TROTSKY AND THE TRAGIC IMAGINATION
Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, as large in scale as it is in imaginative and intellectual commitment, makes one ask again: why did Trotsky fall? What brought to ruin the virtuoso tactician of the Bolshevik revolution, a man equaling, at moments excelling, Lenin in foresight and brilliance of device?
The causes are complex, and their roots lie in the time of victory. In December 1919, Trotsky was at the summit of his political and military achievement. Along a circumference of some five thousand miles, the White armies had been broken and flung back. Yudenich and his British tanks were halted at the doors of Petrograd. On the southern front, White Guards were retreating in disorder from Kiev and Poltava. In Siberia, Admiral Kolchak’s myth of an anti-Soviet Russia was nearing its macabre end. At the Seventh Congress of the Soviets, Trotsky, newly awarded the Order of the Red Banner, seemed to personify the inventiveness, the cold daring, the ruthlessness of hope which had made victory possible. To the world at large, his name was legend.
Yet only four years later he left the Commissariat of War, and on January 16, 1928, he was a man stripped of power, on his way to exile in Central Asia. How did Stalin, moving feline and tenacious out of the shadow of Party bureaucracy, isolate and overcome the greatest of his potential rivals?
The contour of classic tragedy lies near at hand. Trotsky stumbled at the very moment of triumph. He who had argued and fought for proletarian democracy in the full sense, for the right of worker and peasant to express and organize their views in a process of continued revolutionary debate, now adopted the theory and practice of total Party control. It was the Party, uniquely informed by authentic historical insight and underwritten by victory, that was to be the voice and executor of society. Acutely aware of the social, economic chaos left by revolution and civil war—no individual mind could visualize, let alone master, the sum of local ruin—inspired by his own success in shaping and directing the Red Army, Trotsky in December 1919 proposed that the mechanics of military mobilization be adapted to the mobilization of civilian labor (a notion which Saint-Just examined during the French Revolution). During what Lenin termed the “fever” and “mortal illness” of the Party in the winter of 1920–21, Trotsky led the faction which wanted the trade unions to be deprived of their autonomy and absorbed into the fabric of the state. He railed against those who “have made a fetish of democratic principles” and urged, with abrasive eloquence, that “the Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship, regardless of temporary waverings in the spontaneous moods of the masses, regardless of the temporary vacillations even in the working class.”
It was Trotsky who took the salute after the suppression of the Kronstadt rising, that first chapter in the long, grim duel of the Soviet revolution with its anarchic or radical past; it was Trotsky who hailed as a necessary victory the decimation of the sailors whom he had himself kindled to mutiny in 1917 and led during the civil war. The irony of his new situation was profound and suicidal. Having proclaimed that the Party must substitute itself for the will of society—must incarnate that will as a monistic instrument—Trotsky foresaw that the Central Committee would one day substitute itself for the Party as a whole, and that, finally and inevitably, a single dictator would unite in his own person the functions and processes of decision of the Central Committee. Yet, precisely like a personage in classical tragedy, Trotsky did not act to arrest, to defeat, the dangers he foresaw. Clairvoyance and policy drew apart, as if doom, seen as a historical process, had its irresistible fascination. He stumbled on, majestic. One thinks of Eteocles going clear-sighted to the death gate in the Seven Against Thebes, refusing the plea of the chorus for evasion or liberty of action:
We are already past the care of gods.
For them our death is the admirable offering.
Why then delay, fawning upon our doom.
The crisis of interregnum in 1923–24 defined Trotsky’s isolation. Here E. H. Carr’s study of the internal history of Soviet Russia and of the Party is indispensable. The plight of the Soviet economy and the conflicting claims of industry and agriculture provoked bitter divisions. But precisely because of his earlier negative attitude toward the trade unions, Trotsky could not become the natural leader of an “industrial opposition” (such as was to emerge many decades later against the inefficiencies and archaic savageries of Stalinist rule). Increasingly, Trotsky had to play a lone, impatient hand. This was plainly visible during the dissensions in Moscow over the proper course of action to be followed by the German Communist Party. As Carr puts it: for Trotsky “the destinies of the Russian and German revolutions were irrevocably linked: for him it was an emotional, as much as a rational, belief.” In August 1923 Trotsky was confident that the hour was at hand, that proletarian revolution was imminent in the homeland of Marx. The failure of the K.P.D. in October, followed a few days later by Hitler’s Munich putsch, further weakened Trotsky’s emotional and tactical resources. Already Stalin, whose seeming indifference to the German question was compounded of ignorance and instinctive cunning, began to emerge as the dominant partner in the Kamenev-Zinoviev-Stalin triumvirate.
Moreover, there can be no doubt that Lenin’s illness and death left Trotsky off balance and curiously vulnerable. The relationship between these two elemental figures of the Russian revolution was intricate and vital, as only a great novelist might have conceived it. It had begun in polemic. In 1904 Trotsky, who had not yet broken with the Mensheviks, wrote of Lenin as a man “hideous” and “dissolute,” as a Russian Robespierre drawing a line of blood between his Party and the world (had Trotsky already cast himself in the role of Danton?). They again opposed each other over the formulation of the Zimmerwald program in 1915, and in 1917 Trotsky did not respond immediately when Lenin asked him and his friends to join the Bolsheviks. Their alliance was only forged by the needs and triumphs of October. Deutscher writes of the “discord in temperament and habit” between the two giants; one imagines rock and lava.
But during the six short years of their partnership—years that altered the contour of the century and of a large part of the earth—they developed a profound mutual respect. Lenin, notes Deutscher, “made not a single allusion to their past controversies, except to say privately that in some respects Trotsky had been right and to warn the Party, in his will, that it ought not to hold his non-Bolshevik past against Trotsky.” In that famous document, Lenin, while qualifying Trotsky’s genius as too far-reaching in its self-confidence, stated that Trotsky was, “to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee.”
Trotsky acknowledged Lenin’s primacy and uncanny political acumen. He did not renounce his own independence but was distinctly remorseful about his past assaults on Lenin’s integrity and leadership. So long as Lenin was in essential control, Trotsky acted with magnificent dash and spontaneity of tactical resource. It was as if Lenin was the firm pivot against which he could exercise, without fear of political disaster, the freedom and irreverence of his own temper. So long as Lenin was there to listen and judge, Trotsky felt immune from the cancerous workings of Party intrigue and old-guard reprisal. His own isolation from Party cadres seemed as nothing when set against the potential strength of a Lenin-Trotsky entente.
With Lenin’s death, Trotsky’s political flair, his buoyant demon of sarcasm and ruse, seemed to desert him. One cannot help wondering whether his failure to enlist Lenin’s personal prestige in the nascent struggle against Stalin, whether his failure to invoke the full force of Lenin’s testament, with its warnings of Stalin’s abuses of bureaucratic power, do not point to a deeply entrenched feeling of guilt. As if Trotsky had never forgiven himself for his initial attacks on Lenin, as if, perhaps at some subconscious level, he did not feel justified in using his collaboration with Lenin to combat those old Bolsheviks who treated him as an opportunist and latecomer. Fatally—though Stalin may have had a hand in the imbroglio—Trotsky was absent from Moscow at the time of Lenin’s funeral. It was precisely on this occasion that Stalin struck the new ominous note of the cult of personality, of the Byzantine homage to the leader.
Deutscher summarizes the situation thus:
Slowly but inexorably the circumstances which led to Trotsky’s defeat began to unfold and agglomerate. He missed the opportunity of confounding the triumvirs and discrediting Stalin. He let down his allies. He failed to act as Lenin’s mouthpiece with the resolution Lenin had expected of him. He failed to support before the entire Party the Georgians and the Ukrainians for whom he had stood up in the Politbureau. He kept silent when the cry for inner-party democracy rose from the floor. He expounded economic ideas the historic portent of which escaped his audience but which his adversaries could easily twist so as to impress presently upon workers, peasants, and bureaucrats alike that Trotsky was not their well-wisher, and that every social class and group ought to tremble at the mere thought that he might become Lenin’s successor.
What lay behind the procrastination, behind the refusal to appeal to the Party at large, to the army he had called into being, to the international Communist movement in whose eyes his glory stood undimmed? Was Trotsky, as Stalin hinted, too proud to fight? Probably the causes lay deeper. Marxism can effect a dissociation from personal identity very like that experienced by the protagonist in tragic drama. Having entrusted his imagination, his center of reality, to the historical process, the Marxist revolutionary trains himself to accept a diminished range and validity of private regard. The logic, the emotional authority of the historical fact, even where it entails destruction and humiliation to his own person, surpasses the claims, the intensity, of the self. Doom is accepted, almost acquiesced in, as being part of that historical truth and forward motion in which individual existence anchors its meaning. It is the note sounded by those high, stiff personages waiting on death in Yeats’s Deirdre:
They knew that there was nothing that could save them,
And so played chess as they had any night
For years and waited for the stroke of sword.
I never heard a death so out of reach
Of common hearts, a high and comely end.
What need have I, that gave up all for love,
To die like an old king out of a fable,
Fighting and passionate? What need is there
For all that ostentation at my setting?
I have loved truly and betrayed no man.
I need no lightning at the end, no beating
In a vain fury at the cage’s door.
More obviously, Trotsky was caught in a web of physical illness and nervous exhaustion. It kept him away from Moscow at crucial moments and barred him from that day-to-day exaction of organizational intrigue and factional maneuvering at which Stalin excelled. Victory had left Trotsky strangely tired, strangely unbent. When his temper returned to its full pitch of resolution, when he realized that it was only “fighting and passionate” that he could live, that there would be necessary “lightning at the end,” it was too late.
This is the theme of The Prophet Outcast, perhaps the finest volume of Deutscher’s biography. The events take the shape of a Niobe play. Not much in the chronicle of Stalin’s sinuous cruelty surpasses the extermination of Trotsky’s children and grandchildren. Deprived of Soviet nationality, Trotsky’s daughter Zina was unable to rejoin her husband or children. Her restless mind broke under the strain and she committed suicide in Berlin, where the Nazis would, a few weeks later, have closed in on her. Leon (or Lyova), Trotsky’s eldest son, was the untiring companion of exile, his father’s courier, publicist, and advocate. Though Trotsky demanded fantastic labor of him under circumstances increasingly hopeless, though he often treated him with impatience, Lyova’s courage and fidelity held. It was he who kept alive the harried remnants of the Trotskyite movement in western Europe. It was through his efforts that the wavering dream of a Fourth International retained some substance. But the G.P.U. hunted him incessantly. He died in Paris in February 1938, at the age of thirty-two, sick of heart, short of sleep and food. Deutscher concludes that “much of the circumstantial evidence” points to murder.
Trotsky’s youngest son, Sergei, sought to remain wholly outside the contagious glory of his father’s convictions and political fortunes. In vain. Despite Trotsky’s appeal to world opinion, Sergei was deported to a Siberian concentration camp, then tortured in the hope that he would denounce his father. He was probably done to death sometime in 1938, though there are those who thought they saw him alive later. Experiencing the fate of his children, knowing he had brought it on and could do nothing to prevent it, Trotsky passed inchwise through damnation. He wrote of Lyova:
His mother, who was closer to him than anyone in the world, and I, as we are living through these terrible hours, recall his image feature by feature; we refuse to believe that he is no more and we weep because it is impossible not to believe.… Your mother and I never thought, never expected, that fate would lay this task on us … that we should have to write your obituary.… But we have not been able to save you.
As Ovid says of Niobe: dumque rogat, pro qua rogat, occidit (even as she prayed, the child for whom she prayed fell dead).
But it was Trotsky himself, of course, whom Stalin was determined to destroy. The long pursuit led from Turkey to France, from France to Norway, from Norway to Mexico. It is not only the hunters who appall, but those who refused asylum or hedged it with conditions so abject that Trotsky had to seek elsewhere. Unlike Herzen, Ogarev, or Marx, Trotsky was not allowed sanctuary in England. Deutscher suggests that Trotsky and Churchill bear a significant resemblance, as masters of rhetoric, as historians, as amateurs of genius in war. But toward Trotsky, Churchill showed no magnanimity. He rejoiced to see “the Ogre of Europe” now a “bundle of old rags” sitting disconsolate on the shores of the Black Sea, or being hounded from place to place. But then it was Trotsky’s levies that had routed Churchill’s hopes of allied and counter-revolutionary intervention.
The end was in character: “His skull smashed, his face gored, Trotsky jumped up, hurled at the murderer whatever object was at hand, books, inkpots, even the dictaphone, and then threw himself at him. It had all taken only three or four minutes. … Trotsky’s last struggle. He fought it like a tiger. He grappled with the murderer, bit his hand, and wrenched the ice axe from him.”
It was this formidable resurgence of will after his defeat in Moscow which enabled Trotsky to achieve, during eleven years of flight and exile, much of what is permanent in his legacy. Trotsky’s presence during these years, the leap of energy out of the single life take on the particularized universality of legend. His writings become of absorbing fascination to the student of literature (books, inkpots, and the dictaphone are the writer’s arsenal).
On the island of Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmara, Trotsky wrote his autobiography, My Life, and his History of the Russian Revolution. Both are superb books and have stood the test of time. The autobiography was written in limbo, in a tense breathing spell between the momentous historical past and an uncertain future. In it Trotsky achieves a peculiar detachment, seeing much of his life as already in the grasp of history. He has the eye for detail of the natural writer and tactician. In the late summer of 1902, Trotsky escaped from Siberian exile “together with E.G., a woman translator of Marx”:
The driver sped on in the Siberian fashion, making as much as twenty versts an hour. I counted all the bumps with my back, to the accompaniment of the groans of my companion. During the trip the horses were changed twice. Before we reached the railway, my companion and I went our separate ways, so that each of us would not have to suffer the mis-haps and risks incurred by the other. I got into the railway carriage in safety. There my friends from Irkutsk provided me with a traveling-case filled with starched shirts, neckties and other attributes of civilization. In my hands, I had a copy of the “Iliad” in the Russian hexameter of Gnyeditch; in my pocket, a passport made out in the name of Trotsky, which I wrote in it at random, without even imagining that it would become my name for the rest of my life.… Throughout the journey, the entire car full of passengers drank tea and ate cheap Siberian buns. I read the hexameters and dreamed of the life abroad. The escape proved to be quite without romantic glamour; it dissolved into nothing but an endless drinking of tea.
The History is a very great piece of work, “unique in world literature,” says Deutscher, “as an account of a revolution, given by one of its chief actors.” The book has that measure of tremendous occasion achieved also by Carlyle; it conveys the human mass in motion—the sum greatly and menacingly exceeding the vision of the individual parts—as little other historical narrative does. At the same time, the History abounds in individual portraits (Kerensky, Lieber, Chernov, Tseretelli) as perceptive and acid as Saint-Simon’s. The vignettes are unforgettable in their harsh, gay finality of judgment:
As a writer, Miliukov is heavy, prolix and wearisome. He has the same quality as an orator. Decorativeness is unnatural to him. That might have been an advantage, if the niggardly policies of Miliukov had not so obviously needed a disguise—or if they had had, at least, an objective disguise in the shape of a great tradition. There was not even a little tradition. The official policy in France—quintessence of bourgeois perfidy and egotism—has two mighty allies: tradition and rhetoric. Each promoting the other, they surround with a defensive covering any bourgeois politician, even such a prosaic clerk of the big proprietors as Poincaré. It is not Miliukov’s fault if he had no glorious ancestors, and if he was compelled to conduct a policy of bourgeois egotism on the borders of Europe and Asia.
Principally, the History tries to place the tumult and graphic drama of local incident within a framework of Marxist analysis. Trotsky’s “scenes, portraits, and dialogues, sensuous in their reality, are inwardly illumined by his conception of the historical process.” The theoretic control is imperfectly achieved. The events were too near the historian’s skin, and much in his own defeat and in Stalin’s seizure of power lay outside any natural Marxist contour. Nevertheless, the History moves under pressure of close argument and with a constant aim of ideological and sociological analysis. Resembling Churchill’s historical narratives in their scenic grandeur and quality of personal involvement, Trotsky’s works are more adult, more resistant to eloquence.
Hardly less impressive was Trotsky’s accomplishment as prophet and interpreter of the catastrophe of the 1930s. Earlier even than Churchill he tried to rouse the civilized imagination to the reality of Hitler, and he saw more deeply than Churchill into the sources and mechanism of the Nazi movement. Because the fate of the German working class had seemed to him indivisible from that of the Russian revolution, Trotsky was nearly the first to gauge the consequences of Hitler’s rise to power, of the failure of the proletariat in Germany and western Europe to halt the onrush of petit-bourgeois totalitarianism. Trotsky saw National Socialism as “the party of counter-revolutionary despair,” as the movement and ideology of the “small bourgeois run amok.” Mussolini and Hitler embodied counter-revolution from below, they “expressed the urge of the lower middle class to assert itself against the rest of society.” National defeat in 1918, arbitrarily and incompletely brought home, together with the slump of 1929—which, as Canetti has noted, weakened the inmost fabric of social coherence by making currency ephemeral and ridiculous—opened the trap door. Pathological energies of inferiority and vengeance stepped into the emptiness left by the collapse of national pride and normal economic self-respect. With uncanny clairvoyance Trotsky recognized, even prior to 1933, that there is a touch of Hitler present in every frustrated Kleinbürger. Deutscher summarizes what he terms Trotsky’s principal political deed in exile:
Like no one else, and much earlier than anyone, he grasped the destructive delirium with which National Socialism was to burst upon the world.… What underlines even further the political insanity of the times is with what utter unconcern about the future and venomous hostility the men responsible for the fate of German communism and socialism reacted to the alarm which Trotsky sounded.… An historical narrative can hardly convey the full blast of slander and derision with which he was met.… He had to watch the capitulation of the Third International before Hitler as a father watches the suicide of a prodigal and absent-minded child, with fear, shame, and anger.
Here again the archetype is that of the tragic theater: foresight barred from effective action. Yoked together with political helplessness, Trotsky’s lucidity was a curse. He too stood powerless in a place of blood prophesying to those who would not believe him or believed too late:
Now once again the pain of grim, true prophecy
shivers my whirling brain in a storm of things foreseen.
Why do I wear these mockeries upon my body,
this staff of prophecy, these flowers at my throat?
At least I will spoil you before I die. Out, down,
break, damn you! This for all that you have done to me.
Make someone else, not me, luxurious in disaster.…
Lo now, this is Apollo who has stripped me here
of my prophetic robes. He watched me all the time
wearing this glory, mocked of all, my dearest ones
who hated me with all their hearts, so vain, so wrong;
called like some gypsy wandering from door to door
beggar, corrupt, half-starved, and I endured it all.
And now the seer has done with me, his prophetess,
and led me into such a place as this, to die.
Like Cassandra, Trotsky saw not only his own peril (the axe and shivered skull waiting for both behind the bloodstained door) but the harrowing unfolding of events in the polis. He knew, in a torment of ineffectual insight, that the refusal of the German Communist Party to build a common anti-Nazi front, to marshal its large potential reserves in a common movement to the left, would cause not merely its own doom but that of Germany as a whole. Yet that refusal was the direct expression of Stalin’s will and policy. By insisting that the socialists were the real and mortal foe, that one could dispose of Hitler later and indeed make common cause with Nazism in the tactics of the fight against socialists and “plutocrats,” Stalin ensured the annihilation of German Communism and did much to facilitate the triumph of Nazism.
Trotsky cried out in vain against this cynical folly and foretold the reaping of the whirlwind: “It is an infamy to promise that the workers will sweep away Hitler once he has seized power. This prepares the way for Hitler’s domination.… The wiseacres who claim that they see no difference between Brüning and Hitler are in fact saying: it makes no difference whether our organizations exist or whether they are already destroyed. Beneath this pseudo-radical verbiage hides the most sordid passivity.” But the Stalinists merely denounced Trotsky as an hysterical saboteur (“beggar, corrupt, half-starved”) and went on digging the grave of German democracy. Shortly before Hitler became Chancellor, Thaelmann, the leader of the German Communists, branded Trotsky’s warnings as “the theory of an utterly bankrupt Fascist and counter-revolutionary” (“mocked of all, my dearest ones / who hated me with all their hearts, so vain, so wrong”). Only half a year later, behind the barbed wire of the newly established concentration camps, German Communists were to remember the voice of the seer mocked.
Yet as one thinks back on the apparent lunacy of the Stalinist line, a suspicion nags. Was Stalin no less farseeing than Trotsky, though in a cynical, inhuman perspective? Might it have been that he was prepared to see the K.P.D. destroyed and Hitler victorious in groping, instinctive anticipation of a crisis that would ultimately ruin Germany and give the Soviet Union dominance over eastern and Balkan Europe? Or was it that he feared the survival and possible ripening of a competitive, rival version of Communism in the privileged heartland of industrial Europe (as Peter Nettl’s important study of Rosa Luxemburg shows, such ambiguities of strategy complicated the relations between German and Russian Marxism from the start)?
There is no certain way of knowing. But one thing is clear. When Trotsky cried out in 1932—“There are hundreds of thousands, there are millions of you.… If Fascism comes to power it will ride like a terrific tank over your skulls and spines.… Only a fighting unity with social democratic workers can bring victory”—reason and what was left of political decency were on his side. But they stood as alone as in the courtyard of the house of Atreus.
A biography on this scale, and dealing with a life whose resonance deepens and multiplies with the echo of history, stands in as complex a relationship to time as does a work of art. When Deutscher began the first volume, in late 1949, Stalin’s seventieth birthday was being celebrated in Moscow with oriental pomp and abjection. When The Prophet Outcast was published in 1963, Stalin’s body was no longer in the Lenin mausoleum, and there were many who believed that the empty place would be taken, before too long, by Trotsky restored. It appeared as if the process of anti-Stalinist revision initiated at the 20th Party Congress would lead, necessarily, to Trotsky’s rehabilitation in Bolshevik history and in the mythology of Communism. Today—1966—that possibility seems remote. The 23rd Party Congress has reverted to the Stalinist terminology of General Secretary and Politbureau, and it looks as if it is precisely the Stalinist legacy, and the encompassing of Stalin’s role in an acceptable reading of history, which pose the most urgent, intricate challenges to Soviet society.
Both Stalin and Trotsky have moved into the penumbra of “variable truth.” Of all the differences in habits of intelligence that divide Western, post-Cartesian culture from Russian and oriental sensibility, this denial or re-formulation of the historical event is perhaps the most serious. A political system capable of obliterating, by decree, the name of its most heroic city and feat of war (Stalingrad altered to Volgograd) will retreat before no mendacity toward its own past. Soviet totalitarianism is most extreme not in the claims it makes on the utopian future, but in the violence it would do to the past, to the vital integrity of human remembrance. Where is dialogue to begin if a young historian, acting as one’s courteous guide to the Winter Palace, states as an assured fact “established by Soviet research” that Trotsky was away from Petrograd at the time of the October assault “intriguing with the Germans”?
It cannot begin with fresh lies. Vilifications of Stalin, attempts to minimize or distort his role in the war, may flatter one’s sense of just retribution; but truth is victim again. Lukács, the keeper of the Marxist conscience (and characteristically a Westerner) was one of the first to recognize this aspect of de-Stalinization. To replace myth by myth is to gain nothing, it is to leave the past in servitude to present tactics. The legend of a liberal, pro-Western Trotsky under whose rule the Soviet Union would have evolved along consultative lines, of a great revolution gone wrong through the sinister accident of Stalin’s presence, will not hold. It disregards not only the realities of Bolshevik doctrine and the Russian situation, but Trotsky’s own character and the totalitarian line he took in 1920–21. Whatever his anti-Stalinism and fervent hopes in a “gradualist” evolution of Soviet society, Deutscher gives such a myth the lie.
This is perhaps the signal achievement of Deutscher’s book. It strikes a balance of imaginative justice between Trotsky and Stalin, showing their conflict to be, like the Hegelian paradigm of tragic drama, one of complicated, ironic division of merit. Deutscher, who was himself engaged in the dreams of the Fourth International and whose bias of spirit lies plainly with Trotsky (like many a great biographer possessed of his subject, he has come to look remarkably like Trotsky), nevertheless does complete justice to the cruel magnitude of Stalin’s achievement. Similarly to Trotsky himself, who strove for an objective estimate of Stalinist policies even at the worst moments of his personal suffering, Deutscher does not allow us to forget where Stalin was right. This striving for the technical view is the essence of Marxist training and integrity.
In the 1920s the Trotskyite vision of continued revolution and of proletarian insurrection in western Europe did not match the facts. Stalin’s concentration on Communism in one country was wholly realistic. Though the methods he used to break the independence of the kulaks were appalling and left a society bled and shaken to the core, Stalin’s instinct was, by Trotsky’s own acknowledgment, accurate. At that point in Soviet history large-scale collectivization or establishment of central economic control over agriculture was a rigorous necessity. No doubt a Trotskyite regime would have had a different flavor from Stalin’s, a greater candor of emotional and rhetorical life. But it might well have been no less authoritarian and, at need, no less ruthless. As Deutscher notes: the charge “that Trotsky could have leveled against Stalin was that he instituted a reign of terror like Robespierre’s, and that he had monstrously outdone Robespierre. However, Trotsky’s own past and the Bolshevik tradition did not allow him to say this.” It is as if Deutscher’s earlier biography of Stalin had been an exercise in purgation, making possible the emotional, intellectual poise of his portrayal of Trotsky.
In choosing the path of industrial and technological priorities inside the Soviet Union, in their readiness to relinquish overt aims of international incitement in favor of empirical arrangements with capitalism, Khrushchev and his successors are, in fact, developing along Stalinist lines. It is in the Chinese case that strong elements of Trotskyism are present. When the Chinese argue that the process of Communist revolution cannot be limited to one country or power bloc, when they urge that the prevalence of hunger, racial tension, and economic exploitation throughout the underdeveloped world is an immediate challenge and opportunity for militant action, when they hint at the superiority of mass armies over any sophisticated military establishment, they often seem to speak in the great shadow voice of Trotsky. It is a language that commends itself neither to Moscow nor the West.
This axiom of revolution as necessarily international points to one aspect of Trotsky’s genius and defeat which Deutscher has, partially on grounds of Marxist methodology, underplayed. It is true that Trotsky was specifically involved with Jewish questions only in 1903—during the controversy over the Bund at the Brussels congress—but the Judaic quality of his vision and sensibility are difficult to deny. Like Marx, he was Jewish in his instinctive commitment to internationalism, in his strategic and personal disregard of national barriers and antagonisms. In Stalin’s hatred of Trotsky, in his power to isolate Lev Davidovich Bronstein and make him seem alien to the Party cadres, there ran not only the dark, perennial thread of Russian anti-Semitism (as pronounced in Stalin the Georgian as in Khrushchev the Ukrainian), but also the insecurity, the sour fear which the chauvinist, the man rooted in his own ground, feels in the presence of the cosmopolitan, of the wanderer at home in the world. It is precisely that moment at which the Bolshevik revolution abandoned its international hopes and became a matter of Russian circumstance that marks the start of Trotsky’s ruin.
If one forgets Trotsky’s Jewishness, moreover, it is not easy to get into right focus his passionate concern with survival through the word, his sense of the written book as weapon and watchman’s cry, or that fantastic legalism which inspired one of the most moving, bizarre episodes in his career. Under the presidency of the American philosopher John Dewey, a commission of inquiry met in Trotsky’s house in Mexico in April 1937. It examined the charges of treason and sabotage hurled at Trotsky during the course of the Moscow purge trials. For thirteen lengthy sessions Trotsky was questioned and cross-questioned on his political record, beliefs, and responsibilities. He argued and defended himself with the same superb sweep, with the same virtuosity of contempt and passion for detail he would have displayed in an actual Moscow court. “He stood where he stood like truth itself, unkempt and unadorned, unarmoured and unshielded, yet magnificent and invincible.” Though it altered nothing in his material position and did hardly anything to arrest the murderous reach of Stalinist lies, Trotsky was jubilant at the verdict of acquittal. The entire affair has the abstract pathos of a Talmudic parable. Like Marx, Trotsky was one of the great Jewish seers and exiles of the modern age. And he was, perhaps, the first of his heritage, since Joshua, to show military genius.
There is much in Trotsky’s life and in Isaac Deutscher’s presentation of it to match the symbolic forms and ironies of tragic art. There are many scenes which rivet the imagination: Trotsky during his first Siberian exile, writing literary and philosophic essays as vermin dropped from the walls of the hut onto the paper; Trotsky haranguing his guards on matters of revolutionary theory during his brief internment in England in 1917; Trotsky on horseback, spectacles flashing, as he rallied stricken soldiers and militia to stop the White advance on Petrograd. The account of a kulak orgy in the 1930s sticks in the mind: “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 vapors of vodka, with the smoke of their blazing possessions, and with their own despair.” And at the close there is the image of three hundred thousand men and women filing past the dead body, the streets of Mexico resounding with their lament, the Gran corrido de Leon Trotsky.
It is in a biography of this order that the specific energies of tragic drama are today most vital. It is here we find the qualities of representative, public action, of heroic dimension, of prophetic irony and divided justice which characterize the form of the tragic play, and which are so markedly absent from the primarily introspective, middle-class values of modern prose fiction. Heroism and the monumental stance are suspect to the contemporary imagination; they have their strong life in Deutscher’s triptych or, in a more stoic vein, the hero bound yet victorious through sheer intensity of being, in Ernest Jones’s Life of Freud. These books (one thinks as well of Leon Edel’s Henry James, of George Painter’s Proust, of Michael Foot’s study of Bevan) suggest a renascence of biography on the major, Victorian scale. But with the difference that the modern biographer works with the means and expectations of post-Freudian psychology, of current scholarship, and that he has behind him the stylistic habits and achievements of the novel.
The appetite for splendor, for the gesture that implicates more than private life, for ceremony and pathos, is still with us, though often suppressed. The charge made against tragedy in Anouilh’s Antigone is damaging; it corresponds to much of our present idiom:
Et puis, surtout, c’est reposant, la tragédie, parce qu’on sait qu’il n’y a Plus d’espoir, le sale espoir … et qu’on n’a plus qu’à crier,—pas à gémir, non, pas à se plaindre,—à geuler à pleine voix ce qu’on avait à dire.… Et pour rien: pour se le dire à soi, pour l’apprendre soi. Dans le drame, on se débat parce qu’on espère en sortir. C’est ignoble, c’est utilitaire. Là, c’est gratuit. C’est pour les rois.
Nevertheless, the world of kings and of nemesis persists as a necessary possibility for our imaginations, as a need, deeper and more tenacious than democratic theory allows, for decisive form. The medieval and Elizabethan convention, embodying the very spirit of tragedy, that the heavens are hung with black, that day yields to night, that “comets, importing change of times and states” flash in the sky when the hero falls, has not lost its meaning. A whole city marches past Trotsky’s bier: the great die differently from the small.