What would the USSR look like under a Trotskyist regime

First, this is not a timeline where Leon Trotsky gets to be supreme leader of the USSR. For the reality of such scenario be brought about, there are other threads where that is being discussed. What this thread is about is what the USSR look like under a Trotsky-inspired government.

Hyper Industrialization would probably still happen as would agricultural collectivization, because those were Trotsky's ideas. But what of the excessive bureaucracy that often crippled the Communist Party and the Union itself? With the internationalist nature of Trotskyism there would be probably more focus on a national level with the constituent republics being given greater autonomy and political liberty. However considering Trotsky persecuted political dissents, the Soviet Union would still be a oppressive dictatorship, but without the insane sociopathic purges.
 
I'll try to explain some of the key ideas of the Left Opposition and the differences with Stalinism in theory and practice but most of this is gone into more detail in the Platform of the Joint Opposition by Trotsky and others, The Revolution Betrayed by Trotsky, From Lenin to Stalin by Victor Serge, Platform of the Workers' Opposition by Alexandra Kollontai and others and Nine Years of Struggle of the Left Opposition by Max Shachtman.

The programme of the Left Opposition put forward a position of collectivisation of a completely different character to Stalinism. The Left Opposition, as early as 1923, before Lenin had died, had identified a growing strata amongst the peasant population of rich peasants (kulaks) who employed and exploited poorer landless peasant workers due to the NEP's concessions that stabilised the economy somewhat but allowed these rich peasants to benefit and accumulate wealth at the expense of other peasants. The Left Opposition suggested a steady build up of a campaign to convince the poorer peasants to willingly enter into collective farms through tax breaks, subsidies and access to modern agricultural technologies. This is opposed to Stalin's position of effectively supporting the kulaks (they ran a campaign that employed slogans encouraging peasants to get richer) in order to undermine the Left Opposition and then utterly reversing that position once all the Left Opposition had been expelled or imprisoned and therefore enacting collectivisation without any sort of groundwork laid, thus having to deal with a stronger kulak population and greater discontent (peasants even killed livestock enmasse in defiance).

The Five Year plans first proposed by the Left Opposition, to promote industrialisation and plug the gap between the demand for industrial and consumer goods from the peasants, were different in character as well. A tax on the kulaks, the richest peasants with the most land, was proposed to help pay for a series of hydro-electric dams and other power plants in order to supply a growing industry and the cities built up around them with electricity. In 1926, 56% of all surplus grain was in the hands of only 6% of the peasant population and it was this strata of peasants who the Left Opposition would tax in order to fund the development of industry. In contrast, Stalinism simply printed money with the number of bank notes in circulation during the first plan raising from 1.7 billion to 5.5 billion and then to 8.4 billion in the second five year plan - this also threw the price of grain and other goods into flux forcing even more grain requisitions.

The Left Opposition desired greatly to reintroduce party democracy of an honest and healthy variety. They wanted every party member or group of party members to be able to debate their positions and freely use the party press to put forward platforms and ideas to be discussed. The Left Opposition also wanted to increase the number of workers and poorer peasants introduced into the party as opposed to civil servants and middle/rich peasants, whose numbers had been increasing. They wanted to reconstruct the Central Committee to be less associated with the bureaucratic civil servant layers and instead change the composition to involve more workers and poorer peasants. The soviets in general were to be revived as organs of democratic proletarian power in the cities and through evidence of deeds draw in the wider layers of the masses to the programme to build socialism.

There's more I could go into but I don't have the time and can't be bothered. Serge in From Lenin to Stalin introduces some of the key changes in the character of the party and the state that he and the Left Opposition had identified and rallied against that I'll transcribe now:

Everything has Changed.
The aims: from international social revolution to socialism in one country.
The political system: from workers' democracy of the soviets, to the dictatorship of the general secretariat, the functionaries and the GPU.
The party: from the organisation, free in its life and thought and freely submitting to discipline, of revolutionary Marxists to the hierarchy of bureaus, to the passive obedience of careerists.
The Third International: from a mighty organisation of propaganda and struggle to the opportunistic servility of the Central Committees appointed for the purpose of approving everything, without shame or nausea.​

etc etc. He identifies more problems and developments that fundamentally altered the character of USSR but I can't be bothered to type out more. Hope this gives a hint of what might have been...
 
Like a single party dictatorship which had already been smashed any illusion of worker agency in the the Kronstadt rebellion, and showed its willingness to commit indiscriminate mass murder on its opponents in the Red Terror. That's the base line Lenin set, so don't expect Trotsky to make it better internally.
 
A soviet union with trotsky might not be neccessarily better but it would probably be a lot more functional.

A trotsky USSR would probably be an international pariah because of attempts to export the revolution.
On the plus side such a USSR is probably going to refuse any offer hither might make.

Internally we probably wouldnt have the massive forced industrialisation and who knows,we might even avoid the ukrainian famine.

In the end by the time of WW2 we might see a more rural USSR with a larger population and probably a more efficient if worse equiped army since i dont think trotsky was paranoid enough to kill off his general en mass(if he was then it would have been a little harder for stalin to kill him).

Either way the germans probably dont get far in this timeline without the soviet exports and cooperation,in the end hitler and the nazis might be forced out of circumstance to settle for some kind of central european anti-soviet pact,they probably still swallow up everything up to 1939 but attacking poland with no soviet support seems rather foolish and thats if the lack of soviet cooperation hasnt already compleatly gutted their panzer development.
 
Like a single party dictatorship which had already been smashed any illusion of worker agency in the the Kronstadt rebellion, and showed its willingness to commit indiscriminate mass murder on its opponents in the Red Terror. That's the base line Lenin set, so don't expect Trotsky to make it better internally.
Ultimately Trotsky and the Left Opposition saw the Red Terror as something that would only be necessary at the height of the chaos of the Civil War. During the beginning of the revolution, the processes of repression were minimal with few individuals being arrested and many released soon after including people who were clear enemies of the socialist movement such as Krasov, Ataman of the Cossacks, and Purishkievich, an anti-Semite leader. Fewer were executed by the Cheka in the first three years of the Revolution than the 20,000 socialists and workers massacred by the Whites in Finland.

Obviously Terror is horrible and many died unnecessary and cruel deaths perpetrated by the Cheka, including during the black days of the Kronstadt rebellion, but the character of those failures as failures in contrast to an organised repression and slaughter of dissent under Stalin is clear. The majority of the Red Terror of the Civil War came after the assassinations of Volodarsky and Uritsky and the assassination attempts on Lenin and Trotsky and multiple other members of the Bolsheviks and yet, even still, that's but a drop in the ocean compared to the GPU under Stalin. As Serge once wrote: "Precisely because it had within it prodigious energy, because it intelligently harnessed and guided that of the masses on the march, Bolshevism, despite its unity of thought and discipline, was always prey to contradictory tendencies. While some of them opened the way to history’s most beautiful futures, others clearly led it to its destruction".

To simply imply that nothing would have been different to Stalinism if the Left Opposition had taken control of the USSR is ridiculous.
 
To simply imply that nothing would have been different to Stalinism if the Left Opposition had taken control of the USSR is ridiculous.

I think ultimately the Soviet Union would be a lot more in line with the Roman Republic than it was OTL with political repression minimal and far more efficient and has less bureocracy. However the policies implemented would certainly butterfly the Cold War as the Russians would not be in a condition to occupy Eastern Europe. Some sort of tension between the Soviets and the capitalist nations but it would depend on the course of the WWII.
 
Fewer were executed by the Cheka in the first three years of the Revolution than the 20,000 socialists and workers massacred by the Whites in Finland.

Can you cite sources for this claim? Just considering the sheer scale of the Russian Civil War in comparison to the Finnish Civil War this sounds pretty dubious - I don't think we should believe official Soviet figures on this. For example in a semi-recent history of the KGB, the writers estimate the number of people executed by the Cheka in 1918-20 as 250,000. That seems to be in the mid-range of all estimates.

It would be fair to point out that while circa 20,000 supporters of the Red side died outside combat during and after the Finnish civil war, only a part of them was killed in executions (or "executions") - several thousands, for example, died in the prison camps due to a combination of lack of food and diseases, including the Spanish flu. While the (White) Finnish government was also responsible for those unnecessary deaths, "massacred" is a pretty misleading and overt term to use for the entire figure of 20,000 - please make such a comparison only if you also include the deaths of Russian White prisoners in Bolshevik prison camps in the Cheka figures.
 
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"Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because 'the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.

  1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.
  2. Publish their names.
  3. Seize all their grain from them.
  4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday's telegram.
Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: "they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks".
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin.
Find some truly hard people"
 
The Red Army was using chemical weapons against peasant uprisings way before Stalin was in charge, and Trotskyist regime would most likely still have to resort to similar level of violence to reconstruct a new state to the ruins of imperial Russia.
 
Didn't Stalin get a number of his economic ideas from Trotsky, at least in general (so we may avoid liquidation of the kulaks)?
 
What ever it turns into millions more people will inevitable be saved simply by not oiling the industrialisation with blood.

That combined with a more efficient red army and no cooperation with hitler has effectively killed any prospect of OTL ww2 which i personally consider an improvement.
 
The Left Opposition desired greatly to reintroduce party democracy of an honest and healthy variety.

So they said... later, when they were out of power.

The fundamental principle of "democracy of an honest and healthy variety" is that each side agrees to let other sides win sometimes, even those who disagree on basic issues. This is profoundly at odds with the Communist principle that Marxist doctrine is unquestionable truth, and with the Leninist idea that there is only only correct interpretation of Marxism. Under Communism, dissent is not only wrong but treasonous.

Stalin rose to power by playing off the factions in the Party against each other. In every conflict of the 1920s and early 30s, the losers weren't merely put out of power, and left to organize for a comeback, they were liquidated. All the winners were good with this, not just Stalin. Of course the winners in one dispute could be losers in the next, and be liquidated too - often to their surprise.

The big difference would be the absence of Stalin's mass purges. Stalin had zero charisma and mass appeal. He substituted unlimited terror. I can't think of any other Bolshevik with the same circumstances.
 
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TinyTartar

Banned
The Red Army will be as crucial as of an instrument of the Soviet State as the Bolshevik Party was OTL. This will be a more militaristic and imperialist Soviet Union, and less of a bureaucracy is going to form immediately, although, given time, the Trotskyists will form one to maintain power.
 
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