The Tragedy of a True Believer

...This was his undoing...

...His idea of campaigning against the Trio,' Carmichael observes, "boiled down to the issuance of a series of rational arguments presented to an amorphous audience...

...Indifferent to all matters organizational, he was widely resented by the Bolshevik rank-and-file...

...Yet if he was the victim of "vast social forces," did this not put the legitimacy of his own handiwork, the Workers' State, into question...

...At the pinnacle of that apparatus stood Joseph Stalin?the most eminent mediocrity of the Party" Trotsky called him—and along with fellow-mediocrities Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, Stalin accused Trotsky of harboring secret "Bonapartist tendencies...

...When these assignments were over it became clear that he had no roots in the Party...

...Max Eastman has left us a revealing description of Lenin's "young eagle" at a raucous Kremlin reception: "Trotsky wandered among all those old revolutionaries, of whom he was then still the chief faultlessly clad as always, with a brand-new shiny manuscript case under his arm, a benign sort of YMCA secretary's smile put on for the festivities, but not an offhand word to say to anybody...

...Trotsky made two decisive contributions to the Revolution...

...Trotsky was in, but never of, the Party...

...It did not occur to him that his refutations, divorced from any organizational framework or political faction, were meaningless...

...In the cause of workers' solidarity, the new government was able to lay claim to the support of the majority of the Russian people, converting political enemies into reluctant allies: "Thus Trotsky, by elaborating the 'public relations' aspect of the putsch, was responsible for the primary mystification underlying the name of the regime, the Soviet Union, that endures to this day: namely, the notion that the Bolsheviks 'represented' the masses via an electoral principle...

...His fiery oratory —which, it was said, inspired his troops to acts of "heroic madness" —coupled with the system of draconian discipline that he imposed throughout the Red Army, rescued the Bolshevik regime from its numerous enemies...

...Soviet affairs specialist Leon Trotsky, prolific journalist, brilliant orator, able administrator, and, above all, convinced Marxist, believed he had unravelled the secret of history...

...Before then, Trotsky had been associated with the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic movement, and nurtured a particularly violent animus toward Lenin...

...He reminded me of Little Lord Fauntleroy...

...He convinced Lenin that the projected coup should be carried out under the banner of the Bolshevik-controlled Petrograd Soviet, and through this elementary, yet remarkable, act of linguistic legerdemain, legitimized the Bolshevik takeover...

...He asked the newly installed Politburo to appoint him Director of the Press, but was used, instead, for such special assignments as the organization of the Red Army and the Brest-Litovsk negotiations...

...A gifted, many-sided intellectual who had staked all on a single idea, his spiritual universe, as well as his political career, had been wrecked by Stalinism, and he was incapable of putting the pieces back together again...

...After the Revolution, he would gladly have gone back to journalism, his natural metier...

...As a Marxist he could hardly attribute his decline to any single individual —particularly not to one so mean and contemptible as Stalin...

...Lenin had wanted the Bolsheviks to come to power openly as Bolsheviks, but this, Trotsky realized, would have antagonized all of the other political forces in the country...

...Trotsky's tortuous explanations of Stalinism lacked conviction, and he eventually lost the few disciples he had...

...Political power came to reside in the Party apparatus...

...By the end of the Civil War, Trotsky seemed to be the Revolution-incarnate...

...He remained capable, politically speaking, of only one thing—soliciting the attention of multitudes unstructured by administration...

...Now that Trotsky himself has passed into history, Joel Carmichael, in the best study to date, has cut through the legends to show us the man for what he was: the outstanding modern example of the True Believer betrayed...

...Confronted by such an obvious threat, a real Bonapartist would surely have attempted a coup d'etat, but Trotsky was content to write articles and make speeches rebutting the charge...

...His second contribution was more subtle...

...In fact, Trotsky never understood what actually happened to him...

...Betrayed by his Party, Trotsky was even more cruelly betrayed by his ideology...

...Trotsky's real tragedy," concludes Carmichael, "lay not in his personal ordeal but in the collapse of his intellectual framework: even more—in the inhibitions that prevented him from perceiving this...

...Perhaps the most interesting fact about Trotsky's career as a Revolutionary leader, hardly ever commented on, was its brevity: "Beginning with the midsummer of 1917," Carmichael notes, "when he joined the Bolshevik Party and together with Lenin led it through the putsch in October-November, it ended with the Civil War...

...Lenin's death in 1924 sealed Trotsky's fate...

...Without a base of his own in the Party, Trotsky ultimately depended on Lenin's patronage, and after 1922, as Lenin's health declined, Trotsky's political fortunes did, too...

...To the world at large, his prestige was second only ,to Lenin's, but real power, we now know, always eluded him...

...During the Civil War he performed an invaluable, almost Churchillian, role as War Commissar...

...It lasted about three years...

...Indeed, Carmichael convincingly argues that Trotsky's political activities were simply an extension of his literary pursuits...