Trotsky

...Though the Whites (and ultimately Stalin) liked to taunt him for his Jewish origins, for Russia's large Jewish community he felt nothing but contempt and hatred...

...Trotsky's first stop was Prinkipo, an island off the coast of Turkey, where he was to spend four years...

...At the height of his powers as a Soviet warlord, Trotsky continued to expect the revolution to spread to other European countries—if not this month, then next...

...look for vulnerability...

...Efforts to win him admission to Great Britain or the United States came to nothing, but in early 1937 he was able to move to Mexico as the guest of President Lazar() Cardenas, the world-renowned muralist Diego Rivera, and his wife Frida Kahlo...

...His image was airbrushed out of historical photographs or painted over on commemorative canvases and murals...

...Thus began six years of wandering without a visa or a nationality...

...This may indeed have been Lenin's intent, to judge by documents he dictated during his lastillness in 1923...

...Some of the details are worth noting...

...What made Trotsky different from Lenin, Stalin, and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership was his intellectual bent, his Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington Richard Brookhiser Free Press / 230 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Florence King If George Washington is no longer first in the hearts of his countrymen, it is due in part to his major biographies...

...MARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...undoubted literary talent, and his capacity for clothing bloodthirsty ideas in the fancy dress of the French revolutionary tradition...

...Meanwhile Stalin was busily liquidating anyone in the Soviet Union who had a past association with Trotsky, including most of his relatives and very specifically his children (two from his first marriage as well as their husbands, and two from his second by Natalia Sedova, who accompanied him into exile...

...Even less successful are those biographies that dispense with veneration and FLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...

...In this context Trotsky was moved from the commissary of foreign affairs to that of war, and became in effect the generalissimo of a starving, disorganized, and demoralized army...

...Volkogonov makes this explicit: "A political portrait of Trotsky is also an account of the fate of freedom in Russia, without doubt a tragic story...

...either it will go away or you will...

...Why audacious...

...Among other things, Trotsky had his logistics people look into the use of poison gas...

...By careful manipulation of party leaders that Trotsky had offended, or snubbed, Stalin was able to outflank him, isolate him, and force his expulsion from the party, and eventually from the Soviet Union itself...

...But Volkogonov also properly points out that the White cause was not Czarist or monarchist, as even some Western historians have persisted in claiming...

...Rather they were committed revolutionary internationalists— particularly Trotsky—convinced that the upheaval that had begun in Russia would eventually engulf all of Europe, including Germany itself...

...The details of the murder are grisly, though on balance it is difficult to feel sorry for Trotsky: he got no worse than he gave, or was prepared to give...

...Largely self-taught in Marxist theory and much else besides, Trotsky was a prolific writer and journalist who first came to the attention of the Russian Social Democratic Party in exile by his contributions to the party press...

...Based on access to these materials, and on the new climate of academic freedom in Russia, Volkogonov produced massive biographies of Lenin and Stalin...

...his country was merely a theater, and its population merely guinea pigs for so many revolutionary experiments...

...A year later he was arrested and exiled to Siberia for distributing subversive literature to dock workers...

...A vain, imperious man convinced of his intellectual superiority, he did not suffer fools gladly, and was frankly bored with the kind of organizational work which allowed Stalin to fill the party bureaucracy with loyal minions...

...He transformed it into a credible fighting force not so much by superior generalship as by energy, determination, strength of character—and by terror...

...During the Stalinist years the standard party texts habitually referred to him as a "wrecker" and "foreign agent...

...As he puts it, Trotsky forms a "homogeneous link in the chain" from Lenin to Stalin, and "cannot be exonerated of the crime...of creating a system that behaved, while Trotsky was still a part of it, and after, in a way the world has become accustomed to call Stalinist...

...Over time he likewise became notable through his participation in party congresses, where he tended to identify not with Lenin but with what later became known as Menshevism, the more democratic version of Russian social democracy...

...It is this, in fact, which explains much of his enduring fascination for many Western leftists...

...By the time he settled in Mexico, NKVD agents were so thoroughly ensconced in his entourage that his articles often landed on Stalin's desk in the Kremlin before they ever appeared in print...

...Because for more than fifty years, Trotsky—one of the original architects of the Soviet state and the founder of the Red Army—has been a nonperson in the land of his birth...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Eternally Revolting Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary Dmitri Volkogonov Edited and translated by Harold Shukman Free Press /56o pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Mark Falcoff With the collapse of the Soviet Union —and even more, with the end of its totalitarian police state —the Russian people have finally begun to learn what went on in their country during seventy years of Communist rule...

...Once back in Russia after the February revolution, however, he switched sides and became Lenin's closest collaborator, playing a decisive role in the October coup that brought down the only democratic government Russia had ever known...

...But Trotsky—with his literary flair, his genuine fascination with ideas, and his charisma as a public speaker—was someone they could fantasize being...

...His final work was his most audacious of all: this full-dress portrait of Leon Trotsky...

...It was in Mexico that Trotsky planned the founding conference of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International, and began work on a biography of Stalin which he did not live to finish...

...It was not all that long ago that the late Irving Howe published an anthology of Trotsky's writings, as if the latter in some way might be wedged into the gallery of "democratic socialists" to which Howe himself claimed to belong...

...Neither Lenin nor Trotsky (who as the first commissar of foreign affairs of theinfant Soviet republic negotiated the peace arrangement with Germany that became known as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk) were in any sense Germanophiles...

...and he read Seneca to perfect that bane of tell-all biographers, control of his emotions...

...The portrait that emerges in this book is not altogether attractive, and perhaps this is the one way in which it breaks new interpretive ground...

...For many Western Trotskyists (or fellow-travelers, or merely admirers), the fact that Trotsky produced some of the most devastating critiques of Stalin's dictatorship —once exiled from the Soviet Union—is supposed to allow us to assume that had he won the struggle for power after Lenin's death in the early twenties, Russia would have evolved into some form of social democracy...

...But Volkogonov points out that, from the very beginning, Trotsky was a man with virtually no friends, no interests, and no purpose in life but revolutionaryupheaval to be followed by revolutionary dictatorship...

...Martin's...

...It contained, among others, his mother Caridad, an ardent Stalinist who ended her days as the doorkeeper of Castro's embassy in Paris...

...Even today, a visit to any university campus in the United States or Great Britain will turn up vest-pocket editions of the original, complete with hair running in all directions, a goatee, and granny glasses...

...This book draws on a vast and bewildering range of fresh sources: the Trotsky archive at Harvard's Houghton Library, the former Central Party archives in Moscow, the Central State Archives of the October Revolution, and the archives of the Soviet Army, Ministry of Defense, and Committee for State Security...

...Trotsky died as he lived—a victim of force and violence at the service of an idea...

...Until his recent death at 67, one of the foremost practitioners of the new history in Russia was retired Colonel-General Dmitri Volkogonov, who served as special adviser to President Yeltsin and chairman of the presidential commission examining the newly (though just partially) opened Soviet archives...

...The aloof and majestic Washington lends himself to only one type of biography: the moral essay in the tradition of Plutarch, the first-century student of exalted human nature who wrote Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans...

...Trotsky was right about that, though wrong about the kind of regime that would replace the Kaiser...

...He held the families of former Czarist officers hostage as insurance against malfeasance, shot deserters, and utterly disregarded the rules of war...

...Trotsky was dispatched with an alpine axe—an unusual weapon which the assassin concealed under his raincoat...

...The story of Trotsky's exile has already been told in some detail in the third volume of Isaac Deutscher's trilogy...

...Late in life, when told that his pleasurable anticipation of retirement showed in his face, Washington replied: "You are wrong, my countenance never yet betrayed my feelings...

...He shared none of the conventional loyalties, neither to places nor to people...

...it splits the difference between coercion and freedom, persuasion and terror, democracy and dictatorship...

...His affection for his son Lev Sedov was largely based on politics rather than paternal feelings...

...He had no feeling whatever for Russia or Russians...

...One consists of seven volumes, another contains four...

...He was eventually able to move briefly to Norway and then to France, but could remain in neither thanks to pressures from the Soviet Union in one case, the local Communist party in the other...

...An ! excellent student, he 60 March 1996 The American Spectator managed to surmount the restrictive quotas on Jews to win admission to a premier secondary school in Odessa...

...it was anti-Bolshevik and even vaguely democratic...

...But by age 17 he had abandoned formal education for revolutionary agitation...

...Clinton has facilitators and Newt has Tofflers, but Washington had only Seneca, the Roman stoic who advised, "Scorn pain...

...if not this year, then the one after it...

...Interested less in historical narrative than in the portrayal of character for instructive Great Character, Nice Quads 62 March 1996 • The American Spectator...

...Above all, it means absolving the Bolshevik revolution of responsibility for its consequences...

...Never one to read for pleasure, Washington read for information...

...Volkogonov affirms Richard Pipes's findings that the Whites were defeated less by Trotsky than by themselves: their maladroit treatment of civilian populations, particularly Jews, and their political naïvet...

...Here, however, Volkogonov has something new to add...

...No doubt these were characteristics worthy of emphasis for the period after 1934...

...The Kremlin's reach even extendThe American Spectator • March 1996 61 ed to Paris, where his oldest son (and political collaborator) died under mysterious circumstances after a perfectly ordinary appendectomy...

...Volkogonov also spoke with the few surviving members of Trotsky's family—and even with former special agents involved in Stalin's plot to assassinate his rival...

...During the best years of his life—the revolution and civil war—he had presided over some of the most barbarous treatment ever meted out to political enemies, or even to those who were insufficiently suffused with his own ideological ideals...

...Nor, in the long run, did his pen: the only personal remarks he ever committed to paper were cut up by a worshipful nineteenth-century historian for handwriting samples...

...The Russian Revolution of February 1917 was the product not of socialist theory or revolutionary agitation but the bloody, inconclusive battles of World War I. Led by Alexander Kerensky, the February revolutionaries were committed to carrying on an unpopular war, and as such exposed their weakest flank to the Bolsheviks, who promised land and peace to a war-weary peasant army...

...The enduring fascination for Trotsky on the part of Western leftists does notform an immediate part of Volkogonov's story, but it is far from irrelevant to the material in this volume...

...He escaped from prison (and the obligations of family life) less than three years later, beginning a long period of exile in Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the United States, returning to Russia to play a brief but stellar role in the abortive 1905 revolution, and then again in 1917, after the collapse of the Czarist state...

...Most of Trotsky's biographers, particularly Deutscher, have emphasized his revolutionary honor and his sturdy anti-Stalinism...

...This was quite clearly not Volkogonov's intent...

...He never earned a living in the conventional sense...

...Indeed, Trotskyism is the Western Left's way of having the cake and eating it, too...

...Between the hush of veneration and the drone of land surveying, we lose access, and then interest...

...Although Trotsky and Trotskyism disappeared from Russia many decades ago, he (and it) continues to cast a continuing shadow over Western leftism...

...Volkogonov obtained much of the new information about Trotsky's assassination in Mexico in 1940 from talks with Pavel Sudoplatov, the NKVD project officer on the case whose own memoirs were published two years ago...

...Apparently as early as 1934, while still in Turkey, Trotsky's inner circle had been penetrated by Stalin...

...Attempts to replicate the Bolshevik coup in Bavaria and Budapest came to naught, and by 1919-1920 the new regime found itself beset on all sides by counter-revolutionary armies and foreign intervention...

...If the sufferings of Russia over the past seven or eight decades have gained it nothing else, they have at least purchased immunity from this sort of nonsense...

...Instead, he was apprehended and beaten by Trotsky's guards, and turned over to Mexican officials to face a twenty-year jail sentence...

...still another begins with Columbus's discovery of America...

...more recent editions simply dropped all mention of him...

...Harold Shukman, Volkogonov's editor, warns us in the preface what to expect: "Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union coincided with the Party's adoption of the very measures he had advocated: forced collectivization of the peasants and rapid industrialization, using draconian measures whenever necessary...

...That revolution would render irrelevant whatever concessions were temporarily granted at the conference table...

...Seizing power in October, the latter did in fact conclude an immediate peace with the Germans, so advantageous to the latter that even then there were strong suspicions—subsequently confirmed by irrefutable archival evidence—that Lenin and his associates were virtually installed in office by the German General Staff...

...No French, German, or Spanish intellectual worth his salt could identify with Lenin, who was something of a philistine, or Stalin, who was all too obviously a gangster...

...While in prison he married a fellow revolutionary, with whom he promptly had two daughters...

...Thus the story told by Volkogonov is entirely new to many, if not most, of his Russian readers...

...He was a key figure at the founding congress of the Comintern, and logically considered to be Lenin's probable successor...

...Stalin suppressed those papers after Lenin's death, but, as Volkogonov shows, Trotsky's defeat in the succession struggle was largely self-inflicted...

...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...

...The getaway car was forced to depart for the United States without him...

...Trotsky was born Leib Bronshtein to a family of middle-sized landowners in Kherson Pro- vince in 1879...

...The handpicked assassin—a handsome, urbane Spaniard by the name of Ramon Mercader, who seduced Trotsky's homely American secretary Sylvia Ageloff to gain entry into his circle—was originally assured that the Stalinist apparatus would arrange for his escape and safe conduct out of the country...

...right up to the 1917 revolution he was surviving on handouts from his family in Russia...

...the latter was the representative of the Fourth International in Europe until his murder...