Leon Trotsky, Letter to the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission. October 8, 1923

In October 1923, as economic strains and factional resentments sharpened, Trotsky broke his long restraint and warned the Party’s top bodies that “secretarial selection” had produced a swollen, self-protecting apparatus and a demoralized rank and file. Framed as a plea to avert a deeper crisis, the letter linked bureaucratization to policy failure and argued that suppressed dissatisfaction was accumulating “in secret,” threatening a sudden rupture. It helped open the wider intra-party controversy that soon became known as the “New Course” debate.

Original Source: «Известия ЦК КПСС», № 5, 1990 г.

In the fiercest moment of War Communism, the system of appointment within the party did not have one-tenth of the extent that it has now. Appointment of the secretaries of provincial committees is now the rule. That creates for the secretary a position essentially independent of the local organization ...

The Twelfth Congress of the party was conducted under the sign of democracy. Many of the speeches at that time spoken in defense of workers' democracy seemed to me exaggerated, and to a considerable extent demagogic, in view of the incompatibility of a fully developed workers' democracy with the regime of dictatorship. But it was perfectly clear that the pressure of the period of War Communism ought to give place to a more lively and broader party responsibility. However, this present regime, which began to form itself before the Twelfth Congress, and which subsequently received its final reinforcement and formulation -is much farther from workers' democracy. than the regime of the fiercest period of War Communism. The bureaucratization of the party apparatus has developed to unheard-of proportions by means of the method of secretarial selection. There has been created a very broad stratum of party workers, entering into the apparatus of the government of the party, who completely renounce their own party opinion, at least the open expression of it, as though assuming that the secretarial hierarchy is the apparatus which creates party opinion and party decisions. Beneath this stratum, abstaining from their own opinions, there lies the broad mass of the party, before whom every decision stands in the form of a summons or a command. In this foundation-mass of the party there is an unusual amount of dissatisfaction... This dissatisfaction does not dissipate itself by way of influence of the mass upon the party organization (election of party committees, secretaries, etc.), but accumulates in secret and thus leads to interior strains...

It is known to the members of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission that while fighting with all decisiveness and definiteness within the Central Committee against a false policy, I decisively declined to bring the struggle within the Central Committee to the judgment even of a very narrow circle of comrades, in particular those who in the event of a reasonably proper party course ought to occupy prominent places in the Central Committee. I must state that my efforts of a year and a half have given no results. This threatens us with the danger that the party may be taken unawares by a crisis of exceptional severity... In view of the situation created, I consider it not only my right, but my duty to make known the true state of affairs to every member of the party whom I consider sufficiently prepared, matured and self-restrained, and consequently able to help the party out of this blind alley without factional convulsions....

Source: Leon Trotsky, The New Course (New York: New International, 1943), pp. 153-56.