Holding Fast to an Image of the Past

Chapter 3

The Prophet, His Biographer, and the Watchtower
Isaac Deutscher’s Biography of Leon Trotsky1

Introduction

The materialist conception of history was once described by a notable practitioner, the late Edward Thompson, as “perhaps the strongest discipline deriving from the Marxist tradition.”2 Of all the different modes available to that discipline, biography is the least commonly employed. Why? One reason is that, while Marxism does not deny the role of individuals in the historical process, the balance required by Marxist biographers in relation to their subjects is extraordinarily difficult to achieve. Focus too narrowly on their lives, and run the risk of treating the social context in which they played their role as a mere historic backdrop. Place too much emphasis on their times, and stand in danger of reducing them to the sum of the social forces that shaped their personalities. It is not entirely surprising, therefore, that there are very few biographies among the classics of Marxist historiography.3 The exceptions, such as Thompson’s own William Morris (1955 and 1977), tend to be excursions into the genre by writers whose reputations rest on works of broader scope than any one individual.

There are two main Marxist responses to the difficulties that biography presents. One, long established, but relevant only when dealing with conventionally important historical figures, is the “political” biography. Here, attention is mainly restricted to the public world of theoretical controversy and organizational affiliation, without the complications inherent in dealing with the inner life. The other, more recent response has become known as “microhistory.” Here, the focus is on otherwise anonymous individuals whose experiences can be taken as either characteristic of a distinct way of life or emblematic of a particular historical moment. Both approaches have resulted in important work.4 Both approaches also involve serious problems. In the first, the subject rarely emerges in the round and, indeed, often simply becomes the embodiment of a series of political positions. In the second, the full human personality is more likely to be represented, but often at the expense of revealing anything of significance about the wider society it inhabited.

Given these difficulties, the achievements of Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) are all the more remarkable. Of all the great Marxist historians, he was unusual, perhaps unique, in making biography his primary mode of expression. With the exception of a handful of substantial essays, most of which were posthumously collected in Marxism, Wars and Revolutions (1984), Deutscher’s biographies, Stalin (1949 and 1966) and Trotsky (1954–1963), are his central and most enduring legacy. It is fair to say that not everyone shares this opinion, including many of his erstwhile admirers. David Horowitz, former US student radical, author of From Yalta to Vietnam (1965), and subsequent convert to neoconservatism, wrote in the course of a dispute with Christopher Hitchens: “When all is said and done the Trotsky biography must be seen as an incomparably sad waste of a remarkable individual talent.”5 Horowitz has, at any rate, read it. Others have suggested that even this effort is unnecessary. Martin Amis informs us, in the course of yet another dispute with Hitchens, that he has fairly definite views about Trotsky, whom he describes as “a murdering bastard and a fucking liar. And he did it with gusto. He was a nun-killer—they [i.e., the Bolsheviks] all were. The only thing that can be entered in the other side of the ledger is that he paid a price that was very nearly commensurate. Death was visited on him and all his clan.” It therefore comes as no surprise to learn on the previous page from this outburst that: “No, I haven’t read Isaac Deutscher’s The Prophet Armed and The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast, but I have read Volkogonov’s Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary.”6 Martin, we had guessed as much. Horowitz, Amis, and Hitchens are a trio of political corpses in search of a decent burial; we can safely leave them to their literary dance of death. What can those who still want to oppose the new rulers of the world rather than grovel at their feet learn from these books? Whatever the problems with Deutscher’s political judgments—and as we shall see these are considerable—any criticism of them must start from the simple recognition that they represent not only a model of Marxist biography but also two of the essential histories of the Russian Revolution written in any historical mode. The history of the Russian Revolution is refracted through the lives of two of the three great protagonists, but the revolution is never relegated to the background, nor are the protagonists ever detached from the process.7 Verso is therefore to be congratulated for republishing the Trotsky trilogy and making one of the classic works of socialist literature available to a new generation of activists.

The qualifications of a biographer

A general level of imaginative sympathy is, of course, necessary for any biographer to engage with his or her subject. In Deutscher’s case, this faculty seems to have been heightened in relation to Trotsky because of four specific personal characteristics or experiences that the two men had in common.8

First, they shared a political commitment. Deutscher joined the Communist Party of Poland in 1926 or 1927 when the factional struggle within Russia was reaching its climax. He was quickly elevated to the leadership and remained there until his expulsion in 1932 for opposing, in the party press, the disastrous Stalinist policy in Germany. He was, in other words, one of the very few Communists who both accepted and was prepared to act on Trotsky’s analysis. Deutscher helped form the Polish Trotskyist organization and led it throughout the 1930s. Furthermore, unlike most of the Trotskyist leaders of the time, he was capable of independent thought: the Polish delegates to the founding conference of the Fourth International in September 1938 carried his—essentially correct—arguments against proclaiming the new organization at that time.9

Second, they shared the experience of exile. While in London seeking work as a journalist in 1939 Deutscher was stranded by the outbreak of the Second World War and the partition of his country between the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia. He joined the Polish Home Army in Scotland, but spent much of the war in a detention camp for political undesirables as a result of his opposition to the anti-Semitism he found in its ranks. His political opposition to the regime imposed by Stalin after 1945 meant that he was never able to return to Poland. Deutscher once wrote of Trotsky that “like Thucydides, Dante, Machiavelli, Heine, Marx, Herzen, and other thinkers and poets, Trotsky attained his full eminence as a writer only in exile.”10 These sentiments equally apply to their author.

Third, they shared exclusion from academic life. Trotsky had not the slightest desire to be included, of course, and the very idea of the great revolutionary ensconced in the groves of academe is grotesquely comic. In Deutscher’s case, however, it would have saved him from relying on journalism for a living, since his writing in this capacity is by far the weakest part of his output. After the Second World War, Deutscher supported himself by working for bourgeois publications like the Economist and the Observer. When the Cold War closed off even these options, he was forced to promote himself as an expert on Russia and the Stalinist bloc. There is no doubt that his ensuing work as a Sovietologist was often highly speculative and his predictions mostly wrong. Nevertheless, as Peter Sedgwick wrote in an obituary in International Socialism, it is misguided to criticize Deutscher on the basis of what he wrote while carrying out what was, in effect, his day job: “It is as if Marx’s theoretical standing was to be criticised on the basis of the rubbish he wrote against Palmerston in the Tory press.”11 Deutscher was not, of course, alone in the Trotskyist tradition in standing outside academia. Perry Anderson has identified three of Trotsky’s “heirs” who “filled no chairs in universities”: Deutscher himself, Roman Rosdolsky, and Ernest Mandel.12 The parallels between the first two are fairly exact, in that Rosdolsky was also a Left Oppositionist exiled to the United States from his native Ukraine after the Second World War, where he abandoned direct political activity in order to write his classic The Making of Marx’s “Capital” (1968). Mandel’s situation was somewhat different in that he—a party man his entire life—had the resources, however meager, of the Fourth International behind him. At least all three of these men were able to write in relative tranquillity. Victor Serge, another exiled Left Oppositionist and the only one to equal Deutscher in literary terms, was denied even this. When Deutscher could have benefited from a university position in Britain, to enable him the time and a regular income to complete his Life of Lenin, he was denied one on political grounds. The circumstances of this episode are interesting for what they reveal about the cowardice and hypocrisy of Cold War liberalism. In 1963 the University of Sussex offered Deutscher a professorship as Head of Soviet Studies. The offer was first suspended then withdrawn as the direct result of an intervention by Isaiah Berlin, then a member of the University Board. Berlin wrote to the vice-chancellor of Deutscher that he was “the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable.” (Obviously this had nothing whatsoever to do with Deutscher’s Marxism, or his anti-Zionism, or the fact that he had earlier launched a devastating attack on Berlin’s ignorant claim that Marx believed in historical inevitability.) Berlin even made the—highly implausible—claim that he would have supported other radicals like C. Wright Mills or Eric Hobsbawm who, unlike Deutscher, “did not subordinate scholarship to ideology.” Shamefully, but typically, Michael Ignatieff defends his hero in these terms: “The difficulty lay in supposing that Deutscher could be trusted to teach non-Marxist concepts with the fairness requisite in a university teacher.” Berlin’s sabotaging of Deutscher’s chance for an academic career is therefore “a fair enough application of the standards of liberal tolerance in a university.”13 This probably tells us all we need to know about “liberal tolerance.” Actually, Deutscher’s scholarship, at least in his serious historical work, was usually impeccable. Unlike, one might add, that of the sainted Sir Isaiah: his Karl Marx (1939 and 1960), particularly the first edition, is a byword for factual inaccuracy and elementary theoretical misunderstandings (even Ignatieff has to concede that “its defects are obvious enough”).14 Indeed, so bad is this book that it might almost tempt one into making ludicrously sweeping statements like: “The difficulty lay in supposing that Berlin could be trusted to teach Marxist concepts with the fairness requisite in a university teacher.”

Fourth, Deutscher and Trotsky shared a command of literary expression.15 Like another Pole from an earlier generation of exiles, Joseph Conrad, Deutscher mastered the English language rather better than many a native. In his major works, socialist commitment and firsthand knowledge of the labor movement are combined with a technical skill in handling primary source materials. Indeed, his abilities in this sphere put to shame many of those academics who spent their professional lives doing little more than warming the professorial chairs that he was denied. One advantage he retained from being denied access to university employment, however, was the freedom to write for a general audience, unconstrained by the bloodless conventions of British academic propriety. Two examples, out of the many that could be chosen, convey not only his descriptive powers but also how irony—now mainly used as a self-congratulatory sign of one’s postmodern sensibility—can be part of the historian’s repertoire. Here, we are shown the Red Army as it attempts to retake the naval fortress at Kronstadt during the sailors’ and soldiers’ rebellion:

White sheets over their uniforms, the Bolshevik troops, under Tukhachevsky’s command, advanced across the Bay. They were met by hurricane fire from Kronstadt’s bastions. The ice broke under their feet; and wave after wave of white-shrouded attackers collapsed into the glacial Valhalla. The death march went on. From three directions fresh columns stumped and fumbled and slipped and crawled over the glassy surface until they too vanished in fire, ice, and water. As the successive swarms and lines of attackers drowned, it seemed to the men of Kronstadt that the perverted Bolshevik revolution drowned with them and that the triumph of their own pure, unadulterated revolution was approaching. Such was the lot of these rebels, who had denounced the Bolsheviks for their harshness and whose only aim it was to allow the revolution to imbibe the milk of human kindness, that for their survival they fought a battle which in cruelty was unequalled throughout the civil war.16

And here we follow the Russian peasants—the so-called kulaks—as they slaughter and eat their own animals rather than see them collectivized:

So began the strange carnival over which despair presided and for which fury filled the fleshpots. An epidemic of orgiastic gluttony spread from village to village, from volost to volost, and from gubernia to gubernia. Men, women and children gorged themselves, vomited, and went back to the fleshpots. Never before had so much vodka been brewed in the country—almost every hut had become a distillery—and the drinking was, in the old Slav fashion, hard and deep. As they guzzled and gulped, the kulaks illuminated the villages with bonfires they made of their own barns and stables. People suffocated with the stench of rotting meat, with the vapours of vodka, with the smoke of their blazing possessions, and with their own despair. Such was the scene upon which a brigade of collectivizers descended to interrupt the grim carouse with the rattle of machine-guns. The smallholder perished as he had lived, in pathetic helplessness and barbarism; and his final defeat was moral as well as economic and social.17

It is—to use a Marxist cliché that Deutscher generally avoids—no accident that the first quotation concerns the impasse that the revolution had reached by 1921 and the second the consequences of its final destruction in 1928. There are very few passages of comparable power describing the victorious days of worker insurgency in 1905 or—especially—1917. I will return to this point below as it reveals a problem with Deutscher’s attitude to the working class. And, despite all that he had in common with Trotsky, it also suggests a fundamental political divide between the biographer and his subject. But there will be time to criticize Deutscher in due course; I want first to complete our overview of his achievement.

Although the politics of the Russian Revolution are at the heart of these books, they never display the tendency toward depersonalization that, as I suggested above, is often a feature of “political” biography. Deutscher does not avoid this trap simply by filling the book with trivial personal detail; instead he situates the personality of Trotsky as a factor in political developments. At the beginning of The Prophet Armed we are introduced to the proud and impetuous youth who is prepared to follow any idea of which he is convinced to its logical conclusion; we still recognize him at the end of that volume in the leader determined to impose militarization of the trade unions if that is what it takes to preserve the revolutionary state. Equally, Deutscher can suggest analogies between the fate of individuals and societies, and the connection between the two, without extending these into absurdity. A chapter in The Prophet Outcast called “Reason and Unreason” deals, among other things, with the rise of Fascism in Germany. Here, Deutscher gently draws a parallel between the psychological collapse and suicide in Berlin of Trotsky’s eldest daughter, Zina, and the descent into madness of the German society in which she vainly sought refuge.18

Let us explore one example of his approach in more detail. Trotsky was universally recognized as one of the great orators of the socialist movement—as great as Jean Jaurès, it is said. Throughout the trilogy, Deutscher takes the relationship of Trotsky as a public speaker to his audience as both a barometer of the health of the Revolution and an index of his personal fate. To begin with, between February and October 1917, we see Trotsky addressing the thronging crowds at the Cirque Moderne in Petrograd as an agitator and member of a Bolshevik Party still contesting for leadership of the working class:

He spoke on the topics of the day and the aims of the revolution with his usual piercing logic; but he also absorbed the spirit of the crowd, its harsh sense of justice, its desire to see things in sharp and clear outline, its suspense, and its great expectations. Later he recollected how at the mere sight of the multitude words and arguments he had prepared well in advance receded and dispersed in his mind and other words and arguments, unexpected by himself but meeting a need in his listeners, rushed up as if from his subconscious. He then listened to his own voice as to that of a stranger, trying to keep pace with the tumultuous rush of his own ideas and phrases and afraid lest like a sleepwalker he might suddenly awake and break down. Here his politics ceased to be the distillation of individual reflection or of debates in small circles of professional politicians. He merged emotionally with the warm dark human mass in front of him, and became its medium.19

Later, in 1921, after the Civil War, the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, and the introduction of New Economic Policy, we find Trotsky addressing the crowds in an official capacity, as a senior member of the ruling party:

Trotsky’s appearance and speech still thrilled the crowds. But he no longer seemed to find the intimate contact with his audiences which he found unerringly during the civil war . . . Trotsky on the platform appeared more than life-size; and his speech resounded with all its old heroic tones. Yet the country was tired of heroism, of great vistas, high hopes, and sweeping gestures; and Trotsky still suffered from the slump in his popularity caused by his recent attempts to militarize Labor. His oratorical genius still cast its spell on any assembly. But the spell was already shot through with doubt and even suspicion. His greatness and revolutionary merits were not doubted; but was he not too spectacular, too flamboyant, and perhaps too ambitious?20

Later still, in 1926, as Stalin and his faction consolidate their grip on power, Trotsky and the other leaders of the Opposition are depicted attempting to take their case to the rank and file in party cells and workplace meetings:

Trotsky made surprise appearances at large meetings held in Moscow’s motor-car factory and railway workshops. But . . . for the first time in nearly thirty years, for the first time since he had begun his career as a revolutionary orator, Trotsky found himself facing himself helplessly. Against the scornful uproar with which he was met and the obsessive hissings and hootings, his most cogent arguments, his genius for persuasion, and his powerful and sonorous voice were of no avail.21

Finally, we observe the circumstances of Trotsky’s last public meeting, late in 1932. Now three years into his last exile, he speaks at the invitation of Danish social democratic students whose politics were distant from his own (he describes them as “opponents” in the speech), and under the threat of attack from Stalinists or Fascists or both:

The lecture passed without obstruction or disturbance. For two hours, speaking in German, he addressed an audience of about 2,000 people. His theme was the Russian Revolution. As the authorities had allowed the lecture on the condition that he would avoid controversy, he spoke in a somewhat professorial manner, giving his listeners the quintessence of the three volumes of his just concluded History [of the Russian Revolution]. His restraint did not conceal the depth and force of his conviction; the address was a vindication of the October Revolution, all the more effective because free from apologies and frankly acknowledging partial failures and mistakes. Nearly twenty-five years later members of the audience still recalled the lecture with vivid appreciation as an oratorical feat.22

In each of these successive incarnations, from agitator to statesman to oppositionist to exile, Trotsky’s oratorical powers remain the same, but their effect is conditioned by the circumstances in which he is called upon to use them. Thus Deutscher, while unraveling the specifics of Trotsky’s life, illustrates the truth of the general Marxist proposition that human beings not only make history under conditions unchosen by themselves, but that these conditions also determine whether it is possible to make history at all.

The revolutionary as tragic hero

For nearly a decade the only work that stood comparison in scale with Deutscher’s was E. H. Carr’s History of the Bolshevik Revolution. But Carr wrote like the senior civil servant that, for at least part of his life, he was; Deutscher wrote, in Peter Sedgwick’s phrase, as a “tragedian.”23 What does tragedy mean in this context? The distance between human aspirations and the material conditions that might allow them to be realized is necessary, but insufficient. Also required is the attempt to overcome that distance, “to beat against history with one’s fists,” no matter how unyielding the stuff of history might be. Trotsky himself offered the example of the French revolutionary, Gracchus Babeuf: “Babeuf’s struggle for Communism in a society which was not yet ready for it was a struggle of a classical hero with his fate. Babeuf’s destiny had all the characteristics of true tragedy, just as the fate of the Gracchi had whose name Babeuf used.”24 Trotsky rejected the notion of tragedy as illegitimate with respect to his own life. In 1929, at the end of the first year of his third and final exile from Russia, he wrote in his autobiography that he had “more than once read musings in the newspapers on the subject of the ‘tragedy’ that has befallen me.” Against these musings he declared that: “I know no personal tragedy.”25 At the time when he wrote this passage, the point seemed doubly justified. On the one hand, the fate of the Russian Revolution was the collective experience of the Russian people. Trotsky had no wish to elevate his own share of that experience to a special category simply because of his fall from political preeminence. On the other, it was by no means clear to Trotsky at this time that the Russian Revolution had been lost. He still believed that, degenerated though it was, the state that had exiled him could still be reformed through working-class pressure. Consequently, he thought that there was no need in either case to invoke the notion of tragedy. In the first it was self-aggrandizing and in the second premature. These judgments reflect both his personal modesty as a historical figure and—in his refusal to abandon established positions until they had been conclusively proved redundant—his sobriety as a theorist. Nevertheless both judgments were to be proved wrong.

Russia had been ready for Communism in 1917 in a way that France had not in 1796. But Russia had been ready only as part of an international movement, not isolated and devastated in the way that it emerged from the Civil War in 1921. The bureaucratic degeneration that these conditions engendered culminated, by 1928, in a counterrevolution that was as complete as it was unacknowledged by the perpetrators—perhaps even to themselves. Trotsky never accepted that the counterrevolution had triumphed in Russia. Indeed, he was only prepared to contemplate it, even as a theoretical possibility, at the very end of his life. No matter. Whatever the weaknesses in his analysis—and it is only our position on Trotsky’s shoulders that allows us to see what he could not—it is from the struggle that Trotsky conducted against Stalinism, particularly during his last exile, that his status as tragic hero derives. Deutscher was therefore right to speak of “the truly classical tragedy of Trotsky’s life, or rather a reproduction of classical tragedy in secular terms of modern politics.”26 No other biography or work of art has ever captured the nature of that tragedy so well. One only has to think of the dire representations of Trotsky in books such as Bertrand D. Wolfe’s The Great Prince Died (rightly dismissed by Deutscher) or a series of films from Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1969) to Julie Taymor’s Frida (2003).27 There are two great exceptions, both appropriately Modernist in conception: Meaghan Delahunt’s novel, In the Blue House (London, 2001), which reconstructs Trotsky’s life during his Mexican exile, and Ken McMullen’s film Zina (1985), which focuses on the fate of Zinaida Lvovna. Zina may well be the only film in cinema history to feature an exposition of Trotsky’s views on the United Front in relation to fighting Fascism in Germany.

New facts have obviously come to light since Deutscher wrote, and in some cases they mean that some of his specific conclusions must be revised. Deutscher argues, for example, that prior to the twelfth party congress in 1923, Trotsky failed to argue in the Politburo for the publication of Lenin’s Testament attacking Stalin and abstained during the vote. According to Deutscher this was because he felt secure in his own position, was contemptuous of Stalin, and was unwilling to jeopardize the compromise that he thought had been reached with his rivals.28 We now know that Trotsky voted for publication in the Politburo: his refusal to carry the argument into the Central Committee was not the result of complacency, but out of his respect for the decision-making process of the party and unwillingness to take any action that might have given the impression that he was acting from personal motives.29 Similarly, Deutscher tends to downplay the level of Left Opposition support and to portray it as essentially passive, at least beyond the core membership. There is at least some evidence, from contemporary participants and witnesses like Victor Serge, that it was more significant than Deutscher allows, and his failure to take account of their testimony (of which he must have been aware) is another indication of a certain fatalism in his attitude to the opposition to Stalin. We now know that the Left Opposition had far higher and more active levels of support in both the Bolshevik Party and the working class more generally than was conceded by Deutscher or—to be fair—most other writers at the time.30 However, neither of these examples, nor any of the others that could be cited, fundamentally alter our view of Trotsky. Nor do the materials that have become available in the Russian archives since the fall of Stalinism in 1989–91. Trotsky’s most recent Russian biographer, the late, Martin Amis–approved General Dmitri Volkogonov, lists “the former Central party Archives, the Central State Archives of the October Revolution, those of the Soviet Army, the ministry of Defence, the Committee for State Security” as new sources.31 But these have not led even to the type of marginal modifications discussed above. As Daniel Singer wrote of Volkogonov’s own book: “What is important is not new and what is new is relatively unimportant.”32 Deutscher’s books therefore remain indispensable for an understanding of the period they discuss and unsurpassed in bringing their hero alive. An honest assessment of these three volumes cannot, however, restrict itself to highlighting their many positive qualities.

Problems of Deutscherism

Deutscher had been a leading figure in both Polish Communism and Polish Trotskyism. He was not opposed to the founding of the Fourth International on principle but because of a strategic disagreement over the possibilities for revolutionary progress at that time. I reemphasize these facts because there is a type of argument, all too common in certain varieties of Trotskyism, which explains away any personal retreat from revolutionary socialism by uncovering some flaw (a theoretical deviation here, a personality susceptible to “alien class influences” there), the ominous significance of which can only now be revealed. Any doctrine in which the renegade must be shown to have always been a heretic has more in common with Protestant fundamentalism than Marxism, not least because of the implication that experience of the world has no bearing on how opinions change in the course of a life. Rather than argue from a secularized version of Original Sin, it might be more productive to view Deutscher as suffering from the same pessimism about the revolutionary potential of the Western working class that affected most socialists after the Second World War and drove them, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, into the arms of either Washington or Moscow. Deutscher was severely critical of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but his own position was in many respects the mirror image of Orwell’s reluctant embrace of the Western side of the Cold War.33 I suggested above that there were four reasons why Deutscher might have been particularly empathetic toward Trotsky as an individual. Against them, however, it also seems that his pessimism led to two major political differences with Trotsky. These both distorted Deutscher’s account of Trotsky’s life—particularly in the final volume—and gave many of the thousands of radicals who read his books a basic orientation toward Stalinism that, in some cases at least, was to prove deeply disabling for their politics.

The first difference was in relation to revolutionary socialist organization and activity. After the outbreak of the Second World War—or rather, after Russia’s entry into the Second World War—Deutscher never again seems to have considered active participation in a political organization. In 1951 Deutscher reviewed The God That Failed, a collective confessional by ex–Communist Party writers justifying their abandonment of revolution for various forms of social democracy. His alternative was revealing:

[The ex-Communist] cannot join the Stalinist camp or the anti-Stalinist Holy Alliance without doing violence to his better self. So let him stay outside any camp. Let him try to regain critical sense and intellectual detachment. . . . This is not to say that the ex-communist man of letters, or intellectual at large, should retire into the ivory tower. (His contempt for the ivory tower lingers in him from his past.) But he may withdraw into a watchtower instead. To watch with detachment and alertness this heaving chaos of a world, to be on sharp lookout for what is going to emerge from it, and to interpret it sine ira et studio—this is now the only honourable service the ex-communist intellectual can render to a generation in which scrupulous observation and honest interpretation have become so sadly rare.34

Tony Cliff argued that Deutscher was effectively describing his own situation, but that in practical terms his position in the watchtower was no different from one in the ivory tower that he ostensibly rejected.35 As we shall see, there is evidence that Deutscher had descended from the watchtower toward the end of his life, but during the period in which his biographies were written there is no doubt that Cliff’s criticism was substantially correct. Deutscher joined neither the Fourth International nor of any of the dissident organizations that split from it after Trotsky’s death. Indeed, his attitude to Trotskyism was deeply dismissive and Trotskyists paid him back in the same coin, with virtually every one of the 57 different varieties taking turns to attack his work, often while simultaneously plagiarizing his scholarship.36

Deutscher had firsthand personal experience of the weaknesses of Trotskyism. The endless arguments that preoccupied many of the small groups were usually unproductive. The activities that they undertook in the breaks between arguing were often unrewarding. Yet Trotsky regarded it as essential to establish, with whatever human material was available, organizational and theoretical continuities with the early years of the Third International and the traditions of classical Marxism that it embodied. During 1935 he wrote in his diary that “my work is now ‘indispensable’ in the full sense of the word.” He rightly noted that there was “no arrogance” in this statement: “The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it. There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International.”37 Very little of this emerges in Deutscher, creating, at the very least, a severe imbalance in The Prophet Outcast. We learn that, for Trotsky, “neither his character nor his circumstances permitted him to resign from formal political activity. He would not and could not contract out of the day-to-day struggle.”38 Yet the impression is given that all of the energy that Trotsky expended during the 1930s attempting to resolve the internal disputes of his followers, all of the effort that he spent trying to guide them toward more productive activity in the labor movement, really involved so much wasted time. The only dispute discussed in any detail is the one that split the US Socialist Workers Party at the end of decade and, even here, Deutscher focuses almost solely on the aspect that turned on the class nature of the Soviet Union, rather than the debate over the political direction of the organization within which this issue arose. Why is Deutscher so uninterested in the issue that preoccupied his hero for virtually the entire period between his exile and his murder? The answer seems to be that he considered organization unnecessary because another mechanism existed that could bring about socialism. This brings us to the second difference between the two men: their attitude to Stalinism.

What was Trotsky’s position? This changed at least four times between 1923 and 1940, but always in increasingly radical directions.39 His initial approach to reversing the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, before Stalin had consolidated his power, envisaged workers reforming the apparatus through the medium of the existing Soviets. His final position, recognizing that Soviet democracy had long been completely suppressed, advocated working-class political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy. Why only a political as opposed to a social revolution? Because, according to Trotsky, the continued existence of nationalized property meant that Russia remained a worker’s state; the bureaucracy represented a caste that was parasitic on these property relations rather than a new ruling class. Now, as Cliff noted in 1948, this definition of a workers’ state is not the one Trotsky originally held. On the contrary, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, he had believed, along with Lenin and the entire Bolshevik party, that a workers’ state was defined by the political rule of the working class through its representative institutions, regardless of whether property initially remained in private hands or not—and between 1917 and 1928 most of it did remain in private hands, particularly in the countryside. It is possible, of course, to debate the extent to which the working class exercised political rule between these dates, but the basis of the definition itself is unambiguous.40 On this basis of his revised definition, Stalin’s “second Revolution” after 1928 could be deemed far more revolutionary than October 1917 because it introduced the nationalized property relations upon which the “worker’s state” was supposed to depend. Furthermore, if the decisive criterion was nationalized property, then why did it matter which class or social force introduced it? What need was there for the revolutionary party, the working class, or indeed any of the tenets of classical Marxism? The Red Army would be sufficient.

The anti-Marxist implications of shifting from working-class power to nationalized property relations were largely held in check in Trotsky’s own work. He was careful to emphasize in his last writings that nationalized property was a remnant, a last remaining vestige of the workers’ state, and that the progressive content of nationalization would only be realized after the overthrow of the bureaucracy. Moreover, he did not expect the Stalinist regime to survive the Second World War. He regarded it as a deeply unstable formation that would either be overthrown by working-class revolution or bourgeois restoration—and imminently, not in fifty years’ time. If it survived, let alone expanded, the territory under its control, then the Stalinist bureaucracy would have demonstrated that it was indeed a class.41

The war ended. Russian Stalinism survived. Russian Stalinism expanded. Worse, indigenous Stalinist movements founded new states based, in all essentials, on the Russian Stalinist model. Yet the vast majority of orthodox Trotskyists continued to hold fast to a position that had been proved inadequate by events, and even extended it to Eastern Europe and China. Like them, Deutscher accepted that Russia, its satellites, and its imitators were all “workers’ states” because they were based on nationalized property. Yet his description of how The Revolution Betrayed (1937) became “the Bible of latter-day Trotskyist sects and chapels whose members piously mumbled its verses long after Trotsky’s death” conveys his impatience with the religious veneration they accorded Trotsky’s last writings. Why? Not because they clung to its definition of a “workers’ state,” but because they refused to abandon their formal commitment to political revolution.42 Deutscher described himself as “free from loyalties to any cult,” by which he meant Trotskyism as much as Stalinism.43 From 1948 the dominant tendency within the Fourth International, associated with Michael Pablo, had successfully argued that the Stalinist states in Eastern Europe and China were “workers’ states.” But even Pablo had assumed that it would be Stalinist parties that would—under “exceptional circumstances,” “pressure from the masses,” and the like—carry out revolutions. Deutscher was able go much further than orthodox Trotskyists could without rendering their existence completely redundant and claim that Stalinist Russia was not only capable of internal self-reform, but that, even unreformed, it was the major force for world revolution. At one level this is, of course, merely the logic of orthodox Trotskyism taken to its conclusion. For many Trotskyists, therefore, their rage at Deutscher was that of Caliban at seeing his face in the mirror.

Deutscher’s position does at least have the benefit of consistency. Unfortunately it is consistently wrong. “We need not doubt,” he wrote, “that . . . the logic of [Trotsky’s] attitude would have compelled him to accept the reality of the revolution in Eastern Europe, and despite all distaste for the Stalinist methods, to recognise the “People’s Democracies” as workers’ states.”44 I do doubt this, for the simple reason that it is entirely incompatible with Trotsky’s view of Stalinism. Deutscher undoubtedly thought it would be desirable for these property relations to be supplemented by democracy, but that was not decisive. “No one can foresee with certainty whether the conflict will take violent and explosive forms and lead to the new ‘political revolution’ which Trotsky once advocated, or whether the conflict will be resolved peacefully through bargaining, compromise, and the gradual enlargement of freedom.”45 This leaves the question open, but effectively concedes that the bureaucracy is capable of self-transformation, of bringing the degenerate political superstructure into line with the socialist economic base, so to speak. At no point, even before his exile, did Trotsky ever believe that the bureaucracy could reform itself. Even more damaging, Deutscher believed that the working class refrained from any activities that threatened this self-reformation or opened the door to the return of capitalism: “Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland and eastern Germany) . . . found itself almost on the brink of bourgeois restoration at the end of the Stalin era; and only Soviet armed power (or its threat) stopped it there.”46

The theoretical roots of these attitudes are suggested by Deutscher’s inability to distinguish between different types of revolution. In The Unfinished Revolution (1967) Deutscher actually makes several sensible observations on the nature of bourgeois revolutions. In particular, he notes that their class nature does not depend on the presence of the bourgeoisie in the revolutionary process, but rather on whether the outcome of the revolution “was to sweep away the social and political institutions that had hindered the growth of bourgeois property and of the social relationships that went with it.” In this respect, as he rightly remarks: “Bourgeois revolution creates the conditions in which bourgeois property can flourish.”47 These remarks are perfectly compatible with the views of several of his critics, including those of the present writer. The problem arises when Deutscher extends his model from bourgeois to proletarian revolutions, whose structures are necessarily quite different.48

In several places Deutscher argues that all of the “great revolutions” (English, French, Russian) follow the same pattern. First comes the rising against the old regime that unites the majority of the oppressed. Then follows the civil war that exhausts the new society and leads to the supposedly temporary suppression of many of the freedoms for which the revolution was made. Finally, the new ruling class entrenches itself and decisively abandons the egalitarian dreams of the popular masses, leading the most radical elements to cry “the revolution betrayed” before their ultimate suppression.49 The only real difference he sees in the case of Russia is that, unlike the Independents and Jacobins, the Bolshevik Party was formed prior to the outbreak of revolutionary crisis: “This enabled it to assume leadership in the revolution and, after the ebb of the tide, to play for many decades the part the army had played in revolutionary England and France, to secure stable government and to work towards the integration and remodelling of national life.”50 In all other respects, Deutscher finds the parallels exact, even down to role of the leader who eventually emerges. “What appears to be established is that Stalin belongs to the breed of the great revolutionary despots, to which Cromwell, Robespierre, and Napoleon belonged.”51 If Hegel saw Napoleon as the World Spirit mounted on horseback, then, reading this passage, one has the impression that Deutscher saw Stalin as the World Spirit mounted on a tank. We are therefore lucky that Trotsky set down his own thoughts on Stalin’s despotic lineage, for they are very different from Deutscher’s: “In attempting to find an historical parallel to Stalin, we have to reject not only Cromwell, Robespierre, Napoleon, and Lenin, but even Mussolini and Hitler.” His own preferred comparisons are with Kemal and Díaz, the Turkish and Mexican modernizing dictators.52 Deutscher was evidently disturbed by the fact that Trotsky did not support his view of Stalin: “Here the lack of historical scale and perspective is striking and disturbing.”53 Deutscher’s views are here influenced by those of Christian Rakovsky in his “Letter to Valentinov” published in the Opposition press in 1928. In effect, Rakovsky described the Opposition as being “between a demoralised, treacherous bureaucracy on the one side, and a hopelessly apathetic and passive working class on the other”: “It followed (although Rakovsky did not say it) that the bureaucracy, such as it was, would remain, perhaps for decades, the only force capable of initiative and action in the reshaping of Russian society.”54 In fact, Trotsky was far nearer the truth, and it is a matter of regret that he did not live to pursue these comparisons further; for a parallel with the bourgeois revolutions is relevant, but not the one Deutscher imagined. Stalin’s historical role was in fact unique. The “second Revolution” from 1928 was both a counterrevolution in terms of socialism and the functional equivalent of the bourgeois revolution in terms of (state) capitalism, the class triumph of the bureaucracy. Any serious parallel for Stalin would have to embrace, not the political leaders of the bourgeois revolutions, but the individual landowners, capitalists, and imperialists who carried out the original process of primitive accumulation, a process that took nearly 250 years to accomplish in the case of Britain but only twenty-five in the case of Russia—with all that implies in terms of compressed suffering. Deutscher’s confusions between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions lead him to make two central distortions in relation to the Russian experience.

One concerns the role of the working class. Discussing the History, he notes of Trotsky that: “He does not . . . overstate the role of the masses.”55 At first, this seems an odd sentence: Trotsky allocates to the masses their rightful—that is, preeminent—place in the revolutionary process. When one understands, however, that Deutscher has very little confidence in the masses, then it becomes far more comprehensible: “By 1921 the Russian working class had proved itself incapable of exercising its own dictatorship. It could not even exercise control over those who ruled in its name. Having exhausted itself in the revolution and the civil war, it had almost ceased to exist as a political factor.”56 There is a difference between “exhaustion” and “incapacity.” A class can recover from exhaustion, but to be described as incapable suggests a permanent condition. Deutscher occasionally tries to enlist Trotsky in support of the latter contention, but only by massive distortion.

Contrary to a myth of “vulgar Trotskyism,” he did not advocate any “direct workers’ control over industry,” that is, management by factory committee or workers’ councils. . . . He conceived proletarian democracy as the workers’ right and freedom to criticise and oppose the government and thereby to shape its policies, but not necessarily as their “right” to exercise direct control over production.57

Deutscher is basing himself here on the temporary solutions to which Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks were driven as a result of economic collapse and civil war. Now it is true that Trotsky wrote some dire stuff—mostly in Terrorism and Communism (1920)—about the necessity for centralized authority of the one-party state under all circumstances. The way in which he, to put it mildly, made a virtue out of necessity during this period may well be the least glorious episode in his political life. But it was not his final position. In his writings on Germany from the 1930s, for example, Trotsky writes of the period of dual power, before the victory of the working class, that “the worker’s control begins with the individual workshop. The organ of control is the factory committee.” After the conquest of power: “The organs of management are not factory committees but centralized Soviets.”58 “Management” is a higher form of activity than “control,” indicating that the Soviets will be making the decisions, not merely checking decisions made elsewhere. Deutscher’s attitude toward the Russian working class is of a piece with his attitude towards the European working class as a whole after the First World War: “The majority exerted themselves to wrest reforms from their governments and propertied classes. But even when they exhibited sympathy for the Russian Revolution, they were in no mood to embark upon the road of revolution and civil war at home and to sacrifice in the process the standards of living, the personal security, the reforms they had already attained, and those which they hoped to attain.”59 Again, this was not Trotsky’s view. His position—admittedly often exaggerated to the point of absurdity by some of his followers—was that working-class failure to consistently take the revolutionary road was in part due to a crisis of leadership that it was the task of Communists to overcome. Deutscher underestimates the role of revolutionary leadership to an even greater extent than he underestimates the revolutionary capacity of the working class. His treatment of Lenin during 1917 is instructive here.

In The History of the Russian Revolution Trotsky argues that the arrival of Lenin in Russia in April 1917 was decisive in pushing the Bolshevik Party toward the socialist revolution and the seizure of power: “Without Lenin the crisis, which the opportunistic leadership was inevitably bound to produce, would have assumed an extraordinarily sharp and protracted character. The conditions of war and revolution, however, would not allow the party a long period for fulfilling its mission. Thus it is by no means excluded that a disorientated and split party might have let slip the revolutionary opportunity for many years.” Trotsky is not saying that the Bolsheviks would never have arrived at the correct strategy without Lenin, or that the revolutionary opportunity would never have come again, simply that in revolutionary situations time is of the essence and that, without Lenin, it would have been allowed to pass. “Lenin was not an accidental element in the historic development, but a product of the whole past of Russian history.”60 Deutscher finds this intolerable and devotes several pages (far more than Trotsky’s original discussion) in an attempt to refute it. “If it were true that the greatest revolution of all time could not have occurred without one particular leader, then the leader cult at large would by no means be preposterous; and its denunciation by historical materialists, from Marx to Trotsky, and the revulsion of all progressive thought against it would be pointless.” For Deutscher, such a lapse from “the Marxist intellectual tradition” can only be explained by Trotsky’s psychological response to his own isolation: “He needed to feel that the leader, whether Lenin in 1917 or he himself in the nineteen-thirties, was irreplaceable—from his belief he drew the strength for his solitary and heroic exertions.”61 These are among the very worst passages in the entire trilogy and they are rather more revealing of Deutscher’s “needs” than they are of Trotsky’s.

If both the masses and the individual leaders are irrelevant to the accomplishment of socialism then what remains? What great impersonal historic forces can take their place? Deutscher often claimed to uphold what he called “Classical Marxism” against the “Vulgar Marxism” practised by Stalin, Mao, and their epigones, and the virtues of his works confirm that this was no idle boast. Yet within the category of “Classical Marxism” he included many of the thinkers of the Second International, like Kautsky and Plekhanov, whose work was characterized—to different degrees—by an extreme determinism. For them, socialism was inevitable, given a certain level of development of the productive forces. “Classical Marxism” was therefore divided between the determinists and those (like Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Lukács, or Gramsci) who understood the relationship between material circumstances and human activity. Reading Deutscher’s trilogy it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the experience of the defeat of the Russian Revolution led him to revive the determinism of the Second International. If defeat is too overwhelming, if the prospect of starting again is too difficult, then the temptation can be to present it, through the application of pseudo-dialectical voodoo, as a victory—or at least in the process of being transformed into a victory. Hence the title of the postscript to The Prophet Outcast, “Victory in Defeat”: “The Soviet Union emerged as the world’s second industrial power, its social structure radically transformed, its large industrial working class striving for a modern way of life, and its standards of living and mass education rising rapidly, if unevenly. The very preconditions of socialism which classical Marxism had seen as existing only in the highly industrialised countries of the West were being created and assembled within Soviet society.”62 There is a name for the social system that produces “the preconditions of socialism”: it is capitalism. Yet this was the conclusion that Deutscher wished so much to avoid, that he dedicated his considerable powers to persuading his readers of the opposite.

Deutscher’s influence

The trilogy exerted a great influence over the New Left when it emerged after 1956, an influence that was as contradictory as the books themselves. To understand it, we need to envisage the context in which they were first read and discussed.

When Trotsky was murdered in 1940 Stalinist rule was restricted to Russia itself and its immediate western border regions. By 1954, when the first volume of the trilogy appeared, Stalinism had encompassed the whole of Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. It also held the allegiance of the most militant sections of the world working class. Some threats to the stability of the Stalinist ruling class had, of course, already appeared: the first internal split came with the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948 and the first serious opposition from below came with the rising of East German workers in 1953. It was only retrospectively, however, that these events were generally seen as exposing the inherent problems of state capitalism. For all practical purposes, in the early 1950s Stalinism appeared to offer the only real alternative to Western capitalism and imperialism. Against the seemingly unstoppable rise of the system established by his archenemy, Trotsky seemed irrelevant, a figure from another time or another world—perhaps “the lost world of Atlantis” that Deutscher invokes on more than one occasion. As he notes in the Preface to The Prophet Armed: “For nearly 30 years the powerful propaganda machine of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky’s name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor.”63 There was little effective defense against this onslaught.

Few of Trotsky’s own works were in print at this time, except for a handful of pamphlets produced by the nominally Trotskyist organizations that, during this period at least, had few members and little influence. The three biggest groups in the West—the US, French, and British—had maybe three thousand members between them. Even if we apply the label of “Trotskyist” beyond adherents of the Fourth International to such dissident groups as the Workers Party in the United States and the Socialist Review Group in the United Kingdom, their total memberships would have been less than that of, for example, the relatively small Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The CPGB reached its numerical peak with 56,000 members in 1942, although membership had declined to 35,000 by 1951. In other words, the CPGB probably lost considerably more members in these years than the total of number people across the globe who became Trotskyists during the same period.64 Asked whether he was aware of Trotsky’s writings during and immediately after the Second World War, Raymond Williams—perhaps the leading academic socialist thinker of his generation and one who organizationally broke with Stalinism during the late 1940s—replied: “No. That was a crucial lack. It wasn’t until much later that I really learnt of the existence of a socialist opposition in Russia.” This is somewhat disingenuous, since Williams would of course have learned something from his days in the CPGB about “the socialist opposition in Russia,” namely that it was composed of class traitors in the pay of MI6 and the Gestapo. But Williams is correct to describe the existence of a “generational block.”65 The point is confirmed by John Saville, a Marxist historian and member of the CPGB until 1956, who writes that “before the war or after I personally never met a Trotskyist, or was confronted with one at any meeting I addressed; and the same was true, with only a very few exceptions, of members of the ILP.”66 And even if Williams or Saville had chanced to meet a Trotskyist, he would have found that his or her relationship to Trotsky’s own theory and practice was increasingly distant. For all the brilliance of many of the individuals associated with Trotskyism, Alasdair MacIntyre was right to say in his review of The Prophet Outcast that

so-called Trotskyism has been among the most trivial of movements. It transformed into abstract dogma what Trotsky thought in concrete terms at one moment in his life and canonised this. It is inexplicable in purely political dimensions, but the history of the more eccentric religious sects provides revealing parallels. The genuine Trotskyism of [Albert] Rosmer and Natalya [Sedova] must have at most a few hundred adherents in the entire world.67

Nor did Trotsky’s non-revolutionary admirers keep his memory alive. It was possible to support Trotsky without supporting his politics. John Dewey, for example, opened the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry into the accusations against Trotsky by saying: “In the United States, it has long been customary for public-spirited citizens to organize committees for the purpose of securing fair trials in cases where there was suspicion concerning the partiality of the courts.” But as he later added: “Membership on such a committee does not, of course, imply anything more than the belief that the accused is entitled to a fair trial.”68 During the 1930s several centrist groups and individuals had independently arrived at interpretations of Stalinism, particularly its international role, which were compatible with that of Trotsky—George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) is perhaps the best example—but it soon became apparent that, for the majority, the political conclusions that they drew were quite different and, in most cases, quite unrevolutionary. Orwell himself wrote: “Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, although undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind. The essential act is the rejection of democracy.”69 Emrys Hughes, the editor of Forward and subsequently a Labour MP, published articles by Trotsky despite the great hostility of the CPGB and conducted a sympathetic correspondence with him between 1937 and his death. Yet after the assassination he wrote: “There has been no greater irony in modern history than the fate of Leon Trotsky, the advocate of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, the apologist for revolutionary ruthlessness and violence—the leader of the Red Army—being destroyed by the methods of political terrorism which he had defended in the belief that they would preserve revolutionary socialism.”70

More generally, many intellectuals, particularly in the United States, were attracted to Trotsky, not only by his anti-Stalinism, but because of his literary and theoretical abilities, and what they saw as the romance of the revolutionary exile—the superficial aura of tragic heroism that Trotsky himself rejected. It was this admiration that led, for example, the students of Edinburgh University to invite Trotsky to accept their nomination as Rector, a proposal that he of course declined on the grounds that it was an entirely apolitical post.71 Some went so far as to join Trotskyist organizations, but most were unwilling to adopt the life of political commitment that membership entailed. Deutscher vividly describes their gradual retreat: “They balked; and their exalted reverence for him gave place first to uneasiness and doubt, or to a weariness which was still mingled with awe, then to opposition, and finally to a covert or frank hostility. One by one the intellectual Trotskyisants came to abjure first timidly then angrily their erstwhile enthusiasms and to dwell on Trotsky’s faults.”72 Nor were his ideas sustained by academics, since as Deutscher rightly points out, the Stalinist version of history “strongly affected the views of even independent Western historians and scholars.”73 As late as 1967, New Left Review—later to be the vehicle for the super-Deutscherism of its editorial board—could publish, as its first serious consideration of Trotsky’s work, an article by Nicolas Krasso that concluded: “In practical political struggle, before and after the Revolution, his under-estimation of the specific efficacy of political institutions led him into error after error.”74

It was onto this scene, where Trotsky was regarded, at best, as a harmless icon of non-specific anti-Stalinism or, at worst, as a counterrevolutionary renegade from the socialist cause, that the first volume of Deutscher’s biography exploded in 1954. Not the least of our debts to Deutscher is that, in spite of his own disagreements with Trotsky, he played a major role in transmitting the legacy of his hero to subsequent generations. Deutscher was not the first person to refer to Trotsky or his role in the Russian Revolution. Orwell had done so through the characters of Snowball in Animal Farm (1945) and Emmanuel Goldstein in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), whose book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism, is—as Deutscher himself acknowledged—clearly derived from The Revolution Betrayed.75 Nor was his the first biography: Bertram D. Wolfe had published his triple biography of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, Three Who Made a Revolution, in 1948.

Nevertheless, the impact of Deutscher’s trilogy was qualitatively different. His timing was fortuitous. Two years after his first volume appeared the revelations in Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and upheavals in Eastern Europe, culminating in the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, blew apart the Stalinist myth. For virtually the first time, revolutionary socialists had in their hands a substantial, documented history that broadly supported their arguments about the respective roles of Trotsky and Stalin in the Russian Revolutions. More importantly, open-minded socialists who had no contact with Trotskyists—which at this time would have meant most of them—had an independent source of information from which to construct an alternative to the disintegrating orthodoxies of Stalinism. As David Widgery once noted: “Even [in 1968], the range of readable socialist literature didn’t overtax a table top.”76 From 1956 to 1968 Deutscher’s three volumes would have accounted for quite a large part of the table’s surface. The Scottish miners’ leader, Lawrence Daly, who broke with the CPGB in 1956, wrote of Deutscher that “his books on Stalin and Trotsky certainly enlightened thousands of active trade unionists, people who were not only trade union conscious but politically conscious, and they undoubtedly played a very important role in rescuing some thousands of people in this country, dedicated workers in the Labour Movement, from a kind of mummified Marxism, within the narrow and stultifying confines of which they had been ideologically asphyxiated.”77 Tariq Ali, for example, wrote that: “My own political formation has been greatly influenced by Isaac Deutscher, Leon Trotsky and Ernest Mandel (in that order).”78 Now, the fact that Ali places Deutscher before Trotsky may indicate nothing more than the order in which he read these authors, but in many cases newly radicalized workers and students read Trotsky through Deutscher’s interpretation. From Widgery’s account, Deutscher’s Trotsky anthology, The Age of Permanent Revolution, was one of three main sellers on bookstalls at the London School of Economics during the student rebellions of the late 1960s.79 And for some radicals at least, it was possible to be a Deutscherist without becoming a Trotskyist. In 1989, David Horowitz, whom we have already encountered, confessed to a Polish audience: “I was inspired to join the new Left by a Polish Marxist called Isaac Deutscher, who was my teacher. It was Deutscher who devised the theory out of which we hoped to revive the socialist dream.”80

In his autobiography Tony Cliff recalled his concern over the dominance that Deutscher began to exert over audiences during the 1960s: “I remember going to lectures by Deutscher at which there were 1,000 or more present. Twice I spoke from the floor in the discussion criticising Deutscher’s position, but I hardly cut any ice with the audience. . . . Our puny group, offering a tough approach to Stalinism, could not overcome Deutscher’s soft soap.”81 Cliff thought that, because Deutscher’s position did not involve a complete break from Stalinism, it was easier for people from that tradition to accept than one based on a harder Trotskyist analysis, let alone that associated with International Socialism. The claim has some validity for the period in which the books first appeared—it clearly explains Lawrence Daly’s enthusiasm, for example. But it cannot explain why people with no previous history of Stalinism, who were becoming socialists for the first time, found Deutscher’s arguments so compelling. Nor can it explain why they continued to do so long after the nature of Stalinism was accepted even by the majority of Communist parties. The answer is that, as I have already suggested, Deutscherism was a theory of consolation. It was—and here the cliché really is inescapable—no accident that Deutscherism reached its maximum influence between the onset of the downturn in international class struggle in 1975 and the fall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe in 1989. No matter how difficult the current situation may have been in Western Europe or the United States, no matter how few papers were sold on the high street of a rainy Saturday morning, socialism—or societies “transitional” to socialism—already existed in the world and their number was being added to year-on-year: Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (where the phenomenon of a genocidal “workers’ state” was shortly to be discovered), and Afghanistan.

The main vehicle for spreading these views was a journal in which Deutscher’s work had regularly appeared: New Left Review. The apotheosis of “theoretical Deutscherism” was attained in an essay of 1983 by Perry Anderson, somewhat misleadingly called “Trotsky on Stalinism.” After a brilliant summary of Trotsky’s changing analysis of the Soviet Union, Anderson discusses the limitations of Trotsky’s analysis, which supposedly led to failures in prediction. All are derived from Deutscher.82 The key example of what might be called “applied Deutscherism” is Fred Halliday’s The Making of the Second Cold War (1983 and 1986), about which Anderson wrote “it is fitting that the best work confronting the current Cold War should have been produced out of direct inspiration of [Deutscher’s] example.”83 Deutscherism was perhaps best summed up by Mike Davis as the proposition that “the Cold War between the USSR and the United States is ultimately the lightning-rod conductor of all the historic tensions between opposing international class forces.”84

The fall of the Soviet bloc destroyed all the assumptions upon which Deutscherism was based. Some of his acolytes had already changed sides before the debacle of 1989–91, but after it became apparent that that the Soviet Union would neither economically compete with the United States nor politically reform itself in a socialist direction. Horowitz explained to a Polish audience in 1989 how he “waited in vain” for the self-reform of the Stalinist states before concluding that “Deutscher was wrong. There would never be a socialist political democracy erected on a socialist economic base.”85 For those, like Fred Halliday, who had essentially seen the Soviet bloc as the bearer of socialist progress, the debacle “means nothing less than the defeat of the communist project as it had been known in the twentieth century and the triumph of the capitalist.”86 Incredibly, some writers who had previously accepted the argument expressed here latterly began to endorse a Deutscherist position after the Soviet Union had collapsed. Christopher Hitchens wrote of “the dismantling of the Soviet Empire” (an event, incidentally, that he attributes solely to the activities of Mikhail Gorbachev) that “if that momentous process vindicated anyone, it was perhaps Isaac Deutscher (who had believed in a version of ‘reform communism’).”87 Horowitz has no difficulty disposing of these claims: “In particular, the failure of Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union and the collapse of what proved to be the hollow shell of the Soviet Empire brutally contradict and refute the essence of all that Deutscher wrote about them.”88 It would be going too far to say that every Deutscherist has now switched sides to support the United States, capitalist globalization, “liberal values,” and the invasion of awkward third-world states. For every Halliday or Hitchens there is a Davis or an Ali. Nevertheless, Deutscherism made it easy, for those who had no countervailing belief in the ability of the working class to sustain them, to transfer their allegiance from Moscow to Washington.

Conclusion

Toward the end of his life Deutscher began, in response to the Vietnam War, to engage in political activity for the first time in decades. In 1965 he was invited to speak at the National Teach-In about the War in Washington, and then at the far more political event of the same name in Berkeley. He said of the latter event: “This is the most exciting speaking engagement I have had since I spoke to the Polish workers thirty years ago.” More important, perhaps, was his address to the Socialist Scholars Conference the following year (“On Socialist Man”), when he criticized the assembled ranks of the left academy (much smaller in those days, of course) for their failure to connect with the US working class:

Can’t you approach the young worker and tell him that the way to live is to work for life and not for death? Is it beneath American scholars to try to do that? . . . Your only salvation is in carrying the idea of socialism to the working class and coming back to storm—to storm, yes, to storm—the bastions of capitalism.89

These remarks, and his involvement in the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, do not suggest the attitude of a man contemplating the world from a watchtower. And why should that come as a surprise? The crisis over the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 not only had the effect of smoking out of the closet supporters of US imperialism, but of revitalizing socialists who had previously appeared lost to activity. Deutscher, a product of the finest traditions of European socialism before Stalin and Hitler had done their worst, was scarcely likely to be unaffected by the revival of struggle that surrounded him.

Changed circumstances enabled Deutscher to reengage in political activity, but it was the circumstances that prevailed for decades beforehand that shaped both the strengths and weaknesses of the trilogy. The Deutscher who resisted Stalinism gave us what is most valuable in it; the Deutscher who capitulated gave us those aspects most redolent of that epoch of defeat. Now that the false alternative of Stalinism is itself history, the latter will diminish in significance, but the virtues of Deutscher’s great work are likely to endure for as long as we still need to discuss the rise and fall of the Russian Revolution. And of how many other books of the period can that be said?