Trotsky Versus Stalin

by FREDERICK L. SCHUMAN

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FEW neurotics are geniuses. But many geniuses are neurotics. Lev Davidovich Bronstein was more than a little of both. This son of a prosperous Jewish farmer was born in the Ukraine in 1879. He died in Coyoacan in 1940 at the hands of an assassin who accused him of “betraying Trotskyism.” His fiery career spanned the years between the coming of Marxism to the Muscovite Tsardom and the building of Soviet Socialism by the Party of Stalin. He flirted with Menshevism and earned the bitter contempt of Lenin, who denounced him intermittently from 1904 to the early months of 1917. In the heroic epoch of the great adventure, he joined the Bolsheviks (August, 1917), served brilliantly as Commissar of Foreign Affairs and later of War, and helped mightily to save the Soviet state from its foes, even though the guardians of Stalinist orthodoxy prefer to ignore or suppress the fact.

Ultimately Trotsky became the victim of a psychosomatic illness that waxed steadily as the life of Lenin slowly waned and flickered out. In his own words, Trotsky suffered from “a dogged, mysterious infection, the nature of which still remains a mystery to my physicians.” He indulged increasingly in false analyses of Soviet and world politics and repeatedly violated Party discipline. He was darkly convinced, like all paranoiacs, that he was the target of a “plot.” In the years of his exile he found spiritual sustenance in the venom of his own hatred. At the same time — since he was still a genius, albeit selffrustrated and foredoomed to failure — he became a symbol and tool of all the enemies of the U.S.S.R.

His last book, unfinished at the time of his death, was a “biography” of Stalin, subtitled “An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence.” Translated and edited by Charles Malamuth, it was “ready for publication at the time of the Pearl Harbor disaster,” say Harper & Brothers, but was then “postponed until after the end of the war.” It appears now, in the spring of 1946 (price, $5.00), when the market for anti-Soviet literature is again good and when it is once more respectable to meet the demand. In 500 crowded pages containing almost 300,000 words (including the index and appendices) and embellished with 36 photographs, the dead Trotsky, eagerly aided by his “editor,” fires his last salvos at the enemy.

Like most of Trotsky’s writings, Stalin is a literary tour de force, brilliant despite the author’s pettiness, false premises, and frequent lapses into tedious hair-splitting. Like most of Trotsky’s political acts, the book fails of its purpose. It is a polemic by a revolutionary for whom politics had become an agony of intolerance and self-pity. The war that deferred its publication has also refuted its thesis. The new crusaders against Bolshevism will use it as a weapon, though the blade is blunt and rusty. Those who accuse Stalin of fostering world revolution will gladly wield Trotsky’s sword, despite the fact that Stalin’s cardinal sin in Trotsky’s eyes was the betrayal of world revolution. War, like politics, makes strange bedfellows.

Serious students of Russian affairs will find the work baffling. Each page teems with quotations, but, as in the English version of Souvarine’s Stalin (which Trotsky alternately praises and condemns), there is no documentation. Trotsky, ever certain of his own infallibility, states in his Introduction that “bibliographical references . . . would only burden the text” and that its authenticity is “guaranteed” by the fact that the author does not know of a “single instance of any anti-Trotskyite writings that contain a single reference to incorrect use of source material.”

Those prepared to take Trotsky on faith will be strengthened in their faith by Mr. Malamuth’s footnotes, glossary, and chronology — where, for example, it is boldly asserted, without a shred of evidence, that Trotsky was “assassinated by [an] OGPU agent.” Despite brackets, stars, and small print, it is often difficult to ascertain in the later chapters what is Trotsky and what is Malamuth. The editor discloses his own motives and modus operandi by his thanks to Trotsky’s widow and secretary and by his “ very special appreciation . . . for extremely valuable critical comments” to Alexander Barmine, whose article in the Reader’s Digest Goebbels found useful, and to Max Eastman, brother-in-law of a victim of the purge and professional defamer of the U.S.S.R.

The closing chapter is a jumble, as are the two “Supplements,” entitled “The Thermidorean Reaction” and “Kinto (Hooligan) In Power.” Through generous use of insult and invective, Malamuth does succeed in “conveying the spirit of the author,” as Angelica Balabanoff claims in a blurb. But he succeeds in little’ else within the normal scope of an editor’s function. Only the naive will be misled by the pretensions of disinterestedness with which this book is clothed. Its author and its editor and his advisers all have axes to grind.

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THIS volume is less a contribution to history or biography than an exercise in demonography. Since Marxism is a creed of class conflict, it is not strange that its disciples should be vials of wrath. Neither is it astonishing that Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and Trotskyites should hate one another more fanatically than they hate the “lackeys of the bourgeoisie,” for in all religious feuds heretics are more detestable than infidels. What is surprising is that so many of the apostles of Marx, despite their training in interpreting motives in impersonal terms of economic interests and class ideologies, ultimately arrive at a belief in fiends in human form. In Stalinist literature, Trotsky is Satan. In Trotskyite literature, Stalin is Beelzebub. Social processes and political change are herewith explained not in terms of dialectical materialism but in terms of personal diabolism.

Trotsky’s purpose here was to portray the Devil. Recognizing that epithets alone are unconvincing and that ritualist orgies to exorcise evil spirits are unimpressive to the sophisticated, he obviously decided to give the Devil his due and to dress up his philippic in the garments of scholarly objectivity. But the “scholarship” soon becomes pedantry and the “objectivity” is soon vanquished by fierce passion. Trotsky’s technique of denigration oscillates between two themes: Stalin is a mediocrity, a halfwit, and a gross, stupid dunderhead; Stalin is a monster of immorality, a spook from Gehenna and a ghoulish incarnation of unbelievable viciousness.

It follows that the occasional manifestations of wisdom or virtue which Trotsky reluctantly recognizes in Stalin are to be interpreted as evidence of evil or as proof of incompetence. The young Stalin (Koba) who defied the Tsarist police learned from them how to extort confessions. If Lenin called him a “splendid Georgian” in 1912, that meant less than it seems to mean. Stalin, to be sure, did not desert the Partv during the years of reaction, but “remained loyal to it.” He deserves no credit, however, for serving as an underground revolutionist in Russia. The Central Committee saw that he was no “theoretician and publicist capable of rising to higher things abroad,” but a mere “practico” best left at home.

If Stalin’s Marxism and the National Problem is “trenchant” and entitles its author to “recognition as an outstanding theoretician,” the explanation is that “Stalin’s work was wholly inspired by Lenin, written under his unremitting supervision and edited by him line by line.” If Stalin asked Trotsky at the Twelfth Congress (1923) to make the Political Report (hitherto delivered by Lenin) and pleaded for reconciliation when Trotsky refused, this was simply Stalin’s way of ruining his rival, embarrassing Zinoviev, and furthering his own insatiable ambition.

But Trotsky’s Stalin, although a knave of Gargantuan dimensions, is nevertheless a fool and a nobody. At the Fifth Congress in London (1907), “ not a soul paid the slightest heed to the ambitious Caucasian.” Trotsky never knew he was there until Souvarine’s book revealed the fact! Stalin always “ lacked historical perspective.” He could never write. “The reading of Stalin’s writings is as unendurable as discordant music to a sensitive ear.” His letter to Lenin from his Siberian exile “bears the characteristic threefold stamp: slyness, stupidity, and vulgarity.” In nineteen years of revolutionary activity, “Stalin did not emerge as a figure of either primary or even secondary rank. He was unknown.” He is full of “vulgar democratism and parochial obtuseness.” He “never acquired an intimate understanding of the October Revolution’s inherent logic.” “Throughout the period of the Civil War, Stalin remained a third-rate figure.” Comparisons with Lenin are “simply indecent.” “It is impossible to place Stalin even alongside Mussolini or Hitler,” both of whom “displayed initiative, roused the masses to action, pioneered new paths through the political jungle.”

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How could such a nonentity inherit Lenin’s mantle and outmaneuver a genius? (The genius, incidentally, nowhere acknowledges in these pages his own relations with Lenin prior to 1917, or his actual role after 1924.) Trotsky’s answer is clear: a dolt may yet be a scoundrel. Stalin lies. He has “Asiatic cunning.” He lacks all consideration and “never forgave anything.” He is “choleric, rude, consumed by ambition.” He “tirelessly schemed in order to push aside, derogate, blacken, belittle anyone who eclipsed him or interfered with his ambition.” “In his yellow eyes appeared the same glint of animosity that I had noticed in Vienna.” The “mainspring of his personality” is “active, never slumbering envy of all who are more gifted . . . the desire to exert his will, to lord it over others.”

Toward the sick Lenin, Stalin was “morose, his pipe firmly clenched between his teeth, a sinister gleam in his jaundiced eye, snarling back instead of answering.” At the end Trotsky’s Stalin poisons Lenin — and also Maxim Gorky! — and of course murders all the true Bolsheviks. “Undoubtedly characteristic of Stalin is personal, physical cruelty, what is usually called sadism. . . . After he had become a Soviet dignitary, he would amuse himself in his country home by cutting the throats of sheep or pouring kerosene on ant heaps and setting fire to them.”

This is not Marxism but melodrama in the Grand Guignol style. Trotsky’s Stalin, like the orthodox Stalinist version of Trotsky, is a caricature of the mid-Victorian stage villain: mustached, sly, crafty, stopping at nothing, and stooping to the lowest levels of depravity to further his foul plans. That Stalin is a human being and an extraordinarily successful leader of men is inconceivable in these vitriolic pages. That Trotsky was likewise a human being, confused, ineffective, and self-defeated, is also not apparent, for here he is all malice and violence. The reader will look in vain, moreover, for any exposition of Trotskyism here, save for a feeble appendix concluding absurdly that “the concept of permanent revolution” (as distinct from “the theory of socialism in a separate country, the basic dogma of Stalinism”) has “completely passed the test of history.” Equally futile is the search in these turgid chapters for a reply to a question never yet answered: if Trotsky did not employ the means which, in the Moscow trials, he was accused of using to consummate the overthrow of the “Stalinist bureaucracy,” what means, if any, did he use? There is no hint of an answer here, but only blind and allconsuming rage. Yet this too is perhaps an answer.

These pages reveal almost nothing about Stalin save what is already known or what is false. They are the strident echo of a struggle irrevocably resolved long since. But they reveal much about Trotsky. The revelation will not enhance but will reduce his stature. To preserve in memory the virtues of the departed great is always a worthy enterprise, however mistaken or warped or vicious they may have been in life. Trotsky had qualities of greatness. This confused and angry book diminishes them, for it is wholly unworthy of its author at his best. Its publication is to be welcomed for facilitating, among those concerned with facts rather than phobias, a more accurate evaluation of one of the most tragic figures of our time. But its publication — and particularly the manner of its editing — is also a disservice: to Trotsky’s reputation; to the cause of concord between Stalin’s Russia and the Atlantic democracies; and, not least, to the hopes of all who know that devil hunting and witch burning are fatal to the unity of wills and ultimate synthesis of purposes between two worlds which are now conditions for the survival of contemporary mankind.