10/2/2011
Leon Trotsky: A
Revolutionary Life by Joshua Rubenstein, Yale University Press, 240 pages,
$25.
Who was Leon Trotsky?
Today, this is hardly the burning question it was when
Joseph Stalin had Trotsky — born Lev Bronstein — imprisoned, exiled, and
finally, after one crudely botched attempt, murdered in Mexico City in 1940.
Nor can it excite the imagination as it did Isaac Deutscher's when he penned
his monumental three part biography cum hagiography — The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 — some fifty years ago.
Today, Trotsky’s name comes up most often in accounts of
debates in New York's City College cafeteria in the 1930s, among those, such as
Irving Kristol, for whom Trotskyism was a way station out of Marxist dialectic
toward neoconservative dogma. Trotsky does still occupy a humble place in
popular culture, as evidenced by the sweet, smart Canadian film The Trotsky (2009), in which a Montreal
high school student who happens to be named Leon Bronstein believes himself to
be a reincarnation of the Bolshevik firebrand, and sets out in search of his
soul mate, his very own Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin. But for the most part, as Marxism goes so goes its
Trotskyite variant, and for most of us Marxism, in all its tortured variants,
is increasingly archaic.
Joshua Rubenstein, author of "Leon Trotsky: A
Revolutionary Life", acknowledges this when he writes: "Nearly a
century after the Bolshevik Revolution and decades after his death, Leon
Trotsky and the ideas that animated his life. . . seem increasing remote."
But Rubenstein's succinct account also rescues Trotsky from that remoteness,
positioning him at a useful distance for contemporary readers. And with his
Trotsky comes a crucial chunk of twentieth-century history: the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917 — in which Trotsky played a role barely second to Lenin's —
and its all too rapid transition into the Communist police state that crumbled
two decades ago.
Rubenstein notes that Trotsky foresaw the results of
Bolshevism as early as 1904, when he was not in accord with Lenin's strident
insistence on one party rule, and wrote: "Lenin's methods lead to this. .
. the party organization at first substitutes itself 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."
Yet, after Lenin's death in 1924, when Russia's other
parties had been suppressed, and the reduction to Stalin's dictatorship was
well on its way, Trotsky abjectly proclaimed: "In the last analysis, the
party is always right. . . no one can be right against the party. . . since
history has not created any other way to determine the correct position."
Born in 1879 into a Ukrainian Jewish family, Trotsky always
disavowed any connection to the Jewish people. For him, writes Rubenstein:
"The Jews were just another small, persecuted minority." But it's
hard to miss how much Trotsky's prostration before the Communist Party
resembles obeisance toward religious authority. In Rubenstein's view, as
Trotsky abjured the Jewish belief in a messianic age, "he adopted an
alternative utopian faith — one that was secular and far more
dangerous."
It was perhaps only the distance afforded by exile from the
Soviet Union that allowed Trotsky to plainly see that the Communist Party was
far from always right, and that under Stalin it was more often catastrophically
wrong. In the 1930s, when all of Russia's other parties had been suppressed,
Stalin set about purging the Communist Party of every point of view but his
own, and exported a disastrous version of this policy to Germany. As Hitler
closed in on state power, Stalin barred Germany's Communists from joining with
its Social Democrats against the Nazis. Communists and Socialists together
comprised a portion of the population that might have made a stand against
Hitler. But with Communists attacking Socialists as mortal enemies
— "social fascists" — the results, as Trotsky recognized,
"were tragic and entirely foreseeable".
Trotsky had once told a Moscow rabbi: "I am not a Jew.
I'm a Marxist internationalist. . . I have nothing in common with Jewish
things." Still, as per Rubenstein, he was "among the first to foresee
that Hitler’s triumph would spell disaster for his fellow European Jews".
In 1938 he directed his followers to understand that, "the next
development of world reaction signifies almost with certainty the physical
extermination of the Jews." But even at that late date Trotsky could not
abjure Bolshevism, defending its "monopoly of power and resort to revolutionary
terror."
"History is full of such tragic heroes," concludes
Rubenstein. "They dream of justice and then wreak havoc."
Rubenstein is Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty
International. Our paths crossed in 1968, during the student occupation of buildings
at Columbia University. We had the following exchange about Lev Bronstein.
FUSE: Your Trotsky bio is part of a Yale Jewish Lives
series, which includes biographies of Hank Greenberg and Emma Goldman. Would
your book have been different it were not part of that series?
JR: The editors of the Jewish Lives series approached me
because of my earlier work on the Soviet Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg. They
liked the way I described his attitudes in the face of both Nazi and Soviet
anti-Semitism.
FUSE: How did your own Jewishness influence this work?
JR: I was raised in a kosher home and attended a
Conservative Jewish religious school. I do not regard myself as particularly
religious, even though I continue to keep kosher and mark holidays to some extent.
Trotsky regarded his Jewish origins as an accident and had
little if any attachment to Jewish traditions. Though my upbringing and
attitudes are different, I did not seek to judge or condemn him for his. As
a biographer, I see my role as someone who seeks to understand and
to explain the life I am exploring.
FUSE: Your book brings up a basic question: had the
Bolsheviks not seized power in 1917, would some sort of democratic system have
emerged? Or would Tsarism, fueled by the force of the anti-Semitic Black
Hundreds, have prevailed?
JR: I can say with certainty that even before the execution
of the Tsar in 1918, the Romanov dynasty was fully overthrown and had no chance
of returning to power. But the Provisional Government simply did not have the leadership
necessary to deal with the country's problems. Perhaps if it had worked more
strenuously to get out of the war, and pursue land reform, it could have
garnered more credibility among the population. But its measures were
half-hearted. The Bolsheviks saw the opportunity and seized it.
FUSE: Was it a case, then, of either Bolshevism or chaos? A
Constituent Assembly was coming into being, representing many parties. World
War I was going to end in any case, and pretty soon, with Germany's defeat. Was
a post-war parliamentary system for Russia out of the question?
JR: The Bolsheviks would not permit it. Throughout 1917,
there was broad support for a Constituent Assembly, but once it was suppressed
by the Bolsheviks in 1918 there was no hope for a democratic outcome. Lenin and
the Bolsheviks overrode the resistance of their opponents — and their erstwhile
socialist allies. The Whites were no less ruthless, but they represented a
lost, hopeless cause. The monarchy they fought for could not be revived.
Bolshevik triumph was not inevitable. The Provisional
Government could have pursued different policies -- social and military -- but
failed to do so.
FUSE: Before the Bolshevik takeover, Lenin and Trotsky had
often disagreed. You quote a friend of Trotsky's who described a transformation
in him after 1917. She said that he was trying prove himself, trying to catch
up, to, "outdo in zeal and ardor the Bolsheviks themselves. . . by
becoming more intransigent, more revolutionary, more Bolshevik than any of
them."
Didn't we see the same sort of process at work in our
generation of activists?
JR: There was pressure on our generation of activists to
demonstrate allegiance, to follow the lead of the most radical on our campuses.
I saw this at Columbia in 1968 and in 1970. I resisted this urge and challenged
it. Some in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] liked to say, "Nothing
radicalizes like the Cossack’s knout." They were happy to see New York
police storm the campus.
FUSE: Wasn't there something close to deranged about
Trotsky's brand of utopianism? You quote him writing in Literature and Revolution (1924) that: "The average human type
will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this
ridge new peaks will rise."
Didn't this kind of thinking give the Bolsheviks license to
do anything they deemed necessary to drive people to "new peaks"?
JR: Trotsky's faith in Marxist revolution was suffused with that
utopian fervor. With the revolution he was convinced that all aspects of human
society would dramatically improve, including human nature. This faith, combined with the
Bolsheviks' determination to hold onto power, made the regime, including
Trotsky, all the more ruthless.
FUSE: How does this book connect to your work with Amnesty
International?
JR: Once Lenin and Trotsky decided to
reject democratic values, dictatorship was inevitable.
Would rule by Trotsky have been better than rule by Stalin?
George Orwell had his doubts. In 1939 he wrote that: "[Trotsky] is probably
as much responsible for [the Russian dictatorship] as any man now living, and
there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin,
though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind."
Trotsky's story affirms my steadfast belief in civil
liberties and human rights.
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