DEUTSCHER'S BIOGRAPHY OF TROTSKY
By Joseph Hansen
THE PROPHET OUTCAST by Isaac Deutscher, New York: The Oxford University
Press, 1963, 543 pp. $9.50.
The final volume of the trilogy tells the story of Trotsky in banish= ment from the workers state which he, together with Lenin, had founded, It describes the great intellectual contributions made by this giant revolu~ tionist in these years, his final political battles, and the bitter personal tragedies that befell him before he was slain by Stalints emissary. The. volume was obviously. not an easy one for the biographer. The central issues of our time, in which Trotsky stood as the continuator of Marx, Engels and Lenin, are still with us, have grown in acuteness in fact, and it is impossible to deal with Trotsky without also dealing with these... To talk about Trotsky means to talk about the capitalist system in its period of decay and violent resistance to social and economic change, about reviving the proletarian democracy destroyed by the reactionary bureaucratic caste that appeared in the Soviet Union, about the as yet unresolved problem of creating a leadership capable of leading humanity forward to: a new and better order. ;
No matter how Deutscher chose to handle these topics, what he said was bound to be controversial, An additional hazard was that the Trotsky of these years was the Trotsky most familiar to the present generation, — the man who still exists in living memory and whose image seemed to. become engraved on all who met him, if only briefly. - '
The biographer met these challenges very well indeed, As in the previous volumes he remains: scrupulous toward facts,* seeks the truth,
#Even such a biased reviewer as Carleton Beals was reduced to pointing to .the listing of "Almazar," a. right-wing general involved in Trotsky'ts political break with Diego Rivera, as-"proof" of Deutscherts "pseudo~ scholarship." "No such general has ever existed or been a presidential candidate," Carleton Beals assures us in the October issue of The Inde en= dent. "Such is Deutscher's notable scholarship." Beals, evidently emotionally upset by the passing reference in the biography to his strange role in the Dewey Commission, displays such ill will that he does-not even. offer to make the necessary correction about the Mexican general. The name should be spelled-Almazan. The petulance of Beals, of course, could be due to Deutscherts "pseudo-scholarship" in another unfortunate matter: "Deutscher does not even spell my name correctly, His account is a-‘sham, . -and a distortion. Save uy money." (Deutscher spelled the name of His RoyaliHighness "Carlton," Beals! own pseudo-scholarship in relation to Mexico showed up, Ronever. when he .failed to note the most obvious error in Deutscher's biography. In the photographs facing page 480, the caption reads: “Two views of the tlittle fortress! at Coyoacan," The top view is of the home owned by Frida Kahlo where Trotsky first stayed after coming to Coyoacan. The bottom view is of the house which Trotsky had to buy after the break with Diego Rivera,
and does not hide his own views and predilections. The disagreements one may have with him thus center on points in which his judgment and politieal views affect the final portrait he. offers of Trotsky. The merit of the biographical material he has assembled can be questioned by no one, unless ill will enters in, It is a precious contribution to imowledge — of Trotsky, his. ideas, and the. character of the time he lived in.
The general plan of the volume is the same as the two previous ones, Deutscher presents summaries of Trotsky's main writings during the years under consideration, plus excerpts to give the reader a taste of the original, These are nearly always well chosen and constitute a valuable part of the book, But since, unlike the earlier years, most of the original sources are readily available, the biographer has legitimately reduced the proportion of anthology to” the necessities of historical narrative, .
Conscientious work in the Trotsky archives: at Harvard has enabled Deutscher to present new material of the greatést interest. He was particularly fortunate to obtain the special permission of Natalia.Trotsky . before her death to examine family correspondence, The revelation thus: provided of the family life of the Trotskys, particularly when it was caught up most tensely and tragically in the tempestuous public struggles of the final years, adds a new dimension to the image of Trotsky hitherto. available to the public, Deutscher even permits us to glimpse over his shoulder a few lines related to Trotsky's love-life with Natalia, words written only for her, Finally, Deutscher has interviewed many people who met Trotsky or who worked closely with him,. From their reports he has selected what he felt he needed or: had.room for.
Qut of these rich and varied sources a . picture of Trotsky emerges. that is:the most life-like of the three volumes, although, to be completely | frank, the finished portrait does not quite catch Trotsky, in. my opinion, at least as he was known to his closest collaborators in the final years, and calls attention rather too much to the biographer. I will return to this, . a
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Deutscher considers the Prinkipo period, from 1929 to 1933, to be by ' far the most productive and fruitful of Trotsky!s final years, "He devotes half the volume to it, Trotsky's literary production at Prinkipo was indeed enormous and of the highest quality: the three-volume History of une Russian Revolution; an autobiography, My Life; a series o proftoun and
rring articles on the most crucial issue o e day -- the rise of Nazism: continuation of his current appreciations of developments in the
Soviet Union, the only original Marxist contribution on this subject at the time; occasional writings of first-rate importance on such topics as the beginning of the Spanish revolution; and a wide correspondence on an international scale related to the task of reconstructing the revolutionary-socialist movement,
Deutscher does an excellent job of inventorying and assessing these treasures. His praise of Trotsky as a historian is especially warm and — appreciative:
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"Like Thucydides, Dante, Machiavelli, Heine, Marx, Herzen, and other thinkers and poets, Trotsky attained his full iminence as a writer only in exile, during the.few Prinkipo years, Posterity will remember him as the. historian of the October Revolution as-well as its leader, No other ‘Bolshevik has or could have produced so great and splendid an account of events of 1917; and none of the many writers of the anti-Bolshevik parties has presented any worthy counterpart to it."
Deutscher does not hesitate to estimate it as the greatest work of . its kind: "His historical writing is dialectical as is hardly any other. such work produced by the Marxist school of thought since Marx, from whom he derives his method and style, To Marxts minor historical works, The Class Struggle in France, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and The Civil War in France, Trotsky's History stands as the large mural painting stands to the miniature. Whereas Marx towers above the disciple ‘in the power of his abstract thought and gothic imagination, the disciple is superior as epic artist, especially as master of the graphic portrayal of masses and individuals in action, His socio-political analysis and artistic vision are.in such concord that there is no trace of any diver~ gence, His thought and his imagination take flight together. He expounds his theory of revolution with the tension and the élan of narrative; and his narrative takes depth from his ideas, His scenes, portraits, and dialogues, sensuous in their reality, are inwardly illumined by his conception of the historical process," — .
The autobiography,. in Deutscher's opinion, is less satisfactory because of a certain unevenness... One can agree with Deutscher in this 2 without sharing the reasons he offers for finding the latter part of the--. book not up to what can be expected from Trotsky at his best. Deutscher holds that Trotsky's explanation of the struggle with Stalin is defective, Trotsky "does not. go to the root of the matter and he leaves Stalin's ascendancy only half explained." Deutscher feels that Trotsky pictures. Stalin as too much villain and that he "virtually ignores the intrinsic connexion between the. suppression by Bolshevism of all parties and its self-suppression, of which Stalin was the supreme agent." The flaw, in| Deutscher's view, is thus due to faulty political vision -- a considerable weakness in the man whom Deutscher otherwise views as a supreme political genius, However, Trotsky was quite familiar with the theory for which Deutscher argues, concerning the alleged organic connection between Bolshevism and Stalinism, He specifically rejected it on more than one occasion, and with arguments that I find still convincing.
_. Trotsky'ts defective political-insight, if such it is, is. not. peculiar. to ay Lite; it is eommon to everything he wrote, touching this subject, in. his final years, What really gives the autobiography its unevenness is the shift away from personal material, The first chapters are on the level of great autobiographical literature, The latter parts shift to political polemic, Exeellent as this may be in its own right, it clashes increasingly with the autobiographical form in which it is cast, In contrast to his openness in the first parts in offering absorbing intimate material: , Trotsky, in the final parts, becomes more and more reticent.
The reasons for this are perfectly understandable and, in fact, do Trotsky credit. His primary interest was not psychological self-revelation
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but political action. He remained to the end of his life a leader who necessarily subordinated all other considerations to the interests of the. political wars he was engaged in, Deutscher, one must agree, is right in - gaying about the autobiography that "if he had not written it in 1929, or shortly thereafter, he might not have written it at ali,"
‘In unity of form and content, Deutscherts biography contrasts favor-. ably with the final sections of My Life. As we. follow Trotsky!s thought . and the course of his political Dattles, we participate at the same time in his personal fortunes, We catch some of the pleasures, the more common emotional stress, and the searing tragedies. We get to know something of Zina, the daughter who suffered a nervous breakdown under Stalin's persecution, who resisted psychoanalytic treatment and who finally committed suicide, Leon Sedov, the devoted son comes to life for us «= Leon, who had such a close political and personal relationship with his father that he became the receptacle for explosive paternal tensions that could find no other safety valve.and which Leon could not understand but only brood over in the final days before his own death at the hands of the implacable common foe, Natalia emerges as a granite figure. To Deutscher she is the heroine of the epic and all who read this biography are bound to share his admiration for her. She was truly of the stature required to share to the end the fortunes of the prophet outcast, ~
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As the titles of the trilogy indicate: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky's capacity. to see into e Ure was, for Deutscher, his. most irresistible gift. He cites examples of: Trotsky's almost uncanny accuracy. Two of them in the. final volume will undoubtedly impress everyone who reads them, The first one, on the grand level of the international class struggle, illustrates the contrast between Trotsky's clear vision of the meaning of the rise of Hitler and the blind~ ness of the Stalinists, represented in this case by Thaelmann:
"As late as September 1932, a few months before Hitler became Chancéllor, Thaelmann,: at a session of the Comintern Executive, still repeated, what Mlinzenberg had said: 'tIn his pamphlet on how National Socialism is to be defeated, Trotsky gives one answer only, and it is this: the German Communist Party must join hands with the Social Democratic Party.e.. This, according to Trotsky, is the only way in which the German working class can save itself from fascism, Either, says he, the Communist party makes common cause with the Social Democrats, or the German working class is lost for ten or twenty years, This is the theory of an utterly bankrupt Fascist and counter-revolutionary. This is indeed the worst, the most dangerous, and the most criminal theory that Trotsky has.construed in these last years of his counter=-revolutionary propaganda.! . -
"tOne of the decisive moments in history is approaching!, Trotsky rejoined, '... when the Comintern as a revolutionary factor may be wiped off the political map for an entire historic epoch. Let blind men and cowards refuse to notice this. Let slanderers and hired scribblers accuse .us of being in league with the counter-revolution, Has not counter-revolution become anything...that interferes with the digestion of communist bureaucrats...nothing must be concealed, nothing belittled, We must tell
the advanced workers as loudly as we can: After the ‘third period! of recklessness and boasting the fourth period of panic and capitulation has set int In an almost desperate effort to arouse the comaunists, Trotsky — put into words the whole power of his conviction and gave them once again the ring of an alarm bell: ‘'Workers-communists{! There are hundreds of thousands, there are millions of you.... If fascism comes to power it will ride like a terrific tank over your skulls and spines. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle, Only a fighting unity with social democratic workers can bring victory, Make haste, communist workers, you have very little time to lose,t" oo. oo The second example is Trotskyts admonition of. Trygve Lie, who later became head of the United Nations, . The then Minister of Justice in the Norwegian government put Trotsky under house arrest, barred him from answering the charges in the infamous 1936 Moscow frame-up trial, and even cut him off from correspondence, Lie attempted to force Trotsky to sign a shameful agreement not to make any statements referring to the Moscow frame~up trial, in which Trotsky and his son were principal victims, and to submit the mail, telegrams and telephone calls of himself, his wife and secretaries to. censorship, "Twenty years later eye-witnesses: of the scene still remembered the flashes of scorn in Trotsky's eyes and the thunder of his voice as he refused to comply." He levelled a series of. damaging questions at Trygve Lie.
"At this point Trotsky raised his voice so that it resounded through . _'the halls and corridors of the Ministry: 'tThis 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. together with > ‘your Pantoffel-Minister-President. * Trygve Lie shrugged at this odd piece of soothsaying. Yet after less than four years the same government had indeed to flee from Norway before the Nazi invasion; and as the Ministers and their aged King Haakon stood on the coast, huddled together and waiting anxiously for a boat that was to take them to England, they recalled with awe Trotsky's words as a prophet's curse come true,"
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A TIP
: The final volume of Isaac Deutscherts biography of Leon
; Trotsky is readily available in England at a considerable.
saving over the price of the American edition. Send £2/5s,
(U.K.) or $6,50, check: or international money order to
WIR Publications, 574 Grays Inn Road, London, W.C.1.