Personal and Political Dimensions: Deutscher's Biography of Trotsky

...who did?—that the historical dilemma as posed originally by Marx and Engels—socialism or barbarism— might, under certain conditions, be resolved for a time in the emergence of a barbarism that was not only antiproletarian and anti-socialist but no less anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist...

...He was active for years in the movements Trotsky once led, first the Communist Party and then the Trotskyist organization, and he gained a feeling for their realities, for which even the best academic research cannot substitute...

...His knowledge of Trotsky's ideas is thoroughgoing and, so to say, "professional," and he is perfectly at home in the spectrum of the radical world...

...Trotsky (the "Classical Marxist") was the utopian...

...No Communist could be won to such a banner once Stalin's course became definite, and from the early thirties onward the Trotsky movement did not win any...

...There was not an iota of posturing or ritual pietism in these characteristics...

...the idealistic but naive-utopian prophets of the revolution cannot sustain the faith by persuasion...

...It represents only the bureaucratic apparatus...

...The idea that socialism is and can only be the product of the political activity of a self-controlled and democratically organized working class is, it would seem, the heart and soul of Marxism...

...He could not conceive of the real prospect—who could...

...The integral corollary to Trotsky's charge that in domestic policy Stalinism was capitulating to the native bourgeoisie, was that in foreign policy Stalinism was capitulating to the world bourgeoisie and its wellknown labor lieutenants, the Social Democracy...

...capitalism...

...If the errors in Trotsky's fight against Stalinism were twice as grave as they now seem to me, it nevertheless remained a brave, unflagging fight against an infamy that disgraced the name of socialism, a fight that was at all times infused with the spirit of solidarity with the oppressed against the oppressor, that looked for an end of the tyranny not from the tyrant but from the conscious action of his victims...

...Trotsky often repeated that he knew no personal tragedy, and in the thought he tried to convey he was right...

...He has admiration and affection for his protagonist but also critical independence...

...In his biographer you do not feel that spirit or see that fight...

...With the beginning of the World War, the other end of the trap sprang shut on Trotsky...

...It vitiates his judgment of Trotsky...

...His efforts to establish his own worldwide movement failed completely...

...Not so little, however, is Deutscher's account of the split in the Trotskyist movement upon the outbreak of the war...

...It seems to me of some aid in reducing the proportions of the absurdities of the "socialist revolution" carried out against the working class, or without its support and or even without its existence, as let us say in China or Cuba, or in Egypt or Ghana or Zanzibar...

...Stalin's was the hand that directed both the banishment and the assassination...

...therefore it was moving toward socialism...

...All this seems to me to be overridingly central to an understanding and an appraisal of Trotsky's magnificent resistance to Stalinism, and of how the axis of the resistance was so very understandably misplaced...

...so the revolutionary despot replaces them and makes the mass have faith against its silly will...

...During the entire first period of Stalin's crucial changeover which was to disclose the true social nature of the collectivist bureaucracy, Trotsky persisted desperately but helplessly in his basic analysis...

...Given a personal acquaintance with Trotsky, he might have been able to deal with characteristics and attributes he does not seem to be aware of...

...But, primarily, it is a political biography he has written...

...In the last dozen years of his life, every one of his political or personal friends, intimates, associates in Russia was imprisoned and driven to his death, or just plain murdered—except for the very few allowed to die a natural death...

...And come to think of it, was the despotism all bad...

...the bourgeois elements by the BukharinRykovTomsky right wing...

...Mill," the first secretary of the International Left Opposition, who also was or became a G.P.U...

...All the elements for the answers are provided in the work, even if the proportions allotted, the relative emphasis placed upon them, are not always satisfactory...

...This assurance may be taken seriously in Washington or London...

...Tertium non datur...

...And so on...

...The gulf between him and the parties of the Communist International became unbridgeable...

...All the Yiddish press here condemned the trials, with the exception of course of the Stalinist daily...

...As Deutscher notes, Trotsky did not even mention the Fourth International in the will he left behind...

...The Stalinists—the "bureaucratic centrists" — are heedless and headless and helpless...

...His modest fame as an apologist of Stalinism is well deserved...

...Now the author brings to its sorrowful end the story of Leon Trotsky, the biography begun with The Prophet Armed, continued with The Prophet Unarmed, and here concluded...

...The victims of Stalin's massacres included virtually every leader and prominent militant of the Bolshevik revolution and the Communist International...

...The final battle in which the fate of the revolution is to be decided is about to be fought...

...It exerted no influence whatever on events, it exercised no political influence in any country up to the time of Trotsky's death or for the quarter century afterward, except, to a tiny extent, in two countries which are as far from each other as they are from importance in the world today...

...By 1925, the suggestions were accusations, precise and unequivocal, and they were thereafter pressed with rising sharpness...

...At home, the Bolshevik revolution could either advance toward socialism or fall back to capitalism...

...Deutscher has brought to his work uncommon advantages...

...For all the subsequent rationalization, the fact remains that Trotsky (and of course not he alone) had no room in his analysis or program for this stupefying development...

...He suffers, and in a highly aggravated and perverted form, from the effects of the same dogma, a quarter century later, that Trotsky was on the verge of reconsidering a year before his death...

...The Left Opposition alone clearly and consciously defends the imperilled revolution...

...The Old Man will seek to convince me...

...It is resisting planning, industrialization and collectivization of agriculture because it is more and more the helpless instrument of capitalist elements in town and country, at home and abroad...

...It seems to me to provide a key, if not the key, to the calamitous misjudgment of Stalinism displayed by Roosevelt and Churchill toward the end of the war: were they too not convinced, in their own way, that Stalin was "capitulating" to the world bourgeoisie and ready, if thrown a sop, to confine himself to "socialism in a single country...

...Deutscher can find one even in the hecatombs of Stalin...

...It is most strange: both leaders of the Bolshevik revolution left "testaments" which are unique in the annals of the revolutionary movement and, by coincidence, although for different reasons, the documents were in both cases concealed for years not only from the public but from their own followers...

...Yet—facts are still facts—"it was one of the effects of the purges that they prevented the managerial groups from consolidating as a social stratum...

...In a sensational article which was one of the formal pretexts for his deportation to Turkey, he brought this analysis to its peak...

...This is more than amply indicated by the thoughts Trotsky set down right after the proclamation of the grotesque counterrevolutionary revolution...

...The Bukharinist "right" wing is openly yielding to the restorationist forces...

...In every important respect, Stalin moved Russia further and further away from socialism—yet at the same time further and further away from capitalism...

...The Stal inists did not restore capitalism or undermine state property in industry or agriculture but rather expanded them on a scale and at a pace that still fills most of the world with awe...

...Under Keren sky there was a dual power situation, in which the power and rule of the bourgeoisie was overturned by the power and rule of the proletariat...

...But facts are facts and it is better to be objective than not...

...There was no "dual power" situation in the country, and if there was, Trotsky never explained what happened to it...

...Indeed, "Stalin acted as the unwitting agent of permanent revolution within the Soviet Union" (Deutscher dixit...

...It seems to be powerful, but because it does not represent any of the decisive classes, it is doomed to capitulate to the right wing...

...To complete the portrait Deutscher fortified his extensive general knowledge of the subject with immense and minute research, which included the combing of Trotsky's confidential political correspondence and the private correspondence among the members of the family.* • Which makes some of his errors in fact all the more surprising: The Sobelovicius-Soblen brothers ("Roman Wall" and "A...

...In exchange, it lost many of its own followers...

...Once again there is a dual power situation in the country—except that now the power and rule of the proletariat is being overturned by the power and rule of the counterrevolutionary propertied classes...

...Yet Deutscher treats the entire question of the basic and fatal flaw in Trotsky's fight against Stalinism only in a few passing words, briefly, incidentally, almost like a bagatelle...

...But personal tragedy knew him, intimately and bitterly and to his last hour...

...What is happen...

...His whole intellectual formation, all that he had acquired of the doctrine, the politics of Marxism, told Trotsky and his followers that the Stalinist bureaucracy was moving away from socialism, from its ideals, its policies, its internationalism and democratism, its altogether working-class character, its standards of conduct, its values and traditions...

...In his last dozen years, every one of Trotsky's political hopes was cruelly dashed...

...Almost from the very beginning of the open fight against his opponents in 1923, Trotsky suggested that they were abandoning the basic principles of the Bolshevik revolution and of Marxism in two fields: at home, in domestic policy, and internationally, in foreign policy...

...Whatever else could be said about this statement, which left all his followers speechless, it sufficed, by itself, to free Trotsky from the noose of the dogma which he had improvised late in life, namely, that the mere existence of statified property in Russia justified designating the Stalinist regime as a workers' state deserving the allegiance of all socialists, regardless of all other considerations...

...It may be true, it may be false, it may be valid or obsolete...

...He continued to denounce the deceits and the appalling barbarities of Stalinism, but a trap had half closed on him...

...But without it Marxism is literally meaningless...

...and eschew fiction, at which he is trivial...

...Except for his wife and one grandson, Trotsky saw every member of his family hounded to death or murdered: all four of his children, his two sons-in-law and their children, his sister and her husband, his first wife—and then he himself was murdered by the same hand...

...He is too "civilized," too much the gentlemansocialist, for that...

...He was therewith predisposed, so to say, to see in the Stalinist departure from the road to socialism the first and then the next and then the next step along the road back to capitalism...

...This too was fundamentally wrong, and the apparently air-tight arguments of this brilliant and forceful mind began to have less and less effect upon his followers...

...It seems to me to help rid socialist thought of the incubus of the nationalizationdogma, the view that the mere statification of property, even if accompanied by a tyranny over the people, makes a regime working-class or socialist...

...What remained of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism outside Russia — if counterrevolution could only mean, as it did to Trotsky, the restoration or preservation of capitalist property...

...He has studied and portrayed the private life, the family life, the personal characteristics of Trotsky in a way never before publicly treated, so that his subject comes alive not only in mind but in spirit and in flesh...

...This was the central theme of literally dozens of articles, theses, resolutions, platform speeches, faction circulars and the like which formed the indictment of Trotsky and his supporters against the Stalinists...

...Beginning with Poland and the Baltic countries, Stalin did not "capitulate to the bourgeosie" abroad, but destroyed it and along with it all private ownership...

...Like other references of the same type, it is invention, not discovery...

...The Stalinists did not capitulate to the bourgeoisie, the Nep-man and the kulak, but wiped them out as no one before had ever dreamed, let alone proposed, to wipe them out...

...Indeed, he proclaims himself to be a Marxist on every possible occasion, so that none is left for him to explain what that means to him...

...No government in Europe would grant Trotsky the secure asylum (more-or-less) that Western Europe granted all Russian revolutionists in defiance of the Romanov Tsars, but which none of them would grant him in defiance of the "socialist" Tsar...

...The Stalinists did not capitulate to the "right wing," but destroyed it root and branch, with very little effort, in very little time, and for good and aye...

...I know what will happen...

...If you are not moving in the one direction, you are moving in the other...

...In its place he has put forth his own law that applies to all revolutions: The enthusiastic mass is led into a revolution but the subsequent hardships bring a loss of faith...

...Because this possibility was outside his range, the profound and durable turn made by the Stalinist bureaucracy at the crucial moment left Trotsky disarmed in the terms in which he had posed and for long persisted in posing the social dilemma, namely, socialism or capitalism...

...Stalin, we now know, murdered more Communists than were killed by the bourgeois reaction in all of Europe, Hitler included, between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second...

...And the fact, the big historical and decisive fact is that although Stalin denounced Trotsky as a counterrevolutionist and a Fascist agent, it was after all Trotsky's program he carried out, at home and abroad...

...a prominent poet has been criticized but not shot, even though he attacked anti-Semitism in Russia...

...Therefore Deutscher has been proclaiming "Trotsky's victory in defeat," because Stalin's successors have to and will liquidate the evil of Stalin's heritage and restore the spirit of democracy and internationalism incarnate in Trotsky...

...Khrushchev has not been shot, even though he openly attacks Mao...

...Deutscher does not fail—quite the contrary—to bring Trotsky to life as a human being...

...It was no less wrong, and certainly as misleading and disorienting, as the analysis of the nature of Stalinism inside Russia...

...But these are little things...

...For all that was true and brilliant in this analysis, its flaw was that it was fundamentally wrong...

...A triumph of the book is the truly pulsing and unforgettable picture it gives of the meaning, realized in Trotsky, of devotion to ideals and ideas regardless of personal consequences, of defiance of a most powerful vindictive tyrant, of confidence in the perseverance, the capacity for recuperation and for selfemancipation of the disinherited...

...I tried for hours to urge Krivitsky during a secret visit to my rooms to see Trotsky in Mexico...

...The last volume of the trilogy covers the period from Trotsky's deportation from Russia to Turkey to the time of his murder in Mexico...

...He even saw the immediate prospect of a Bonapartist coup d'Etat and even named two possible candidates for the man on horseback—Voroschilov and Tukhachevsky...

...agents were not Latvians but Lithuanians, as the family name indicates...

...and outside of it as well...

...In the twenties Trotsky saw the bureaucracy moving away from the socialist direction...

...I know of no other person in history who was subjected to such a long-lasting and systematically planned campaign of personal and political vilification as Trotsky suffered...

...It is not quite correct that Walter Krivitsky, who broke with the G.P.U., "sought contact" with Trotsky...

...it is the agency of the bourgeois counterrevolution...

...Senine") who abandoned Trotskyism to become G.P.U...

...Here two questions arise: Was the tragic element in Trotsky's life only personal...

...The two questions are therefore his main province...

...In his own time, Deutscher saw the bureaucracy moving away from the capitalist direction...

...Some people find a silver lining in every cloud...

...B. Z. Goldberg to whom alone he refers was the notorious exception...

...Was the tragedy his alone...

...This is all the more remarkable in an author who never saw the contemporary who is his hero...

...They were his nature and his true convictions...

...Therefore Stalin was "the unwilling agent" of Trotsky's permanent revolution...

...It is this idea that Deutcher seems to have in mind when he refers, somewhat airily, to "Classical Marxism...

...By 1928, already expelled from the party, he sounded the tocsin that the revolution itself was in imminent danger of destruction...

...The Marxism of Stalin, despotic savior of the revolution, was not so classical...

...Among other things this is what his purges meant literally: and Deutscher is appalled by their horror...

...And no matter what this guardian did to debase, to exploit, to oppress, even to massacre the working class—even when it exceeded the most reactionary bourgeois regime of its time in these respects—Trotsky did not tire of repeating that he would defend its regime "unconditionally" in war...

...But practically all the leaders of the Opposition, by twos and threes, then by dozens and scores, capitulated to Stalin...

...None of Trotsky's charges seemed, for years, to be as well-grounded as this one...

...After ten years of these assurances by Deutscher, the bureaucracy has indeed made great strides toward democratism: Molotov and friends have not been shot, but only expelled from the party without anyone hearing their side or knowing where they stand...

...It is not that Deutscher is a Stalinist...

...The Stalinist faction in the decisive battle that lies ahead will count for next to nothing...

...The events in Russia, Germany, Austria, the Saar, France, Spain followed their dismal course in every direction save the one he worked for...

...The world revolution was completely abandoned by Stalinism and replaced by the national-socialist conception embodied in the notorious theory of "socialism in a single country...

...But Deutscher knows from experience and study that the idea is unrealistic and unrealizable...

...The last two decades of Trotsky's life are devoted overwhelmingly to his fight against the rise of Stalinism...

...and if there are few or meager landmarks in this literary domain to compare it with, this still does not diminish its outstanding merit...

...Stalinism represented a reaction against the principles and achievements of the revolution...

...Deutscher should stick to history, at which he is talented...

...ing in the country now is the unwinding of the October film backwardKerenskyism in reverse...

...thus the revolution is saved by the despots, without the erratic mass and against it...

...The quintessential social nature of this reaction, stripped of all verbiage, ideology, deception and self-deception, was the restoration of the rule of capitalism in its most brutal form...

...When the leadership began disclosing the split in its ranks between the Bukharinists and the Stalinists, Trotsky regarded the development as a mighty confirmation of his analysis and the course of his fight...

...Even then, while the portrait would have been somewhat richer and more vivid, the main dimensions would remain as they are...

...Neither is Deutscher's...

...This was pretty strong tobacco, and Trotsky must have felt in some way the disaster it connoted from every conceivable standpoint...

...The course of this new bureaucracy had completely refuted his basic analysis of its social and political nature...

...agent, was not an American, but a Frenchman of Russo-Jewish origin...

...He sustained them in the face of such political and personal adversity as no contemporary was forced to en dure...

...I am too old to start a second political life...

...the clash between them...

...Writers of the Jewish-American press "who had hitherto described themselves" as Trotsky's admirers did not turn upon him during the Moscow Trials, as Deutscher suggests...

...For the first time in his life, he acknowledged that the Stalinist bureaucracy might soon prove to have been the representative of a new ruling class and its regime the forerunner of a new barbarism, the exploitive society of "bureaucratic collectivism...

...It seems to me to provide one of the keys to an understanding of axial problems of the "emerging nations...

...Deutscher is no Stalinist...

...It is already taking steps to undermine the nationalization of the land, the state monopoly of foreign trade, and is prepared to take other steps which will destroy all the foundation stones of socialism in Russia...

...Time and again—as in this article—Trotsky reiterated: the right-wing "tail" will come down upon the centrist head and smash it...

...The Fourth International, which was to be the regenerated movement of Communism, was still-born...

...Andres Nin was not "the founder" of the Spanish Communist Party...

...The proletarian class is represented by the Opposition...

...Deutscher must have an irrepressible strain of cheerfulness in him...

...His maneuvers with the parties of the Socialist International yielded no glory and no fruit...

...So, during the universalized massacre in Russia, Stalin saved it from...

...as political biography, it is unequalled...

...Despondent, demoralized, almost suicidal, Krivitsky refused...

...The bureaucracy—sometimes it was the bureaucracy as a whole, sometimes it was the right wing of the bureaucracy with the Stalino-Centrists inexorably following suit—is capitulating to the kulak and the Nep-man, to the bougeoisie or the neo-bourgeoisie...

...As biography, it is an achievement unsurpassed by anything written in this century...

...The agent was bureaucratic, despotic, Asiatic, bloodthirsty, but he was the agent...

...therefore it was moving toward capitalism...

...Some resisted Stalinism to the end, to the grim and grisly end...

...One end of a trap thus sprang shut on Trotsky...

...The same formation told Trotsky that the sole alternative to socialism is capitalism...

...This already indicates that the biography deals as it must with the life of both antagonists, their ideas and deeds, and Party and, earlier, of the Communist Party, who befriended Trotsky in Norwegian exile was not "Schoffle" but Olav Scheflo...

...At first, Trotsky, pinned by the horns of his dilemma, sought to fit the reality into a new and startling category: the Stalinist bureaucracy was carrying out a "counterrevolutionary social revolution...

...The leader of the Norwegian Labor And the result of all this is served to the reader in a splendorous prose which seems especially suitable for the aim of this work: to give life, light and coherence to the interplay of a highly dramatic personal record, a vast conflict of men, ideas and movements, and some of the most tempestuous events of our time...

...Deutscher creates the impression that the events in Russia and elsewhere are not so much a case of Trotsky having misjudged the nature of Stalinism as it is of the Stalinists having misjudged, you might say, the nature of Trotskyism...

...To keep his followers from going over to Stalin, he bombarded them with polemical insistences that Stalin's policy did not represent a left course but only a left zigzag which would, any minute now, be over-compensated by a long and lasting zigzag to the right, and that this was in the unchangeable nature of Stalinism...

...It is on the basis of this fight that Trotsky should be judged, at least for the period in question...

...It was their tragedy: and even though he would not and did not capitulate, it was Trotsky's tragedy too...

...Trotsky was never given, or he never gave himself, the opportunity to return to more extensive reflections on the seminal theme he had opened up...

...He was compelled, so reluctantly and with so much unacknowledged self-repudiation, to transcribe the "channel of capitalist restoration" into the "guardian of the economic foundations of socialism"— the bad guardian, the bureau cratic guardian, the despotic and bloody guardian, but guardian just the same...

...The Stalinist bureaucracy, the Stalinist faction, is the channel for the return of bourgeois rule in Russia...

...indeed, he never mentioned it again...

...This is less puzzling than it may seem...

...As the Latin scholars say: Tertium non datur...

...He knows the iniquities and monstrosities of Stalinism as well as the next man, or better...