Dear Editor
Dear Editor Trotsky Joel Carmichael's review of Trotsky's 1905 and The Great Debate Renewed ("Pen of the Revolution," NL, May 15) was excellent. His verdict, that Trotsky's character rather than...
...The intellectuals who continued to sympathize with the Russian Revolution after Stalin took over, only to be suddenly disillusioned when the true nature of his regime became evident, never understood the meaning of Thermidor...
...His triumph by terror, however, became a grave precedent and an enticing route to success, one which has haunted the world in a widening, increasingly well organized scope ever since...
...It is strange too that Lenin, who had insisted Russia was already a Socialist society immediately after the seizure of power in 1917 (Trotsky cites this with approval in his Lenin), should have waited for his deathbed to perceive that Stalin—the man he had put in charge of all personnel policy and administration—had become powerful...
...Silvio F. Senigallia asserts that the Christian Democrats "have supplied each Italian head of state for the past 25 years...
...He is Anthony Howard.—Ed...
...If Trotsky's genius was limited merely to the "abstract," as Carmichael puts it, why were so many countries afraid to allow him to enter as an exile...
...Tel Aviv Simon Budlyner Producers Co-ops Your April 17 special issue, "Coming Together—The Cooperative Way," was most interesting...
...Historic factors" must, of course, include human behavior...
...It seems to me that in view of the aid given to farmers' co-ops and small business by the Federal government, there is no basic reason for not extending similar assistance to producers' copartnerships or cooperatives...
...New York City Laszlo T. Kiss Joel Carmichael's judgment of Trotsky in his review of 1905 is truly amazing...
...The experiment in Yugoslavia is also designed along the same lines, and despite the considerable disagreement about how well it is functioning, producers cooperatism has appeal as a model for industrial democracy...
...Above all, after Stalin gained the power that permitted him to cast Trotsky out, why did he find it necessary to have Trotsky murdered abroad...
...I should have liked, however, to see a discussion of producers cooperatives...
...There is one especially important trait among the vastly different characteristics of Trotsky and Stalin that proved to be crucial at the climax of their colossal clash...
...Even those who are not enthused about his decisive role in the Bolshevik coup or his theoretical contributions (essentially superb but misconstrued abstractions heralding the age of totalitarianism), cannot escape the captivating attraction of his luminous, dynamic personality or the exciting drama of his being overshadowed and eliminated by his colorless rival, Stalin...
...Trotsky remarked that even had Lenin lived, unless a revolution had succeeded in Germany or elsewhere, he would have been thrown into jail, for this was the road the counterrevolution was taking in Russia...
...Einaudi, President from 1948-55, was a Liberal...
...Perhaps Carmichael should do a little more reading, particularly of the conversations between Lenin and Trotsky on leadership...
...Giuseppe Saragat, who served from 1964 until early this year, was a Socialist...
...Wrong Heads In "Election Eve in Italy" (NL...
...He was acutely aware of his mediocrity as a theoretician (amid the company of such intellectual potentates as Lenin, Buk-harin, Zinoviev and Trotsky himself) and this awareness protected him from taking undue risks and making fatal mistakes—a rewarding disposition that ultimately led to his banal but absolute victory: unlimited control over the Soviet state...
...Instead of "head of state," the sentence should have read "head of government": All of Italy's Premiers for the past quarter-century have been Christian Democrats...
...They have done infinite harm by thinking that their disillusionment was with Communism, and by persisting in pointing to Russia as a Communist society, when indeed it had been transformed into a fascist state...
...Thus, precisely because Trotsky's capacities were so formidable, his failure to react against the Bolshevik apparatus he had helped create is all the more striking...
...This would have the added value of providing a medium to combat the alienation of labor...
...For example, discussing who could succeed him if he were killed, Lenin said Trotsky was the only one who could...
...Only on his deathbed did Lenin finally realize what Stalin was doing to assume power...
...Stalin's fear of the tremendous influence of this man reveals his distinct disagreement with Carmichael's assessment...
...Had Kerensky's regime survived, the peerless Trotsky could have continued in the framework of liberal freedoms with oratorical splendor and (perhaps) constructive dissatisfaction...
...For the record, it should also be noted that in "Shifting 'Statesman'" ("Correspondents' Correspondence," NL, May 15) the new editor of the New Statesman was incorrectly identified, through a printer's error, as Anthony Howe...
...Neither of them could foresee the exact form in which this failure would come...
...consequently, he had a compulsion to express himself as a forceful speaker, prolific writer and original social thinker...
...Trotsky, like most brilliant men, was an extrovert...
...Washington, D.C...
...Stalin, on the other hand, was profoundly introverted...
...One of the main hindrances, of course, is the heavy capital requirements of business today...
...He was, to put the matter in better and clearer terms, a totally selfless individual with ideals for which he gave his life...
...Hence it might have been sensible not to dissolve the Constituent Assembly or exclude other Socialists and middle-class spokesmen from the Soviet government...
...As I pointed out in my review, the Russian revolution never was a true revolution...
...Having had a small hand in the formation of organizations to invest in small businesses, I would like to see an attempt made, even on a modest scale, to foster active worker participation in management...
...S. Visich That is correct...
...Only the future will tell us whose critical criteria cast the most light on this bygone literary world...
...Trotsky replied that he was a Jew and that this would make things difficult in a still backward Russia...
...Instead of treating Kott's influence on Brook objectively, he has given vent to his temper and to a bias against modern approaches to Shakespeare and the classics in general...
...By taking an untruth as his revolutionary mandate, Trotsky not only helped foist a myth on the world but debarred himself from effective action...
...Simon I read with astonishment John Simon's review of Peter Brook's King Lear ("The Screen Bestrides the Stage...
...To speak of the figure who, among so many other things, organized the Red Army from absolute nothingness into the force that defeated the white armies, with all their foreign aid, as a man whose downfall was due not to historic factors but to personality failures, is to show a complete misunderstanding of his life and times...
...Roslyn, Long Island Rudolph L. Weissman Vice President, W. E. Hutton & Co...
...As far as I recall, neither Luigi Einaudi nor Giuseppe Saragat were Christian Democrats...
...Weber still believes in...
...so long as Trotsky remained alive, Stalin quite properly felt a menace to his dictatorship...
...New York City Jack Weber Joel Carmichael replies...
...His verdict, that Trotsky's character rather than his ideas was the primary cause of his fall, indicates keen insight and admirable judgment concerning the most enigmatic historical "failure" of this mercurial century...
...He undermined his own destiny by helping to crush Russia's inchoate democracy and to open the path to the dark dungeons of totalitarian arbitrariness where he was easily overcome and defeated by the man who was the master of those surroundings...
...NL, December 28...
...At one time quite a few businesses in France were owned by the workers, particularly in the printing industry...
...John Stuart Mill was interested in the potential of this type of organization, as was Beatrice Webb, being influenced by Mill...
...By calling the famous Shakespearian researcher Jan Kott (now professor of drama at the New York State University in Stony Brook) a "foolish and arrogant . . . pseudoscholar" Simon merely insults himself...
...he was born to plot, cheat and so to win...
...Indeed, the great "fear" of Trotsky was part of the myth that I see Mr...
...in his own writings, Trotsky shows graphically that it was a putsch organized by a handful of people...
...It is perfectly true that Trotsky's methods did not extend to "nitty gritty politicking in the back rooms of power...
...Moreover, both Lenin and Trotsky were utterly convinced that without a revolution in the more advanced capitalist nations, the Russian Revolution was bound to fail...
...Richard J. Margolis is to be congratulated for his excellent coverage of a topic that has been rather neglected, at least in this country...
...A revolution elsewhere would, no doubt, have changed matters in Russia...
...Passive silence—¦ even for reasons of self-defense and survival —was unbearable for him...
...Perhaps the revival of Trotsky's works will serve to correct their misconception...
Vol. 55 • June 1972 • No. 13
