Trotsky inspects the Red Army
It has always been easier to locate a self-proclaimed Trotskyist than it has been to find a similarly enthusiastic Stalinist or Leninist. From the bourgeois intelligentsia to the student with a poster of the Russian revolutionary on his bedroom wall to the unreconstructed activist, Leon Trotsky has long been, to many, the real hero of the October revolution. If only he had succeeded Lenin following the latter’s demise in 1924, then the revolution might have survived, along with many millions of Russians brutally exterminated by Stalin; or so the story goes.
Whether the mythology that surrounds the man who believed in the concept of permanent revolution can withstand this paperback edition of the latest biography by the historian Robert Service remains to be seen. But if Service, who has drawn extensively on newly available material, is to be believed, there was only ever one way the revolution was going to end, with or without Trotsky.
From his childhood in what is now southern Ukraine, Trotsky confused and confounded those who knew him in equal measure. Embarrassed by his pampered upbringing, which nonetheless allowed the family to enjoy the first intrusions of modernity into the Russian countryside, Trotsky was thrilled when his parents, desperate to endow their son with a formal education, sent him to live with relations in Odessa. From this point on it became clear, at least in Trotsky’s mind, that he was cut out for far more than a simple existence on the land.
“He’ll either turn out as a great hero or
a great scoundrel” surmised one early acquaintance and, for a while, his brilliance as an orator, combined with a great literary style that Trotsky honed during his first period of incarceration, looked set to propel him towards heroism.
By 1904, Service argues, Trotsky was already Trotsky: “He could write and speak with brilliant fluency. He was supremely daring and confident. At the same time he was a tiresome colleague, who liked to bust the bindings of party discipline. He relished the company of those who appreciated
his intellectual vivacity. He treasured his personal independence. He was quicksilver.”
Following a seemingly unstoppable
early career as mastermind of the Bolshevik victory in the Russian civil war the wheels began to fall off Trotsky’s wagon early in post-revolutionary Russia, following a severe economic crisis in 1920-21. Lenin
sketched “a preliminary rough draft of theses concerning the peasants” which was to become the basis for the New Economic Policy which, effectively, ended war communism. Trotsky’s opposition to the plan also effectively ended his hopes of succeeding Lenin at the head of the Soviet.
Reading Service’s life of Trotsky, it is tempting to believe this would not have made the slightest bit of difference; yet it is inconceivable that Trotsky would have signed the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939, as Stalin did. This alone would have altered the course of both Soviet history and, of course, world history.
While it is impossible to ignore Service’s contribution to our reading of Soviet history, if only because this book, along with his earlier lives of Lenin and Stalin occupy a full foot of space on many bookshelves, including mine, there is something undeniably
mean spirited about his attempts to
de-mythologise the heroes of the Soviet revolution. Service has taken Trotsky’s own writings, which remain mercifully intact despite the torching of his house in Turkey by Trotsky’s own mentally ill daughter, as source material, before seemingly setting out to write a deliberate riposte to Trotsky’s own falsification. The truth about Trotsky almost certainly falls somewhere in between.
That Trotsky was bourgeois in his own outlook and pursuits there is little doubt – Trotsky once assumed a man in overcoat could not be a revolutionary because he was so poorly dressed – but he was equally sincere in his desire for “one party, one working class, one revolution” despite his own attempts to seed sectarianism when that one party failed to coalesce in his own image. A failure that takes on an air of inevitability when viewed through this senior Service lens.
Trotsky’s “revolution” took him from pastoral Jewish Ukraine via Bloomsbury, where he first met Lenin, and exile in Turkey, Switzerland, Vienna and Paris, to Mexico, where he met his death. Along the way the Old Man enjoyed life with a succession of women, each as remarkable for their own quiet achievements as they were for facilitating Trotsky’s permanent zeal. Although even by Trotsky’s standards his final affair with Frida Kahlo, the wife of Trotsky’s Mexican host and chief supporter, Diego Rivera, seems improbably ill-mannered.
Such is the life of the political exile it is little wonder Trotsky never learned whom to trust, and whom to keep at arm’s length, particularly when at theend of that arm is the hand of a man gripping an ice pick. The pen may indeed be mightier than the sword but even Trotsky’s pen was, in the end, no match for the mighty Soviet hammer.
