The Cunning of History

...Aware that Trotsky's predictions about the development of the American economy were "a bust," he nonetheless refuses to say that Trotsky was wrong...

...Few men have exhibited such courage and devotion to principle under sustained persecution, and paid so dearly with the lives of those whom they loved...

...While his common sense told him that the Revolution had been "betrayed," his theory of the Soviet Thermidor attributed that betrayal to factors beyond Stalin's control and therefore made his use of the term "betrayal" absurd...

...The opposite of 1.) is 3.): "It seems implausible to assume that the October Revolution would not have occurred without Lenin...

...If it turns out that taking hostages, deceiving others, violating one's pledged word and framing political opponents is necessary to win victory, then it is history which is cruel, the iron law of the class struggle which is ruthless toward its victims—and not the Communists, who are merely the human instruments by which the historically inevitable comes to pass...

...Unfortunately, Leon Trotsky could only occasionally permit himself a lapse from doctrinal orthodoxy...

...Those who know Trotsky only from his political writings will be surprised at this portrait of a man with a rich and intense emotional life—a man who could be tender and sometimes foolish toward family and friends, despairing and hopeful, aware of even slight nuances in the susceptibilities of those around him...

...Dewey accepted Trotsky's profession of (ideal) utilitarianism...

...The struggle between the personal and the political pervades Trotsky's deepest emotions...

...for the Soviet government such as it is today, including that government which has banished me and deprived me of Soviet citizenship...

...For he was refusing to extend the basis of that opposition by embracing elements outside the Party, even if they were Socialists and workers, or elements outside the working class, even if they were peasants...

...It is a life to whose dimensions only a great poet or dramatist can do justice...

...For all his reflections on the past, he kept his eyes tightly closed to the fact that his critique, written long before he had become a Bolshevik, of the Leninist revision of Marx—which substituted a monolithic party dictatorship over the proletariat for Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat—both predicted and explained what transpired in Russia after October...

...Deutscher is properly outraged at this doctrinal heresy and undertakes to set Trotsky right...

...And because it denies the possibility of genuine alternatives in history and derives morality from the "objective" and "necessary" laws of the class struggle...

...This "law of the class struggle" is conceived as an ineluctable force compelling events toward the inevitable triumph of the revolutionary Party...

...The rest of Deutschere discussion of this point illustrates his unfamiliarity not only with the requirements of empirical confirmation but with those of formal inference...

...Deutscher does not seem willing to subject any of his predictions to empirical tests...

...Although he accurately presents the gist of Dewey's trenchant criticism of Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours, a brochure on the ethics of Bolshevik-Leninism, Deutscher shows that he does not understand it...

...Only the metaphysics differ...

...The principal flaw I am referring to is Deutschere superMarxist orthodoxy—really his Leninism—which transcends even the orthodoxy of Trotsky...

...Whether Trotsky's prognostications . . . will look as unreal toward the end of this century as they did at its middle," he writes, "must, of course, remain an open question...

...Here Trotsky's fidelity to the facts triumphs over his allegiance to dogma...

...With scornful finality he writes: "If it seems implausible to assume that the October Revolution could have occurred without Lenin, this is surely not as implausible as is the opposite assumption that a brick falling from a roof, in Zurich, early in 1917 could have altered the fortunes of mankind in this century...

...Anyone who challenged the dictatorship of the Party was as much a class enemy to Trotsky as to Stalin...

...The struggle was literally between one man and the regime of the largest nation on earth, but that man was a Titan...

...Yet for all his daring, Trotsky never considered challenges to the apocalyptic economic mystique of Marx, or to the dialectical materialist ontology of Engels...

...The father who, in his exile, could contemplate suicide in the desperate hope that perhaps Stalin would thereby be induced to spare his son, Sergei, does not hesitate to denounce his other son, Lyova, for "slovenliness bordering on treachery" merely for the failure, through no fault of his own, to forward documents in time...

...Yet throughout his book...

...Deutscher's Marxism is...

...But this "might" implies "might not...

...Apparently the predictions are not at fault—they follow from Marx's economic analysis...

...Consequently, his plea for democracy was not a plea for the democratic rights of all workers and peasants, nor a plea for the democratic right of other working-class parties...

...The result is pitiful...

...One wonders what all those liberals and progressives who endorsed the Trials now make of them, how they account for the roles they so willingly played in defaming those who insisted on examining the evidence...

...These tied him to the support and defense of the Soviet Union as "a workers' state" even when it was invading neighboring states (Poland and Finland) and shooting down their workers and peasants...

...In the case of the Communists, these decisions are made not by considering the actual effects of means on ends but, at most, on the prospects of victory for their Party...

...He might well have added, for the government which has murdered tens of millions of its own workers and peasants...

...The responsibility for the use of any means is then thrust on the so-called "law of the class struggle," and is therefore not taken by the human actors themselves, who are aware of what they are doing...

...A falling brick is not the only event which could have removed Lenin...

...By refusing to make a functional analysis of terms like "state...

...the Church or the Party is the only authorized interpreter of the Divine Command or the Historical Need...

...Deutschere own orthodoxy renders his moral condemnation of Stalin inconsequential as well an unintelligible...

...They describe their actions as if they were merely natural events, determined by an objective law of the class struggle which they discover but do not create...

...Trotsky is in no need of rehabilitation by Stalin's heirs and erstwhile admirers, either within or without the Soviet Union...

...But it falls short of greatness because it lacks a touch of the sacred fire which burns so fiercely in its subject...

...Even in 1940, Deutscher admits, although the number of workers in the Soviet Union had become huge, "the workers' direct influence on political life was immeasurably less than it had been in the last years of Czarism, not to speak of 1917...

...Any means are justified if they lead to the victory of the Party...

...For all its merits, however...

...Since third alternatives are not viable in most situations, Deutscher would have to approve, however reluctantly, a Communist invasion of Western Europe even if most Western European workers were destroyed in the process, for the very same reasons that he ultimately approved, after first deploring, the Soviet violation of Finland's rights to self-determination as an action strategically necessary for the preservation of "the workers' state...

...By making a fetish of the legal relations of production, and insisting therefore that the Communist regime...

...On the contrary, it is up to Deutscher to show that someone else would have appeared in Lenin's absence...

...The assumption is plainly question-begging, as is the assumption that in an economy of material plenty all class conflicts and even the state will disappear...

...To Preobrazhensky he wrote: "You know better than I do that had Lenin not managed to come to Petrograd in April 1917, the October Revolution would not have taken place...

...As a biographer, Deutscher's achievement is highly creditable...

...Deutscher, like Trotsky, is unaware that, for all his moral indignation over Stalin, he is saddled with a theory of history which make such indignation unintelligible...

...He knows how to point up a story by highlighting significant detail...

...Nor am I referring to his vindictive and sneering references to Boris Souvarine and others who, not content with criticizing the crimes of Stalin, were morally and intellectually moved to criticize the system which made those crimes possible...

...He makes effective use of historical analogies...

...But whether the victory of the Party, achieved by these means, will in fact lead to the declared or professed ends is never considered...

...He was also willing to sanction the use of political means to further desired ends in concrete historical situations...

...And if 1.) is true, 3.) must be false...

...When it came to analyzing contemporary political events where the empirical data were controlling and the terminological pieties about the underlying forces and inevitable goals of history were irrelevant, he was without peer...

...There was a meeting after the sessions were over...

...Yet together with Lenin, and despite his theory which stressed "the ripeness is all," he showed that indeed sometimes "the readiness is all...

...He weaves together the personal and political events in Trotsky's life history so skillfully that the reader is always aware of the protagonist as a complex and suffering human being, and not merely as the arrogant incarnation of a program...

...Not only did he predict that the middle classes would disappear and become "pauperized," if not "proletarianized," but that the New Deal will culminate "in ferocious capitalist reaction and a devastating explosion of [American] imperialism . . . directed into the same channels as the policy of fascism...

...He was like a great medieval scholar or Talmudist whose brilliant insights, imaginative reach and logical ingenuity were brought to bear on secondary matters...

...Deutschere biography is flawed at its heart...

...But Dewey then showed that, in specific historical situations, Leninists do not justify the use of their own political means in relation to their actual effect on the good of man or distinguish them from other possible means...

...It is history which is at fault for its tardiness in living up to them...

...It also overlooks the possibility that the democratic transformation of capitalism into a welfare economy may achieve plenty more quickly without sacrificing freedom...

...His real view of Lenin's role, at times muffled in the History, is perhaps more sharply stated both in his letter to E. A. Preobrazhensky, written in 1928...

...All Deutscher can do is declare that "If neither Lenin nor Trotsky had been there, someone else might (sicl) have come to the fore...

...But no such explanation is necessary...

...He was at his worst, for example, in the Introduction he wrote to The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx, in which his blind application of the Marxist schema to a confident prediction of America's future had disastrous and somewhat comical results...

...Even sadder, this is the same man whose heart, encased in triple-plated dogmas about history, never seemed to be moved by the agonies of those whose lives he had earlier written off as part of the cost of the class struggle...

...the final volume of his trilogy on the life of Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher concludes one of the most remarkable biographies of the 20th century...

...The logical and psychological analogy with the religious fanatics who believe they are doing the work of the Lord is exact...

...In this respect, his procedure is characteristic...

...But the actual decisions concerning means are always made by historical agents...

...Deutscher snaps at Trotsky's heels to prevent him from jettisoning this fetish of a "workers' state," which at best could only become a state for workers administered by Communist shepherds who, of course, know better what is good for the sheep than the sheep themselves...

...One does not need to accept Dewey's own ethical view, which stresses the continuity between ends and means, to recognize that his criticism of Trotsky's position is definitive and annihilating...

...He would never admit that what the Communists were doing in the Soviet Union was what the theory of historical materialism had declared it impossible to do...

...Trotsky was a thinker of far greater intellectual power than Lenin, who was a master of political improvisation with a perfect sense of timing, though crude and inept in handling fundamental ideas...

...Trotsky subscribed to a theory of history which excluded the possibility of heroic, event-making men in history...

...In all of Trotsky's writings, despite his power of imagination, there is no expression of concern or compassion for what happened to the children of the "class enemy," to the dependents of those who were shot "like partridges" after Kronstadt, to the "wild children"—every one of them a human tragedy—or the children of the "kulaks" transported in cattle cars to the wastes of Siberia under conditions which cattle never had to endure...

...Only when Trotsky found himself cast into the same historical dustbin that he had cast others was his faith in the logic of history somewhat disturbed...

...As Deutscher describes the pattern of infamy which Stalin imposed on the Soviet Union, the mind reels once more in incredulity and horror...

...The good of man is inadequately described by Trotsky as the "increase of man's power over nature and decrease of man's power over man...

...History has no record of a human being similarly circumstanced who fought against such odds and with such limited resources...

...Practically to the day of his death Trotsky could say: "Before class enemies I assume full responsibility...

...It is history which casts human beings into its dustbin, not Lenin or Trotsky...

...Whatever else the Marxist theory in any of its versions explains, it leaves unexplained the grandeur and the tragedy of his life...

...An indeterminately large number of contingent events could have removed him...

...even under Stalinist terror, is historically "more progressive" than any other democratic society with a capitalist or mixed economy, Deutscher—even more than Trotsky, who at least harbored some fleeting doubts—is compelled to extenuate in advance any horrible crime committed by a Communist regime as a lesser evil if opposition to that evil threatens the continuity of its system of production...

...Leon Trotsky's personality dwarfs his ideas, as large and important as these ideas are...

...in reality, composed of a set of completely unverifiable hypotheses, and is thus comparable to the religious belief that God will see to it that things come out right in the end...

...The notion of "a workers' state" which is not controlled or influenced by workers is either a deception or a flight into mysticism...

...The greatest irony of all, the views that he fashioned in defense of the Soviet dictatorship against the critical revolt of his own disciples, may yet save the Soviet Union from the very grave into which its guardians hurled him by the hand of an assassin...

...For all his grave errors, both as a man and as a thinker, Trotsky today looms larger than ever on the horizons of historical action and political thought...

...The best illustration of this is the discussion, in his History of the Russian Revolution, of the role of Lenin in the October Revolution...

...But if there are any Deutschers around at the end of the century, will they not say the very same thing—namely, that it is an open question whether the predictions will not hold for the end of the 21st century...

...it was only a plea that his own faction, rather than Stalin's, be the one to administer the dictatorship of the Party...

...He demands of those who accept the view that Lenin's presence was responsible for October to prove that if Lenin had not been there, it would have been impossible for someone else to have done his work...

...I am not referring to errors of fact, which are surprisingly few...

...It made his appeals for democracy and freedom, which became louder as the pitch of internal Soviet error increased, sound disingenuous...

...It is a moving and evocative study of a heroic figure, a master of the deed and of the word, whose actions and ideas deeply affected the lives of millions and whose influence has not yet run its course...

...However much Trotsky abominated the methods of Stalin, he was nonetheless prepared to welcome Stalin as a comrade-in-arms rather than make common cause with those who opposed not only Stalin but the dictatorship of the Party...

...Most human beings sense their kinship with each other in grief and death and great suffering...

...But the opposite of 1.) "It seems implausible to assume that the October Revolution could have occurred without Lenin," is not 2.) "a brick falling from a roof, in Zurich, early in 1917 could have altered the fortunes of mankind...

...before the History, and in his French diary, written after...

...Something is wrong with a political passion which blinds one to what is universal in human experience...

...Trotsky himself, when not in the grip of his unexamined dogmas about historical materialism, had a flair for empirical analysis...

...Deutschere biography has many merits...

...Trotsky had protested that the charge of Bolshevik immoralism came only from those who believed in a world of eternal and absolute moral truths, in transcendent ends that could have no commerce with the means used to achieve them...

...Despite Stalin's mistakes and crimes, the logic—or illogic—of Deutscher's position would compel him to support the Kremlin in any adventure against the democratic West...

...In both cases, the good is what the Lord commands or what History demands...

...property" and "workers' state," and therefore refusing to judge the character of the state by what it does, how it does it, and for whom, Trotsky was hampering his own opposition to Stalin...

...With transcendent naivete, Deutscher assumes that the "workers' state," even if it functions like an oriental despotism, will some day generate an economy of plenty which will usher in a New Jerusalem of freedom and democracy...

...This is arrant heresy to orthodox Marxism, for it makes "the most important social event in human history" contingent upon an historically chance (not uncaused) event...

...Hidden from the public eye, Trotsky's grief for his children and friends was Biblical in its integrity...

...What was lacking was an appropriate measure of compassion for those who had suffered when Trotsky himself had shared the seat of power...

...But if we consider the complex, disjunctive proposition that expresses all the possible contingent events which could have removed Lenin, then if 1.) is affirmed, the disjunctive proposition is no less plausible than 1...

...The notion that some kinds of victory may not be worth winning is completely foreign to them...

...Again and again, one gets the impression that the Communists, in commenting on their actions, seem to stand outside the realm in which personal moral decisions are made...

...In the case of the central events described in The Prophet Outcast—the Moscow Trials and the subsequent purges, with their multitudes of innocent victims—Trotsky was, from the outset, the accuser rather than the accused in the minds of those who cared even a little about justice and truth...

...Logically, Deutscher has to prove that someone "would have" come to the fore rather than "might have," and he does not come within a mile of doing so...

...Deutscher is mistaken, though, in asserting that Trotsky never met John Dewey outside the public sessions of the International Commission of Inquiry into the truth about the Moscow Trials...

...The fateful consequences of Trotsky's dogmatically held belief that the legal relations of production uniquely determined the character and culture of a society were manifest in his political program and pronouncements...

...It is implausible that any one of them could have this effect...

...Until he was killed by the hand of a GPU assassin, the Kremlin feared him more than it feared Hitler...

...He impatiently dismisses Dewey's argument as neither new nor original...

...In the context of revolutionary literature, though, it was new, original and valid...

...Yet this is the same man who permitted the coarse-grained but wily Stalin, whose measure he early took (although he failed to discern Stalin's capacity for growth in evil), to elbow him off the stage of history...