Trotsky

by Dmitri Volkogonov

  These early biographies are uncontroversial and superficial, containing only the bare facts of Trotsky’s life. Fifteen years later his image would be presented in the Soviet Union as malevolent, blood-thirsty, repellent. Addressing the February/March 1937 Central Committee Plenum, Stalin would describe the Trotskyists and their leader as ‘a barefaced gang of wreckers, spies and murderers’.5 The Soviet press depicted Trotsky as the source of all evils, and for the next fifty years continued to heap odium on him as on no one else. Gradually the old abuse gave way to new myths, claiming that Trotsky was a bloodstained maniac hungry for personal power, that he was in every way the forerunner of Stalin. Over the last few years, Trotsky has become a subject of more balanced judgement, a personality symbolizing not merely the radicalism of the Communist idea, as it was expressed in the uncompromising and Utopian nature of Bolshevik plans, but also in its tragic realization. Trotsky was at the birth of the Soviet state, he was one of the architects of the Soviet totalitarian bureaucratic system whose baleful effects have yet to be eradicated from Russian life.

  It was Trotsky’s fate that he was able to synthesize an unbending faith in Communist ideals with the criminal mercilessness of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that he could be both one of the inspirers of the Red Terror and its victim. He was, in my view, unique in that he combined what was most attractive about the Russian revolutionaries with the most repugnant aspects of Bolshevism. Early in the century, Trotsky had read the prophetic words of the anarchist Prince Kropotkin:

  All revolutionaries dream of the revolution as an opportunity to liquidate their enemies legally … of conquering power, of creating an all-powerful, all-knowing state which will deal with the people as subjects and subordinates, ruling them with the help of thousands and millions of bureaucrats of all kinds … They dream of a ‘committee of public salvation’, whose purpose is to get rid of anyone who dares to think differently … Finally, they dream of restricting the initiative of the individual and of the nation itself … to make sure the nation chooses leaders who will think for it and make laws in its name.6

  Trotsky marked this passage with a query, but both he and the Bolshevik leadership acted according to Kropotkin’s formulation with no such questioning.

  I have come to see, in writing my studies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, that each one complements the other historically. Lenin emerges in revolutionary history as the inspirer, Trotsky as the agitator and Stalin as the executor, the one who carried out the idea. The swerves, the collisions and the tragedies of Soviet history can be observed in sharp relief when seen through the prism of these three personalities. In this respect, the biographical method is quite effective, for it allows one to analyze an entire historical layer of time through the personal fabric of a human existence. In the draft of one his articles, Trotsky underlined the phrase: ‘If personalities do not make history, then history makes itself by means of personalities.’7

  Trotsky enjoyed many triumphs, the most significant being that of October 1917. Having tasted this victory, it might have seemed to him that things would go on in this way for a long time, if not forever. And yet, soon after the end of the Civil War, he felt himself to be virtually superfluous in the ordinary world of everyday concerns. Everything pointed to his being made for big events, for worldwide glory, but the world revolution had stumbled, and even the ‘Asiatic’ one had not occurred. One tragedy after another now began to dog Trotsky’s life. He lost all his jobs, was exiled, deported, wandered the globe in search of a safe hiding place from Stalin’s assassins, and while virtually every member of his family, as well as countless numbers of his comrades, were meeting violent deaths. Labelled ‘Trotskyist’, it was not only genuine supporters who were being liquidated, but also millions of compatriots who were merely suspected of any lack of loyalty to the dictatorial regime. It is amazing that Trotsky managed to survive ten years in emigration, considering the scale of Stalin’s manhunt for him. Two months before he was assassinated, he wrote: ‘I can say that I live in this world not in the dimension of rules, but in that of exceptions.’8 The life of this revolutionary was almost magical, a meteoric flight into world fame, and a long, long drama of struggle, hopes and disappointment, ending with the last act in Mexico.

  Trotsky himself, his gaze fixed on the mirror of history, did not regard his life as tragic. At least, in 1930, in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, he could write: ‘“And what of our personal fate?” I hear you ask. I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of personal fate … I don’t recognize personal tragedy. I recognize the replacement of one leader of the revolution by another.’9 In practice, of course, he was able to lose the fight, but not to abandon hope. He knew very early on that, as far as history was concerned, his defeat might come to be seen as more worthy than victory in a different battle.

  Trotsky’s biographers enjoy a rich store of materials left by their subject, in the form of books, articles, pen-portraits, memoirs, essays. His wife, Natalia Sedova, recalled that he had intended writing a series of major books, but ‘everyday events … pushed them to one side’. His book on Stalin was forced on him by a combination of financial need and his publishers. Several times he said he wanted to write a ‘pedestrian’ book that would earn him enough money to be able to ‘entertain himself writing about things that interested him. But he never managed,’ Sedova wrote. ‘He was not capable of writing pedestrian books.’10

  Trotsky was one of the first of the Soviet leaders to exploit the intellectual potential of his secretaries to the maximum. His every speech and note, prepared or spontaneous, was carefully recorded, transcribed and printed. Most of the twenty-one volumes of his collected works that he managed, with a few gaps, to publish before his exile in 1927 consist of his reports, speeches and newspaper articles.11 Another important source are the archives, including the Houghton Library at Harvard, which contains some 20,000 documents, including 3000 letters; the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which houses more than 1000 letters, including Trotsky’s correspondence with Lenin; and part of the Nicolaevsky Collection at the Hoover Institution. Archives inside Russia, which have been completely closed until very recently, include the former Central Party Archives, the Central State Archives of the October Revolution, those of the Soviet Army, the Ministry of Defence, the Committee for State Security, and a number of others. The majority of the documents in this book are published for the first time.

  Another important source was the testimony of relatives of Trotsky who had by some miracle survived, and a number of people who had met or known him personally. Among these, I would like to express my gratitude to Trotsky’s niece A.A. Kasatikova, his great-nephew V.B. Bronshtein, and the wife of his younger son Sergei, O.E. Grebner; to one of his stenographers, N.A. Marennikova, and one of Stalin’s secretaries, A.P. Balashov; to N.A. Ioffe, D.T. Shepilov, A.K. Mironov, V.M. Polyakov, N.G. Dubrovinsky, D.S. Zlatopolsky and F.M. Nazarov, all of whom had relations with the family or with Trotsky himself; and among the remaining ‘Trotskyists’, to I.I. Vrachev, Stuart Kirby, and the late Tamara Deutscher, widow of Trotsky’s best biographer, Isaac Deutscher.

  I have also been fortunate enough to have talked to senior Soviet security officers whose knowledge of Trotsky’s fate went beyond hearsay. These include P.A. Sudoplatov, Ye.P. Pivonravov and A.N. Shelepin. From the end of the 1920s until 20 August 1940, when he was liquidated on Stalin’s orders, Trotsky was kept under constant surveillance by the special services, the GPU, OGPU and NKVD, the latter body knowing more about him than he could ever have suspected. Stalin was kept regularly informed about his every move, and on occasion Trotsky’s writings found their way to Stalin’s desk even before they were published. I have used the correspondence of the NKVD field unit that penetrated Trotsky’s entourage, and have had numerous conversations with the people responsible for carrying out the Central Committee’s order to assassinate him.

  Among Western authors whose works I have consult
ed, Isaac Deutscher’s three-part biography stands out, as do the efforts of Yuri Feltshinsky; Baruch Knei-Paz’s monograph is a fundamental work, while others who have contributed to ‘Trotskology’ include Dale Reid, Michael Jacobson, Joel Carmichael, Isaac Don Levine, Harold Nelson and Robert Tucker. Only recently have Russian scholars approached the subject, and among them I should like to mention Yu.I. Koroblev, V.I. Startsev, N.A. Vasetsky, Y.A. Polyakov and P.B. Volobuev.

  I began working on my three ‘portraits’ many years ago, gradually gathering little-known material, facts, publications and personal testimony. Had I observed proper methodology, Lenin should have come first, followed by Trotsky and then Stalin. The reason they have appeared [in Russia] in reverse order is not accidental. The book on Stalin, who now personifies Russia’s historic failure, was written by 1985, at a time when an honest critical analysis of Lenin was simply impossible. Soviet prejudice against Trotsky continues even now to be very strong, and in 1987 the Party could still speak of the great service done by higher Party circles, led by Stalin, in ‘the victory over Trotskyism’. Thanks to decades of brainwashing, most people in the Soviet Union are not even aware that Marxism in Russia developed in three stages: Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism, all of them deriving from the same root. Despite some major differences, what all three men shared was reliance on social violence, a belief in the absolute certainty of only one ideology, and the conviction that they had the right to dispose of the destinies of nations.

  I have tried to describe the evolution from freedom to the unfreedom that characterized the dominant social thinking of the time. Before October 1917, all Russian revolutionaries clamoured for freedom of speech, yet when Maxim Gorky declared that Bolshevik violence was ‘the path to anarchy, the end of the proletariat and of the revolution’, the Bolsheviks took harsh measures not only against Gorky’s paper Novaya Zhizn, but against all the free press. At a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) chaired by Lenin in December 1917, Trotsky proposed even ‘harsher measures against the bourgeois press and foul slanders on the Soviet regime’.12 Almost without realizing it, he and the others were confining freedom to a reservation where in due course the time would come to liquidate it altogether. Here lay the paradox of Bolshevism: having proclaimed freedom as the aim of their revolution, they did not see that they were taking it away not only from the ‘ex-people’, but also from those they had promised to make ‘everything’, the people who had trusted them. It was the party-cum-state they invested with freedom, then the bureaucratic machine, and finally the dictator.

  To the end of his life, Trotsky did not see that many of the fundamental tenets of Marxism, which he never doubted, were profoundly wrong. But it was precisely the false ideas of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of class war that lay at the root of the future tragedy, and it was the process of making these postulates into immutable principles, to which Trotsky remained faithful all his life, that led the country to its historic failure. A political portrait of Trotsky, therefore, is also an account of the fate of freedom in Russia, without doubt a tragic story.

  When in March 1922 Lenin wrote, in his secret letter to the Politburo, ‘If it is necessary to achieve a particular political goal by means of a number of cruel measures, then they should be carried out in the most energetic way and in the shortest possible time,’13 Trotsky was in complete agreement with him. This was the deeply ingrained flaw in Russian Jacobinism, of which Trotsky was one of the most eloquent exponents. However pitiful the results of his efforts, to the end of his life Trotsky never ceased to peer into the future, believing fanatically, as he did, in the coming of the world revolution.

  1

  At the Turn of the Century

  The leaders of the October revolution were born during the reign of Alexander II (1855-81), a time when, arguably, the tsarist regime experienced the first tremors of its own demise, when the ‘tsar-liberator’ was blown up by a bomb thrown by members of the terrorist group ‘People’s Will’. The Russian Empire was lagging behind the West, and the small but significant intelligentsia was the first section of society to feel and express its disillusionment, although the peasants and the workers had not yet lost their age-old delusion of ‘the good tsar’.

  By the turn of the century that atmosphere had changed. It was a difficult and confused time. The gentry had long lost their power and were growing still weaker, the burgeoning working class was generating revolutionary discontent, while the taciturn peasantry, oppressed by hopelessness, harboured the potential for violent rebellion. Revolutionary ideas were being spread with increasing vigour by intellectuals claiming to speak in the name of the hapless. Some were calling for enlightened reform, others preaching extreme radicalism, including individual terror. The Church meanwhile, as well as the police and the censor, did its utmost to strengthen the throne. Those with perspicacity, however, were able to sense in the barely detectable subterranean tremors the approach of a time of great change and convulsions. Just as one can almost smell the approaching spring in February, so the turn of the century in Russia was felt to be the time before the storm.

  The Bronshteins

  The life of Jews in Russia was governed to a great extent by the constraints of the Pale—that is, the broad corridor from the Baltic to the Black Sea, roughly following the old Polish frontier, and within which the great majority of the Jewish population were compelled to reside. Russia proper, or the provinces outside the Pale, was mostly off-limits to Jews. The rules which governed the Pale were themselves arbitrary, being both extended and narrowed by Alexander I and Nicholas I. When they were narrowed, some Jewish families, unwilling to suffer the restraints of life in some pathetic shtetl, or townlet, moved to the south of Russia, to what in Soviet times would be called ‘virgin lands’. The government encouraged settlement on the fertile northern shores of the Black Sea where, as well as Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks and Bulgarians, a small number of Jewish colonists also settled—though they were rather exceptional, since agriculture and cattle-raising were not occupations associated at that time with the Jews. The Bronshteins, who came from a shtetl near Poltava, close to the centre of present-day Ukraine, were one such exception.

  Trotsky’s father, David Bronshtein was a tough and enterprising farmer. He bought about 250 acres from a retired Colonel Yanovsky near the small town of Bobrinets, in the more southerly province of Kherson, and by dint of hard labour and close-fisted resourcefulness, and by the constant acquisition of more and more land, became a substantial landowner. During the revolution he was to find himself caught between two fires: the Whites saw him as the father of a Red leader, while to the Reds he was a rich private farmer and exploiter. A number of telegrams of the time show that Trotsky’s relatives were spared by neither the Whites nor the Reds. Having lost his estate, David Bronshtein, with the help of some local Reds, cabled his son: ‘On Denikin’s orders, Uncle Grigory, his wife and cousin, Lev Abramovich Bronshtein, have been arrested and taken to Novorossiisk as hostages. Their situation is very serious. I ask you to do everything to obtain their release and to inform us of the result in Odessa.’1

  Trotsky helped his dispossessed father by setting him up as the manager of a requisitioned flour mill near Moscow. David Bronshtein retained a life-long admiration for his son, although he could not understand how his family could have produced a revolutionary. Totally illiterate, only towards the end of his life did David manage to make out some words, and then only in order to decipher the titles of the books and articles his youngest son was publishing. He died of typhus in 1922.

  Trotsky’s mother, Anna, was a typical Jewish town dweller from Odessa, where she had received a modest education. She married David for love, thus condemning herself to the life of a peasant, no easy option for a city girl. She managed, however, to adapt, and also to introduce some elements of culture into the family’s life as countryfolk. Whenever opportunity allowed Anna spent her time reading, occasionally ordering books by post, and did all s
he could to ensure an education for her eight children, of whom only Lev, two sisters and a brother survived beyond childhood.

  Leib (Lev) Bronshtein was born on 25 October 1879 (7 November according to the Western calendar, which the Soviet regime adopted on 1 February 1918). In the brief autobiography he submitted in 1919 for the Party’s official record, he wrote that he was ‘born in the village of Yanovka, Kherson Province, district of Yelizavetgrad, on the small estate of my landowner-father’.2 In fact, the family already owned more than 250 acres, was renting another 500, had a steam-operated mill, plenty of various livestock, and was employing peasant labourers by the dozen. Lev’s childhood, of which he wrote little, was not, he recalled, one of hunger and cold, as the family was already comfortably off. ‘But it was a bleak sufficiency, for the family ‘strained every muscle and directed every thought towards work and savings’, and children were accorded little space in such an environment. ‘We were not deprived, except of life’s generosity and tenderness.’ Childhood for Lev had been neither the ‘sunny meadow’ enjoyed by a small minority, nor the ‘dark cave of hunger, violence and misery’ suffered by the majority. ‘It was the grey childhood of a petty bourgeois family, in the countryside, in the sticks, with wide-open spaces and narrow, mean interests and values.’3 Perhaps the young Lyova learned some of the realities of life as he kept notes for his father, of how much they were getting for their wheat, how many pounds of grain a peasant had brought for milling, how much the poor peasants were earning.

  Another facet of his childhood was closely associated with his mother, and with the mostly successful efforts she made to imbue her children with a love of knowledge. Trotsky recalled the long winter nights, the house buried in snow higher than the windows, when his mother loved reading to them, stumbling over a word or a complicated phrase, and showing her delight when one of the children offered an explanation. ‘But,’ he wrote, ‘she read with persistence, tirelessly, and during the slack hours on winter days, we could hear the steady hum of her voice as we entered the porch.’4 Perhaps it was on such nights that his mother sowed the seeds of a culture that would soon produce rich fruit.