It is perhaps the most dramatic and iconic scene of the October revolution. At the Second Congress in Petrograd, the Bolshevik Trotsky points his finger at the exit and thunders to the Menshevik Martov: ‘Go! You are miserable bankrupts who belong in the dustbin of history.’ And Martov and the Mensheviks leave, with fateful consequences. Later, the arresting phrase ‘dustbin of history’ (along with many equivalents!) becomes part of the English language (in North American English, the word ‘dustbin’ occurs only in this celebrated phrase).

Only – it never happened. It is fiction.

A full presentation of my evidence of my investigation into this episode and the history of the evocative word ‘dustbin’ would read something like a detective story (‘and where were you, Mr. Reed, at one a.m. on the night of October 25^th?’). And, the further I investigate the Second Congress and this dramatic episode in particular, the wider are the ramifications of the whole ‘dustbin’ issue. In my footnotes to the excerpt from Sukhanov presented later, I examine one of these wider issues: did the Congress delegates give unanimous approval to a proposal by Martov to install a government that included all socialist parties? (No, they did not.) Otherwise, in this memorandum, I present my discovery as I first found it.

Because we really do not know exactly what Trotsky said in Russian, if anything, I will usually just refer to ‘the word’ and ‘the remark’. This usage will help keep us from prejudging the issues. At the end of the memo, I give the two essential passages from eye-witness participants John Reed and Nikolai Sukhanov. For Sukhanov, I use the standard translation by Joel Carmichael, because the English rendering introduces further distortions that need to be considered.

 

Theses on ‘Dustbin’

• There are no official proceedings of the Second Congress; all we know is taken from the newspapers (and even they are often confusing and contradictory). Luckily, a wonderful 1997 Russian publication gives us all the relevant newspaper accounts from a wide range of political viewpoints, and this material has provided a solid base for my investigation (Vtoroi Vserossiiskii s’ezd sovetov rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov, Moscow: Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1997).
• None of the papers or other contemporary sources contain Trotsky’s famous remark in any form. Its first appearance comes in March 1919, when John Reed published Ten Days That Shook the World. There are good reasons to be sceptical even of his account, but we should accept it for the time being, because the most vital fact to be grasped is the dramatic contrast between his account and that of Sukhanov.[1]
• Sukhanov’s account can be shown to be secondary, because Reed was not even in the building at the point in the proceedings where Sukhanov places it: he had left to see what was happening at the Winter Palace. Reed therefore cannot simply have misremembered the exact circumstances of when Trotsky made his famous remark. We must therefore conclude that Sukhanov learned about the remark from Reed’s book, came up with a Russian version and, finally, placed it in a more convenient spot in his own narrative.
• There is therefore no independent account of what Trotsky actually said in Russian: Reed’s English phrase ‘garbage heap’ is as close as we will ever get. This is a principal reason for all the confusingly diverse incarnations of the word.
• ‘Garbage heap’ turned into ‘dustbin’ mainly through the vagaries of multiple translation. Sukhanov found the remark in Reed and translated it into Russian as sornaia korzina istorii. In the 1950s, Joel Carmichael produced an immensely influential translation of Sukhanov; he translated Sukhanov’s Russian term into British English, that is, ‘dustbin’. The result is that even American historians eschew the term introduced by their compatriot (‘garbage heap’) and adopt the out-and-out Briticism introduced by Carmichael.
• Returning to the Second Congress: The shift in the location of the remark is not just a matter of timing: it marks a profound difference in political context.
• In Reed’s account, Trotsky’s remark was a reaction to the Mensheviks, SRs, and other walkouts as they were physically walking out of the Congress. It was a highly emotional and chaotic moment. The exiters (those who walked out of the building and out of the soviet system) had just enraged the delegates by, as it were, flinging the whole soviet system onto the garbage heap of history. Thus, Trotsky’s remark had nothing to do with Martov: it was, instead, addressed to the delegates to urge them not to get too upset by the exiters. His comment therefore did not cause anyone to do anything they were not already doing.
• We should also note the following: not only is there no independent source for Reed’s ‘garbage heap’ remark, but there is also no other indication that Trotsky said anything at all at this point in the proceedings!
• According to Sukhanov’s version, in contrast, the remark comes later, during some short remarks by Trotsky as an introduction to a Bolshevik resolution that was offered in response to the exiters. All contemporary newspaper accounts frame these brief remarks as a defence of the armed uprising that had been described as an ‘armed conspiracy’ by the Menshevik and SR exiters. Nothing resembling the dustbin remark can be found in these accounts.
• Furthermore, Sukhanov frames the remark as Trotsky’s answer to Martov’s concrete proposal for solving the crisis. Thus, per Sukhanov, Trotsky is telling Martov, a delegate who was still participating in the Congress, to leave the proceedings and betake himself to the garbage heap. Indeed, Trotsky is pictured as consigning him to history’s garbage heap simply because he proposed a compromise! And, according to Sukhanov, Martov’s decision to leave was in direct reaction to the ‘garbage heap’ insult. All of these implications of the Sukhanov version are profoundly misleading but, alas, profoundly influential.
• Bottom line: in Reed’s account, Trotsky says to the delegates about people leaving the hall: ‘let them go!’ In Sukhanov, Trotsky tells people still at the Congress: ‘Go!’
• Sukhanov had strong motivations for the distortions he introduced, no doubt unconsciously, and these motivations are stated explicitly in his own account. He was devastated by the failure to create a government acceptable to all (something that most people felt was impossible). He realised that the pro-coalition forces who had walked out from the Congress were primarily responsible for the failure of his project, but he, nevertheless, had an emotional need to somehow blame Trotsky and Lenin as well for the collapse of his hopes. As shown by many of his remarks, he was very angry at them for their dictatorial activity in the years after the Congress. Finally, he was a great admirer of Martov (although also angry at him for his decision to walk out of the Congress), and his partisan account of Martov’s role at the Congress and his alleged ‘compromise’ proposal completely distorts what Martov was actually proposing.
• The distortions introduced by Sukhanov are compounded by the English translation, which (following a general practice) translates soglashenie, agreement, as ‘compromise’. ‘Compromise’ does not give any idea of the real issues involved.
• Trotsky and the Bolsheviks were indeed very intolerant toward the long-time ‘agreementisers’ who left the Congress after damning it and all its works. But the Bolshevik leaders had a very different attitude toward the equally long-time anti-agreement people who stayed: the Left SRs, the Novaia zhizn group, and various individuals. When spokesmen from these groups advocated a widening of the political basis for the new government (not in the form of a cabinet coalition representing all socialist parties regardless of their stand on the coalition question), the Bolshevik speakers – Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Kamenev – did not throw anathemas at them, but instead argued with them as erring comrades. They did not curse the very idea of a widened government, but they tried to show that there was little the Bolsheviks could do to bring it about. In fact, ‘wooing the Left SRs’ is a major plot strand in the story of the Second Congress – but one that has been hidden from view by Sukhanov’s vivid piece of fiction.
• Sukhanov’s account was born out of angry hostility to Trotsky – but Trotsky himself grew to embrace Sukhanov’s image of himself as a badass intolerant hardliner. In Trotsky’s first short history of the revolution written in early 1918, there is no hint of the remark nor indeed of this kind of intolerance (N.B.: his account gets most actual details wrong, as he relies entirely on a faulty memory). On the contrary, Trotsky emphasises the wooing of the Left SRs. In the volume of his collected writings published in 1924, Sukhanov’s version is only mentioned in a footnote without further comment. The famous essay included as an introduction to this volume – Lessons of October – adds nothing about the Second Congress itself. In the 1930 History, the chapter on the Congress is taken straight out of Sukhanov, and the text of the remark is verbatim from Sukhanov. Finally, in his autobiography, the remark (still word for word out of Sukhanov, although with interesting cuts) becomes symbolic of a clash of two fundamental views of the revolution – and, probably for this reason, the pro-agreement Menshevik leader Fedor Dan is substituted for Martov, since Dan is a better symbol of the Mensheviks during 1917 as a whole.
• The contrast, indeed, incompatibility between Reed’s version of Trotsky’s alleged remark and Sukhanov’s version will be obvious to anyone who reads the passages excerpted below. It is curious, then, that (as far as I know) no one to date has remarked on these difficulties.
• A description of the Congress based strictly on contemporary accounts, uncontaminated by either Reed or Sukhanov, will show that the current picture of its political dynamics – derived in large part from Sukhanov – is untenable. The Bolsheviks, the pro-coalition exiters, the anti-coalition remainers, the rank-and-file delegates, and the mercurial Martov himself: their outlook and attitudes all need to be reassessed with critical attention to sources.
• Takeaways: a) Reed is the only independent account we have of Trotsky’s famous remark; b) Sukhanov found Trotsky’s remark in Reed and then wove it into a piece of partisan fiction; c) the political implications of the two accounts, the historically acceptable one by Reed and the unacceptable one by Sukhanov, are very different; d) a new look at the Second Congress based on critical examination of sources is urgently needed; e) the ‘dustbin of history’ belongs in the dustbin of historiography.

 

John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) (ellipses in original)

Then came Abramovitch, for the Bund, the organ of the Jewish Social Democrats—his eyes snapping behind thick glasses, trembling with rage.[2]

“What is taking place now in Petrograd is a monstrous calamity! The Bund group joins with the declaration of the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries and will leave the Congress!” He raised his voice and hand. “Our duty to the Russian proletariat doesn’t permit us to remain here and be responsible for these crimes. Because the firing on the Winter Palace doesn’t cease, the Municipal Duma together with the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Executive Committee of the Peasants’ Soviet, has decided to perish with the Provisional Government, and we are going with them! Unarmed we will expose our breasts to the machine guns of the Terrorists… We invite all delegates to this Congress—” The rest was lost in a storm of hoots, menaces and curses which rose to a hellish pitch as fifty delegates got up and pushed their way out…

Kameniev jangled the bell, shouting, “Keep your seats and we’ll go on with our business!” And Trotzky, standing up with a pale, cruel face, letting out his rich voice in cool contempt, “All these so-called Socialist compromisers,[3] these frightened Mensheviki, Socialist Revolutionaries, Bund—let them go! They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of history!”

Riazanov, for the Bolsheviki, stated that at the request of the City Duma the Military Revolutionary Committee had sent a delegation to offer negotiations to the Winter Palace. “In this way we have done everything possible to avoid blood-shed…” We hurried from the place, stopping for a moment at the room where the Military Revolutionary Committee worked at furious speed, engulfing and spitting out panting couriers, despatching Commissars armed with power of life and death to all the corners of the city, amid the buzz of the telephonographs.

Sukhanov, Notes on the Revolution, 1922 (ellipses in original) Joel Carmichael translation

When would Martov’s resolution be debated?[4]

It was begun by Martov himself when he got the floor amidst an endless series of emergency statements.

‘The news that’s just come’ he began.

But the meeting, which an hour before had passed his resolution unanimously, was now very irritated with every species of ‘compromiser’.[5] Martov was interrupted: ‘What news? What are you trying to scare us for? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’

In some detail Martov analysed the motives for his resolution. Then he proposed that the Congress pass a decree on the necessity for a peaceable settlement of the crisis by forming a general democratic Government and electing a delegation to negotiate with all Socialist parties …

Martov’s reply came from Trotsky, who was standing at his side in the crowd that packed the platform. Now that the Rightists had left, Trotsky’s position was as strong as Martov’s was weak.

‘A rising of the masses of the people’, Trotsky rapped out, ‘needs no justification. What has happened is an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. We hardened the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection, and not a conspiracy.[6] The masses of the people followed our banner and our insurrection was victorious. And now we are told: renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom? I ask: with whom ought we to compromise? With those wretched groups who have left us or who are making this proposal? But after all we’ve had a full view of them. No one in Russia is with them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made, as between two equal sides, by the millions of workers and peasants represented in this Congress, whom they are ready, not for the first time or the last, to barter away as the bourgeoisie sees fit. No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this[7] we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out; go where you ought to be: into the dustbin of history [в сорную корзину истории]!’

‘Then we’ll leave,’ Martov shouted from the platform amidst stormy applause for Trotsky.

No, excuse me, Comrade Martov! Trotsky’s speech of course was a clear and unambiguous reply. But rage at an opponent, and Martov’s emotional state, still did not bind the fraction to a decisive and fatal act. Martov, enraged and upset, began pushing his way off the platform. And I called an emergency conference of our fraction, scattered throughout the hall.

Meanwhile Trotsky was reading aloud a harsh resolution against the Compromisers and against their ‘wretched and criminal attempt to smash the All-Russian Congress’; ‘this will not weaken, but strengthen the Soviets, by purging them of any admixture of counter-revolution’.

[1] I have since realised that Trotsky did use a metaphor close to the ‘dustbin’ remark in the days previous to the Congress, namely, sweeping out the pro-coalition Soviet leadership.

[2] In reality, Genrikh Ehrlich; the real Abramovich spoke a little later, after Reed had left the session.

[3] Of course, Trotsky did not actually say ‘so-called Socialist compromisers’. He simply said ‘agreementisers’ (soglashateli), since everyone knew to whom he was referring. Reed added ‘so-called Socialist’ as an explanatory gloss for his readers – which shows that he did not see it as his mission as a journalist to give word-for-word renditions of what was actually said. Reed’s translation as ‘compromisers’ might make us think Trotsky is referring to Martov, but Martov himself had long opposed these very same ‘compromisers/agreementisers’.

[4] We might ask: if Martov’s ‘proposal’ had been unanimously approved, as historians claim, why was it only now being debated? Why does Martov only now give full details and justification? Had the Congress earlier unanimously approved a proposal about which they knew very little? See next footnote.

[5] This sentence is an example of Sukhanov’s Martov-related distortions. It implies that the crowd had earlier accepted Martov’s detailed strategy for a peaceful resolution, but now, under the sway of emotion, changed its attitude. Not so: the Martov ‘proposal’ that earlier had received unanimous support was the rather innocuous one that the topic of finding a peaceful way exit from the crisis should be the first one discussed on the agenda. This earlier approval did not in any way imply support for the concrete (and highly dubious) strategy that Martov presented later: halt the work of the Congress until negotiations produced a government acceptable to the whole democracy. And so, the delegates were not being over-emotional simpletons when they showed their disapproval. (In my view, American historians took a fatal wrong turn when they assumed that the earlier unanimous approval signified support for a broad multiparty coalition as a definition of Soviet power – but Sukhanov is not responsible for this error.)

[6] At this point in the Russian text, an ellipsis is marked (missing from the English translation). All the words prior to this ellipsis are quoted directly from newspaper accounts; all the words afterwards are purely Sukhanov and have no other warrant. And indeed, the argument presented here about the small possibility of any ‘compromise’ was surely not put forth by Trotsky on this occasion.

[7] The Russian text (и кто выступает с предложениями) makes it even more clear that Trotsky is allegedly raining anathema down on anyone who, like Martov, even proposes any sort of ‘compromise’. Israel Getzler, in his biography of Martov, gives the correct meaning: ‘those who come with such-like proposals’. (p. 162).