Secure The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 Designed By Isaac Deutscher Accessible In Edition
up the Trotsky saga, . .
This last volume is easily the most moving in the trilogy, For readers who don't share my pedantic desire for completion, I'd almost recommend skipping straight to The Prophet Outcast.
Here I think we find Trotsky as he is most remembered today not man of power, founder of the Red Army and apparent successor to Lenin, but the tragic figure, cast out and persecuted yet defiant til the end.
Though we live in cynical times many of us can still appreciate a heroic dissident,
Inthe great publishing house Verso reissued Deutscher's classic biography, In the press many critics took this as an opportunity to pay tribute again to the legend of Trotsky.
See, for example, Chritopher Hitchens' piece in the Atlanitc sitelink theatlantic. com/magazine/a . Trotksy is commemorated almost as the conscience of Bolshevism, the one who could have brought about a better, more humane communism and kept Stalin from permanently bloodying that word.
It's a stirring narrative, but I actually think it does a disservice to Deutscher's great subtlety and rigor as a historian.
He's too much of a historical materialist to ever go in for hagiography, His account of the birth and development of the Soviet Union is probably the most illuminating thing I've ever read on the subject.
His admiration for Trotsky does not prevent him from showing the ways in which Trotsky was complicit in his own downfall and that of his country.
So then was Trotsky a great man
It's all very complicated, of course, but my answer, after reading this biography.
. . NO. I have no doubt Trotsky was amazingly brilliant and courageous, However, it seems to me that he ultimately failed very badly at what ought to have been the central task of his life.
He couldn't stop Stalin. A great orator and military strategist, nonetheless his political judgment was often abysmal, We see this especially in the second volume, where he repeatedly underestimates his adversary, It's not just hindsight that makes this clear, Throughout the twenties other members of the politbureau including Lenin repeatedly tried to warn him of the danger posed by Stalin.
He never took the threat seriously enough,
Moreover, the image of Trotsky as principled critic of Stalinism is a huge oversimplification, It's much more the case that Stalin was an extremely unprincipled opponent of Trotsky's physical and political existence.
The critique Trotsky did develop lagged woefully behind the ungodly reality of Stalin's reign, To equate Stalin with 'Thermidor' was precisely the wrong analogy, If only that were true! The historical Thermidor actually brought an end to the terror in France.
Stalin unleashed terror on an unprecedented scale, Nor can it honestly be said that he represented the forces of reaction or counterrevolution, Even at his most barbaric, Stalin acted from a certain revolutionary logic, A logic which Trotsky endorsed,
Trotsky was the first to speak up for 'primitive socialist accumulation,' a planned economy, and class war on the kulaks.
Stalin appropriated these ideas directly from his arch rival, In the early thirties he applied them directly to the flesh of the peasantry, creating enormous hecatombs.
This was Stalin's first genocide, The second came a few years later with the terror, Even though Trotsky and his followers were one of the explicit targets, even in this case Stalin showed signs of a tacit ideological agreement.
Trotsky had constantly railed against the party bureaucracy turning into a new exploiting class, By killing or imprisoning the vast majority of party members, Stalin aimed in part to destroy this new class of bureaucrats.
This is not to say that Trotsky would have done exactly
the same thing if he'd come to power.
He was not exactly a gentle lamb himself, but still it's hard to imagine him being half as brutal as Stalin was.
What does seem fairly clear is that Trotsky helped create the conditions which made Stalinism possible, This does not subtract from his tragic dignity at the end, but it does seriously complicate his legacy.
'The Opposition wanted industrialization and collectivization to be carried out in the broad daylight of proletarian democracy, with the consent of the masses and free initiative "from below"whereas Stalin relied on the force of the decree and coercion from above.
' pp
Hm, well, sometimes I think seriously about becoming an astronaut, . . No doubt this was a nice sentiment on the part of the Opposition, but as Deutscher's lucid historical analysis makes clear, no such consent could be forthcoming.
Nor should it have been why would the peasantry consent to be eradicated Moreover, bythe term 'proletarian democracy' was an oxymoron in the Soviet Union the industrial working class made up only a small fraction of the population.
The rural masses were increasingly hostile to the Bolshevik regime, True democracy would almost certainly have meant its dissolution, In that sense Stalin could accurately claim to be acting in defense of the revolution with his strongarm tactics.
Which is not meant as a defense of Stalin, of course it merely shows the limits of those who sought to dissent from him while remaining within the framework of Bolshevism.
During the height of the Ukranian genocide, it was a staple of Stalinist propaganda that the kulaks' hatred of the revolution was so intense that they elected to destroy their food supplies and starve rather than feed the Soviet Union.
Was there any basis in reality to this outrageous claim Deutscher writes:
"While the peasants were being rapidly reduced to this state in, they still took a fiercely insane plunge into dissipation.
In the first months of collectivization they slaughtered over,,cows and oxen, nearly,,goats and sheep,,,pigs, and,,horses the slaughter went on until the nation's cattle stock was brought down to less than half of what it had been" pp
For the most part, even though he writes mainly from the view of party official rather than the peasant victims, Deutscher has done an admirable job avoiding euphemism or excuse when discussing the violence of collectivization.
However, the passage above makes me a bit nervous and suspicious, Deutscher does not actually cite his source for this information, It's quite possible something like this did actually occur, but any official Bolshevik sources would have every reason to exploit the episode for propaganda purposes.
Bukharin: our great mistake was in identifying the party with the state,
Trying to make sense of Stalin's insane consolidation of power in the thirties, Maybe what's surprising is that it took as long as it did for a one man autocracy rise.
From the start the Bolshevik regime could only survive through political repression, First all other parties were banned then throughout the twenties it became increasingly that even within the Party there was no way to handle dissent.
Competing factions were banned. Power became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, By the late ''s the Stalinist faction was effectively the ruling party then by the ''s it became narrower still: Stalin had to head off a tendency to factionalize within his own faction.
So the party and by extension, the state came to be identified wholly with his own person.
Seen from this angle, perhaps even the most bizarre slanders of the terror may have had a certain logic to them.
There's a sense in which as he gained more power he became more vulnerable, His power was legitimized solely by, . . power, and so just to maintain it he had to exert it ever more extensively,
Also, from this perspective, Trotsky's reputation as a dissident intellectual is somewhat ironic, In the aftermath of 'he helped set the repressive political machine in motion, The fact that he would eventually be one of its victims is perhaps more a sign of how out of control it became than of any dissident spirit on his part.
Even after he was exiled, the terms in which he denounced Stalin can seem surprisingly tepid, For instance, he still refused the idea of forming another party, He was completely sincere in his commitment to the revolution and the one party system he helped create he ended up painting himself in a corner with this commitment.
One more thought: by the early ''s the Soviet Union was basically in an undeclared civil war, of the party or urban population against the peasantry if one hesitates at all to use the word 'war' here, it's only because the use of force was so extremely onesided to what extent can Stalin's consolidation be understood as him decreeing special 'war powers' for himself
"Stalin had timed the trial to be staged just after Hitler's march into the Rhineland and shortly after the Popular Front had formed its government in France.
In doing so he blackmailed the labor movement and the leftist intelligentsia of the west, who looked to him as their ally against Hitler.
" pp
One of the most mystifying episodes in xxth century intellectual history is the indulgence so many intellectuals gave to Stalin.
Perhaps you could say this was somewhat excusable in the early thirties, when Stalin did everything possible to suppress information about the horrors of collectivization and the Ukranian genocide.
Yet this indulgence continued after the show trials, which were of course public events, No outside observer with even a mildly critical intelligence could possibly believe that the accusations at the trials were true.
Thus we find the unedifying spectacle of truly great minds resorting to grotesque casuistry to come up with some justification to keep supporting Stalin for instance, Malraux, Brecht, amp it pains me to say this MerleauPonty.
At the same time, while it's easy now to excoriate this sort of thing, we shouldn't forget that Europe was in a truly desperate situation by the late 's.
Unfortunately it did prove to be true that Hitler could only be defeated through an alliance with Stalin.
The most inane statement encountered in these pages may come from George Bernard Shaw in 'he explained his reluctance to publicly defend Trotsky from Stalin's baseless slander
The strength of Trotsky's case was the incredibility of the accusations against him.
. . But Trotsky spoils it all by making exactly the same sort of attacks on Stalin, Now I have spent nearly three hours in Stalin's presence and have observed him with keen curiosity, and I find it just as hard to believe that he is a vulgar gangster as that Trotsky is an assassin.
Oh, yes, If only both sides could acknowledge their share of the blame, then we could all move forward together! And note the nauseating appeal from personal experience.
Having once spent a few hours in Stalin's company, Shaw now considers himself an expert, Because of course Stalin would level with an elite cultural emissary from the west, Shaw doesn't seem to consider the possibility that his visit was a highly staged propaganda coup for the Soviet Union.
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