BY LEON TROTSKY
The following article, "Is parliamentary democracy likely to replace the soviets?" was written by Leon Trotsky in February 1929. Trotsky, a central leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, had just arrived in Turkey as an exile from the Soviet Union. It is reprinted from the Writings of Leon Trotsky - 1929, the first in a 14-volume set. Another translation of the article was published in the May 22, 1929, issue of The New Republic under the title "Which Way, Russia?" Copyright (c) 1975 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted with permission. Subheadings and footnotes are by the Militant.

"If Soviet power is faced with mounting difficulties; if the crisis of leadership in the dictatorship is growing increasingly acute; if the danger of Bonapartism cannot be excluded - would it not be better to take the road of democracy?" This question is either posed point-blank or persists as an underlying theme in a great many articles devoted to recent events in the Soviet republic.

It is not my object to get into a discussion here of what is best and not best. My aim is to disclose what is probable, that is, what flows from the objective logic of developments. And I have come to the conclusion that what is least probable or, more precisely, what is absolutely excluded is a transition from the Soviets to parliamentary democracy.

Many newspapers have explained to me politely and in popular language that my expulsion was the result of the lack of democracy in Russia and, consequently, that I should not complain. But first of all, I have complained to no one; and second, I have also had occasion to be expelled from several democracies. That adversaries of the Soviets should regard the present acute crisis of leadership in the USSR as the inevitable consequence of the rule of a dictatorship - a dictatorship for which I, of course, assume full responsibility - is quite in the order of things. In the most general sense this observation is true. I am not in the least prepared, on the basis of my being exiled, to overthrow historical determinism. But if the leadership crisis did not arise by chance from the dictatorship, the dictatorship itself also did not arise by chance from the short-lived democracy which replaced czarism in February 1917.1 If the dictatorship is guilty of repression and all the other evils, then why did democracy prove itself powerless to preserve the country from dictatorship? And where is the evidence to show that it would now be able to hold dictatorship at bay, having taken its place?

To express my idea more clearly, I must expand the geographical frame of reference and at least recall to mind certain tendencies of political development in Europe since the war [World War I], which was not just an episode but the bloody prologue to a new era.

Almost all those who were leaders in the war are still alive. The majority of them said at the time that it was the last war, that after it would come the reign of peace and democracy. Some of them even believed what they were saying. But today not one of them would be so bold as to repeat those words. Why? Because the war brought us into an age of great tensions and great conflicts, with the prospect of more great wars. At this hour powerful trains are speeding toward each other down the tracks of world domination. We cannot measure our epoch by the yardstick of the nineteenth century, which was preeminently the century of expanding democracy. In many respects the twentieth century will differ from the nineteenth more than all of modern history has from that of the Middle Ages.

In a Vienna newspaper, [French bourgeois Radical Socialist Party leader Edouard] Herriot recently enumerated the cases of democracy's retreat in the face of dictatorship. After the installation of revolutionary power in Russia and the defeat of the revolutionary movement in a number of countries, we witnessed the establishment of fascist dictatorships throughout all of southern and eastern Europe. How can this extinction of the "altar fires" of democracy be explained? It is sometimes said that in these cases we are dealing with states that are backward or immature. This explanation is hardly applicable to Italy. But even where it is true, it explains nothing. In the nineteenth century it was thought to be a law of history that all backward nations would rise up the stairs of democracy. Why then does the twentieth century drive these nations down the road to dictatorship? We think that the explanation emerges from the facts themselves. Democratic institutions have shown that they cannot withstand the pressure of present-day contradictions, be they international or internal or, most frequently, both kinds combined. Whether this is good or bad, it is a fact.

Democracy acts as a safety switch
By analogy with electrical engineering, democracy might be defined as a system of safety switches and circuit breakers for protection against currents overloaded by the national or social struggle. No period of human history has been - even remotely - so overcharged with antagonisms as ours. The overloading of lines occurs more and more frequently at different points in the European power grid. Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode. That is essentially what the short circuiting of dictatorship represents.

At the same time, the strength of the contradictions within each country and on a world scale is not declining but growing. There are hardly any grounds for consolation in the fact that the process has only taken hold on the periphery of the capitalist world. Gout may start in the little finger or big toe, but eventually it reaches the heart. Moreover, no matter what the state of affairs is in the countries where capitalism is strong and democracy is of long standing - a question that we cannot go into here - what we have pointed out thus far, we feel, throws sufficient light on the question posed in the title of this article.

Soviets are new property relations
When people counterpose democracy to the Soviets, what they usually have in mind is simply the parliamentary system. They forget about the other side of the question, the decisive one at that - namely, that the October Revolution cleared the path for the greatest democratic revolution in human history. The confiscation of the landed estates, the total elimination of the traditional class privileges and distinctions of Russian society, the destruction of the czarist bureaucratic and military apparatus, the introduction of national equality and national self-determination - all this was the elementary democratic work that the February revolution barely even addressed itself to before leaving it, almost untouched, for the October Revolution to inherit. It was precisely the bankruptcy of the liberal-socialist coalition, its incapacity for this work, that made possible the Soviet dictatorship, based on an alliance of the workers, peasants, and oppressed nationalities. The very same causes that prevented our weak and historically belated democracy from carrying out its elementary historical task will also prevent it in the future from placing itself at the head of the country. For in the intervening time, the problems and difficulties have grown greater and democracy weaker.

The Soviet system is not simply a form of government that can be compared abstractly with the parliamentary form. Above all it is a new form of property relations. What is involved at bottom is the ownership of the land, the banks, the mines, the factories, the railroads. The working masses remember very well what the aristocrat, the big landowner, the official, the loan shark, the capitalist, and the boss were in czarist Russia. Among the masses there undoubtedly exists much highly legitimate dissatisfaction with the present situation in the Soviet state. But the masses do not want the landowner, the official, or the boss back. One must not overlook these "trifles" in intoxicating oneself with commonplaces about democracy. Against the landowner's return, the peasants will fight today just as they did ten years ago, to the last drop of blood.

The great proprietor can return to his estate from emigration only astride a cannon, and he would have to spend his nights out on the cannon as well. It is true that the peasants could reconcile themselves more easily to the return of the capitalist, since state industry thus far has provided the peasants with industrial products on less favorable terms than the merchant used to earlier. This, we should note in passing, is at the root of all the internal difficulties.

But the peasants remember that the landowner and capitalist were the Siamese twins of the old regime, that they withdrew from the scene together, that during the civil war they fought against the Soviets together, and that in the territories occupied by the [counterrevolutionary] Whites, the factory owner took back the factory, and the landowner, the land. The peasant understands that the capitalist would not come back alone, but with the landlord. That is why the peasant wants neither of them. And that is a mighty source of strength, even though in negative form, for the Soviet regime.

Things must be called by their right names. What is involved here is not the introduction of some disembodied democracy but returning Russia to the capitalist road. But what would Russian capitalism look like in its second edition? During the last fifteen years the map of the world has changed profoundly. The strong have grown immeasurably stronger, the weak incomparably weaker. The struggle for world domination has assumed titanic proportions. The phases of this struggle are played out upon the bones of the weak and backward nations. A capitalist Russia could not now occupy even the third-rate position to which czarist Russia was predestined by the course of the world war. Russian capitalism today would be a dependent, semicolonial capitalism without any prospects. Russia Number 2 would occupy a position somewhere between Russia Number 1 and India.

The Soviet system with its nationalized industry and monopoly of foreign trade, in spite of all its contradictions and difficulties, is a protective system for the economic and cultural independence of the country. This was understood even by many democrats who were attracted to the Soviet side not by socialism but by a patriotism which had absorbed some of the elementary lessons of history. To this category belong many of the forces of the native technical intelligentsia, as well as the new school of writers who for want of a more appropriate name I have called the fellow travelers.

There is a handful of impotent doctrinaires who would like to have democracy without capitalism. But the serious social forces that are hostile to the Soviet regime want capitalism without democracy. This applies not only to the expropriated property owners but to the well-to-do peasantry as well. Insofar as this peasantry turned against the revolution, it always served as a support for Bonapartism.

Soviet power or Bonapartism
Soviet power arose as the result of tremendous contradictions on the international and domestic scene. It is hopeless to think that democratic safety switches of a liberal or socialist type could withstand these contradictions, which during the past quarter century have built up to their highest tension; or that they could "regulate" the thirst for revenge and restoration that inspires the ousted ruling classes. These elements are stretched out in a long line, with the merchant and industrialist holding onto the kulak, the landlord holding onto the merchant, the monarchy tagging along behind them, and the foreign creditors bringing up the rear. And all of them are straining to take first place in the country in the event of their victory.

Napoleon correctly summed up the dynamics of the revolutionary age, dominated as it is by extremes, when he said, "Europe will be either Republican or Cossack." Today one may say with far more justification, "Russia will be either Soviet or Bonapartist."

What I have just said should indicate that I am not about to assert the existence of absolute guarantees for the permanent stability of Soviet power. If the Opposition thought that, there would be no sense in the struggle we are waging against the danger of Bonapartism. I am even less inclined to claim that the solidity of the Soviet system can remain unaffected by the particular policies of the present Soviet government. The bitterness of our internal struggle shows full well how dangerous we think Stalin's zigzag policies are for Soviet power. But the very fact of our struggle testifies also that we are far removed from the so- called attitude of pessimism. We proceed from the conviction that the Soviet system has great inner reserves and resources. The line of the Opposition is not toward the collapse of Soviet power but toward its strengthening and development.

Our conclusions may be formulated in the following brief propositions:

1. Independently of its socialist mission, the support for which lies first of all in the most advanced section of the industrial proletariat, the Soviet regime has profound social and historical roots in the masses of the people and constitutes insurance against a restoration and a guarantee of independent, i.e., noncolonized development.

2. The main historical struggle against the Soviet Union, and the main internal struggle against Communist rule, has been conducted, not in the name of replacing dictatorship by democracy, but of replacing the present transitional regime with the rule of capitalism, which would inevitably be a dependent and semicolonial one.

3. Under these circumstances, a switching over onto the track of capitalism could be accomplished in no other way than by a prolonged and cruel civil war, accompanied by open or disguised intervention from without.

4. The only political form such an overturn could take would be a military dictatorship, a contemporary variety of Bonapartism. But a counterrevolutionary dictatorship would have, lodged in its very foundations, the powerful mainspring of a new October Revolution.

5. Not only is the struggle of the Opposition waged solely and completely on Soviet foundations; it is also the direct continuation and development of the basic line of Bolshevism. The present stage of this struggle is not a decisive but, so to speak, a conjunctural one.

6. The further development of the Soviet system, and consequently the fate of the Opposition as well, depends not only on factors of a domestic nature but to a very great extent on the further evolution of the entire world situation. What direction will developments take in the capitalist world? How will the strongest states, in need of expansion, deploy themselves in the world market? What form will the reciprocal relations between European states take in the coming years - and of immeasurably greater importance, those between the United States and Europe, above all Great Britain?

There are a great many prophets who, without much thought, take up the question of the fate of the Soviet republic but remain silent on the dominant fate of capitalist Europe. Yet these two questions, although in an antagonistic way, are inextricably bound together.  
 
 
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