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Leon TrotskyHe was a mass murderer, not the true champion of the working class.

By Clive James
Posted Monday, April 2, 2007, at 7:06 AM ET
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The following essay is adapted from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, a re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century. Slate is publishing an exclusive selection of these essays, going roughly from A to Z.

Under a totalitarian regime it is the apparatus that implements the dictatorship. But if my hirelings are occupying all the key posts in the apparatus, how is it that Stalin is in the Kremlin and I am in exile?
—Leon Trotsky, quoted by Dmitri Volkogonov in Stalin

Leon Trotsky. Click image to expand.

After being murdered at Stalin's orders, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism. Trotsky could write and orate, he loved women, and he presented enough of a threat to the established Soviet power structure that it should want to track him down to his hiding place in Mexico and rub him out. It followed, or seemed to follow, that Trotsky must have embodied a more human version of the historic force that sacrificed innocent people to egalitarian principle: a version that would sacrifice fewer of them, in a nicer way. Alas, it followed only if the facts were left out.

It was true that Trotsky, in those romantic early days in Paris, was a more attractive adornment to the cafe than Lenin. In the Rotonde, where Amedeo Modigliani settled his bill with drawings and paintings when he lost at craps, Lenin could at least defend "socialist realism" against Fauvist painter Maurice de Vlaminck, whereas Trotsky couldn't even get a job as an artist's model (too small). But the Russian civil war that turned Trotsky into one of the century's most effective amateur generals also unleashed his capacities as a mass murderer. The sailors at Kronstadt, proclaiming their right to opinions of their own about the Revolution, were massacred on his order. The only thing true about Trotsky's legend as some kind of lyrical humanist was that he was indeed unrealistic enough to think that the secretarial duties could safely be left to Stalin. His intolerance of being bored undid him. But his ideas of excitement went rather beyond making love to Frida Kahlo, and at this distance, there are no excuses left for students who find him inspiring. Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution will always be attractive to the kind of romantic who believes that he is being oppressed by global capitalism when he maxes out his credit card. But the idea was already a dead loss before Trotsky was driven into exile in 1929. He lost the struggle against Stalin not because he was less ruthless but because he was less wily.

Trotsky was good at sarcasm. His journalism written in Mexico would have been enough reason on its own for Stalin to nominate him as a target. Pro-Soviet credulity among Western intellectuals was usually proof against logic, but Trotsky had rhetoric: a more penetrating weapon. If Stalin's emissary had not managed to smash Trotsky's head in, his jokes might have made the Moscow show trials sound less convincing. From that viewpoint, Trotsky's murder was not only horrifying, it was untimely. Treachery made it possible, and the subject is still surrounded with a miasma of bad faith. Pablo Neruda was instrumental in smoothing the assassin's path but never wrote a poem on the subject: something to remember when reading the thousands of ecstatic love poems he did write. They are full of wine and roses, but no ice ax is ever mentioned. Admirers of Neruda don't seem to mind. The same capacity for tacit endorsement is shown by Trotsky's admirers, who even today persist in seeing him as some sort of liberal democrat; or, if not as that, then as a true champion of the working class; or anyway, and at the very worst, as one of those large-hearted Old Bolsheviks who might have made the Soviet Union some kind of successfully egalitarian society had they prevailed. But when it became clear that the vast crime called the collectivization of agriculture would involve a massacre of the peasantry, Trotsky's only criticism was that Stalin's campaign was not sufficiently "militarized." He meant that the peasants weren't being massacred fast enough.

We can dignify Trotsky's ruthlessness with the name of realism if we like, but the question abides of just how realistic his ruthlessness would have been if he had won a power struggle against Stalin and stayed on to rule the Soviet Union. As things turned out, there never was a power struggle. Trotsky wasn't interested in the hard grind of running the show: Leave that to Stalin. But—an important but—Trotsky yielded no points to Stalin in the matter of dealing with anybody who dared to contradict him. It was a trick they both inherited from Lenin. Golo Mann said it went back all the way to Marx. Marx's Italian contemporary Giuseppe Maz­zini observed that he had more anger in his heart than love, and that his whole temperament was geared to domination.

We can still see it today, even when totalitarianism is no longer a thing for states, but only for religious fanatics. It is the trick of meeting contradiction by silencing whoever offers it. Trotsky's undoubted fluency as a polemical journalist does not mean that he wouldn't rather have had a gun in his hand. The humanist makes a big mistake in supposing that a literary talent automatically ameliorates the aggressive instinct. Osama Bin Laden has several of Trotsky's characteristics. According to students of Arabic, he commands his native language with vibrant fluency, giving a thrilling sense of its historic depth; he can lead a simple life and make it look enviably stylish, as if asceticism were a luxury; and above all, he can inspire the young to dedicate their lives to an ideal. If the ideals of the caliphate tend to become more elusive on close examination, so did the ideals of communism: but they needed to be incarnated for that very reason. Trotsky lived on after Stalin, and to some extent is still alive today, not because young people want the world he wanted: a phantasm that not even he could define. What they want is to be him.

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Clive James, the author of numerous books of criticism, autobiography, and poetry, writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He lives in London.
Reprinted from Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James © 2007 by Clive James, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company Inc. This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Remarks from the Fray:

It is not something we remember much about today, of course, but the czarist regime was one of history's most benighted -- mourned only by those who know nothing about it's reality. The Czar's government carried out massacres of Jews on as open and regular a basis as did Hitler. [...]

The discussions of my youth centered around whether or not Lenin and Trotsky were justified in the measures taken to overthrow the interim government which replaced the czar after the February Revolution. The interim government had refused to end an obviously unsustainable war with Germany. This meant that it could not hold power for long -- Russia was coming apart at the seams. SOMETHING was going to replace it, and given Russian history that something was probably going to be nasty.

It happened to be Communism -- a new actor on the stage of history. But if it hadn't been Communism, it would have been either a czarist restoration or a military dictatorship. And, indeed, those were exactly the forces that fought the Bolsheviks in the first years after 1917. I saw no merit on their side when I was young and I see none today.

It was the aftermath of the communist takeover, not the fact of it, that matters. Was there a palatable alternative to the brutal regime which grew out of the November Revolution or was it an inevitable outcome? In my youth, I would have been one of those whom James cites who saw possibilities that were attractive and saw Trotsky as their most likely midwife.

I was a fool, James says. Trotsky was the same kind of man Stalin was -- his rule would have been more or less as bloody. This may be true. Not because Trotsky was like Stalin in his character but because if you're going to hold on to power by "any means necessary" in this world, you are going to end up much like Stalin no matter who you are. Either that or you are going to end up dead. The world doesn't give a rat fuck what your intentions are. If you decide that the end justifies the means, you are very, very likely to end up as a butcher.

Those on the right who are inclined to wag their fingers at "socialism" or "Marxism" or "leftists" are advised to remind themselves that they spend much of their time these days defending torture of prisoners, and that they tolerate in their political bailiwick fascists like Ann Coulter who consider mass murder to be perfectly acceptable in defense of...whatever it is that Ann Coulter defends. "The end justifies the means" produced Stalin -- true -- but it also produced Hitler and it did so with the tacit approval of a German capitalist class which made a lot of money in the process. Let him who hath not sinned cast the first stone.

--the_slasher14

(To reply, click here.)

Trotsky was indeed a threat to Stalin and THAT is because he didn't support communism the way Stalin did. Trotsky had a romantic notion of equal rights, equal sharing of the public wealth and resources. The one thing he and Stalin could agree on was that no capitalists planned to give up any of that to make the world a better place.

The sailors (and the many soldiers) who resisted the revolution were in fact armed combatants by all definition. Many soldiers chose to defend the oppressive Czar regime and the virtual slave "serf" owning ultra wealthy who were for the most part friends of the regime. When you chose to "defend" the Czar and his oppressive regime with weapons you indeed were on the losing side of a civil war-this is NOT comparable to unarmed civilians being slaughtered and tossed into a mass grave.

Russia at that time was worse than the USA can imagine-nearly 98% of the wealth and property was owned by less than 1% of the population and those who served that 1% were either those that enforced their will or those who were forced to eek out a living for the right to live like a pauper on their property. This is why so many soldiers chose NOT to protect their leaders and join the revolt.

Trotsky knew the difference between what Marx had in mind and what Stalin actually delivered and for that Stalin had him killed. It is not revisionist to think of Trotsky as a hero of the Russian revolution if you remember just what it was the Russian people were fighting for-something not so far from what America had fought for really. The difference is that the Russians had seen capitalism taken to an ugly extreme-had seen the government side with it to make the vast majority of the people poor-seen competition stifled or even killed. [...]

True that Trotsky was no saint-few revolutionary leaders are-Washington and his army certainly killed a few British too. To call Trotsky a "mass murderer" is revisionist in my opinion. He was a leader of a violent revolution and he died a violent death. Living by the sword tends to result in dying by it.

--RMLReturns

(To reply, click here.)

Neruda may have had his faults-- okay, he had a lot of faults-- but while he may have been pals with one of the people involved in the earlier *failed* assassination attempt, I would be interested in seeing the author's evidence to back up the claim that Neruda was "instrumental" in Trotsky's death.

--MRHULOT2

(To reply, click here.)

Calling the permanent revolution "romantic" is like calling Marxism romantic. Which, of course, liberal capitalists will gladly do, not because there is any truth to such a statement, but because it is an attempt to defame these concepts, of course, not through rational, intellectual argument, but through rhetoric alone. However, it is interesting that such ideas cease to be "romantic" when workers are occupying factories and revolting against the capitalist system -- the word "romantic" is quickly replaced with "immanent threat".

It is interesting that James backs up none of his claims and doesn't mind misinterpreting the ideas of Trotsky's. Concepts of militarism and the permanent revolution go hand in hand. Trotsky's complaint that Stalin was not "militarized" enough is merely a concern that Stalin, and the Soviet Union, were not doing enough to spread the revolution worldwide and liberate the world's oppressed.

There is nothing ruthless about killing your enemies when those enemies are defending an oppressive regime. Human life is not sacrosanct within itself, as so-called "peace-loving" liberals like James claim. Liberal peace is a peace of the oppression of the working class and third world poverty; a state in which the status quo is maintained. A supporter of oppression deserves to die if he is willing to attack workers as they fight for their rights. Some things are worth fighting for, and worth killing for, especially if the people you are killing are supporters of the Czar.

--EMC

(To reply, click here.)

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