Christian Rakovsky: Selected Writing on Opposition in the USSR 1923-30, edited and with an introduction by Gus Fagan, Allison & Busby, 1980, £4.95.
Allison and Busby's publication of this book is one of the most important publishing events for English-speaking Marxists for decades. One of the greatest figures in the history of the European working class movement is at last made accessible to us.
In addition to Rakovsky's most important political writings in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, this book contains an extremely valuable biographical essay by Gus Fagan on Rakovsky's extraordinarily varied life.
[Rakovsky illegible] reoriented [illegible] movement and went on to become the effective leader of the entire socialist movement in the Balkans before the First World War. He played a central role in the Second International before the war and was one of the main driving forces behind the Zimmerwald movement championing an internationalist resistance to the war. He participated in the Russian Revolution, became President of the Ukraine, then a leading Soviet diplomat. But by this time, he was a leader of the Left Opposition within the Soviet Communist Party. When Trotsky was exiled at the end of the 1920s, he became its main leader in the country until his capitulation in 1934.
Publication of his writing places the history of the Left Opposition in a new light. Most importantly it destroys the traditional picture of that movement as simply the followers of Trotsky, a picture fostered both by Stalinist propagandists wanting to downplay the significance of the struggle inside the Bolshevik party and by bourgeois writers with no desire or ability to grasp the ideological and political issues at stake. Isaac Deutscher, of course, did not subscribe to this myth but ironically his biography of Trotsky, by rightly focusing on Trotsky himself, has contributed to it.
That this is no small matter can be seen by reading Rakovsky's magnificent speech on the national question at the 12th Party Congress in 1923. This speech in fact surveys the entire situation of the Revolution and the future perspectives for its development or downfall and it contains the key ideas that were later to form the basis of the politics of the Left Opposition. One of Trotsky's greatest errors was his failure to launch the struggle against Stalin at this Congress as Lenin had wished and indeed it could be argued that it was Rakovsky who really initiated the fight in the spring of 1923 (in conjunction with Preobrazhensky).
The speech indeed has an extraordinary power and relevance to the problems that many Marxists have today in dealing with Eastern Europe. It reminds us that workers' states are not created only for communists and socialists. They are created for all workers and peasants and when these non-socialist masses stand up for their rights and seek to exercise their power they by no means necessarily do so under the banner of communism. They may well do so under the banner of nationalism and democracy, particularly when they have been bitterly disappointed by the existing 'Communist' apparatus ruling them. Rakovsky's speech has lost none of its resonance today. In Ukraine in the 1960s, Ivan Dzyuba in his famous theoretical onslaught on Russian Chauvinism and national oppression in Ukraine that had such a strong influence on the entire opposition in Ukraine at that time, quoted the speech to provide the theoretical underpinning of his attack.
The second key text here is the famous Letter [illegible], readily available in English for the [illegible]. This text was the real theoretical groundwork for the Trotskyist theory of bureaucratisation in the workers' states. It requires serious study by all who wish to grasp this phenomenon.
The last section of the book contains texts [illegible] drift of sections of the Left Opposition. Reading Trotsky's writings at this time as well as Rakovsky's, we can hardly escape the conclusion [illegible] the 'centre'. Trotsky felt that the 'left turn' would quickly give way to further capitulation to the right on the part of the bureaucracy and indeed it was Rakovsky who first grasped the real dynamic of bureaucratic consolidation against both the left and the 'right' at the start of the 1930s.
Gus Fagan is to be congratulated on this pioneering effort to bring Rakovsky back into the intellectual and political history of Marxism.
The task remains of bringing Rakovsky to the attention of socialists in Romania and the Balkans. The Romanian bureaucracy indeed has been unable to maintain a total silence on the main founder of Romanian socialism, despite Ceaucescu's attempts to trace his own lineage back to the Dacians and Roman legions! But the time will come when Romanian socialists will trade their real authentic traditions through the life and work of their great political ancestor, Christian Rakovsky.