The Journey 71. Richard Spence – Trotskyites, Neocons and Their Hatred of the Soviet Union

Publisher RA “Kris” Millegan talks with Richard Spence about his book, Wall Street and the Russian Revolution: 1905 – 1925, the split between Trotsky and Stalin and the evolution of Trotskyites into neocons who hated the Soviet Union.

Kris: We have the neocons here in America now and a lot of them are Trotskyites. How did that happen? What does it mean for us as a country? Who are these people?

Richard: Mr. Bolshevik, the guy who gets the whole thing going is Lenin. But he fades out of the picture pretty quickly. He died in 1922. After which there is a battle for succession. Leon Trotsky is probably the second best known or at least one of the best known Bolsheviks. He and Lenin had been sort of politically at odds. They were never friends. Trotsky had a small, kind of fanatical following around him. He wasn’t really viewed as one of the party.

He lost out to a much more skillful, bureaucratic manipulator named Joseph Stalin, who knew how to create a mass base of support in the party. Trotsky’s usually regarded as the great architect of the Red Army. He was an organizational genius. He was fundamentally an opportunist. And an egoist. Pretty much everything he did was to promote his own career and greatness. It was said that he always thought that he was the smartest guy in the room. And he usually was. But he couldn’t see those occasions when he wasn’t. He thought Stalin was an idiot. He could never see that he was being effectively outsmarted. He created kind of a personality cult, attracting those who became very, very loyal to him.

In the 1920s, he was pushed out of the central committee, then he’s pushed out of the party, then he’s sent into internal exile, then he’s kicked out of the country in 1929 by Stalin. Trotsky still had this cadre of people who were devoted to him. Their loyalty wasn’t to communism. It wasn’t to the USSR. It was to Trotsky. With this kind of religious reverence.

After his exile, this Trotskyite movement became more and more focused on [helping him return] and they became the Soviet Union’s most bitter enemies. Not ideologically but with a personal, visceral hatred that it was Stalin in charge who was benefitting. It’s the wrong guy in control. The Stalinists’ complaint about a determined Trotskyite conspiracy against the Stalinist Soviet state was real. Unable to get much leverage inside the USSR, the Trotskyites would cooperate with anyone. They transitioned over time to the most militant anti-Soviets you could find. That’s the kind of neocons. They’re not traditional conservatives. Their root instincts are actually fairly radical. They have an object of hatred and they will make a pact with anyone. They will do anything necessary.