I believe Alan Smithee is the director of the television series, V. Which in and of itself should be an indictment. The alien resistance is called the Fifth Column? Were they in Madrid? Or maybe they worked with Trotsky…

Either way, Smithee is a no talent hack. Just look at the list of garbage for which he is responsible:

• Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)
• Stitches (1985)
• Let’s Get Harry (1986)
• Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home (1987)
• The Shrimp on the Barbie (1990)
• Solar Crisis (1990)
• The Nut House (1992)
• The Birds II: Land’s End (1994)
• National Lampoon’s Senior Trip (1995)
• Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996)
• Exit (1996)
• Mighty Ducks the Movie: The First Face-Off (1997)
• Firehouse (1997)
• An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (1998)
• River Made to Drown In (1999)
• Woman Wanted (2000)

And this is not the complete works of the hack. Now, I am willing to forgive The Mighty Ducks, because that was good. As is every movie about hockey. But c’mon! Shrimp on the Barbie! The Nut House?!?! Woman Wanted???????

CRAP!

So the point of this rant is this: STAY OFF MY BLOG SMITHEE!! Stop leaving your “cute” little comments. Spend your time making a good flick. Then, when you have, come back. And only then will I accept your little comments.

Love always, Eman.

Stalin’s Nemesis came to me very highly recommended: a Radio 4 Book of the Week, it had met an enthusiastic reception in very diverse quarters. Richard Overy at the Literary Review liked it. The Socialist Party, with some reservations, liked it. Tariq Ali liked it, although I half suspect he liked it in order to make a point about Robert Service.  (We shall come back to Service at another time.) The TLS liked it, but liked Service even better.  The Scotsman liked it. All over the place, people liked it, even if their liking sometimes seemed to be more ideologically driven than anything.

I did not like it.

This was, of course, no Young Stalin.  But it was a book that – however well received – was not to my taste as a reader or as a historian, for two quite different sets of reasons.  Moreover, a great deal of my reaction to this book was not even necessarily specific to Patenaude’s text, but reflects my general dislike for certain conventions of historical biography.  That is why I am once again introducing Good Kirsty and Bad Kirsty (forgive the ridiculous aspect of moral judgment, but it was quicker that way), who appeared in a previous review of Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba.  Good Kirsty is my inner historian; the uptight one in charge of my thesis.  Bad Kirsty, who isn’t actually bad but merely mouthy and easily worked up, is my inner reader. (She doesn’t know much about Art, but she knows what she likes).

Their take on Stalin’s Nemesis, and biography in general, follows.

Good Kirsty: You start.

Bad Kirsty: No, you start.

GK: No, you… OK, I’ll start.  I had a lot of problems with this book, many of them practical.  As I work on Trotsky and more generally on memoir, biographies have two main uses for me.  I can use them to look at the various ways people write about historical figures, and I can also use them for reference.  I have issues with biography as a form of history; even the best ones risk placing the focus too much on that one person, and more often than not it’s the author’s preoccupations that end up colouring the whole picture.  But a well annotated and scholarly biography can be really useful for me in checking chronology and chasing up further sources.  I have a few biographies of Trotsky that I use for that purpose all the time.

This is the source of one of my biggest annoyances.  Stalin’s Nemesis isn’t footnoted/endnoted in the traditional sense.  Instead of numbered citations in the body of the text, the notes are organised by page number.  In other words, whenever you find yourself wondering “where did the author get that from?”  (a frequent question for me as Patenaude tends to go ahead and cite sources, directly or indirectly, without any further reflection) you have to flick ahead to the Notes section, find the page number, and you might see something like:

24  heroic defence of Petrograd: My Life, 423-435

Which technically does point you to where the author got the information – and there is a glossary of full titles – but still leaves you in the dark as to how that information was used.  (I can see where possibly the idea was to keep the main text uncluttered, but I don’t think this was a successful strategy, at least from a reference point of view).   Or worse yet, you might see:

137 strenuous time: Van, 104-5

referring to Trotsky’s secretary, Jean Van Heijenoort, by his nickname, or even:

27  bloodthirsty chorus: Natalia, 210

“Natalia” refers here, not to one of the millions of other Natalias populating Russia’s history, but to Trotsky’s second wife Natalia Sedova.  The constant repetition of “Trotsky and Natalia” throughout the text was already up for argument – why should Trotsky be referred to by his last name but Sedova exclusively by her first? – but in a citation it ought to be Sedova, surely.  That sits very badly with me.

BK: The Trotsky/Natalia thing irritated me too.  And it might be that you’ve brainwashed me, but I did find it hard to enjoy the narrative because so much of it was essentially a dramatic reconstruction of events.  I constantly found myself asking “but how do you know that?”  And so much of the language seemed unnecessarily florid, the speculation too intense.  I felt uneasy, as I did with Dancing with Cuba, at the idea that this version of events is presumably supposed to carry a certain authority (and Patenaude’s academic profile would suggest that it is).

I’m quite capable of reading Trotsky’s own accounts of his life for enjoyment, knowing that he’s the ultimately flawed source and seeing perfectly well where the narrative is a little too convenient or the narrator unrealistically omniscient; and his language is even more florid than Patenaude’s, come to think of it.  I can do the same for a historical novel or film if it’s really well done as entertainment.  But with biography I rarely if ever have that enjoyment, and certainly not with this particular strain of biography.

Perhaps the problem is the sense of disconnection.  Reading a memoir, you engage directly with that person’s version of events, which is of course inherently unreliable, but unreliable at first hand.  Whereas biography gives you the story at second or third hand.  It can feel very much like hearing someone gossip about a mutual acquaintance.  And Patenaude’s biography is deeply gossipy.  It has been praised for being frank about Trotsky’s sex life, for example, but of course that still comes down to speculation; necessarily so.  To me a passage like this one (on Trotsky’s plan of escaping to a neighbour’s house in the event of an attack) feels prurient rather than brave:

The young woman in question was Frida’s sister Cristina.  Before a rehearsal could be arranged, however, she approached Van and explained that during the previous several months Trotsky had on four or five occasions directly and insistently propositioned her.  She had managed to deflect these unwanted advances without raising a fuss.  She also told Van that Trotsky had divulged to her the escape plan and the anticipated rehearsal.  Van was angry that Trotsky would risk compromising his security for a sexual liaison, but he said nothing.  There turned out to be no need, because Trotsky stopped pushing for a rehearsal, possibly sensing that its true purpose had been discovered.  Yet how many times must the Old Man have raised the ladder and rehearsed the escape plan in his mind. (p. 64)

(Those first names and nicknames again!)

Not that the personal life of the subject isn’t to be written about.  It might even be a particularly interesting topic with someone like Trotsky, who so effectively obscured his personal life in his own literature.  But…

GK: But surely it’s one thing to write about the stories that emerge from the literature around Trotsky – or indeed any historical figure – weigh them up, analyse them, take them apart; and quite another effectively to retell them verbatim?

BK: Yes.  Although I do understand that instinct.  After all, it’s biography.  You’re writing a narrative, not a thematic discussion of the sources. If you choose that form, you’re bound by its constraints.  And surely the general reader doesn’t want or need to be swamped in a heavy-going discussion of what may or may not be reliable.

GK: I take the point – and freely admit traditional biography is not the form I would myself choose – but even so, there seems to be a trend in writing about Soviet history in particular that equates popular or accessible to sensational(ist).  Of course sensational biographies are old news; just look at Suetonius.  But there seems to be a gulf between what we now see as popular history and academic history that is arguably quite new.  Isaac Deutscher’s three volume Trotsky biography (published between 1954 and 1963)  was also addressed to a general audience, and it has certainly lasted the test of time as an accessible introduction to Trotsky as well as a reference for specialists.  But Deutscher’s books are dense.  They are deeply partisan, and of course they are limited by the context of the time, but they are monumentally well shored-up. Whereas Stalin’s Nemesis, to take just one example (*cough*Montefiore*cough*) has this emphasis on a slick, exciting narrative with plenty of colourful language.  Much closer to a historical novel than anything.

BK: I wonder how much of this comes from the authors, or the academic community, and how much from the publishers or even directly from the readership?

GK: I honestly don’t know.  I suspect a combination of all of the above (answers on a postcard please!). But the success of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: a History – to take one example in Russian studies – would suggest to me that people aren’t actually averse to buying and reading “difficult” history books.

BK: I agree.  I’ve come across a lot of individuals who are always ready to proclaim that people are somehow more stupid than they used to be (almost always over a matter of taste, and never including the speaker under “people”, of course).  I think that’s an extraordinarily bad place from which to start.

GK: Personally, I always wonder how a book like, for example, Geoffrey Swain’s biography of Trotsky (Longman, 2006) – which is very readable and succinct as well as scholarly – would fare if it had a “commercial” publisher and even half of the promotion accorded to “popular” biographies.

BK: Get you and your scare quotes.

GK:  Well, those terms are hardly written in stone… and while I certainly agree with your point above that someone buying a book to read for interest probably doesn’t want to be hit with the whole debate about the sources, I always think there’s something rather condescending about the idea that popular and academic history are somehow opposites, that one simply can’t present a complex subject to a general audience without streamlining it into something far simpler. The act of writing a biography already streamlines the various facts and perspectives around the subject into a narrative.  But that doesn’t mean a biography has to be simply a story.  The best biographies I have read are the ones that acknowledge the areas where there is doubt or confusion or a plain lack of evidence.  They engage with the sources, whereas Patenaude’s text looks rather like a patchwork of different accounts.

BK: And I think it does interfere with the readibility too.  I’m never sure quite what this kind of biography is supposed to be.  The subject itself is of course very serious, although with Trotsky there’s always wit.  But then this rather breathless, overexcited narrative and the cartoonish descriptions just make the whole thing seem over the top.  I suppose when you’re dealing with a subject who not only had a dramatic life but such a big, dramatic, personality – not to mention such a florid writing style – as Trotsky, adding even more hyperbole can just make it all too rich to digest.  At least, that’s the effect it had on me: I got tired of all the excitement.  I just wanted to engage with the story, which I know very well is an interesting one, and hear what the author had to say about it based on the evidence.  But no clear perspective emerges among all the colour and muddle.

GK: Well, I think we’ve probably gone on too long.  Time to sign off.  We’ll be back for Robert Service, though.

BK: Oh yes.  We certainly shall be.

Fade out with scary music.

Faber and Faber, 352 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0571228751

La más reciente novela del escritor cubano Leonardo Padura, El hombre que amaba a los perros, tendrá su edición cubana con el sello de Ediciones Unión y deberá salir de imprenta en la Isla el próximo verano, afirmó su autor.

Padura, quien leyó partes de la novela en un encuentro con sus lectores este martes en la sede de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC), aseguró que la editorial cubana está trabajando ya el texto.

“Tengo un acuerdo de exclusividad con Tusquets Editores -la editorial de Barcelona que publica en primicia todos sus libros-, que no impide publicar la novela en Cuba, pero nos pide esperar un tiempo después de su salida en España, pues aquí los lectores la compran a 20 pesos cubanos -menos de un dólar- y eso es un mal negocio”, bromeó.

El escritor anticipó detalles de su nueva obra y de la investigación que sustenta El hombre que amaba a los perros, cuya esencia, dijo, “es que la utopía sigue siendo necesaria (…) La utopía es lo que suspira debajo de todas las historias de esta novela”.

Contó que este es una historia que se desarrolla en Rusia, Turquía, Francia, Noruega, Estados Unidos, México y Cuba, pero “es un libro escrito desde aquí, desde la perspectiva cubana, desde mi visión como cubano”.

Evocó las impresiones que tuvo durante su primera visita, en octubre de 1989, un mes antes de la caída del muro de Berlín, a la casa donde vivió y fue asesinado León Trotski en Coyoacán, México.

Recordó que para la mayoría de los cubanos de su generación el líder soviético, figura clave junto a Lenin en la Revolución de Octubre, era un hombre prácticamente desconocido.

La historia central de la novela recrea los preparativos y el asesinato en México de Trotski a manos del español Ramón Mercader, como final de una oscura trama urdida por Stalin. Pero la novela comienza en el 2004, cuando Iván, aspirante a escritor y veterinario de segunda en La Habana, reconstruye la historia que le había contado en 1977 un enigmático hombre que paseaba por la playa a dos galgos rusos y que le confiesa detalles de la vida de Mercader, también conocido como Jacques Monard.

La trama gira, afirmó Padura, alrededor de la misteriosa figura del asesino, quien vivió en Cuba desde 1974 hasta 1978, y está enterrado en un cementerio en las afueras de Moscú.

Contó las dificultades que entrañó la búsqueda de fuentes confiables sobre Ramón Mercader, pues durante muchos años “el hombre que amaba a los perros” vivió en el anonimato. “Las personas que se relacionaron con él en Cuba no sabían de quién se trataba… Todo el testimonio que tengo de él en la Isla es oral”, aseguró.

En la UNEAC, los escritores Reinaldo Montero y Rafael Acosta de Arriba antecedieron en la palabra a Padura e hicieron sendas presentaciones de esta novela, “un libro sencillamente estremecedor”, al decir de Rafael Acosta.

Leonardo Padura (La Habana, 1955) es uno de los más importantes escritores cubanos, con gran notoriedad por sus novelas de misterio protagonizadas por el detective Mario Conde. También, por sus extraordinarios reportajes periodísticos en el diario Juventud Rebelde en la década del 80 del siglo pasado, sus cuentos y ensayos, y por una obra de plena madurez literaria, La novela de mi vida, donde la figura central es el poeta cubano José María Heredia.

Fuente: cubadebate

It is commonly assumed by the public that Communism (also called “Marxism”) was created by the German philosopher Karl Marx. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, a young Marx joined the already existing Communist movement and, after publishing several works on the subject of Communism and Capitalism (a term he coined), he became such a central figure that the term “Marxist” became synonymous with the term “Communist”. In much the same way Adam Smith did not create Capitalism but rather created the authoritative work on Capitalism (The Wealth of Nations) and yet is still considered the “founder” of Capitalism.

So who did create Communism?

Like most things in life, there is no short and simple answer. Communism, or at least the primitive ancestor of Communism has existed for thousands of years. At the dawn of man, humans lived in tribes, working together for survival. What one man killed was food for everyone, the spear or hammer made by one person could be used by another. The concept of private-property did not evolve until much later in human history- the reason being that selfishness and individualism simply could not mesh with the harsh realities of the time. One human could not survive on his own, the tribe as a whole could not waste time and energy on creating twenty individual hammers for the twenty men of the tribe when one could be shared just as easily. At the same time, the shared property (combined with the need for everyone to pull their own weight) eliminated any chance of a class system evolving. Without any difference in wealth or workload, society was more or less egalitarian.

So what happened?

As humans became more settled and as the barter system emerged (to be discussed in a later post), shared-property died slowly out and the class system arose. While today the vast majority of hunter-gatherer, pastoral, horticulturalist, and nomadic people groups still live in classless, shared-property systems, the majority of the world’s population began moving away from this system after the establishment of permanent agricultural communities. By the fall of the Roman Empire, most of the world’s people groups practiced Capitalism in some form. It was not until 1516 when Thomas Moore, one of Henry VIII’s closest advisers, published his work Utopia that the concepts of shared-property and classlessness were reintroduced into society (albeit merely as subjects of intellectual discussion). Only in the early 1800s were the concepts developed into actual political/economic theories. Henri de Saint-Simon, a member of the French aristocracy, created several works on the subject and while never implementing them in any major way, laid the foundations for what would become known as the Communist movement. It was not until 1848 when two young Prussian authors named Marx and Engels published their collaborated work The Communist Manifesto that Communism (or “Socialism”- at the time the two words were more or less interchangeable) became a concrete theory. Between the two men’s works, the entire Communist philosophy was created, though it was not implemented until 1871, when Parisian Socialists revolted against the imperial French government and established a short-lived attempt at a Communist government until the Commune (revolutionary government) was wiped out by the French military. While Communist philosophy spread across much of the Western world, there were no major attempts at Communism (baring the establishment of Amish, and later, Hutterite, communities- which are closer to the primitive classless/shared-property practices of various tribal societies). There was a brief attempt at Fabianism (a British Socialist movement), however it quickly devolved into a philosophy, rather than a physical attempt at the implementation of Communism. It was in Russia in 1917 that the first major attempt at a Communist revolution (since the 1871 revolution) took place. The Bolsheviks (the Russian Communist party and revolutionary movement), led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian monarchy and the feudal system. After Lenin’s death in 1923, a split ensued that left the USSR divided between the followers of Leon Trotsky (creator and commander of the Red Army and Lenin’s second-in-command) and the followers of Joseph Stalin (the General Secretary of the Communist party). Stalin, despite the efforts of Trotsky and his followers, assumed control and eventually exiled Trotsky in 1929. Under the despotism of Stalin, the USSR, while maintaining the facade of Communism, devolved into a semi-Socialist dictatorship (Trotsky referred to it as a “deformed workers’ state). While Trotskyism grew in popularity in the West, the general Communist movement was marred by the atrocities committed by Stalin and the imperialists policies pursued in Eastern Europe after his death. In China, Mao Zedong led what is generally considered to have been a Communist revolution, but the later policies of Mao have caused many other Communists to doubt whether China could be counted as true Communist country since the mid 1950s. While the revolution itself is considered to be beneficial, the vast majority of modern Communists hold that contemporary China is no more a true Marxist country than Stalin’s USSR (this opinion is viciously opposed by Maoist factions of the Communist movement). While Communism was quickly becoming popular in the third-world (due largely to Western neo-colonialism) the next major advancement of Communism occurred in Cuba after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara defeated the dictator Batista. Once again Communists are split on the subject of whether Cuba may be considered a true Marxist government- much like China, there is popular that the revolution was a positive event but the movement is split on whether Cuba did or did not devolve into another deformed workers’ state. Indeed, the same could be said for almost every country where a Communist revolution has taken place (though almost all Communists are united in believed that North Korea is not a true Communist country). While the collapse of the USSR in 1990 has led many to believe that Communism has been defeated, the Communist movement is technically as active as it ever was.

In short, the history of Communism is far from simple. Much of its history can be interpreted depending on your sympathies and opinions.

Then again, the same could be said for any aspect of history.

Author’s Note: Since Communism isn’t merely an economic or political or social theory but rather a combination of all three, you can see how describing the theory itself- let alone its history- is a massive undertaking that could easily fill a book. Considering my space and the attention span of the reader is sorely limited, I have been forced so skim over the major events of Communist history. Don’t be ticked off at me if I missed some (though if I have something that might be wrong, please correct me).

O presidente venezuelano, Hugo Chávez, convocou neste sábado (21) a 5ª Internacional Socialista em um encontro com representantes de mais de 50 partidos de esquerda reunidos em um evento realizado em Caracas desde quinta-feira (19). "Atrevo-me a convocar a 5ª Internacional para retomar a 1ª, a 2ª, a 3ª, a 4ª", disse Chávez, entre aplausos dos participantes.

Chávez e Evo Morales com representantes de partidos de esquerda reunidos em Caracas

Chávez recordou que passaram 145 anos da convocação de Karl Marx da 1ª Internacional; 120 anos da 2ª Internacional convocada por Friedrich Engels; 90 anos da convocação de Lenin da 3ª Internacional e 71 anos da convocação de Trotsky da 4ª Internacional.
Na opinião do mandatário, o mundo novo, necessário e possível, nasceu só que o império estadunidense e seus aliados o querem liquidar antes de que cresça.

Manifestou que esse império velho, essa classe dominante de idéias retrógadas, racistas e fascistas anda cheio de ódio com a espada levantada tratando de cercear a esperança que nasceu.
"Acho que a 5ª Internacional é uma responsabilidade porque a crise a nível mundial se acelera", proclamou.
"Se fosse possível ao Partido Socialista Unido da Venezuela (PSUV) e outro partido deste mundo conformar o primeiro núcleo da 5ª Internacional, o faríamos", disse Chávez.

E acrescentou: "estou certo de que se poderia contar com mais levando em conta que estão aqui reunidos 52 organizações partidárias de esquerda".
O presidente venezuelano disse que as organizações partidárias presentes ao encontro devem refletir sobre a convocatória da 5ª Internacional e depois responder se é oportuna esta convocação.

Neste sábado, os representantes dos diversos partidos da izquierda internacional que assistem ao encontro que se realiza em Caracas discutem o documento final onde esperam condenar a instalação de bases militares norte-americanas em território colombiano, assim como o apoio a diversos movimentos revolucionários em várias partes do mundo.

Entre as principais propostas a serem incluídas no texto está a condenação enfática ao golpe de Estado en Honduras e à continuidade do bloqueio econômico imposto pelos EUA contra o povo cubano.
Com informações da Prensa Latina

Fonte: Imprensa Latina

A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky: A Biography

By David North

Trotsky: A Biography

Robert Service,

Harvard University Press,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009

The Specter of Leon Trotsky

Courtesy: wsws.org, via Globeistan

In 1955 James Burnham, the intellectual godfather of modern American neo-conservatism, reviewed The Prophet Armed, the first volume of Isaac Deutscher’s monumental biography of Leon [Lev Davidovich] Trotsky. Fifteen years had passed since Burnham had resigned from the Fourth International at the climax of a political struggle in which he had crossed polemical swords with Leon Trotsky. It had been a difficult experience for Burnham, who felt somewhat overmatched in this political and literary contest. “I must stop awhile in wonder,” Burnham had written in a document addressed to Trotsky, “at the technical perfection of the verbal structure you have created, the dynamic sweep of your rhetoric, the burning expression of your unconquerable devotion to the socialist ideal, the sudden, witty, flashing metaphors that sparkle through your pages.”

In the aftermath of his repudiation of socialism, Burnham moved rapidly to the extreme right (as Trotsky had predicted). By the mid-1950s he viewed Trotsky’s life and work through the prism of his own ideological commitment to a global struggle against Marxism. Deutscher’s work filled Burnham with alarm. The problem was not literary in character. Burnham readily acknowledged the author’s masterful reconstruction of Trotsky’s revolutionary persona.

“Mr. Deutscher has cast his story of Trotsky in the Greek mould, and with sufficient justification,” Burnham wrote. “His Trotsky is a protagonist of the most dazzling brilliance, who rises in 1905, 1917 and in the Civil War to successive heights where he fuses with History and becomes her voice.” Burnham allowed that the author had succeeded in conveying to his readers Trotsky’s extraordinary qualities: “the flaming oratory, which many who heard him believe to have been the greatest of our century; the linguistic facility; the witty and vibrant prose; the quickness with which Trotsky mastered every new subject; the breadth of interest, so rare among the dedicated revolutionaries.”

Burnham noted that Deutscher’s portrait of Trotsky was not one-sided; that he “conscientiously displays, also, Trotsky’s weaknesses…” But despite the many literary virtues of the biography, Burnham denounced it as an “intellectual disaster.” Burnham’s reason for his condemnation was that “Mr. Deutscher writes from a point of view that accepts and legitimizes the Bolshevik revolution.” The biography was “organically warped” and unacceptable. “Not all the scholarly references from all the libraries are enough to wash out the Bolshevik stain.”

Burnham confessed his horror that Deutscher had received “all the courtesies of our leading research institutions, the aid of our foundations, the pages of our magazines, publication and promotion by the great Anglo-Saxon Oxford Press.” Did the establishment not recognize the danger in allowing, and even encouraging, the details of Trotsky’s heroic life and revolutionary ideas to reach the broader public, and especially the youth?

Burnham concluded his review with a cry of despair: “The minds of many of our university students and opinion-makers are being deeply formed, on the supremely important issues with which he [Deutscher] deals, by his ideas. It is surely one more among the many indications of the suicidal mania of the western world.” (2) The conclusion that implicitly flowed from this review was that Deutscher’s book and others like it, which portrayed the October Revolution and its leaders sympathetically, should not be published.

Courtesy: http://wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/serv-n11.shtml

A brilliant, ruthless ideologue who created the political machinery that would eventually turn against him.

Of all the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution, Leon Trotsky commanded the most compelling public presence and, eventually, exerted the most lasting influence on Western intellectuals. Still, the arc of his life story moved from pre-eminence to thwarted ambition and ideological collapse.

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on a Ukrainian farm, Trotsky grew up to become a spellbinding orator and a magnificent writer who, with Vladimir Lenin, propelled the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian government in November 1917. Soon after, he led the Red Army during the civil war. But with the close of that conflict, in 1921, he began to lose political stature, a process accelerated by Lenin’s declining health. By the time Lenin died in January 1924, Joseph Stalin was eclipsing Trotsky in the struggle for power.

Not that Trotsky ever lacked zeal. As part of the ruling elite, he had been every bit as ruthless as Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks, including Stalin. In “Trotsky: A Biography,” Robert Service fashions a vivid portrait of this brilliant, merciless ideologue, who did not hesitate to drag his country kicking, screaming and bleeding toward the utopia he dreamed of creating for it. In June 1917, four months after the abdication of Czar Nicholas II, when the liberal Provisional Government was trying to manage a newly democratic society and wage war against Germany and Austria, Trotsky yearned for another revolution, this time in the name of the proletariat.

The regime he sought to establish would be dictatorial and violent,” Mr. Service writes. Trotsky’s rhetoric gave an image of what was to come. “The strength of the French Revolution,” he shouted to a group of revolutionary sailors, “was in the machine that made the enemies of the people shorter by a head. This is a fine device. We must have it in every city.” And have it they did. Once in power, Trotsky advocated show trials and the execution of political prisoners; he suppressed other socialist parties and independent trade unions; he pushed for the censorship of art that did not support the revolution; and he created the institutions of repression that were later turned against him and his followers.

As Stalin gained absolute power, he exiled Trotsky, first to Soviet Central Asia and then, in 1929, to Turkey. Once outside the Soviet Union, Trotsky came to understand the monstrous nature of Stalin’s regime and remained convinced—and committed to convincing others—that the regime he and Lenin had sought to establish was never intended to result in the dictatorship that Stalin had in mind. For Trotsky this belief had intensely personal and historical dimensions. He spent the rest of his life defending both his role in the revolution and his idea of the revolution, particularly in his memoir, “My Life,” and in his multivolume “History of the Russian Revolution.”

Trotsky insisted that Stalinism should not be considered a legitimate or inevitable consequence of Bolshevism. He could not accept the idea that Stalin might be Lenin’s true heir and therefore his own. So he wrote angry descriptions of Stalin’s crimes and remained oblivious to Lenin’s. He seemed to be haunted by the fugitive fear that he had helped to create the system that was destroying his dream of a socialist utopia and, not least, his family: Stalin killed Trotsky’s first wife, his two sons, his sister and other relatives.

It may be true that, had Trotsky come to power, the Soviet Union would have avoided the full-scale destruction of the Red Army’s officer corps (which Stalin engineered in the late 1930s) and the bloody purges of the Communist Party itself. What is certain is that Trotsky’s fate—his exile, the death of his children, his own death in Mexico, in August 1940, at the hands of Stalin’s assassin—”turned him into a political martyr,” as Mr. Service puts it. Trotsky “was often given the benefit of the doubt by authors who might otherwise have exercised their skepticism.” Particularly during Trotsky’s three years in Mexico, he provoked a deep fascination among left-wing American radicals, who rejected Stalin but were impatient with Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Mr. Service’s chronicle is long overdue. For two generations, students of Soviet history have turned to Isaac Deutscher’s monumental three-volume biography of Trotsky, published between 1954 and 1963. But Deutscher, who adored Trotsky, was altogether too forgiving of him. Like Trotsky, he defended Lenin and the revolution while saving his outrage for Stalin. Mr. Service, who has written highly regarded biographies of Lenin and Stalin, approaches Trotsky without emotional or ideological attachment. He has also mined a rich lode of newly accessible archival material, including documents that reveal Trotsky’s support for cruel methods while Lenin was still actively leading the government.

This is not to suggest that all of Mr. Service’s judgments should go unchallenged. He hardly discusses Trotsky’s writings, either as a Marxist theoretician or as an accomplished and independent journalist in the years before World War I. He also slips into personal animus that is sometimes out of place. For example, he holds Trotsky responsible for his elder daughter’s suicide in Berlin in 1933. It is true that Trotsky could have offered more paternal support, but Stalin had taken away her Soviet citizenship; psychologically fragile, she was cut off from her husband and daughter, who remained in the Soviet Union. The principal blame belongs elsewhere.

More than anything else, Mr. Service compels us to look at Trotsky as he really was rather than to accept the image that Trotsky conjured for himself. “Death came early to him,” Mr. Service concludes, “because he fought for a cause that was more destructive than he had ever imagined.”

Mr. Rubenstein is the Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA and the author of “Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg.”

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431804574538603020283292.html

Our friends Philosophy Football have created a wonderful new t-shirt bearing Trotsky’s wise words that:

“The revolution will inevitably awaken in the British working class the deepest passions which have been diverted along artificial channels with the aid of football.”

Verso has just made available a 3-volume discounted set of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, The Prophet.

Tariq Ali recently said of Deutscher’s work:

For over half a century, Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky, a literary-historical masterpiece in its own right, was regarded as the last word on the subject. Many who were deeply hostile to the Russian revolution and all its leading actors nonetheless acclaimed these books: in 1997, asked to nominate his favourite book for National Book Day, the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, nominated the trilogy.

Each book in the set is also available individually:

The Prophet Armed:  Trotsky 1879-1921

The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929

The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940

WIN!

We have one t-shirt and one set of Deutscher’s legendary biography to give away. To win answer two questions:

• Name the text that the above quote from Trotsky comes from.
• What was the name of the Mexican muralist who attempted to assassinate Trotsky?

Entrants must email their answers to enquiries AT verso.co.uk (twitters and comment responses will not be accepted!), with their names and the addresses to which the prize should be sent. The first correct answer will win. The competition is only open to those outside of North America.

Robert Service’s new biography of Trotsky is reviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal. Having read Service’s excellent biography of Lenin a few years ago, this seems like a book worth reading. Joshua Rubenstein’s thoughtful review touches on some thoughts about socialism and socialists.

Socialism had three major failings. The first is what economists study most closely. It is the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, because of the rejection of prices and money as a medium of exchange. Whether you support socialist ideals or not, it is literally impossible to achieve. Do away with prices and currency, and they will emerge in a different form. They are part of human society.

The second aspect of socialism intrigues philosophers: socialism genuinely sought to change human nature itself. People as they currently are are in no shape to realize Marx’s vision of communist society. So part of the communist program was to actively mold and change people so that vision could one day become a reality.

Before Marx came along, Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia were also written about societies with a fundamentally changed human nature. More, knowing his ideal to be impossible, coined the word “utopia,” which literally means “no place.” His book is a pleasant dream (for a collectivist at least), but More knew it was one that could ever come true. We are they way we are. And we’re stuck that way, for better or worse.

This leads us to the third aspect of socialism, which most concerns Trotsky. This is, for me, the most remarkable part, and the most chilling. It is the sheer violence that accompanied Marxism-Leninism everywhere it was tried. And I mean everywhere. Every single country to adopt communism had a checkered human rights record. No exceptions. Not one had anything resembling freedom of speech or press, or due process, or property rights.

Most historians now estimate that communist governments killed around 100,000,000 people. Mostly their own citizens. At no other point in human history have governments been so murderous of their own people. No other ideology has had consequences so bloody as Marxism and its variants.

One reason for the violence is that it allowed the governments to maintain power; resistance is less likely when the prevailing climate is of fear. Another is that human nature is stubborn. If it is to be changed, force is required. But, of course, the basic tenets of humanity are immutable. We are who we are.

Communist leaders, including Trotsky, were simply chilling. Many of them come off as sadists. They seemed to actually enjoy bloodshed. Revel in it. Yet Trotsky still has his admirers today. They need to answer for why they look up to someone who would even have thoughts like the following, let alone give voice to such brutish impulses in public speeches:

“The strength of the French Revolution,” he shouted to a group of revolutionary sailors, “was in the machine that made the enemies of the people shorter by a head. This is a fine device. We must have it in every city.” And have it they did. Once in power, Trotsky advocated show trials and the execution of political prisoners; he suppressed other socialist parties and independent trade unions; he pushed for the censorship of art that did not support the revolution; and he created the institutions of repression that were later turned against him and his followers.

Review: Stalin’s Nemesis. The Exile, and Murder of Leon Trotsky. Bertrand M. Patenaude. Faber & Faber. 2009. Trotsky A Biography. Robert Service. Macmillan. 2009.

“Estimations of Trotsky tend to shade into explanations for his political downfall.” So comments Bertrand Patenaude. How should the man be considered? Why should we be interested in his defeat? Rigid, lacking sound political instincts, the overweening “flaw” in his haughty personality, – all judgements of Stalin’s Nemesis – Trotsky offered brilliant justification of the Russian Revolution, and mordant criticisms of Soviet rule under Stalin. To Robert Service Trotsky was “an exceptional human being and a complex one”. He was a major actor in a central drama of the 20^th century, whose “ideas, including those about Russian history, had a lasting impact”. Patenaude’s Stalin’s Nemesis is a solid, if not particularly friendly, account of Trotsky’s life following his expulsion from the Soviet Union. It frequently expands to encompass the longer course of his vocation, from inspiring mass leader to marginalised founder of the Fourth International. But to get the full flavour of a study that puts the emphasis on how the one-time Commissar’s personality, imprinted with a “definite ideology”, shaped his career, from a leading player in the October capture of power, to exile, and victim of Stalin’s brutal revenge one needs to read Robert Service’s biography. With all the faults, and these flow in abundance, of such a method. Not that would have expected a sympathetic portrait. In Stalin (2004) Service compared Trotsky’s use of violence to Stalin’s and stated that he alone of the leading Bolsheviks approached the Georgian “in bloodthirstiness”. Or indeed a rounded grasp of Communist ideology and history. In his Comrades (2007) Service asserted that by the end of the 19^th century Marxism had become “an infallible set of doctrines and political substitute for religion.” And that Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ “new type of state” based on “one-party, one-ideology” with no respect for “law, constitution and popular consent” that had spread to “mutate like a virus”, infecting the body of Fascism, and Nazism. It remains around, apparentl, to taint “the Islamist plans of Osama Bin Laden” and the Taliban.

Each book then offers not just narrative but assessments of Trotsky. That is, to the history of Communism and the Soviet Union. Patenaude’s story is largely centred on life in his Mexican homes in Coyoacán. Wider historical description and judgements about Trotsky tend to flow from this location. Despite its dismissive conclusion about the “dogma of Marxism” and Trotsky’s faith in the “glorious Soviet future” (did Patenaude mislay his style guide?) the book is gripping and illuminating. Aware of his previous writings, one expects less, and gets a lot less, from Service. In an ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist review David North (here) has rigorously unravelled the string of howlers that litter the book – apparently produced by a serious historian – from names, dates of people’s death, (including that of Natalia, Trotsky’s wife) to graver errors. The claim that this is the “first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist” may, nevertheless, be true. It is less than sure that Service’s efforts, to offer a “more searching approach” than previous biographies, such as Isaac Deutscher’s celebrated Trilogy, or the painstakingly documented publications of Pierre Broué, not to mention his subject’s own “self-serving and misleading” accounts, offer more than acres of darkness about Trotsky.

Mexico, after years of wandering in exile, initially internal, in Kazakhstan, to outside the USSR in Turkey, France, to Norway, was Trotsky’s final home. The axe had fallen. He was now, for the Soviet state, officially a “counter-revolutionary” who had formed an illegal anti-Soviet party. No state appeared comfortable with receiving this dangerous revolutionary. But, from 1937 up till his murder in 1941, he found a guarded welcome from the Mexican President Cárdenas, a supporter of the Spanish republic and protector of countless loyalist refugees. The agrarian reformer had yielded to lobbying from the celebrated muralist, and self-styled Trotskyist, Diego Rivera, and out of a sense that it was the “proper thing to do” had accepted the Russian revolutionary. The artist housed him in Coyoacán, in his casa azul (blue house), “filled with plants and flowers, pre-Columbian sculptures” and “a fruit bearing orange tree” in the patio. With talent Patenaude describes the enveloping clouds around Trotsky’s stay. Life in the Blue House, where he had an affair with Rivera’s wife, the painter Frida Kahlo (riven in many minds by Julie Taymor’s dashing bio-film), was not without drama. Sketches of Trotsky’s intimate relationship with his wife, Natalia, his pastimes, fishing, hunting, cacti collecting, and fraught diners, enliven the human side of – to anyone immersed in the drier side of Trotskyist literature – of the Old Man. There are snapshots of an earlier existence, from his role as the Bolshevik Army leader, the bitter struggles with Stalin following Lenin’s death in 1923, to his eventual hounding out of the Party.

That past was brought back quickly. In the growing Stalinist terror, Moscow ideologues attacked Trotsky the ‘counter-revolutionary’. Near-by the Mexican Communist Party launched violent campaigns against his presence. From the start Trotsky and his entourage were under siege. Unfortunately, not only real threats weighed on them. There were petty rows. “Life in the Trotsky household was marked by frequent periods of tension and petty strife which at times had the effect of undermining Trotsky’s security.” Which, by the time they had moved from the Blue House to the Avenida Viena (a result of the liaison with Frida) had become a full-time task. This was not always well carried out, despite efforts to recruit reliable guards, install alarm systems, and watch towers. Those out to crush him got closer and closer to Trotsky’s immediate circle. They imprisoned and executed members of his family, and assassinated important Trotskyist activists on the streets of Europe. This campaign spread to whole political movements. In Spain the 1937, a Stalinist-instigated a suppression of, at the height of the Civil War, the ‘Trotskyist’ POUM (an independent anti-Stalinist Marxist group. that Trotsky’s own dozen strong band of Spanish followers had been told to reject as ‘centrist’) was undertaken on the grounds of their ‘services’ for “European and Asiatic fascism”. Amid the repression their leader, the Catalan Andreu Nin was abducted from prison, tortured and murdered by a GPU-led squad. By the start of 1940 the henchmen of the Soviet Union’s GPU were operating with the purpose of eliminating Trotsky in his New World redoubt. The infiltration by Stalinist agents, first Bob Harte, then, the sadly well known, under various names, Mercador (Ramón, Raymond), Jacques Mornard, who wormed his way into the Coyoacán refuge, by the cruel seduction of the trusted Sylvia Ageloff, is outlined with all its tortuous mendacity.

Wider politics played the major part of Trotsky’s life in exile. The Marxist revolutionary had not come to Mexico to abandon the fight against Stalinism; he wished to confront it with all possible means. Apart from holding the reins of the nascent Fourth International – in preparation since Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, and founded officially in 1938 – Trotsky wrote prolifically on international affairs. He offered  criticisms on a global scale of Communist policies. In the Bulletin of the Opposition, and countless articles for the international left (and bourgeois) press he showed the truth about the “privileged caste” that made up the ‘Stalinist bureaucracy’, and the ‘gravedigger’ of the Russian Revolution, Stalin. Trotsky tried to organise resistance on a world-scale. Trotsky was still engaged in a biography of Stalin up to Mercador’s lethal assault.

Patenaude describes a central episode in this unequal combat: the Dewy Commission, (1937). This was set up to challenge the Soviet charge that Trotsky was behind untold plots ‘uncovered’ during the Great Terror, and prosecuted during the Moscow trials. The 78-year-old American educationalist and pragmatist philosopher, John Dewy, who headed the public tribunal, declared that the injustice of this ‘legal’ process ranked with the Dreyfus affair and that of Sacco and Vanceti. This Commission, an Inquiry into such claims, visited his Central American location. It took testimonies from many sources, was not without its difficult moments for Trotsky. Here his record as a leading Bolshevik came into play. How could the former People’s Commissar (as Service asserts much more frequently) demand the rights of democratic justice when his own actions in power had betrayed them? Stalin’s Nemesis suggests that Trotsky was forced into a corner over his defence of his action in suppressing the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion – his role as “the bloody Field Marshall Trotsky”. It might have been relevant here to read what Victor Serge had to say on the subject, that if, as Trotsky alleged (high-handedly) the revolt was led by men different to those who once rose in support of the October Revolution, that whether the Party that crushed them was also the same. Or was it not too already suffering from “bureaucratic befoulment”? Did in fact there have to be some kind of re-assessment, as Serge suggested, of the early years of Bolshevik power. To begin with the introduction of the Cheka (forerunner of the GPU and other state security organs) and the suppression of overt opposition to the Party? That, the “central Committee”, by condemning in 1918 the right to apply the death penalty “without hearing the accused who could not defend themselves” an “Inquisitional procedure forgotten by European civilisation.” *

If the Moscow trials, the Commission concluded, were a frame-up (a view, to our astonishment today, not shared by many on the left), this leaves unresolved the difficulties, moral and political, these particular issues raise. Patenaude outlines the American educator’s 1938 exchange with Trotsky on ethics. The Dialectical Materialist claimed that the class struggle was the ultimate basis of all morals. That under Lenin the Party had followed the ‘laws’ of social development and revolution in crushing its enemies. That, “the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of power of man over man.” In contrast Stalin used unrestrained terror to serve the authority of bureaucratic rule. Thus, he concluded, end had a ‘dialectical’ relation to means. Stalin’s goal needed repression, Lenin and Trotsky’s…. Dewey asked in reply if these ‘laws’ had testable proof, and what ‘means’ precisely were ruled out to achieve a world where people were free. One might conclude that how to maintain some kind of human decency regardless of the political circumstances remains unresolved. Dewey to an extent shared with Trotsky the premise that morality was not fixed but (as the American later wrote) based on “growth, improvement and progress”. He foresaw its future in a wider democratic process rather than formal political association – social development towards ending the rule of a minority over others in short. This leaves open what kind of political action gave an opportunity for Stalin to rise to power, and the lack of clarity about Trotsky’s defence of early Bolshevik methods of compulsion. In what sense, viewed today, can we say that they were in line with the promise of future human liberation? This end has yet to come.

What then of the politician, the Marxist, the revolutionary leader? Patenaude cites Max Eastman’s opinion that Trotsky “lacked the gift for personal friendship”. He had no real friends, but “followers and subalterns”. Their Morals and Ours wanted to end power over people; his political action was based on instrumental authority. That he saw “individuals as servants to an aim and an idea rather than personalities in their own right.” Eastman was well-placed to know: he fell out with Trotsky over his casual treatment well before he broke with the left and began a steady drift rightwards. But how far does this get us? Trotsky no doubt considered himself equally as a tool – of History (as Edmund Wilson described his self-image in To The Finland Station). In this fashion we was an actor in pre-written script. British intelligence agent (and financier of anti-Bolshevik forces), Bruce Lockhart, said of Trotsky during the Revolution “he strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it.” But from this, to try, as Robert Service does, to align the course of Trotsky’s political career around his personal qualities, from “alienating others” to “will to dominate”, is less than savoury. Not that we can blithely reduce his arguments, as Tariq Ali so characteristically does, to the thesis that “Trotsky was a cold blooded and ruthless murderer” whose crimes merit exposure (Guardian Review. 31.10.09). Some of hard judgements are far from baseless (even Ali, given to hero-worshiping, admits the Bolsheviks decided to “hold onto power whatever the cost”). But that if there is one thing that marks out Service’s Trotsky it is a relentless wish to bring the role of the individual in History forward. Trotsky: A Biography constantly runs the risk of replacing critical historical determinism by a critique of one individual’s personality. However, Trotsky’s perception of himself as part of a broader movement of events was not wholly misjudged. His fate was laid out as much by history as by the workings of his character. His “greater propensity for commands than for discussion”, his “extremely violent” practice, (for the sake of argument, conceded without countervailing traits) only flourished in conditions where people and institutions obeyed. Where in fact violence had become entrenched – by causes far beyond the Will of a “high order” Intellect. Whose origins are beyond the character defects of one revolutionary leader.

Trotsky: A Biography is, then, dominated by the working out of an inner destiny. Yet, in Stalin Service had noted, “Neither Lenin nor Stalin was a wholly free agent. They were constrained by the nature of the regime which they had created.” This is even truer of Trotsky. His inability sustain his position owed less to a general lack of political abilities to an absence of the very specific skills – mixing loud loyalty with low cunning, a capacity to reassure the apparatus and build a coterie around him – that were needed to win power in the emerging bureaucratic state. It is pretty obvious that organising a kaleidoscope of alliances, from the left to the United Opposition, on a platform of challenging the growth and power of this army of functionaries, was not going to make much head-way inside the very Party that swelled in symbiosis with the bureaucracy. Trotsky disdained to make appeals outside this circle. Then, the real issues are deeper. Why did he help build the administration only to attempt its transformation? Did he, even given his handicaps as a politician, offer anything other than a variant on the “model” of the one-party one-ideology state? Was Trotsky, for all his later criticisms of the Stalinist system, too wrapped in a set of near-identical assumptions about Capitalism and building Socialism, to offer a realistic different form of Communism? In sum, did he leave behind anything of value to the present world?

Service is in little doubt about the central responsibility Trotsky had in forming the Soviet regime.  To begin with, Trotsky’s life was marked out by a dictatorial personality-become-dictatorial politics. Living life on his own terms, the young Trotsky became father to the man; “intensely self-righteous” his ideology propelled him into enforcing a closed political system, his version of Marxism as a guide to creating a Communist society. The means? He rejected individual terrorism, only to support “mass terror realised by the revolutionary class” – which brooked no opposition to the “proletarian dictatorship” that would construct socialism. In this respect, “the Bolshevik regime was flawed from its inception”. Trotsky may have beguine as a supporter of workers’ liberation but “As soon as he had power, he eagerly suppressed popular aspirations by violence.” Next, Trotsky’s own inability to offer a convincing alternative, in democratic and economic terms, to Stalin’s version of a totalitarian state, was through-going. He had an inability to think outside of the Party, “the Party in the final analysis is always right because the party is the sole historical instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its fundamental tasks”. Such fundamental ‘partyism’ Service calls “the frame of communist authoritarianism”. Trotsky had differences over policies with Stalin (and he claimed that some of them, promoting socialisation and land collectivisation, were adopted, albeit in a ‘deformed’ way during the period of the first Five Year Plans). Nevertheless, Trotsky’s strategy, for a whole decade, was to capture that party. When this failed he wanted to build a new one. But Trotsky’s own version of ‘workers’ democracy’ resembled the Bolsheviks’ own proto-totalitarian machine – the forging of that “sole historical instrument for the proletariat.” Finally, the failure of Trotsky’s prophetic Marxism was complete. Instead of an inevitable revolt to restore workers’ power. When there was (in the Transitional Programme’s words) the “downfall of the Bonapartist clique and the Thermidorian bureaucracy” there was no socialist take-over to take over the bureaucracy and create a new ‘superstructure’ over the ‘socialist’ foundations of the economy. Capitalism was restarted in the Soviet Union, and its satellites. Collective property ended up in the hands of a new state protected bourgeoisie.

Much of the argument of Stalin’s Nemesis resembles the Bellman’s in The Hunting of the Snark (“What I tell you three times is true”). Trotsky was bad, bad and bad. But what remains? For all this constant battering on one-theme Service still raises important problems (from the nature of political Marxism to the development of capitalism). We have, Trotsky, the  brilliant, World Actor, which first brought him to prominence, but whose inability to relate to others, and to act as an ordinary politician (making allies, cutting deals)  isolated him, while his know-all imperiousness and indifference to others, helped doom what little chance he had of forming a new International during his exile. Thus, Trotsky “did not suffer fools gladly: indeed he did not suffer them at all.” One supposes that this is not an attribute that recommends itself to anyone on a dispassionate jury selecting Commissars with the power of life and death over others. Though it seems a good qualification for many positions, from entrepreneurs, CEOs, political spin-doctors and indeed British government figures, all with at least (in theory) more constraints than Trotsky had around him during his years in power. Is this in any case a fair character assessment, if not exactly psychometrics? Service is not alone is describing a Trotsky that always saw the wood, the human mass, and never the individual human tree. That, Trotsky was barely a Politician at all. He never even began to present a challenge to Stalin, during his Soviet years. Or that afterwards in the vainglorious attempt to form a Fourth International as an alternative to Stalinist Communism and the reformist (and ‘centrist’ left-wing) socialist and social democratic parties, Trotsky overreached himself. He was left with, when all seemed lost, as Patenaude states, only faith in a better future.

But this leads us further. To the ‘dictatorial-political’ strain in Trotsky’s ideology and person. That is, Trotsky’s ingrained support for repression. Service justly brings forward Terrorism and Communism (1920). This is a key text (my edition is published tellingly by Gerry Healy’s Workers’ Revolutionary Party). Trotsky polemicises against the German Second International Marxist Kautsky, who defended a conventional form of democratic socialist government based on free elections and civil liberties. In high Jacobin mode Trotsky argued that not only the needs of the hour called for the severest form of revolutionary dictatorship, but that ruthless repression of political enemies, and compulsion in all spheres of life, from labour armies, to swift punishment for any disobedience to Soviet Rule, were inevitable features of any transition to a socialist society. Service intercalates the reality behind such sentences. The Bolsheviks had indeed “Shot innocent hostages. They had stripped large social groups of their civil rights. They had glorified terrorist ideas and gloried in their application” That this is, if anything, an underestimation of Trotsky’s totalitarianism, can be seen from these oft-quoted words, “..The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. i.e., the most ruthless form of the state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.” (Terrorism and Communism. 1975)

 Nobody who supported these ideas, or even briefly entertained them, is much of an exmaple for the left. Even if the target, Kautsky’s conventional defence of progress through reform made little difference to the ruin and chaos of Europe in this period.

But how did Trotsky come to this view? This is not clearly explained. There is no serious reference to previous writings supporting such a comprehensive use of force over politics, and the prime motor of the economy, even if one can detect traces of it in earlier braggadocio and toying with the imagery of the French Revolution. For most of its existence, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was, for Marxists, in so far as it was used sparingly, hardly at all by Marx himself. It referred to a period when the working class imposes its rule as a class, not a party, and there is no doubt room for great ambiguity in the term. Hal Draper has argued that the phrase was taken over to gain, and transform, a large part of the contemporary radical left, that is those influenced and organised in the Blanquist tradition. This modelled itself on France in 1789 and truly wished for a sharp short period of outright forceful rule by a revolutionary minority to set the people free. By contrast Marx, he states, emphasised another side of ‘dictatorship in this sense (that is, in the 19^th century where the phrase was coined). For him it signified an emergency period of ‘rule’, turned into administration by the working class majority – that is, democracy, hence “nothing more and nothing less than ‘rule of the proletariat – the “conquest of political power, by the working class, the establishment of a workers’ state in the immediate post revolutionary period.” (The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin. 1987). Draper argued that the problem with Lenin, and equally with Trotsky, was that they were unable to see the workers’ state in these democratic terms. That Trotsky in the above work went “farthest in advocating the workers; democracy in state affairs”. As a result throughout Trotsky’s life, Draper observes, there was confusion, a separating between ”the concept ‘workers’ state (‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) from the question of working-class control from below (‘rule’).” (Hal Draper. Op cit.) Which leaves open the nature of what Draper calls the influence of the “environment”, the political atmosphere, that allowed/encouraged Trotsky to deform Marx. This fierce rhetoric, if it did not come from a close understanding of Marx, could not just be the product of the Russian left’s internal development.

It is history, not just Marxist classics, that supplies some of the answer. In the early Soviet Union Lenin’s initial programme of placing the workers in charge of all levels of the state – a plan to ensure its eventual ‘withering away’ as its functions were devolved to society – were overwhelmed by the needs of the Civil War. If, that is, it was ever seriously contemplated not much of it remained – from Taylorist One-Man Management in the factories, to state rule by decree. Soviet power, that is, the Bolsheviks; hold on the administration, had, Trotskyists still argue, to be defended at all costs. The Generals of the White Armies were open about their desire to crush their Bolshevik enemies. They smashed anything that stood in their way, they would have re-imposed autocratic rule over the corpses of the workers, the Jews, and the left. That in these conditions, “The question as to who will rule the country, i.e. the life or death of the bourgeoisie, will be decided on either side, not by references to the paragraphs of the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence.” (Terrorism and Communism) Can this be faulted? Some may say that a fight for life and death would be better pursued with a democratically mobilised country behind a left government and the Soviets. But then hindsight is not much of guide to historical explanation.

The issue here, though, is not only that Trotsky (according to his democratic critics) was wrong, preparing the way for a lamp that burnt right through the Russian people’s lives, but that “bloody Field Marshall” was also a personality which was moulded by long wars that had drenched the land on blood. That a soil which threw up so many similar types needs as much explaining as the individual, the theory, and the state machine that gave it free reign. That regardless of the contribution of the latter (which we will return to), the fields of slaughter in Europe and Russia were created not by Communist theory, or the Soviets, but by imperial clashes. That Trotsky’s militarism was largely their product not Marx’s, or even one strand within Russian Social Democracy (Trotsky’s own position in-between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks for much of his career would seem to make his views the result of many different influences) and that it is the height of a biographer’s vanity to imagine that he can judge the Man without looking deeply into the conditions in which he throve.

How is this? Service refers to Trotsky’s early championing of the terrifyingly brutal short stories of Isaac Babel. Trotsky showed his “eye for excellence” by picking them out. Lionel Trilling described The Red Cavalry based on the author’s experience of fighting with Cossack irregular troops in Poland, as about “violence of the most extreme kind”, “written in a kind of lyric joy” (Penguin 2007). In this it mirrors a substantial part of early 20^th century writing, early futurism, and given depth and realism in post Great War literature. A parellel is in the novels of the ultra-nationalist Freikörps supporter, Ernst Jünger, which was infected with descriptions of this “rush” of violence. In Britain we remember better anti-war memories, poetry and works such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But amongst accounts of the horrors of armed conflict, of the steady attrition of life, and daily deprivations of the trenches, and, naturally, of the Russian Civil War, we can see that not just characters in novels revelled in brutality, an ultra-modernist longing for a new world cleansed by violence, or a reactionary need to water the native earth with the blood of foreigners. A brutal cast of mind was widely spread in real life.

If Trotsky had his share of this, then it should be recognised that it was less his inner character that drove him than the forces of History he, after all, felt obliged to follow. Service’s ancient Greek drama, in which the path traced out by one’s inherent personal qualities is given, shows its limits here. The breakdown of ‘civilisation’ and its barbaric replacement profoundly shaped the politics and public personalities of the inter-war period. The resulting culture of ‘hardness’ contributed, as is more than well-known, to the ultimate cult of violence, the demarcation of Friend and Enemy on racial grounds in the Nazi State. Stalin had his own violent background, as a near-gangster, described in Montefoire’s Young Stalin (2007). This ingrained his predisposition to revenge any slight, and gave a taste for the liquidation of enemies. Trotsky, by contrast, had had time, when that régime’s nature became apparent, to show at least some self-reflection on the error of letting violence prevail over politics – a great deal of time during his Mexican exile. Is this the result? The Fourth International’s (FI) Transitional Programme (1938) calls for a state run by the people through Soviets in which “all political currents of the proletariat can struggle for leadership of the soviets on the basis of the widest democracy.” Without defining what are the workers’ political currents, and what are not, this is not enough of a self-criticism. But a far cry from hurling anathemas at all but One current. And, if he did not recognise this change, Trotsky never got the hang of recognising that kind of turn.

Another layer of Trotsky: A Biography lies in the lengthy history of the FI’s founder’s political struggle and his policies. It would be wearying to delve too deeply here. There is much material that may be found wanting. Trotskyists (such as Pierre Broué) have claimed that the Trotsky and the opposition did offer an alternative political structure (workers’ democracy inside the Party), and a programme for administrative reform toward a democratic socialist economy. The crucial issue though is organisational. Trotsky soon retreated from War Communism. Rule by force, and the militarisation of labour was never extended to his planned subordination of Trade Unions to production. Lenin’s death left him the lurch. By 1923 he began to regroup and react to the growing power of Stalin and the emerging bureaucratic monolith. In that year’s The New Course he began to identify a new bureaucratic stratum – a distinction with Lenin’s conception of lingering influence of Imperial office practice. Against this Trotsky agitated for the right of the party masses to engage in ideological debate. This was largely justified on the grounds that the direct expression of differing opinions – from the base – would help root out bureaucracy. With echoes of his much earlier critique of Leninism Trotsky asked,

“If factions are not wanted, there must not be any permanent groupings; if permanent groupings are not wanted, temporary grouping must be avoided; finally, in order that there be no temporary groupings, there must be no differences of opinion, for wherever there are two opinion, people inevitably group together.”

This was published; the gates barring all criticism had not closed yet. But it met strong resistance. Against this line of reasoning Stalin was able to make capital out of Trotsky’s acquiescence in the 10^th Bolshevik Party (R.C.P (B)) Conference’s secret decision to suppress all factionalising (1921). From there Stalin called Trotsky’s calls for vibrant inner-party discussion during the 13^th Conference (1924) “unrestrained agitation for democracy” an “absolute and a fetish” which “is unleashing petty-bourgeois elemental forces.” It was in vain that Trotsky protested that he was opposed to factions, that he believed that (as previously cited) “in the last analysis the Party is always right.” Stalin was in a position to go full throttle. Leninism, he asserted, was built as a “monolithic organisation, hewed from a single block, possessing a single will and in its work uniting all shades of thought into a single current of practical activities.” As Stalin gradually consolidated his power this version of Democratic Centralism won out, and the unitary Will found no place for Trotsky’s opinions.

Without exaggerating Trotsky’s chances – trapped, as he was, in a political web partly of his own making, which paralysed his freedom of action – this issue, of democracy, is the crucial one. Hal Draper grasped the nettle. Either Trotsky recognised freedom for factionalism inside a Communist organisation – which he was never to do – or he too would end up confronting the need to suppress “differences of opinion”. Nor can differences be confined inside a single party. Political history is the history of factionalising, from groupings, tendencies, cliques, fractions, factions, to sects. The Greek word, ‘stasis’, that is the attempt to upset the existing order, the urge to overthrow the powers that be, ‘sedition’, is the spring behind their existence. It is a universal political phenomenon (insofar as politics – disputing and agreeing – are human qualities), as much as production itself. Before the Russian Revolution Georges Sorel, who preferred anti-party syndicalism, was fond of referring to socialist parties that tended to smoother differences in bureaucratic oligarchies and engage in parliamentary office-seeking and jobbery. To some the turn of Bolshevism-in-power into Stalinism indicates an even worse fate. One major factor in party bureaucratisation (apart from the wider social hierarchy they often mirror) is a ban on factionalism – or (as in the more modern period) a gutting out of inner-party democracy to prevent differing currents’ voices having any effect on their policy. The Bolsheviks were long accused of tendencies in this direction (not least by Trotsky himself). This was false, though one should not idealise the freedom to criticise that existed in an atmosphere of heated clashes and the threat of expulsions inside Lenin’s party. Stalin, as we have seen, raised such a move to a point of principle. Trotsky attempted to halt the dynamic. That he did so only is a very half-heartened way, and completely endorsed the Communist monopoly of power, is clear. But from there to allege that Trotsky’s initial attempts to at least raise some degree of opposition to bureaucratic rule, at a terrible cost to his own political career, that he, in Service’s opinion had “laid several foundation stones for the erection of Stalin’s political, social and even cultural edifice” is presumptuous. It should not be forgotten that by 1923 he was doing his utmost to assemble the blocks in a very different way.

Trotsky, therefore, remains ambiguous. His later writings, displayed in the limpid prose of The History of the Russian Revolution (1932 – 3) the brilliant analysis of the degeneration of the Soviet Union in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), which analysed Soviet bureaucracy in terms of administering shortages, should not dazzle us into ignoring that they were flawed. Claims that the revolution had left a fundamentally healthy socialist form of property – hence economy were deeply problematic. Service is right to note Trotsky’s inability to see any plausible way that the October Revolution could be ‘righted’ to correspond to this enduring ground. Perhaps more significantly this perspective skewed his judgement, anxious for the socialist productive forces to expand, Trotsky considered their growth over-rode many other considerations. His enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, largely founded on this perspective, in the years before his assassination, right up to the invasion of Finland, and the Partition of Poland, shows serious errors of judgement. Perry Anderson has claimed that far from ‘de-generating’ the dynamic of Stalinism reached out further and produced a “generation” of new Stalinist states, not only through force of Russian arms, but in Asia, by indigenous revolutionary combat (Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalin. 1978). That this, against Anderson, was not a sign of a “transition beyond capitalism” can be seen in the present-day Chinese regime.

Was Trotsky a major Marxist theorist? He wrote and spoke in sweeping generalisations, with illustrations rather than conceptual analysis and thoroughly researched references peppering his paragraphs. In contrast to Lenin, his views were not presented through dense texts designed for an activist to chew over but by lyrical prose that aims to seduce a general audience. The histories move us, and the fate of the Russian Revolution is explained in a way that leaves its imprint, without necessarily satisfying our curiosity about those he disagreed with (all are given fairly short shrift), or taxing our minds too much. Amongst his theories the ‘law of combined development’ (called in Trotskyist circles “the Law of Combined and Uneven Development’), summaries some perhaps useful ideas. It is far from law-like – claims about the different rates of development across the world, and the potential for ‘leaps’ from forms of manufacturing to modern industrialisation, from autocratic regimes to democracies are heaped together with (Trotsky’s version of) socialism. This discovery’s presence is sometimes still glimpsed in academic leftist discourse about international development – uneven apparently, but ‘combined’ with global trends.

One has the impression that Trotsky wrote rather like some supercilious British leftist orator who imagines he has cleverly shown his enemies up as fools and knaves and expects the audience to nod in agreement. Is a fluent and appealing rendering of a speaking style everything? Lenin’s own production sharpens one’s critical senses despite often-wooden phraseology (one imagines the original Russian is not much different in that respect). But they compel because the founder of the Soviet State’s core works are very concrete analysis of specific political conjunctures – leading up to the 1918 Revolution, and the problems it faced afterwards. All that he produced was grounded on weighty studies about the development of capitalism in Russia, its politics and flashes of insight into the operations of the world system – imperialism. One who is opposed to the Bolsheviks’ Dictatorship of the Proletariat through a democratic centralist party, and any aspect of their policies, is always aware of these, rather than anyone else’s, (that is, Trotsky onwards) premises. When Lenin discussed philosophy in Materialism and Empirico-Criticism he went to the sources, even if he dosed his writing with heavy-handed polemic. This was no exception, when Lenin polemicised he read and grappled with his opponents’ arguments. His notes on Hegel demonstrate a remarkable effort under the hardest circumstances to think something new. Trotsky was different. Marxism was largely a settled matter for him. He replied to American critics of Dialectics by regurgitating the homilies of early Dia-Mat and showed few signs of grasping what the contrary opinion was about. As for conjunctural writings, Trotsky on Germany (the rise of Hitler) and France (during the Popular Front) never capture Lenin’s zest for detail. Their telegraphed message, that the workers’ parties should unite – against the merging Nazi threat – or to break from the mildly reformist and strongly respectable Parti Radical can be seen now, as rather thin. The latter – while in accord with rising French workers’ occupations, failed to anticipate that the fall of the Popular Front government (which relied on their co-operation) would not result in the rise of a powerful left party eager for Trotsky’s advice on how to form Committees of Action that would reflect the will of the “struggling masses”. Naturally the Popular Front collapsed – Trotsky was not there to help the left.

If these are well-known cases of Trotsky’s apparent foresight, even more contentious were efforts to roll out comment on a wider range of world political issues, from Britain to China. They stretch even the admirers’ capacity to defer to Trotsky’s authority. Trotsky’s role as Global sage became a major cause (or perhaps, symptom) of his failure to win converts from existing left-wing groups to the banner of the Fourth International. So, opining on Spain (not a country he was in any way really familiar with), Trotsky attacked one of the few independent European Marxist groups with any social weight, the POUM. His writings, which criticised the party for its willingness to engage in support for the Republican government, are a disgraceful farrago of wishful thinking and spite. It is not to their honour that Trotskyists today continue to try to snaffle some glory for having ‘defended’ the POUM, or lay claim to its desperate struggle – as Ken Loach attempted in the film, Land and Freedom. ** As for the predictions, sometimes Trotsky was acute (in foreseeing, like many others) a war between the USSR and Nazi Germany, other times, embarrassing, like his feeling that that the second World War would result in genuine Continent-wide workers’ revolutions. Régis Debray once described Trotsky as an expert on everything under the sun, and a few things more besides. This is fair comment.

It is sometimes said that Trotsky tried to ride the waves of history, buoyed up in an epoch of revolutions that had their own inner currents. Trotsky’s constant refrain that capitalism was in decline, that the world would soon see another crisis that would give birth to a new wave of radical Marxist-led revolutions, and that the miniscule Fourth international (the embodiment of historical truth) would play a major role in these uprisings, tend to confirm this. They are both quaint (his longing for the Sublime when we would all be geniuses) and misleadingly vague (the end of ‘power’). Yet there continues to be grandeur in his stand. If we can be harsh with our criticisms of him it is not to diminish the immense courage that he showed in raising the banner of opposition to Stalin. His ideas were not, by a long shot, completely misguided. He did fight, tooth and nail, against the burgeoning bureaucratic state – if on a basis which has its flaws, (but then what would not have been faultless given its origins inside the Communist Party?). He was hated enough by Stalin to be murdered. Patenaude notes that in 1961 Brezhnev gave his killer (released from gaol in 1960) the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal for, “heroism and bravery’ and ‘carrying out a special task’.

What of Trotsky’s legacy? Patenaude never musters the effort needed to go far into this question. He  contents himself with the solemn comment that the Marxist revolutionary died a “prisoner of the myth of October as a workers’ revolution.” Service at least tries to draw some balance-sheet. It does not ignore the most signification aspect – the destiny of his political following, as well as his place in the public imagination of the wider left. As he put it in Comrades, Trotsky was, around 1968, hauled onto the “pedestal of esteem” by students and young people. This has, he claims, faded. In Stalin’s Nemesis, he observes that Trotskyists have never been “much larger than groupuscles”, who “never came close to taking power anywhere”. That Trotsky was to become little more than a “comfort blanket for revolutionaries who did not mind that they were not making a revolution” These remarks may those who think the Russian Revolution’s myth is all that Trotsky’s politics represented, both as a legend himself, and the bearer of its mythology, he would seem for Patenaude and Service to have been tried, and, for all his better qualities, found severely wanting. It would be fruitless to protest that the real problems with Trotsky are political, and, apart from the assessment of his life and fatal decease, we should perhaps pay more than passing attention to what they indicate to present-day left political life.

What then of the Trotskyist movement? It is far more influential than Service credits – its impact continues throughout the left, notably in France, but also in Britain where Trotskyists had a hey-day in the 1970s Labour Party. More recently those with a Trotskyist background were elected to the Scottish Parliament (before descending into fractious dispute). Trotskyism has offered a political induction for countless individuals, including the former Prime Minister of France, Lionel Jospin, prominent Labour MPs, and even Ministers. In many counties Trotskyists is a significant presence in trade unions. Trotskyist groups have provided and still offer a range of different ideas on politics, a full galaxy of opinions on nearly every weighty issue. What then of their faults? Many of these can be traced back to Trotsky. Trotsky’s effort to build a new International involved him in constant attacks on all other independent anti-Stalinist groups – without exception. He could not have equal allies – the American SWP was tolerated for its ready obedience. When that dried up within sections of the New York party, his wrath was immense, showering his critics with abuse. The ability to tolerate contradiction was not the Dialectician’s forte. Like Trotsky many have not yet, despite the recognition of multi-party democracy by the Fourth International in 1977 not entirely agreed on the nature of democracy’s importance to socialism. This position is not universally accepted. Some from the Trotskyist tradition remain wedded to Trotsky’s hostility to factionalism, as the long list of expulsion and splits from the British Socialist Workers Party indicate all too clearly. Others are even more backward looking, basing themselves entirely on Trotsky’s words. But his or her judgements alone are unlikely to convince anyone who does not share this belief in a grace radiating from his life. Their time has passed, and we do not have to turn our backs every time we act to look at the works and deeds of Trotsky, Lenin or Stalin, to decide what we should do today. When we do – at some point we on the left have to have some guidance in the history that has shaped us – we will find matters of interest and reflection in writings such as Patenaude’s, the fruit of some honest toil in the archives – but precious little Enlightenment in any of Service’s words.

++++++++++++++++++++

** Victor Serge. Once More Kronstadt. 1938. In a full dossier of the affair, headed by Trotsky’s explanation. The Konstadt Rebellion in the Soviet Union 1921. Education for Socialists. 1973. The context was post-civil war worker unrest, notably in adjoining Petrograd (Petersburg), and demands for a lifting of the repression of civil rights. Trotsky claimed that the sailors demanded, “privileges”, that were out for privileged food rations, that the insurrection’s victory would “bring nothing but a victory of the counter-revolution” and that their ideas were “deeply reactionary”. They “reflected the hostility of the backward peasantry tot he worker, the conceit of the soldier of sailor in relation to the ‘civilian’ Petersburg, the hatred of the petty bourgeois for revolutionary discipline.” Later Alfred Rosmer, the French syndicalist, Communist and then left oppositionist, who was deeply involved with the early Soviet republic, offered a variant of this scarecrow of an argument. He cast aspersions on the political forces that flocked around the mutineers. Whatever the ‘tragic’ nature of the crushing of Kronstadt, the Communists afterwards took measures to assuage the causes of the defiance (rend of food requisition, dampening down peasant dissatisfaction, better bread rations and elements of small scale enterprise in urban areas). In any case, the uprising itself had rallied all the enemies of Bolshevism, “Que des éléments contre-révolutionnaires aient cherché à profiter de la situation, c’était normal; leur role était d’exciter les mécontentements, d’envenimer les griefs, de tirer vers eux le mouvement. D’où sortit le mot d’ordre des “ soviets sans bolchéviks ” ? il n’est pas aisé de le préciser, mais il était si commode pour rallier tout le monde, tous les adversaires du régime, en particulier les socialistes-révolutionnaires, les cadets, les menchéviks, empressés à prendre une revanche, qu’il est permis de supposer que ce sont eux qui en eurent l’idée, et la propagande qu’ils firent sur cette revendication pouvait toucher les marins et les soldats, la plupart jeunes recrues venant des campagnes, troublés déjà par les plaintes acrimonieuses que leur apportaient les lettres de leurs familles, irritées par la brutale réquisition.” Moscow sous Lénine. 1953. John Rees reiterates this, in a much more unsavory way, including repeating Trotsky’s charges that the mutiny was led by people who “not really” proletarians In Defence of October. International Socialism, 52. 1991. This reminds one of Stalinist claims about the workers’ uprising in Berlin 1953 that they were ‘not really; workers but US agents in disguise. The historical debate continues. But the main point is that the Bolsheviks were unwilling to allow any of these forces, from the left to the centre any political expression whatsoever. So “’c’était normal” that they flocked to support the Kronstadt revolt. As for the rebels themselves, most accounts state that their demands were for freedom of workers’ parties (Pages 113 – 114. Ian D.Thatcher. Trotsky. 2003). Even if the slogan about soviets without Bolsheviks were true, what was so wrong with wanting to get rid of one party from elected bodies – democracies do it all the time? The question was how could this be achieved democratically – a mechanism Lenin and Trotsky’s version of the dictatorship of the proletariat excluded at all costs.

** For the real (‘centrist’ not Trotskysist) campaign to help the POUM see, Marceau Pivert. L’affaire du P.O.U.M. (1938) SIA (organe hebdomadaire de Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste1).

Two Recent Books on Trotsky

¿QUÉ ES Y A DÓNDE VA LA UNIÓN SOVIÉTICA?

Este libro fue escrito cuando el poderío de la burocracia soviética parecía inquebrantable y su autoridad indiscutible. El peligro del fascismo alemán atraía naturalmente la simpatía de los medios democráticos de Europa y de América hacia los soviets. Generales ingleses, franceses y checoslovacos participaban en las maniobras del Ejército Rojo y cantaban loas a oficiales, soldados y técnica. Estas alabanzas eran perfectamente merecidas. El nombre de los generales Iakir y Uborevich, comandantes de las divisiones militares de Ucrania y de la Rusia Blanca, era citado con respeto en las páginas de la prensa mundial. En el mariscal Tujachevski se veía, con toda razón, al futuro generalísimo. En esos momentos, numerosos periodistas extranjeros de “Izquierda” y no solamente del tipo de Duranty, sino también algunos perfectamente conscientes, escribían extasiados sobre la nueva Constitución  soviética     como     “la    más     democrática     del    mundo”.

Si este libro hubiera visto la luz inmediatamente después de ser escrito, muchas de sus conclusiones hubieran parecido paradójicas o, lo que es peor, dictadas por una pasión personal. Pero algunos, “azares” de la suerte del autor hicieron que apareciera en diversos países con un retraso considerable. Mientras tanto se desarrolló la serie de procesos de Moscú que sacudieron al mundo entero. Toda la vieja guardia bolchevique fue sometida al exterminio físico, fusilados los organizadores del partido, los participantes en la Revolución de Octubre, los edificadores del Estado soviético, los dirigentes de la industria, los héroes de la guerra civil, los mejores generales del Ejército Rojo, entre ellos Tujachevski, Iakir y Uborevich, de los que hablamos antes. En cada una de las diversas repúblicas de la Unión Soviética, en cada provincia, en cada región, la depuración fue sangrienta, no menos feroz que en Moscú, aunque más anónima. La preparación de las elecciones “más democráticas del mundo” va acompañada de fusilamientos en masa que barren de la tierra a la generación de la revolución. En realidad nos encontramos en vísperas de uno de esos plebiscitos cuyo secreto conocen tan bien Hitler y Goebbels. Si Stalin tiene el 100% de los votos o “solamente” el 98′5%, no depende de la población, sino de las prescripciones dadas desde arriba a los agentes locales de la dictadura bonapartista. El futuro Reichstag de Moscú tendrá como misión, podemos predecirlo desde ahora, coronar el poder personal de Stalin bajo el nombre de presidente plenipotenciario, de jefe vitalicio, de cónsul inamovible o -¿quién sabe?- de emperador. En cualquier caso, los “amigos” extranjeros, demasiado celosos, que han cantado himnos a la “Constitución” estalinista, corren el peligro de caer en una difícil situación. Les manifestamos de antemano nuestra compasión.

El exterminio de la generación revolucionaria y la depuración implacable entre la juventud, atestigua la tensión terrible de las contradicciones entre la burocracia y el pueblo. En el presente libro hemos tratado de proporcionar un análisis social y político de esta contradicción antes de que apareciera tan violentamente a la luz pública. Las conclusiones que, hace más de un año, hubieran parecido paradójicas, se exhiben hoy ante los ojos de la humanidad en toda su trágica realidad.

Algunos de los “amigos” oficiales, cuyo celo es pagado en rublos de buena ley y en divisas de otros países, tuvieron la imprudencia de reprochar al autor que su libro ayudaba al fascismo. ¡Cómo si las represiones sangrientas y las bribonadas judiciales no hubieran sido conocidas sin eso! Identificar la Revolución de Octubre y los pueblos de la URSS con la casta dirigente, es traicionar los intereses de los trabajadores y ayudar a la reacción. El que realmente quiera servir la causa de la emancipación de la humanidad, debe tener el valor de mirar la verdad de frente, por amarga que ésta sea. Este libro no dice sobre la Unión Soviética más que la verdad. Está impregnado de un espíritu de hostilidad implacable hacia la nueva casta de opresores y de explotadores. Por eso, sirve a los verdaderos intereses de los trabajadores y a la causa del socialismo.

El autor cuenta firmemente con la simpatía de los lectores reflexivos y sinceros de los países latinoamericanos.

L. Trotsky
México, septiembre de 1937 (Prólogo a “La Revolución Traicionada“)

Recupero este texto con motivo de la polémica en torno a la entrevista a Willy Meyer.

Le truc sympa avec les communistes – j’y reviens, mais notre ami le juge de paix avait décrété la semaine internationale du communisme, alors j’en profite, on est vendredi – c’est qu’il est aussi insaisissable qu’un trou de serrure un soir de ripailles.

Il n’est jamais là où on pense le trouver. Echinez-vous à mettre en exergue ses errances multiples avec une panoplie d’historiens, on vous certifiera qu’il ne s’agissait pas de communisme.

Essayez alors de discuter cinq minutes avec un communiste (en général, pour faire tendance, ils se disent trotskystes, les héros communistes qui ont passé l’arme à gauche – après en avoir souvent bien usé – de façon violente ont en général meilleure presse).

Si vous n’en connaissez pas, dégotez-en un spécimen sur le forum en ligne de Libération, ce vénérable quotidien qui ne renonce pas à effrayer les annonceurs qui lui manquent en exposant le Q.I. de ses lecteurs.

Trollez un peu sur les démocraties populaires (ils appellent trolls les égarés qui osent émettre un doute sur leurs idées, en général des UMPistes (sic) amoureux du nain (re-sic) et dépourvus d’intelligence (re-re-sic).

Deux stratégies de défense, bien éprouvées, dont la contradiction leur échappe totalement (un homme de gauche, dont l’intelligence des dires est inhérente, n’a pas à s’attarder sur ce genre de détails, les nécessités de la guerre anti-impérialiste faisant loi).

La première, c’est que les démocraties populaires – ainsi que la holding stalinienne – n’étaient pas du vrai communisme. Bon, ça on l’a souligné précédemment. C’était une dictature, une trahison. Il s’en faudrait de peu que Staline, en fin de compte, soit de droite.

La seconde, c’est que tout compte fait, les gens n’étaient pas si malheureux, la preuve, certains sondages attestent qu’une bonne majorité regrette leur régime (tout comme un condamné sortant d’une longue peine doit regretter la prison un temps). En 1945, certains Allemands regrettaient peut-être également l’Allemagne conquérante et prospère, est-ce une raison pour réhabiliter le nazisme ?

Bref, le régime-pas-vraiment-communiste des démocraties populaires était une dictature (donc de droite), mais en même temps les gens le regrettent.

J’en perds mes restes de latin…

Mais tout n’est pas perdu. Il y a une lueur d’espoir qui dénote une étincelle d’intelligence dans leur cerveau collectivisé. Plus que tous les autres, ils reconnaissent enfin les vertus de la concurrence. Comptez le nombre de partis, de mouvements, de « choses » lancés par les uns et les autres ces dernières années.

Le communiste mécontent de la division de son camp en 25 mouvances claque la porte et en crée un 26e, qu’il affuble sans rire du nom d’unitaire.

Bon, soyons clairs, ils n’ont aucune chance d’arriver au pouvoir. Ni même de faire une ébauche de révolution (ah, celle de 1848, quand on commençait à avoir la main, c’était tout de même autre chose). Mais sinon, qu’est-ce qu’on rigolerait…

‘He had a remarkable passion  for croquet, perhaps partly because the character of the game – more than any other – gave special latitude to the expression of his natural cunning, imaginativeness and resourcefulness.  And it was here, as in every other place and in every matter where the opportunity arose to show his individuality that X was organically incapable of tolerating rivals alongside him;  and the winning of victory over him at croquet was the surest way of making him into your worst enemy’

David Barwell, an occasional player at Rye challenged us to name who was being described in the quotation above.  Guesses included Napoleon Bonaparte until it was revealed that the subject had a Mexican connection.  It turns out that it was Leon Trostsky.

The Competitive Croquet Player

It transpires that the description comes from the pen of  Grigori (Grisha) Zin, a medical doctor who got to know Trotsky in Nikolaev, Ukraine.  In his autobiography My Life published in 1930, Trotsky remarks; ‘In the country I played croquet and ninepins, led in forfeits, and was insolent to the girls.’

Trotsky’s love of croquet must be well known, a distinguished Professor of Classics at the University of New Mexico put up a sign naming his front garden (where he did, indeed, play croquet) ‘The Leon Trotsky Memorial Croquet Lawn’!

Vous ne me verrez pas souvent traiter d’art sur ce blogue (je l’avais pourtant fait ici), mais j’ai découvert une oeuvre fascinante d’un point de vue idéologique. Il s’agit d’une fresque murale de l’artiste Mexicain Diego Rivera peinte en 1933-34 et intitulée “Man, controller of the universe“.

La commande a été passée par Nelson Rockefeller, lui-même un amateur des fresques de Rivera qui sont reconnues mondialement, pour décorer le hall du RCA Building de New-York. Étant un communiste aguerri, Rivera a tenté d’utiliser son oeuvre pour passer un message à son client, mais lorsqu’un portrait de Lénine a commencé à émerger de la fresque, Rockefeller a payé l’artiste ($21,000) et a détruit l’oeuvre. Une énorme controverse s’en est suivie. Rivera scandait à la radio que si un millionnaire se payait la Chapelle Sixtine, cela ne lui donnait pas le droit de détruire l’oeuvre de Michelange qui s’y trouve, puisqu’elle appartient au patrimoine de l’humanité.

Peu de temps après, le gouvernement Mexicain a permi à Rivera de reproduire son oeuvre sur un mur du Palacio de Bellas Artes de Mexico City (voir image plus bas, cliquez dessus pour une meilleure résolution).

Tout d’abord, on aperçoit au centre le travailleur, le héro du marxisme, qui maîtrise la technologie et contrôle son univers grâce à la science. Sur le côté gauche, Rivera dresse un portrait négatif du capitalisme, qu’il oppose à une vision positive du communisme sur la droite (évidemment, du point de vue du travailleur, le capitalisme est à droite et le communisme à gauche!).

En haut à gauche, on aperçoit une armée terrifiante et intimidante, munie de masques à gaz et d’armes destructrices, alors qu’à droite, l’armée est au service du peuple.

Ensuite, on voit à gauche une statue faisant référence à Dieu et à la religion, jetant un regard menaçant sur le monde, laissant entendre que le capitalisme est pro-religieux. À droite, côté communiste, la statue n’a pas de tête (Rivera était d’ailleurs un athée). Est-ce que le capitalisme et la religion vont nécessairement ensemble? Est-ce que les communistes sont athées? C’est ridicule.

En bas à gauche, on aperçoit Darwin, en référence à la théorie du darwinisme social, souvent utilisée par les communistes pour critiquer le capitalisme. Comme si le capitalisme prônait la loi de la jungle, où le plus fort survit et le plus faible crève. C’est ridicule puisque le capitalisme ne sous-entend pas d’agression, mais bien la coopération libre entre les individus de la société pour améliorer leur sort. L’économie n’est pas un “jeu à somme nulle”. Tout le monde peut gagner en faisant des échanges. La compétition est là pour nous rappeler que les ressources sont limitées et pour nous forcer à bien évaluer nos préférences.

Devant Darwin, on peut voir une classe de jeunes de différentes nationalités qui se font endoctriner à l’idéologie capitaliste. En haut d’eux, on voit une manifestation à New-York où des policiers battent les manifestants à coups de matraques. Or, la répression a été beaucoup plus utilisée dans les sociétés communistes que dans les sociétés libres, tout comme l’endoctrinement et la désinformation.

En bas à droite, on peut voir l’interaction entre les travailleurs et les hommes politiques (Trotsky, Engels et Marx), pour laisser entendre que le communisme donnait le pouvoir aux travailleurs. C’est en fait le contraire qui prévaut: le communisme ne permet pas aux travailleurs de bénéficier à leur guise du fruit de leur labeur. Dans un régime communisme, les travailleurs sont les esclaves du régime. À côté d’eux, des femmes vêtue de blanc qui semblent émancipées (les femmes sont-elles plus “libérées” dans un régime communiste?).

À gauche de ces femmes, on voit la fameuse image de Lénine, qui tient la main d’un travailleur, d’un soldat et d’un esclave noir, entouré de gens du peuple. À l’opposé, au centre-gauche, on voit des “bourgeois” qui se la “coule douce” en buvant des cocktails, en fumant et en jouant au bridge, pendant que les travailleurs au chômage manifestent à l’extérieur, attaqués par la police. On peut y apercevoir un portrait de Rockefeller lui-même. Le peintre voulait aussi montrer la décadence du capitalisme et la lutte des classes qui y prévaut; comparativement au communisme où tout le monde est égal et uni.

En somme une vision tout à fait utopique du communisme et plutôt caricaturale à l’égard du capitalisme. Cette façon de voir les choses tenait peut-être bien la route en 1933, mais l’histoire a par la suite donné tort à cette idéologie. Le militarisme, la répression, le culte de l’élite du pouvoir, la corruption, l’endoctrinement et le non-respect des libertés se sont avérées davantage reliées au communisme qu’au capitalisme.

Ça me fait penser, je viens d’écouter la partie 1 des Grands Reportages (RDI) sur le mur de Berlin.

En juin 1953, les travailleurs de la constructions ont fait une grève pour protester contre les conditions de travail déplorables (des horaires exigeants, un rythme de production effreiné). Cela n’était évidemment pas permis par le régime communiste de la RDA.

Leur slogan était: “Nous ne sommes pas des esclaves!”

L’armée est intervenue et a tiré dans le tas, tuant quelques centaines de manifestants. Vive le capitalisme!

Note: Cette oeuvre fait partie des 80 trésors de l’humanité de Dan Cruickshank, une série de documentaires de la BBC qui est diffusé présentement au Canal Évasion.

A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky: A Biography
By David North
11 November 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/serv-n11.shtml

Trotsky: A Biography
Robert Service
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009

The Specter of Leon Trotsky

In 1955 James Burnham, the intellectual godfather of modern American neo-conservatism, reviewed The Prophet Armed, the first volume of Isaac Deutscher’s monumental biography of Leon [Lev Davidovich] Trotsky. Fifteen years had passed since Burnham had resigned from the Fourth International at the climax of a political struggle in which he had crossed polemical swords with Leon Trotsky. It had been a difficult experience for Burnham, who felt somewhat overmatched in this political and literary contest. “I must stop awhile in wonder,” Burnham had written in a document addressed to Trotsky, “at the technical perfection of the verbal structure you have created, the dynamic sweep of your rhetoric, the burning expression of your unconquerable devotion to the socialist ideal, the sudden, witty, flashing metaphors that sparkle through your pages.” (1)

In the aftermath of his repudiation of socialism, Burnham moved rapidly to the extreme right (as Trotsky had predicted). By the mid-1950s he viewed Trotsky’s life and work through the prism of his own ideological commitment to a global struggle against Marxism. Deutscher’s work filled Burnham with alarm. The problem was not literary in character. Burnham readily acknowledged the author’s masterful reconstruction of Trotsky’s revolutionary persona.

“Mr. Deutscher has cast his story of Trotsky in the Greek mould, and with sufficient justification,” Burnham wrote. “His Trotsky is a protagonist of the most dazzling brilliance, who rises in 1905, 1917 and in the Civil War to successive heights where he fuses with History and becomes her voice.” Burnham allowed that the author had succeeded in conveying to his readers Trotsky’s extraordinary qualities: “the flaming oratory, which many who heard him believe to have been the greatest of our century; the linguistic facility; the witty and vibrant prose; the quickness with which Trotsky mastered every new subject; the breadth of interest, so rare among the dedicated revolutionaries.”

Burnham noted that Deutscher’s portrait of Trotsky was not one-sided; that he “conscientiously displays, also, Trotsky’s weaknesses…” But despite the many literary virtues of the biography, Burnham denounced it as an “intellectual disaster.” Burnham’s reason for his condemnation was that “Mr. Deutscher writes from a point of view that accepts and legitimizes the Bolshevik revolution.” The biography was “organically warped” and unacceptable. “Not all the scholarly references from all the libraries are enough to wash out the Bolshevik stain.”

Burnham confessed his horror that Deutscher had received “all the courtesies of our leading research institutions, the aid of our foundations, the pages of our magazines, publication and promotion by the great Anglo-Saxon Oxford Press.” Did the establishment not recognize the danger in allowing, and even encouraging, the details of Trotsky’s heroic life and revolutionary ideas to reach the broader public, and especially the youth?

Burnham concluded his review with a cry of despair: “The minds of many of our university students and opinion-makers are being deeply formed, on the supremely important issues with which he [Deutscher] deals, by his ideas. It is surely one more among the many indications of the suicidal mania of the western world.” (2) The conclusion that implicitly flowed from this review was that Deutscher’s book and others like it, which portrayed the October Revolution and its leaders sympathetically, should not be published.

Burnham’s fears, at least from his political standpoint, were not without justification. He foresaw the subversive potential of Deutscher’s rehabilitation of Trotsky, whose historic role and political ideas had been buried for so many decades beneath the massive heap of Stalinist lies. In February 1956 Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party more or less admitted that Stalin was a mass murderer and vindicated the indictment issued 20 years earlier by the dictator’s implacable opponent. In the years that followed, the political stature of Leon Trotsky rapidly grew throughout the world.

Against the backdrop of growing working class militancy and the radicalization of youth, Deutscher’s biographical trilogy – The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast – introduced countless thousands of youth, intellectuals and workers to the deeds and ideas of Leon Trotsky. Organizations that claimed to base themselves on the political heritage of Trotsky grew significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. This was particularly the case in Britain. As early as 1964, the leadership of the Young Socialists, youth movement of the British Labour Party, passed into the hands of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, the activities of Trotskyist organizations were a major preoccupation of the principal British Intelligence agency, the MI5. (3)
A New Offensive Against Trotsky

This historical experience is worth recalling as one considers a peculiar literary phenomenon: the publication, within the space of little more than five years, of three biographies of Leon Trotsky by British historians. In 2003 Professor Ian Thatcher of Leicester University (and previously of Glasgow University) produced his Trotsky, which was published by Routledge. Three years later Longman published the Trotsky of Glasgow University’s Geoffrey Swain. And now, as 2009 draws to a close, the Trotsky: A Biography by Professor Robert Service of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, has been brought out with considerable fanfare. The British publisher is Macmillan. In the United States, Service’s book has been published by the Harvard University Press. What underlies this evident interest of British academics in Leon Trotsky, who has been dead for nearly 70 years?

This reviewer has in another place submitted the works of Thatcher and Swain to an exhaustive analysis, and proved that they are crass exercises in historical falsification, of absolutely no value to anyone interested in learning about the life and ideas of Leon Trotsky. As if heeding Burnham’s warning, Thatcher and Swain were determined not to provide Trotsky with a platform, and therefore took care to quote as little as possible from his writings. Both works set out to reverse the popular image of Trotsky that had emerged from Deutscher’s great trilogy. Thatcher and Swain belittled Deutscher for creating the “myth” of Trotsky as a great revolutionary, Marxist theoretician, military leader, political analyst, and opponent of the totalitarian bureaucracy. The Thatcher-Swain biographies set out to create a new anti-Trotsky narrative, utilizing slanders and fabrications of old Stalinist vintage in the interest of contemporary anti-communism. (4)

Now comes Robert Service’s contribution to the on-going efforts to demolish Leon Trotsky’s historical reputation. In its pre-publication promotional material, the Harvard University Press proclaims: “Although Trotsky’s followers clung to the stubborn view of him as a pure revolutionary and a powerful intellect hounded into exile by Stalin, the reality is very different. [Service’s] illuminating portrait of the man and his legacy sets the record straight.” Does it really?
Biography as Character Assassination

Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history, but, rather, an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favorite devices is to refer to “rumors” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumor’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.

Trotsky once declared, as he defended himself against the slanders of Stalin’s regime: “There is not a stain on my revolutionary honor.” Service, however, portrays Trotsky as an individual without any honor at all. He attempts to discredit Trotsky not only as a revolutionary politician, but also as a man. Service’s Trotsky is a heartless and vain individual who used associates for his own egotistical purposes, a faithless husband who callously abandoned his wife, and a father who was coldly indifferent to his children and even responsible for their deaths. “People did not have to wait long before discovering how vain and self-centered he was,” Service writes of Trotsky in a typical passage. [56]

Service’s biography is loaded with such petty insults. Trotsky was “volatile and untrustworthy.” “He was an arrogant individual” who “egocentrically assumed that his opinions, if expressed in vivid language, would win him victory.” “His self-absorption was extreme. As a husband he treated his first wife shabbily. He ignored the needs of his children especially when his political interests intervened.” [4]

Trotsky’s intellectual and political life was, Service would have his readers believe, as shabby as his personal life. Trotsky’s “lust for dictatorship and terror were barely disguised in the Civil War. He trampled on the civil rights of millions of people including the industrial workers.” As for his subsequent political defeat, Service dismisses, without counter-argument, Trotsky’s analysis of the growth of the Soviet bureaucracy and its usurpation of political power. Service simply asserts, as if he were stating the obvious, that Trotsky “lost to a man [Stalin] and a clique with a superior understanding of Soviet public life.” [4]

According to Service, Trotsky was nothing more than a second- or third-rate thinker. Trotsky, he writes, “made no claim to intellectual originality: he would have been ridiculed if he had tried.” [109] “Intellectually he flitted from topic to topic and felt no stimulus to systematize his thinking.” [110] Trotsky wrote quickly and superficially: “He simply loved to be seated at a desk, fountain pen in hand, scribbling out the latest opus. Nobody dared to disturb him when the flow of words was forming in his head.” [319] And what was the result of this “scribbling”? Service writes: “His thought was a confused and confusing ragbag.” [353] “He spent a lot of time in disputing, less of it in thinking. Style prevailed over content…This involved an ultimate lack of seriousness as an intellectual.” [356] This is Service’s verdict on the literary work of a man who must be counted among the greatest writers of the twentieth century. (5)

A biographer need not like or even respect his subject. No one would suggest that Ian Kershaw harbors the slightest sympathy for Adolf Hitler, to whose life he devoted two extraordinary volumes that were the product of many years of research. However, whether a biographer admires, despises or feels a cool and detached ambivalence toward the object of his scholarly attention, he must respect the factual record and strive to understand that person. The biographer has the responsibility to examine a life in the context of the conditions of the times in which his subject lived. But this is beyond Service’s intellectual capacities and the boundaries of his knowledge. Instead, in a manner both pointless and absurd, he assumes from the outset the standpoint of a disapproving career counselor. Trotsky, Service opines in the biography’s introduction, “could easily have achieved a great career as a journalist or essayist if politics had not become his preoccupation.” But Trotsky did choose a career in politics, and revolutionary politics at that, a decision that Service cannot abide or come to grips with.

Service describes his book as “the first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist.” [xxi] What is meant by “full-length”? Service’s biography is certainly long, plodding on for 501 pages. But in terms of content, it is no more than a super-sized version of the biographies produced by Thatcher and Swain. Like the earlier works, this is a biography without history. There is not a single historical event that is recounted with anything remotely approaching the necessary level of detail.

Service reduces the immense and complex drama of the revolutionary epoch in Russia to a series of vacuous tableaux, which serve only as the scenic background for Service’s ridicule of Trotsky’s alleged political, personal and moral failures. The coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, the eruption of the Spanish Civil War and the formation of the Popular Front in France are dealt with in a few desultory sentences. Even the Moscow Trials and the Terror merit little more than a page. Far more attention is given by Service to Trotsky’s brief intimacy with Frida Kahlo!
A Compendium of Errors

Moreover, the biography is full of factual errors that call attention to the author’s extremely limited comprehension of the historical material. In the course of a disoriented excursion into Trotsky’s pre-1917 views on the subject of revolutionary terror, Service writes that Trotsky “spoke out against ‘individual terror’ in 1909 when the Socialist-Revolutionaries murdered the police informer Evno Azev, who had penetrated their Central Committee.” [113] In fact, Azef (the correct transliteration from the Russian spelling) was not murdered in 1909. He was not murdered at all. Azef, who had organized terrorist acts, including assassinations, while working as an agent of the Okhrana inside the Socialist Revolutionary Party, survived his exposure and died of natural causes in 1918. Service fails to quote even a single sentence from Trotsky’s important article on the Azef affair.

Discussing the events of 1923 in Germany, Service asserts that the revolution failed after “Street fighting petered out” in Berlin. [31] In fact, there was no fighting in Berlin. The leadership of the Communist Party called off the uprising before fighting could begin in the capital. The only serious fighting in a major German city occurred in Hamburg.

In a passing reference to the Chinese Revolution, Service states that the Communist International sent instructions for an insurrection against Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang in April 1927. “It was just the excuse that Chiang needed to conduct a bloody suppression of communists in Shanghai and elsewhere.” [355] This is wrong. No such plan existed and no such instructions were sent. Service confuses the events in Shanghai in April 1927 with later developments in Canton.

In another passage, Service writes that in June 1928 Trotsky was working on his critique of the programme of the Comintern’s Fifth Congress. [371] Actually, the Fifth Congress was held in 1924. The critique to which Service is referring was addressed to the Sixth Congress.

Service even manages to get the year of the death of Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova, wrong. He states, “She died in 1960, deeply mourned by her network of Mexican, French and American friends.” [496] In fact, Sedova died in January 1962 at the age of 79. Several months before her death, in November 1961, as one would expect a biographer of Trotsky to know, Natalia Sedova had written to the Soviet government, demanding a review of the Moscow Trials and the rehabilitation of Trotsky. At the end of the book, in yet another gross blunder, Service misidentifies the wife and daughter of Trotsky’s youngest son, Sergei, as being the wife and daughter of the older son, Lev. [500-501] These errors got by not only the editors at Macmillan and the Harvard University Press, but also eluded the none-too-watchful eye of Professor Ian Thatcher, who, we are informed by Service, read the entire manuscript.

Following the same procedure as Thatcher and Swain, Service fails to engage himself with Trotsky’s writings. With the exception of Trotsky’s My Life, which Service attempts to discredit, there is no persuasive evidence that the biographer worked systematically through any of Trotsky’s published books and pamphlets prior to writing this biography. Aside from the writings of Ian Thatcher, whom he profusely praises, Service has paid little attention to existing scholarly literature on Trotsky. Service affects an attitude of contempt toward biographers, educated in the Marxist tradition, who have taken Trotsky’s literary output seriously. The late Pierre Broué, a highly respected historian and the author of a massively researched and authoritative biography of Trotsky, is dismissed as an “idolater.” Deutscher is mocked as one who “worshipped at Trotsky’s shrine.” [xxi]

There is reason to doubt that Service actually read the work of most of the other historians to whom he pays perfunctory tribute in his preface. For example, Service takes note of Professor Alexander Rabinowitch as a historian who subjected Trotsky to “skeptical scrutiny,” and lumps him together with James White of Glasgow University, who ridiculously denies that Trotsky played any significant role in the October 1917 seizure of power. [xxi] In fact, Professor Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks Come to Power substantiated Trotsky’s role as the principal tactician and practical leader of the Bolshevik victory.

Despite Service’s self-satisfied description of his biography as “full-length,” there are virtually no extracts from, or adequate summaries of, Trotsky’s major political works. Service does not even review the basic concepts and postulates of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, which formed the foundation of Trotsky’s political work over a period of 35 years. His voluminous writings on China, Germany, Spain, France and even Britain are barely mentioned.

On the few occasions when Service does refer to one of Trotsky’s books, what he has to say is usually wrong. In a thoroughly confused reference to Literature and Revolution, Service attributes to Trotsky the view that “It would take many years … before a ‘proletarian culture’ would be widely achieved.” [317] Trotsky, as anyone who has actually read Literature and Revolution knows, emphatically rejected the concept of “proletarian culture.” (6) But Service does not know this – either because he did not read the book or because he was not able to understand it.

By now the reader must be wondering how Service, without paying attention to Trotsky’s writings, manages to keep himself occupied for 501 pages. How is it possible to write a “full-length biography” of a man who was among the most prolific writers of the twentieth century without paying the necessary attention to his literary output?
Unearthing Trotsky’s “Buried Life”

As if anticipating this question, Service informs his readers at the very outset that his central concern is not with what Trotsky wrote or actually did. “This book’s purpose,” Service writes, “is to dig up the buried life.” He allows that “the evidence starts with the works – his books, articles and speeches – which he published in his lifetime.” But that is not sufficient. Even the study of all of Trotsky’s writings would “tell us about his big objectives without always elucidating his personal or factional purposes at any given moment. As an active politician he could not always afford to spell out what he was up to.” [4-5]

Service continues:

His written legacy should not be allowed to become the entire story. It is sometimes in the supposedly trivial residues rather than in the grand public statements that the perspective of his career is most effectively reconstructed: his lifestyle, income, housing, family relationships, mannerisms and everyday assumptions about the rest of humanity. … As with Lenin and Stalin, moreover, it is as important to pinpoint what Trotsky was silent about as what he chose to speak or write about. His unuttered basic assumptions were integral to the amalgam of his life. [Emphasis added, 5]

This statement is truly one with which Stalin, who was very careful not to tell other people what he really thought, could agree. It is entirely in line with the inquisitorial principle employed by Stalin in the organization of the Moscow trials. Evidence of crimes against the Soviet state was not to be found in the public statements, writings and deeds of the Old Bolshevik defendants. Rather, their terrorist conspiracies flowed from the “unuttered basic assumptions” that had been camouflaged beneath the public record.

And how does Professor Service intend to ferret out Trotsky’s “unuttered basic assumptions”? Service announces that Trotsky’s “buried life” can be uncovered by examining unpublished early drafts of his writings. “The excisions and amendments tell us what he did not want others to know. This is particularly true of his autobiography.” [5]

This statement forms the basis of Service’s major accusation against Trotsky: that his autobiography, My Life, which he wrote in 1930, is an unreliable and suspect work. Service complains that Trotsky’s “account of himself has been accepted uncritically by generations of readers. The reality was different, for whenever inconvenient facts obscured his desired image he removed or distorted them.” [11]
Trotsky’s Embarrassments

And precisely what did Trotsky conceal or falsify in My Life? There are two major discrepancies that Service claims to have discovered when he compared the first draft of Trotsky’s autobiography, which is deposited at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, with the published version. The first is Trotsky’s supposed efforts to conceal the extent of the wealth of his father, David Bronstein. The second, to which Service devotes obsessive attention, is Trotsky’s supposed attempts to downplay his Jewish origins. Service writes:

As a Marxist he was embarrassed about the wealth of his parents, and he never properly acknowledged their extraordinary qualities and achievements. What is more, the published account of his boyhood in his autobiography tended to drop those passages where he appeared timid or pampered; and without denying his Jewish origin he trimmed back references to it. By examining the drafts and proofs, we can catch glimpses of aspects of his upbringing that have long lain hidden. Thus he stated publicly only that his father was a prosperous, competent farmer. This hugely understated the reality. David Bronstein, married to Aneta, was among the most dynamic farmers for miles around in Kherson province. By hard work and determination he had dragged himself up the ladder of economic success and had every right to be proud of his achievement.” [12]

Before answering Service’s allegation that Trotsky downplayed his father’s wealth and sought to conceal his ethnic and religious background, let us first draw attention to the dubious character of the underlying claim: that the progression of drafts to their completed form is best understood as a process of concealment and falsification. Service asserts what he must first prove. To support his charge, he would have to show why Trotsky’s “excisions and amendments” should not be seen as the proper exercise of artistic discretion by a great master. There are many reasons, which have nothing to do with the intention to conceal, why Trotsky may have removed certain passages and added others.

Service fails to provide a single example in which Trotsky’s published account of his childhood differs in any material way from the earlier draft. At any rate, Service’s allegations are entirely without substance. That Trotsky “was embarrassed about the wealth of his parents” is a claim for which Service can cite no authority other than his own imagination. Trotsky’s account traced his father’s rising prosperity, though it must be pointed out that David Bronstein achieved significant wealth only well after Trotsky had left home. The Bronstein family did not move from the mud house in which Trotsky was born into a house built with bricks until the future revolutionary was almost 17 years old. But Trotsky provides in My Life a richly detailed and affectionate account of his father’s relentless struggle to rise in the world and to accumulate wealth. Writing of his own social position as a child, Trotsky stated: “As son of a prosperous landowner, I belonged to the privileged class rather than to the oppressed.” [My Life (New York: Dover, 2007), p. 87]

Max Eastman’s 1926 biographical account of Trotsky’s early life states that David Bronstein “got rich working and hiring the peasants to work with him. He controlled almost three thousand acres of land around the little Ukrainian village of Ianovka, owned the mill, and was altogether the important man of the place.” Eastman knew these facts because Trotsky related them to him. Eastman wrote, “Trotsky is proud of his father, proud of the fact that he died working and understanding. He loves to talk about him.” [The Young Trotsky (London: New Park, 1980), p. 3]

Service’s own account of the Bronstein family – whom he refers to as “plucky Jews” [14] – is based entirely on what was published in My Life and Eastman’s Young Trotsky. He has conducted no new and independent research that either adds to, or refutes, the information provided by Trotsky and Eastman. There is not a single detail in Service’s account of Trotsky’s early childhood that cannot be traced back to these two earlier works.

Even more astonishing, in light of his claims to have exposed the untrustworthiness of Trotsky’s autobiography, Service relies for his depiction of Trotsky’s youth almost entirely on the published version of My Life, not on the earlier draft. In the second chapter of his biography, entitled “Upbringing,” Service includes nine substantial extracts from Trotsky’s autobiographical writing. Eight of them are reproduced from the published version of My Life; only one is from the earlier draft. In not one instance is Service able to pinpoint an important discrepancy between the published work and the draft.

That does not mean that Service comes up entirely empty handed in his exploration of the draft version of My Life. For example, he discovers that a young school friend whom Trotsky identifies as Carlson in the published edition of the autobiography was identified as “Kreitser” in the draft. This discovery, proudly noted by Service in a footnote, must surely be counted as a major breakthrough in the field of Trotsky studies! If he had accomplished nothing else, Service has, with one mighty footnote, restored young Kreitser’s name to its proper place in history.

Trotsky’s Origins

Let us now turn to Service’s contention that Trotsky sought to downplay his Jewish ancestry. There is, to be blunt, something rather unpleasant and suspect about Service’s preoccupation with this matter. The fact that Trotsky was a Jew occupies a central place in Service’s biography. It is never far from Service’s mind. He is constantly reminding his readers of this fact, as if he were worried that it might slip from their attention. Indeed, given the emphasis placed on Trotsky’s ethnicity, this book might have very well been titled, Trotsky: The Biography of a Jew.

Before we explore this disturbing element of Service’s biography in greater detail, let us first respond to the allegation that Trotsky sought to conceal or deflect attention from his ancestry. This claim is as false as the biographer’s contention that Trotsky sought to downplay the wealth of his parents. As always, Service assumes that his audience will never bother to read Trotsky’s autobiography, in which Trotsky exhibits not the slightest reticence in discussing his ethnic and religious background. And how could he have possibly avoided the subject? The circumstances of his childhood were inextricably intertwined with his Jewish ancestry.

…In my father’s family there was no strict observation of religion. At first, appearances were kept up through sheer inertia: on holy days my parents journeyed to the synagogue in the colony; Mother abstained from sewing on Saturdays, at least within the sight of others. But all this ceremonial observance of religion lessened as years went on – as the children grew up and the prosperity of the family increased. Father did not believe in God from his youth, and in later years spoke openly about it in front of Mother and the children. Mother preferred to avoid the subject, but when the occasion required would raise her eyes in prayer. (7)

As for his own relation to his Jewish origins, Trotsky explained:

In my mental equipment, nationality never occupied an independent place, as it was felt but little in every-day life. It is true that after the laws of 1881, which restricted the rights of Jews in Russia, my father was unable to buy more land, as he was so anxious to do, but could only lease it under cover. This, however, scarcely affected my own position. As son of a prosperous landowner, I belonged to the privileged class rather than to the oppressed. The language in my family and household was Russian-Ukrainian. True enough, the number of Jewish boys allowed to join the school was limited to a fixed percentage on account of which I lost one year. (8)

Trotsky reflected on the relation of his Jewish background to his intellectual development:

This national inequality probably was one of the underlying causes of my dissatisfaction with the existing order, but it was lost among all the other phases of social injustice. It never played a leading part – not even a recognized one – in the list of my grievances. (9)
The Torah and the Rabbi

Service is quite clearly dissatisfied with this explanation, which he does not even bother to quote. He sets out to “correct” Trotsky’s account by attempting to make the subject’s life conform to the prejudices of the biographer. This effort proves unfortunate for the credibility of Mr. Service. In a key passage, which supposedly refutes My Life, Service writes that Trotsky

liked to give the impression that he was integrated into every common aspect of school activities. This was not so. St. Paul’s, like all Imperial schools, had to teach religion. Leiba Bronstein (10) entered it as a Jew and did not convert to Christianity. He had to continue his spiritual devotions under the guidance of a rabbi who taught the Jewish pupils, and David Bronstein paid for his services. The rabbi in question failed to make clear whether the Torah was superb literature or holy writ – and Leiba was later to conclude that he really was an agnostic of some kind. [37]

This account is attributed by Service to Max Eastman’s The Young Trotsky, which was published in 1926. But has Service been faithful to Eastman’s narration? Let us take a look at the original text. This is how Eastman tells this story:

It had been the ambition of his father’s – as combining cultural elevation with a certain conventional piety – to have a private tutor read the Bible with his son in the original Hebrew. Trotsky, being only eleven years old, was somewhat abashed before the bearded old scholar who undertook the task. And the scholar, being old and full of his duty, was hesitant about unveiling his own critical views to so young a boy. So it was not clear at first whether they were reading the Bible as history or as literature, or as the revealed word of God. (11)

There is a quite noticeable difference between the two accounts. Eastman’s “Bible” becomes, in Service’s account, the “Torah.” Eastman’s “bearded old scholar,” who reveals himself to be an agnostic, is transformed by Service into a “rabbi.” It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the text was, indeed, the Torah – though this word generally conveys a wider range of texts than that encompassed in the Pentateuch. But as Service has no additional information to offer, beyond what Eastman wrote, what is the purpose of this change in wording? There is even less justification for Service’s transformation of the old agnostic scholar into a rabbi. It should be stressed that this is not a translation issue. Service is referencing an English-language text.

It might be possible to dismiss this as nothing more than a careless exercise of authorial imagination but for the fact that Service’s continuous harping on Trotsky’s religious background is obsessive, obnoxious, and, in its cumulative impact, ugly. He employs the suspect device of noting anti-Semitic attitudes and then proceeding to reinforce them. The reader is offered such passages as the following on page 192:

Russian anti-Semites had picked out Jews as a race without patriotic commitment to Russia. By becoming the foreign minister for a government more interested in spreading world revolution than in defending the country’s interests Trotsky was conforming to a widespread stereotype of the ‘Jewish problem.’ … As things stood he had already become the most famous Jew on earth. America’s Red Cross leader in Russia, Colonel Raymond Robins, put this with characteristic pungency. Talking to Robert Bruce Lockhart, head of the British diplomatic mission in Moscow, he described Trotsky as ‘a four kind son of a bitch, but the greatest Jew since Christ.’ Trotsky, furthermore, was merely the most famous Jew in a Sovnarkom where Jews were present to a disproportionate degree. The same was true in the Bolshevik central party leadership. If Lenin were to have dispensed with the services of talented Jews, he could never have formed a cabinet. [Emphasis added]
Robert Service and the Jews

This passage is shortly followed by a chapter entitled “Trotsky and the Jews,” which begins: “Trotsky hated it when people emphasized his Jewish background.” [198] This emotion may have had something to do with the type of people who were inclined to do the emphasizing. There follow several pages of pointless and ridiculous observations. On page 201 the reader is helpfully informed that “Trotsky’s rejection of Judaism by no means meant that he shunned individual Jews.” After naming a few of the Jews with whom Trotsky was on good terms (all major figures in the Russian and European socialist movement), Service notes (also on page 201) that “Trotsky also had companions who were cosmopolitans without being Jews.” Trotsky, you see, “spoke a lot with August Bebel,” the founder-leader of the German Social Democratic Party. The biographer allows that “there was no trace of Judaism in Trotsky’s adult lifestyle,” although there were many “secularized Jews [who] continued to observe religious food prohibitions and celebrate traditional feast days.”

Service then proceeds to call his readers attention to the fact, in case they had not made the appropriate mental note, that Trotsky’s four children – Nina, Zina, Lev and Sergei – “were given names without association with Jewishness.”

More important information follows on page 202: Trotsky “was brash in his cleverness, outspoken in his opinions. No one could intimidate him. Trotsky had these characteristics to a higher degree than most other Jews emancipated from the traditions of their religious community and the restrictions of the Imperial order. He was manifestly an individual of exceptional talent. But he was far from being the only Jew who visibly enjoyed the opportunities for public self-advancement. In later years, they were to constitute a model for Jewish youth to follow in the world communist movement when, like communists of all nationalities, they spoke loudly and wrote sharply regardless of other people’s sensitivities. Trotsky can hardly be diagnosed as having suffered from the supposed syndrome of the self-hating Jew. Hatred did not come into the matter. He was too delighted with himself and his life to be troubled by embarrassments about his ancestry.” [Emphasis added]

Having suggested that Trotsky’s revolutionary career was an example of Jews taking advantage of opportunities for “public self-advancement,” Service develops this idea in the next paragraph:

“Trotsky was one of those tens of thousands of educated Jews in the Russian Empire who at last could assert themselves in situations where their parents had needed to bow and scrape before Gentile officialdom.” Many Jews, Service notes thoughtfully, sought advancement in respectable professions. But “the second route was to join the revolutionary parties where Jews constituted a disproportionate element.” This is a theory of well-known anti-Semitic parentage: revolution as a form of aggressively ambitious Jewish revenge against a society dominated by Christians. But Service has still more to say on this subject. He declares:

“Young Jewish men and women, trained in the rigors of the Torah, found a congenial secular orthodoxy in Marxist intricacies. Hair-splitting disputes were common to Marxism and Judaism (as they were to Protestantism).” It is now possible to explain Service’s previous twisting of the Eastman citation. Trotsky, according to Service’s distorted account, had also been trained in the “rigors of the Torah.” From there, the reader is led to believe, it was only for the career-minded Bronstein a hop, skip and jump to Das Kapital, the Theory of Permanent Revolution, and a corner suite in the Kremlin.

Service, on page 205, writes that: “The party’s leadership was widely identified as a Jewish gang.” No source is given for this statement. He adds, a few sentences down, “Jews indeed were widely alleged to dominate the Bolshevik party.” Again, there is no source provided for this allegation. These allegations are not challenged, let alone refuted. On the next page, 206, Service reproduces a paragraph from an “anonymous letter to Soviet authorities” which is a wild anti-Semitic denunciation of “full-blooded Jews who have given themselves Russian surnames to trick the Russian people.”

In another bizarre passage, dealing with the famous negotiations conducted by Trotsky with representatives of Germany and Austria-Hungary at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Service writes: “As the Germans and Austrians strode to the table for talks they expected to be treated with deference. They acted as if victory was already theirs. They shared the prejudices of their social class. For them, socialists of any kind were hardly human. Russian communists, who included so many Jews in their leadership, were little better than vermin.” [197]

Service fails to provide a source for this assessment of the attitudes of the German delegates. In his autobiography, Trotsky wrote: “At Brest-Litovsk, the first Soviet delegation, headed by Joffe, was treated in a most ingratiating way by the Germans. Prince Leopold of Bavaria received them as his ‘guests.’ All the delegations had dinner and supper together.” Trotsky noted with bemusement that “General Hoffmann’s staff was publishing a paper called Russky Vyestnik (The Russian Messenger) for the benefit of the Russian prisoners; in its early phases it always spoke of the Bolsheviks with the most touching sympathy.” (12)

Naturally, this initial friendliness was politically motivated and did not last long. The deadly seriousness of the issues that confronted the opposing parties at Brest-Litovsk inevitably found expression in the increasingly tense and confrontational atmosphere. This process is depicted brilliantly by Trotsky in My Life. His characterizations of his chief adversaries, Kühlmann, Hoffmann and Czernin, are true to life. They are political reactionaries, representatives of the aristocratic elite, but not monsters. Their attitude toward the Bolsheviks is a complex mixture of curiosity, bewilderment, fear, hatred and respect. In Trotsky’s account, there is no suggestion that he was dealing with men who viewed the Bolsheviks, with or without Jews, as “vermin.” That thought belongs to Service, not to the leaders of the German and Austrian delegates at Brest-Litovsk.

For all Service’s preoccupation with Trotsky’s religion, his book is remarkably uninformed by any of the very serious and outstanding scholarship on the question of Jewish life and culture in Odessa and Imperial Russia. The important works of Steven J. Zipperstein of Stanford University are not included in Service’s bibliography. There is nothing more than a fleeting reference to the bloody anti-Semitic pogroms that killed thousands. Service does not even mention the infamous case of Mendel Beilis, the Jewish worker who was arrested in 1911 for the ritual murder of a Christian youth – a case that provoked international outrage against the tsarist regime. Had he bothered to do so, Service might have taken note of Trotsky’s important and influential essay on this case.

This reviewer wishes to register his disgust with Service’s inclusion among the biography’s illustrations, for no obvious reason, of a Nazi caricature of “Leiba Trotzky-Braunstein.” The caption provided by Service states: “In reality, his real nose was neither long nor bent and he never allowed his goatee to become straggly or his hair ill-kempt.” Did Service intend this as a joke? If so, it is in very bad taste.

What, then, should be made of Service’s obsessive fixation with Trotsky’s Jewish background? The use of anti-Semitism as a political weapon against Trotsky is so well known that it is impossible to believe that Service’s incessant invocation of his subject’s Jewish roots is innocent. Whatever Mr. Service’s personal attitude to what he refers to as “the Jewish problem,” he is all too obviously making an appeal precisely to anti-Semites for whom Trotsky’s Jewish background is a major concern. It is fairly certain that the Russian-language edition of this biography will find favor within this reactionary constituency. One cannot help but suspect that Professor Service has taken this into consideration.
Service’s Sources

A substantial portion of Service’s book is devoted to the blackguarding of Trotsky’s personality. He extends his efforts to discredit Trotsky as a revolutionary politician to every aspect of his personal life. Service seems to believe that the Theory of Permanent Revolution will be less persuasive if Trotsky can be shown to have been an unpleasant individual. And so, Service’s portrait of Trotsky never rises above the level of a vulgar caricature. His subject is always impossibly vain, insensitive, domineering and egotistical. Service is intent to show that these traits were already painfully apparent when Trotsky was still a teenager. He relies entirely on the testimony of a single individual, Gregory A. Ziv, who first met Trotsky in the late 1890s during the first stages of his revolutionary activities. Much later, in 1921, after he had emigrated to the United States, Ziv wrote a bitter memoir which was extremely hostile to the former friend and comrade who had, in the meantime, become the world famous leader of the Russian Revolution.

No one would deny that Ziv’s memoir is a document that any serious historian would consult in the preparation of a biography of Trotsky. After all, Ziv knew Trotsky at a critical juncture in the life of the emerging revolutionary. But a historian is obligated to approach documents and sources critically, to carefully consider the degree of trust that can be invested in the information they provide. A highly critical approach is certainly warranted in the case of Ziv. There are many reasons to doubt the objectivity and reliability of his evaluation of Trotsky’s personality. First and foremost, Ziv, after he arrived in the United States, became extremely hostile to Trotsky’s stand on the imperialist war. Ziv was a supporter of Russia’s participation in the “war for democracy.” This information is not given to the reader by Service. But Max Eastman, who was familiar with Ziv’s memoir, offered the following background information:

When Trotsky came to New York [in January 1917] during [the] war – anti-patriot, anti-war, revolutionist – he met Doctor Ziv, who he knew had been publishing a little pro-war paper there in the Russian language. He met him most cordially; and wishing to remember the friendly emotions of these earlier days, he invited him to his house. They talked long and drifted back to the mood of their recollections. But Trotsky, knowing that Ziv could teach him nothing and that he could convince Ziv of nothing, refrained from opening the political question. It was characteristically courteous, and a very friendly, exercise of judgment. But to the doctor’s editorial vanity it seemed to have been an unendurable offense, the manifestation of a self-seeking intellectual arrogance which he suddenly discovered had characterized his friend’s activities from the cradle. Hence this little volume of weak and ludicrous personal spite. (13)

Prosecutors are legally obligated to make exculpatory evidence available to the defense. Following this general principle, a biographer should not conceal from his readers information that calls into question the credibility of the witness whose testimony he is citing. But Service is indifferent to such principled considerations. While insisting that Trotsky’s memoirs must be subjected to the most skeptical scrutiny, Service shows absolutely no inclination to question anything written by Ziv in his memoir. And so he quotes Ziv’s statement that Trotsky “loved his friends and he loved them sincerely; but his love was of the kind that a peasant has for his horse, which assists in the confirmation of his peasant individuality.” [46] This observation makes so deep an impression on Service that he repeats it: “Lëva looked on his revolutionary comrades as the peasant regarded his horse…” [46] What intelligent reader would believe such nonsense?
Enter Schopenhauer

Another claim by Ziv that Service seizes upon concerns the influence of a pamphlet by Artur Schopenhauer, the 19th century German idealist philosopher, upon the young Trotsky. Service does not actually provide an extract from this passage, but presents only a summary. For the purpose of clarifying this issue, which sheds light on Service’s method, this reviewer has consulted Ziv’s original text.

In his memoir Ziv devotes slightly more than one paragraph to this question. He notes that Schopenhauer’s pamphlet “somehow fell into his [Trotsky’s] hands,” and then offers a brief summary of the philosopher’s argument. The purpose of the pamphlet is to teach “how to vanquish one’s opponent in debate, regardless of whether one was actually correct or not.” The pamphlet, according to Ziv, “does not teach rules which must be followed in conducting a debate, but rather exposes devices – more or less crude, or more or less subtle – to which debaters resort in order to be victorious in a debate.” Then, in a somewhat surprising admission, Ziv indicates that he does not have any precise information on the impact of the pamphlet on his friend. He writes: “One can imagine how Bronstein was overjoyed by this small pamphlet that by no means was less valuable for its small size.” Yes, many things can be imagined, but that does not make them true. Ziv’s wording suggests that he did not have any direct evidence that the work made a great impression on Trotsky. He did not write, for example, “Bronstein told me that he was overjoyed by this pamphlet…” If Mr. Ziv was giving sworn testimony, as a witness for the prosecution, the defense attorney would question him carefully on this point. Indeed, after noting that Ziv acknowledges that he does not even know how Trotsky obtained the pamphlet, he would probably ask: “Mr. Ziv, do you really know for sure that Trotsky ever read the Art of Controversy? Did you ever actually witness him reading the book?” As a matter of fact, based on what Ziv wrote, we cannot know for sure whether Trotsky did read The Art of Controversy. But the answer to this question is, for the purpose of evaluating this biography, less important than Service’s failure to question Ziv’s claims.

Quite the opposite. Service goes far beyond the claims of Ziv. He writes, “Lëva prepared himself as if for a military campaign. He scrutinized Schopenhauer’s The Art of Controversy with the purpose of improving his debating skills.” [45] In fact, as we have shown, Service does not have the evidence to support this claim.

Why is this matter important? Service implies that Schopenhauer’s arguments provide a key to understanding the development of not only Trotsky’s polemical style, but also his allegedly aggressive and domineering personality. Roaming far from Ziv’s actual text and offering his own bowdlerized interpretation of Schopenhauer, Service misrepresents the philosopher as an advocate of an array of unscrupulous debating ploys and tricks. “Victory, crushing victory,” declaims Service, “was the only worthwhile objective.” The philosopher, according to Service, “went on to declare that the ideas of ‘ordinary people’ counted for nothing.” [45]

Service finally declares: “Schopenhauer did not belong to the regular armature of Russian revolutionary thought, and Lëva Bronstein did not openly acknowledge his influence on his techniques of argument. Yet he probably found much that he needed for his politics and personality in The Art of Controversy.” [45, Emphasis added]

So, in the end, what are we really left with? Service’s claim that Trotsky discovered in Schopenhauer a philosophical justification for his alleged contempt for humanity and poisonous polemics is based on assumptions, suppositions and guesses unsupported by facts.

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that Trotsky read – nay, studied with great care – Schopenhauer’s Art of Controversy, that does not tell us whether he agreed or disagreed with it; what he accepted and what he rejected. Trotsky read many things as a youth, including, as he tells us in My Life, the writings of John Stuart Mill. Yet no one would accuse Trotsky of being an admirer of British empiricism and liberalism. Finally, Service seems to assume that Trotsky’s alleged study of The Art of Controversy could only have had malign consequences. In the opinion of this reviewer, it is more likely that Trotsky, if he had read The Art of Controversy, might have found in this pamphlet material that proved later to be of assistance in exposing the calumnies, distortions, half-truths and lies of his many unscrupulous enemies. Indeed, one suspects that Stalinism taught Trotsky far more than Schopenhauer on the subject of dishonest polemics.
Trotsky and Sokolovskaya

The relentless efforts to malign Trotsky backfire, and cast Service himself in a very unflattering light. He appears to be organically incapable of feeling any sympathy whatever for the many emotional injuries and traumas endured by his subject in the course of a life dedicated – or, to use the words of his first love and wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, consecrated – to the revolutionary cause. Even when dealing with the plight of the 19-year-old Lev Davidovich, imprisoned and in solitary confinement, Service’s attitude is contemptuous and sneering. For example, he quotes from a deeply moving letter that Trotsky wrote to Sokolovskaya in November 1898. The young man is consumed by loneliness and suffers from insomnia. He confesses that he has contemplated suicide, but then reassures Alexandra that he is “extraordinarily tied to life.” And what is the response of Robert Service? He writes: “There was showiness and immaturity in these sentiments. He was a self-centered young man.” [52]

Eventually Trotsky and Sokolovskaya marry and are sent into Siberian exile. They have two children. Trotsky’s reputation as a brilliant young writer brings him to the attention of the major leaders of Russian socialism. Anxious to expand the scope of his activity in the revolutionary movement, the young man resolves to escape from Siberian exile. In his autobiography, Trotsky writes that Sokolovskaya encouraged him in this decision.

But Service, without presenting any evidence that contradicts Trotsky’s narrative, declares: “This is hard to take at face value. Bronstein was planning to abandon her in the wilds of Siberia. She had no one to look after her, and she had to care for two tiny babies on her own with winter coming on.” Service brings his diatribe to a climax with an utterly vulgar comment: “No sooner had he fathered a couple of children than he decided to run off. Few revolutionaries had left such a mess behind them.” [67] Service, contradicting himself, concedes that Trotsky “was acting within the revolutionary code of behavior.” [67] But he then asserts, “Even if Alexandra really did give her consent, Lev showed little appreciation of the sacrifice he had asked of her. ‘Life,’ he said as if it were a simple matter of fact, ‘separated us.’ In reality, he had chosen to separate himself from his marital and parental responsibilities.” [67]

Aside from the libelous character of this allegation, contradicted by everything that is known about the realities of revolutionary struggle, it is hard to imagine a more anachronistic approach to the writing of history. Service presumes to judge the behavior of revolutionaries in late 19th century Russia, who were engaged in a struggle to the death against the tsarist autocracy, with the hypocritical standards of a wealthy, conservative and self-satisfied upper-middle class philistine in modern-day Britain.

Let us, by the way, note that Service cuts off Trotsky’s sentence before its conclusion. “Life separated us,” Trotsky wrote, “but nothing could destroy our friendship and our intellectual kinship.” (14)

The enduring character of the profound friendship and mutual solidarity of Trotsky and Sokolovskaya was confirmed by the latter in discussions with Eastman in the 1920s. Alexandra never betrayed that friendship, for which she ultimately paid with her life. Stalin murdered her in 1938. Service makes this cold and contemptuous comment on her tragic fate: “Her troubles started with a short-lived marriage contracted to keep her and Trotsky together in Siberia – and it was in Siberia that she finally expired.” [431]

Service’s treatment of the tragic fate of Trotsky’s daughter Zina, who committed suicide in Berlin in January 1933, is callous and malicious. He writes, “Trotsky coped with the tragedy by blaming everything on Stalin and his treatment of her.” He continues:

This accusation, frequently repeated in accounts of Trotsky, was ill aimed. Zina had spent all the time she had wanted in Sukhum; it had been Trotsky who summoned her abroad and not Stalin who had deported her – and it had been Trotsky with whom she wanted to live. Trotsky’s attempt to politicize the death was not his finest moment. [386]

Service chooses not to quote from the letter Trotsky wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on January 11, 1933, less than a week after his daughter’s suicide. He does not inform his readers that Zina was unable to return to Russia, where her husband, daughter and mother still lived, because the Stalinist regime had revoked her Soviet citizenship. As Trotsky wrote, “Depriving her of her citizenship was only a wretched and stupid act of vengeance against me.” (15)

Determined to discredit Trotsky in any way possible, Service absolves the Stalinist regime of any responsibility for the death of his daughter. And this is despite the fact, as Service knows full well, that Stalin would, within just a few years, murder Trotsky’s first wife, his sons, his brothers and his sister, and even his in-laws.
A Shameful Episode

Despite the considerable length of this review, it has left much unsaid. A comprehensive refutation of all of Service’s distortions and misrepresentations would easily assume the size of a substantial book. This reviewer will leave for another time the exposure of Service’s political falsifications as well as his persistent defense of Stalin against Trotsky. In this regard, another important issue that remains to be explored is the significance of the Trotsky biographies of Thatcher, Swain and Service as manifestations of the confluence of neo-Stalinist falsification and traditional Anglo-American anti-Communism. Indeed, a striking feature of the on-going campaign against Trotsky is the degree to which it draws upon the lies and frame-ups of the Stalinists.

There is one final issue that needs to be raised, and that is the role of Harvard University Press in publishing this biography. One can only wonder why it has allowed itself to be associated with such a deplorable and degraded work. It is difficult to believe that Service’s manuscript was subjected to any sort of serious editorial review. There are still, or so one would like to believe, professors in Harvard’s Department of History who can distinguish serious scholarship from trash.

There was a time when Harvard was justly proud of its role as archivist of the closed section of Trotsky’s papers, which it guarded under lock and key – in accordance with the instructions of Trotsky and Natalia Sedova – for nearly 40 years. The Houghton Library considered these papers to be among its historically significant collections. In 1958, Harvard, on its own initiative, published the diary that Trotsky kept in 1935. The publisher’s foreword noted respectfully that Trotsky “is to many today one of the heroes of our time.” A half-century later, it provides its imprimatur for a slanderous and slovenly work. Is Harvard today, in a period of political reaction and intellectual decay, atoning for its earlier displays of principles and scholarly integrity? Whatever the reason, Harvard University Press has brought shame upon itself. One suspects that at some point in the future, with the recovery of morale and courage, it will look back upon this episode with great regret.

Notes:

1. “Science and Style,” in In Defense of Marxism (London: New Park, 1971), p. 233. [return]

2. Russian Review, Volume 14, No. 2 (April 1955), pp. 151-152. [return]

3. See Defend The Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, by Christopher Andrew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), and Spycatcher by Peter Wright (New York: Penguin, 1987). [return]

4. See Leon Trotsky and the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification, by David North (Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2007) [return]

5. It should be noted that Service hews closely to the line developed previously by Geoffrey Swain, who complained that Trotsky has been viewed as “a far greater thinker than he was in reality. Trotsky wrote an enormous amount and, as a journalist, he was always happy to write on subjects about which he knew very little.” [3] It must be also be noted that Service, in his 2004 biography of Stalin, dealt far more respectfully with the Soviet dictator and mass murderer. “Stalin was a thoughtful man,” Service wrote, “and throughout his life tried to make sense of the universe as he found it. He had studied a lot and forgotten little. … He was not an original thinker nor an outstanding writer. Yet he was an intellectual to the end of his days.” See Fred Williams’ review of Service’s Stalin in the World Socialist Web Site [http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/stal-j02.shtml]. [return]

6. In opposition to the proponents of “Proletcult” in the early 1920s, Trotsky argued that the proletariat, as an oppressed class, cannot create its own culture. The culture of the future, which will emerge on the basis of a far higher development of the productive forces, when there is no need for a class dictatorship, “will not have a class character. This seems to lead to the conclusion that there is no proletarian culture and that there never will be any and in fact there is no reason to regret this. The proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture and to make way for human culture. We frequently seem to forget this.” [Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005, p. 155] [return]

7. My Life, p. 84.

8. Ibid, pp. 86-87.

9. Ibid, p. 87.

10. Leiba was the name given to Trotsky at birth, and this is how Service refers to him in the book’s early chapters.

11. The Young Trotsky, pp. 12-13.

12. My Life, p. 363.

13. The Young Trotsky, p. 21.

14. My Life, p. 133.

15. Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932-33 [New York: Pathfinder, 1972], p. 80.

The decision [to kill the imperial family] was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this punishment showed everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom This Lenin sensed well.

Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935

Trotsky was later killed himself at Stalin’s behest. Trotsky has been painted as a martyr by Trotskyites pedalling the myth that the Russian Revolution was ‘betrayed’. The fact is, Trotsky himself fell victim to the brutal logic unleashed in the ‘Revolution’ that brooked no opposition and was accountable to no standards beyond its own success at whatever cost. Trotsky’s murder was as much a useful tool to ’shake up our own ranks’ as the Tsar’s – it’s just that he wasn’t in the ‘in crowd’ any more. Stalin ’stopped at nothing’ to use Trotsky’s words.

“I swallowed books, fearful that my entire life would not be long enough to prepare me for action.” – Leon Trotsky

A true militant if ever there was one. We must clearly distinguish between Trotsky and Trotskyism today, much as Marx distanced himself from the pseudo-Marxists of his time. Trotsky himself was a proper revolutionary, a militant metapolitician – whereas today Trotskyism has lost its theoretical side, hindering a dialectical praxis itself. Debord puts this in a different respect (and in a critique of anarchism) that one “abandons the historical terrain by assuming that the appropriate forms for this transition [of ideas] to practice have already been discovered and will never change.” It is not the case that what Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky developed in their thoughts of the overcoming of Capital are no longer relevant or applicable today, but that we must reaffirm what has maintained itself and what has not; what has changed form and what has been negated.

We must reverse an old idiom and instead kill one bird with two stones. Trotsky knew this deeply, and for that we must all be Trotskyists.

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Unfortunately, there are some real morons getting a voice today. The New York Times is giving voice to an out-and-out totalitarian. It bums me out that Žižek’s status, like Noam Chomsky’s, is that of an admired and respected intellectual and not an obviously evil sociopath.

Still, there’s a lot of great, compassionate, sensible commemoration out today as well. Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has some great posts, about why the neglecting communist crimes matters, comments on Paul Hollander’s article, and setting the record straight that yes, Trotsky was really evil.

reason.tv has a video on a powerful new exhibit, and a montage from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

There’s much more, so I’ll just pass along Mike Gibson’s roundup.

Never forget.

Dear respected diary,

Today, I complete to-do list: take Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s shoes to cobbler for repair. Oh, also I make glorious people’s revolution. It was good day.

What did you do? That’s right. Nothing. You have no compassion for repressed peoples of world. Sometimes I think you are bourgeois spy. Will tell Dzerzhinsky tomorrow to keep eye on you.

Now, I have guys night out with Trotsky and Kalinin. Maybe we make karaoke.

PS: Never forget respected bitches – Я жил Я жив Я будет жить

All power to the Soviets…for the next 27,023 days or so.

Make Vladimir Ilyich proud.

He didn’t come back from Switzerland just for the квас.

While reviewing Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky, Tariq Ali indicates which account of Trotsky’s life still stands the test of time:

For over half a century, Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky, a literary-historical masterpiece in its own right, was regarded as the last word on the subject. Many who were deeply hostile to the Russian revolution and all its leading actors nonetheless acclaimed these books: in 1997, asked to nominate his favourite book for National Book Day, the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, nominated the trilogy. Twelve years later the culture in this country has become so overwhelmingly conformist that any alternative to capitalism is considered outlandish.

Read the full review here.

Isaac Deutscher’s 3 volume biography of Trotsky, The Prophet, is now available as a discounted shrinkwrapped set.

Also available individually:

The Prophet Armed:  Trotsky 1879-1921

The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929

The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940

And also available is Slavoj Zizek presents Trostsky: Terrorism and Communism.

Tariq Ali’s latest book, including more of his book reviews, is Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and Other Essays. For more information on Tariq’s writings and events see his website.