TROTSKY : THE PASSIONATE REVOLUTIONARY
By Allan Todd
Pen & Sword Book. 227 pages. £25. ISBN 978-139901-076-4
Reviewed by Jim Burns
Years ago I met Reg Groves, author of a book called
The Balham Group, a
history of a small gathering of early British Trotskyists he had
been involved with in the 1930s. It would have been in the 1970s
when I first had the opportunity to talk to Groves, and there had
been something of an upsurge of interest in Trotskyism and other
left-wing alternatives to capitalism. The so-called “underground”
bookshops that flourished at the time had racks of publications
offering a variety of views on current problems.
And past problems, too. It often seemed to me that the Trotskyist
magazines and papers were particularly inclined towards resurrecting
old arguments. They involved the different factions that existed in
what had never been much more than a limited, if dedicated, number
of devotees of Trotsky’s ideas. The Left, it seems, has always been
prone to dissension within its ranks, but the Trotskyists appeared
to have taken the art of factionalism to greater levels than most.
Splits and miniscule groups with only a handful of members were par
for the course, and most managed to produce a publication of one
sort or another. In them they put forward their arguments for having
the only correct interpretations of what Trotsky had said and
intended. There is a story, “The Party”, by Isaac Rosenfeld, a
one-time American Trotskyist, which satirises such groups: “the fact
is that the party has existed separately for only seven years; it
split off from the parent body, which in turn was born by separation
from an earlier party and so on”.
Leon Trotsky, as he was known, was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in
1879 in a rural area of Southern Ukraine. His father was a wealthy
landowner, despite the restrictions placed on Jews owning or even
renting very large areas of land. His mother was better educated
than his father,
subscribed to a lending library, and gave her children (Trotsky had
a brother and two
sisters) opportunities to take an interest in the arts. Trotsky
spent seven years at St Paul’s School in Odessa,
though at one point he was briefly expelled for taking part
in a demonstration against an unpopular teacher. But he was an
extremely successful student with maximum marks in every subject.
While in Odessa he lived with the Spentzer family who introduced him
to the work of a variety of writers. He later said, “It was a good
intellectual family. I owe it a lot”.
Allan Todd notes that, at this stage of his life, Trotsky looked and
behaved like “a typical bourgeois cosmopolitan youth”. But he was
noticing the very real inequalities in Russian society, and was
aware that his comfortable way of life was derived from wealth
created by the peasants his father employed and exploited. He argued
with his father about this, sometimes in front of the peasants, and
Todd says he “already displayed tendencies towards a lack of
discretion and an inclination to contradict”.
In 1895 Trotsky moved to a school in Nikolaev, a town used by the
police as a useful place to settle and observe political
revolutionaries. For Trotsky it was an opportunity to develop his
political thinking. He met people linked to the Narodniks, the
promoters of a form of agrarian socialism and, in many ways, the
forerunners of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) who initially
played a prominent part in the 1917 events in Russia. They were not
Marxists, and neither was Trotsky at that time.
It was when he became a student at the university in Odessa that he
began to take greater note of Marxist theories. He helped form the
South Russian Workers’ Union (SRWU) which, despite its title,
consisted mainly of “student activist intellectuals”. Trotsky had
already come to the attention of the police and he was arrested in
1898 and exiled to Irkutsk. He associated with the Mensheviks, who
tended to be less in favour of tight central control than the
Bolsheviks. It was in 1903 that he began to use the name he became
known by, Leon Trotsky. I’m deliberately moving quickly through his
activities, such as escaping from exile, travelling to various
European cities – Zurich, Vienna, Paris, London – meeting Lenin, and
being nicknamed “The Pen” because of the frequency and quality of
his numerous essays and articles for the radical press. It all
necessitated his leaving behind a wife and two daughters when he
chose to become an active revolutionary. It’s worth noting that Todd
remarks how Trotsky’s intellectual “brilliance” sometimes annoyed
those who were less gifted than he was. He could come across to them
as arrogant.
Although still allying mostly with the Mensheviks, Trotsky was also
displaying a growing commitment to Marxism by attacking other groups
in the wider revolutionary movement such as the Narodniks and the
anarchists. He was active during the 1905 Revolution in St
Petersburg, arrested, and sent to Siberia. He escaped and made his
way to Finland. He had, by this time, formed a relationship with
Natalya Sedova, “a seasoned revolutionary” who was to become his
lifelong companion. Again, it’s necessary to move at a fast pace
through the years leading up to 1917. Trotsky wrote steadily,
sometimes as a literary and art critic, and was a war correspondent
during the Balkan conflicts of 1912/13. Like many hopeful
revolutionaries he was taken aback when, in 1914, the workers of the
world didn’t unite, but instead turned on each other and supported
the war programmes of their respective countries. The slogan,
“Workers of the World Unite” now had a hollow ring to it.
He kept moving through the usual locations – Vienna, Zurich, Paris –
though the war situation made it increasingly difficult to settle in
any one place. At one point he was in New York. When, in 1917, it
became obvious that something was afoot in Russia he left the United
States and headed to Petrograd, as St Petersburg had been renamed
once war with Germany broke out. Arriving there he was acclaimed by
the crowds of workers and soldiers who were demonstrating in the
streets. He was particularly popular among the sailors of the
Kronstadt naval base.
Trotsky was still not formally a Bolshevik, but identified with them
as the insurrection developed. It was largely his plan that ensured
the success of the overthrow of the Kerensky government in November
1917. And there’s no doubt
that Trotsky was responsible for the formation of the “new” army
that eventually defeated the various White armies that attempted,
with the help of interventionist British, American, French and
Japanese forces, to defeat the Bolsheviks. Todd mentions Trotsky’s
harsh methods when imposing discipline on the troops, with deserters
shot. It was a harshness that also came out when he later suppressed
a rising by sailors at Kronstadt who were protesting against
increasingly rigid controls imposed by the Bolsheviks.
It was when the fighting finished that Trotsky’s troubles began.
Lenin was ill and would soon die, and Stalin, who had fallen out
with Trotsky during the war years, was General Secretary of the
party and building a power base within it. It’s a fascinating period
to study, assuming one can follow all the twists and turns at the
meetings, and the scheming that went on in private. What it came
down to in the end is that Trotsky, for all his high intellect, was
outflanked by Stalin. The increasing bureaucratisation within the
party gave Stalin the opportunities to appoint his own people to key
positions. And it’s more than likely that Trotsky made the mistake
of assuming that because Stalin wasn’t an intellectual he wasn’t
intelligent. It’s a mistake frequently made by intellectuals whose
arrogance turns people against them. Trotsky had dismissed Stalin as
a “nonentity” and described him as “the gravedigger of the
revolution”. And it would
seem that Trotsky simply hadn’t the kind of mind set that can
cultivate personal contacts and use them to good advantage when
wanting to take control. There was also the basic clash between
Stalin’s idea of Socialism in One Country and Trotsky’ s theory of
Permanent Revolution which suggested that, unless there were
revolutions in other countries, the revolution in Russia would
stagnate.
In the end Trotsky was outmanoeuvred and forced into external exile.
Many countries refused to give him sanctuary, and after brief
sojourns in Turkey and Norway he was offered refuge in Mexico, which
then had a left-wing government. It also had a powerful communist
party which would prove troublesome to Trotsky. It’s from this point
that the legend of Trotsky as the true revolutionary holding out
against the tyranny of Stalinism, and leader of small bands of
dedicated Trotskyists, began to take hold. Volunteer guards came
from the United States and elsewhere to protect him against possible
attacks. It was assumed, if not directly known, that he was on
Stalin’s hit-list. Members of Trotsky’s family still living in
Russia were arrested and executed, and his son, Lyova, active in
Paris as Trotsky’s advocate, died in mysterious circumstances. A
Stalinist agent, Mark Zborowski using the name Etienne, had
infiltrated Lyova’s organisation and seemed reliable but
regularly passed information
to Moscow.
There had been attempts on Trotsky’s life, especially that led by
David Sequeiros, the Mexican artist and fervent communist. The final
one came in 1940 when Frank Jacson cultivated a relationship with
Sylvia Agelof, an American Trotskyist in Mexico, and through her
gained access to Trotsky. Jacson was actually Ramon Mercader, a
Spaniard and an NKVD operative. The story of how he drove an
ice-pick into Trotsky’s head is well-known. Mercader himself was
overpowered by Trotsky’s guards and was later tried and sentenced to
twenty years in a Mexican prison.
I’m not sure what the state-of-play is now with regard to supporters
of Trotsky. No doubt there are some out there, but we hear little of
them these days. And it’s also worth wondering how his reputation
stands in general? I don’t
think many people would now be inclined to take his teachings to
heart. And I have doubts about what he would have done had he ever
been in a position of authority.
I suspect he may have been pushed by circumstances into
adopting some brutal methods and measures. He was hardly
liberal-minded during the difficult early days of the Bolshevik
take-over and wanted to militarise the unions and apply conscription
to the workers. And there is his undeniable ruthless record with
regard to military discipline and the suppression of the Kronstadt
rebellion. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I can understand why he has had some appeal over the years. An
intellectual who is also a man of action, and actually participates
in world-shaking events, might well appear attractive to
those whose own activities go little beyond talking and
writing about the possibilities of revolution. Am I being cynical in
saying this? Perhaps, but it is possible that, for some, following a
dream that may never become reality is a good way of seeming to be
spotless. Others engaged in the dirty business of struggling to
achieve even minor changes will inevitably come out stained and be
accused of compromising.
Trotsky is a fascinating figure to follow on paper. He would have
loved to have been in a position to concentrate on writing. His
range of interests – he could easily and knowingly converse about
art and literature with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera or the
French surrealist André Breton – could take him beyond the world of
revolutionary politics. But events determined which course he had to
follow and how and why he came to his tragic end.
Allan Todd provides a brisk account of Trotsky’s life and
achievements, and also indicates that he had some failings as a
person and as a possible leader of a country beset by numerous
problems, both internal and external. His book has notes, many of
which point to the importance of Isaac Deutscher’s work in
documenting Trotsky’s story. There’s a very short bibliography (to
be fair numerous books are referred to in the notes), and some
illustrations.
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