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BEHIND
THE
MYTH
Trotsky:
A
Biography
By
Robert
Service
(Macmillan
624pp
25)
This
has
never
been
a
terribly
plausible
view
of
the
man
who
welcomed
the
ruthless
crushing
of
the
Kronstadt
workers
and
sailors
when
they
demanded
a
more
pluralist
system
of
government
in
1921,
and
who
defended
the
systematic
use
of
terror
against
opponents
of
the
Soviet
state
until
his
dying
day.
Introducing
a
system
of
hostage-taking
in
the
Civil
War
and
consistently
supporting
the
trial
and
execution
of
dissidents
(Mensheviks,
Social
Revolutionaries,
liberal
Kadets,
nationalists
and
others),
Trotsky
never
hesitated
to
endorse
repression
against
those
who
stood
in
the
way
of
communist
power.
This
much
has
long
been
clear,
but
the
full
extent
of
Trotsky's
role
in
building
Soviet
totalitarianism
has
not
been
detailed
-
until
now.
Rigorously
researched,
covering
Trotsky's
education
and
upbringing,
his
life
as
an
migr
before
the
revolution,
his
time
as
a
military
leader,
his
losing
battle
with
Stalin,
his
women,
his
life
as
an
exile
and
his
assassination,
Robert
Service's
new
biography
discloses
a
man
very
different
from
the
one
celebrated
by
bien
pensants.
The
author
of
distinguished
biographies
of
Lenin
and
Stalin,
Service
is
eminently
qualified
to
set
Trotsky
in
his
historical
context.
Here
Service
surpasses
himself,
and
produces
a
life
that
is
genuinely
revelatory.
Trotsky's
lifelong
effort
to
distance
himself
from
his
Jewish
background
-
'The
workers
are
dearer
to
me
than
all
the
Jews,'
Service
reports
him
saying
-
is
carefully
and
sensitively
examined.
There
is
an
interesting
discussion
of
Trotsky's
attempt
to
fashion
a
distinctive
philosophical
position
for
himself
(despite
having
a
commendably
unorthodox
interest
in
Freud,
he
was
no
more
successful
than
Lenin
in
this
regard).
The
book
is
rich
in
telling
detail.
The
young
Trotsky
liked
to
dominate
the
independent-minded
women
revolutionaries
in
his
circle,
and
to
this
end
studied
carefully
Schopenhauer's
The
Art
of
Controversy,
a
guide
to
debating
tricks.
Trotsky
was
'an
intellectual
bully',
Service
writes,
who
'relished
wounding
his
opponents'.
None
of
this
is
flattering
to
Trotsky,
but
Service
is
always
scrupulously
balanced.
The
result
is
a
powerfully
demystifying
biography
of
one
of
the
most
heavily
mythologised
figures
of
twentieth-century
history.
Western
historians
have
largely
accepted
Trotsky's
self-serving
account
of
his
opposition
to
Stalin's
policies
and
methods,
but
the
differences
between
the
two
leaders
were
more
limited
than
has
been
commonly
believed.
Trotsky
favoured
moving
quickly
to
central
planning
and
collective
farming,
and
shared
Stalin's
view
of
the
need
to
isolate
the
kulaks
(richer
peasants).
Far
from
being
more
liberal
than
Stalin,
during
the
New
Economic
Policy
(NEP)
he
blamed
Stalin
for
sheltering
Menshevik
economists.
It
was
Trotsky
who
pushed
ahead
with
the
'militarisation
of
labour',
which
imposed
army-style
discipline
and
punishment
on
Soviet
workers.
Hailed
as
an
apostle
of
cultural
freedom
because
of
his
interest
in
the
arts,
Trotsky
believed
as
much
as
Stalin
did
that
culture
must
be
assessed
(and
policed)
in
terms
of
its
political
correctness.
Trotsky's
influential
essay
Literature
and
Revolution,
Service
writes,
'was
essentially
a
work
of
political
reductionism.
When
all
is
said
and
done,
it
was
Trotsky
who
laid
down
the
philosophical
foundations
for
cultural
Stalinism.'
It
is
often
claimed
that
Trotsky's
superiority
was
in
his
analysis
of
the
European
situation.
In
fact
his
views
on
international
affairs
were
far-fetched
in
the
extreme.
It
is
true
that
he
grasped
the
threat
posed
by
Nazism
more
clearly
than
Stalin.
Even
so,
he
shared
Stalin's
vulgar-Marxist
interpretation
of
Hitler
as
a
'tool
of
German
finance-capital',
never
acknowledging
the
high
levels
of
mass
support
Hitler
had
achieved
among
the
German
working
class.
Right
up
to
his
assassination
in
August
1940,
Trotsky
believed
Europe
was
on
the
brink
of
proletarian
revolution.
When
Nazi
power
was
at
its
height
he
was
still
talking
seriously
of
a
revolt
of
German
workers
against
Hitler
and
claiming
that
Finnish
peasants
would
welcome
Stalin
as
their
liberator.
Trotsky
may
have
seen
the
Nazi
danger,
but
if
his
analysis
of
events
had
been
accepted
Nazi
Germany
would
never
have
been
defeated.
Throughout
the
catastrophes
of
the
1930s
he
was
consistently
hostile
to
liberal
democracy.
In
October
1939
he
was
praising
the
Comintern
for
remaining
neutral
in
the
European
war.
In
July
1940
he
wrote
that
the
Trotskyite
Fourth
International
should
join
the
Comintern,
refuse
to
support
Britain
against
Germany
and
oppose
American
entry
into
the
conflict.
What
was
needed
was
'a
people's
referendum
on
the
war',
which
would
reveal
to
American
workers
'the
futility
of
their
democracy'.
There
is
something
ludicrous
in
the
spectacle
of
Trotsky
scorning
the
futility
of
democracy
at
a
time
when
Hitler
had
almost
extinguished
it
in
Europe.
But
it
is
of
a
piece
with
an
entire
life
of
self-
deception.
As
Service
writes,
Trotsky
'had
matchless
self-righteousness'.
In
The
Revolution
Betrayed
(written
in
1936)
he
admitted
that
the
Soviet
Union
was
like
Hitler's
Germany,
a
totalitarian
state.
He
never
admitted
any
responsibility
for
bringing
the
Soviet
version
of
totalitarianism
into
being.
But
along
with
Lenin
he
had
created
the
system
that
Stalin
inherited
and
used
for
ends
with
which
Trotsky
generally
sympathised.
Inhumanly
ruthless
in
his
dealings
with
non-Bolsheviks
and
at
the
same
time
thoroughly
inept
in
his
relations
with
Stalin,
Trotsky
was
too
vain
and
self-deceiving
to
merit
the
status
of
tragic
hero
accorded
him
by
Western
admirers.
Undoubtedly
he
was
courageous,
and
it
can
hardly
be
denied
that
he
was
a
key
player
in
some
of
the
formative
conflicts
of
the
last
century.
But
in
the
end
it
is
impossible
to
see
him
as
other
than
an
absurd
figure,
a
fantasist
seeking
to
found
a
paradise
who
helped
build
a
hell
on
earth.
Had
Trotsky
prevailed
in
his
struggle
with
Stalin,
would
the
world
today
be
in
better
shape
-
or
would
it
actually
be
worse?
It
is
a
question
Robert
Service
does
not
answer.
But
he
has
given
us
the
best
biography
of
Trotsky
to
date,
and
there
seems
little
reason
why
anyone
should
write
another.
Trotsky: A Biography by Robert Service
The Sunday Times review by Robert Harris
On August 20, 1940 an agent of the Soviet intelligence services came up behind the seated figure of Leon
Trotsky and smashed an ice pick into the top of his skull with such force it penetrated three inches into his
brain. Trotsky, according to his assassin, gave out a piteous, shattering cry and in a final spasm of furious
energy threw himself onto me and bit my left hand.
The murder was ordered by Stalin, whose policy towards his enemies he once summed up laconically as,
One man, one problem; no man, no problem. But the assassination proved to be a serious political
mistake. Trotsky became a martyr 200,000 mourners lined the streets of Mexico City to watch his funeral
and in the years that followed a potent myth gathered around him: if only, his adherents argued, it had
been Trotsky who had succeeded Lenin and not Stalin, then the USSR might have been spared its famines
and its terrors, its show trials and its denials of freedom, and could have established communism with a
human face 60 years before Gorbachev.
Now, 50 years after the last full-scale biography of Trotsky in English, Robert Service has turned his
attention to this myth and has, effectively, assassinated Trotsky all over again. He tries to be fair. That
Trotsky had immense personal courage is indisputable. That he was one of the 20th centurys great orators
and polemicists is also in no doubt (in an arresting comparison, Service writes that among his political
contemporaries only Churchill equalled him as a prose stylist). He was personally incorruptible, even
priggish, disliking tobacco, alcohol and smutty stories. Money and luxury meant nothing to him. He liked the
novels of Georges Simenon.
But after that, Service more or less runs out of positive things to say, and the detail on the debit side is
mountainous. If one can imagine the most obnoxious middle-class student radical one has ever met bitter,
sneering, arrogant, selfish, cocky, callous, callow, blinkered and condescending and if one freezes that
image, applies a pair of pince-nez and transports it back to the beginning of the last century, then one has
Trotsky.
Born in another age, Trotsky might have whiled away his time harmlessly enough on a small private income,
calling for a workers revolution while never actually doing any physical work himself. It was his hatred of his
parents, or at any rate their type poor Jewish farmers who, by hard work and innovation, managed to build
up a profitable business that animated Trotsky. There is no creature, he wrote in 1935, more disgusting
than a petit bourgeois engaged in primary accumulation. The absurd exaggeration (no creature?) and lapse
into jargon is pure Trotsky.
But cometh the hour, cometh the man, and in St Petersburg in 1917 it was Trotsky every bit as ruthless
and clear-sighted as Lenin who recognised that in a revolutionary situation power will always flow to the
most fanatical. I tell you, heads must roll, blood must flow, he told the Kronstadt sailors. 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 it in every city. It was Trotsky who whipped up the workers and soldiers by his
speeches, who urged the storming of the Winter Palace, who insisted that the Bolsheviks must maintain their
grip on power by the institutionalised use of terror (the organised violence of the workers as applied to the
bourgeoisie) and who insisted that ministers must henceforth become commissars.
Service makes it absolutely plain that Trotskyism was Stalinism in embryo. As early as 1922 he came up
with the idea of staging trials of the regimes political enemies that would have, in his cynical words, the -
character of a finished political production show trials, in other words. As commander of the Red Army,
he favoured hostage-taking and summary executions. According to Service, he implemented a policy of
decimating regiments which deserted or showed cowardice under fire military discipline on the field of a
harshness barely seen since the Roman legions. At times it seemed that Trotsky and Stalin were competing
for the status of the most brutal commissar.
It may be wondered why, given such lack of squeamishness, Trotsky allowed himself to be defeated by
Stalin for the Soviet leadership after Lenins death. It was certainly not that he was a nicer man: years later,
two of his most devoted followers agreed that Trotsky entirely lacked a feeling for others as individuals and
that he has no humanity; its entirely absent from him. Indeed, contrary to popular belief, Stalin had far
more charm at a human level and would take endless pains to humour obscure party officials who might one
day do him some good. Trotsky, in contrast, would sit ostentatiously reading French novels in politburo
meetings when other speakers bored him. His biting sarcasm made even thugs such as the chief of the
secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, afraid of opening their mouths.
This personal coldness extended even to Lenin, the only man who ever gained any kind of psychological
dominance over him, and by far the hardest of the troika who established the USSR. (Compared to Lenin,
Molotov once observed, Stalin was a kitten.) After Lenin suffered his stroke in 1922, Trotsky never went to
visit him. Service makes it clear that Trotsky could have been Lenins heir if he had shown even the most
basic ability to make alliances in the politburo. But he failed to exploit his opportunities. It was not just Stalins
cunning that defeated him; it was his own intellectual arrogance.
In 1927, the 15th Party Congress voted to expel Trotsky from the party. In 1928 he went into internal exile. In
1929 he was deported to Turkey, which only agreed to take him in return for a guarantee from Moscow that
he would not be assassinated. Thereafter, Trotsky drifted around the world to France, to Norway and
finally to Mexico making a living by writing (for his History of the Russian Revolution he was paid $45,000
by the Saturday Evening Post), dreaming of world revolution and bitterly complaining that the bourgeois
democracies that he wished to obliterate would not allow him to settle within their borders.
At no point in his denunciations of Stalin did Trotsky acknowledge that the violence and cynicism of the
Soviet state might, in large part, be the inevitable consequences of the regime they had created together. His
system of thinking that the proletariat was the progressive class, that the Communist party was the party
of the proletariat, and that therefore the Communist party was the progressive party and must have a
monopoly of power was entirely closed: a mantra in place of reasoning. Whatever might happen, Trotsky
would never stop believing: I shall still pass into non-existence with indestructible confidence in the victory of
a cause I have served all my life.
This is not political thinking: this is a secular version of religious fundamentalism. It bears out the wisdom of
RH Tawneys observation in the 1930s that being a communist seems to put a kink in the brain which can
never be straightened out. Seldom has the pathology of the revolutionary type, and its murderous -
consequences, been more mercilessly exposed than in this exemplary biography.