Enemies of history

At the start of the 21st century, no one felt the need to reach for studies of ‘third-period’ communism to understand British and American politics. By 2016, I would say that they have become essential.

Admittedly, connoisseurs of the communist movement’s crimes have always thought that 1928 was a vintage year. The Soviet Union had decided that the first period after the glorious Russian revolution of 1917 had been succeeded by a second period, when the West fought back. But now, comrades, yes, now in the historic year of 1928, Stalin had ruled that we were entering a ‘third period’ when capitalism would die in its final crisis. As the Wall Street crash was only months away, this was not as fanciful as it seemed.

The strategy for hastening its fall was suicidal, however. No compromise was possible with anyone who stood in history’s path. Reformists were opportunists and traitors. Social democrats were social fascists; as bad as the Nazi gangs which were already gathering on Berlin streets. Or perhaps worse. For at least the fascists were honest in their way. The parliamentarians and the compromisers were sneaks who had been ‘bribed by the bourgeoisie’ to deceive the masses, as no less an authority than Lenin had said.

When Stalin’s enemy, Leon Trotsky, who was hardly a moderate, warned that instructing left-wingers to fight other left-wingers was a sure way of allowing fascism to ‘ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank’, Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German communist party, denounced him for his ‘criminal counter-revolutionary propaganda’.