Old Man Trotsky

A long and thought-provoking review by Christopher Hitchens of of Isaac Deutscher's three-part biography of Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein) in the July/August issue of Atlantic Online tries to revive the perception of the Russian revolutionary as "the Old Man" - a "prophetic moralist". To anyone who has spent time in the study of Russian history and culture, the concept of Trotsky as a moralist will seem a strange assertion. Atter all, it was Trotsky who, with Lenin, conspired at the creation of an evil totalitarianism that spanned most of the twentieth century, caused incalculable human suffering, and claimed the lives of untold millions of people.

On what does Hitchens base his support for this perception? Mainly, it seems, on the notion that Trotsky predicted the fall of Norwegian democracy, and the rise of Vidkun Quisling:

Most haunting of all, perhaps, was the moment when Trotsky, hounded from country to country, was ordered by the Norwegian government in 1936 to move on. An agitation against him had been started by Moscow's agents, who had not yet made their pact with Hitler, and by Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the Norwegian Fascists, whose name would later become synonymous with collaboration. The invertebrate Social-Democratic government of Trygve Lie, who was subsequently the founding secretary-general of the United Nations, caved in and told Trotsky to stop writing or else submit to deportation. Trotsky told these gentlemen,

"This is your first act of surrender to Nazism in your own country. You will pay for this. You think yourselves secure and free to deal with a political exile as you please. But the day is near—remember this!—the day is near when the Nazis will drive you from your country, all of you."


Hitchens also discerns what he calls two "moral moments" in Trotsky's political career. The first of these, he asserts, occurred during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, when Trotsky "saw that all parties in the conflict were being manipulated by the 'Great' Powers in a cynical rehearsal for a larger war, and he believed that in all the contending countries there were healthy democratic and socialist elements that could rise above crudity and superstition." The second "moral moment" took place nearly two decades later:

As Hitler was advancing toward power in Germany, the European left once again abandoned its nerve and its principles, and declined to make common cause. The most depraved offender was Stalin's Communist International, which insisted that the Social Democrats were a greater enemy than the Nazis, and which implied that a victory by Hitler would merely clear the way for a Communist triumph. In a series of articles that really do vibrate with the tones of Cassandra, Trotsky inveighed against this mixture of ugly realpolitik and cretinous irresponsibility.

Hitchens writes of it being difficult to re-read these articles "even today without a tingling in the scalp and a lump in the throat... Better than Freud or Reich (or Churchill), Trotsky intuited the sheer psychopathic element that underlay the mass appeal of fascism..."

Such a statement seems to leave entirely out of account that it was from the paranoid, homicidal thinking of Lenin and Trotsky that the European fascists originally derived their muddled and dangerous ideas - a point that is made with admirable clarity by Oriana Fallaci in her recent book La Forza della Ragione, as she demonstrates the early adherence of Benito Mussolini to the extreme left wing of Italian politics, the Settimana Rossa: "He had been in prison with Nenni, had directed Avanti!, eulogized the storming of the Winter Palace, admired Lenin and Trotsky. His National Fascist Party was not a party of the right. Like Hitler's National Socialist Party, it was or wanted to be or said it was a revolutionary party." (p. 206)

Hitchens is at pains to show Trotsky as a sensitive, caring Russian intellectual, "for whom in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough..."

He always had the Russian classics in mind, and though these did seem to invoke the committed life as the highest calling, they also supplied ample warning of defeat and disappointment, if not despair. George Steiner cites a favorite passage of mine from Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. It describes one of his escapes from Siberian exile, in which he succeeded in boarding a train under his real name, Lev Davidovitch Bronstein.

"In my hands, I had a copy of the Iliad in the Russian hexameter of Gnyeditch; in my pocket, a passport made out in the name of Trotsky, which I wrote in it at random, without even imagining that it would become my name for the rest of my life ... Throughout the journey, the entire car full of passengers drank tea and ate cheap Siberian buns. I read the hexameters and dreamed of the life abroad. The escape proved to be quite without romantic glamour; it dissolved into nothing but an endless drinking of tea."

Hitchens' reference to - and apparent endorsement of - this kind of sentimentalism is, I believe, dangerous, for it ignores central testimonies of twentieth century Russian literature, such as the two volumes of memoirs by Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose central aim in writing those volumes was not only to chronicle the disaster that befell her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, as a universal disaster for Russian and European culture and civilization, but also to demonstrate the falsehoods that characterized the view of the Russian revolution from the West - particularly as expressed in the writings and utterances of Western intellectuals.

One can only suppose that Hitchens, in writing of Trotsky as he does, is in some way reflecting his background as someone who has emerged from the left that briefly stormed the barricades in 1968, during the "revolution" of the so-called "New Left". I remember the shock - it was a culture shock, but it was also much more than that - I felt when, after spending the years 1967-69 in Cambridge, England, I travelled to the Soviet Union for my second period of research as a British Council exchange scholar (I was writing a dissertation on the work of the Russian symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky), and encountered face-to-face students from North Vietnam and Cuba, who left me in no doubt of their revolutionary intent: it was to destroy the West, and everything it stood for.

Having read Hitchens' review again, I can't help wondering whether, if he had actually spent some extended periods of time in the USSR, he would not write of Trotsky, and of Bolshevism, as he does in his review. Perhaps the real problem for the European and American left - even for those members of it who have "seen the light" and, like Hitchens, have developed away from the constrictions of left-wing thinking - is that cultural and political divide that still separates East from West. The problem is the reality of the Soviet Union and its terrible heritage which, contrary to what is claimed so glibly in many sections of our Western media, has not disappeared but continues to survive in new and altered forms - not only in Russia itself, but also in other parts of the world, in China, North Korea, even in totalitarian states such as those of Syria and Iran. As for Deutscher - surely it is time to put his misguided trilogy to rest, rather than resuscitate it in this extravagant and unseemly way.