Dear Editors,
I noticed a few small errors of fact in the Nils Dahl memoir, published in your issue of Summer 1989 (Volume 2, no 2). The first concerns a reference to the Berlin transport workers' strike that occurred in the autumn of 1932. Dahl says that `in Prussia there was a Labour [ie Social Democratic Party – RB] government which sent troops against the strikers.' This was not so. The minority Social Democratic administration had been ousted by Chancellor von Papen's legal coup d'etat on 20 July 1932. Prime Minister Otto Braun was deposed, along with all his SPD cabinet colleagues, and replaced by a commissioner, the conser¬vative mayor of Essen, Dr Bracht. (The removal of the Prussian Social Democrats had been a shared objective of the Communist Party and Nazi leaders, and had led to their joining forces the previous year in a referendum for this very purpose.)

Dahl is also mistaken in describing the Black Front as being led by Gregor Strasser. It was in fact a left Nazi organisation created by Gregor's brother Otto in 1930, following the latter's break from Hitler. Otto Strasser had objected to Hitler's policy of courting support from big business, and broke away to form what he considered to be a pure Nazi movement. Otto Strasser fled Germany after the Nazi takeover, thus avoiding the fate that befell his brother in the `Night of the Long Knives' of June 1934.

The two other errors may not be those of Dahl but of Trotsky himself. Dahl recalls Trotsky referring to Lenin's `first revolutionary government' as including Socialist Revolutionaries and `other peo¬ple, some of whom had rather Anarchistic leanings'. The first Bolshevik government in fact contained no other parties. The Left SRs (but never any Anarchists ...they would shortly be joining other non-¬Bolshevik left groups in either exile, premature graves or labour camps) became the Bolsheviks' very junior part¬ners in a coalition formed two weeks later, and resigned after their opposition to the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in March 1918.

The other error concerns Lenin's rela¬tionship with Martov. According to Dahl, Trotsky recalled that Lenin expelled Mar¬tov from the USSR. That is not so. Mar¬tov left the USSR in September 1920 by his own choice, on a Soviet passport made out and stamped by the appropriate authorities. Lenin authorised his depar¬ture, but did not order it. It is also certain that Martov did not go to Switzerland, as Dahl says, but to Berlin, where he died of TB in April 1923.

I cannot comment on the assertion that Lenin secretly sent money to finance the Menshevik newspaper Martov was helping to edit, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik. What are on record are Lenin's characterisa¬tions of Martov's policies and activities in his last years of exile. In his pamphlet The Tax in Kind, which outlined the principles of the New Economic Policy, Lenin describes Martov as one of a group of `servile accomplices of the white guards', as guilty of `placing the masses at the mer¬cy of whiteguard terrorism', and of being one of several `abominable agents and out and out servitors of reaction' (an anticipa¬tion of `Social Fascism'?). Martov himself Lenin called 'nothing but a philistine Nar¬cissus' for defending the Kronstadt rebels and concluded that `the place for Men¬sheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries ...is not at a non party conference but in prison, or on foreign journals, side by side with the white guards ...we were glad to let Martov go abroad' (Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 32, pp359 362). A year later, at the Eleventh Party Congress, Lenin was demanding that `for the public manifestations of Menshevism, our courts must pass the death sentence, otherwise they are not our courts, but God knows what...' (Collected Works, Volume 33, p282).

Was Lenin financing Martov's `white guard' journalism, as footnote 11 asserts (`there can be no doubt about its authen¬ticity')? Despite Lenin's undoubted lingering affection for his old Iskra com¬rade, I do not think so. But neither do I think Lenin believed a single one of the in¬sults he hurled at him. Nevertheless, one must ask the question ...is this the behaviour of someone who, to quote Dahl, `regarded criticism as valuable'?

Readers might be interested to know that I have written a play on this theme, and hope to have it produced shortly.
Robin Blick

Editor's note: Robin Blick is almost certain¬ly mistaken here. We now know that it was Nadezhda Krupskaya who was responsible for sending Lenin's 'Testament' after his death to the Menshevik press. She would not have done this if she did not know that it was in accordance with his wishes.

Dear Comrades,
I am happy to accept Ian Driver's factual correction in the last issue of Revolu¬tionary History to my letter in the previous issue (Volume 2, no 1). This let¬ter was not intended for publication but was an off the cuff observation in a longer letter on other matters to Al Richardson. Al, on his initiative and no doubt with the commendable intention of generating discussion in the letters page of the magazine, extracted this part. If I had known I would have been more careful in its formulation. What I should have said was that some (though not unimportant) currents in the movement did take an abstentionist attitude to the Resistance. Ian Driver is quite right to point out this error. I would only take exception to his last paragraph: 'Hopefully, these brief points will serve to set the record straight and show that it was not the Trotskyists who were responsible for retarding the advance of revolutionary Socialism but rather the counter revolutionary Stalinists.' If he looks again at my letter he will see that in no way do I imply this.

Ian Driver mentions that the French Trotskyists encouraged and led the seizure of a number of factories in the Paris area. Rodolphe Prager also refers to this in the article in Revolutionary History Volume 1 no 3, and observes: `The Stalinist trade union officials occupied themselves with obstructing this movement and ended by ordering the Western suburbs committee to wind up on pain of exclusion from the CGT. The evidence suggests that despite the favourable symptoms which numerous mass initiatives revealed, this was not the irresistible explosion on which they could have counted. A spirit of patriotism was fed by the fact that the war was still going on, and this was accepted as a justification for exceptional controls. obstructing the class struggle. The Trot¬skyists' denunciation of the imperialist war placed them against the stream and isolated them in the face of enthusiasm for the war...'

This tallies with my personal ex¬perience. I was in the British Army that landed in Normandy. In August 1944 I managed to get attached to a unit of the FFI (Free French Forces) that was making its way into Paris with supplies for the Resistance Forces that were fighting in the city. Many of the armed Resistance groups were already being incorporated into the Gaullist Forces, and the unit I was with had originally been an independent Resistance maquis. When I attempted to put forward Trotskyist arguments, in par¬ticular, that the local Resistance commit¬tees should exert power and not allow de Gaulle to replace them by appointed of¬ficials and Prefects, the general reaction of the resistance fighters was: `But we haven't beaten the Boches yet. We mustn't start fighting among ourselves. When the war is over we'll have elections, and settle all that then,' I can also attest to the dif¬ficulties and dangers that Trotskyist work in the Resistance entailed. Though I was originally welcomed into the unit (`an ex¬tra rifle is always useful') the captain com¬manding the column and others became extremely hostile, and I think I was only protected by the fact that I was in British uniform. Ian Driver's comment that Trot¬skyists who participated in the French Resistance risked assassination by the Stalinists is an understatement. We now know that they were. So I do not underestimate the difficulties.

I agree with Driver that there were many instances of `dual power' and of ten¬sion between the local resistance groups and the Gaullist authorities appointed from Algiers. But nevertheless, on the whole, with the help of the Stalinists, the incorporation of the resistance into the Gaullist state machinery was accomplish¬ed fairly speedily.

Incidentally, there is an interesting ac¬count of `dual power' in Italy by James Cameron in Special Operations Europe. Cameron was in the SOE, and worked with the Italian resistance. He describes how the Resistance Committee in Milan, which included Stalinists, Socialists and Chris¬tian Democrats, ignored advice by the Anglo American Military Command, organised an insurrection in Milan and controlled the city for several days. When they greeted the advancing American forces at the outskirts of Milan, the American officer drawled: `Well guys, you can take it easy now. We've come to liberate you!'

Harry Ratner

Dear Editors,
Ken Tarbuck (Letters, Revolutionary History, Summer 1989) takes to task my review of Ernest Mandel's Making of the Second World War, published in your Winter 1988 89 issue. He says that to call Mandel's book an apology for Stalinism, and Mandel `a criminal' is to engage in factional infighting unworthy of your journal. I am sorry that he deems polemics to be out of fashion, but hope that he'll allow just one more.

Ken agrees that Mandel is wrong to at¬tribute Soviet victory in 1945 to October 1917. Yet this for him does not mean that Mandel `defends by argument', as the Ox¬ford English Dictionary has it of apologists, the politics of Stalinism.

Ken's recourse to the OED is quaint but not in the Bolshevik tradition. The review of Mandel's book pointed out that it put the revival of Soviet war production after December 1941 down to `the economic and social superiority of a planned economy'. To anyone interested in the fate of the Soviet working class today, it should be clear that to celebrate Soviet `planning' in the War is to make a dangerous apology for an era   Stalin's   that many still yearn for in the USSR.

The War marked the climax of the defeat of the Soviet working class. Either one accepts that, and refuses to ascribe any progressive content to a system which helped lose the USSR 20 million workers or, in terms of practical consequences, one upholds the Soviet social formation   then or now   as some kind of an ex¬ample to the working class. Given that Revolutionary History no doubt hopes to attract young readers, it is a staggering complacency that Ken exhibits when he shrugs off the review as `a parade of ini¬quities' committed by Stalin, `most if not all' known `to anyone with some knowledge' of the USSR. For Ken, it seems, the facts and statistics of the defeat of the Soviet workers are but `a matter for legitimate debate' no more. They do not need parading, as he puts it, and they need have no implications for political activity or for the characterisation of figures like Ernest Mandel.

As it happens, the review did not call Mandel a `criminal', as Ken makes out. It argued that Mandel's half paragraph co¬quetting with the problem of Russian na¬tionalism was criminal, particularly as the impetus given to Russian nationalism by the War was not recognised as a defeat by Soviet workers. Ken, ever the liberal apologist for Mandel, admits that nationalism is something that has `probably been played down'; indeed, he is anxious to deny that Mandel is `above criticism'. But again he fails to engage in anything more than `factional infighting'. When millions of Soviet workers are today at¬tracted to Russian nationalism, Ken wants to exonerate Mandel for his failure to grasp the origins of that movement in the War.

Does Ken agree with the review that Mandel's paeans to the heroism of Soviet workers in the War are a dishonest at¬tempt to dignify Soviet property relations with a progressive character? Does he agree that Soviet foreign policy was motivated after 1926 by the line of peaceful coexistence with imperialist powers? Ken calls for standards, clarifica¬tion and respect, but won't answer the substantive points made in the review. Does he follow Mandel in blaming the `passivity' of the workers of Eastern Europe for the tragedy of the mid  to late 1940s there, or does he hold Stalinism responsible? We are not told; yet once again these questions are of great contem¬porary importance.

Really what offends Ken is the tone of the review. Yet anyone familiar with the tone of Lenin's polemics against even left wing centrists, let alone against apologists for Menshevism, will know how vitriolic the man's language could be. Your reviewer is not Lenin, but she hopes that Revolutionary History will continue to uphold, in Leninist style, the right to call a spade a spade.
Gemma Forest

Some comments

Dear Comrades,
Revolutionary History has a valuable role to play in helping to educate a new genera¬tion of revolutionaries about the history of the movement. In their various organisations comrades will be told either that the history of Trotskyism is not very important or, alternatively, that their own organisation is the one true inheritor of the great tradition. Hopefully they will turn to Revolutionary History for a more balanced view. However, Revolutionary History will only win and deserve such readership if it accepts certain principles. Firstly, that nobody is sacrosanct. The record and ideas of everyone, even Trot¬sky and Marx, must be subjected to rigorous criticism. Secondly, the journal must scrupulously avoid factionalism. Of course, there should be vigorous and par¬tisan polemic in signed articles, but the journal itself should be free of any fac¬tional identification. On this basis may I make two small observations on the most recent issue (Volume 2, no 2).

Firstly, in the obituary note on Munis, the Editors write that his group `developed ultra leftist positions on the trade unions'. Some readers, familiar with the way such terms have been thrown around in the movement in recent years, may imagine that they refused to back the Broad Left slate for Minuting Secretary of the Trades Council, or something of that order. Unfortunately there was rather more to it than that. In Les Syndicats con¬tre la Rdvolution by Munis and Peret (Le Terrain Vague, Paris, 1968), Munis argues that the destruction of the trade unions is the immediate priority task for workers. Of course, we can understand how, in an age of defeat and isolation, and facing the very real thuggery of the Stalinist unions, an authentic revolutionary like Munis could come to such a position. Nonetheless, the position should be labell¬ed as pernicious and dangerous. Norman Tebbit could happily live with 'ultra-¬leftism' of that sort.

Secondly, in the `Reader's Notes' your anonymous compiler lists a number of obituaries of CLR James. Such a bibliography is extremely valuable, but am I the only one who feels that it is in¬trusive to include brief, sniping comments in such a bibliography? Your compiler singles out Robin Blackburn's obituary in the Independent as `pretentious' and `grossly ignorant'. But the three brief quotations he gives fail to justify this con¬demnation.

Admittedly Blackburn did commit the heinous crime of getting James' pseudonym wrong. But to call James an 'Anarcho Bolshevik' does not seem outrageous to me. After his break with or¬thodox Trotskyism James combined a profound admiration for Lenin and October with a total rejection of organisation in the present period (a paradox drawn out admirably by Paul Foot in Socialist Worker, 1 July 1989; an item that might well be added to the list of tributes to James).

And it is certainly a fact that James was interested in the `early works of Raymond Williams'   he wrote a long, critical and not unsympathetic review of Culture and Society and The Long Revolution called `Marxism and the Intellectuals'. This was originally written for Correspondence in 1961, but when that journal rejected it James persevered until it was published by Facing Reality in 1962. It is reproduced in Spheres of Existence (Allison and Busby, 1980).

It seems to me a matter of some interest that James should have thus confronted the most influential (around one million books sold) thinker of the emergent New Left, and certainly not something to be dismissed as self evidently absurd. Of course, I may have quite misunderstood your compiler's intentions   but that is the danger of cryptic interpolations in a bibliography. Better to give us the references and let us make our own minds up.
Yours fraternally
Ian Birchall