The fate of the leaders of 1917

On 19 March 1938, on the eve of the founding of the Fourth International (September 1938), the Trotskyists who had established the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States published, on the front page of their organ Socialist Appeal, the following table entitled “Lenin’s General Staff of 1917”.

At the time the table was published, the third major show trial of the Moscow proceedings-also known as the “Trial of the Twenty-One”- had just concluded. This trial, said to have targeted the “Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyists”, brought a number of prominent figures before the court: Bukharin, the former president of the Communist International; Rykov, a one-time prime minister; Rakovsky; Krestinsky; and Yagoda, the former head of the NKVD prior to Yezhov. [*]

During the Stalinist terror years of 1936-1938 -the “Great Purge”- almost all of the leaders of the October Revolution, save for those who had died at a relatively young age of natural causes, were eliminated in the course of the fabricated Moscow Trials. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens and foreign communists were sentenced to execution or long prison terms behind closed doors, following so-called trials that lasted no more than five to ten minutes. Beyond the “visible” proceedings, involving well-known figures and reported in the press, it was clear that a vast wave of terror was sweeping across the country; yet no one had any precise sense of its true scale.

In the bureaucratic police state constructed under Stalin’s leadership, obtaining reliable information about what was taking place was so difficult that the fate of some of the prominent figures listed in the table was still uncertain at that time.

For example:

• In the table, Milyutin is marked as “missing”; yet he had already been shot in 1937.
• Under Berzin’s photograph -who had been strangled to death by the NKVD in 1935- there appears a question mark indicating that his fate was unknown.
• Similarly, Lomov, who was executed in 1938, is accompanied by a question mark meaning “fate unknown”.
• Bubnov is listed as “disappeared”; yet at the time the table was published, he was in prison.
• Beneath Kollontai’s photograph, the caption reads “Missing?”, which most likely conveyed the suspicion that she might have been eliminated by the regime. In fact, it would later become clear that she was alive, and she would die of a heart attack in 1952.
• Muranov and Stassova are also described as “disappeared” in the table, as no information about them was available at the time. Yet both survived the “Great Purge”. Although Stassova was investigated, she was acquitted in 1938. Both eventually died of natural causes, in 1959 and 1966 respectively.

Despite all its shortcomings, the table prepared by Socialist Appeal presented an exceedingly bleak picture. (It still does today.) Yet within just a few years, this dark tableau would become even grimmer:

• Sokolnikov, who was in prison, died there in 1939.
• Bubnov, likewise imprisoned, died in 1940.
• Trotsky, living in exile in Mexico City, was assassinated in 1940 by a Stalinist agent.

One of the most comprehensive online digital archives devoted to Marxist thought and socialist movements, the Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) later updated and revised the table originally prepared by Socialist Appeal in 1938, correcting its omissions and reorganising it.

While the table in Socialist Appeal comprised 24 individuals, the final version prepared by the MIA includes 26 members of the Central Committee. In this way, the fate of those who sat on the Committee in the year of the October Revolution can be seen much more clearly:

• Of the 1917 Central Committee -which included Lenin and, notoriously, Stalin, the gravedigger of the revolution- nine members died from causes not directly political, such as old age, illness, or a train accident. (The MIA marked those who died in the 1920s in yellow [5 persons], and those who died in the 1950s or later in green [4 persons].)
• Three members perished in the Civil War (1918-21). [Marked in purple.]
• Nine members were executed by firing squad. [Marked in red.]
• One member was killed by strangulation. [Marked in red.]
• One member (Trotsky) was sent into exile and subsequently assassinated. [Marked in red.]
• Two members died in prison. [Marked in red.]
• One member committed suicide. [Marked in purple.]

This table vividly and graphically demonstrates how the bureaucracy under Stalin, in the course of seizing control of the Bolshevik Party and the state apparatus, systematically eliminated the leadership of the October Revolution.

The most revolutionary proletarian party history has ever known could be turned into the party of the bureaucracy only through a massacre of this kind.

The message conveyed by the table is unmistakable: Stalinism was not the continuation of the October Revolution but a systematic and profoundly bloody counter-revolution directed against it.

[*] In the first major trial of August 1936, sixteen individuals were prosecuted on charges of belonging to the “Trotskyist-Kamenevite-Zinovievite Left Counter-Revolutionary Bloc”. The two most prominent defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. In the second major trial, held in January 1937, a further seventeen people accused of membership of the “Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre” were brought before the court. Among the most notable defendants in this case were Karl Radek, Yuri Pyatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov.