Trotsky
Lives
by Paul Le Blanc
Robert
Service. Trotsky: A Biography. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 600 pages, including end notes,
bibliography, index. $35.00.
Robert
Service has written, to great acclaim, a new biography of Leon Trotsky.
“Trotsky moved like a bright comet across the political sky,” Service tells us.
Along with Lenin and other leaders of the Russian Revolution associated with
the Bolshevik — soon renamed Communist — party, “he first came to global
attention in 1917.…He lived a life full of drama played out with the world as
his stage. The October Revolution changed the course of history, and Trotsky
had a prominent role in the transformation.…There is no denying Trotsky’s
exceptional qualities. He was an outstanding speaker, organizer and leader.”
(1, 3)
As
the workers’ councils (soviets) and earnest revolutionary ideals of the
Bolsheviks gave way to the increasingly vicious bureaucratic dictatorship under
Joseph Stalin, Trotsky became the most formidable critic of what was happening.
He was taken seriously not simply by anti-Stalinists on the Left, “but by a
large number of influential commentators who detested the Stalin regime.
Trotsky’s explanation of what took place since the fall of the Romanov monarchy
in February 1917 took root in Western historical works,” Service notes. At the
same time, “Stalin depicted Trotsky as a traitor to the October Revolution,
laid charges against him in the show-trials of 1936–8 and ordered Soviet
intelligence agencies to assassinate him. In 1940 they succeeded.” (2, 1)
Yet
Stalin’s Communism proved unable to sustain itself for even half a century
afterward. With the global triumph of capitalism, however, there is also a
multi-faceted global crisis of capitalism — assuming far-reaching dimensions
that are ecological, social, cultural, political, military, and economic. Ten
years ago the members of the United Nations promised the achievement by 2015 of
Millennium Goals that would dramatically push back global poverty and hunger,
also advancing the empowerment of women and the education of children, improvements
in health care, improvements in environmental sustainability, improvements in
“fair trade,” and more. The modest gains toward realizing the UN Millennium
Goals are more than balanced by setbacks and disappointments. An old socialist
slogan of the 1970s — “Capitalism Fouls Things Up” — seems quite relevant in
the early 21st century.
This
is certainly an ideal moment for people to engage with one of the greatest
revolutionaries of modern times. Service makes exciting claims: that his
searches among archival holdings shed new light on the subject, and that he
offers, for the first time, an objective account of this symbol of
revolutionary Marxism. But in more ways
than one, the book he has produced is not what it claims to be. In fact, what
many reviewers have enthused over, in their discussions of Service’s book, is
the demolition of what they (and Service) consider to be a myth. As novelist
and journalist Robert Harris approvingly comments in London’s Sunday Times, “50 years after the last
full-scale biography of Trotsky in English, Robert Service has turned his
attention to this myth — and has, effectively, assassinated Trotsky all over
again.”[1]
A Cultural
Phenomenon
There
is at least one problem here — the reviewer’s claim that this is the first
full-scale biography in English since the outstanding and sympathetic
three-volume work by Isaac Deutscher which appeared in the 1950s and ’60s (and
has been recently republished by Verso). In fairness to Service, he himself
actually asserts: “This book is the first full-length biography of Trotsky
written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist.” (xxi)
However
phrased, the claim is simply not true. In 1975, Joel Carmichael produced a work
of about 500 pages, Trotsky: An
Appreciation of His Life. In 1977 Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Trotsky (close to 500 pages) appeared. In
1979, Ronald Segal’s over 400-page biography, Leon Trotsky, was published. Service’s purported biographical
assassination comes in at slightly more than each of these, but not by much.
Service’s emphasis on not being a Trotskyist is belied by the fact that these
three works are all non-Trotskyist — and two reject fundamentally (as does
Service) all that Trotsky stood for.
For
that matter, over the past couple of years, preceding the appearance of
Service’s book, there have been three additional major studies, all
critical-to-hostile — Ian Thatcher’s Trotsky
(2002), Geoff Swain’s Trotsky (2006),
and Bertrand Patenaude’s Trotsky:
Downfall of a Revolutionary (2009). It is remarkable that so many critical
books have appeared on Trotsky’s life. If one is willing to add a major Russian
work translated into English in 1995, there is Dmitri Volkoganov’s hostile Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary,
which received a reception quite similar to that accorded to Service’s new
volume. One might ask why such obsessive debunking must go on and on…and
on.
This
is hardly a problem for Simon Sebag Montefiore (whose help Service acknowledges
in his preface). An upper-class historian, novelist, and authority on Stalin,
Montefiore complains in the Conservative Daily
Telegraph that “Trotsky, like Mao and to some extent Lenin, has long been
one of those Communist titans who, for some, achieved the status of fashionable
radical saints, even in the democracies that they would have destroyed in an
orgy of bloodletting.” While “Lenin and Mao have been recast as brutal monsters
not unlike Stalin himself,” only now has Trotsky also been able to join the
pantheon of Red monsters — presented by Service in all his “ugly egotism and
unpleasant, overweening arrogance, the belief in and enthusiastic practice of
killing on a colossal scale.”[2]
The
more politically neutral Times offers
a more delicious characterization by reviewer Richard Harris, hardly a Tory but
rather an enthusiastic supporter of the former “New Labor” Prime Minister Tony
Blair. Perhaps drawing from his own experience, he writes: “If one can imagine the most
obnoxious middle-class student radical one has ever met — bitter, sneering,
arrogant, selfish, cocky, callous, callow, blinkered and condescending — and
if one freezes that image, applies a pair of pince-nez and transports it back
to the beginning of the last century, then one has Trotsky.”[3]
In
the Wall Street Journal, scholar and
human rights activist Joshua Rubenstein offers a mixed judgment. While praising
Service’s “vivid” and “long overdue” biography as “approaching Trotsky without
emotional or ideological attachment” (which could be the understatement of the
year), he also accurately notes that Service “slips into personal animus that
is sometimes out of place,” and that the book “hardly
discusses Trotsky's writings, either as a Marxist theoretician or as an accomplished
and independent journalist” — which is a remarkable limitation, given the
centrality of such things to all that Trotsky was.[4]
What would one make of biographies about Newton or Darwin or Einstein that
hardly discussed their scientific theories? This is a fatal limitation: one
cannot understand and assess Trotsky without a more serious-minded engagement
with his ideas.
At
least one reviewer, Tariq Ali, in the left-leaning Guardian simply slams “Service's plodding account in which some of
the allegations are so trivial that they are best ignored.” He adds, as if
amplifying Rubenstein’s point about the failure to deal with Trotsky’s actual
ideas: “On most of the important issues — the danger of substituting the party
for the state in Russia, the necessity of uniting with social-democrats and
liberals to defeat Hitler, the futility of forcing the communists into an
alliance with Chiang Kai-shek in China, the fate that awaited the Jews if
Hitler came to power and constant warnings that the Nazis were preparing to
invade the Soviet Union — he was proved right time and time again.”[5]
The Actual Book
Engaging
seriously with the actual book under review, one cannot agree fully with the
judgments of the reviewers just cited. It is somewhat better, and much worse,
than one might be led to believe. Service’s study is really quite readable. The
prose is clear, and the story interesting. It follows the basic outline
sketched by Trotsky himself in his literary masterpiece My Life, supplemented by Deutscher’s brilliant trilogy — The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The
Prophet Outcast. This provides a coherent structure, which Service seeks in
a workmanlike manner to compress into a more succinct, relatively fast-paced
narrative.
Service
certainly dispenses large dollops of the negative judgment regarding Trotsky,
the stuff that many reviews on the right and left focus on. Debating about
Trotsky with Christopher Hitchens, under the auspices of the Hoover
Institution, Service characterized the revolutionary as “the most amazingly
brilliant man…but such a dreadful mistake of a life and a career.”[6]
That matches the thrust of his speaking tours, and of all the publicity around
the book.
Nonetheless,
there remains the strong influence of Deutscher’s magisterial biography, the
considerable researches from post-1960s social historians on the Russian
Revolution (essentially corroborating John Reed’s exuberantly sympathetic
eyewitness account, Ten Days That Shook
the World), and the power of Trotsky’s own writings. All push into the
pages of Service’s biography, and they push in a different direction than that
in which he himself prefers to travel.
More
than this, in some ways — not in all, as we shall see — Service proves himself
a capable historian. He spent many years researching Lenin, producing a capable
if increasingly hostile three-volume political summary, “capped” by a sadly
inferior (though widely lauded) biography. This has given him a fair sense of
the shape of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement leading up to
the 1917 Revolution. This stands him in good stead as he contextualizes much of
Trotsky’s story. In addition to this, and in addition to the use of a
considerable amount of secondary literature, he actually spent time mining the
archives and has come up with new material.
Service
makes much of this archival exploration, promising new revelations supposedly
culled from earlier drafts of My Life
and other writings. While there are, in fact, no stunningly defamatory
“revelations” forthcoming from the archives, there are insights offered from —
for example — correspondence between Trotsky and his first wife Alexandra. A
youthful Trotsky, imprisoned for revolutionary activities, writes to his lover:
“Mikhailovski in an article about Lassalle says that one can be more frank with
the woman one loves than with oneself; this is to a certain degree true but
such frankness is possible only in a personal conversation but not always, only
in special and exceptional circumstances.” Engaging with such correspondence,
Service comments aptly: “Then and later he favored extreme images and striking
turns of phrase. This was no artificial invention. It flowed from the
personality of someone who did not feel alive unless he could communicate with
others.” (52, 53)
At
the same time, there is a remarkable sloppiness that crops up in this book. For
example, Service speculates that Trotsky’s father hired a rabbi to teach his
young son the Torah (24) — but his source is the short account by Max Eastman
in Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth,
which makes it clear that the father hired a private tutor — one who had a
beard, to be sure, but who was an agnostic scholar, not a rabbi. This matches
the relatively secular inclinations that Service acknowledges were
characteristic of Trotsky’s father. It is odd that, with no more evidence to
cite than Eastman, Service converts this into Jewish religious instruction.[7]
At
times, his “facts” are simply wrong. Service tells us that Trotsky “spoke out
against ‘individual terror’ in 1909 when the Socialist-Revolutionaries murdered
the police informer Evno Azev, who had penetrated their Central Committee.”
(113) But this is impossible. Azev most definitely was a police spy who held a
position of immense authority within the Socialist-Revolutionary organization:
coordinating the terrorist assassinations carried out by the
Socialist-Revolutionaries. This was a tactic which Trotsky and other Marxists
of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party absolutely opposed. But Azev
himself, after being exposed, escaped to Germany, where he was imprisoned until
1917 and apparently died of kidney disease in 1918.[8]
Why would Trotsky denounce a murder that never happened? Of course he didn’t.
But it certainly undermines one’s confidence in Service’s ability to get things
right.
There
are also examples of important facts being left out of the account. One of the
most disconcerting comes up in Service’s seemingly detailed account of the
Brest-Litovsk negotiations. The Bolshevik Revolution had come to power
promising “peace, bread, land” and one of the highest priorities for the new
soviet government was to extricate Russia from the devastation of the First
World War, with Trotsky as the chief peace negotiator with the Germans, “moving
like a weaver’s shuttle between Brest-Litovsk and the Russian capital,” as
Service nicely phrases it. (208) The German military sought to impose a very
nasty settlement, which the revolutionaries were loath to accept. Some argued
for waging “revolutionary war” against German imperialism while Lenin insisted
that the regime must sign the German peace terms, however odious. Trotsky took
a middle position — “neither peace nor war” — in hopes that through drawing the
negotiations out and peppering them with widely-publicized revolutionary
speeches, the proletarian ferment visible in Central Europe would be
transformed into workers’ uprisings. Service notes that Trotsky first won a
majority (even the anxious and skeptical Lenin went along). But then, he tells
us, Lenin somehow — presumably through persuasive conversations and lobbying
among his comrades — was finally able to secure a majority for making peace.
How did this happen? What Service inexplicably fails to mention is that the
German military, losing patience, launched a massive and successful offensive
which demonstrated the hollowness of the “revolutionary war” notion and the
inadequacy of Trotsky’s compromise position. The German High Command then put
forward even more odious demands which Lenin now had little difficulty in
persuading a majority to accept.[9]
There
are a number of surprising examples of more minor sloppiness. For example,
André Breton, the poet and theorist of surrealism who sympathized with Trotsky,
is consistently but incorrectly identified as a “surrealist painter.” (399,
453, 461) The anti-Trotskyist Bertram Wolfe is mistaken for Trotsky adherent
Bernard Wolfe (441). At one point Service tells us: “Instead of calling his
first son after his own father, he and Natalya had chosen the name Sergei.”
(201) But of course Sergei Sedov was the second son and Lev Sedov the first, as
Service himself documents elsewhere in the book.
More
than once such sloppiness is exposed by Service himself. Describing the 1916 voyage of Trotsky and his
family to New York on a Spanish steamship, Service tells us that “Trotsky
claimed they travelled second class.” This is “exposed” as “a silly fib,” since
— while paying for second-class tickets — it was found that the second-class
berths were overbooked, “and they were given a first-class cabin at no extra
charge.” But according to the footnote Service offers, Trotsky was telling this
“silly fib” to himself, since it appeared (apparently as a mistaken
recollection) in his 1935 diary, not meant for publication and only published
after his death. In the same passage, Service asserts that the Trotskys “did
not mingle with passengers from the lowest decks,” feeling “no impulse to spend
time talking to workers.” Yet a few lines later, Service tells us that, in
discussions about World War I, “Trotsky only met one person who appealed to
him. This was a housemaid from
Luxembourg.” In the next paragraph, Service tells us, an entry in Trotsky’s
diary indicates that his sons “made friends with the Spanish sailors, who told
them that they would soon get rid of the monarchy in Madrid,” which — one would
assume — also appealed to Trotsky. (153)
Personality and
Politics
As
already noted, there is a significant amount of anti-Trotsky editorializing,
especially concentrated in the book’s introductory and concluding sections, but
interlarded as sniping assertions, speculations, and projections throughout
much of the biography. The book’s purpose, Service insists, “is to dig up the
buried life” of a man whose “self-serving account of Stalin and Stalinism
deeply influenced the discourse of writers both left and right,” but who had
himself demonstrated a “lust for dictatorship and terror,” and, in fact,
positively “reveled in terror.” (The faint-hearted need not fear — the book
never really presents such raw lust and reveling!) Trotsky’s character,
according to Service, involved the following traits, to take some of those
offered in the book’s index: alienating others, arrogance, aversion to
sentimentality, bossiness, careless about people’s attitudes to him, dislike of
losing at games, egotism, impatience with stupidity, insensitivity,
perfectionism, prickliness, Puritanism, temper, vanity, self-centered, will to
dominate. (4, 499, 497, 597) Nor is this all wrong.
Isaac
Deutscher also affirmed that Trotsky sometimes displayed a “prickly and
overbearing character and a lack of talent for teamwork.” Trotsky’s Bolshevik
comrade Anatoly Lunacharsky offered an acidly frank pen-portrait in 1923: “His
colossal arrogance and an inability or unwillingness to show any human kindness
or to be attentive to people, the absence of that charm which always surrounded
Lenin, condemned Trotsky to a certain loneliness.” Others, including Service,
indicate that Trotsky could indeed show kindness and great charm, and that over
time he mellowed somewhat — and yet these less endearing characteristics never
vanished. From the archives he digs out correspondence to Trotsky’s second wife
Natalya from Lev Sedov, Trotsky’s capable revolutionary-activist son,
complaining in 1936 “that all of Papa’s failings are getting worse with age:
his intolerance, hot temper, teasing, even crudity and desire to offend,” and
that “Papa never recognizes when he’s in the wrong. That’s why he can’t bear
criticism. When something is said or written to him with which he disagrees he
either ignores it entirely or gets back with a harsh reply.” (230,
431–432) Yet other qualities that
Lunacharsky stressed also persisted — “the remarkable coherence and literary
skill of his phrasing, the richness of imagery, scalding irony, his soaring
pathos, his rigid logic, clear as polished steel,” and the fact that “there is
not a drop of vanity in him, he is totally indifferent to any title or to the
trappings of power.” And yet, Lunacharsky concluded, “Trotsky treasures his
historical role and would probably make any personal sacrifice…in order to go
down in human memory surrounded by the aureole of a genuine revolutionary
leader.”[10]
(Some see this latter quality as a flaw, others as a strength.)
While
there is overlap between much of this and aspects of Service’s description,
essential elements in his negative characterization (charges of hypocrisy,
ingrained authoritarianism, “reveling in terror”) seem to flow from the
author’s desire to turn people against a serious consideration of Trotsky’s
orientation, not from the research he has done. One suspects it precedes that
research and is rooted in his ideological and institutional commitments. While
Service is not up-front about his own politics, in the first sentence of the
book’s preface he forthrightly describes the Hoover Institution as his “base.”
For many years it has been widely known for its conservative orientation, and
Service enjoys the status of a highly esteemed Senior Fellow there.
The
Hoover Institution’s mission statement affirms “the principles of individual,
economic, and political freedom; private enterprise; and representative
government were fundamental to the vision of the Institution's founder,” the
conservative U.S. President Herbert Hoover, who believed deeply in laissez-faire capitalism. “By collecting
knowledge, generating ideas, and disseminating both, the Institution seeks to
secure and safeguard peace, improve the human condition, and limit government
intrusion into the lives of individuals.” The influence on Service of this
perspective was suggested during his Trotsky debate with Christopher Hitchens
at the Hoover Institution itself. “With a centralized state-run economy,” he
argued, even with “a somewhat more astute character such as Trotsky,…it was an
absolute certainty that you couldn't…get the kind of results that you wanted
for popular consumption such as you can have under a market economy.”[11]
Whatever
the motivation and underlying ideology, all too often we find Service engaged
in an odd game of scoring of nasty personal points. It gets in the way of what
one might expect from a serious biographer. Here are four examples among many.
·
In reaction to Trotsky’s love letters to Alexandra, in which he
expresses doubts and depression, Service informs us that “unconsciously Trotsky
was trying to induce Alexandra to do more than love him: he wanted her to
understand and look after him and perhaps this could be achieved by admissions
of weakness.” How does Service know that Trotsky’s admission was an insincere
calculation? An admission of weakness to someone you love is not necessarily a
manipulative ploy. Service’s put-down of Trotsky here is out of harmony with
his seeming acceptance of Trotsky’s admission to Alexandra that “one can be
more frank with the woman one loves than with oneself.” (52)
·
Sometimes, Service’s eagerness to be critical interjects a
superficiality cutting across a more substantial and plausible criticism that
could be made. As a very young revolutionary, when he and his comrades had been
arrested, Trotsky took the lead in a rather pointless challenge to prison
authorities that landed him and his comrades all in solitary confinement. “As
with several such episodes of daring in his life, Trotsky did not include this
information in his published memoirs.” But the initial hot-headed “heroism” had
been unnecessary. After the punishment, we are told, Trotsky and his comrades chose
the path of peaceful cooperation. Service prefers the following: “It had to be
dragged out of him by admiring writers. Although he liked to cut a dash in
public, he disliked boasting: he preferred others to do the job for him.” (56)
A less convoluted explanation, however, is that Trotsky was by no means proud
of such immature and pointless “daring.” Perhaps he was a little ashamed.
·
During his exile in Vienna, Trotsky is hit in rapid succession by a
series of troubling events — the death of his mother, a painful accident at the
dentist from which he gradually recovers, the sudden appearance of his eleven
year old daughter from his first marriage (after five years of not seeing her),
who visits from the Ukraine in the company of his father. Trotsky then suffers
an illness brought on by stress. His father goes with him to the doctor.
“Perhaps Trotsky had taken his father along because he needed him to pay for
the consultation,” Service speculates. “His letters [neither quoted not cited]
hint at a further motive. Trotsky seems to have appreciated being accompanied
by someone devoted to his interests. He was again the center of attention, and
the joint visit to the Viennese professor restored his spirits.” (123–124) Why
turn this all into an example of Trotsky being egotistical and
self-centered? In fact, it might make
sense for a father to want to be there for his son under trying circumstances,
and it might be natural for even a person in his 30s to value and need the
company and reassurance and caring of his father. In the 1920s, Max Eastman
noted: “Trotsky is proud of his father…. He loves to talk about him.”[12]
·
There is a parenthetical comment about Trotsky and Karl Radek in 1915:
“They were almost friends, insofar as either man had any.” (145) Yet Service
himself notes close friendships that Trotsky had with Adolf Joffe and Christian
Rakovsky, and — among those who were outside of the Trotskyist movement — one
could add Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer as well as Otto Rühle and Alice
Rühle-Gerstel. There are other friendships one could mention (in addition to
friendships with certain members of his family).[13]
Nonetheless,
Service is enough of an historian that often the material takes over the man,
drawing the narrative into a clear account of what Trotsky and other
revolutionaries actually thought and attempted and accomplished. In describing
the months leading up to the October/November Revolution of 1917, describing
the process of convergence of the most committed revolutionaries into the
Bolshevik party, he gives a true sense of the realities. He quotes the future
Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky who was powerfully impressed (as were many) by
Trotsky, freshly returned from exile and showing himself to be one of the most
eloquent, passionate, brilliant mass orators: “Here’s a great revolutionary
who’s arrived and one gets the feeling that Lenin, however clever he may be, is
starting to fade next to the genius of Trotsky.” Service writes:
Lenin felt no worry about having
personal rivals on the political far left. He needed and wanted active,
talented associates such as Trotsky. He and Trotsky agreed on a broad agenda
for revolution in Russia. The Provisional Government had to be done away with
and a “workers’ government” instituted. The era of European socialist revolution
had arrived. The Great War would be terminated only when the far leftists came
to power and repudiated capitalism, imperialism, nationalism and militarism.
There had to be immediate basic reform in Russia. The peasantry should take
over the land of the Imperial family, the state and the Orthodox Church.
Workers should control the factories… . All spoke approvingly of the power of
the masses. There was agreement that workers and peasants should be encouraged
to remake life as they wanted. Factories, offices and farms ought to be
reorganized. Differences remained among Bolsheviks — and they were about to be
brought to the surface the moment the party seized power. But between February
and October the disputes were containable… . [T]he Provisional Government [of
pro-capitalist and moderate socialist politicians] had to be overthrown in
favor of a revolutionary administration. Fundamental social and economic reform
would then be implemented. The European war would be brought to an end.
Revolution in Russia would be followed by the overturning of the ruling classes
throughout Europe. Failure to act would be a disaster. The
counter-revolutionary elements in the former Russian Empire were waiting for
their opportunity to strike. (167–169)
All
of this gives a good sense of how things were — in the thinking of Lenin,
Trotsky, and others who rallied to make the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Problems
of Communism
The
problem with this, from Service’s standpoint (and that of the Hoover
Institution), is that the revolutionary socialist goals are simply impossible
to achieve. Presumably, the only reasonable path involves supporting private
enterprise and limiting government intrusion into our social life, as explained
in the Hoover mission statement. Violation of such strictures results in chaos,
and as a consequence would-be revolutionaries, still determined to force their
ideals onto an unwilling society, inevitably construct a totalitarian order.
This defines the story that Service feels he must tell.
Service’s
view was sharply challenged in his debate with ex-Trotskyist Christopher
Hitchens. The most powerful forces initiating a brutal civil war against the
Bolshevik Revolution had little desire, as Hitchens put it, to replace the
workers’ and peasants’ soviets by “a parliamentary democracy with an
independent judiciary.” He noted that, “if Trotsky's Red Army had not won the
Russian Civil War, then the word for fascism…was probably going to be the
Russian word instead of an Italian word.” Service squirmed a bit: “It’s a
little exaggerated, but it's pretty fair that the Whites had officers who were
vicious, carried out a brutal civil war against the Reds.” To which Hitchens
snorted: “Brought the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion [an anti-Semitic classic concocted by Russian reactionaries]
to Europe in their backpacks when they left. Not doing us any favors. Brings
the German [version] of Fascism with it!” Throughout much of Europe, varieties
of fascism and vicious dictatorships received support from the upper classes to
create a barrier to the spread of revolution.[14]
Contrary
to the expectations of Lenin and Trotsky, and despite the upwelling of global
insurgencies, socialist revolutions of the workers and peasants were not
triumphant outside of Russia. The isolation of this vast but backward country
in a hostile capitalist world, the brutalization of World War I and the Russian
Civil War, the destructive impact of all these factors on the Russian economy
combined with the revolutionaries’ own mistakes and managerial inexperience —
the result being a horrendous crisis, dramatically eroding popular confidence
in the revolutionary regime. A “temporary” Communist party dictatorship was
consequently established to secure stability until the Soviet republic could be
rescued by the “imminent” World Revolution that never quite materialized. Many
revolutionaries died or de-radicalized in the five years after 1917, although
both idealistic and opportunistic elements from the larger population flocked
to the new party in power. In many cases, the surviving Communists and newer
Communists — if they were not in the “rank-and-file” — became corrupted with
their exclusive access to power and privilege. Lenin died in the midst of the
crisis, in alliance with Trotsky pushing against the expanding, increasingly
privileged party-and-state bureaucracy that ruled in the name of Communism.
Lenin’s last struggle was too little, too late.
It
fell to Trotsky to become the primary spokesman and symbol of the Left Opposition.
There were earlier left-wing oppositional currents which Trotsky and Lenin had
short-sightedly helped vanquish.[15]
There would also be later ones — the more frightened and ineffectual “Right
Opposition” led by Nikolai Bukharin, and the more militant yet hopeless
stirrings associated with Mikhail Riutin. But Trotsky’s opposition — whatever
its limitations and contradictions — represented the most impressive,
consistent, persistent alternative to the bureaucratic tyranny and murderous
policies that triumphed under Stalin. After its thoroughgoing defeat in the
late 1920s, and particularly after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Trotsky
sought to build up a principled revolutionary current in the world Communist
movement (the parties associated with the Communist International, or Third
International). When he concluded that the bureaucratic dictatorship in the
Soviet Union could be replaced by democratic soviets of the workers and
peasants only through a revolutionary overthrow, he drew those from various
countries who agreed with him into the small but uncompromising Fourth
International, whose small parties and grouplets sought to provide “a stainless
banner” to the workers and the oppressed, in hopes that the anticipated new
wave of wars and revolutions would draw masses of workers and oppressed peoples
to the revolutionary Marxist, Bolshevik-Leninist perspective that he and his
comrades sought to preserve.
Service’s
attitude toward all of this is marked by utter contempt, asserting again and
again that Trotsky “shared many of Stalin’s assumptions,” specifically: “He
called for state economic planning and offered nothing that was essentially
different from Soviet practices except the assurance that he would do things
less violently and more democratically.” (357) It is obvious why a Senior
Fellow of the Hoover Institution might be horrified over Trotsky’s commitment
to state economic planning (this Trotsky certainly did share with Stalin), but
one wonders at Service’s dismissive attitude toward making economic planning
less violent and more democratic.
Unfortunately,
one of the many bits of misinformation conveyed in this biography is Service’s
assertion that Trotsky, “in his autobiography of 1930 would represent himself
as a constant critic of the basic official measures introduced in the 1920s,”
particularly the concessions to market economics represented by the New
Economic Policy (NEP) which stretched from 1921 to 1928. Service correctly
points out: “Trotsky never called for the NEP to be abandoned even while
calling for certain features to be modified or removed. He accepted that the
Soviet economy would require a private sector for the foreseeable future.” The problem with what Service says is that
Trotsky indicates the same in his 1930 autobiography. There he notes that
Stalin and other critics in the Communist Party leadership “discovered that my
stand at the time was one of ‘under-appreciation of the peasantry,’ and one
almost hostile toward the New Economic Policy. This was really the basis of all
the subsequent attacks on me. In point of fact, of course, the roots of the
discussion were quite the opposite…” When Lenin “shaped the first and very
guarded theses on the change to the New Economic Policy,” Trotsky continued
(and Service documents), “I subscribed to them at once.” Lenin and Trotsky
favored, for this period, a form of mixed economy under workers’ control (until
new possibilities of socialist development would be opened by workers’
revolutions in more advanced industrial countries). At the same time, the two
agreed to “a bloc against bureaucracy in general,” as Trotsky put it in his
autobiography. This was to become a key pillar in the program of Trotsky’s Left
Opposition, sustained when he joined with others (including Gregory Zinoviev,
Lev Kamenev, for a time Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaya) in what came to be
known as the United Opposition. “The Leningrad workers were aroused by the
political trend in favor of the rich peasants — the so-called kulaks — and a
policy aimed at one-country socialism.” This attitude was certainly embraced by
the Opposition. But never was it advanced in opposition to the basic measures
represented by NEP — nor does Trotsky seek to give this impression in his
autobiography.[16]
Internationalism
and Workers’ Democracy
Another
key pillar of Trotsky’s program, while leading the Left Opposition and
afterward, was continuing (in the spirit of Lenin’s Bolsheviks) to tie the fate
of the Soviet Union to the spread of socialist revolutions to other countries.
Service complains that in his revolutionary internationalism Trotsky “offered
no analysis of how far he was willing to risk the existence of the Soviet
state.” (357) Here again it is the biographer, not Trotsky, who seems to be at
one with Stalin, who insisted that — regardless of what happened with the world
revolution, the Communist regime could and should focus on building “socialism
in one country.”
Trotsky
— like all Marxists up to the 1920s — understood that socialism could not be
built in a single economically backward country. The ability of the workers and
peasants of Russia to move forward to a better life, and to the thoroughgoing
economic democracy that socialism was supposed to be, was dependent on their
moving forward on the same path as, and receiving life-giving assistance from,
the working classes making socialist revolutions in the more advanced
industrial countries. Naturally, the anticolonial revolutions in Asia and
Africa would also be essential to bringing down global capitalism. Insurgencies
in the “backward” regions would feed insurgencies in the “advanced” economic
centers — which would then further assist the march of progress in the
“backward regions. This had been the whole point of devoting so much time and
energy and resources to building up the Communist International and its member
parties.
The
fact that Service (along with many others) doesn’t quite “get it” is suggested
in the way he discusses Trotsky’s revolutionary internationalism, especially in
the post-1917 period. It is almost as if one were discussing fashion, rather
like one’s taste for “political correctness” or one’s taste in ties: “Trotsky
remained a vigorous internationalist. He wrote endlessly about the need for
revolution in Europe and Asia. This too was hardly an unusual standpoint to
take in the first years after the October revolution, but Trotsky held to it
with remarkable firmness… . He remained averse to either extolling or
deprecating the qualities of particular peoples and believed that this was the
proper approach of a Marxist.” (207) This last comment is true but beside the
point. Quite simply, without the triumph of revolutionary internationalism, the
revolution in Russia would be defeated.
In
a later attempt to get it right, Service opines that the reason for building “a
fresh global organization dedicated to bringing down capitalism and promoting
revolution,” the Communist International, was rooted in the concern that “so
long as they ruled the sole extreme-left European state they would remain a
likely target for attack by a coalition of capitalist powers.” This conception
was shared by Stalin and his temporary ally Nikolai Bukharin in the mid-to-late
1920s. But Trotsky responded: “The capitalist world shows us by its export and
import figures that it has other instruments of persuasion than those of
military intervention.” Against them he quoted Lenin: “So long as our Soviet
Republic remains an isolated borderland surrounded by the entire capitalist
world, so long will it be an absolutely ridiculous fantasy and utopianism to
think of our complete economic independence and of the disappearance of any of
our dangers.” Warning against the notion that “the USSR can perish from
military intervention but never from its own economic backwardness,” he
insisted that so long as the Soviet Union existed within a global capitalist
economy, it would not be possible for it to achieve socialism. This had been a
perspective shared by Lenin and the early Bolsheviks — but the new bureaucratic
power elite crystallizing around Stalin, denying any break with Lenin’s
thought, embraced the notion that it was possible to achieve “socialism in one
country.”[17]
Service
has so little understanding of Trotsky’s Marxism that he attributes to him the notion that “Marxists in Russia
would be able to…build an entire socialist society.” (109) In fact, while
Stalin proceeded to advance toward such “socialism” in economically backward
Russia (through his brutal and murderous “revolution from above”), Trotsky
insisted prophetically that such efforts could at best result in a “skinflint
reactionary utopia of self-sufficient socialism” that had little to do with the
actual socialist goal. Genuine socialism could only be created on the basis of
relative abundance, and as part of the transition from global capitalism to
worldwide socialism.[18]
Service does not bother to deal with this 1928 critique of the Stalin-Bukharin
Draft Program for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (which he
even mistakenly confuses with the Fifth Congress).
In
The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky
deepened his analysis by referring to the perspective advanced by Karl Marx
nine decades earlier: “A development of the productive forces is the absolutely
necessary practical premise [of Communism], because without it want is
generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that
means that all the old crap must revive.” The reference to “all the old crap”
is to brutal competition, inequality, exploitation, oppression — qualities that
characterized Stalin’s version of “socialism” no less than capitalism. Trotsky
elaborated:
The basis of bureaucratic rule is
the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle
of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can
come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are
compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to
appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the Soviet
bureaucracy. It “knows” who is to get something and who has to wait.[19]
None
of this comes through in the dozen sentences that Service devotes to The Revolution Betrayed, the 1936
culmination of more than a decade of analytical effort and one of the keystones
of Trotsky’s theoretical heritage. He remains remarkably dismissive of the
passionate critique that the object of his biography advances through the
1930s. “The bureaucracy can no longer uphold its position in any other way than
by undermining the foundations of economic and cultural progress,” according to
Trotsky. “The struggle for totalitarian power resulted in the annihilation of
the best men of the country by its most degraded scoundrels.” His proposal was
for a political revolution initiating the following changes: “the establishment
of the widest Soviet democracy and the legalization of the struggle of parties;
the liquidation of the never-changing bureaucratic caste by electing all
functionaries; the mapping out of all economic plans with the direct
participation of the population itself and in its interests; the elimination of
the crying and insulting gaps of inequality; the liquidation of ranks, orders,
and all other distinctions of the new Soviet nobility; a radical change of
external politics in the spirit of principled internationalism.”[20]
In
the face of all this and more, Service shrugs: “He was no more likely than
Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism even though he claimed and
assumed he would.…His confident assaults on Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s
distracted attention from the implausibility of his own alternative strategy.”
(497) The reason for this, apparently, was the authoritarian role he had played
in the crisis of civil war and economic collapse from 1918 to 1922. “The
Bolshevik party had treated even workers and peasants savagely whenever they
engaged in active opposition,” Service writes. “Trotsky’s earlier ideas about
‘proletarian’ self-liberation were like old coins that had dropped unnoticed
out of his pocket.” (267) For seriously revolutionary-minded people, Trotsky’s
trajectory in these years raises important questions — but for Service it slams
all doors firmly shut. He seems to use what happened in this intense five-year
period to dismiss everything that Trotsky thinks, says and does afterward, and
to question all that went before.
This
is in stark contrast to the interpretation offered by Deutscher, who comments
that “in the first half of 1922 Trotsky still spoke primarily as the Bolshevik
disciplinarian; in the second half he was already in conflict with the
disciplinarians,” coming “closer to the Workers Opposition and kindred groups”
— not accepting what he believed to be utopian, unrealistic aspects of their
positions, but “acknowledging the rational side of their revulsion against
authority.…He began to protest against the excesses of centralism as these made
themselves felt… . He clashed with the party ‘apparatus’ as the apparatus grew
independent of the party and subjected party and state to itself.” Deutscher
emphasizes what he perceives as the growing cleavage between “the power and the
dream” — and the deepening contradiction felt by the Bolsheviks who had created
a machine of power to make the dream a reality. “They could not dispense with
power if they were to strive for the fulfillment of their ideals; but now their
power came to oppress and overshadow their ideals.” Deutscher added: “Nobody
had in 1920–1 gone farther than Trotsky in demanding that every interest and
aspiration should be wholly subordinated to the ‘iron dictatorship.’ Yet he was
the first of the Bolshevik chiefs to turn against the machine of that
dictatorship when it began to devour the dream.”[21]
Service
will have none of this. But he does not succeed in providing a persuasive and
coherent alternative perspective. Rejecting both the dream and the power, he
can find no redeeming qualities in the subject to which he devotes more than
500 pages.
The
Actual Trotsky
Regardless
of one’s political standpoint, serious engagement with Trotsky’s life and ideas
generally results in one being more profoundly and positively impressed than
Service and his cheerleaders would have us be. Christopher Hitchens — breaking
from Trotskyist and revolutionary perspectives, and tacking closer to the
Hoover Institution’s conservative orientation than he certainly had ever
imagined — has not been able to stop himself from insisting that Trotsky was “a
person of immense moral and physical courage…who…wrote pamphlets and made
speeches against the menace of Hitlerism, which are much better and were made
much earlier than any of Winston Churchill's.” [22]
The splendid literary and social critic Irving Howe, another ex-Trotskyist who
avoided tacking quite so far rightward, felt compelled to insist thirty years
ago that Trotsky “must be regarded as one of the great writers of his time,”
and went on to specify:
Perhaps nowhere else do these
talents shine forth so brightly as in Trotsky’s writings in the early 1930s on
the rise of Nazism. These consist of articles and pamphlets composed hurriedly
in exile: there is no effort to work out a theoretical synthesis, partly
because Trotsky’s major objective is to offer tactical guidance for preventing
Hitler’s victory and partly because the phenomenon of Nazism is still new. But
such brilliant works…contain within them many of the elements needed for a
theory of Nazism.…Trotsky’s main purpose in these writings was not to provide a
full-scale theory of fascism but to stir the German left toward concerted
action. With blazing sarcasm and urgency — he never could be patient toward
fools — he attacked the preposterous policy of the German Communists [following
Stalin], who in their ultraleft “third period” were declaring the Social
Democrats to be “social fascists” representing a greater danger than the Nazis.
Trotsky kept insisting on what seems utterly clear and simple: that only a
united front (“march separately, strike together”) of the Communists and Social
Democrats could stop Hitler.… Had Trotsky’s advice been followed…the world
might have been spared some of the horrors of our century; at the very least,
the German working class would have gone down in battle the than allowing the
Nazi thugs to take power without resistance.[23]
How
could it be that Service would shrug this off?
With
a similar minimal engagement with the documentary sources, Service also shrugs
off the efforts to build up the Fourth International — a global network of
revolutionary socialist organizations, quite small but to which Trotsky devoted
the final years of his life. Howe sees him in these years as a figure of
“flawed greatness…an all too human figure,” who “alternates between periods of
ferocious work and sluggish withdrawal. He feels guilty with regards to his
children, all of whose lives, in one way or another, have been sacrificed in
the political struggle. He is afraid that he may die before finishing his
revolutionary task. He is overcome by the incongruity between the magnitude of
his political perspective and the paltriness of his political means.”
Nonetheless, “caustic and proud, shaking off his personal griefs in order to
return to the discipline of work,” he tries to do the very best he can —
particularly in what Howe sees as the “ill-starred venture” of the Fourth
International.[24]
Service
cannot allow himself such critical generosity. There are a scattering of little
nuggets drawn from the archives — although, in some cases already published and
long-available to the rest of us. A genuinely revolutionary approach of
socialist organizations toward workers in struggle should be “not to command
the workers but only to help them, to give them suggestions, to arm them with
facts, ideas, factory papers, special leaflets, and so on.” The need to make
revolutionary socialist organizations “habitable for workers” (not just
intellectual and white-collar workers) was a primary concern for Trotsky. “Many
intellectuals and half-intellectuals terrorize the workers by some abstract
generalities and paralyze the will toward activity,” he cautioned. “A
functionary of a revolutionary party should have in the first place a good ear,
and only in the second place a good tongue.” (443)[25]
For
the most part, however, Service is satisfied with superficialities (“global
Trotskyism was a lot less substantial than Stalin imagined”) and snide inaccuracies:
“He had sealed himself in the cave of his fundamental beliefs. He allowed no
questioning of them. He bullied his followers who dared to object; and he
preferred them to leave the Fourth International than to cause him bother.”
(441, 472) Whatever limitations one sees in Trotsky’s political practice in the
Fourth International, serious histories of the Fourth International as well as
a number of memoirs and primary sources, do not confirm Service’s glib
characterization.[26]
Service
focuses on Trotsky’s 1939–1940 polemics with James Burnham to make his point
about Trotsky’s sterile bullying. These were part of a fierce factional battle
in the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that — when examined in its fullness —
actually refutes the point Service is making. This is documented and succinctly
presented in Isaac Deutscher’s biography:
The American Trotskyists had
split into a “majority” which, led by James P. Cannon, accepted Trotsky’s view,
and a “minority” which followed Burnham and [Max] Shachtman. Trotsky urged all
of them to exercise tact and tolerance; and while he encouraged the
“Cannonites” to conduct the argument against Burnham and Shachtman vigorously,
he also warned them that the Stalinist agents in their ranks would seek to
exacerbate the quarrel; and he advised them to allow the minority to express
itself freely and even to act as an organized faction within the S.W.P. “If
someone should propose…to expel comrade Burnham,” he gave notice, “I would
oppose it energetically.” Even after the minority had held its own National
Convention, Trotsky still counseled the majority not to treat this as an excuse
for expulsions.”[27]
As
it turned out, the political differences were so sharp that Burnham, Shachtman,
and their co-thinkers felt a need to establish their own separate organization.
The biographers of the two provide essential information. “In April 1940
Shachtman left the Socialist Workers Party and founded his own Workers Party on
the basis of his own conceptions,” notes Peter Drucker in his left-wing study
of Shachtman. They simply did not want to be constrained by the limitations of
Trotsky’s perspectives, unlike him seeing the Soviet Union under Stalin as not
simply needing an anti-bureaucratic political revolution but, in fact,
representing a new oppressive form of society as bad as capitalism (and some
would soon say worse than
capitalism). This new group was almost immediately jolted by the discovery that
one of its key theorists was as “bad” as Trotsky had said he was. In his
conservative study of James Burnham (who soon enlisted in the Central
Intelligence Agency and became an editor of the right-wing National Review), Daniel Kelly notes that “on top of his
disillusionment with Trotsky, Burnham now seemed uncertain about the value of
the movement and even of socialism.” Within weeks, he had abandoned the Workers
Party, explaining to his stunned comrades “that he could no longer accept
Marxism, whose ideas modern historians, economists, and anthropologists had
shown to be false.”[28]
It is really not at all surprising that that he and Trotsky had come into such
sharp conflict.
Shachtman
and his comrades were eventually followed in their exit from Trotsky’s Fourth
International by others having the somewhat different perspective that the
Soviet Union represented simply a new variant of capitalism (state capitalism).
Yet the independent currents — generating an impressive body of political
thought and analysis — nonetheless retained a positive attitude to Trotsky, in
stark contrast to Burnham (and Service).[29]
Political Choices
and Permanent Revolution
Fifteen
years after his break, Burnham would denounce the Trotsky biography of Isaac Deutscher.
Near the beginning of the review, he offered a list of Trotsky’s sins that
would certainly not surprise Service: pride, subjectivism, impatience, and
inhumanity. He conceded that Deutscher’s work was well-researched study and
filled in “many gaps,” and that it showed Trotsky’s considerable talents but
“conscientiously displays, also, Trotsky’s weaknesses, not only those major
flaws that I have already named, but the human failings that were sometimes the
obverse of his talents.” Nonetheless, the biography was an “intellectual
disaster.” The reason was ideological: “Mr. Deutscher writes from a point of
view that accepts and legitimizes the Bolshevik revolution.” Burnham lamented
that “the minds of many of our university students and opinion-makers are being
deeply formed” by Trotsky’s perspectives which Deutscher sought to convey. “Not
all the scholarly references from all the libraries,” according to Burnham,
“are enough to wash out the Bolshevik stain.”[30]
Service
— with the assistance of the Hoover Institution and to the applause of many
pro-capitalist intellectuals — seeks once and for all to undo such damage. A
central point of this biography, repeated over and over again, was that
Trotsky’s orientation does not represent any meaningful alternative to
Stalinism. Service informs us at the beginning of the book that “Stalin,
Trotsky and Lenin shared more than they disagreed about.” Near the end of the
book he insists that Trotsky “was close to Stalin in intentions and practice.”
(3, 497) The same theme is sounded more than once in-between — even as the
evidence (sometimes the evidence he himself presents) suggests otherwise.
There
were plenty of informed people of the time, both Trotskyist and non-Trotskyist,
who saw things quite differently. Among these was the eloquent powerhouse of
British empire and conservatism Winston Churchill, who in conversations and
writings of the 1930s emphasized the differences between the revolutionary
Trotsky and the much more reasonable Stalin. The old counterrevolutionary
expressed himself most candidly in a 1938 private conversation with the Soviet
Ambassador to Britain. This was when Stalin’s bloody purge against “the
anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” was going full throttle. Service
himself offers the story in passing. “I hate Trotsky!” Churchill told Stalin’s
man. “I’ve kept an eye on his activities for some time. He’s Russia’s evil
genius, and it is a very good thing that Stalin has got even with him.”
(465)
Indeed,
the cigar-chomping aristocrat had said as much publicly a year earlier, with
all the self-satisfied conservative eloquence he could muster:
Once
again he has become the exponent of the purest sect of Communism. Around his
name gather the new extremists and doctrinaires of world-revolution. Upon him
is turned the full blast of Soviet malignity.…The name of Lenin, the doctrine
of Marx, are invoked against him at the moment when he frantically endeavors to
exploit them. Russia is regaining strength as the virulence of Communism abates
in her blood. The process may be cruel, but it is not morbid. It is a need of
self-preservation which impels the Soviet Government to extrude Trotsky and his
fresh-distilled poisons.[31]
This,
shorn of its excess and its tacit embrace of Stalin, is the image that Service
also offers us, despite a far more positive subtext inadvertently pushing up
like grass, flowers, and dandelions through the cracks of his somewhat barren
account.
In
the youth radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s, many young activists read the
condensed little collection of writings edited by Isaac Deutscher and George
Novack, widely circulated in paperback, entitled The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology. In the
introduction to that volume, Deutscher described Trotsky’s theory of permanent
revolution — to which Service gives remarkably short shrift — as “a profound
and comprehensive conception in which all the overturns that the world has been
undergoing (in this late capitalist era) are represented as interconnected and
interdependent parts of a single revolutionary process.” In the theory of permanent revolution, we see
the dynamic interplay of democracy and class struggle, the self-activity of the
masses of laboring and oppressed people reaching for their own liberation within, while at the same time straining beyond, the context of global
capitalism. Three elements can be found in Trotsky’s theory: (a) the
possibility and necessity, under the right circumstances, of democratic and
immediate struggles spilling over into the struggle for working-class political
power, (b) culminating in a transitional period going in the direction of
socialism, (c) which can be realized only through the advance of similar
struggles around the world. In fact, these elements permeate Trotsky’s orientation
from his youth to his death. “To put it in the broadest terms,” Deutscher
emphasized, “the social upheaval of our century is seen by Trotsky as global in
scope and character, even though it proceeds on various levels of civilization
and in the most diverse social structures, and even though its various phases
are separated from one another in time and space.”[32]
Young
activists hoping for a better world may be drawn to the vitality of Trotsky,
despite Service’s efforts. It is possible that some of them may even get their
introduction to Trotsky by reading his book. The assumptions of the Hoover
Institution may, after all, turn out to be less relevant than the life and
ideas of Trotsky in face of what is actually happening in the world. The young
activists may conclude that they are living in the age of permanent revolution,
and then commit their lives to making it so.