It will be seen that the Marxist movement had arrived by the beginning of the century at a point where it could provide a base and frame for an ambitious and gifted young man. Trotsky is not, like Marx, a great original thinker; he is not a great original statesman, like Lenin; he was perhaps not even inevitably a great rebel: the revolution was, as it were, the world in which he found himself living. He is one of those men of the first rank who flourish inside a school, neither creating, nor breaking out of, its system.
The young student who had impressed his fellows by the eloquence and force of his reasoning at a time when he did not yet know what he was talking about, because he had at any cost to play a role, found his place in the army of Marxism—in the drama of progress, on the stage of the earth, conceived in a certain way. This is not, of course, to imply that there has been anything insincere or specious about the relation of Trotsky to this role. On the contrary, he has staked upon it not only such things as comfort and peace of mind, but his own life and the lives of his followers and family, and that enjoyment of political power itself which is the only worldly satisfaction that Marxism allows to its true priesthood; and he has learned in the Marxist academy a certain perfection of revolutionary form and standards of revolutionary honor.
There is a passage in which Trotsky tells of the effect on him of reading the Marx-Engels correspondence which is worth quoting as a description of the tradition that Marx and Engels had founded. Trotsky had been trying to work with the Austrian Social Democrats, who had been both stultified by the Germanic academicism—the workers sometimes addressed them as “Genosse Herr Doktor,”—and demoralized by the Viennese skepticism: Victor Adler had once shocked Trotsky by declaring that, as for him, he preferred political predictions based on the Apocalypse to those based on Dialectical Materialism.
“In this atmosphere,” says Trotsky, “the correspondence between Marx and Engels was one of the books that I needed most, and the one that stood closest to me. It supplied me with the principal and most unfailing test for my own ideas as well as for my entire personal attitude toward the rest of the world. The Viennese leaders of the Social Democracy used the same formulas that I did, but one had only to turn any of them five degrees around on their own axes to discover that we gave quite different meanings to the same concepts. Our agreement was a temporary one, superficial and unreal. The correspondence between Marx and Engels was for me not a theoretical, but a psychological revelation. Toutes proportions gardées, I found proof on every page that I was bound to these two by a direct psychological affinity. Their attitude to men and ideas was mine. I guessed what they did not express, shared their sympathies, was indignant and hated as they did. Marx and Engels were revolutionaries through and through. But they had not the slightest trace of sectarianism or asceticism. Both of them, and especially Engels, could at any time say of themselves that nothing human was strange to them. But their revolutionary outlook lifted them always above the hazards of fate and the works of men. Pettiness was incompatible not only with their personalities, but with their presences. Vulgarity could not stick even to the soles of their boots. Their appreciations, sympathies, jests—even when most commonplace—are always touched by the rarefied air of spiritual nobility. They may pass deadly criticism on a man, but they will never deal in tittle-tattle.* They can be ruthless, but not treacherous. For outward glamor, titles or rank they have nothing but a cool contempt. What philistines and vulgarians considered aristocratic in them was really only their revolutionary superiority. Its most important characteristic is a complete and ingrained independence of official public opinion at all times and under all conditions.”
But even here we can see that it is the attitude itself, rather than what is to be accomplished through the attitude, that appeals to the imagination of Trotsky: he sees himself as the aristocrat of revolution. Lunachársky tells of Trotsky’s exclaiming of the Social Revolutionary leader Chernóv, who had accepted a place in the coalition government before the October Revolution: “What contemptible ambitiousness!—to abandon his historic position for a portfolio.” But the position of honor is only removed to the end of a longer perspective. “Trotsky,” Lunachársky adds, “treasures his historic role, and would undoubtedly be willing to make any personal sacrifice, not by any means excluding that of his life, in order to remain in the memory of mankind with the halo of a genuine revolutionary leader.” Bruce Lockhart wrote in his diary in February, 1918, after his first interview with Trotsky: “He strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it.” And there is somehow the impression created that the cause of human progress stands or falls with Trotsky: Truth’s quarrel is Trotsky’s quarrel. He tells in his autobiography of his judgment on the boys at his school when he went back after having been suspended over the demonstration against the French teacher. He divided them into three distinct groups: those who had “betrayed” him, those who had “defended” him, and those who had “remained neutral.” The first group he “cut completely”; the second group he cultivated. “Such, one might say,” he goes on, “was the first political test I underwent. These were the groups that resulted from that episode: the talebearers and the envious at one pole, the frank courageous boys at the other, and the neutral vacillating mass in the middle. These three groups never quite disappeared even during the years that followed. I met them again and again in my life, in the most varied circumstances.” So even the reader of Trotsky inevitably finds himself involved in something in the nature of an issue of personal allegiance to the author. Trotsky is not content, as Lenin was, to present the course of events, which he or another in this or that case may have interpreted more or less correctly: he must justify himself in connection with them.
We who of recent years have seen the State that Trotsky helped to build in a phase combining the butcheries of the Robespierre Terror with the corruption and reaction of the Directory, and Trotsky himself figuring dramatically in the role of Gracchus Babeuf, may be tempted to endow him with qualities which actually he does not possess and with principles which he has expressly repudiated. We have seen the successor of Lenin undertake a fantastic rewriting of the whole history of the Revolution in order to cancel out Trotsky’s part; pursue Trotsky from country to country, persecuting even his children and hounding them to their deaths; finally blame him, in staged scenes of vilification, hysterical, oriental and vulgar, and more degrading to the human spirit than the frank fiendishness of Ivan the Terrible, for all the treacheries, mistakes and disasters that have been the fate of his own administration—till he has made the world conscious of Trotsky as the accuser of Stalin’s own bad conscience, as if the Soviet careerists of the thirties were unable to deny the socialist ideal without trying to annihilate the moral authority of this one homeless and hunted man. It is not Trotsky alone who has created his role: his enemies have given it a reality that no mere self-dramatization could have compassed. And as the fires of the Revolution have died down in the Soviet Union at a time when the systems of thought of the West were already in an advanced state of decadence, he has shone forth like a veritable pharos, rotating a long shaft of light on the seas and the reefs all around.
But we must try to see the man inside the role and to examine his real tendencies and doctrines.
The boy who came back to the farm from Odessa with his book learning and his new glasses, his new habits of cleanliness and his new city clothes, found himself cut off from his kindred, a creature of another order, who felt that he was superior to them; and the relationship established here seems to have persisted all Trotsky’s life in connection with human beings in general. He tells us in My Life with that candor that sets him off sharply from the ordinary public figure, that his first emotions of “social protest” consisted of “indignation over injustice” rather than of “sympathy for the downtrodden,” and “even when my revolutionary ideas were already taking shape, I would catch myself in an attitude of mistrust of action by the masses, taking a bookish, abstract and therefore skeptical view of the revolution. I had to combat all this within myself, by my thinking, my reading, but mainly by means of experience, until the elements of psychic inertia had been conquered within me.” Lunachársky has said, and his impression is amply confirmed by other persons who have known Trotsky, that “a tremendous imperiousness and a kind of inability or unwillingness to be at all caressing or attentive to people, an absence of that charm which always surrounded Lenin, condemned Trotsky to a certain loneliness.” It is characteristic of Trotsky that—in an article on a book by Céline—he should argue, as no other of the great Marxists would have done, in favor of the revolutionary movement on the ground that it “leads humanity from out the dark night of the circumscribed I.”
Possessing neither Lenin’s gift for establishing personal relations of confidence nor the cunning political sense which has made it possible for Stalin to build up his machine and manipulate public opinion, Trotsky has ended by finding himself today in essentially the same position that he occupied between the split of 1903 and the revolution of 1905, and then again after 1905 up to the time of his return to Russia in 1917: that of an independent Marxist with a few devoted followers but no real popular constituency behind him. It is when he has been brought by a moment of crisis to a position of unquestioned authority and is free to act for himself that he becomes powerful as a political force, for he has the genius of making people do things. As Commissar for War in 1918 and 19, he managed, traveling in his armored train, to speed so fast from front to front, to appeal to the soldiers with such passion, to telegraph so promptly for supplies, to write and despatch so many resonant press stories, to put pressure so effectively on the military experts who had been trained under the old regime to lend their skill to the Revolution, and to catch and shoot so many disaffected officers, that the sixteen Soviet armies, feeling behind them this demon of will, held their fronts against the Kolcháks and Deníkins and saved the Revolution; and when Yudénich was advancing on Petrograd and Lenin was in favor of abandoning it, when the regimental commander had given his men the order to fall back and his troops were running away and had already reached division headquarters, Trotsky mounted the first horse he could find and, chasing one soldier after another with his orderly behind him brandishing a pistol and shouting, “Courage, boys: Comrade Trotsky is leading you!”, compelled the whole regiment to turn and recover the positions it had left; the commander now appeared at the most dangerous points and was wounded in both legs; the men attacked the tanks with bayonets. And in politics itself it is evidently true, as Bruce Lockhart said years ago, that Trotsky is never so formidable as when he has been driven into a tight place. Certainly his stature never appeared so imposing as at the time when, denied asylum by all the nations of Europe, he was forced to defend himself against the murderous persecution of Moscow.
And so the drive of the ideal behind all this is less the desire for human happiness than the enthusiasm for human culture, for that “first truly human culture,” as he says in Literature and Revolution, which socialism is eventually to make possible, that blazes out from the shutin man to illuminate this twilight of society. And so it is the theory of Marxism, the diagram of social development, rather than the immediate vicissitudes of the lives of his fellow creatures, that is present to Trotsky’s mind. The Marxist must act, of course; but he cannot consent to do so unless he can understand the situation and explain his own intervention in terms of Marxist theory. “The feeling,” he writes, “of the supremacy of general over particular, of law over fact, of theory over personal experience, took root in my mind at an early age and gained increasing strength as the years advanced… . [This feeling] became an integral part of my literary and political work. The dull empiricism, the unashamed cringing worship of the fact which is so often only imaginary, and falsely interpreted at that, were odious to me. Beyond the facts, I looked for laws… . In every sphere, barring none, I felt that I could move and act only when I held in my hand the thread of the general.”
At its worst, this results in the substitution of a kind of logical demonstration—recalling his mathematical aptitude—for the appreciation of men in their milieux, as is likely to be the case particularly with certain of his political predictions, written remote from the seat of operations. At its best—when he is examining events that have already taken place, so that the foundation of reality is given—it produces historical studies of extraordinary subtlety and solidity. Trotsky differs from the typical Marxist pedant, with his spinning of abstract “theses,” in that the dominance in his mind of Marxist theory still leaves the play of his intelligence pretty free: one finds in his writings not only the Marxist analysis of mass behavior but a realistic observation—in regard to personality particularly—in the tradition of the great Russian writers; and not only a sense of development and form which gives dignity to the least of his articles but also a vein of apt imagery which lends beauty to even his polemics and makes some passages in his books unforgettable. 1905, The History of the Russian Revolution, My Life, the biography of Lenin, and Literature and Revolution are probably a part of our permanent literature.
“The social-revolutionary radicalism,” he goes on in the passage already quoted, “which has become the permanent pivot for my whole inner life grew out of this intellectual enmity toward the striving for petty ends, toward out-and-out pragmatism, and toward all that is ideologically without form and theoretically ungeneralized.” Yes, but a permanent pivot in the center of one’s inner life is also a stake beyond which one cannot range. Trotsky has told us how in the course of his formative years he several times lengthened his tether: he had “resisted” first revolution, then Alexándra Lvóvna and Marxism, then art. And up to 1917 he had also resisted Lenin. Yet for letting out the rope to the stake, one does not the less remain confined to the circle. In the most serious undertakings of mankind, we are forced to distrust the mentality which resists having its pattern upset: there is always the danger that it might fail to take account of the emergence of important new factors. It has been the burden of all Trotsky’s later writings and the chief basis of his self-justification that from the beginning of the Revolution, he has been orientated toward Lenin (he admits, of course, his conflicts with Lenin, but the fact that he should attempt to minimize them shows his need for a fixed “pivot” of authority); and since Lenin’s death, toward the memory of Lenin. And Trotsky’s Marxism is as dogmatic as Lenin’s. He is as far from the exploratory spirit that distinguished Marx and Engels; and, being essentially a writer and a doctrinaire rather than like Lenin an inspired worker in the immediate materials of humanity, the implications of this dogmatic Marxism are all the more clearly exposed in his work.
Let us see what these implications are. First of all: there has been, so far as I know, no other first-rate Marxist for whom the Marxist conception of History, derived from the Hegelian Idea, plays so frankly teleological a role as it does in the work of Trotsky. Here are some references from his book on the 1905 revolution, written soon after the events it describes. “If the prince was not succeeding in peacefully regenerating the country, he was accomplishing with remarkable effectiveness the task of a more general order for which history had placed him at the head of the government: the destruction of the political illusions and the prejudices of the middle class.” “History used the fantastic plan of Gapón for the purpose of arriving at its ends, and it only remained for the priest to sanction with the priestly authority its [history’s] revolutionary conclusions.” “When one rereads the correspondence of our marvelous classics [Marx, Engels and Lassalle], who from the height of their observatories—the youngest in Berlin, and his two ranking seniors in the very center of world capitalism, London—observed the political horizon with never-relaxing attention, taking note of every incident, every phenomenon, that might indicate the Revolution’s approach; when one rereads these letters, in which the revolutionary lava is boiling up, when one breathes this atmosphere of an expectancy impatient but never weary, one is moved to hate that cruel dialectic of history which, in order to attain momentary ends, attaches to Marxism raisonneurs totally devoid of talent in either their theories or their psychology, who oppose their ‘reason’ to [what they regard] as the revolutionary madness.” History, then, with its dialectical Trinity, had chosen Prince Svyatopólk-Mirsky to disillusion the middle class, had propounded revolutionary conclusions which it had compelled Father Gapón to bless, and will cruelly discredit and destroy certain Pharisees and Sadducees of Marxism before it summons the boiling lava of the Judgment. These statements make no sense whatever unless one substitutes for the words history and the dialectic of history the words Providence and God. And this Providential power of history is present in all the writing of Trotsky. John Jay Chapman said of Browning that God did duty in his work as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection and preposition; and the same is true of History with Trotsky. Of late, in his solitude and exile, this History, an austere spirit, has seemed actually to stand behind his chair as he writes, encouraging, admonishing, approving, giving him the courage to confound his accusers, who have never seen History’s face.
What it may mean in moments of action to feel History towering at one’s elbow with her avenging sword in her hand is shown in the remarkable scene at the first congress of the Soviet dictatorship after the success of the October insurrection of 1917, when Trotsky, with the contempt and indignation of a prophet, read Mártov and his followers out of meeting. “You are pitiful isolated individuals,” he cried at this height of the Bolshevik triumph. “You are bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the rubbish-can of history!” These words are worth pondering for the light they throw on the course of Marxist politics and thought. Observe that the merging of oneself with the onrush of the current of history is to save you from the ignoble fate of being a “pitiful isolated individual”; and that the failure so to merge yourself will relegate you to the rubbish-can of history, where you can presumably be of no more use. Today, though we may agree with the Bolsheviks that Mártov was no man of action, his croakings over the course they had adopted seem to us full of far-sighted intelligence. He pointed out that proclaiming a socialist regime in conditions different from those contemplated by Marx would not realize the results that Marx expected; that Marx and Engels had usually described the dictatorship of the proletariat as having the form, for the new dominant class, of a democratic republic, with universal suffrage and the popular recall of officials; that the slogan “All power to the Soviets” had never really meant what it said and that it had soon been exchanged by Lenin for “All power to the Bolshevik Party.” There sometimes turn out to be valuable objects cast away in the rubbish-can of history—things that have to be retrieved later on. From the point of view of the Stalinist Soviet Union, that is where Trotsky himself is today; and he might well discard his earlier assumption that an isolated individual needs must be “pitiful” for the conviction of Dr. Stockman in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People that “the strongest man is he who stands most alone.”
Then the confusions of the Marxist morality become more and more obvious in Trotsky as its conceptions are brought into question, no longer merely by the mild Kantianism of Bernstein, but by the harsh and inescapable critique of the development of events in that State which the Marxist morality founded. I quote from the first volume of his biography of Lenin, published in French in 1936, in which these matters are not yet being specifically debated. Trotsky writes of Lenin’s mother, for example, that, “An inexhaustible spring of moral force would make it possible, after every fresh blow of fate, for her to reestablish her interior equilibrium and to sustain those who needed her support. Moral genius, not supplemented with other gifts, does not make itself conspicuous at a distance: it can only be seen at close range. But if there were not in the world such generous feminine natures, life would not be worth living.” And when he tells the story of the lie that the boy Vladímir confessed to, he remarks, “Thus we see that the categorical imperative of morality was by no means so foreign to Vladímir as has subsequently been asserted by Lenin’s innumerable enemies.” Yet later on he says of Anna’s statement that her brother Alexander was incapable of lying and that this was vividly brought out at his trial: “One is tempted to add, What a pity! Such a mentality, in a merciless social struggle, leaves you defenceless in politics. However the austere moralists may reason, professional liars that they are, lying is the reflection of social contradictions, but also sometimes a weapon for fighting them. It is impossible by a mere individual moral effort to escape from the web of the social lie.” Finally, he explains, apropos of the charge of “amoralism” brought against Lenin by one of his early opponents: “Now, it appears that this amoralism consisted in accepting any means as admissible so long as it led to the end. Yes: Ulyánov was not an admirer of that morality of the Popes or of Kant, which is supposed to be appointed to regulate our lives from the height of the starry heavens. The purposes he was pursuing were so great and super-personal that he openly subordinated moral standards to them.”
Two years later, after the Moscow trials of March, 1938, he wrote a long article called Their Morals and Ours (New International, June, 1938) against persons who had been asserting that the systematic falsehoods of the Kremlin and its remorseless extermination of the old Bolsheviks had grown quite logically out of the Jesuitical policy pursued by the Bolsheviks themselves. This article must be regarded as the locus classicus of Trotsky’s ideas on this subject. What do we find in it? We find first of all that the Jesuits have been maligned. The notion that they ever believed that the end could justify any means is a malicious invention of their opponents: what they did hold was that a given means may be neither bad nor good in itself, but may become either through the purpose it serves. Thus it is a criminal act to shoot a man “with the aim of violation or murder,” but an act of virtue to shoot a mad dog which is about to attack a child. “The Jesuits represented a militant organization, strictly centralized, aggressive, and dangerous not only to their enemies, but to their allies as well.” They were superior to the other Catholic priests of their day because they were “more consistent, bolder and more perspicacious.” It was only in so far as they became less Jesuits, less “warriors of the Church,” that is, in so far as they were perverted into “bureaucrats,” that their order degenerated.
Thus such means as lying and killing are morally indifferent in themselves. Both are necessary in time of war, and it depends on which side we want to win whether we approve them or reprobate them. Trotsky illustrates this phenomenon strikingly, and evidently without being aware of it, in the very essay under discussion, by bitterly complaining of the “hypocrisy” and the “official cult of mendacity” of the Kremlin and denouncing one of his calumniators of the GPU as a “bourgeois without honor or conscience.” When the Bolsheviks calumniated the Mensheviks, then, the reader is moved to inquire, did this not imply anything derogatory to their conscience or their honor? One finds the answer in another passage: “The question does not even lie in which of the warring camps caused or itself suffered the greatest number of victims. History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the [American] Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning and violence breaks the chains—let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!” There is, then, a court of morality above the warring classes, and this court is presided over by, precisely again, the Goddess History. For anyone but a Marxist it would appear as if history in the ordinary sense of the description or study of past events might well approach without moral animus the casualties of both North and South in the American Civil War. Should the historian, even in assuming that one side in a given conflict represents a progressive force and the other a retrograde one, have “different yardsticks” for the heroism or cruelty of the one and of the other? In using the word cruelty itself, Trotsky implies a moral judgment which is independent of partisan feelings and belongs to the common language. (It is, however, worth noting that the Russian word for cruelly, used in a generalized sense, as in the passage quoted from Lenin on here, is likely to be translated into English as “severely.” Severely has no moral connotations, whereas cruelly has; but the element of cruelty in life had been, as it still is, in Russia so much a matter of course that it almost loses its moral implications. Where the conflict becomes so acute, it is difficult for either side to admit common concepts of morality. What is true here is also true of the other “means” with which Trotsky is dealing. A foreigner who has been lied to by Russian officials over a long enough period of time will end by losing his native candor.)
It would be possible to work out a point of view which would take care of these contradictions, which would explain in what proportion our notions of good and evil are universal and in what proportion they are determined by class, much more adequately than Trotsky has done here; I have tried to suggest how it might be put at the end of my chapter on the Dialectic. But it could perhaps never really be developed by anyone who, as Trotsky is, was trying to fight the class struggle himself. The shell of party polemics, that convention which is in itself an abrogation of peacetime relations and an obstacle to serious discussion, interposes itself here between Trotsky and the real problems at issue. There is a good deal of the mere argument ad hominem—or rather, argument to social class—of the kind exploited first by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. In reply to the objection that communism “repudiates, instead of refashioning them, religion and morality,” the “eternal truths … that are common to all social systems,” the founders of Marxism retort that since these social systems are all built on exploitation, they may well arrive at similar values; and in answer to such complaints as that communism destroys marriage and the family, throw back into the teeth of their opponents the disintegration of family relations produced by industrial work. In this way the question of whether, and if so, to what degree, certain qualities and types of behavior may be agreed to be desirable in themselves by human beings of different classes—this question never gets discussed at all; and Trotsky meets it here even less squarely than the Communist Manifesto: Who are these creatures who dare to probe our morality? They are the “petty pickpockets of history,” etc. The very title Their Morals and Ours attempts to divert attention by putting the debate on a polemical plane.
But again he invokes Lenin: “The ‘amoralism’ of Lenin,” he says, “that is, his rejection of super-class morals, did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same ideal throughout his whole life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed; from displaying the highest conscientiousness in the sphere of ideas and the highest fearlessness in the sphere of action, from maintaining an attitude untainted by the least superiority to the ‘ordinary’ worker, to a defenseless woman, to a child. Does it not seem that ‘amoralism’ in the given case is only a pseudonym for higher human morality?” It is true, of course, that Lenin followed a moral logic of his own; but he lived it, and we can see how he was torn in feeling, if not perplexed in decision, by its difficulty. Even less than Trotsky did Lenin examine it or try to formulate it; yet today the best that Trotsky can do is to point into the past toward Lenin—that is, to show that there was once a great Bolshevik who was a humane and dedicated person.
It cannot be said that Trotsky has shown himself particularly humane. It seems to have been principally the planning side of socialism, the opportunity for increasing efficiency, and the ruthless side of Marxism, that attracted him when he was actually in power. The whole Bolshevik dictatorship, of course, was fundamentally undemocratic. With a people quite untrained in political democracy, it was inevitable that a revolutionary government should itself have to resort to despotism. And it is true that during the years of civil war the brutal methods of war-time imposed themselves as a matter of life or death for the Revolution itself. It is true that the first impulses of the Bolsheviks to be generous with their political enemies brought extremely disillusioning results: when they had released the monarchist general Krásnov, after his raid on Petrograd, in return for his word of honor that he would cease to fight the Bolshevik regime, he immediately returned to the attack. But through this crisis, which called forth Trotsky’s best, he did not respond in any very sensitive way to the feelings and needs of the people. Read the pamphlet, The Defense of Terrorism, published in 1920, in reply to a pamphlet by Kautsky that attacked the Bolshevik regime, in which he defends both the Bolshevik shooting of military and political enemies and his own project for a compulsory labor army. True it was written “in the car of a military train and amid the flames of civil war” and Trotsky begs us to bear this in mind; but what we feel in it is the terrific force of a will to domination and regimentation with no evidence of any sympathy for the hardships of the dominated and regimented.
For when he had whipped the Red Army into shape at the cost of many drumhead executions and definitely routed the Whites, he proceeded, against Lenin’s advice, to turn his admirable military machine into a conscript army of labor. But the soldiers, who had stuck it out against the enemies of the Revolution, began to vanish when they were put on public works. So, also, the Commissar of War was opposed to allowing trade unions, insisting that since trade unions were by definition class weapons against the employees and since they were living in a workers’ republic, they had no longer any need for such instruments. Lenin pointed out to him that the Bolshevik regime was not yet really wholly a workers’ republic, but rather—since the workers were to a considerable extent directed by officials not of working-class origin—a “workers’ republic with bureaucratic distortions.”
The inauguration of the New Economic Policy (at the beginning of 1921), which allowed a certain amount of private exchange and let up on the requisitions from the peasants, relieved the whole situation by restoring the old motive of personal gain in place of the ideal of communist discipline. It is to the credit of Trotsky’s sagacity that he had advocated the adoption of such measures in February, 1920, at a time when they were rejected by Lenin. But there had in the meantime taken place an incident which, instead of being eventually forgotten, has come to take on a more sinister significance in view of subsequent developments in Russia. In February, 1921, the sailors of the Kronstadt fortress, who had played an heroic part in the 1917 revolution, rebelled in behalf of the peasants, and troops were sent against them by the Bolsheviks and the mutiny was ruthlessly extinguished. Trotsky has recently defended his action on the ground that the personnel at Kronstadt were no longer the heroes of October and that the mutiny meant counter-revolution. But, after all, it was thought proper immediately afterwards to accede to the mutineers’ demands by the establishment of the N.E.P., and in the meantime—as we learn from other sources—the men’s families had been taken as hostages, and the sailors themselves, with such women as were with them, including the prostitutes of the barracks, had been massacred with every circumstance of ferocity by that child of the Tsar’s Okhrána and father of Stalin’s GPU, the Cheká. One remembers Trotsky’s satisfaction at the time of the 1905 revolution when the action of the St. Petersburg Soviet in connection with a similar mutiny on the part of the Kronstadt sailors prevented their execution by the Tsar; and one realizes that Trotsky’s enthusiasm for freedom is less a positive than a negative affair, that it is expressed mainly in indignation against other people who will not let his side be free. Even in Literature and Revolution (of 1924), where Trotsky is dealing with a field that is more or less his own, and despite the range of his appreciation and his opposition to the more vulgar kind of attempt to break literature to the yoke of party doctrine, he is trying to bring the other Soviet writers inside his Marxist intellectual circle or chiding them when they stray.
Lenin was moved to rebuke Trotsky during the period of which I have spoken and which was the occasion of their only serious falling-out, for his addiction to “intellectualistic formulas that fail to take into account the practical side of the question”; and in his “testament,” Lenin’s notes to the Central Committee written down not long before his death, in indicating Trotsky as “the ablest man” on the Central Committee, he criticizes his “too far-reaching confidence and a disposition to be far too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs.” And it is as a hero of the faith in Reason that Trotsky must figure for us. He tells us in his autobiography how he used to be driven mad at school by hearing boys who were studying science talk about “ ‘unlucky’ Monday or about meeting a priest crossing the road,” and how he would “get all excited and use harsh words” (as he was to do in the above case, with Kautsky) when he could not convince the people at Yanóvka that the measure of the area of a trapezoidal field which he got quickly by applying Euclid was more accurate than the different one which they arrived at after “many weary hours” of measuring it bit by bit. But Marx, after all, is not Euclid; you may be able to calculate to some extent in moments of revolution what Trotsky is so fond of describing as the parallelogram of social forces; but to mold the living growth of a society you must be aware of what people want. Trotsky has illustrated by his whole career in a very instructive way what is valid and what is blind in this rationalistic aspect of Marxism.
* This was written before Trotsky had been able to read the complete text of the correspondence, published by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. It did not begin coming out till 1929, the year that My Life was finished. But of course the very expurgation to which Bebel and Bernstein subjected the letters is evidence of the ideal of self-discipline that the Marxists had come to set themselves.