About Lenin's Pravda and Vienna's Pravda by Trotsky
The newspaper is a formidable weapon of the proletariat
For many years we did not hesitate to celebrate another holiday between May Day and Victory Day, a professional one - the Day of the Press. Party ideologists immediately fastened it to the release of the first issue of one of the publications of the Russian Social Democrats, which eventually became the officialdom of the RCP (b), VKP (b) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and now the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
Today, only two magazines in Russia are older than Pravda - Vokrug Sveta and Ogonyok, and even that only because for several years it was published as a non-independent supplement to Birzhevye Vedomosti. And no one will raise a hand to belittle the role of Pravda both in the October success of the Bolsheviks and in the victories on the fronts of the Civil and Great Patriotic Wars.
On May 5, I was pleased with the fact that neither Pravda nor the Day of the Press was forgotten in the big press, unlike the other - the Day of the Russian Press, which on January 13, before the Old New Year, is generally not noticed by anyone. Even among professionals.
Pravda, of course, owes its birth primarily to Lenin, who by 1912 had become the undisputed leader not only of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, but of the entire Russian Social Democracy. Until recently, the omnipotent Plekhanov, and with him many other authoritative Marxists, at the XNUMXth Prague Party Conference went to a direct split with the Bolshevik faction.
But the Bolsheviks, who announced the creation of a separate party, supported Vladimir Ilyich's idea of creating a mass workers' newspaper without objection. By that time, the press organ of the RSDLP was considered to be Sotsial-Democrat, published abroad, low-circulation and overloaded with articles devoted to inner-party showdowns.
What was required was a mass publication addressed directly to the working class. It is well known that the attempt made two years before Prague to create such a different Pravda, which was published in Vienna at his own peril and risk by Leon Trotsky, failed.
His son-in-law, Lev Kamenev, was sent to reinforce him by the decision of the Party Central Committee, but he, too soft by nature, fell under the influence of a relative and did not cope with the task. Nevertheless, a subsidy of 150 rubles a month for the services rendered by the Viennese Pravda to the party as a whole was deducted to Trotsky up to the point of a hard break with Kamenev and Lenin.
Leo is a peacemaker
Leon Trotsky inherited the Viennese Pravda from Shpilka, a group of Ukrainian Mensheviks who hoped that the famous revolutionary leader of the Petrograd Soviet would revive the publication with his bright words. Pravda soon moved away from Ukrainian problems, as Hairpin disbanded itself.
The editor-in-chief was ready to attract to the newspaper such authors as Lunacharsky and even Bunin, who collaborated with another, even older Pravda - a small magazine, literary and artistic and leftist. Also among the authors was Adolf Ioffe, who in 1918 will sign the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty that was almost torn down by Trotsky.
The editorial secretary of this Pravda was Skobelev, the future Minister of Labor in the Provisional Government, and the editor and regular columnist was Ryazanov, who would become the founder of the Marx-Engels Institute.
The well-known Uritsky was in charge of communication with the underground, who also accumulated funds received from the localities. They were clearly not enough, and Trotsky tried to get money from a wealthy American family, but such a gesheft did not interest her. He turned to his fellow socialists, to the European Social Democrats and even to Lenin, having managed to do this until almost 1912.
Through his "Pravda" Trotsky (in the portrait by artist Kiselis), who did not want to determine with whom he was — the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks, fought with all his might against the split in the RSDLP. By the way, reconciliation with the help of Kamenev did not take place yet also because of the refusal of the "Mensheviks" to submit to the majority.
Trotsky refused his son-in-law to publish attacks on the Mensheviks, but in the newspaper and in the brochure "Our Political Tasks" he attacked Lenin's work "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back". For which he immediately received a rebuff with direct accusations and typically Leninist phrases: "impudent lies" and "perversion of facts."
And at the same time - the removal of the Vienna "Pravda" from the subsidies of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Interestingly, already in 1922, Trotsky marked the tenth anniversary of Lenin's Pravda not only with his active participation in the celebrations, but also with a programmatic article in it, where he did not say a word about how Pravda began.
And then, in all his works, even in his autobiographical book "My Life", he, who called himself "the second Bolshevik", and in contrast to Stalin - a real Leninist, delicately avoided the "slippery topic".
And the implacable "Old Man"
A number of memoirists claim that Lenin decided to name the newspaper Pravda on the advice of Maxim Gorky, who hardly knew anything about Trotsky's Vienna Pravda. But the collision was obviously much more complicated, with a touch of sharp personal contradictions.
We must not forget that the Viennese Pravda was in a bad way with its sponsors, although the emigrant Trotsky, who published it by no means at his own expense, was clearly cunning in his memoirs about the difficult financial situation of the family. The newspaper could not boast of either large circulation or particular popularity.
However, the Viennese Pravda enjoyed a certain prestige among all Social Democrats, including European ones. Trotsky, however, was blamed for his stubborn desire to "serve, not lead" the proletariat. Even such an apologist as the author of the three-volume Armed Prophet, Isaac Deutscher, admitted that there was a clear admixture of demagoguery in such a position.
Throughout the years after the first Russian revolution was suppressed, Lenin was primarily concerned with strengthening the party ranks and party unity. But in a completely different way, more precisely, according to the principle "who is not with us is against us." Ilyich was ready to reunite with the Mensheviks only on the condition of their complete submission.
The highly respected Plekhanov, who was not called otherwise than "The Old Man", was simply discarded by the Bolshevik leader as a waste of steam. And in this he, as it turned out very soon - with the outbreak of the world war, was absolutely right. Perhaps the rejection of the oldest Marxist, who had degenerated from social democrats into social patriots, and subsequently brought Lenin and Trotsky together.
For Trotsky, Lenin clearly did not forgive the ostentatious conciliation and unwillingness to simply join the Bolsheviks. Therefore, when, after the Prague conference, the question of the name of the newspaper arose, he did not doubt the right to Pravda, recalling at the same time that very 150-ruble subsidy. Although at first it was exclusively about Rabochaya Gazeta.
Ardent Trotskyists even today insist that Lenin simply "squeezed" Trotsky's Vienna Pravda. They are not Leninists, unlike their leader and teacher, the real Lion of the Revolution - these newspapers, in fact, have nothing in common, except for the name. "Pravda" from Vienna almost immediately disappeared into oblivion - with the release of the first issue of Lenin's "Pravda" on May 5, 1912 (see photo).
The very same owner and the hapless editor-in-chief is clearly tired of internal party squabbles. For the sake of decency, he nevertheless decided to be indignant, and even turned to the socialists from Germany as arbitrators. It did not help, the political career of Trotsky, the hero of 1905, clearly did not ask.
In Russia, crushed by counter-revolutionary terror, he, who had escaped from exile, had nothing to do. Among the Bolsheviks, he certainly could not compete with Lenin, and with many more, the Mensheviks, with some of whom he even made friends, were simply not to Trotsky's liking. And all because of their undisguised desire, according to Trotsky's own definition, "to become bourgeois."
In 1917, this happened, the Mensheviks were corrected to cooperate with the Cadets and Octobrists, and in 1912 Trotsky decided to do what he liked best - literature and journalism. He went to the Balkans, where the war with the Turks began. Instead of his own Pravda, he now worked for Kievskaya Mysl.
There Trotsky wrote more than fifty essays, reports and analytical reviews, which together made up the sixth volume of his collected works - a real Balkan political and economic encyclopedia. One of his ideas, partially embodied in socialist Yugoslavia, was the idea of creating a unified federation of socialist Balkan republics.
Your word, Alexey Maksimovich
And Lenin's Pravda immediately began to gain momentum. Nikolai Poletaev, a Duma deputy from the Bolsheviks, became its editor-in-chief and official publisher. He was replaced by the future People's Commissar for Food Aleksey Badaev, whose name was given to both the brewery and the famous Leningrad warehouses, which were burned down under fascist bombs.
Vyacheslav Scriabin (pictured), better known as Molotov, became the secretary of the editorial board, and Maxim Gorky immediately became the head of the literary department.
He has repeatedly expressed his doubts that the workers' Pravda really needs publications about the need to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and even, oh horror, with specific instructions on how to conduct street battles.
Gorky's fears were justified - often up to 80 percent of the circulation was arrested, and Pravda was closed just with enviable regularity. But it came out over and over again under new names, and the circulation could not be compared with the good old Iskra and the Vienna Pravda by Trotsky.
Fragment of the famous photo of Gorky and Lenin playing chess with Bogdanov on the island of Capri
On the eve of the World War, the ranks of the Bolshevik Party were rapidly replenishing, and the circulation of Pravda was rapidly growing. At the beginning of 1913, up to 23 thousand copies were produced per day, in March - already 30-32 thousand, and the number of subscribers exceeded 5,5 thousand.
But this did not in the least prevent Lenin, the founder of the newspaper, but not the editor-in-chief, and even more so - not the publisher, from regularly conflicting with the editorial board. Yes, Ilyich never skimped on compliments that the newspaper had become both an agitator and an organizer of the revolutionary masses, but he sharply objected to the taboo on publications about discord between factions.
For this, Olminsky, and Molotov, and Stalin, who for many years became one of the key employees of the editorial board, suffered. In many respects, his personal, but forgotten merit must be considered the fact that by 1917 Pravda penetrated into the farthest corners of the Russian Empire, having something like correspondent points even in cities such as Tashkent and Samarkand.
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