Albert Glotzer's Trotsky: Memoir & Critique
Gellman, Emanuel
TROTSKY: MEMOIR AND CRITIQUE, by Albert Glotzer. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989. 343 pp. $24.95. By rights, I ought to "recuse" myself from reviewing this book. As acknowledged in its...
...There are the efforts by the Stalinists to harass Dewey, to discredit the commission, to distort news reports...
...But now, much as I hate to give up an old passion, maybe it's best left to history while we consider new definitions...
...Glotzer quotes from the book extensively...
...But that is beside the point of his critique...
...When Glotzer did get to have a private audience with Trotsky, it seems to have been largely devoted to little factions and people now forgotten...
...In a later chapter he discusses Lenin's and Trotsky's views on anti-Semitism...
...As it is, Trotsky was finally assassinated by a GPU agent, Ramon Mercader, in Mexico, in 1940...
...Had he remained in the Soviet Union he would have been one of the first to perish in the purges of the thirties, nor would he have been able to write, correspond, meet people from abroad...
...Glotzer has a long footnote about Carter, for which I'm grateful...
...Now, the main reason to read this book is the chapter on the Moscow Trials and the commission, chaired by John Dewey, which went to Mexico in 1937 to investigate the frame-up and hear Trotsky's testimony, directly and through cross-examination by the commission's lawyer, John Finnerty, and others...
...He traveled to Kadikoy, intending to remain about two weeks but staying for close to two months...
...Does Bureaucratic Collectivism describe the society now coming into being (or collapsing...
...Both are out of print...
...And that's where Glotzer, one of the first recruits to the Trotskyist opposition in the United States, enters the story...
...Until the eve of the 1917 revolution Trotsky disagreed with Lenin on many issues...
...There is more to the story than testimony and stenography...
...Glotzer was a top-notch court reporter, and he was called upon to take it all down...
...It took several years (after the split in the SWP and the organization of the Workers party, later the Independent Socialist League) to bring Shachtman over...
...To my taste, Glotzer could have devoted more space to the commission and how it worked...
...The household consisted of Trotsky, his wife, Natalia, his grandson Sieva, a cook, a fisherman, two policemen who for some reason never tied their shoelaces, and Jan Frankel—a few years older than Glotzer, fluent in several languages, who had borne all the secretarial burden for over a year, served guard duty, shopped in Istanbul, a general dogsbody...
...The Commission Report, Not Guilty, has over four hundred pages...
...When, in 1923, he wrote a brilliant critique of the party's bureaucratization, The New Course, appealing 442 • DISSENT Books particularly to the youth to assert themselves, he did not propose a faction to fight for democracy in the party—and, most certainly, not for any political organization outside the party...
...Trotsky voted for the resolution...
...However, in his bibliography, Glotzer lists a British edition...
...q SUMMER • 1991 • 443...
...It may he a ghoulish way of looking at it, but Trotsky won eleven years in which to work because (after exile to Alma Ata) Stalin deported him...
...At the tenth Bolshevik congress in 1920, under Lenin's direction, the party outlawed factions...
...I'm a member of DSA and an editor of Dissent...
...Let me put it this way: Glotzer is a leading member of Social Democrats USA...
...There was endless correspondence and an incredible series of articles, pamphlets, and tracts—in the most important of which Trotsky warned about the danger represented by Hitler for the world, perhaps his finest achievement in those years...
...Old Bolsheviks might not have been purged, but Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries would still have been on trial...
...Without his knowledge of politics he would have had difficulty (he says) transcribing his notes, which, as published by Harper and Brothers, add up to a volume exceeding six hundred pages, The Case of Leon Trotsky...
...The book is heavier on "critique" than "memoir," but I can agree with most of the critique...
...Trotsky was delighted to have someone with secretarial skills, able to go through masses of letters in English that had accumulated...
...maybe that's still available...
...Whatever our failings in American history, we were steeped in the history of Bolshevism and the revolution...
...Glotzer presents a Glotzer-eyed view of the history of the American Trotskyist movement, which eventually took the name Socialist Workers party (SWP...
...It would be fair to say that I agreed with Glotzer before Glotzer agreed with Glotzer...
...quite interesting...
...A decoy story was put out, while Glotzer traveled back to Chicago with the notes on his body...
...There was even a reasonable possibility that Glotzer's notes might be stolen...
...Though it isn't common where political differences separate friends, I've maintained a friendly relationship with Glotzer for close to sixty years...
...Today, the work of the commission is almost forgotten...
...Glotzer could easily have written these pages sixty years ago...
...How sad for Trotsky to have wasted time on this, then and later, so intent was he on the chimera of organizing an international Marxist movement to challenge the Comintern...
...In the thirties, Joe Carter and James Burnham (before he drifted off into the Managerial Revolution), with some help from me, introduced the heresy that the Soviet Union was not a "degenerated workers' state" as Trotsky said, but a new class society to which Carter gave the name Bureaucratic Collectivism...
...Except, except—Glotzer would not have criticized Lenin then (nor would I...
...In 1931, at age twenty-two, he decided to visit Trotsky...
...When his house burned, after two years, he moved to a shabby building in Kadikoy, a suburb of Istanbul facing the Asiatic Sea...
...Glotzer completed his book before the most recent and previously unimaginable changes in the USSR and Eastern Europe...
...The idea is generally credited to Max Shachtman...
...Glotzer agrees with all the sensible authorities that Lenin was not a Stalin...
...It was the most useful analysis, I think, for some fifty years...
...But he was converted to "Leninism" on the role of the party—the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which, in practice, was the "dictatorship of the party...
...Had he lived, the rule of the party might not have been as cruel...
...For Frankel, Glotzer was a blessing—a friend who could also help in various ways...
...Afternoons, Trotsky dictated the second volume of his History of the Russian Revolution from notes prepared the night before, which were transcribed by a Russian typist...
...Turkey gave refuge to Trotsky, on the island of Prinkipo...
...When that happened, he did write the first extensive explanations, and for that he deserves proper credit...
...Looking back, it's interesting that while we were presenting a position opposed to Trotsky's, we pored over his writings, notably The Revolution Betrayed, where Trotsky comes close to conceding the possibility of a new class structure not foreseen by Marx...
...Glotzer interrupts his memoir (into which he inserts some "critique" that he didn't arrive at until much later) after he leaves Kadikoy, to examine at length the development of the Bolshevik party in Russia, the relations between Lenin and Trotsky, in the course of which he criticizes both, especially on their devastating position that "the party is always right...
...He did not protest the trial of the Mensheviks...
...Glotzer's footnotes and bibliography direct the reader to more substantial sources...
...Besides, Glotzer could also serve as a guard, join the "Old Man" on fishing expeditions (relaxation, sportthough with a net—and food for the table), even a hunt once, with permission of the Turkish authorities...
...Glotzer is fully aware of Trotsky's great abilities and accomplishments—as organizer of the Red Army, writer, unrelenting foe of Stalin in his years of exile...
...As acknowledged in its introduction, I read an early draft of the manuscript several years before its publication, and offered such advice as I could...
...I'll leave Glotzer's book with that thought...
Vol. 38 • July 1991 • No. 3
