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Buy the Book
Blood Brother
New biography demythologizes Russian Revolution’s romantic hero.
Trotsky: A Biography
By Robert Service
(Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 648 pages,
$35)
For decades, Western intellectuals have judged him the Good Marxist. His assassination by Joseph Stalin’s agents was further proof — if further proofs were needed — of his honorable intentions. If only Leon Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had emerged as Vladimir Lenin’s successor, how differently the history of the Soviet Union, indeed, the whole history of communism, might have read.
Trotsky’s estrangement and exile from Stalin’s Soviet Union has been the stuff of romantic legend, a myth largely fashioned by Trotsky himself. In his many volumes of autobiography, and in works like The Stalin School of Falsification, Trotsky used his considerable rhetorical skills to disguise his political closeness to Stalin and thereby retain the admiration of thinkers in the West, including some on the right. When H.L. Mencken heard Trotsky’s library had burned, he wrote offering to send the exile some books. (Trotsky rudely declined.) Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson and Saul Bellow admired Trotsky both as a man of ideas and a man of action, one who, with the great surrealist AndréBreton, could write A Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art, when not leading the Red Army into battle against the White Russians, the Ukrainians, and the Poles.
Trotsky’s latest biographer, Robert Service (author of acclaimed biographies of Lenin and Stalin), suggests it is foolish to take Trotsky at his word. If there is one overarching theme in Service’s study, it is that there was very little difference in philosophy between Trotsky and his nemesis Stalin. “The basic agenda of the two men was much more similar than it was dissimilar,” he says.
Lebya Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) was born in 1879, to a well-to-do Jewish farm family in the Pale of Settlement in what is now central Ukraine. Trotsky’s father, like many Jewish parents, sent his children off to Lutheran schools to be educated. Unable to break into the professions because of his race, Trotsky takes up one of the few vocations open to young Jewish intellectuals: he becomes a revolutionary. Due largely to his extraordinary literary talents, he quickly moves up the ranks of the budding revolutionary movement, eventually becoming a leader of the October Revolution, and subsequently, commander of the Red Army.
Then, in 1924, Lenin died, and there erupted a battle of succession over who was to succeed as head of state. Lenin at first chose Stalin, a man he considered a safe, steady, plodding bureaucrat, the opposite of a flamboyant, charismatic Napoleonic character like Trotsky. Too late, however, Lenin realized his mistake. Trotsky, however, was not one to admit defeat or go quietly. He charged Stalin with (among other things) making too many compromises with the revolutionary spirit. Trotsky likewise argued that Stalin was uninterested in spreading communism to Germany and China, which was necessary for communism’s survival. Service calls Trotsky out on this, saying none of the revolution’s leaders believed communism could survive in an isolated state, but that Stalin, following his so-called “Socialism in One Country” thesis, first wanted to consolidate the gains within Russia before trying to export the Revolution. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky blamed his loss in the succession battle on Stalin’s greater ruthlessness, and, by 1929, Trotsky found himself expelled from the Soviet Union. “He lost to a man with a superior understanding of Soviet public life,” says Service.
Today, Trotsky’s defenders whitewash his own ruthless character, preferring to dwell on his extraordinary literary talents, and his prescience with regard to the growing menace of Nazism. Irving Howe describes his writings against Hitlerism as the greatest political polemic written in the 20th century. What’s more, they maintain that Trotsky would have murdered far fewer political opponents than Stalin, remembering that Stalin murdered more communists than Hitler.
HOW MIGHT HISTORY have looked had Trotsky succeeded Lenin? “If ever Trotsky had been the paramount leader instead of Stalin, the risks of a bloodbath in Europe would have been drastically increased,” writes Service, for the simple reason that Trotsky, a believer in permanent revolution, would have taken more risks than Stalin in encouraging revolution in Germany and elsewhere. (While we are playing What If, former Trotskyite Christopher Hitchens has pointed out that Trotsky’s German revolution would have preempted the Nazis coming to power, and thus not only World War II, but the Holocaust as well.)
Judging from his past deeds, Trotsky would have continued to act with savage ruthlessness, that meant forcing peasants onto collectivized farms — as he vowed to do — or ordering the execution of dissidents, crushing the Kronstadt worker and sailor rebellion in 1921 (they demanded, among other rights, freedom of speech and the press), or creating a system of hostage taking during the civil war — all of which he did do.
The reason so many Western intellectuals, right and left, fell — and continue to fall — for Trotsky is they were charmed by his charisma, his intellect, and his literary skills (“His autobiography is magical to read,” Service admits), as well as fooled by his obscurantism. What’s more, they were desperate for any Soviet alternative to Stalin.
The idea that a humane communism could have come out of Trotskyism is pure romanticism, Service says. Yet, Trotskyites maintain even today that the tragedy of Soviet history lay in Trotsky’s failure to win the battle of succession for leadership of the Soviet Union. Service’s biography will not convince them otherwise. But for those with an open mind, Trotsky: A Biography shows that in the end, Stalin and Trotsky were blood brothers. Blood being the operative word.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (44) | Leave a comment
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Richard Baker| 11.17.09 @ 7:24AM
Liberal glorification of another mass murderer. Trotsky and Stalin. A distinction without a difference. Wonder what Corporal Hitler, Stalin, and Trotsky are having for lunch in Hell?
Howard| 11.17.09 @ 9:18AM
So what if Trotsky was less bad? That is like saying arsenic is not as bad as cyanide. the USSR would not have been a "workers paradise" or a liberal democracy. I still marvel at how Western liberal intellectuals still marvel at Trotsky. Sort of like Anita Dunn getting all warm discussing Mao. The term "Useful Idiot" (coined by Lenin), is still so appropriate.
Derek Leaberry| 11.17.09 @ 11:06AM
Much like many other monsters- Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Lincoln- it is too bad Trotsky didn't meet his fate much sooner.
Interested Conservative| 11.17.09 @ 11:47AM
Nice try Derek - are you an extreme leftist or rightist? Should FDR be on the list too?
Big Leo| 11.17.09 @ 11:57AM
Actually, being an extreme moonbat transcends all left-right divisions.
Derek Leaberry| 11.17.09 @ 12:01PM
Over 600,000 dead and a devastated south are on Lincoln's bloody hands.
Interested Conservative| 11.17.09 @ 12:43PM
And your point is? What price freedom? Or, slavery would have withered eventually? Or, FDR's wa a "good" war. more necessary than Lincoln's?
Then again, Big Leo is likely right about transcendance.
Philoktetes| 11.17.09 @ 12:59PM
IC, I think that slavery would have withered eventually. It withered in Great Britain and its possessions through the actions of Christain men putting their faith into action. The same wouldd have happened here without all the bloodshed.
Interested Conservative| 11.17.09 @ 2:33PM
Philo - I understand that's the Ben Stein argument, and recognize its merit, though disagreeing with much of it. I doubt Derek gets to that rationale considering he started with Lenin.
A separate question though about your comment about Britain - I don't recall slavery ever in British Isles - very close in most respects i.e. serfdom, class distinctions, hereditary aristocracy, all the way to the treatment of the Irish - BUT - wasn't slavery a colonial enterprise of the Empire, rather than an organic part of the nation?
I ask all this out of curiousity but also as background to why their resolution was along colonial and commercial grounds rather than reaching the civil war we suffered. They had a wider problem, but we had a deeper problem.
Philoktetes| 11.18.09 @ 3:12PM
IC, slavery was outlawed in England in 1100's, and serfdom, I don't know, maybe in the 1500's. I think that black slaves were allowed in England up to 1770's, and then that was declared illegal. So no slaves in the British Isles after 1770's. I think that the English thought that if it were illegal at home, it should have been illegal in the rest of the empire.
Don Carlson| 11.20.09 @ 12:14AM
Derek 'Nathan Bedford Forest' Lee-berry comes to haunt us all with his life-long obsession with the injustices visited upon the Holy Southern States who formed the Confederacy in order to protect its humanity from the ravages of uncivlized Northerners--to protect its African slaves from a fate worse than slavery--to protect all its inbred Leaberries from having to think. Ooooohhh! That Lincoln was the devil incarnate! God saaaave Dixie and the Leaberries!
Derek Leaberry| 11.17.09 @ 4:23PM
Does anyone educated in the history of the era really think Lincoln went to war to free the slaves? That's what is taught in the Dewey schools which means it is propaganda and indoctrination and a lie. Lincoln went to war to force the South to remain in the Union despite the fact that, by the 1850s, Northerners and Southerners detested each other. Think of the Civil War as the South's attempt for a divorce, for which they had the hell beat out of them. Lincoln caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands for, at least in part, an abstract theory- an inseparable union. The other was the desire of Northern industrialists to dominate the country, including the looting of the Federal treasury which they effectively managed for several decades after 1860.
Would I support a war to force Vermont or Massachusetts or Hawaii to remain in the Union? No. By all means, I'd pay all three billions just to get out.
Yes, Lincoln is not nearly in Trotsky's class, let alone Mussolini's or Napoleon's or Tojo's. But he has blood on his hands in the manner of the German army staff of 1914 or the Hapsburg government of 1914. Lincoln could have chosen not to go to war but he, like the German army staff, went to war. He's no hero.
Interested Conservative| 11.17.09 @ 4:56PM
But he did free the slaves!
Jimmy D| 11.17.09 @ 6:21PM
Thank you, Derek!
It's important to make the finer distinctions that contemporary historians so completely distain and revise. As a "Recovering Yankee" in the great state of Alabama, I recommend "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South" to all my thoroughly propagandized friends up north.
Richard Baker| 11.17.09 @ 6:15PM
Leaberry:
Interesting view of Lincoln. He saved the United States and you state that he's not nearly a Trotsky? Are you nuts? Did you think that a civil war wasn't going to be brutal? I suggest you look at the English Civil war as an example. The Founding Revolutionaries didn't pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to start this country to then have a bunch of petulant slaveholders destroy it. I'm from Virginia and am damn glad that Lincoln saved the Union.
Jimmy D| 11.17.09 @ 6:29PM
Richard,
Really! It's not that simple. Petulance doesn't come near to the issues that were at play. Try the book I mentioned. Reducing the view of that struggle to one between cruel slave-owners and kindly Christian Liberators is intellectually injurious. Don't be scared. You can actually approach the real history of the "War of Northern Aggression", as it has long been termed in the Southwithout becoming a racist or an apologist for Slavers.
Richard Baker| 11.17.09 @ 6:55PM
Jimmy D:
I understand the history of the South. I was responding to Leaberry and his comments regarding slavery. There were, of course, many reasons for the War but comparing Lincoln to Trotsky is nuts. Speaking of atrocities, remember Andersonville? Yes, and I know there were Union prisons just as bad. The nature of a civil war is brutal and the seeds of this particular War were in the number 3/5 and the disagreement begun in the 18th Century. The War was and is over. While, as a former soldier, I respect Lee, Jackson, and many others for their devotion to duty, I disagree with their reasons for secession. The Founding Revolutionaries didn't suffer and die for anyone to rend the Union asunder. In that, thank God for Lincoln and Grant. The Fire-eaters, who were Pro-slavery advocates, like Ruffin, Rhett, and Wigfall ultimately did the South no good. My home state of Virginia suffered terribly, as a result, as did so many others.
William Woodford| 11.17.09 @ 7:01PM
Being enamored of what former sixties radical David Horowitz calls the Socialist Idea, Christopher Hitchens misses the bigger What If. As Richard Pipes points out in “Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime,” without Lenin’s seizure of the Menshevik Revolution of early 1917 there wouldn’t have been a Third Reich. Lenin and his concepts of a vanguard socialist party and a ruthless totalitarian dictorship was Hitler’s role model.
Ivo Enforcer| 11.24.09 @ 1:44AM
That's interesting... I would've put Mussolini and his Fascist party, black shirts, and march on Rome as the closest thing we can refer to as Hitler's 'role model' - you know, those things Hitler openly admired and emulated. Beer hall putsch and the brown shirts of the SA, anyone? Even the Nazi salute was taken from the Fascist Italians, who of course borrowed it from the ancient Romans.
If you are going to try and identify a Soviet leader toward whom Hitler did look with some amount of respect, look no further than Stalin - more than once the Fuhrer openly admired him (even going so far as to suggest that Stalin would make a good overseer of the east, once it was conquered by Germany); he modeled the system of concentration camps after the GULAG (remembering of course that the NKVD and the GULAG system were established by Stalin long after Lenin’s death), and by the end of the war, as his paranoia reached its heights, Hitler never stopped moaning about his regret in not carrying out Stalin-style 'purges' of the German military, whom he felt had betrayed him.
The concept of a ‘vanguard ruling party,’ or in other words an oligarchy, go back as far as recorded human history, as do the concepts of totalitarianism and dictatorship; the idea that Hitler looked to Lenin and his Bolshevik party as the ’inspiration’ for his own style of rule seems unlikely - there were a hundred better fitting examples in history he could have looked to. More importantly, in regards to the ‘ruling party,’ Hitler hardly made use of the Nazi party after his rise to power - in fact, even before he became chancellor he began distancing himself from his party: destroying the SA to appease the Wehrmacht and the German Officer Core, and, after becoming chancellor, handing over the duties of raiding Jewish property within the Reich to state institutions such as Goring’s Reichewekre became the rule. This was opposed to allowing the party to ’spontaneously’ erupt into violence, as was the case of the infamous (and short-lived), Krystalnacht. Krystalnacht was actually the exception: after one night of letting the Nazi party loose in Germany the repercussions were so bad, both at home and abroad, that Hitler (at Goring’s urging), ordered all further efforts at dealing with the Jewish Question to be handed over to the state, so as to give a sense of order and normalcy to the program.
More significantly, as opposed to the Bolshevik party established by Lenin, in which party members controlled all positions in government as well as in the military (particularly after Stalin came to power - he eliminated even those who once belonged to a dissenting party and then switched over to the Bolshevik side - Trotsky being one of these [a former Menshevik]), the government of Nazi Germany remained a mix. A classic example of this would be Hjalmar Schacht, who remained head of the Reichsbank and competitor with Goring for control of the German economy until 1939 (several years after Hitler became Chancellor), despite the fact that he was never a member of the Nazi party. More to the point, Schacht would openly disagree with Hitler on economic policy, even getting into loud arguments with the Fuhrer at the burghof.
Of course the primary difference between the Fascist regime of Nazi Germany and the Bolshevik one (as set up by Lenin, before Stalin altered it), is that the German regime answered only to the Fuhrer, whereas the Bolshevik regime answered to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Party; i.e. one man rule as opposed to the rule of a ‘vanguard.’ On more than one occasion Lenin (though he held an aura in the minds of the communists comparable to that of Washington to the revolutionary American government), had proposals rejected and was regularly argued with. Hitler rarely tolerated such dissention and, while he was at times willing to argue, his word was always final. The Bolshevik regime had no comparable personality in its government until Stalin consolidated power through use of subtle backstabbing and political manipulation - which, for the record, is a far cry from how Hitler took power.
The point is simply this: the idea that Hitler ‘idolized’ Lenin’s Bolshevik government seems unfounded. He certainly idolized elements of Stalin’s very different ‘Bolshevik’ regime, but in comparison to the parallels that can be drawn between the Fuhrer’s regime and that of Benito Mussolini far surpass any other possible considerations.
Richard Baker| 11.17.09 @ 7:20PM
Mr. Woodford:
The number of connections between what was started by the Bolsheviks of 1917 and Nazi Germany are striking. The problem is, of course, that hindsight is still 20/20. Wish foresight was, as well.
victor| 11.17.09 @ 10:15PM
Which leads to the reason that Hitler fought the Communists in the beginning; they were competitors, not the enemy.
The two groups believed in many of the same things.
DaveS| 11.17.09 @ 8:19PM
If I want the unvarnished truth about anyone, including Trotsky, I always go to Wikipedia.
victor| 11.17.09 @ 10:14PM
Unvarnished?
At Wikipedia?
Depends on who is doing the varnishing.
Or should I say, subjective editing?
Derek Leaberry| 11.18.09 @ 9:09AM
Mr. Baker, I do believe that all states have the right, implied by the ratification process of the Constitution, to leave the Union if they so desire. Had Lincoln let the original seven Southern states leave the Union(and remember that Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee left only after Lincoln announced his desire for war), the USA still would have been a large continental power stretching from Maine to California with a small, agricultural nation, the Confederate States of America, to the south. Secession would have been peaceful and beneficial to both by eliminating the stress of regional hate.
The dire circumstances the United States finds itself in today in which democratic politics have essentially bankrupted the country with tens of trillions of unfunded mandates looming into the future seems to me to prove that a country of 300 billion is impossible to govern wisely. On top of that, we are two different peoples inhabiting the same country, a Left that hates the historic America and wishes to "progress" to assorted freak shows like homosexual "marriage" and a Right that wishes to preserve Western Civilization, Christianity and the historic American nation, warts and all. Perhaps we should separate the nation at least in two parts with the Left getting the Pacific Coast and the East north of the Mason-Dixon line and the Right getting the South, Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.
Jeff Perren | 11.18.09 @ 4:46PM
"What's more, they maintain that Trotsky would have murdered far fewer political opponents than Stalin, remembering that Stalin murdered more communists than Hitler."
A stellar character reference, indeed. Perhaps, "they" should relocate to that communist paradise, North Korea.
cobra| 11.18.09 @ 4:46PM
Without any question, Trotsky would have been a much bigger disaster to the world than Stalin was.
The reason?
Trotsky was a talmudic, the leader of the talmudic revolution in Russia, and would have treated the Christians, in Russia and beyond, much worse than they were treated subsequently in communism.
We should never overlook the character of the original revolution.
Stalin was a thug, a Georgian in Russia, and never had the drive to support the talmudic causes beyond what his tactics required.
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Richard Baker| 11.19.09 @ 12:38PM
cobra:
With approximately 75- 100 million having been killed by the Bolsheviks through Stalin due to various causes, it would be hard to see how Trotsky could have been much worse.
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