Pen of the Revolution

...In truth, the 1905 St Petersburg soviet, of which Trotsky was a leader and which his book extols with all due modesty as to his own role, was a historical abortion It lasted only 52 days, it was little more than a debating session with generally incompetent performers, it accomplished nothing and was closed down by the police without a show of force A reading of the St Petersburg press of that period reveals that by itself the uprising would not have had any effect on Tsarism beyond, perhaps, accelerating slightly the liberalization already taking place Revived in February 1917, the 1905 soviet was merely a camouflage for the Bolsheviks, who snatched all semblance of power from it on the night of October 25...

...Yet in a different context Trotsky was perfectly willing to disregard the primacy of "social forces" and to explain political events by the role of that old "bourgeois' standby-personality Repeatedly, he attributed the success of the October Revoluion to one man, Lenin, without whom the great "historical occasion" might have been "let slip " Moreover, after making a ritual reference to the historic inevitability of that event, he asserted that Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev could have undone the Revolution had he and Lenin not been present...

...Trotsky was totally committed to the Marxist authenticity of the October Putsch as an installment of the world revolution Even at the moment of his bitterest criticism of Stalinism, he could not attack its foundations without sacrificing his own claim to historical greatness To plaster over the yawning gap between Marxist theory and his own euphoria Trotsky was obliged to stoop to remarkable vulgarities, such as his bland contention that "capitalism snapped at its weakest link" in Russia-a contradiction of the classical Marxist tenet that the revolution could break out only in an advanced industrial country...

...Consequently, there was no "struggle for power' , Trotsky was excluded without any trouble He only posed a public relations problem, for he remained a celebrity in the eyes of the masses, sharing the mystique of the October Revolution so carefully cultivated by Bolshevik mythology...

...Years before, Lenin had said that anyone trying to reach socialism without democracy would bring about "monstrous" things The comment, soon forgotten, was prophetic Trotsky himself was most at home in a democratic milieu, where his personal virtuosity, independent of organizational ties, could magnetize multitudes Twitched off the stage by a party he could no longer influence, he had no option but to wait for history to rectify its own mistakes Thus, as the real Bolshevik Revolution picked up momentum in the late '20s, slaughtering millions of peasants m its breakneck program of collectivization and industrialization, Trotsky was left spiritually hamstrung He was, in fact, thrust into the passivity he had formerly sneered at in the Mensheviks, becoming a kibitzer in the arena of history...

...Once forced into exile, Trotsky's intellectual sleight of hand was directed by his ever more desperate need for revolution to break out on a titanic scale elsewhere He could be rescued only by some political landslide that would rediess the imbalance created by Lenin's jumping the gun on history...

...Ramparts editor David Horowitz seems to imply that Marxism is totally irrelevant to America's problems today, at least as they are viewed by the New Left-its penchant for Marxist rhetoric apparently notwithstanding For an "ample background" to the debate over Trotsky's thought, Horowitz recommends the works of E H Carr and Isaac Deutscher, both of whom he calls, with astonishing naivete, "free from polemical distortion and idolatry ". Whatever the merits of these two scholars, objectivity is not among them Carr, who holds that history is fabricated by the victors, sees fit to explain ferocious disputes by means of documents contrived and published years afterward by those very victors Deutscher, who is quoted copiously throughout the book, is particularly endearing because of his combination of hero-worship for Trotsky and determination to defeat him in argument Like most Marxist historians, including Trotsky himself, Deutscher's Hegelian infatuation with ideas makes it almost impossible to discern what is really happening to the individuals who exemplify those ideas...

...The first publication in English of 1905, Trotsky's early account of the St Petersburg uprising of that year, which Lenin called the "dress rehearsal" for 1917, affords a fresh look at the revolutionist as a young man Trotsky The Great Debate Renewed, a short collection of polemical essays by Marxist academicians, shows him in a much later incarnation as a leading Socialist theoretician Edited by Nicolas Krasso, a refugee from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 now lecturing at London University, the book uses Trotsky as the axis for the great debate" of the title...

...When it came to explaining his own undoing, however, Trotsky reverted to his grandly tranquil, impersonal contemplation of irresistible social forces His voluminous writings cast less light on why this unusually active man became so passive within the Communist organization during the '20s than is contained in one brief remark by Angelica Balabanoff, full of the penetration so often shown by women in analyzing male behavior He was, she said, too "weak and unsure of himself ". Of course, the matter is more complex than that When he wrote 1905, at the age of 27, Trotsky had already carved a niche for himself in world history By 1922, when the book was reprinted in an expanded Russian edition, he could sincerely imagine his career to be an ascension paralleling the surge of the Marxist world revolution That this proved to be a delusion was the tragedy of his life As we know today, Stalin's apparatus was already emerging, unforeseen and uncontested, m retrospect, its development highlights both Trotsky's ineptitude as an organization man and the collapse of his ideas...

...The same fault is exhibited by nearly all the contributors to The Great Debate Renewed, especially in their discussion of the so-called struggle for power" within the Russian Communist party during the '20s Obsessed with ideology, they fail to see that Trotsky's tall had less to do with his theories than his character The most cursory non-Marxist examination of the period, however, finds that he was really quite incapable of "struggling" at all He was hampered not only by the unpopularity of his ideas, but by his far more fundamental inability to command the allegiance of his peers and form a faction His success as a communicator appears to have been limited to the abstract-in speeches before large meetings and writings for periodicals-and did not extend to nitty-gritty politicking in the back rooms of power...

...Pen of the Revolution 1905 By Leon Trotsky Translated by Anya Bostock Random House 488 pp $1 5 00 Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed Edited by Nicolas Krasso New Critics Press 191 pp $8 95 Reviewed by Joel Carmichael Author, "An Illustrated History of Russia," "A Short History of the Russian Revolution," and a forthcoming biography of Trotsky Eulogized in a new play by Peter Weiss, soon to be portrayed on film by Richard Burton, and the subject of a spate of recent books, Leon Trotsky is currently enjoying something of a revival Long a preeminent Marxist writer, he has become for many an emblem of revolutionary "purity," untarnished by identification with any existing social order His remarkable literary talent-marked by a slashing style and epigrammatic clarity-remains as evident today as when Lenin's wife dubbed him "The Pen " And time has only added to the glamor of this central figure in the overthrow of the Tsarist empire who was elevated to martyrdom by a Stalinist assassin...

...Trotsky himself scarcely realized what was happening until long after Lenin's death, his ineffectuality in personal relations no doubt inclining him all the more to overestimate the role of ideas Significantly, he failed even to recognize the importance of Stalin's position as General Secretary, with control over personnel and procedures throughout the parvenu government...

...But psychological considerations such as these, compelling as they may be to the nonideological historian in assessing Trotsky's thought, are not to be found m The Great Debate Renewed Trotsky's own book, though dated, still pulses with the vitality of a remarkable man In contrast, the essays of Krasso et al, with their closely reasoned argumentation about pedantic irrelevancies, are devoid of life...

...In his introduction to the essays...