Trotsky: A Biography By Robert Service (Pan Macmillan, £25)
Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky By Bertrand Patenaude (Faber and Faber, £20)
There was a fad among popular historians in the 1980s and 1990s to produce works of “virtual” or counterfactual history, as a way of answering some of the intriguing “What if?” questions. What if Napoleon had succeeded in invading England? What if America had never won independence? This was more than an amusing game. Some excellent historians, Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts among them, worked on books that contained important ideas that could not have been explored within the constraints of real time.
The great hypothetical debate on the left for 60 years has been this question: what if Leon Trotsky instead of Stalin had emerged as leader of the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin in 1924? Would the tragic and blood-soaked failure of the communist experiment have worked out differently?
As both of these excellent books show, Trotsky’s great genius was as a writer—“he could not bear to write an ugly sentence,” Robert Service says in his biography, which is an exaggeration, but not by much. Before he acquired the nom de guerre Trotsky, the young Lev Bronstein, as he was born, was known in Russian revolutionary circles as The Pen. He used his great literary gifts to write the narrative of the Bolshevik victory and of where it turned sour. Extraordinarily, it remained for seven decades the story that was told about communism, as often on the right as the far left.
Trotsky’s story was that Russia, and inevitably the entire world, was on the road to communism—led bravely and brilliantly by comrades Lenin and Trotsky—but for the stroke that killed the Bolshevik leader. Then the Soviets were drawn away from the true path by the apostate Josef Stalin, who manoeuvred unfairly to seize the top job in the Soviet Union. All hope for the brave new world that Trotsky dreamed of when, as he put it, “man will become incomparably stronger, more intelligent, more subtle… his body more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical… there will be paradise on earth” were dashed. Instead there followed the Terror, the show trials, the war with Hitler, the gulag, the disillusion of failed ideals.
It is a political fantasy, very close to a religious faith; and it is one that as these books show with clarity and power, fired the imagination of generations of people on the left, who believed that if the ideas of Trotsky had been implemented the story would have been altogether happier. On the right, meanwhile, it offered a comforting explanation in the “great man” tradition of history, to explain the failure of a social system.
Time, then, for some counterfactual history alongside the actual version. As violence and destruction were at the heart of the system Trotsky helped to create, not an aberration, this is what might have happened if he had seized power. All the real facts, Trotsky’s views and quotes come from Service’s masterful book, the third in his “troika” of biographies of the Bolshevik leaders (Lenin in 2000, Stalin in 2004) that comprise a history of the first two-thirds of the Soviet Union’s existence. The story goes like this. It is 27th January 1924 and, instead of convalescing from nervous exhaustion in the Crimea and missing Lenin’s funeral, as happened in reality, Trotsky is in Red Square making a rousing eulogy of his dead comrade. He is a flamboyant, electrifying speaker, by far the most powerful of any of the leading Bolsheviks. In November 1917, his oratory played a major part in inspiring the revolutionary soldiers and workers in the putsch in Petrograd and today he is on his usual sparkling form. Halfway through the speech, Trotsky brandishes a piece of paper and reads. It is a passage from the “Last Testament of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,” which warns that Stalin must not be allowed significant power because he would abuse it and at all costs he should be removed from his position as general secretary of the Soviet Communist party.
Trotsky—almost as famous as Lenin—is the obvious candidate to lead the country and over the next few months he consolidates his position. He was the war commissar during the recent civil war, and proved himself a man of action as well as a writer and orator. He did more than anyone to reorganise the red army into a fighting force capable of beating the Whites. But he did so with savage ruthlessness. (When the Kronstadt sailors mutinied against the new Soviet government in 1921, he had crushed them mercilessly. He said the regime must 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 one in every city.”)
The economy of the nation Trotsky inherits is going badly. Lenin in his last years instituted the New Economic Policy, which introduced large elements of capitalism and free markets into the nationalised system. Trotsky never entirely supported it. Now, in power, he abandons the NEP, introducing rigorous central planning, rapid industrialisation and collectivised agriculture. He reserves his greatest loathing—perhaps because his father had been one—for the rich peasants, the kulaks. In power, he lets loose the secret police—the Cheka, whose establishment he had approved on the first day of the revolution—on the peasantry. Untold numbers in Russia and the Ukraine die.
Trotsky has never been a clubbable man, and hates the social aspects of politics. He tries but is unable to form a group of trusted allies. He makes cutting remarks to colleagues, out of vanity, to ensure that he sounds cleverer than them. There are endless splits within the Bolshevik party. Trotsky talks of party democracy, but he loathes any contradiction. He shuts his opponents up and throws them out of the party. In time, Trotsky becomes increasingly impatient with the proletariat in the rest of the world, which annoyingly refuses to act in line with his prophecy that they would rise up against the capitalists and imperialists. In fact, the danger comes from an ultra-right ideology growing ever more powerful in Germany and central Europe. Quietly, with none of his usual rhetorical flourishes, he abandons his theories of world revolution and embraces instead what one of his sidekicks baptised as “socialism in one country” to protect the USSR. Later, he believes, if the Soviets are victorious in the war he knows to be on the near horizon, he can export revolution at the point of a gun.
There are opponents who will never accept him as leader. Trotsky has many killed, perhaps millions pour encourager les autres, and exiles others. The refugee organisations were minuscule, revolving around his old opponent, Stalin, who travels the world looking for a place of safety, finally settling in central America. They keep splitting into ever smaller groupuscules arguing over vital issues such as how many angels could balance on a pinhead, reserving their bitterest hatred for each other. But they will not accept that only Trotsky could interpret true ideology in the spirit of Marx and Lenin.
This is counterfactual history. But, as both these books (though Service’s in particular) remind us, the real Trotsky was a man cut from this cloth. He was, as Service puts it, a brilliant talent who “rose like a comet in the sky,” but who also embodied an Everest of ego, vanity and snobbery. Trotsky barely cared about people if an interesting idea was near. A cold man, he unleashed forces of cruelty and violence that ultimately crushed him; and that would assuredly, had he risen to power, have crushed many millions of others.
Neither Service nor Patenaude could say it, but a counterhistorical or hypothetical last line in either of their books might have said: “On 21st August 1940 one of Moscow’s agents carried out orders from above. Stalin was killed by an assassin, who smashed his skull with an ice pick.”
Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky By Bertrand Patenaude (Faber and Faber, £20)
There was a fad among popular historians in the 1980s and 1990s to produce works of “virtual” or counterfactual history, as a way of answering some of the intriguing “What if?” questions. What if Napoleon had succeeded in invading England? What if America had never won independence? This was more than an amusing game. Some excellent historians, Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts among them, worked on books that contained important ideas that could not have been explored within the constraints of real time.
The great hypothetical debate on the left for 60 years has been this question: what if Leon Trotsky instead of Stalin had emerged as leader of the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin in 1924? Would the tragic and blood-soaked failure of the communist experiment have worked out differently?
As both of these excellent books show, Trotsky’s great genius was as a writer—“he could not bear to write an ugly sentence,” Robert Service says in his biography, which is an exaggeration, but not by much. Before he acquired the nom de guerre Trotsky, the young Lev Bronstein, as he was born, was known in Russian revolutionary circles as The Pen. He used his great literary gifts to write the narrative of the Bolshevik victory and of where it turned sour. Extraordinarily, it remained for seven decades the story that was told about communism, as often on the right as the far left.
Trotsky’s story was that Russia, and inevitably the entire world, was on the road to communism—led bravely and brilliantly by comrades Lenin and Trotsky—but for the stroke that killed the Bolshevik leader. Then the Soviets were drawn away from the true path by the apostate Josef Stalin, who manoeuvred unfairly to seize the top job in the Soviet Union. All hope for the brave new world that Trotsky dreamed of when, as he put it, “man will become incomparably stronger, more intelligent, more subtle… his body more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical… there will be paradise on earth” were dashed. Instead there followed the Terror, the show trials, the war with Hitler, the gulag, the disillusion of failed ideals.
It is a political fantasy, very close to a religious faith; and it is one that as these books show with clarity and power, fired the imagination of generations of people on the left, who believed that if the ideas of Trotsky had been implemented the story would have been altogether happier. On the right, meanwhile, it offered a comforting explanation in the “great man” tradition of history, to explain the failure of a social system.
Time, then, for some counterfactual history alongside the actual version. As violence and destruction were at the heart of the system Trotsky helped to create, not an aberration, this is what might have happened if he had seized power. All the real facts, Trotsky’s views and quotes come from Service’s masterful book, the third in his “troika” of biographies of the Bolshevik leaders (Lenin in 2000, Stalin in 2004) that comprise a history of the first two-thirds of the Soviet Union’s existence. The story goes like this. It is 27th January 1924 and, instead of convalescing from nervous exhaustion in the Crimea and missing Lenin’s funeral, as happened in reality, Trotsky is in Red Square making a rousing eulogy of his dead comrade. He is a flamboyant, electrifying speaker, by far the most powerful of any of the leading Bolsheviks. In November 1917, his oratory played a major part in inspiring the revolutionary soldiers and workers in the putsch in Petrograd and today he is on his usual sparkling form. Halfway through the speech, Trotsky brandishes a piece of paper and reads. It is a passage from the “Last Testament of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,” which warns that Stalin must not be allowed significant power because he would abuse it and at all costs he should be removed from his position as general secretary of the Soviet Communist party.
Trotsky—almost as famous as Lenin—is the obvious candidate to lead the country and over the next few months he consolidates his position. He was the war commissar during the recent civil war, and proved himself a man of action as well as a writer and orator. He did more than anyone to reorganise the red army into a fighting force capable of beating the Whites. But he did so with savage ruthlessness. (When the Kronstadt sailors mutinied against the new Soviet government in 1921, he had crushed them mercilessly. He said the regime must 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 one in every city.”)
The economy of the nation Trotsky inherits is going badly. Lenin in his last years instituted the New Economic Policy, which introduced large elements of capitalism and free markets into the nationalised system. Trotsky never entirely supported it. Now, in power, he abandons the NEP, introducing rigorous central planning, rapid industrialisation and collectivised agriculture. He reserves his greatest loathing—perhaps because his father had been one—for the rich peasants, the kulaks. In power, he lets loose the secret police—the Cheka, whose establishment he had approved on the first day of the revolution—on the peasantry. Untold numbers in Russia and the Ukraine die.
Trotsky has never been a clubbable man, and hates the social aspects of politics. He tries but is unable to form a group of trusted allies. He makes cutting remarks to colleagues, out of vanity, to ensure that he sounds cleverer than them. There are endless splits within the Bolshevik party. Trotsky talks of party democracy, but he loathes any contradiction. He shuts his opponents up and throws them out of the party. In time, Trotsky becomes increasingly impatient with the proletariat in the rest of the world, which annoyingly refuses to act in line with his prophecy that they would rise up against the capitalists and imperialists. In fact, the danger comes from an ultra-right ideology growing ever more powerful in Germany and central Europe. Quietly, with none of his usual rhetorical flourishes, he abandons his theories of world revolution and embraces instead what one of his sidekicks baptised as “socialism in one country” to protect the USSR. Later, he believes, if the Soviets are victorious in the war he knows to be on the near horizon, he can export revolution at the point of a gun.
There are opponents who will never accept him as leader. Trotsky has many killed, perhaps millions pour encourager les autres, and exiles others. The refugee organisations were minuscule, revolving around his old opponent, Stalin, who travels the world looking for a place of safety, finally settling in central America. They keep splitting into ever smaller groupuscules arguing over vital issues such as how many angels could balance on a pinhead, reserving their bitterest hatred for each other. But they will not accept that only Trotsky could interpret true ideology in the spirit of Marx and Lenin.
This is counterfactual history. But, as both these books (though Service’s in particular) remind us, the real Trotsky was a man cut from this cloth. He was, as Service puts it, a brilliant talent who “rose like a comet in the sky,” but who also embodied an Everest of ego, vanity and snobbery. Trotsky barely cared about people if an interesting idea was near. A cold man, he unleashed forces of cruelty and violence that ultimately crushed him; and that would assuredly, had he risen to power, have crushed many millions of others.
Neither Service nor Patenaude could say it, but a counterhistorical or hypothetical last line in either of their books might have said: “On 21st August 1940 one of Moscow’s agents carried out orders from above. Stalin was killed by an assassin, who smashed his skull with an ice pick.”
