Trotsky's Struggle for Power

...The Prophet Armed, which recounts Trotskv's career up to 1921, and in the present volume, he has transcended his sympathies...

...he could not descend to the mundane political arena and personally maneuver for endorsement by the narrow-minded mortals who ran the Party...

...He will yet emerge as the most complex, interesting and tragic figure among those three, a fitting subject for a monumental work of the historical art...

...It is hard to escape the conclusion that Trotsky failed in the "struggle for power" because he was not struggling for power...

...When in the following years he could have led, as his rivals did, only by imposing himself on the movement or a faction, he became a lone wolf instead...

...Deutscher's real focus here is the development of the Communist movement and its guiding principles...

...It represented the eternal contradiction between the ideal and the actual, the exceptional and the commonplace in human affairs...

...Petersburg Soviet...

...His use of annotation is erratic and often pointless, as where he cites "The Trotsky Archives" without mention of the particular document...

...Reviewed by Robert Vincent Daniels Associate Professor of History, University of Vermont LEON TROTSKY will live in history with Lenin and Stalin as one of the three great personalities brought forth by the Bolshevik Revolution...

...By then it was too late, and the last struggle was a vain anti-climax...

...Such are the people who become prophets...

...Trotsky's tragedy—to be condemned by the movement he helped found—was more than his own failure...

...But Trotsky the man is no longer at the center of Deutscher's stage as he was in the first volume: it is rather Trotsky the theoretician, Trotsky as the protagonist of ideological controversy...

...It was never resolved, and his powers in neither sphere could achieve their fullest realization...

...When the revolutionary movement turned to him in 1905 he made his memorable entrance into history as leader of the St...

...in a work of basic historical research such as Deutscher has undertaken, the whole process of reasoning from documentary fact to philosophical conclusion must be made clear to the reader, or the logical structure will sag and fall...

...Steeped in Marxian preconceptions, he is not able to look at the Bolshevik Revolution with the long view of the outsider...

...with Trotsky, he has never lost hope that the "Bolshevik idea and tradition...

...His life is a salutary reminder that the Communist movement which he served was not cast all of one piece of inhuman deviltry, but is the product of human intelligence and human error, of hate and devotion, a headlong venture of blind men who thought they saw all...

...With no more than verbal gestures of self-defense he took the abuse handed him by the Stalin-Zinoviev machine in 1924 and 1925, and sat unfathoming on the sidelines when Stalin crushed Zinoviev in the winter of 1925-26...

...In 1922, as the Communists faced the prosaic though complex tasks of reconstruction without the presence of their ailing chief, Trotsky was lost, unable to win the confidence of the highly fallible mediocrities who surrounded him in the Party leadership...

...Trotsky's whole life was shaped by the tension between thought and action...

...He is a prisoner of the Marxist myth of proletarian virtue and of the Leninist myth that the Revolution was "proletarian" in its mysterious essence and hence the embodiment of this virtue...

...Deutscher's involvement in theory bespeaks a certain frame of mind to which his manner of handling historical data also testifies in part...

...who as a young member of the Polish Communist party became committed to Trotsky's cause in the 1920s, and is at present engaged in the first full-scale biographical study of Trotsky ever to be attempted...

...It is to Deutscher's credit as an historian of imagination and integrity that in his first volume...

...When the agitation of his supporters and the provocations of his opponents moved him to take a stand in the fall of 1923, he collapsed and withdrew under the cover of what I strongly suspect must have been a psychosomatic illness...

...His will to resist and his courage in the face of all odds, such as he displayed in exile, were truly heroic, but when challenged to fight single-handedly for his own advantage within the movement, Trotsky was impotent...

...With all his limitations of perspective and presentation, Deutscher has a keen appreciation for the flow of events—he knows what happened, if not why, and he avoids the tone of retrospective inevitability that political commentators so easily fall into...

...lent him the support of a new co-leader, did Trotsky once again show his old fighting spirit...

...and his own righteousness avails him not when they resolve to cast him out...

...Only on one condition could Trotsky mobilize his dazzling powers of leadership: when he had a co-leader to link him with the rank and file of his revolutionary movement and lend him the tenacity to fight despite his doubts...

...The commitment to action fettered his thought, while the reflective impulse crippled his resolution on more than one crucial occasion...

...When his golden opportunity to assume Lenin's mantle came in the early months of 1923, Trotsky was paralyzed by indecision...

...Working in this realm of abstract political analysis, he succumbs at last to the weaknesses of involvement...

...Through the eyes of Trotsky and his supporters, Deutscher discerns at least in part the true nature of Soviet socialism—a bureaucratic alternative to capitalism in which the workers and peasants are systematically exploited by the police state in order to accumulate industrial capital...

...among his notable contributions are his vignettes of Trotsky's rivals and supporters, and his pioneering reconstruction of the story of Opposition politics while Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata in 1928...

...He demands of his fellows intellectual and moral integrity which they cannot attain...

...Woodrow Wilson is another in recent memory...

...Deutscher has fashioned an exciting portrait of the human Trotsky which frankly shows his failings of character and judgment as well as his brilliance, his incredible energy and his catholicity of interests...

...Deutscher displays a natural literary talent in his descriptions of people and events...

...Exceptionally talented, he attempted too much even for one thus endowed: He was one of the rare individuals whose natural powers tempt them to try to be both the man of profound thought and the man of decisive action...

...As a Trotskyist, Deutscher of course knows that the Revolution went wrong, but he cannot give a clear explanation why...

...Trotsky was a man of superhuman energy and intellect, so brilliant that by himself he could not reach down to an ordinary human following and lead them...

...As in many of his current political essays, Deutscher does not always distinguish between fact and conjecture...

...Trotsky was never a coward, but he could only fight enemies who wore a different uniform—the Tsar, anti-Communists, Stalinists in the years after his exile when Trotsky was convinced they had betrayed the Revolution...

...This point is far from trivial...

...Trotsky was ever the brilliant lieutenant, but could not be more...

...We find in this volume the effect on the Communist party of its retention of power without popular support: the inexorable logic of one-party dictatorship turning into one-man dictatorship: the theoretical soul-searching and the bitter debates which developed over Russia's economic difficulties: the dawning perception by the Opposition through their dark Marxist glasses that Soviet Russia was developing a managerial ruling class to fit the realities of industrialization...

...allying with him in 1926 and 1927...

...Only when Zinoviev...

...anchored in the social structure of the Soviet Union" will soon recover and make virtue prevail in the Communist movement...

...He was incapable of this...

...The myth of the proletarian revolution dies hard...

...We have passages which read as though Deutscher had his tape recorder planted under the Central Committee conference table—yet nary a footnote...

...On Trotsky the man in the galling period of indecision, frustration, vain struggle and repudiation after 1921, Deutscher has done admirable work—objective, probing and balanced...

...they cannot live with him...

...Above all, Deutscher justly stresses the contradiction between "the power and the dream," and the fatal dilemma faced by all the Communist opposition factions when they tried to reconcile the machinery of Party dictatorship with the vision of proletarian freedom and equality...

...Trotsky, the thinker as well as the actor, really believed in the ends as well as the means, but he failed, just as the Athenian who could not meet the challenge which the Spartan posed on his own terms...

...He is entranced with the vision of Trotsky in 1917 marching in "triumphant har-mony with his time—and hence he must blind himself to the pitiful incongruence of the "Marxist" revolution in Russia and the tragic destiny that faces any society where violent revolution becomes the only possible path...

...Outstanding among the survivors of this group is Isaac Deutscher...

...He is more concerned with making points than with the clear marshalling of hard facts, and while the latter desir-eratum can sink into pedantry, it must not be ignored...

...The prophet is doomed to a tragic end, in his own lifetime at least...

...In 1917 Lenin gave him what amounted to co-leadership of the Bolshevik party, and Trotsky rose to the occasion as the great executive of revolution...

...The heroic proportions of Trotsky the man are strikingly evidenced in the hold which his leadership and his memory have had over those loyal followers of caliber high enough to appreciate him...