOKED by the Western political elites.

To say the least, Putin has been very moderate, possibly too moderate in his response to the forceful deception and aggression of the West… Putin does not indulge in rhetoric nor propaganda. His words stand the test of historical facts — and the hypocritical West knows this, BUT still try the con-jobs.

The Article in the CONVERSATION also derided the discovery of bio-labs in Ukraine — bio-labs, the existence of which was confirmed by Victoria Nuland in order to promote their “non-nefarious” intent. Nuland can not be trusted EVER. These bio-labs had the hallmarks of being the descendants of the Nazi experiments during WW2…

So… there NO parallel between the Bolsheviks invasion of Poland in 1920 and Russia “limited military intervention” of 2022 — except the West chose to turn this into a full blown war, by scuttling a decent peace deal for Ukraine in 2022: Reinstating the Minsk agreements. The West has also supplied weapons to Ukraine, but cannot send troops without being nuked… THIS IS A HIGHLY DETERMINING FACTOR…

Our final point is that America exploited the Nazis in Ukraine to overthrow its legitimate government and to promote Russophobia to the max. Russophobia also permeates the CONVERSATION article which DOESN’T mention the Nazis in Ukraine…

— “Articles on The Conversation are written by academic experts with the help of journalists. All our work is free to read and republish. We want to give you the highest quality, unbiased information to help you make better decisions.”

BULLSHIT… One can smell the CONversation bias from a million miles away…

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.