The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. I
By , tr. by
[Simon & Schuster, $4.00]
FIFTEEN years after the February days comes this long-anticipated chronicle by the exiled Trotsky — military genius in class war, revolutionist, historian with a ‘scientific conscience,’ engineer of ‘permanent’ as well as world revolution, and supreme master of polemic writing. As a record and an interpretation by the second most important manipulator of events which shook the world, this work has enduring value. Trotsky’s account of how the 1917 revolution was engineered divides into two volumes. The first, now published, shows how the Bolsheviks helped the February revolution along to chaos; the second, yet to come, how they merged their forces into the October triumph. Meanwhile, a Soviet decree of February 21, 1932, bars Trotsky from Russian soil forever.
The story of 1917 is roughly known. Trotsky supplies the infinite details, and a new interpretation, based on a profound study of past revolutions and episodes in the long history of class struggle, as well as on documents of 1917. In philosophizing on the reasons why a backward nation was the first to put the proletariat in power, he ciles the law of ‘combined development’ as the key to the riddle of 1917. To bring the Soviet State into being it was necessary to combine a peasant war (the movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development) and a proletarian insurrection (the movement signalizing its decline), harnessing both steeds to the chariot of revolution so that Russia could accomplish in a few months what advanced countries had achieved in the travail of the centuries. As for the inevitableness of the revolution, he writes: ‘To that historic flood which was rolling its billows each one closer to the gates of the palace, the last Romanov opposed only a dumb indifference,’ while ’the Siberian Christ with a scar on his skull’ (Rasputin) ruled an empire which carried matured revolution in its womb. Nevertheless, says Trotsky, the proletariat, despite the million and more workers on political strike during the months before the war in 1914, could not possibly have come to power if the bourgeoisie had had the ability and desire to solve the agrarian problem.
Trotsky decries the popular notion that the February revolution was spontaneous. The art of revolutionary leadership, he declares, consists nine tenths in ability to divine the mood of the masses, which Renin possessed to an unexcelled degree. The fate of every revolution lies in the army. The psychological moment when the soldiers go over to the revolution is prepared by a long molecular process. In a dramatic chapter the author seems to relive such moments of suspense: the officer snaps out orders to fire; the crowd answers with screams of terror and threat, drowning out the commands; the rifles waver; the officer trains his pistol on the most suspicious soldier. At the critical instant; the officer is shot down by a revolutionist planted in the crowd, and the soldiers rush to embrace their brothers. Such moments decide the fate of revolutions.
Notable, also, is Trotsky’s analysis of the ‘ dual power from February to October, the conflict of authority between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. He presents fresh information on the ‘sealed train’ episode — how Lenin, raging in his Zurich cage, thought of false whiskers, and even of traveling as a deaf-and-dumb Scandinavian, but finally had to make an ‘international’ treaty with the Hohenzollerns in order to get to Petrograd. There is no mention, however, of the charge that the ‘explosive trainload’ of thirty emigrant Bolsheviks received German gold. Trotsky dwells upon the fact that Lenin had first of all to conquer the Bolsheviks on the scene (including Stalin), who had permitted the flabby régime of ‘dual power’; had to make the party understand its mission and so take the ‘road to October.’ Lenin’s Thesis of April 4, says Trotsky, passed over the work of the party like the wet sponge of a teacher erasing what had been written on the blackboard by a confused pupil.
Too much credit cannot be given to Max Eastman for his translation and his footnotes. His command of powerful English permits a faithful rendering of Trotsky’s rapid style in narrative. The book fairly roars with revolution.
BRUCE HOPPER