Tuesday 23 November 2010

The Prophet Irrelevant


I mentioned last December that I visited the house, now a museum, of Leon Trotsky when I was in Mexico City, his last place of exile (The Artists and the Revolutionary). I walked through the bedroom where the bullet holes from the assassination attempt of May 1940, led by the artist David Siqueiros, can still be seen. And then there is the study where Ramon Mercader lethally assaulted him with an ice pick in August of that same year, a time when the world’s attention was elsewhere. Finally, in the garden, there he is: his grave, with the hammer and sickle carved. The whole thing simply filled me with a sense of melancholy, not readily dispelled by the hot Mexican sun.


I have no sympathy at all for Trotsky as a politician or a thinker. But, my, how could I not be moved by a fate of a man who went from the height to the depths of history in such a short space of time; the hero of 1917 to the exile and outcast of 1940, living constantly in fear of his life. No longer the prophet armed, not even unarmed; simply irrelevant.


Trotsky was the author in so many ways of his own doom. A brilliant organiser, the man who created the Red Army almost single-handed and led it to victory in the Civil War, he was still a very poor judge of people, and quite hopeless when it came to playing the treacherous back-stabbing political game so favoured by the Bolshevik party, which became particularly intense after Lenin went into decline, suffering successive strokes before his death in January, 1924. Above all he misjudged Stalin, his nemesis, describing him as a ‘grey blur’, dismissing him in the most condescending and racist terms in a highly tendentious biography.

There is a tendency to assume that if Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had been the victor in the internecine party struggles of the 1920s things would have been so much better. I see no evidence at all for this. His conduct during the Civil War and after was just as brutal as any other Bolshevik apparatchik. More than that, the Stalinist programme of collectivisation and industrialisation, pursued with such murderous energy after 1928, was earlier the programme of Trotsky and the left opposition. Trotsky as Vohzd may have been less paranoid than Stalin. I do not believe he would have been less murderous, especially given that both men shared the same visceral hatred for the Russian peasantry.

When he died that August all those years ago he had long since been bypassed by the main currents of history, his rag-bag followers organised, if that’s the word, in the so-called Fourth International, another irrelevance. He died the last victim of the Moscow Show Trials, a victim of the relentless malice of Stalin, a victim of his own delusions. My previous assessment of the man still stands;

…one has to reflect that, in his days of power, it was he who denied life to others, who acted in a brutal and oppressive fashion, a fashion that closed so many futures forever. Too much was sacrificed on that abstract alter to which he dedicated his life, the alter of a frightful idol. We all, each and every one of us, only ever live in a perpetual present. It is a terrible thing to destroy others in the name of a bloodless utopia.

36 comments:

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  2. Actually, Stalin was as widely read and as much of an intellectual as Trotsky, but he was much more collegiate, much less senatorial and snobbish than his great rival. I think it wrong to say that he ‘broke’ with Trotsky ideologically, implying, as it does, that they were joined in the first place. Sorry, this is not semantic nit-picking, it’s simply important to understand that they were always rivals. Also you should understand that while Stalin subjected the worldwide communist to the interests of the Soviet state –a process that was underway before he achieved supreme power – he still had his own internationalist programme, evidenced in the disastrous Third Stage strategy. And you are quite wrong in suggesting that Stalin did not seek an empire; he most assuredly did. And I repeat my essential point: by 1940 Trotsky and Trotskyism was an irrelevance, not dangerous to any degree. Stalinism was dangerous.

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  5. Again, Adam, no they were not; there were quite serious ideological disputes, even with Lenin.

    I mean that he was determined to extend Russian power across the whole of Eastern Europe and Northern China.

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  6. Maybe I am not making myself clear. During Lenin's early and middle reign, Leninism was crucial, Trotskyism was too, Stalin was a rival but he was at best third crown to the others.

    That was the determination, but as you acknowledge Stalin was less concerned about this future 'goal' than he was about reconstituting the internal state. Thatcher in her final years wanted to vastly reform much of the economy beyond previous reforms but this was her dream; it was not political reality in the Conservative Party.

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  9. Stalin had Trotskey killed and Beria strangled Stalin. There you have it, serves them right.

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  10. Adam, Leninism only really emerges after the death of Lenin, particularly in the great theoretical debates of 1924, when it was gradually set in stone. Trotsky after 1925 had no power at all; he would never have power again. His life from that point forward was increasingly dominated by political theory. In similar circumstances I imagine Stalin would have been reduced to 'impasioned pleas.' In Stalin's place Trotsky would have made every necessary political compromise. His early political career had clearly shown his capacity for pragmatism. Stalin's 'pragmtism' did indeed create a communist empire, and the antibodies which would destroy it in the end.

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  11. Anthony, I would like to see the evidence for your Beria theory. But you are right; they were all a bad bunch. It would have been better for the world if they, and Lenin, had never been born.

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  14. news.bbc.co.uk/2hi/europe/2793501.stm The documentary the last mystery of Stalin BBC radio4 on monday,24 feb,2000 GMT by Leonida Kruselnycky. I believe the discovery channel also ran a documentary. Also someone confirmed this with Rus intel connections but this I can not substantiate. It seems like his bodygaurds were told to stand down at last minute which was unusual procedure like when they set up JFK.

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  15. There was nothing the least bit ‘impassioned’ about Trotsky; it simply wasn’t in his nature. His writings all show evidence of a sober and calculating intellect. During the early years of power, as I have already said, he was as calculating and as pragmatic as anyone else in the Bolshevik leadership. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that he would not have continued in this vein, as notions of permanent revolution proved ever more elusive. He was certainly right in criticising the policy being pursued by Bukharin and Stalin in China.

    In the final analysis the Soviet State, for all of the realpolitik and pragmatism of Stalin, was based on an ideal, that there was a better future being worked towards, that a better future was achievable. It may have worshiped power but the foundations were ideology, an ideology that Stalin projected and pursued. But his cynicism, his brutality, the thuggishness of his regime made a mockery of the ideal. Bit by bit the monster he created was destroyed by, to use the Marxist expression, its own internal contradictions.

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  16. Anthony, thanks for that, something for me to look into.

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  19. By the way, I should like to say, Stalin did not worship power, it was power.

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  20. The shabby reality of Stalin’s Russia, tottering on the verge of yet another purge at the time of his death, this time with all the overtones of a pogrom, was not the ‘better future’ envisaged by the early exponents of Russian Marxism. Stalin’s one-sided and top-heavy industrial programme created massive consumer shortages throughout the economy, particularly in housing, shortages which were never made good. It also created bureaucratic stupidity resting on a total lack of personal initiative, another thing which was to lead to the eventual collapse of the whole rotten system. Chinese communists have had the good sense to abandon communism. The Russians carried it like an albatross to the end.

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  24. No, industry not before all else; that only happens in planned economies, and planned economies, for all their short term successes, are long-term disasters, especially where consumer demand is depressed. There is no communist ideology in China; it has all given way to a new emphasis on Confucism.

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  27. Healty consumer demand means a healthy economy, simply because it's the most efficient way of sending signals and chanelling resources. One may not be able to live on bread alone but when all one has is iron and steel and rusty old plant then things truly are terminal!

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  29. That's far too cynical a view: people can make sacrifices, even so far as their lives, for greater and nobler causes. But when it comes down to everyday life we just want a degree of comfort, to be left to get on with things as best we can, to spend our money in the way that we think it should be spent, which I do not believe is reducible in every instance to 'wicked avirice'. Or, if it is, I would rather have wicked avarice than the 'virtue' of Stalin or Trotsky or Mao. I think you may very well be able to live on bread and water. I, on the other hand, need cocaine and caviar. :-)

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  31. Ironically Thatcher was personally appalled by the excesses her Government allowed amongst the public; she was something of a roundhead herself. Mind you I used to by a consuming cavalier too, then I realised life is too horrible to merit such pass times.

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  33. History Channel 4 part series - Stalin the Myth Fri, oct,23,2009...http://Rapidshare.com/files/1529515691/History.Channel.Stalin.the.Myth.PD TV.XviD-ingot.part1.rar /15299540281/pt2 /152956410/pt3 /152949357/pt4 I hope this helps. History is good in that it helps to know what issues were faced by society and what resolutions were found and mistakes made. Do not dwell so much in the past (MGON) that you loose focus on present events as decisions made now will have a profound effect on the future.

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  34. Adam, the roundhead aspect to the Thatcher legacy is something I intend to tackle...soon. :-)

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  36. Anthony, thanks so much for this. I'm more than a little intrigued. History is the key to so much, past and present.

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