Prophet of a False Cause
SHUB, DAVID
WRITERS and WRITING Prophet of a False Cause The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921. By Isaac Deutscher. Oxford. 522 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by David Shub Author, "Lenin: A Biography"; contributor,...
...it is doubtful whether it represented even 10 million voters...
...Deutscher, by omission, exaggerates the importance of the organs which did print Trotsky...
...He indicts Plekhanov as a "chauvinist" for supporting the Allied-Russian struggle against Hohenzollern Germany...
...In March 1921...
...Instead of examining what was wrong with the cause -and the "god"-he had served from 1917 to 1924, Trotsky spent the rest of his life justifying both...
...2) the government formed at Samara, which raised the People's Army of the Constituent Assembly, was led by Socialist Revolutionary Assembly deputies...
...He never once contributed to the scholarly Russian Marxist monthlies which, after 1896, solicited regular contributions from Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, Lenin, Potresov, Martov and other important Social Democrats...
...The Pravda published by Trotsky in Vienna in 1908-9, to which Deutscher devotes pages, was a small propaganda sheet which appeared irregularly, never more than once a month...
...Deutscher writes: "In the military vacuum of Asian Russia, the Legion rapidly occupied a vast area, overthrew the Soviets and made common cause with Kolchak's White Guards...
...finally, of distortions of history...
...In describing the Civil War, Deutscher fails to mention that the Soviet power was overthrown early in 1918 in Siberia, the Urals and other parts of Russia by the Russian people themselves, before Masaryk's Czech Legion took up arms against them...
...Deutscher says Lenin's journey from Switzerland through Germany to Russia in April 1917 was arranged by the Swiss Socialist Robert Grimm...
...Italics supplied...
...I have devoted all this space to the events of 1917-21 because I believe that only through a proper understanding of them can one appreciate the nature of the present Communist threat and the continuing tragedy of the Russian people...
...We never discover how the youngster who called Marxism a "doctrine for shopkeepers and traders" later came to justify mass terror, the hostage system and the suppression of trade unions in the name of "Marxism" as he and Lenin interpreted it...
...He says, for example, that "the Second Congress of the Soviets represented about 20 million electors, perhaps rather fewer...
...Instead, Deutscher refers the reader to works by Trotsky and Pokrovsky...
...41 million votes were cast for the Constituent Assembly...
...Deutscher says that the Red Terror was proclaimed "in retaliation for the attempt on Lenin's life and the assassination of Uritsky in Petrograd" on August 30, 1918...
...So does his biographer...
...He says: "A popular right-wing newspaper published 'documents' alleging that Lenin had been in the pay of the German General Staff and writs were issued for the arrest of Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev...
...This, says Deutscher, "can be seen from as authoritative a source as [General] Denikin, who describes in great detail the connection between the White Guards and the headquarters of the Cadets...
...was incitement to armed insurrection in time of war with the financial aid of Imperial Germany...
...then or since, I never once heard mention of Antid Oto...
...I shall devote the remainder of this space to citations: first, of exaggerations of Trotsky's stature...
...He also claims that, at this time, "almost the entire garrison was on the side of the Bolsheviks...
...second, of "non-political" errors of fact...
...Upon seizing power, Deutscher says, the Bolsheviks "arrested a few right-wing politicians and banned some newspapers that had openly called for armed resistance...
...Of course, he justifies it...
...the Denikin quotation refers to a period many months later, after the Cadets were outlawed, after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and after the Bolsheviks had signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty...
...The relationship of these sentiments to Trotsky's part in the forcible liquidation of the Assembly four months later should, it would seem to me, concern any objective biographer...
...Deutscher claims that these spread his fame to "circles in Petersburg, Kiev and even the emigres in Western Europe...
...Trotsky's role in the Revolution of 1905 is also inflated...
...Deutscher says that the liberal Constitutional Democratic party was outlawed on November 28, 1917 and the members of its Central Committee arrested because they were "the political headquarters of the White Guards...
...Those who in 1954 still see the Russian Revolution through Trotsky's eyes may well ponder whether, wittingly or not, they do not fit the words of a true prophet, Isaiah, who said: "We have made lies our refuge and under falsehood have we hid ourselves...
...He also says that the Bolsheviks had heard reports of a demonstration for the Assembly by the people of Petrograd...
...A British critic comments that they were "compelled" only "in the sense that a burglar surprised by an armed householder may be forced to shoot to save his own skin...
...Exaggerations: Deutscher devotes pages to Trotsky's 1901 writings in the Irkutsk newspaper Vostochnoye Obozreniye ("Eastern Review"), a small, four-page provincial paper...
...The evidence is inescapable (cf...
...Osvobozhdeniye, the paper published by Peter Struve in Stuttgart and Paris, did not advocate "a diluted version of Marxism...
...The "big Menshevik daily" in St...
...They killed more than a hundred people...
...As spokesman for Lenin, Leon Trotsky organized the coup that destroyed liberty in Russia...
...contributor, "Russian Review," "Yale Review," etc...
...As Lenin's chief of staff, he welded the Red Army which crushed not only "White" generals but all the popular forces which for three years fought the Bolshevik dictatorship...
...Petersburg, was a four-page tabloid...
...As Max Eastman, who knew Trotsky well, writes: "One feels, as Deutscher describes his thoughts and deeds, that Robespierre and Danton, Spartacus and the Gracchi, all the rest of them, except only Lenin, seem half-equipped amateurs by comparison with Leon Trotsky...
...Antonov...
...Of this, the great majority voted for the Bolsheviks...
...Non-political errors: The works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx were not forbidden in Russia during the 1890s...
...Thus, the portrait, though externally rich and detailed, does not really yield the man...
...Trotsky's wife had seen the demonstrators and estimated their number as 20,000...
...211 ft...
...and that he, Deutscher, "knew personally old ex-deportees who, in the 1920s and 1930s, would in conversation still refer to Trotsky as Antid Oto and ask, for instance, 'What does Antid Oto say about the situation?' " This seems largely fancy...
...Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik materials alike, including the speeches and writings of Lenin and Trotsky at the time, confirm that the Cheka was formed eight months before the assassination of Uritsky (who, by the way, was slain because he was head of the Petrograd Cheka-a fact Deutscher does not mention...
...4) Kolchak had nothing to do with this government-only in November 1918 did Siberian White Guards overthrow the All-Russian anti-Bolshevik government at Omsk (also headed by Socialist Revolutionaries) and proclaim Kolchak "Supreme Ruler...
...Lenin's writings make it amply clear that he never in any sense considered subjecting his dictatorship to the control of democratically elected Soviets...
...Petersburg of which Trotsky was one of six editors lasted 17 days...
...he was active for three months, while the Revolution lasted almost two years...
...both Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik sources indicate that Lenin sent trusted Lett sharpshooters, sailors and marines to suppress the demonstration with orders to shoot...
...Although he lists Plekhanov's two volumes on the war and the revolution in his bibliography, he nowhere fairly reports Plekhanov's analysis of the relation between the cause of Russian democracy and the Allied war effort...
...This is gross falsification...
...she visited the United States for only a few weeks during World War I. Distortion of history: Deutscher follows the Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin approach to the events of 1917-21, according to which Bolshevism was "the revolution" (i.e., the only revolution possible or desirable for Russia) and according to which all oposition to Bolshevism must be minimized or vilified...
...Deutscher still denies the direct financial support given the Bolsheviks in 1917 by Imperial Germany...
...The evidence suggests that at most 25 per cent of the Russian people, and somewhat less than half of the relatively small working class, backed Lenin...
...This fact leads Deutscher to claims which Lenin and Trotsky never dared to make...
...Deutscher insinuates that a majority of Russians, or a majority of Russian workers, favored the Bolshevik coup...
...In quoting Trotsky's speech at the Pre-Parliament (September 1917), Deutscher significantly omits the very first phrase-"The bourgeois classes, while apparently non-political, have set themselves the aim of frustrating the Constituent Assembly"-and the final exclamation: "Long live the Constituent Assembly...
...3) there were no White Guards when this government was formed...
...And the author of the celebrated theory of "permanent revolution" was not Trotsky, but the Russian-German Marxist Parvus...
...We do not learn why Trotsky in 1904 described Lenin as a "despot and terrorist," but in 1924-after Lenin had proved him right-swore that he was the truest Leninist of all...
...The facts, readily confirmed by Chamberlin, Stewart or any other non-Communist history: (1) The revolt of the Czech Legion occurred in European Russia...
...And, if the garrison had been pro-Bolshevik in July, there is every reason to assume that Lenin would have taken power then...
...Arturo Labriola was neither a philosopher nor a Marxist, but a syndicalist...
...About the same time, the Right Socialist Revolutionaries tried to reassemble the dispersed Constituent Assembly and to form a rival government at Samara under the protection of the Czechs and Kolchak...
...A similar demonstration in favor of the Constituent Assembly took place the same day in Moscow...
...For a summary of the source materials, the reader can consult my Lenin biography, pp...
...The documents could be recognized at a glance as a clumsy fabrication...
...the Italian Marxist and philosophical essayist was Antonio Labriola...
...Equally false...
...the memoirs of Generals Ludendorff and Hoffmann) that the trip was arranged by Parvus, Erzberger, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau and Count Maltzan with the full endorsement of the German General Staff...
...There were no executions of workers in the period from February to October 1905...
...See Maxim Gorki's newspaper, Novaya Zhizn, January 7 (20), 1918...
...he actually inflates it...
...He largely accepts Trotsky's elastic views on "historical necessity" to rationalize the Soviet edifice of terror and oppression...
...Lenin and Trotsky nervously ordered Antonov-Ovseenko to disperse the demonstration if need be...
...Deutscher is, to be sure, quite objective with regard to Trotsky's surface defects, his prodigious vanity and what Lenin called his "too far-reaching self-confidence...
...The facts not supplied by Deutscher: The Russkaya Gazeta, which Trotsky edited in October-November 1905 in St...
...it was always frankly an organ for non-Socialist liberals...
...Trotsky became known as a journalist after writing for Iskra, a year later, but, nevertheless, was not taken seriously as a political thinker or theoretician before 1917, either in Russia or abroad...
...Trotsky led the Leninist Cheka troops which massacred the Kronstadt sailors whom he once described as "the pride of the Russian Revolution...
...The Government's charge against Lenin et al...
...He admits that the denunciation of the men of Kronstadt as "counter-revolutionary mutineers led by a White general appears to have been groundless...
...In discussing the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors against Bolshevik tyranny in March 1921, Deutscher no longer speaks of fictitious "White Guards" taking part in the fight, as he did in his Stalin biography...
...Trotsky, then 22, signed his articles "Antid Oto...
...Deutscher does say a few words about the forcible dissolution of the Constituent Assembly...
...We have it from the Soviet writer Demian Bedny that Stalin told the July marchers to demonstrate with their rifles...
...The elections to the Constituent Assembly, held after Lenin's coup, gave the Bolsheviks 9.8 million votes, and anti-Bolshevik Socialist parties more than 22 million...
...Now he writes that the insurgent sailors of the Red Navy "were led by anarchists...
...Alexandra Kollontai was never an editor of the New York Russian daily Novy Mir...
...The right-wing press had nothing to do with this...
...Certainly such understanding is not widespread when Julius Braunthal, Secretary of the Socialist International, recommends Deutscher's apologia to the world Socialist movement...
...Neither of them at this stage saw any conflict between Soviet constitutionalism and a Bolshevik dictatorship...
...A few years later, Lenin was dead and his "prophet armed" was quickly toppled by Stalin...
...Non-Bolshevik reports indicate that 100,000 people participated in the Petrograd demonstration...
...Here are some of the signposts of this approach: Deutscher tries to discredit the leaders and supporters of the democratic Provisional Government by charging falsely that they "wished to create security for landed property...
...This period marks the end of the first volume of Deutscher's biography...
...He does not reveal that freedom of the press was abolished in November 1917, and that in the following month the democratically elected municipal councils and the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants were dissolved...
...This reviewer lived in Irkutsk and was active in Social Democratic circles there in 1906-7...
...The Second Congress of Soviets, in fact, was boycotted by numerous local soviet?, and many delegates who were elected never reached Petrograd in time...
...In describing the preparations for the Communist coup, Deutscher says that Lenin and Trotsky "were, in a sense, Soviet constitutionalists...
...My dictionary defines "prophet" as "a spokesman for a god...
...Nor does Deutscher come to grips with the moral problem posed by Trotsky's career, the problem of ends and means...
...the Bolsheviks say they were "forced," "compelled" to take these actions to save "the revolution...
...Nor does he state that the Cheka-precursor of the GPU, NKVD and MVD-was created and had launched mass terror in December 1917...
...Trotsky agreed with him on this after the summer of 1917...
...Deutscher says, led a regiment to the meeting place "but found nothing to disperse," saying there were no more than 5,000 demonstrators...
...Trotsky and Deutscher have justified all these actions on the grounds of "historical necessity...
...Deutscher attempts to absolve the Bolshevik leaders of complicity in the Petrograd uprising of July 1917...
...The fact is that there were no White armies when the Cadet party was outlawed...
...Yet, not only does he fail to penetrate the legend Trotsky built around himself...
...Deutscher ignores not only the detailed record of the Provisional Government's official investigation (which names names, places, sums and banks), but also the direct testimony of Masaryk, Thomas, Sadoul and others, as well as the full-length exposition by Eduard Bernstein in the Berlin Vonvarls in 1920...
...Neither of these has ever coped with the detailed specifications of this indictment, although both show remarkable rhetorical agility...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 18
