NEW IN ENGLISH & SPALabor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The L
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Saturday, May 28, 2022
Stalin’s 1944 exile of Crimean Tatars commemorated despite Russian occupation – The Militant
[....]May 18 was the 78th anniversary of Moscow’s forced deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people from their homeland to Central Asia in 1944. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin said the Tatars were all agents of the Nazis. The date is marked annually by Tatars in Crimea and across Ukraine. Despite a ban on Tatar actions imposed for the past eight years since Russian troops seized and occupied the peninsula, hundreds gathered solemnly at a memorial monument in Kerch.Over two days in 1944 over 200,000 Tatars were herded into cattle cars, locked in, and taken by rail deep into Russia, above. Over half died during the journey and by privation over the next two years.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, waves of Tatars began returning home, to discover their homes had been seized under Moscow’s attempts to “Russify” the population. Today the Tatars, the native people of Crimea, make up some 12% of the population. With Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Tatar culture flowered and identification with Ukraine expanded....
Working class needs to lead fight against racist violence, Jew-hatred – The Militant
[....]Gendron’s ravings blame Jews for seeking to “replace” Caucasians with Blacks and immigrants. He says that a key goal of his attack was to incite “retaliation and further divide” Blacks and immigrants from Caucasians. These rightist views can be found widely on the internet.Democratic Party politicians from President Joseph Biden to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Charles Schumer are also using the killings to push through measures that undermine political rights in the name of combating “domestic terrorism.”
To promote these steps, the liberals cover up basic facts, including by trying to block access to the vile 180-page manifesto written by Gendron.
Jew-hatred permeates Gendron’s manifesto. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, the rulers will increasingly use Jew-hatred to divert attention from the real source of the problems working people and the middle class face, which is capitalism. The fight against Jew-hatred is crucial to the working class....
Monday, May 23, 2022
Saturday, May 21, 2022
The road forward to meet US rulers’ assault on families, women’s rights – The Militant
Numerous demonstrations took place across the country May 14 following the leak of a draft Supreme Court ruling that would overturn the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion.
Justice Samuel Alito’s draft holds the Roe decision was not constitutional, and hands decision-making on abortion and related questions to state legislatures and public debate. It would mean that in states where abortion is legal those laws would continue to stand. Some state governments have passed or are considering legislation to impose restrictions on access to the procedure. Nationally the door would be open to a widespread debate.
But the heart of the discussion has to be put on a broader basis. The key question isn’t abortion. It’s how to organize working people to defend ourselves and make gains amid a broader capitalist crisis that is making it harder to start a family and to hold one together. This includes the fight for jobs, adequate wages, protection against soaring inflation, accessible and affordable health care, child care, access to family planning, including adoption, as well as access to contraception and safe and secure abortion when needed.
Liberals and middle-class radicals, however, oppose this course. They think working people are “deplorables” and fear a fight to win public opinion. They want to shut down discussion and show disdain for the rights and opinions of others.
“To put the right to have an abortion up for debate,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says, “degrades” women. But it’s the liberals’ refusal to discuss this and all the related questions that have aided opponents of women’s rights in systematically restricting access to the procedure ever since Roe was pushed through in 1973....
Full article:
Putin’s charge Ukraine gov’t is ‘fascist’ is a lie – The Militant
Russian President Vladimir Putin claims Moscow had to invade Ukraine to “denazify” the country. He propagates through his rigidly government-controlled media the charge that “neo-Nazis” and “far-right nationalists” took over Ukraine in 2014 in a “coup” backed by Washington and are carrying out “genocide” against Russian speakers in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
But his accusations are false to the core. The government of Ukraine is elected and not much different than other liberal capitalist regimes around the world. Russian speakers are a significant part of the Ukrainian population. They overwhelmingly back Ukraine independence and are proud members of the fierce resistance to Moscow’s invasion.
In the United States, calling anyone you disagree with “Nazis” or “fascists” has become the stock in trade of many middle-class radicals, who use it as a way to shut down debate and discussion and silence opposition.
For Putin, his slander has an additional purpose. In World War II, Moscow’s resistance to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was a key part of defeating Hitler, at a huge cost of millions of lives of Russian, Ukrainian and other peoples there. By invoking the specter of fascism, Putin hopes to convince working people in Russia to support the war effort or at least keep quiet.
Full article:
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Five who made a revolution
Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read (2022) is an accessible book. In it, Terry Eagleton celebrates five teachers and their methods. Describing them, Eagleton also elucidates some of what has gone to make him such a clear, useful critic.
* * *
Only world- spanning upheavals, making it impossible for old classes and their ideas to rule in same old ways, can explain the development of new approaches to literature, to say nothing of the development of new critics themselves.
Missing from Eagleton's book is any attempt to portray intellectual ferment in the most revolutionary historical period in Europe since 1789-1799: the epoch of world revolution inaugurated by the Bolsheviks in 1917.
* * *
Eagleton is not a man of 1917. For him, the moment of reception for new-old 1920s methods of critique was the conservatized status quo of the circa-1968 UK labor movement. Radicalizations and shifts in mass psychology were for workers, students, and intelligentsia in other parts of the world.
Worse, Eagleton was politically miseducated in Tony Cliff's International Socialists organization, a UK approximation to the US groups formed around renegades like Max Schachtman, who consciously rejected the program and principles of the Communist International in Lenin's Time. (This shortcoming can still be seen at work in Eagleton's most politically worthless book, 2011's Why Marx Was Right).
For Eagleton's critical revolutionaries, the political landscape could not have been more different. Eliot, Richards, Empson, Leavis, and Williams grew up in a pre-1914 US and UK; their early careers began after the war, and after the triumph of Bolshevism. As each critic wrangled with and often rejected ongoing radicalizations and national independence struggles, they also wrangled with and "made new" a struggle with words and their use, exploring contradictions of tragedy, poetry, and fiction. The youngest critic in the book's cohort, Raymond Williams, ultimately pushed on from print and into an analysis of TV drama.
* * *
Links to my reading notes and excerpts posted last week on Facebook can be found below:
Introduction
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316691101726368&id=100001565934753
1 T.S. Eliot
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316730228389122&id=100001565934753
2 I.A. Richards
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316768231718655&id=100001565934753
3 William Empson
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316771735051638&id=100001565934753
4 F.R. Leavis
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5318383181557160&id=100001565934753
5 Raymond Williams
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5321415424587269&id=100001565934753
Jay
11 May 2012
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Friday, May 6, 2022
Women’s rights are a key part of the broader fight of the working class against the attacks of the capitalist rulers and their government
Bourgois electoral politics is not one evil party versus one good party.
It's two parties of the class enemy on a seesaw. Each time workers buy into their lesser-evil con, we lose more rights and freedoms we fought for.
Each side of the seesaw is a different type of assault. That's the context for everything from the Hyde Amendment to "Abortion should be legal... But rare."
JR
* * *
[....]"The framework for the debate working people need about women's emancipation can't start from abortion or the Roe v. Wade decision," Mailhot said. "It starts with combating all the obstacles under capitalism to family formation in the working class and worse-off layers of the middle class. And with the second-class status of women and the way it underpins capitalist rule."
The comments of several judges during the Dec. 1 hearings shows a Supreme Court majority is considering overturning Roe v. Wade, if not now, then down the line, Mailhot said.
But that won't close off the needed discussion over how women's rights are a key part of the broader fight of the working class against the attacks of the capitalist rulers and their government. This includes the need to advance all aspects of family planning, fighting for health care, society's responsibility for contraception and child care, and more.
Debate over adoption
One aspect of this is the place of adoption. Judge Amy Coney Barrett noted that since Roe v. Wade adoption and "safe haven laws" make it easier for women to give up unwanted children without fear of being prosecuted. Why not talk about adoption as an alternative? she raised.
"Questions like the one asked by Barrett about adoption can't be sloughed off as irrelevant — or even worse — 'Catholic-minded,'" Mailhot said. They must be taken up from the standpoint of the working class.
"Among working people, adoption is a normal way of dealing with a societal need — couples who can't have kids and giving a home to kids who don't have one," Mailhot said. Relatives and friends often take in children of people they are close to.
For most working-class families adoption is an exercise in class solidarity — a rejection of the 'me and mine' attitudes hammered into us by the capitalist class."
"Two of the five children adopted by my sister and her husband were foster kids, who were never formally adopted but were taken in as part of their family," he recalled. Mailhot described how a neighbor complained to his parents, "your daughter's family looks like the League of Nations."
"Along with fulfilling a need, I always thought my sister's family helped break down prejudices in the small town where they lived and in my own family," he said.
Mailhot pointed to a Dec. 2 article by Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who said that the Roe v. Wade ruling has generated such sharp debate because "Roe involved death."
"But it is the capitalist system that is about death," Mailhot said. "From the rulers' wars, to the maiming and deaths of workers on the job, to the treatment of the elderly, to the thousands of women who lost their lives in botched abortions before the procedure was decriminalized."
From the full article here:
https://themilitant.com/2021/12/24/working-class-fight-for-womens-emancipation-support-for-families/
❖
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Three Mile Island: from the pages of The Militant newspaper
Netflix is introducing a new documentary about the March 1979 Three Mile Island accident.
Cards on the table: I am a supporter of unpopular sides in energy debates: pro oil pipelines, pro nuclear power stations, pro aggressive electrification of the third world. Closing the gap on uneven energy (and thus cultural) development is to me the heart of what Lenin meant by his 1920 statement, "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country."
Before proceeding to some articles of historical interest from The Militant that discuss Three Mile Island, I want to encourage readers to check out a communist's review of "Chernobyl" (a 2019 mini-series in five parts on HBO/Sky), which can be read here.
Also of compelling reading interest are the weekly reports on the TMI accident and response from the 1979 issues of The Militant itself.
The April 1979 supplement of The Militant is a good place to start.
* * *
From 1986:
Cover-up at Three Mile Island
How Washington reacted to a nuclear disaster
BY Tom Leonard
Washington has cynically used the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant to launch an anti-Soviet propaganda campaign. At the heart of Washington's attack is criticism of the Soviet government's handling of the disaster.
But it would be hard to top the U.S. government's campaign of lies and cover-up when a near meltdown occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, in 1979. Three Mile Island was the worst nuclear power plant accident in the United States so far. So blatant were Washington's lies that a New York Times/CBS survey at the time of the disaster found only 20 percent of those polled felt "public officials have been honest in telling the public all they know about the danger from the accident."
The night of March 29, plant managers also dumped 400,000 gallons of radioactive water resulting from the accident into the Susquehanna River. It was at this time that a member of the NRC repeated the liethat "the danger is over for the people off-site."
When asked about these new emissions and dumping of radioactive waste the following morning, March 30, the plant's management continued to cover up the danger. For example, when Metropolitan Edison's vice-president John Herbein was pressed for an answer by reporters, he arrogantly replied, "I don't know why we need to tell you anything we do."
That same morning three NRC commissioners were meeting to evaluate what was happening inside Three Mile Island. But their worries of a nuclear core meltdown were not made public until a partial transcript of their meeting was published nearly three weeks later on April14. All of them confessed to ignorance about what the plant's managers were doing to contain the potential meltdown. Commissioner Joseph Hendrie complained, "We are operating almost totally in the blind." Another meeting participant, Roger Mattson, was connected to the meeting by a phone from inside the plant. He complained about "too little information, too late unfortunately, and it is the same way every partial meltdown has gone."
It was March 30 by the time the NRC admitted in public that a meltdown was possible. However, after consulting with the White House, a press release was agreed to that played down the seriousness of the situation.
After the plant began to release radiation later that same day, the cover up began to be exposed. The new leak was followed by a statement from Pennsylvania Gov. Richard Thornburgh. He merely advised everyone within a lO·mile radius to stay indoors and keep windows shut. He also suggested pregnant women and children leave the area, but there was never an
organized evacuation. By this time, however, the extent of the danger was becoming generally known and many people wisely began to voluntarily evacuate. President James Carter visited the area. Parroting the lies of plant management, the NRC, and state officials, he said publicly that radiation levels were "safe for all concerned."
….weeks after the disaster began, the government admitted area residents would suffer from radioactive poisoning. On that day Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano told a Senate committee that as many as I 0 would die of cancer downwind from the plant.
Residents of nearby Harrisburg and people across the country and the world were outraged by the U.S. government's lies and complicity in the Three Mile Island cover-up. The disaster also convinced millions around the world to oppose the production of nuclear energy.
The lie that there are safe levels of radiation is still being peddled by the U.S. government. But as one anti-nuclear energy activist correctly pointed out during the events at Three Mile Island, "A little radiation is harmful. More radiation is more harmful."
This conservative estimate was challenged by many radiation experts. Prof. Ernest Sternglass at the University of Pittsburgh estimated that up to 2,500 deaths could result from radioactive krypton and xenon released at Three Mile Island. He also estimated that the rates of spontaneous abortions, birth defects, and leukemia would increase 20 to 50 percent.
This was evident after the disaster when 125,000 demonstrated in Washington, D.C. , on May 6, 1979, demanding "No nukes!" Prominent among the banners was a slogan that still holds true: "Uncle Sam lies about nuke safety."
Source: http://themilitant.com/1986/5019/MIL5019.pdf
* * *
From 1989:
Three Mile Island ten years later
BY Doug Jenness
Through the misty rain and leafless trees, the cooling towers of the nuclear power plant looked like phantoms. Only the yellow-blossomed forsythia on the riverbank seemed to offset the unreality of it all.
But it was real enough. A few days before, a meltdown in the core of one of the plant's two reactors had led to the worst accident in the history of the nuclear power industry in the United States.
Standing on the bank of the Susquehanna River on April 2, 1979, looking out at the Three Mile Island reactor, I and other Militant reporters couldn't see the radiation that had spewed out of those stacks or that had been dumped into the river. But in the 10 years since, the 700 percent increase in the cancer rate in Goldsboro, Pennsylvania, the nearest town to the damaged nuclear reactor, is testimony that it was there. So is the increase in deformed farm animals and misshapen vegetation in the surrounding area. Some 2,000 victims of cancer and other illnesses have sued the owners of the plant for damages.
The plant was crippled beyond repair, and even after 10 years and $1 billion dollars, the cleanup of the radioactive mess has still not been completed. And if the company gets its way, wrapping up the cleanup will mean leaving it in "monitored storage" for 90 years, not dismantling and removing the plant. It is also seeking Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to get rid of 2.3 million gallons of mildly radioactive water by evaporation. This process, however, cannot remove radioactive tritium, which will be evaporated into the air with the water.
At the time of the Three Mile Island mishap, there were 72 operating nuclear plants, providing 11.4 percent of the country's electricity. Today there are 111, meeting 20 percent of electricity needs.
These figures, however, don't tell the whole story. All plants now running or approaching completion were or-dered six years or more before the accident, and there have been no new orders since 1978.
Widespread opposition to the hazards of nuclear energy has played a role in halting the expansion of nuclear powered plants. By forcing more stringent restrictions, construction of new plants has become very costly to the utilities owners.
But today the nuclear industry is preparing for a comeback. The U.S. Council for Energy Awareness, the industry's main lobbying group, recently stated, "Although initially seen as a major setback for commercial nuclear power, the accident in fact proved to be an impetus for change that has left the industry far stronger 10 years later."
Thomas Pigford, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley and a promoter of nuclear power, is even more blunt. "The accident," he wrote in a March 28 column in the New York Times, "was arguably a positive development. Without hurting anyone[!], it triggered a substantial change in nuclear utility management, emergency planning and, to a degree, regulation."
The 10-year hiatus in orders for plants, he said, "has given the industry time to evaluate the technical fixes mandated after the accident, refine designs for future plants and improve plant management. This means America's nuclear option potentially can be even stronger."
For this nuclear engineer, Three Mile Island was a victimless experiment, not the grim warning that awakened tens of millions around the world to the dangers inherent in nuclear-powered energy.
In the 10 years since that disaster, more than 26,000 accidents have occurred at nuclear plants in the United States, including some in which scores of workers have been contaminated by radioactive substances. While no accident has been as grave as the 1979 one in Pennsylvania, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency estimates that the chance over the next 20 years of another meltdown, or worse, is high.
Internationally, we have already seen a nuclear accident far more disastrous than Three Mile Island - the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl reactor in the Soviet Union….
Big business and their supporters, such as Professor Pigford, who are committed to nuclear power attempt to belittle the human costs of using this form of energy. But the stubborn truth is that nuclear reactors are exceedingly hazardous, and scientific knowledge and technology have not found any way, at least up until now, to make nuclear energy safe. The only course that can stop nuclear disasters is to shut down all the nuclear plants.
Source: http://themilitant.com/1989/5312/MIL5312.pdf
* * *
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
[Book Review] Trotsky on Lenin (Haymarket Books)
Trotsky on Lenin (Haymarket Books) combines Trotsky's early rough draft of a projected three-volume life of the Bolshevik leader with a reprint of On Lenin, a 1924 collection of reminiscences.
Haymarket publishes a few interesting books each year. Very few contribute to a reader's fundamental grounding in Marxism. Most titles on their list tail the latest fads in petty bourgeois thinking.
Every left-wing publisher must daydream about finding its own lode, like Verso did with Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. (Like Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Imagined Communities is fundamentally innocuous: it can be taken any way the instructor wishes to spin it.) Trotsky on Lenin will not be such a money-spinner for Haymarket. (The same cannot be said for books by communist revolutionaries published to arm workers today who want to find a way to end the dog-eat-dog carnage of the dictatorship of capital.)
* * *
Trotsky on Lenin is fundamentally a fragment marketed for the sake of novelty. Its look at tsarist society, and the radicalization of youth repelled by it, makes for interesting reading, but it cannot provide the whole story.
Why prefatory material by initial translator Max Eastman, an avowed and virulent anticommunist at the time he introduced Trotsky on Lenin, was made available without response or context by Haymarket is another question. Editor Maurice Friedberg, however, seems to be an excellent compliment to late-career Eastman. At best he is a self-satisfied political ignoramus:
[....] Trotsky's biography is not the work of a scholar; indeed, many pages of it are frankly nothing but conjecture and read like an old-fashioned vie romanisée . In relating his story, Trotsky is unswerving in his admiration for Lenin. Adulation for his hero is coupled with scorn and venom for his idol's critics. The book is often dogmatic and bristles with hatred for Lenin's ideological opponents, particularly those who seemed to doubt any of the basic premises of Marxism. Trotsky seems to me in places to despise objectivity and to ridicule those whose Marxist faith is so weak that it must be reinforced by reason. He is equally disdainful, in his own words, of "self-satisfied ignoramuses and well-read mediocrities." He has no patience for democratic "frills," which to him are a sham and an excuse for an unwillingness to serve the Communist cause honestly. None of this detracts at all from the value of the book. And, as if to compensate for what his biography fails to reveal about Lenin, Trotsky reveals much about himself and about the spirit of the movement they both created.
As indicated above, half the length of Trotsky on Lenin is a reprint of the 1924 pamphlet On Lenin. In this collection, it is prefaced with a potted comparison essay see-sawing between the careers of Lenin and Trotsky. Editor Lionel Kochan does attempt a political explanation of the shifting international fortunes of the communist movement in 1923-24: noting the defeat of the German revolution, Lenin's terminal decline, and Trotsky's growing isolation.
Trotsky's relative isolation and his relationship to Lenin can also be seen and understood in the perspective of his Jewish origin. The latter was certainly not the condition of the former, but they were equally certainly connected. Trotsky, like the other radical Jews of his generation inside and outside Russia, e.g., Luxemburg, Victor Adler, Martov, Otto Bauer, not only, of course, scorned Judaism as a religion, but also saw no prospect of a separate Jewish existence, for which the only solution lay in social revolution, assimilation and an allegiance to internationalism. "Disdain and even a moral nausea"—this is the way in which Trotsky describes his reaction to nationalism. "My Marxist education deepened this feeling, and changed my attitude to that of an active internationalism. My life in so many countries, my acquaintance with so many different languages, political systems and cultures, only helped me to absorb that internationalism into my very flesh and blood." So far as Russia itself was concerned, although those Marxists of Jewish origin were frequently at political odds with each other, they shared the important negative characteristic of hailing from outside the densely populated areas of the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Western provinces of the Empire.1 Trotsky himself was born in a village in the Ukraine and attended school in Odessa; Martov was born in Constantinople and taken to Odessa at the age of four; Kamenev was born in Moscow and educated at Vilna and Tiflis; Zinoviev was born in Elizavetgrad (former province of Kherson).
But it was not sufficient for these men and their like to be subjectively internationalists; it was also necessary to be accepted as such. In this Trotsky was less successful and the fact of his Jewish origin took an inescapable part in his career. It was precisely for this reason, for example, that Trotsky was deputed by Lenin to lead the assault on the Bund —the Jewish Marxist party—at the Second (London) Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903. It was, in part, due to precisely the same factor that Trotsky found himself, in 1917, Commissar for foreign and not domestic affairs; and it was, of course, only because of his origin that the weapon of anti-semitism could be used against him in the struggle for power that followed Lenin's death. Internationalism, however sincerely adhered to, did not, in short, give the answer to Trotsky's ambivalent position. On the contrary, it may even have contributed to his isolation, as it certainly did to his downfall.
In general terms it is clear enough that during the decade or so before 1917 Lenin's ascendancy amongst the Bolsheviks expressed itself, in terms of personality, in the gradual movement of the more theoretical and speculative intellects amongst the Russian Marxists into the ranks of Menshevism or some intermediate grouping (e.g., Plekhanov, Martov) or even further to the right (Struve). The process of moulding the Bolsheviks into a force able to make a bid for power necessarily required a responsive instrument, i.e., one responsive to Lenin's views. Of course, this did not prevent or inhibit the most intense controversy inside the party. But it was for the most part within the framework set by the current political situation—tactics in 1917, to accept or reject Brest-Litovsk, the role of the trade unions, etc. In effect, however, the party had lost a considerable degree of freedom in discussion. New tasks obviously required a new approach. There is nothing surprising in this. The more earnestly that actual political tasks confronted the Bolsheviks, the more narrowly did controversy have to content itself with seeking means to perform those tasks.
What is significant is that this process was accompanied, inevitably, by a change in personnel of a type necessarily uncongenial to a cosmopolitan intellectual of Jewish origins, as exemplified in Trotsky. Of course, it would be absurd to identify cosmopolitanism and intellectuality solely with those Bolsheviks of Jewish origin. But it would be equally absurd to claim that the activity of these latter did not give the party a special flavor compounded of these attributes.
Their elimination can be observed, for example, through a scrutiny of those 17 members of the Central Committee elected after 1920 for the first time.2 They included only one Jew (Karl Radek) though over one-third were of non-Russian extraction. Almost three-quarters were of peasant stock and over 40% had had only an elementary education. As against this, the members of earlier Central Committees were distinguished by a greater proportion of men of middle-class origin, with a higher educational attainment and a higher proportion of Jews amongst the large number of those of non-Russian extraction. This was a representative picture of the personnel elected to the seven central committees formed between May 1917 and March–April 1922. The same over-all analysis is also derived from an examination of a larger sample of leading Bolsheviks. It has been shown that two separate generations of Bolsheviks can be said to have reached political maturity in the years between 1917 and 1922. There was that generation born between 1868 and 1874 (40) and that born between 1883 and 1891 (103). Again, pronounced differences separate the two groups in terms of ethnic origin, social background, and educational attainment. Thus, in the first group, dominance is claimed by those who were of non-Russian extraction, came from a middle-class background and enjoyed a higher or secondary education. There was in fact none with an elementary education.
The younger group, on the other hand, contained a higher proportional representation of Russians, of lower-class background with an elementary education. This change did not affect the central leadership of the party (i.e., those eight party members who sat in at least six of the seven Central Committees elected between 1917 and 1922). But it did appear in the Central Committee as a whole, and it is embodied in Stalin "the prototype and, at the same time, the forerunner of the 'new men.'"3 Both Stalin and Trotsky were born in 1879. But whereas, by 1924 say, the one belonged to the future, the other belonged to the past.
This is the past that Trotsky seeks to re-capture and in so doing, to establish his credentials as an Old Bolshevik, although he only joined the party in 1917 and had spent the previous decade in opposition to it. He idealizes Lenin, he harks back to their days in common harness, he portrays his dependence on Lenin—"my master," he calls him in his autobiography. To no avail. The Central Committee was progressively shedding its international-revolutionary character....
* * *
