Trotsky was right about the military condition of the USSR, even if he did not know everything that was happening in the country: the decapitated Red Army would find it extremely hard to resist the Wehrmacht. He knew Budenny and Voroshilov all too well from the civil war, and they duly demonstrated their utter lack of ability during the Second World War. But he could not have known, for example, that security chief Yezhov wrote to Voroshilov in 1937: ‘Corps Commander Comrade Kapulovsky has sent me a letter from Kiev and asks you to accept it. I summoned him to Moscow where he told me a number of facts that I suggested he write down. I enclose two copies of his statements.’27 Ivan Kapulovsky, an ensign in the tsarist army and a brave officer, was being harassed by suspicion and imminent arrest. What he wrote in his letter to Yezhov was simply a fantastic jumble of statements about more than twenty senior officers, including some of those who would be tried with Tukhachevsky. It did not save him. He was arrested the same year and shot.
It is doubtful if any military system could have remained steadfast if, for instance, it took no more than a single telegram from the chief of NKVD security in the Far East, Mironov, to effect the arrest of twelve senior officers. Mironov’s telegram closed ominously: ‘The arrest of the others is being prepared.’28
Even though he was not informed in detail as to what was happening in the USSR, Trotsky could imagine it with a high degree of accuracy. Pacing the small yard of his home in Coyoacan, he could not but wonder if his predictions would come true.
The Portraitist’s Brush
Some of the most successful and striking of Trotsky’s literary output was in the form of political biographies. In Paris before the First World War, and again after the revolution, he published a wide range of sketches—of Russian and European politicians, revolutionaries, writers and artists—which constitute most of the eighth volume of his collected works. With the onset of the purges and the terror, his portraits tended increasingly to be obituaries. Among his best biographical writing his own autobiography, My Life, must hold pride of place as a work of remarkable self-analysis, as well as imaginative history. Although he wrote it at the relatively early age of forty-eight, soon after his deportation, his life up to then had been eventful enough to merit recording.
For many years, however, the lives of two other revolutionaries, Lenin and Stalin, stood awaiting his portraitist’s brush, and both studies remained unfinished. Trotsky had planned to write a biography of Lenin while his subject was still alive, and he had asked his assistants, Sermuks and Butov, to file everything they could find on his relations with the leader. He did not start work on the book until Lenin died, intending at first merely to publish a book of reminiscences. The Trotsky archives contain a typescript of more than two hundred pages, including published and unpublished articles, some of it published in 1924 as a book entitled On Lenin: Materials for a Biographer. The most striking pieces in this rather fragmentary publication were entitled ‘On his Fiftieth Birthday’, ‘Wounded’, ‘Ill’ and ‘Deceased’. Trotsky noted in the preface that he had intentionally omitted ‘several circumstances as too closely related to the evils of the present day’.29 The publication of the book was evidently decided in haste, as the manuscript bears a note dated 16 October 1924: ‘With the agreement of the State Publishing House, the net proceeds of this publication will be used to provide relief for the men and women worker-victims of the floods of Leningrad …’30
Among Trotsky’s papers there are many indications of his intention ‘to write a book on Lenin’, ‘to speed up the work on the manuscript’, and ‘finally to complete this book’. From Prinkipo he wrote to the Rosmers in Paris that by the autumn he wanted to write a book called ‘Lenin and his Imitators’, and also a collection of ‘personal sketches (of friends and enemies)’ in which Lenin would occupy pride of place.31 Four years later, on 20 February 1934, he would write to his Paris publisher: ‘My work on Lenin has not yet emerged nor will it quickly emerge from the preparatory stage … The first chapters will hardly be ready for translation before July …’32
Only a month before leaving Prinkipo, he had written to his supporter Sara Weber in New York: ‘Our move to France coincides with financial difficulties … In the coming months, nine tenths of my time will be devoted to the work on Lenin.’33 But the time Trotsky and his wife spent in France was not conducive to creative writing, and both in Norway and later in Mexico he was too distracted by persecution, deportation, the Moscow trials and the counter-trial, the founding of the Fourth International, and finally his book on Stalin to be able to concentrate on and complete his study of Lenin. He did not want to rush the writing of this work, which was important to him. After Prinkipo he began to sense that he would end his life in exile, and that his hopes of positive changes in the Soviet Union were increasingly less likely to be realized. The book on Lenin was intended to be a sort of settling of the score with history, and a witness to the lightness of his own case. Lenin, both in the USSR and to the world at large, was still a figure of epoch-making scale, and Trotsky believed, with good reason, that his biography would show that as the second man of the revolution he, Trotsky, had done everything possible to maintain its achievements, its ideals and its hopes. A book of such import could not be written in two or three months, like The Revolution Betrayed. Above all, it must show that it was Trotsky together with Lenin who had tried to save the revolution; the book was to be about the ‘two leaders’ of the Russian revolution.
Trotsky had of course already written of this at length in his autobiography, but he was well aware of Berdyaev’s comment, that ‘this book was written to glorify Trotsky as a great revolutionary and still more to diminish his mortal enemy, Stalin, as a non-entity and pathetic imitator. Undoubtedly, Trotsky stands head and shoulders above the other Bolsheviks in many respects, if one does not count Lenin. Lenin was of course more powerful and a more significant figure, the head of the revolution, no less, but Trotsky was more talented and more brilliant.’34
The former Bolshevik-turned-Menshevik Nikolai Valentinov wrote of the leaders of the October coup in a different tone: ‘Lenin’s originality lay in the fact that his view of himself lacked what is there in most other people’s self-assessment, namely trivial vanity and self-admiration. There was an inordinate amount of just this, for instance, in Trotsky, who was the most prominent figure of the revolution after Lenin. He was not yet forty-eight when he began to write his autobiography and to describe his life and the revolutionary feats he had accomplished in terms of self-glorification.’35 It could as well be argued that Trotsky’s autobiography shows him to be as much a talented writer as a great revolutionary. Being perhaps aware of this, he intended his book on Lenin to reveal his own qualities in greater depth and detail. Regrettably, it remained uncompleted.
As he lived through the vicissitudes of the last phase of his life, Trotsky was obsessed by the idea that he could not make his final exit before he had answered Stalin. To be sure, he had written dozens of devastating articles about the tyrant in the Kremlin. Indeed, he could barely write any political article that did not include some scathingly worded disclosure about Stalin. But nothing would satisfy the craving to utter the last word better than to write a major analytical biography. He had been thinking along these lines for some time. As early as August 1930 he had written a long article entitled ‘Towards a Political Biography of Stalin’,36 which was in effect a short outline of the future book. His objective was not merely to show Stalin as Cain, but also to illuminate the genetic origins of Stalinism as the embodiment of ‘bureaucratic absolutism’.
In many respects Trotsky’s incomplete biography of Stalin was one of his least successful books, and in places Trotsky’s talent as a political journalist, historian and thinker seems to have deserted him, subverted by the bile and hatred that motivated him. Despite this, he did succeed in defining many sources of Stalinism, in the growth of the state and Party organizations, the rapid strengthening of the all-powerful bureaucracy, and the eliminatio
n of political, spiritual and intellectual alternatives in society. Trotsky, however, was also utterly un-self-critical, unable to write of his own shortcomings and seemingly unaware that the chief flaws in the system which he began to attack after October 1923 had emanated from himself and Lenin, the Jacobins-in-chief of the revolution. Many of Trotsky’s totalitarian ideas materialized in the new state. He was one of the chief architects of ‘bureaucratic absolutism’, though he showed no awareness of it in any of his writings.
He regarded his deportation as illegal, even if, as his son Lev pointed out on Prinkipo, it had undoubtedly saved his life—for the time being. Yet the practice of deporting political undesirables had first been used when he was in power, and far from denouncing it, he had been in strong support of it as normal revolutionary practice. In an article entitled ‘Our Differences’, written in 1924 but not published at once, Trotsky wrote: ‘Revolutions have often failed because the working masses were spineless, indecisive and too good-natured … A revolution can survive only if it changes its very character into a more severe form and arms itself with the sword of Red terror … The Red terror was an essential weapon of the revolution.’37 Once in exile, Trotsky rightly condemned Stalin’s terror, while managing to omit his own previous views on the role of violence in the revolutionary restructuring of society. He rationalized this by stressing the difference between the civil war years, when he had used terror against the state’s enemies, and the peaceful conditions of the 1930s, when it was being used against the state’s own people. As late as 1938 he could still justify the 1918 decree on hostage-taking by calling it ‘a necessary measure against the oppressors’.38
Trotsky found writing the book on Stalin extremely hard. He felt himself unable to apply his usual standards of analysis, comparison and objective scrutiny of the factors that would give colour, shape and form to the sinister portrait he was creating, and complained to Natalya: ‘It’s hard going. It’s incredibly hard to write calmly about the swine. It’s easier to pour a bottle of black ink on the paper. I can only write about this Cain that way.’ He showed her a fragment of what he had written. It read: ‘Stalinist methods take to the limit, to the highest tension and to the point of absurdity, all the lying, cruel, base devices that constitute the mechanism for ruling any class society. Stalinism is a clot of all the deformities of the historic state, its malign caricature, a revolting grimace.’39 All this was undoubtedly justified, but when a text is dominated by the endless incantation of such phrases as ‘the political gangrene of Stalinism’, ‘Stalinism is the hangover of the revolution’, or ‘Stalinism is counter-revolutionary banditry’, the effect is bound to pall eventually. Hatred is not the artist’s best friend.
Recalling the last days of his membership of the Central Committee, Trotsky wrote that by 1927 Central Committee sessions had become disgusting spectacles. Questions were not discussed on their merits, but everything was decided behind the scenes in private session with Stalin. The line of attack against the opposition was prearranged, with roles and speeches previously assigned:
When the comedy was staged, each time it more closely resembled an obscene and rowdy bar-room burlesque. The tone of that baiting became more unbridled. The more impudent members, the climbers most recently admitted to the Central Committee, exclusively in recognition of their capacity for impudence towards the Opposition, continuously interrupted … veteran revolutionists with senseless repetitions of baseless accusations, with shouts of unheard-of vulgarity and abusiveness. The stage director of all this was Stalin. He walked up and down at the back of the praesidium, looking now and then towards those to whom certain speeches were assigned, and made no attempt to hide his approval when the swearing addressed to some Oppositionist assumed an utterly shameless character.40
To the extent that he concentrated on depicting his subject’s image in the most damaging light, Trotsky began to lose sight of the essential, but then he seems to have become aware of this and again focused on the social and political analysis of the phenomenon of Stalinism, rather than its progenitor.
On the question of Stalin as the natural heir of Lenin, Trotsky was especially scathing:
The current official comparisons of Stalin to Lenin are simply indecent. If the basis of comparison is sweep of personality, it is impossible to place Stalin even alongside Mussolini and Hitler. However meagre the ‘ideas’ of Fascism, both of the victorious leaders of reaction, the Italian and the German, from the very beginning of their respective movements displayed initiative, roused the masses to action, pioneered new paths through the political jungle. Nothing of the kind can be said about Stalin. The Bolshevik Party was created by Lenin. Stalin grew out of its political machine and remained inseparable from it.41
The creation of Stalin’s portrait by Trotsky may be the only occasion in history when the sitter killed the painter before the work was done. At least, it was fitting that Trotsky was working on it when he was assassinated.
Chronicler of the Revolution
Trotsky’s historical writing bears the clear imprint of personal experience. Perhaps it is for this reason that we find in it not only the ‘stages’, ‘periods’ and ‘epochs’ of human evolution that are the stock-in-trade of most historical literature, but also feel the surge of emotions, the will and the mind of the dramatis personae who populate its pages. For Trotsky, history was an endless gallery of individuals, fighting, confused, possessed, acting in accordance with the objective (and Marxist) laws of development. Compared with many other writers of the revolutionary period, Trotsky did not confine himself merely to chronicling events, but strove for the philosophical heights of history-writing. The past for him was a drama of ideas and of people.
No other Marxist ever attempted, as Trotsky did, to write the history of the three Russian revolutions, and throughout it is the Bolshevik version that he gives. Of 1905 he wrote: ‘The revolution came and completed the period of our political childhood. It consigned to the archives our traditional liberalism and its sole attribute: its faith in the successful replacement of government figures.’42 As a radical revolutionary, he blamed the indecisiveness of the liberals for the failure to bring about a nationwide uprising. The revolution that was to be organized by the Marxists, therefore, would come as the result of a ‘merciless struggle with liberalism for the minds of the masses’.43 The numerous articles he wrote on the 1905 revolution were less true history than impulsive responses to events, but he was nevertheless sufficiently attached to what he had written to submit significant amendments to the Institute for Party History in 1921, when it was researching the period.44 At this point, when he was as it were measuring himself for the historian’s mantle, there was only a very rare mention of himself in his writings, none of the historical egocentrism of which later historians would accuse him.
Trotsky made his first serious attempt to recount the October revolution only a matter of months after the event. At the Brest-Litovsk peace talks he spent his evenings writing a brief account which went into many editions, in Russia and abroad, as a short book. But it was not until he reached the age of fifty that he became a real historian. It was then that he wrote his History of the Russian Revolution, a work agreed by most to be his best, alongside his autobiography. Had he never written another word, his reputation as a talented historical writer would have been assured by these two works.
The History, a work of nearly fifty chapters and appendices, unfolds a vast canvas in two acts, February and October 1917. The sole existing draft of the book is now located in the Hoover Institution at Stanford, California. It found its way there because Boris Nicolaevsky, who had fled Europe for the USA on the eve of the Second World War, transferred his archives—and himself—to Stanford in 1963. How Trotsky’s manuscript came to be in Nicolaevsky’s hands is not entirely clear. Before leaving Norway for Mexico, Trotsky had transferred part of his archives to the Institute of Historical Research in Paris, where Nicolaevsky was then working. On the night of 6 November 1936, as we
know, a burglary took place and the material, weighing some eighty kilograms, was taken. Most of the papers, including manuscripts, articles and correspondence, were spirited away bit by bit to Moscow, many of them being shown personally to Stalin. Notes from Yezhov were passed regularly to Stalin by his assistant, Poskrebyshev, for example: ‘Top secret. To Central Committee Secretary, Comrade Stalin. I enclose 103 letters taken from Trotsky’s archives in Paris. The letters contain Trotsky’s correspondence with the American Trotskyist Eastman and his wife Yelena Vasilievna Krylenko for 1929-1933.’45
A Menshevik, Boris Nikolaevsky had spent many years as the unofficial archivist of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, and had amassed a large and important collection in the process. He arrived in the USA in the year of Trotsky’s death, and in New York he continued the work of sorting, classifying and editing the vast quantity of correspondence and research that was in his hands. Assisted for many years by Anna Mikhailovna Burgina, the long-time companion of another Menshevik, Irakli Tsereteli, and who became Nikolaevsky’s wife late in life, Nikolaevsky realized in time that a proper institutional home was needed for his important property. As the Russian exile community dwindled and resources, such as they were, disappeared, he approached several universities for a solution. Only the Hoover Institution realized that the custodian was inseparable from the collection, and in 1963 it offered both Nikolaevsky and Burgina tenured posts as official curators of the Nikolaevsky Collection at Stanford. The Trotsky part of the collection includes manuscripts of books and correspondence dating from the first half of his last exile, when he was on Prinkipo. One of the great rarities of the collection is the manuscript of his History of the Russian Revolution.
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