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Bertrand M. Patenaude, “Trotsky:
Downfall of a Revolutionary” (HarperCollins: New York, 2009), 370
pp., $27.99. Robert Service, “Trotsky: A Biography” (The Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2009), 600
pp., $35.
George Breitman, editor of a
multi-volume series of Leon Trotsky’s uncollected works, once wrote a
review with the title, “Two Worthless Biographies About Trotsky.” That
judgment, applied to these new biographies, would not be overly harsh;
both books are worth less than readers might have hoped.
Robert Service, Professor of Russian History at Oxford, has written
the definitive hostile biography of Trotsky; Bertrand M. Patenaude, a lecturer at Stanford University, has composed
an apolitical narrative of Trotsky’s last years. Both books lean
heavily on the “Trotsky Collection,” housed at the Hoover Institution
Archives at Stanford. These include papers and letters from Trotsky’s
political followers as well as other biographers of Trotsky. They add
some minor and occasionally interesting detail and color to an already
familiar portrait.
Patenaude’s book is
something of an oddity. He has written a biography of a major historical
figure, a symbol of revolutionary opposition to Stalinism,
that exhibits little concern for political struggles or
political theory. In fact, it seems almost perverse to criticize the
book’s shortcomings in political analysis since analysis of any kind
makes up only a small fraction of the biography.
When Patenaude does comment on
the central focus of Trotsky’s life—the revolutionary struggle for
socialism—Patenaude presents a jumble of
confusion or confines himself to snide remarks. Leaving aside the
abundant examples of the latter, it would be useful to review how he
treats an important political event.
Here, for instance, Patenaude
explains the rapprochement between Lenin and Trotsky between the 1917
revolutions: “Trotsky remained one of Lenin’s harshest critics until
1917. … It was then, during the heady days between the February and
October revolutions, that Trotsky embraced Bolshevism, recognizing that
the Party machinery created by Lenin was the only vehicle capable of
carrying out a socialist revolution in Russia. This was his
Faustian pact. Lenin’s part of the bargain was to endorse Trotsky’s
concept of the Russian Revolution, which provided the theoretical basis
for the Bolshevik seizure of power” (p. 45).
The historical accuracy—and sense—of the analysis
collapses under the weight of the ill-chosen literary metaphor. First,
despite what Patenaude suggests, there was no
“deal” between Lenin and Trotsky, nor could there have been since
neither was in contact with the other. By April 1917 Lenin was already
in Russia while Trotsky
was being held prisoner in a Canadian concentration camp. Trotsky did
not arrive until a month later. “And both of us,” Trotsky wrote in his
autobiography, “though we were writing in different parts of the world
and were separated by an ocean, gave the same analysis and the same
forecast” (“My Life,” p. 329).
Second, a “Faustian pact” is a fatal bargain, a deal with
the devil in which one gains life-long success only at the price of
one’s eternal soul.† The metaphor is meant to imply that Trotsky was
unknowingly complicit in his own assassination since he had helped to
create the revolution that would ultimately lead to his 1940 murder in
Mexico.
Such is the depth and quality of Patenaude’s
thinking. He is capable of delving no further into any of the issues
and conflicts of Trotsky’s life. In fact, the “Faustian” idea, shallow
though it may be, is not even original with Patenaude
(or Robert Service, whose book ends on a similar note). Another
biographer of Trotsky, Dmitri Volkogonov, made the same point more than a decade
earlier. Volkogonov quoted from Trotsky’s
“Terrorism and Communism” and claimed, “In these utterances we find an
unexpected resonance between the victim and the murderer. The ideas of
Bolshevik Jacobinism, so firmly implanted by Trotsky in the Russian
revolution, had come back to strike at him with the force of a
boomerang” (“Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary,” p. 467).
Patenaude fares no better
when he takes up one of Trotsky’s most justifiably famous works, “The
History of the Russian Revolution.” Patenaude
writes, “The ‘History’ is best appreciated as a work of literature.† The narrative pulses with drama and coruscates
throughout” (p. 179). He also informs readers that “Trotsky’s
‘History,’ while free of jargon, is unmistakably the work of a Marxist
historian” (p. 180).
Indeed, it is, and even a casual reader skimming the book
would realize that, for all its literary qualities, “The History of the
Russian Revolution” is most sig- nificant for its blend of history and
political theory, which includes an explanation of the law of uneven
and combined development, permanent revolution, the theory of the
vanguard party, the problem of nationalities, the “art of
insurrection,” and much more.
Patenaude, in his
analysis, essentially ignores the heart of Trotsky’s work. When placing
an emphasis on drama and narrative, Patenaude
is actually describing the book he himself has written.
Unfortunately, as he continues his comments on Trotsky’s
“History,” Patenaude does venture upon a
thought, though it is not his own. Why, Patenaude
asks, does Trotsky downplay his own role in the Russian Revolution to
Lenin’s advantage? Why is it that Trotsky “deliberately places himself
in Lenin’s shadow?”
He then answers, “Trotsky idolized Lenin, and yet here his
elevation of the Bolshevik leader was in part an act of
self-aggrandizement. Trotsky’s name was inseparably linked to Lenin’s
in the context of the Revolution. … Thus, in exalting Lenin, he was by
implication also lifting himself onto the pedestal” (p. 180). Mystery
solved: Trotsky praises Lenin in order to praise Trotsky.
Of course, there is a chance—though Patenaude
does not consider it—that Trotsky actually meant what he wrote.
Trotsky’s reasoning was clear and direct: Lenin was the founder and
central leader of the Bolshevik Party. Without such an organization,
the revolution could not have been accomplished. For all of Trotsky’s
skill as an orator and a mass agitator, he recognized that no such
party could have been assembled from scratch during the tumultuous
months of 1917. The revolutionary moment would have come and passed;
counter-revolution would have triumphed.
Lenin’s role was thus essential to the socialist victory.
This fact alone—and not the twisted logic of “self-aggrandizement”—explains
Trotsky’s “elevation of the Bolshevik leader.”
If Patenaude’s argument is
foolish, as indeed it is, an even greater folly is that he lifted it
without attribution from Dmitiri Volkogonov’s biography. When Volkogonov
wrote about Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution,” he
commented: “But, of course, in raising Lenin to the very summit of
historical justification, Trotsky was surreptitiously also placing
himself on the pedestal of history, since he had so often been named as
the second man of the revolution” (“Trotsky: The Eternal
Revolutionary,” p. 433).
These few examples sum up the overall standard of Patenaude’s political analysis, which at its best
is merely adequate. In fairness, it should be said that he is capable
of giving Wikipedia-quality accounts of
significant topics, like Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. More
often than not, though, Patenaude is simply
out of his depth. Unfamiliarity with and incomprehension about Marxism,
rounded out with a misplaced condescension, results in a flawed and
superficial biography.
Much the same can be said of Robert Service’s “Trotsky: A
Biography,” which, along with biographies of Stalin and Lenin,
completes his Russian Revolution triptych. In the book’s
“Introduction,” Service states that Trotsky’s “portrait of his life and
times involved many distortions—and these have clouded our
understanding of Soviet communist history.” Some of these supposed
“distortions” occurred because “Trotsky found some of [his works] an
embarrassment,” and so he “kept a lot to himself when publishing his
autobiography and releasing selections of documents. This book’s
purpose is to dig up the buried life” (p. 4).
Actually, the book’s purpose—the metaphor is
unavoidable—is to bury Trotsky once again, a task that bourgeois
academics find themselves compelled to perform approximately every
decade.
Service mocks the “Western political left” in the 1960s, a
time when “Trotsky came into vogue, often among people who were
untroubled by the desire to read what he had written and done” (p.
497). However, Service is even more forthcoming in an on-line interview
with the Hoover Institution program, “Uncommon Knowledge.” There
Service says, “The idea that somehow a humane version of communism
could have come out of Trotskyism is pure romanticism, but it appealed
to people in the ’60s and ’70s who wanted just such a figure, someone
who was standing outside all of the worries about the Vietnam war and
who wanted to think there was a possibility that the USSR ... if it had
been differently led in the 1920s, a different turn could have taken
place.”
Bury Trotsky, then, because he stands for the idea that
socialism can create a better society and a world free of war, racism,
and exploitation. These were the ideals that motivated militants in the
1960s, ideals that remain alive throughout the world today and continue
to inspire a new generation. This is what Service would bury, if he
could.
Service’s central point is that Trotsky is Stalin minus
the moustache and graced with a better literary style. Even the latter
point is intended as a twofold criticism: first, Service complains that
in the 1920s Trotsky spent too much time writing, thus allowing Stalin
to maneuver successfully against him. So, Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trotsky
scribbled while the Revolution degenerated.
Second, Service claims that generations of readers and
historians have been taken in by the grandness of Trotsky’s prose,
which only obscures the fundamentally totalitarian nature of his
political life and his political theories (“he reveled in
terror”). What’s more, Service
argues, a Trotsky in power would have been even more brutal than
Stalin.
Service outlines his analysis in the “Introduction”:
“Trotsky’s strategy for communist advance anyway had little to offer
for the avoidance of an oppressive regime. His ideas and practices laid
several foundation stones for the erection of the Stalinist political,
economic, social and even cultural edifice. … As for the charge that
Stalin was an arch-bureaucrat, this was rich coming from an accuser who
had delighted in unchecked administrative authority in the years of his
pomp… [In “My Life,” Trotsky wrote, “I felt the mechanics of power as
an inescapable burden, rather than as a spiritual satisfaction,” p.
582.] And if ever Trotsky had been the paramount leader instead of
Stalin, the risks of a bloodbath in Europe would have been drastically
increased” (p. 3). As Service said of Trotsky in an on-line interview,
“He wasn’t a good thing for anybody at any time.”
In 500 pages of biography, Service does everything he
possibly can to reinforce that biased judgment. It’s a belief become
obsession that turns Service into a shoddy historian. He seizes every
possible opportunity to portray Trotsky negatively, even when the
effort involves misreading, self-contradictions, unverified
assumptions, and more.
Service’s self-proclaimed task “to dig up the buried life”
begins in the first chapter. There, Service writes, “As a Marxist he
[Trotsky] was embarrassed about the wealth of his parents, and he never
properly acknowledged their extraordinary qualities and achievements
(p. 12). Actually, “as a Marxist,” Trotsky knew that Marx’s father was
an attorney sufficiently well off to send his son Karl to university,
where he obtained a Ph.D in philosophy. Engels, as is well known, came from a family of
German capitalists and helped oversee the family’s business interests
in Manchester, England. Lenin’s father was a government official, a
director of primary schools whose place in the civil service hierarchy
ultimately equaled the rank of a general. By comparison, Trotsky had no
need to feel any such “embarrassment.”
As for the family’s achievements, Service claims that
Trotsky “hugely understated the reality” when the truth is that
Trotsky’s father “dragged himself up the ladder of economic success”
(p. 12).† Yet, 12 pages later, Service quotes
Trotsky discussing his father’s business accounts and concluding with
the observation that “my father slowly but doggedly kept climbing
upwards,” essentially the same concept in different words.
As the book continues, Service’s political analysis and
historical methodology do not improve. In Part Two, Trotsky has finally
returned to Russia following the overthrow of Nicholas II and the end
of the Romanov monarchy. The Provisional
Government is in power along with workers’ councils, or “soviets.” Both
Lenin and Trotsky opposed the Provisional Government and called for
“All Power to the Soviets.”
Service describes Trotsky’s efforts: “Trotsky went around
distilling enthusiasm for direct action. His printed articles did not
spell out what he had in mind because he did not want to provide the
Provisional Government with an excuse to take him into custody. When he
got up on the platform it was a different matter. … The regime he
sought to establish would be dictatorial and violent: ‘I tell you heads
must roll, blood must flow. … The strength of the French Revolution was
in the machine that made the enemies of the people shorter by a head.
This is a fine device. We must have it in every city.’ Trotsky stood
forth as a Jacobin of his time” (p. 172).
The import of this paragraph should not be lost on any
reader. If the above account is accurate, then Trotsky had announced
the beginning of the Red Terror or, at least, his fervent wish for it,
years before the Terror actually commenced. No one, not Lenin, not even
Stalin, made such statements. Trotsky would have “stood forth” not only
“as a Jacobin of his time” but as the ideological father of the Red
Terror.
This assertion, which defies reason and fact, is another
example of Service’s poor scholarship. Service would have it that
Trotsky wrote one thing but said another. Yet Trotsky’s speeches were
written down, published, and later collected in book form as part of
the documentary record of the Russian Revolution. The appearance of his
speeches in newspapers could hardly have escaped him. Further, had the Provisional
Government wished to arrest him (as, ultimately, it did), his speeches,
heard by friends and enemies alike, would have been sufficient cause.
Public speaking is not a particularly good way of hiding one’s
opinions.
A greater problem arises with the source of the quote from
Trotsky. Service cites one source—only one—“Stormy Passage” by W. Woytinsky. No other eyewitness observer (a Nikolai Sukhanov or a John Reed, for instance) confirms
this general idea, much less the specific quote itself. Is the source
reliable? Service does not trouble himself to ask the question. Why
bother, since it suits his purpose? So, Service tells the reader
nothing about W. Woytinsky.
Trotsky, however, had written about him in the first
volume of “The History of the Russian Revolution.” There, Trotsky
explains that Woytinsky quit the Bolshevik
Party in March 1917 and joined the Mensheviks, who supported the
Provisional Government and opposed the proletarian revolution in
principle. As a Menshevik, Trotsky points out, Woytinsky
“became, as was to be expected, a professional Bolshevik-eater.” The
English translation seems rather loose here, but the image of Woytinsky as a fierce factionalist emerges clearly
enough.
A competent historian, one who felt a basic responsibility
for honesty, would have made these facts clear. Service does not.
Instead, he uses an unlikely quote from a single dubious source and,
without investigation or comment, presents a doubtful statement as
truth. As a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor
of Russian History at Oxford University, Service would
surely know the flaw in such a method.
Service’s errors in logic and analysis extend to his
discussion of Trotsky’s writings and political activities. Worse,
Service makes statements that are obviously misleading or wrong.
Writing of Trotsky’s, “Literature and Revolution,” Service states,
“Like fellow communist leaders, Trotsky wanted a high culture
subordinate to the party’s purposes (p. 317). Actually, Trotsky says
that for those artists who would at least accept the Russian
Revolution, the policy of the Bolshevik Party should be “to allow them
complete freedom of self-determination in the field of art.” Even
Bertrand Patenaude writes that Trotsky was
Soviet Russia’s “most effective advocate of freedom in the arts” (Boston
College Magazine, Fall 2009, p. 45).
Service’s more egregious offense is to cite Trotsky as the
precursor to Stalinist policies in art—policies that would include the
promotion of “right-thinking” mediocrities and heavy censorship, repression,
imprisonment, and worse for authentic artists. Service’s accusation is
astonishing: “‘Literature and Revolution’ was essentially a work of
political reductionism. When all
is said and done, though, it was Trotsky who laid down the
philosophical foundations for cultural Stalinism” (p. 318).
Apparently, the identity is founded on the argument that
Trotsky wrote, however briefly and abstractly, in favor of censorship
when the interests of the Revolution were at stake, and Stalin actually
practiced censorship. Ergo, Trotsky is the true architect of “cultural Stalinism.”
A pamphlet-length essay would be required to set the
record aright, but let one instance suffice. In 1930, Trotsky referred
to Isaac Babel, author of “Red Cavalry,” as “the most talented of our
younger writers” (“My Life,” p. 361). Ten years later Stalin had Babel imprisoned,
tortured, and shot. The manuscripts, documents, correspondence, etc.
that were seized at the time of Babel’s arrest have
never been found. Everything essential is contained in this one
example. The fate of Isaac Babel reveals, in the field of art and
culture, the unbridgeable gap between Stalin and Trotsky.
At other times Service criticizes Trotsky for writing at
all. Service complains that Trotsky “might have found more useful
things to do” than write a book of reminiscence, “On Lenin,” since
“[t]he work scarcely justified the amount of creative energy he used
up…” In the same paragraph Service says the composition of the book
took only weeks, and it was “vivid and interesting” (p. 319). That
alone would seem sufficient justification for a literary work, at least
to a fair-minded critic.
Throughout Service’s biography his hostility to Trotsky
causes him to misinterpret facts or to try and cast them in the worst possible
light. Consider, for example, how Service analyzes Trotsky’s work with
his co-thinkers. Service quotes from a 1929 letter Trotsky wrote to the
Leninbund, the German Left Oppositionists:
“As the Leninbund looks now, it will never
guide the German proletariat, not even the vanguard of the vanguard.
The Leninbund must restock its ideological armoury, and must accordingly recognize its rank
and file. The first prerequisite of this is an ideological clarity of
line.”
Here is how Service interprets these three sentences:
“This was Trotsky’s way of attracting a following in Europe and North America. He was to be
the sole leader. He laid down the line, and others were mean to follow
without demur” (p. 391).
Service’s comment is simply nonsense, if not slanderous.
Nothing in the above lines suggests Trotsky as a “sole leader” or
indicates a desire to become one. Even had he wanted to, there was no
means by which Trotsky could impose his will on others. Further, one
need only look at the “Writings” series in this period (published by
Pathfinder Press) to see that a good deal of demurring between the Leninbund and Trotsky went on for years.
What’s more, Trotsky wrote explicitly, “Of course, no one
can dispute your right to have differences with the Russian Opposition
in general or with Trotsky in particular. But this should be done
clearly, precisely, and openly…” (from “Where
Is the Leninbund Going?” in “Writings of Leon
Trotsky [1929],” p. 307).
Service takes as his source a letter from Trotsky held in
the Hoover Institute Archives. He complains, rightly, that “the English
here is lumpy; I have reproduced the translation sent to the Communist
League in the USA” (p. 548). But a better translation has been
available since 1975, when the 1929 “Writings” was published. From this
translation a reader learns that Trotsky wanted the Leninbund
to “rearm ideologically, and to rebuild [not ‘recognize’] its ranks
accordingly” (“Writings of Leon Trotsky [1929],” p. 249).
This series of mistakes, misinterpretations, and misreadings are only based on one paragraph, but
this paragraph is no exception to the rule. Service cannot be trusted
as a reliable source on matters large or small. Every chapter suffers
from similar ignorance and teems with similar problems.
A multi-volume “Anti-Service” would have to be written to
set matters right. Such a work would lack for no shortage of
topics, including questions of Marxist theory for which Service has no
aptitude. For instance, he fails to understand the significance and
difference between Lenin’s theory of the democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
“The differences, indeed,” Service claims, “were detectable only with
an ideological microscope” (p. 91).
To “The Revolution Betrayed,” one of Trotsky’s major
works, a systematic critique of the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy,
Service devotes only two paragraphs. Ultimately, he believes the work
was written for personal and psychological reasons: “At some
unconscious level he [Trotsky] seemingly needed the reassurance that
great historical forces and not an individual adversary of comparable
talent had brought about his defeat” (p. 457).
But in a speech written in the year that “The Revolution
Betrayed” was published, Trotsky offered, contrary to the amateur
psychoanalysts of the future, a Marxist analysis: “It is absurd to
explain such a furious struggle by personal motives. It is a question
not only of political programmes, but also of
different social interests, which clash in an increasingly hostile
fashion” (“I Stake My Life!”).
Only someone without interest in Marxism could make the
kind of “absurd”
(using Trotsky’s word) comments cited in the above paragraphs. It is
not a question of disagreement, for then Service would have developed a
rebuttal to the opinions of his subject. He does not even try. Marxist
ideas, when they are considered at all, are treated superficially or
dismissed out of hand.†
Of course, someone so ill equipped in the field of Marxism
ought not to be writing major biographies of Marxists. It is equally
obvious that someone who says Trotsky would have been better off if he
had died in the 1930s before he had written works like “The Revolution
Betrayed,” as Service claimed in the on-line “Uncommon Knowledge”
interview, perhaps ought not to be writing a biography of Trotsky.
Robert Service not only dismisses Marxism, and not only
continually insults Trotsky; he continually insults his readers. Every
chapter delivers an affront to logic, common sense, historical fact, or
scholarly standards. Slanders and smears are his stock-in-trade.
A knowledgeable reader is at first startled, then
disgusted, and, finally, morbidly curious. Reading the biography
becomes a kind of bizarre game in which the reader tries to anticipate
just what kind of bias-driven stupidity will appear on the next page or
two. But, before long, even this perverse pleasure fades, and every
page turned comes to feel like a drop of hot motor oil on an open eye.
Biography goes only so far and is only of so much
importance. So, yes, LT was cantankerous, difficult, and overly
libidinous. He was easily roused to anger when his fundamental beliefs
were challenged. He could be brutally demanding of intimates and family
and could speak cruelly to his wife. He found rest and relaxation
through vigorous outdoor exercise but seemed always to have a pen in
his hand. So on and so forth.
What matters, though, is that the LT of the preceding
paragraph—actually, Leo Tolstoy—is the author of “War and Peace” and
“Anna Karenina.” The episodic details of his life matter little when
compared to the permanent achievement of his life’s work. The same is
true for Leon Trotsky, author of “The Permanent Revolution,” “The
History of the Russian Revolution,” and “The Revolution Betrayed.” His
life’s work will far outlast this work of his life.
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