Burnham and Cannon coexisted uneasily. Cannon was wary of Burnham’s social and academic status, while Burnham objected to Cannon’s authoritarian management style, his anti-intellectualism, and the crude invective he hurled at his opponents: “scoundrels,” “bloodhounds,” “sons-of-bitches,” “shysters,” “miserable,” “contemptible,” “sniveling,” “stinking,” and so on. Burnham also criticized Cannon for blindly following Trotsky’s lead. “The tendency in your letters to lump together all our opponents as ‘Stalinist agents,’” he complained to Cannon in June 1937, “(analogous to, and perhaps copied from, T’s recent habit of calling everyone who disagrees with him a ‘G.P.U. agent’) seems to me unprofitable.”
The real trouble between the two men started when Burnham began to challenge Trotsky’s position on what was known in the movement as the “Russian question.” Trotsky had long maintained that despite the repressiveness of the Soviet bureaucracy, even the purges and the Terror, the fundamental achievement of the October Revolution—the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production—remained intact. The USSR, Trotsky said, was a “degenerated workers’ state,” deeply flawed but still salvageable for socialism and therefore deserving of “unconditional defense” should it come under military attack. Any attempt by Bolshevik-Leninists to deny the proletarian nature of the Soviet Union, Trotsky had warned, would be regarded as “treason.”
In 1937, Burnham, together with another comrade, Joseph Carter, began to argue that the Soviet bureaucracy was no mere caste, as Trotsky insisted, but a new exploiting class, and that therefore the USSR could not be characterized as a workers’ state, not even a degenerated one. Burnham and Carter described the Soviet system as “bureaucratic collectivism.” An increasing number of comrades thought this analysis made sense, to the point where, toward the end of 1937, Cannon alerted Trotsky that the party was experiencing “a little epidemic of revisionism.” From this and other reports reaching him, Trotsky learned that the opposition was centered in New York, and was especially strong among the youth.
At the founding congress of the Socialist Workers Party, which convened in Chicago on December 31, 1937, Burnham and Carter’s statement on the Russian question received only four out of seventy-five votes. Cannon hoped this would end the matter, but the controversy became more acute under the pressure of events, including the third Moscow trial in March 1938 and continued Soviet treachery against the non-Communist left in Spain. What was the difference, a growing number of comrades openly began to ask, between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR?
Here the dissenters could support their arguments with quotations from Trotsky’s recent book The Revolution Betrayed, where he described Stalinism and fascism as “totalitarian” twins bearing a “deadly similarity.” The essential difference, in Trotsky’s view, was that the Soviet government had nationalized the means of production. But for an increasing number of comrades, this was a distinction without a difference. A factional fight was brewing by the summer of 1939, even before the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Trotsky failed to appreciate the enormous shock the pact produced on his followers. For many of them, the aftershocks were no less disorienting. Trotsky had been predicting that the Kremlin would reach a purely defensive agreement with Nazi Germany, as a way to keep the war off Soviet territory for as long as possible. The Soviet invasion of Poland, which began on September 17, only two and a half weeks after the German assault from the west, demonstrated that the pact was no mere nonaggression treaty, but an aggressive military alliance. This confounded the Trotskyists and, it seems clear, staggered Trotsky himself.
The Germans had launched their blitzkrieg with a massive attack from the air that destroyed the Polish air force and communication lines. As bombs rained from the sky, German armored columns plunged deep into the Polish interior, up to thirty miles ahead of the infantry, scattering civilians, spreading terror, and leaving the Poles no chance to mount a coordinated defense. In three weeks, western Poland was entirely overrun. Only Warsaw managed to hold out for another week under the Luftwaffe’s relentless aerial bombardment.
By comparison, the Soviet invasion from the east was more like an occupation. The Poles there had been ordered not to fight because it was believed—or at least hoped—that the Red Army was entering to join the fight against the Germans. Instead, the Soviets arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of Poles to remote regions of the USSR. Tens of thousands more Poles were executed. The most infamous episode came to be known as the Katyn Forest Massacre, in which more than 21,000 Polish reserve officers who had been mobilized at the outbreak of the war—the large majority of them teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other members of Poland’s intelligentsia—were shot to death and buried in mass graves. The Soviets would later attempt to place responsibility for this atrocity on the German armies that invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa.
As the German and Soviet armies erased Poland from the map, Trotsky dictated a long article called “The USSR in War,” which he completed on September 25. Much of it was devoted to a theoretical discussion about whether Stalinism, fascism, and even the New Deal constituted a new political paradigm, so-called bureaucratic collectivism. Trotsky turned back this theoretical challenge, but in doing so he said something entirely unexpected. Socialism, he announced, was about to face its ultimate test. If the Second World War did not spark a proletarian revolution in the West, or if the proletariat were to take power but then surrender it to a privileged bureaucracy as in the USSR, this would confirm the emergence of a new form of totalitarianism. In that case, Trotsky acknowledged, “nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society ended as a Utopia.”
Less than a year earlier, Trotsky had presented a vision of the Bolshevik-Leninists preparing to storm heaven and earth. Now he appeared to be harboring doubts about the entire socialist project, and this admission took his followers by surprise. It also undermined their confidence in his analysis of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, which was another surprising part of his article. In Trotsky’s view, the Red Army, far from behaving like a mirror image of the Wehrmacht, was serving as a vehicle for progress in Poland by expropriating the large landowners and nationalizing the means of production. In other words, despite the reactionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet Union was objectively spreading the features of socialism abroad. Most of Trotsky’s American comrades found this judgment difficult to square with what common sense told them about the Soviet subjugation of Poland.
“The USSR in War,” instead of uniting the Socialist Workers Party, served to sharpen its discord. Shachtman had now joined forces with Burnham. Together they declared that the Soviet Union could in no sense whatsoever be classified as a workers’ state, that the Soviet invasion of Poland was an act of imperialism, and that the party should disavow its pledge to defend the USSR unconditionally. A serious factional fight had broken out. Trotsky now put everything aside in order to devote his energies to preventing the party from splitting in two. Anyone familiar with his past record as a conciliator in factional politics could have anticipated that disaster lay ahead.
At the zenith of Trotsky’s glory, after he had masterminded the Bolshevik insurrection in October 1917 and then led the Red Army to victory in the civil war, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar of Education, wrote a profile of him. Among the inevitable comparisons with Lenin, one came out decidedly in Trotsky’s favor. Lenin, although irreplaceable as the chief executive of the Soviet government, “could never have coped with the titanic mission which Trotsky took upon his own shoulders, with those lightning moves from place to place, those astounding speeches, those fanfares of on-the-spot orders, that role of being the unceasing electrifier of a weakening army, now at one spot, now at another. There is not a man on earth who could have replaced Trotsky in that respect.”
And yet
, Lunacharsky testified, “Trotsky was extremely bad at organizing not only the Party but even a small group of it.” The same charismatic personality that swept people off their feet was “clumsy and ill-suited” to working within a political organization. He could electrify crowds, but not persuade individuals. “He had practically no wholehearted supporters at all.”
Lunacharsky based this judgment on Trotsky’s career since 1902, after his first escape from Siberia and arrival in London. It was Lenin who arranged for him to be brought to western Europe and who introduced him into the émigré circle of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In March 1903, at Lenin’s suggestion, Trotsky was co-opted onto the editorial board of the party’s organ and power center, Iskra. Lenin sized up the twenty-three-year-old Trotsky as “a man of exceptional abilities, staunch, energetic, who will go further.”
The honeymoon ended abruptly four months later, at the second congress of the Russian Social Democrats. The delegates assembled in Brussels, but then transferred to London to escape the attentions of the Russian secret police. The congress was attended by forty-three delegates representing twenty-six Marxist organizations. Trotsky held the mandate of the Siberian social democrats. Several issues divided the delegates, most importantly the definition of party membership. Lenin advocated a strictly centralized party, with all members participating in revolutionary activity—participating, as opposed to merely cooperating, which was the less restrictive formula proposed by Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod, close colleagues of Lenin who now closed ranks against him.
This fundamental disagreement was compounded by others. When Lenin proposed to reduce the Iskra editorial board from six members to three, the move was seen by his opponents as a further attempt to consolidate his control over the party. After a vote taken toward the end of the conference was won by Lenin’s supporters, they became known as Bolsheviki, Russian for Majoritarians, while Martov, Axelrod, and the others were labeled Mensheviki, the Minoritarians. On the crucial votes, Trotsky was with the Mensheviks.
Trotsky’s reaction to the split was self-contradictory. He declared himself in favor of party unity yet launched extremely bitter polemical strikes at Lenin, whom he accused of behaving imperiously and of advocating a dangerous centralism. The most violent of these attacks took the form of a lengthy pamphlet called Our Political Tasks, published in Geneva in 1904. Here Trotsky called Lenin “malicious,” “hideous,” “dissolute,” “demagogical,” and “morally repulsive,” among other epithets. He compared Lenin to Robespierre and, more trenchantly, a “slovenly lawyer.”
A strong proponent of social democracy as a mass movement, Trotsky was genuinely repulsed by Lenin’s centralism, which placed professional revolutionaries in the vanguard and seemed to assume that workers were a hindrance to the revolution. Trotsky was thus a proponent of Menshevism against Bolshevism, yet in September 1904 he announced his break with the Mensheviks. The Russian Revolution of 1905, which catapulted him to fame as a leader of the short-lived St. Petersburg Soviet, validated his status as a revolutionary free agent.
As Czar Nicholas II called in the army and the police to crush the revolution, Trotsky was arrested, tried, and sentenced to a second term of exile in Siberia, from which he again escaped, landing in Vienna in 1907. There, for the next seven years, he made his living from journalism, much of it devoted to bringing about a reconciliation of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, who remained factions of the same party. His ineptitude as a conciliator served to isolate him further. Although he had closer personal ties to the Mensheviks, he managed to alienate them, even as he continued to earn the animosity of the Bolsheviks. After Lenin consummated the schism in 1912 by declaring the Bolsheviks to be a separate party, Trotsky bitterly denounced him: “The entire structure of Leninism is at present based on lies and falsification, and carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own destruction.”
Then came the world war and a string of catastrophic defeats for the Russian army led by Czar Nicholas, resulting in the collapse of the Russian autocracy in the February Revolution of 1917. Trotsky arrived in Petrograd in May, not long after Lenin. At first Trotsky turned down Lenin’s offer to join the Bolsheviks, but changed his mind in July, a few weeks before he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. It was Trotsky’s idea to cloak the Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government in democratic legitimacy by timing it to coincide with the opening of a national Congress of Soviets about to gather in Petrograd. On the night of October 25, the congress was informed about the seizure by the Red Guards of the Winter Palace. Some delegates walked out of the hall. The Mensheviks accused the Bolsheviks of carrying out a putsch, and protested that some kind of political compromise ought to be agreed.
Trotsky showed no sympathy for his vanquished former comrades, only mockery and disdain. Taking the platform, he delivered History’s cruel verdict. The Bolshevik triumph, he declared, was a mass insurrection, not a conspiracy. “Our rising has been victorious. Now they tell us: Renounce your victory, yield, make a compromise. No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: You are bankrupt. You have played out your role. Go where you belong from now on: into the dustbin of history!”
From that moment on, Trotsky held tightly to the myth of Red October as a workers’ revolution. Try as he might, however, he could not obscure his long history of anti-Bolshevism, which his enemies in the Party preferred to characterize as his “Menshevism.” This goes a long way toward explaining Trotsky’s passivity in the struggle to succeed Lenin: as an outsider, he made a fetish of Bolshevik unity. He was, in any case, poorly equipped to lead a Party faction. He could not overcome his isolation. He had never acquired the habits necessary for working within a political organization, let alone for maneuvering in the corridors of power.
Max Eastman, who was electrified by the description of Trotsky in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and who then had the opportunity to watch Trotsky in action as head of the Left Opposition in Moscow, sized him up much the way Lunacharsky had done back in 1919. “In the time of revolutionary storm, he was the very concept of a hero,” Eastman observed. “But in calmer times he could not bring two strong men to his side as friends and hold them there.” In Eastman’s view, this more than anything else explained Trotsky’s loss to Stalin in the factional fight, and then the hopelessness of his efforts to organize an international opposition to Stalinism. “He could no more build a party than a hen could build a house.”
Cast out of the Communist Party and then the Soviet Union, Trotsky saw no irony in the fact that he ended up “sharing the bitter fate he had meted out to the Martovs and the Axelrods,” as one historian has put it. On the contrary, Trotsky’s account of the October events in The History of the Russian Revolution dramatized his banishment of the Mensheviks as a moment of triumph, showing no trace of remorse.
Eastman carried with him the section of Trotsky’s History that contained this passage—in the form of the publisher’s proofs of his English translation—when he and his wife visited Prinkipo in the summer of 1932. The Eastmans were paying a social call, but the visit would also give Trotsky an opportunity to verify the accuracy of Eastman’s version of the book. At forty-nine years of age, Eastman was strikingly handsome: tall, trim, and tan, with a shock of white hair and dark, pensive eyes. He had not seen Trotsky for several years, and once again he remarked on the pale blue color of his eyes, which a long line of journalists mysteriously kept insisting were black. On the second day of Eastman’s visit, they were incandescent with anger.
Trotsky had been disturbed by Eastman’s unorthodox views of Marxist theory, notably his debunking of the concept of dialectical materialism. Eastman’s visit to Prinkipo was an opportunity for Trotsky to set the amateur philosopher straight. When Eastman stood his ground, their argument threatened to spiral out of control, as neither man allowed the other to finish a sentence. “Trotsky’s throat was throbbing and his face was red; he wa
s in a rage,” Eastman wrote in his diary. Natalia became worried as the altercation spilled over from the tea table into the study: “she came in after us and stood there above and beside me like a statue, silent and austere. I understood what she meant and said, after a long, hot speech from him: ‘Well, let’s lay aside this subject and go to work on the book.’ ‘As much as you like!’ he jerked out, and snapped up the manuscript.”
Eastman was a contrarian by nature. Born in upstate New York to two unconventional, liberal-minded Congregationalist ministers, he was educated at Williams College, and then studied philosophy at Columbia University under John Dewey, completing the requirements for a doctorate. He chose not to accept the degree, evidently because doing so might compromise his self-image as a revolutionary poet. He settled in Greenwich Village and became an influential figure in American radical politics and culture. In 1913 he published Enjoyment of Poetry and became an editor of The Masses, the pioneering magazine of socialist politics, art, and literature.
In 1917 The Masses was forced to close as a result of the tightening wartime censorship, and the following year Eastman and his fellow editors were twice tried and twice acquitted for violation of the Sedition Act, in connection with the magazine’s outspoken opposition to U.S. participation in the world war. He and his sister and fellow suffragist, Crystal, then founded a successor, The Liberator, which published John Reed’s initial reports from Petrograd on the Bolshevik Revolution. The first of these conveyed an invitation from Lenin and Trotsky: “Comrades! Greetings from the first proletariat republic of the world. We call you to arms for the international Socialist revolution.”
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