Book Review:
Made for revolution
A Review of the three-part biography of Leon Trotsky:
THE PROPHET ARMED: TROTSKY, 1879-1921, 497 PP
THE PROPHET UNARMED: TROTSKY, 1921-1929, 444 PP
THE PROPHET OUTCAST: TROTSKY, 1929-1940, 512 PP
BY ISAAC DEUTSCHER
PUBLISHED BY VERSO
Reviewed by DALE SHIN
On any reckoning, Leon Trotsky has strong claims to be considered the greatest revolutionary of the previous century. Early critic and later comrade-in-arms of V. I. Lenin, whose Bolshevik Party in October 1917 spearheaded history’s first socialist revolution; founder of the Red Army that won the ensuing civil war; courageous witness to the subsequent degeneration of that revolution into a police raid, under the heel of Joseph Stalin, the despot who succeeded Lenin as leader of the Bolsheviks, and whose name became synonymous with the totalitarian rule he exercised-here is the profile of one of the outstanding Marxists of his generation, of whom the Polish socialist-historian Isaac Deutscher, in his authoritative biography of Trotsky, wrote that he was “made for revolution.”
Originally published under the shadow of the Cold War, Deutscher’s classic work helped to reacquaint readers on both sides of the Atlantic with its subject’s prolific life and influence, at a time when “Trotskyism” was a popular term of ridicule in left-wing circles-in the main due to the malicious slanders propagated by Moscow’s paid intellectual publicists, as well as the petty sectarian feuding and obsessive hairsplitting amongst Trotsky’s self-styled adherents. Deutscher’s monumental study, with each volume chronicling a different chapter of Trotsky’s saga-from his role in the October uprising and civil war, through his leadership of the ill-starred Left Opposition to Stalin, to his exile from the USSR and eventual assassination at the hands of a Soviet agent-sought to redeem his rich (if uneven) legacy; but also to recall the democratic ideals that had animated the Russian Revolution in its early years, before the Stalinist counter-revolution buried them, along with the women and men who fought against their perversion. More than a decade after the collapse of “Communism,” Verso has reissued Deutscher’s magisterial trilogy so as to remove anew the amnesia, and anathema, that continue to surround Leon Trotsky and the revolution he was made for.
THIRD EYE OPEN
Deutscher borrowed the title of his work from Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, where, in a passage reproduced as an epigraph to The Prophet Armed, Machiavelli notoriously argues that “all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed.” By “prophet,” the Italian philosopher meant an innovator possessed of visionary imagination and ambition, not an actual clairvoyant. The dual sense of the term, however, suits the Russian revolutionary, who was equipped with “a sixth sense, as it were, an intuitive sense of history, which singled him out among the political thinkers of his generation, sometimes exposed him almost to derision, but more often found triumphant, if delayed, vindication.” Thus, while most Marxists before 1917 believed that the impending Russian Revolution would overthrow the then-ruling monarchy and install a representative democracy, thereby launching the development of liberal capitalism in Russia-which in turn would set the scene for a socialist epilogue to this ‘bourgeois’ revolution, albeit at an unspecifiable future date-Trotsky acutely foresaw that the coming upheaval would not exhaust itself with these limited goals, but would culminate in gyrations aiming at the immediate abolition of class rule, helmed by the relatively small, but disproportionately powerful, urban working class.
Trotsky’s audacious prognosis of “permanent revolution” was to be eminently borne out by the events of 1917. His prevision was not without its limits, however. Flushed with optimism, he predicted that the Russian Revolution would incite concurrent working-class insurgencies across the continent, without whose aid it would not be able to prolong itself. It never entered Trotsky’s mind that Soviet Russia would be abandoned to its own meager resources by the inertia of the European labour movement. And yet, if he could not visualize this possibility, he did unwittingly summarize beforehand the usurpatory logic that was to inform the ideology and practice of the post-revolutionary state so isolated: “the party organization at first substitutes for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.”
As The Prophet Unarmed shows, this schema of “substitutionism,” first silhouetted in 1904, essentially characterized the evolution of Bolshevism in government. Threatened with foreign invasion, left to fend for themselves by the Western proletariat, and drawn into a bloody civil war, the Bolsheviks promoted a self-destructive siege mentality; they closed ranks within the party, banning organized factions, and throttled dissent outside it, outlawing all oppositional groups. These were measures which Trotsky, to his discredit, enthusiastically supported, and whose pernicious precedents would later be invoked by Stalin to crush resistance to his growing monopoly of power-in the front rank, Trotsky himself. By a grotesque historical irony, Trotsky’s arch-nemesis “struck him down with his own weapons”; and in 1929, he was banished from the republic and branded a traitor. Even in exile, however, Trotsky’s restless speculative mind would not lay fallow: among other things, he forecast the rise of Hitler, warning that the short-sighted tactics imposed by Stalin and others upon German labour in the fight against Nazism were clearing a path for the Third Reich.
HOW STALIN GOT HIS GROOVE BACK
The exoneration, then, of a revolutionary martyr who deserved a better fate than to have his exemplary record of socialist internationalism effaced by the calumnies heaped upon it by his adversaries. But also an exculpation of the autocrat chiefly responsible for his downfall: these were Deutscher’s mutually canceling accomplishments. For it is one of the principal aims of The Prophet Armed and its sequels to trace “the thread of unconscious historic continuity” that led from Lenin and Trotsky’s shamefacedly repressive policies of the early 1920s to the atrocities perpetrated thereafter by Stalin’s homicidal regime. Deutscher could thus argue that Stalinism, so far from an aberration in the course of the revolution, represented its consummation, whose most important “practical achievement,” that is, a nationalized economy based on state control of industry and trade-for Deutscher as for Trotsky, the saving grace of the Soviet “workers’ state,” however “degenerated” otherwise-could not have been secured without resort to despotic means.
Such is the thrust of the Machiavellian flourish Deutscher mines for his commanding metaphor: after the civil war, when the Russian people, fatigued by the ravages of the preceding years, lost their ardour for the revolutionary cause, and when even some Bolsheviks, aghast at the creeping authoritarianism of the upstart state bureaucracy, were expressing belated misgivings about the direction they were headed in-Trotsky included-a new, tougher-minded, “prophet” was needed in order to shepherd and, when necessary, strong-arm the demoralized masses and divided party to their common destiny. Enter Stalin, whose lasting virtue was to have overseen, beginning in 1928, the forcible collectivization of agriculture and modernization of industry, in spite of the massive toll in human suffering and loss of life these incurred-to which should be added the scores of political opponents he had executed or imprisoned.
To be sure, this “second revolution” (which was reproduced in the East European countries annexed to the USSR after WWII) strayed considerably from the model of working-class self-emancipation traditionally conceived by Marxists as the only viable road to socialism; it was, rather, a continuation of that “substitutionism” that had yielded Stalin’s dictatorship in the first place. But those, Deutscher concluded, were the world-historical breaks. Not a revolution “from below,” but one “from above and from outside” had been the order of the day, relegating the “undiluted classical Marxism” upheld by Trotsky to a political anachronism; the futility of which was exemplified by his final years as The Prophet Outcast-years spent collecting cacti, raising rabbits, and refereeing the internecine disputes among his ever-fractious followers. Another paradox, however: for the very material progress over which Stalin had presided was now-in the 1960s- “disrupting and eroding Stalinism from the inside,” as the bureaucracy itself began to press for the democratic reform of Soviet society. From above, outside, and inside: history, evidently, could be made from anywhere but below. The historian, alas, lacked not only his subject’s unswerving commitment to “undiluted Marxism,” but also his oracular powers; “de-Stalinization” proved less the heroic prologue to a “return of classical Marxism” than a farcical prelude to the dissolution of “actually existing socialism.”
UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES
The Prophet trilogy has been widely hailed as one of the greatest modern biographies, and it is not difficult to see why. Its protagonist, as is well-known, was himself a notably gifted writer. Peerless among his contemporaries, Trotsky’s literary prowess was matched by that of his biographer. Deutscher’s sinuous prose, demonstrating mastery of a language that was remarkably not his native tongue, conscripts his reader into the hothouse world of Russian revolutionary politics: one athwart with epic popular struggles, acrimonious intellectual debates, and sanguinary factional intrigues, and enlivened by a pervasive sense that an epoch was here being defined.
But it is Trotsky’s indomitable revolutionary spirit, the sheer constancy of his convictions amid so many personal betrayals, disappointments, and humiliations, that impart the most durable impression of that world. Never before had the entire machinery of a state-political, ideological, military-been deployed to destroy a single individual. Yet, for all the persecutions Trotsky faced, “there was no penance in him to the end.” Understandably bent (he even contemplated suicide, hoping to exchange his life for those of his children-all of whom died before him), his will remained fundamentally unbroken. A young Trotsky had pronounced “a curse… upon all those who want to bring dryness and hardness into all the relations of life”; and the seer was to persevere in his opposition to the established powers of his age-fascism, Stalinism, capitalism-up until the day an assassin struck him fatally in the head. The prophet’s curse revenged itself against the first two members of that Triple Alliance; it has yet to descend upon the third, which continues to bring dryness and hardness into all our lives. But then, Trotsky only proposed the end of class society-he left it for us to dispose of it.
Dale Shin is an occasional contributor to New Socialist magazine. Some of his best friends are Trotskyists.
New Socialist Issue #51 - May/June 2005