In 1929, Pravda reported that a guerrilla force, under the command of Zhu Deh, was heading towards Chao-Cho. Pravda's report, in small type, had no accompanying analysis or detail, but was a bland, non-committal piece of reportage, enabling the ECCI to take credit for any success and disown any failure. It was a continuation of the dishonest and schizoid behaviour of publicly warning about putschism, whilst requiring silent support, from its members, for the organisation of armed insurrections, in the unfavourable conditions of counter-revolution.
Trotsky responded to the report by demanding that the CPSU and Pravda give the required background and analysis of what was happening in China, so as either to support or condemn it.
“What is the meaning of this struggle? Its origins? Its perspectives? Not a word is breathed to us about it. If the new revolution in China has matured to the point that the Communists have taken to arms, then it would seem necessary to mobilize the whole International in the face of events of such gigantic historical importance. Why then do we hear nothing of the sort? And if the situation in China is not such as puts on the order of the day the armed struggle of the Communists for power, then how and why has a Communist detachment begun an armed struggle against Chiang Kai-shek, that is, against the bourgeois military dictatorship?” (p 226)
The reality, of course, was that there was no rise in the level of revolutionary activity, or rebuilding of workers' organisations and, confidence. The workers were in defensive mode, as the bourgeoisie stabilised itself. The workers had, correspondingly, abandoned the Communist Party, that had betrayed them, with its alliance with the bourgeoisie and KMT.
A similar thing can be seen with Ukraine-Russia. The pro-NATO and pro-Putin campists alike present fairy-tales about the corrupt, right-wing regimes they both support, and the ridiculous idea that what exists, on both sides, is a national “bloc of four classes”, or popular front, welded together by the threat of external domination, and in which the war is actually being waged by the working-class for its own class interests. As in all wars, it is certainly workers who, as soldiers in the bourgeois army, do the fighting and dying, but it most certainly is not for their own class interests, as against those of the bourgeoisie that sends them to die and suffer mutilation, and whose state determines the conditions under which they fight.
In 1929, the Comintern had entered the ultra-Left, sectarian Third Period, in which, in contrast to the previous opportunism of the Popular Front, the Stalinists now presented everyone outside the CP's as some kind of fascist. In this scenario, the permanent rise of the revolutionary wave meant that any advance, by opposing class forces was merely temporary. Trotsky quotes Zinoviev, who, by this time, along with Kamenev and others, had left the United Opposition, and returned to the Stalinist fold.
“It is no accident that Zinoviev who, in distinction to the other capitulators, still pretends to be alive, has come out in Pravda with an article which shows that the domination of Chiang Kai-shek is entirely similar to the temporary domination of Kolchak, that is, is only a simple episode in the process of the revolutionary rise. This analogy is of course bracing to the spirit. Unfortunately, it is not only false, but simply stupid. Kolchak organized an insurrection in one province against the dictatorship of the proletariat already established in the greater part of the country. In China, bourgeois counter-revolution rules in the country and it is the Communists who have stirred up an insurrection of a few thousand people in one of the provinces.” (p 227)
This same lunacy was seen in Germany, where the victory of Hitler was greeted with the response, “After Hitler, its our turn.”
“We think, therefore, we have the right to pose this question: Does this insurrection spring from the situation in China or rather from the instructions concerning the “third period”? We ask further, what is the political role of the Chinese Communist Party in all this? What are the slogans with which it mobilized the masses? What is the degree of its influence upon the workers? We hear nothing about all this.” (p 227)
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