Trotsky's Account of 1917
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WRITERS and WRITING Trotsky's Account of 1917 The History of the Russian Revolution. By Leon Trotsky. Reviewed by Michigan. 1,333 pp. $12.50. William, Henry Chamberlin It was a happy idea of...
...But Trotsky w as the superb tactician...
...But it was Trotsky who had most to do with the planning of the details...
...The feverish weeks which preceded the actual uprising were, for Trotsky, his finest hour...
...The situation became more and more unmanageable...
...Indeed the stakes were so great, the consequences of the Communist victory were so portentous that almost no historian, even one who strove for complete factual accuracy, could altogether repress some subjective feeling about the result...
...the power of the Provisional Government became more and more shadowy...
...And, of all the men who were active in undermining and finally overthrowing the democratic Provisional Government, Trotsky alone possessed enough of the combined talents of historian and journalist to create a living record of the process of disintegrating upheaval which he did so much to set in motion and keep rolling...
...this made it much easier for the Bolsheviks to win them over...
...responsible to no one and, more and more, obeyed by no one...
...Trotsky shows with retrospective glee how much of the essential process of insurrection was carried out under the guise of "defending" the rights of the soviet...
...The "dual power" of the Provisional Government and the soviets, awkward enough when there was a moderate Socialist majority in the soviets, was positively fatal when the largest soviets were under the control of a party determined to destroy the Provisional Government and substitute its own dictatorship, masked behind the slogan "All power to the soviets...
...Lenin was the master strategist of the Bolshevik coup d'etat: as Trotsky says, "if the Bolsheviks had not seized the power in October and November, in all probability they would not have seized it at all...
...And time did not wait...
...But his son most probably and his grandson almost certainly was a smug, well-fed, privileged bureaucrat, similar to most of the characters in Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone...
...Both before and after the preparation of the history, he expressed the strongest condemnation of what he called the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution under Stalin...
...fascinating in its recapture of the atmosphere and psychology of the turbulent days it describes...
...The idealism is a passing phase...
...This, incidentally, is a preview of the tactics of carrying out aggression behind a pretense of "defense" which the Soviet Union has often carried out, most conspicuously at the present time in the Middle East...
...But from the beginning there was a power vacuum...
...Trotsky was well read in history...
...Trotsky became President of the Petrograd Soviet, and in that capacity his role in planning the actual seizure of power on November 7 was very great...
...Trotsky's monumental history reflected his own personality...
...Stalin was not prominently identified with any of the decisive moves...
...After General Kornilov had failed in a clumsy attempt to oust Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government, there was a sharp swing to the extreme Left...
...This is what Trotsky, still living in the intoxicating memory of 1917 and encased in the armor of dogmatism, could not and would not see...
...The soldiers of the Petrograd garrison were most anxious not to be sent to the front...
...Here was the perfect historical background for a dictatorship...
...This is why Milovan Djilas, who carried his disillusionment to its logical end, stands out morally and intellectually as a more courageous and far-sighted man...
...Events might have followed a happier course if there had been a transfer of power from the fallen autocracy to a representative parliament which would have commanded respect and authority...
...Trotsky composed his history after Stalin had banished him from the Soviet Union...
...Besides firing the crowds with his oratory, he took advantage of the special elements in the situation which made for an easy and almost bloodless conquest of power...
...A dual power came into existence, with soviets, hastily improvised councils which represented mainly factories and military units, exerting many executive functions while the Provisional Government hung more or less in the air...
...Not that Trotsky has written an objective story or an infallible interpretation of the turmoil, the collapse of old and the emergence of new social and economic relations that took place over the vast expanse of the former Russian Empire in 1917...
...the dictatorship is permanent...
...It is brilliant, polemical, studiously and conspicuously unfair to political opponents, swift as lightning in some characterizations and descriptive phrases, long-winded in arguing fine points of Marxist theology, exasperating in its assured dogmatism...
...The Bolsheviks gained the majority in the two largest soviets, in Pet-rograd and Moscow...
...Something is always added to a record of great events when they are described by a leading actor, as the Second World War, for instance, has been described by Winston Churchill...
...What he failed to recognize, either in the history or in anything he wrote until Stalin's agent murdered him in Mexico, is that this bureaucratic degeneration was not the fault of one man, but of the whole Communist theory and method, with its systematic suppression of all forms of human liberty...
...The veteran first-generation Communist, with a background of a hunted, poverty-stricken life, much of it spent in prison or exile, sometimes was a self-sacrificing idealist, a fanatic of his cause...
...The tragedy of the government of liberals and moderate socialists that took over the administration of Russia after the overthrow of the Tsar in March was that, with all its good intentions and the honorable records of most of its members in the struggle for Russian freedom, it lacked the ability to govern...
...It was quite helpless to stem or divert into orderly channels the popular movements that were sweeping the country: the movement to end the war, the peasant drive for land, the workers' call for control of the factories, the separatist movements that gained momentum among the minor nationalities...
...But the war made it difficult to call such an assembly at once...
...William, Henry Chamberlin It was a happy idea of the University of Michigan Press to make available again (now in one volume) Trotsky's record of the tumultuous eight months in Russia in 1917 which began with the downfall of the Tsar and ended with the triumph of the Bolsheviks...
...He should have known that the idea of a "pure" elite exercising supreme power over the destinies of their fellow-citizens indefinitely is a supreme fallacy, like the idea of the end justifying the means...
...The Duma, the national legislature which existed under the old regime, was elected on such a narrow franchise that it could not be considered representative of all the people...
...The idea was that a Constituent Assembly, or constitutional convention, would be elected on a basis of universal suffrage and determine Russia's future political structure...
...It was Lenin, in hiding because a warrant was out for his arrest, who put the weight of his authority behind a call for insurrection and drove through a resolution committing the Bolsheviks to this course in the face of some open objection and considerable misgivings in the Party Central Committee...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 46
