When ‘Socialist’ States Suppress National Liberation

Trotsky defended the Soviet invasion of Finland. The campists quote him for Ukraine, and get him wrong at every joint.

TL;DR: The campists cite Trotsky’s 1939 defence of the Soviet invasion of Finland to license support for every ‘anti-imperialist’ aggressor since, Ukraine included. They misread him at every joint. His ‘same camp’ line was conditional on a Finnish civil war that never opened, and by April 1940 he knew it had not; the Red Army came to subjugate a neutral country, not to arm a rising. He refused the word ‘imperialist’ only in its strict Marxist sense, Hilferding’s finance capital and Lenin’s export of capital, a model already breaking down by the 1940s and silent on imperial domination as such. And his whole defence rested on the USSR being a degenerated workers’ state. Capitalist Russia is not one, so nothing carries over. Their strongest precedent is the case that convicts them.

A reader sent it in. A letter from Trotsky to a comrade in Ceylon, dated the twenty-fourth of November 1939, six days before the Red Army crossed into Finland. The subject is India, not Finland. The framework is identical, and it is the framework the campists never quote.

The Red Army, Trotsky writes, is not an independent political factor. It is a military instrument of the Bonapartist bureaucracy of the USSR. Everything else follows. Military intervention is only the continuation of political intervention, and the political intervention of Stalin’s Comintern was already underway in India, as everywhere else. The general historic role of the bureaucracy is counter-revolutionary. But through their own narrow interests they can be forced, on occasion, to support a progressive movement. Trotsky reaches for the sharpest possible illustration: Ludendorff, the Prussian militarist, gave Lenin a train to the Finland Station, a progressive act, and Lenin accepted it. The task is to discern the progressive act, support it independently, foresee the betrayal in time, and warn the masses before it lands. March separately, strike together. Keep a suspicious eye on the temporary ally as well as on the foe.

That is the whole of it. Contingent, independent, distrustful, alert to the coming betrayal. Nothing in that letter licenses handing the working class over to the tanks.

Which is worth holding in view, because three weeks later, two weeks into the war itself, Trotsky wrote the passage the tankies do quote. It sits in ‘A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party’, dated the fifteenth of December 1939, his polemic against Shachtman and Burnham. It ran the following March in the New International, the SWP’s own theoretical organ, over the editorial masthead of Burnham and Shachtman and a few pages from Shachtman’s open reply. Weeks later the minority split away, and the magazine went with them. He refused the word ‘imperialism’ for Soviet policy, and he told Fourth Internationalists in Finland to take their place, as he put it, ‘in that camp where the Stalinists are compelled to support the expropriation of the capitalists’. Lift the sentence clear of the argument and you have your warrant: Trotsky blessed the invasion, so bless every anti-Western power that comes after. Budapest, Prague, Kabul, and now the road to Kyiv, the old man’s signature on all of it.

The warrant is forged. It is forged at every joint.

Take the word first, because the campists rest their whole weight on it. Trotsky refused to call Soviet policy imperialist, and on the terms of the quarrel he was in, he was right to. ‘Imperialism’ in 1939 was not an insult; it was a Marxist category with a hard edge, Hilferding’s finance capital fused from bank and industry, Lenin’s export of capital from the mature economies to the backward ones, the carve-up of the world among the monopolies. A planned economy sending an army into Finland answers to none of it. When the bourgeois press, and Shachtman echoing it, tarred Soviet expansion as ‘imperialist’, Trotsky saw the move for what it was: the word stretched to cover both the foreign policy of finance capital and the policy of liquidating finance capital, so that the property question could be quietly buried. He would not let the two be dissolved into one. Concede him every word.

But two things follow that the tankies never say when they borrow his refusal. The first is that the category he was defending did not outlive the decade. By the end of the 1940s the Hilferding-Lenin account was breaking on the facts: capital had begun to move between the advanced economies rather than draining from core to periphery, and the export-of-capital thesis that held the whole theory together no longer described the world. On those strict terms it had stopped making much sense to call the USSR imperialist. Nor, on the same terms, the United States. The word the campists wield as Trotsky’s was already a period piece in his hands.

The second is that imperialism in the sense this article means it is a different and older thing: the policy of imperial domination, the building and holding of an empire of subject nations by conquest and coercion. Not finance capital. Tanks, redrawn borders, a puppet government, a collaborator stratum to run the periphery. In that sense, the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe was imperialism plain, and the Baltics the following year showed it in full. Trotsky’s refusal of the Marxist label says nothing against it, and the tankies who quote the refusal are trading on the slippage between two meanings of a single word. Keep the two apart and you can call Russia’s war on Ukraine imperialist without owing Shachtman a syllable.

Now the same camp. The sentence is conditional, and the condition is load-bearing. Trotsky wrote that the war was ‘apparently beginning to be supplemented by a civil war’ in which the Finnish poor sided with the Red Army against their own owning classes and the conservative Finnish labour bureaucracy. Apparently. He built on the word as though it were firm ground: the Red Army in Finland, he wrote, expropriates the landlords and brings in workers’ control. It did no such thing. The Terijoki government, proclaimed one day into the invasion and folded away the day the peace was signed, was a shell of Comintern émigrés under Kuusinen. And the Finnish workers’ movement, in the weeks after Trotsky set the sentence down, ran the other way entire. In the January Engagement of 1940 the trade unions and the employers recognised one another as bargaining partners; on the fifteenth of February the Social Democratic leadership put its name to a joint appeal with the Civil Guard, the White Guard that had crushed the Reds in 1918, urging socialists into its ranks. The conservative labour bureaucracy Trotsky had named as the enemy’s prop did more than back the bourgeois army: it made its peace with the paramilitary of the White terror. No rising came.

The fiction did more than mislead him. He made it a cudgel against comrades in his own party. He faulted Burnham’s minority for failing to mention, even once, the expropriations and the workers’ control the Red Army was supposedly carrying through, for resting their case on ‘democratic abstractions and noble sentiments’ rather than the concrete process he believed was under way in Finland. There was no concrete process. Whatever the confusions Trotsky pinned on the minority elsewhere, and some were real, on this they were right, and he rebuked them for missing what was not there, on the word of a Soviet press that was inventing it.

The same move runs through the letter to Ceylon three weeks earlier and through this text too, in the image of Hitler forced to arm an Indian rising he means to crush the next morning: a reactionary power compelled against its own nature to carry a revolution part of the way. Grant the logic entire. The premise still had to hold, and it did not. The Red Army had not come to arm a Finnish rising; it had come to subjugate a neutral country that threatened no one, and Trotsky’s own warning told him where that ends: the Kremlin turning its guns on the workers it claimed to be freeing.

Trotsky knew the civil war had not come by April, and here the honest reader has to slow down, because he did not recant. In the balance sheet he drew of the whole affair he insisted the prognosis had been conditional from the start, one variant among several, and that the civil war failed to open not because the class analysis was wrong but because Stalin, caught between the threat of Allied intervention and Hitler’s impatience, cut the war short and gave up the sovietising of Finland before it could begin. A prognosis, he wrote, is not a promissory note to be cashed on a fixed date. On the method he was right. He was also, by then, calling Finnish resistance no more an act of genuine national defence than Norway’s, and defending in principle the right of a workers’ state to override a small nation’s independence when its own survival against imperialism required it. That is the real Trotsky, not the tidier one a self-determination case would want, and it is the mistaken judgement that flows straight from the mistaken assessment: a neutral country’s right to exist, subordinated to a workers’ revolution that its workers never raised a hand for. He gave no ground, and the ground he stood on was the workers’ state and nothing else.

The Baltics finish the argument, because there the missing condition finally arrives, and arrives as its own refutation. In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the summer of 1940 the expropriation did happen. Capitalist property was liquidated. And it was done from above and against the population: an occupying army and its political police staged the elections and nationalised the economy, breaking every independent workers’ organisation they could reach, with the mass deportations to come the following summer. The property overturn Trotsky’s conditional required was carried out as counter-revolution. That is not the same camp. That is the warning coming true on schedule.

So who actually held the line the campists attribute to Trotsky, the line that says support the Soviet tanks wherever they extend state property? Not the Fourth International. That was the position of the Stalinists, and of the ex-Trotskyist Sam Marcy’s Workers World Party, who followed the logic to its terminus and cheered the tanks into Budapest. The Fourth International did the reverse. It condemned the occupation of the buffer states after world war two, the crushing of the Berlin rising in 1953 and the Hungarian revolution in 1956; both wings of the movement, after the 1953 split, said the same. Shachtman, meanwhile, had already broken away to build a different politics entirely, one that ended with him backing Washington in Vietnam. The confusion of property form with class power has a name, the bureaucratic error, and it was never the orthodox position. It was the thing orthodoxy was fighting.

Here is where it bears on Ukraine, and here the correction turns into the argument. Trotsky’s defencism, the whole of it, rested on one foundation: the class character of the invading state. A degenerated workers’ state extending nationalised property, however filthy the method, was still a workers’ state, and that was why he defended it and why he could imagine a camp worth joining. Remove that foundation and the entire construction collapses, the defencism and the same-camp logic together. Trotsky made the point himself, in this same December text, against the ultra-lefts who wanted to sacrifice the Soviet social structure in order to smash the bureaucracy: the USSR shorn of the property relations October established would be nothing but a fascist regime. The defence was always a defence of those relations, never of the regime sitting on top of them: defence of the USSR, in the exact words Shachtman himself had endorsed in January 1939 before he abandoned them, ‘regardless and in spite of the Stalinist regime’. Capitalist Russia has none of those relations. There is nothing left to defend, no progressive property form travelling in the baggage train, nothing that Trotsky’s conditional could attach to. The tankies reach for Finland as their precedent and it is the one case that convicts them: Finland is where Trotsky refused the word ‘imperialist’ in the one strict sense that has since dissolved, and where his defence of the invasion rested wholly on a workers’ state that Russia no longer is. The honest line to ‘we want Russia to lose’ does not go around the property question. It goes straight through it.

There is a version of all this that the campists could still salvage, and honesty requires naming it. If you thought the invasion had been militarily necessary to the defence of the October revolution, the calculus might look different, and Trotsky at moments seems to reason as though it were. But the history refuses even that. Finland was never incorporated; the peace of March 1940 left the revolution exactly where it stood; and the buffer against Germany was built under a pact with Germany and drove a neutral Finland into Berlin’s arms by 1941. The necessity argument does not survive its own outcomes. The letter to Ceylon had already said as much: the task is not to speculate about future interventions but to fight the present one, with a firm distrust of the temporary ally. The tankies kept the ally and lost the distrust.

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Postscript: the conditional and its afterlife

Return to that word, “apparently”. It is the most honest word in the December text, and by the following April Trotsky was defending it as such. When the ex-oppositionists jeered that the promised civil war had never come, he answered that he had promised nothing, that he had laid out one conditional variant among several, that a prognosis is not a promissory note. He was right on the method and wrong on the object. He had misjudged the situation on the ground and drawn his conclusions from the misjudgement, and part of the reason is plain geography: a man in Coyoacán, an ocean from the front, reading a thin and slow stream of news with next to nothing on hand to test it against. What reached him loudest was Moscow’s press, which had built Kuusinen’s Terijoki government into a ‘People’s Government of Finland’ leading a rising that was always about to break, and which his whole method disposed him to credit over the bourgeois dispatches. The corrective was out there. From the first day the Finnish working class stood with Helsinki, not with Kuusinen; the Western reporting already called Terijoki a puppet and the resistance national; the rising the Comintern advertised was one that Stalin’s own intelligence never expected and the wrecked underground party could not have produced. It did not carry to Mexico, or it carried as the noise of the ‘democrats’ and he set it aside. The pact he read with something close to precision, the Baltic carve-up plain from the ruins of the Anglo-French talks that summer. The interior he got wrong.

The one document that would have ended all argument about the war’s paternity stayed sealed for fifty years. The secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the clause that ran a line through Eastern Europe and dropped Finland and the Baltics on the Soviet side of it, was denied by Moscow from the day it was signed. Molotov, who had put his own name to it, went to his grave in 1986 still denying it existed; the Congress of People’s Deputies conceded the thing only in December 1989, and the originals were laid on a table in Moscow in 1992. Trotsky inferred its substance and never saw its text, and argued the character of the invasion twenty-two years after Lenin’s government had recognised Finland’s independence on New Year’s Eve 1917.

What his epigones made of it is the part that does not close. They kept the December sentence and lost the April qualification; they froze one conditional variant into a standing law and carried it down the decades to bless one Soviet tank after another, none of which turned on the single question Trotsky made everything turn on, the class nature of the state doing the invading. He at least was reasoning about a workers’ state, degenerated and Bonapartist and criminal but still carrying the property relations of October beneath it, and he at least was reasoning from Mexico in 1939 with the news arriving thin and late. His epigones had the archives and kept the error anyway. Whether a tradition that now stands with Ukraine can lean on that Trotsky at all, given how little of Finland’s independence he was willing to defend, is the harder question, and it is not one the archives were ever going to answer.

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Sources

Leon Trotsky, ‘Letter to an Indian Comrade’ (24 November 1939), Internal Bulletin of the Socialist Workers Party, December 1939.

Leon Trotsky, ‘A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party’ (written 15 December 1939), first published in New International, Vol. VI, No. 2, March 1940; collected in In Defense of Marxism (New York, 1942).

Leon Trotsky, ‘Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events’ (25 April 1940).

‘Secret Additional Protocol’ to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (23 August 1939), Avalon Project, Yale Law School.

‘Decree on State Independence for Finland’ (31 December 1917), Seventeen Moments in Soviet History.

‘How Finland found a road to reconciliation after the Civil War of 1918’, thisisFINLAND, on the January Engagement and the 15 February 1940 Social Democrat and Civil Guard appeal.