Trotsky
This is a guest post by Michael Ezra
I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my copy of Robert Service’s biography of Leon Trotsky, published today. In a pre-publication review for Standpoint, George Walden argues that it is “ the best biography of Trotsky to date.” Walden’s reasoning is that Service “disregards all sentimental nonsense and gives us the facts.” One of the biographies Walden possibly had in mind when he wrote that phrase was Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast .
As a student, I once made the mistake of asking a committed Trotskyist what I should read in order to gain a greater understanding of the man himself. A further mistake was following the suggestion that I read Deutscher’s “definitive” trilogy. Well written thought it is, Deutscher views Trotsky through rose-tinted glasses. To provide examples of his method, when Trotsky was effectively lying, Deutscher referred to it as “a masterpiece of diplomatic camouflage.” Trotsky defended the idea that “man must work in order not to die,” declared that “The militarisation of labour… is the indispensible method for the organisation of our labour forces” and stated that compulsory serf labour had been “a progressive phenomenon.” Deutscher praised that particular argument as “the only frank attempt made in modern times to give a logical justification of forced labour.”
There are some blatant absurdities. For example, when it comes to “the dilemma between authority and freedom,” Deutscher argues that “Trotsky was almost equally sensitive to the claims of both.” This is about a man whose whole nature was authoritarian. There are sins of omission. In his account of the Kronstadt rebellion, there is no mention of Trotsky’s famous order, “shoot them like partridges.” He was also not immune from errors of fact. For example, Deutscher claimed that the Kronstadt rebellion was “led by Anarchists.” In truth, as Robert Daniels had previously shown (American Slavic and East European Review, December 1951), it was “a strong opposition movement … in Communist Party organisations” that had been at the forefront of the rebellion. Despite the fact that thousands were killed by the Bolsheviks for this rebellion, Deutscher does not draw the logical conclusion that P.G. Maximoff had earlier drawn:
As in many other instances we have here a clear case of mass murder subject to criminal prosecution.
If anyone is any doubt as to the way Deutscher viewed Trotsky, his following sentence should give some clarification:
The passions of [Trotsky’s] intellect and heart, always uncommonly large and intense… swelled into a tragic energy as mighty and high as that which animates the prophets and the law-givers of Michelangelo’s vision.
So great do some Trotskytists view Deutscher’s hagiography, they may view it as worthwhile plagiarising. Ian Thatcher has demonstrably shown (Revolutionary Russia, June 1999) that this is exactly what Tony Cliff did in numerous places in his introduction to Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (Pluto Press, 1997). To provide but one example: Deutscher wrote:
He [Trotsky] draws a memorable analogy between three doomed monarchs: Nicholas II, Louis XVI, and Charles I, and also between their Queens … As for the Tsarina and Marie Antoinette, both were ‘enterprising but chickenheaded’
In Cliff’s introduction, the following can be found (pp.x-xi):
He [Trotsky] drew a memorable analogy between Nicholas II and Louis XVI, and also between their Queens … As for the Tsarina and Marie Antoinette, both were ‘enterprising but chicken-headed’
The moral of this story may well be that one should not ask a Trotskyist as to what books one should read on Trotsky. For a shorter view, one could do worse than read Alfred G.Meyer’s essay, “Lev Davidovich Trotsky,” (Problems of Communism, November-December 1967):
When [Trotsky] was in command … he had no use for democracy….Trotsky did more than most to destroy democracy in Soviet Russia. A staunch proponent of the one party state, he vigorously helped to suppress the rival parties. …. [A]lthough it is usually asserted that Stalin was the first to kill his own party comrades, that honor, too, goes to Trotsky …. Indeed, terror as a method to ensure efficiency – the most Stalinist trait one could mention – was pioneered by Trotsky as much as by anyone….. [I]f Stalinism is to be labelled a totalitarian form of rule, no one favoured totalitarianism more than L.D. Trotsky.
In an interview he gave promoting his book to National Review Online, Robert Service draws a sensible conclusion (0:29-0:49):
Trotsky was in favour of a one party state, of mass terror, of an end to political and cultural pluralism …. The idea that somehow a humane version of Communism could have come out of Trotskyism is pure romanticism.
Comments
| 16 October 2009, 11:32 am |
All you have to do is read Trotsky – he message was “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for civil war” which made him more of a nutter than Lenin. Terrorism and communism and his writings on Britain show he had that single theme.
My favourite part of Deutscher is where he tries to spike the complaint that Trotsky turned up to a Bolshevik conference in military uniform – apparently he had just rushed back from the front and hadn’t had time to change (if you look at the pictures, though, it was a dress uniform, would he really ahve worn that at the front?).
I might get this book from my local library, i enjoyed Service’s Stalin, much better written than Montefiore…
| 16 October 2009, 11:35 am |
My Favourite Trotsky story is that after the death penalty was abolished, he arranged to have an enemy sentenced to be shot, not to be executed mark you, just shot…genius…
| 16 October 2009, 11:35 am |
Anyone ever seen The Assassination of Trotsky, starring Richard Burton? There’s a clip here.
| 16 October 2009, 11:48 am |
I should say that I found the link to the Service interview on National Review Online on this blog post. Christopher Hitchens is also interviewed. It is in 5 parts and the post above links to each of them. In my opinion, it is well worth watching.
| 16 October 2009, 12:45 pm |
Trotskyism isn’t an ideology, it’s a mental disorder. His house is in Mexico City and it used to be that every 20th August members of the local CP would gather in the local cantinas and fill their bladders with beer. They would then climb over the wall of the house that stands at Viena 45 and gather around the grave in the garden. Comrades would then have a nice long slash…
I posted some photos of the property a while back. Also included is as photo of the twatting hammer that was used to put a stop to his stupidity.
Today there are plenty of streets and buildings named after Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin over here, but nothing named after St. Leon the Loser.
Says it all really.
| 16 October 2009, 12:47 pm |
It goes without saying that one should always try caricature an opponent’s views so as to facilitate the inevitable offhand rejection of them. This has the additional benefit of leaving one’s unthought-out preconceptions unruffled, because suspending judgment and trying to grasp a radically different viewpoint in its historical and social context is almost always a waste of time.
In fact, I don’t know why you would even bother to read Service’s book, since it is very unlikely to say anything that alters your opinions, which I imagine a pretty much set in stone, whatever the evidence. Did you know, for instance, that Trotsky once made sexually explicit suggestions in letters to his wife and had affairs with other women. O, the rotten dog!
| 16 October 2009, 12:53 pm |
Hitchens once looked very foolish defending Trotsky against Service.
| 16 October 2009, 1:11 pm |
Great post Michael.
Deutscher’s hagiography, as you probably know, was one of Tony Blair’s favourite books…
Here’s another Trotsky story:
Trotsky, when still in Russia, had expressed the desire to have a car and to drive. Joffe, a Soviet diplomat and friend of Trotsky, sent him from abroad a Mercedes, specially equipped with a powerful engine. Trotsky took the wheel and, after five hundred yards, went into a ditch. That was the end of the driving.
http://poumista.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/john-cornford-and-brian-pearce-and-leon-trotsky-and-trotskys-mercedes/
| 16 October 2009, 1:39 pm |
“On the rare occasions when he noticed women, he became interested in them”
Hmm…
| 16 October 2009, 2:22 pm |
The Hitchens/Service debate is well worth viewing.
One wonders abour the quality of Service’s biography as Hitchens, of all people, actually comes out of the debate better than Service. Service was particularly weak when it came to attempting to counter the analysis of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
BTW, I would suggest that anyone who claims that Deutscher’s biography is a hagiography has not actually read it.
BTW Pt2, nice to see some honest ‘totalitarian’ Stalinism from Exile. Goes nicely with the anti-anti-fascism of the site.
| 16 October 2009, 2:33 pm |
Germinal comments:
I would suggest that anyone who claims that Deutscher’s biography is a hagiography has not actually read it.
The online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines “hagiography” as:
The writing of the lives of saints; saints’ lives as a branch of literature or legend.
A pretty standard online dictionary gives a definition extracted from The American Heritage Dictionary as follows:
1. Biography of saints.
2. A worshipful or idealizing biography.
One need only read the titles of each volume of Deutscher’s trilogy to know that he views Trotsky as a “prophet.”
| 16 October 2009, 2:44 pm |
Michael Ezra writes:
“One need only read the titles of each volume of Deutscher’s trilogy to know that he views Trotsky as a “prophet.””
Oh dear. That kind of proves my point. You see, as Deutscher says in his introduction to volume 1, the ‘prophet’ he refers to is a concept taken from Machievelli’s ‘The Prince’ as a political leader who wishes to enact radical change in the face of intransigent opposition. Only a prophet, ie politician, who is ARMED can carry out this change. And a ‘prophet’/politician who is UNARMED or OUTCAST cannot enact radical change.
| 16 October 2009, 3:01 pm |
For my part, I would suggest that anyone who claims that Deutscher’s biography is a hagiography has not actually read something that is an actual hagiography.
Yes, Deutscher’s sympathies are clear, as are some of the gaps and simplifications that result from his approach, but there was no more to those books than simple one-sided polemic I would wager they would have been entirely condemned, erm, to the dustbin of history by now.
To compare them to early Soviet literary works, Deutscher’s approach is far more akin to the mood of Gladkov’s “Cement” than it is to Ostrovsky’s “How The Steel Was Tempered”; there is still some room to breathe in there; the bias is not absolute and entirely overwhelming.
| 16 October 2009, 3:05 pm |
“Oh dear. That kind of proves my point.
Does it Germinal, or does it only prove that by reading something before criticising it you show yourself to be the anti-semitic, totalitarian loving Leftist you obviously are. Take your coherent arguments and informed opinions elsewhere, this is no place for you.
| 16 October 2009, 3:24 pm |
Germinal,
Come on! Right the way though the three volumes, it is evident that Deutscher hero worships his subject. I have already quoted from The Prophet Outcast:
The passions of [Trotsky’s] intellect and heart, always uncommonly large and intense… swelled into a tragic energy as mighty and high as that which animates the prophets and the law-givers of Michelangelo’s vision.
This type of language is common. In he second volume, one can find the following:
[Trotsky] at any rate, would be withSpartacus, not with Pompey and the Caesars.
I am sure I can find numerous more examples if I had the time to re-read the volumes, but it is not necessary. Other reviewers, way before me, for example George Lichtheim (Commentary, January 1964), have already said that Deutscher hero-worships Trotsky.
| 16 October 2009, 3:40 pm |
If you watch the National Review discussion with Hitchens and Service – you’ll find a very interesting discussion and perhaps surprisingly not *that* much of a gap between the two of them on the core questions.
| 16 October 2009, 3:41 pm |
Tony Cliff’s writings on Lenin encapsulate the true spirit of hagiography. Deutscher’s trilogy, on the other hand, is a partisan rendering—he is not against overthrowing the Tsar, who, according to Mr Ezra’s political philosophy, should presumably have been allowed to hold on to Russia, since he was legally constituted as it sole owner—but it does not skate over controversial issues (such as Kronstadt), and it has some claim to literary merit: it tells an exciting story very well, with the arc of the story almost classical in character.
Yet, as the Iraq war shows, those who favour doing nothing to fight injustice believe that they don’t have to face the consequences of their non-actions. They get to believe—erroneously—that they faced no moral dilemmas, only the other fellow did. Ditto with the Russian revolution.
I don’t see how it is hero-worshiping to speculate that Trotsky was more likely to have sided with Spartacus and the slaves. I mean, why wouldn’t he have?
| 16 October 2009, 3:57 pm |
The version of Deutcher’s trilogy that I have is an earlier one, (Oxford University Press 1987 reprint) with different pagination, than the one I have been linking to on Google Books. On the back cover of The Prophet Outcast, and clearly approved by the publisher is an short blurb from Leonard Schapiro’s review that appeared in Listener. Even here, on the back cover, Schapiro says that Trotsky is Deutscher’s “hero.”
| 16 October 2009, 4:25 pm |
dave,
I am certainly not a pro-Tsar partisan, although I will say as Solzhenitsyn makes clear in his superb trilogy The Gulag Archipelago, conditions for political dissidents in the Tsar’s prisons was far better (including the opportunity to escape) than they were under Stalin’s prisons that came later.
What I am actually in favour of is democracy, not totalitarianism and lack of democracy which is a feature of how the Bolsheviks ruled the Soviet Union. Unlike the idea that what happened in 1917 in Russia was some kind of mass uprising of the whole working class, Richard Pipes demonstrates (The Russian Revolution, [Vintage Books, 1990]) that what took place was in reality a coup d’etat, “the capture of governmental power by a small minority” and it was more of intellectual uprising as opposed to a working-class uprising. Moreover, it is also clear that virtually as soon as they took power the Bolsheviks were involved in terror.
| 16 October 2009, 5:22 pm |
Believe it or not, it’s not possible to get me to put in a good word for Stalin’s prisons.
But how would you have proposed to bring the Whites around to democracy, without imposing your will on them by means of “bayonets and cannon”?
The thing that’s wrong with Pipes’s books is that he doesn’t see the Russian revolution as an overarching social process made up of many sub-processes, of which the Bolshevik “coup” is just one—an attempt to grab the rudder of the ship, to pinch Tolstoy’s extended metaphor.
| 16 October 2009, 5:37 pm |
Deutscher’s writings on Trotsky, Stalinism and the USSR are almost completely worthless. The only potential useful function of his writings is to demonstrate the general trend of Stalinist apologia that infected and to a large degree still infects much of the left. See Julius Jacobson’s article “The Anatomy of an Apologist” (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/jacobson/1965/10/deutscher.htm).
I’m looking forward to reading Service’s biography, mainly because it promises to be a master class in confusion. How many pages before we discover Trotsky had a brain tumor a la Lenin? Can’t wait.
| 16 October 2009, 5:52 pm |
‘Unlike the idea that what happened in 1917 in Russia was some kind of mass uprising of the whole working class, Richard Pipes demonstrates (The Russian Revolution, [Vintage Books, 1990]) that what took place was in reality a coup d’etat’
November, yes, but March?
| 16 October 2009, 6:40 pm |
Pipes says on one page that foreign intervention was marginal in the ‘Civil War’ and a few pages later that the White’s got all their weapons from foreign powers! Genius!, actually internally contradictory, you don’t even have to go and read some serious studies like Kevin Murphy or Steve Smith to pull it to pieces.
As for Trotsky advocating Red Terror, lets not forget which side of the front line displaced Jewish communities took refuge (I’ll help you out, it wasn’t behind Churchill’s stooge army).
I will read Services effort with interest.
| 16 October 2009, 9:50 pm |
I always find it amusing how the name Richard Pipes seems to send defenders and apologists for Communism into an apoplexy. Be that as it is may, let me provide another source. How about Sergey Petrovich Melgounov?
Turning to a random page (p.33) in his book, The Red Terror in Russia (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1925), we find the following:
In the August 31, 1918 edition of the Petrograd Krasnaya Gazeta an article shrieked:
Let our enemies be killed by the hundred! Nay, those hundred must be made thousands! Let the rascals be drowned in their own blood! Only rivers of blood can atone for the blood of Lenin and Uritsky! Blood! Blood! As much blood as possible!
Izvestia added the words of Lenin:
Even if ninety per cent. of the people perish, what matter if the other ten per cent. live to see revolution become universal?
Melgounov’s book, which I believe to be essential reading for anyone studying this period of history or for anybody who is deluded into thinking that Lenin and Trotsky were somehow good guys, is literally full of this sort of stuff. I really struggle to see how anyone can defend Lenin and Trotsky with a good conscience.
| 17 October 2009, 9:32 am |
‘Unlike the idea that what happened in 1917 in Russia was some kind of mass uprising of the whole working class, Richard Pipes demonstrates (The Russian Revolution, [Vintage Books, 1990]) that what took place was in reality a coup d’etat’
November, yes, but March?
It’s a while since I read the Pipes book, but IIRC he talks about the Bolshevik attempts to seize power in July (unsuccessfully) and November (successfully) as “counter-revolution from the Left”.
| 17 October 2009, 12:23 pm |
I think it is probably a little excessive to call ID’s trilogy a hagiography, but it is insufficiently critical and very partisan.
Julius Jacobson well worth reading.
Also section of Ron Radosh’s autobiog where he talks about ID’s role in the new left – I’ll dig it out and type it up.
| 17 October 2009, 12:27 pm |
Thelonious,
That the “October revolution” was a coup is common knowledge, anyone who ever read about the russian revolution in school should know that, even the most extreme communists admit it (even if some of them go to great length to justify it). You doesn’t have to read Richard Pipes to learn that.
What socialrepublican reacted to was that Michael Ezra’s weird sentence seams to indicate that he meant that the “February Revolution” too was a coup (or that it didn’t happened) wich I am sure neither Richard Pipes or Ezra think is the case.
“1917″, should probably be read as “november 1917″, that would make the sentence to make sense.
| 17 October 2009, 12:34 pm |
With “the most extreme communists” I meant meant ofcource people today, it is true that in old soviet propaganda it has in sometimes been portraid as an uprising (eg. in The Battleship Potemkin).
| 17 October 2009, 4:23 pm |
Izvestia added the words of Lenin:
Even if ninety per cent. of the people perish, what matter if the other ten per cent. live to see revolution become universal?
In the end, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were all committed to the idea of fewer but better Russians.
| 17 October 2009, 6:16 pm |
Ezra do you actually have any serious points to make? The Bolsheviks were prepared to use blood thirsty language proves what exactly? Quoting an anti ‘Red Terror’ book from 1925 proves what exactly.
There was a white terror, there was a red terror, the was a New Labour terror in Iraq
| 17 October 2009, 6:26 pm |
@Bjorn,
That is correct, I was referring to October/November 1917, I thought it was obvious.
@Poumista
I think the most telling part of Ron Radosh’s memoirs, Commies, is where he describes (pp.126-7 ) a trip he made to a mental hospital in Cuba. He asked a seemingly sane individual who was teaching others how to paint how he could deal with mentally unbalanced patients. The person responded, “I’m a patient myself.” Radosh was clearly confused and the person explained – “I’m a homosexual, and that is why I am confined here.” In a question and answer session with the doctor, the doctor explained, that homosexuality was a disease and it justified commitment to a mental hospital.
The doctor was also proud to tell the tour group that Radosh was on:
in our institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been lobotomised than any other mental hospital in the world.
One group member was horrified – but Suzanne Ross, a Castro loyalist, said:
We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies.
Regarding Radosh’s comments about the effect of Deutscher on the New Left, as I have it to hand, he says on pp.78-9 that Deutscher
develop[ed] a unique outlook on the Soviet Union …. [and] provided a convenient way for those who had been enamored with the USSR and Stalin to remain loyal to the ideal of communism while being critical of the reality…. for those infauated with Stalinism, he was a bridge away from it; for those who were already anti-Stalinist, he was a bridge towards acceptance of it.
| 17 October 2009, 6:44 pm |
@FFLP
It is not just blood thirsty language. According to Stephane Courtois on p.4 of his co-authored book, The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999) a figure that “approaches 100 million” were killed as a result of the effect of Communism. What is absolutely clear is that the terror and the murders did not start in the Stalin era but can be traced back to when Lenin was in power. As Lenin said January 1918:
We can’t expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover, bandits must be dealt with just as resolutely: they must be shot on the spot.
| 17 October 2009, 9:11 pm |
I have been reading the Trotsky biography with great enjoyment since I received it on Thursday. He uses the simple expedient of repeatedly quoting Trotsky’s many and fundamental gross misreadings of almost every political situation of major importance he wrote on, most of which were suppressed by his hagiographers. Service does not regard Deutscher as a hagiographer, merely overly starry-eyed and deluded in his presentation, and given to the omission of inconvenient truths, plus prone to use the romantic language quoted above. He also finds greater fault with Deutscher for being driven by an analysis based on the belief that Stalinist Russia would ultimately self-transform itself into a more humane and democratic version of Communism.
He also witheringly demonstrates how all the Trotskyist groupuscules who’ve provided most of the writings about Trotsky were either ignorant of what he actually said or did. Of course they will huff and puff to the contrary and rave on about the fact that some of Service’s most telling sources were those in the Hoover Institute (which spent years buying up collections of Soviet and Trotskyist archives, including those of the man himself) and the Soviet and satellite state archives.
A minor and irrelevant detail (from a political point of view). Trotsky’s surviving great grandson (most of his family were murdered by Soviet agents) became a Chassidic Jew.
From peyos to peyos in four generations….
| 17 October 2009, 11:03 pm |
“Even if ninety per cent. of the people perish, what matter if the other ten per cent. live to see revolution become universal?”
Social Darwinism, red in tooth and claw.
| 18 October 2009, 4:32 pm |
The Bolsheviks were prepared to use blood thirsty language proves what exactly?
And the nazis were prepared to use racist language proves what exactly?
Idiot.
| 18 October 2009, 7:01 pm |
Germinal @ 16 October 2009, 2:44 pm
“the ‘prophet’ he refers to is a concept taken from Machievelli’s ‘The Prince’ as a political leader who wishes to enact radical change in the face of intransigent opposition. Only a prophet, ie politician, who is ARMED can carry out this change. And a ‘prophet’/politician who is UNARMED or OUTCAST cannot enact radical change.”
Methinks that to be a “politician” one has to practice the supremacy of lawful elections. Hardly includes Machiavelli or Trotsky.
| 19 October 2009, 10:12 am |
The Bolsheviks were prepared to use blood thirsty language proves what exactly?
I love the “were prepared”.
It’s time to re-think Kerensky as well.
| 20 October 2009, 6:15 pm |
To add further, I guess my view is in line with the following quote from Michael Lynch, “Trotsky: Angel of Enlightenment or Frustrated Dictator?”History Review, March 1999:
Lenin and Trotsky had worked together on a deliberate policy of terror that precisely foreshadowed the later Stalinist tyranny. Stalinism, therefore, was not a reversal of Leninism but a continuation of it. Trotsky’s enforced militarisation of labour, his crushing of the trade unions, the extreme methods he used to discipline the Red Army, his savagery against the Kronstadt rebels in 1921, and his ferocity towards the Russian peasantry undermine the romantic image of him as “the angel of enlightenment” in an otherwise cruel world.
In exile, Trotsky denounced Stalinism not because it was brutal but because it was brutal for the wrong reasons. All the signs were that, had Trotsky had the opportunity to enforce his concept of revolution on the Bolshevik state, he would have used very similar means to those that Stalin employed. Absolute authority was the necessary requirement of Bolshevik rule. Long before Stalin imposed himself on the Party, Trotsky had supported Lenin in the creation of the one-party totalitarian state, with its secret police, show trials, and prison camps. Trotsky believed unashamedly in state terror.
On Deutscher’s trilogy, I do not think I can quite match the following praise from Max Shachtman (Dissent, July 1964):
As biography, it is an achievement unsurpassed by anything written in this century; as political biography, it is unequalled.
Trotsky started out as a great revolutionary but destroyed the independent soviets and was in many ways worse than Stalin.
His theories about the class nature of the Soviet Union were self-serving nonsense and his antifascism helped promote the Second Imperialist War.