CONTROVERSY OVER INTRODUCTION TO TROTSKY'S BIOGRAPHY OF STALIN
(The following two letters, concerning the publication of a new edition of Trotsky's biography of Stalin, are being circulated to book reviewers in the United States. They deal with the inclusion of an introduction which, aside from serious factual inaccuracies, is directed against Trotsky in a venomous way both politically and personally.
(It would seem that the rising interest in Trotsky's writings, which has gone up another notch with the publicity attendant to the fiftieth anniversary of the October revolution, led the publishers to calculate that it would be a profitable enterprise to add a book by Trotsky to their list.
[At the same time, Trotsky's views are so abhorrent to them that they felt it necessary to include a prophylactic in the package. Thus, instead of a mere disclaimer that Trotsky's views scarcely co-~ incide with theirs, they hired a professional to cook up something "fitting" for the opening pages. It must be admitted that they chose the right man for this delicate task, and they can sleep with their good bourgeois conscience properly tranquilized.
(This is not the first time a publishing house has displayed an ambivalent attitude toward Stalin. The original publishers, Harper & Brothers, pressed Trotsky, much against his will to do the biography. Trotsky was assassinated before the manuscript was completed but enough was prepared to make a substantial volume which was printed at the beginning of World War II. Harper & Brothers thereupon refused to release the book until the war had ended. The gesture, intended to please Stalin, was in line with the official policy of the State Department during the war years. (That policy went so far as to persuade Hollywood to produce a propagandistic film, Mission to Moscow, which presented the monstrous Moscow frame-up trials as genuine.
(For the past twenty years, of course, “anti-Communism" has been Washington's official policy. And so the new publishers, patriotic Americans that they are, insist on making clear to the world that despite their understandable aggressiveness in exploiting a profitablelooking item, still they're not exactly the ones to be caught helping Trotsky to spread his revolutionary, pro-Soviet views.
x * *
New York, N.Y.
November 3, 1967 Dear Sir:
On behalf of Esteban Volkov of
Mexico City, Leon Trotsky's grandson and
heir to Trotsky's literary properties, I
am sending you his attached protest
against the introduction by Bertram D.
Wolfe which Stein and Day has included
in the new edition of Trotsky's biography
of Stalin.
When Mr. Volkov signed the contract
for the republishing of Stalin, he did not
realize that a new introduction was in-
tended; and when he saw the draft of that
introduction, he immediately protested and
demanded its removal. Stein and Day re-
fused to omit it but offered to include
a statement of objection to it by Mr. Vol-
kov. The latter thereupon retained Attor-
ney Philip Wittenberg of New York, who
sought to obtain the removal of the intro-
duction. When that effort failed, he asked
that Mr. Volkov's letter of objection be
included in the book's front matter. He
was informed that the pages had already
been printed and that was no longer pos-
sible but that Stein and Day would send
copies of Mr. Volkov's letter to all re-
viewers who were being sent advance cop-
ies of the book. The same information was
given to Mr. Perry H. Knowlton of Curtis
Brown, Ltd., who arranged the original
contract between Mr. Volkov and Stein and
Day.
Accordingly, a copy of Mr. Volkov's
letter of protest to Mr. Knowlton was sent
on September 18 to Stein and Day with the
request that it be duplicated and sent out
to the reviewers.
Stein and Day, however, has not
sent out copies of the letter and has not
given any reason for not doing so. Con-
sequently I have been authorized by Mr.
Volkov to send you the attached letter of
objection to the introduction.
Sincerely yours,
George L. Weissman
x * *
Mexico, D.F.
July 31, 1967
Dear Sir:
In my letter of July 13, among
other things I told you that:
With respect to Mr. Wolfe and his
text, my opinion is as follows:
1. Mr. Wolfe is a person who is
diametrically opposed to Leon Trotsky,
and he does not hide it in his text, be-
ginning with the first paragraph in which
he pretends not to know whether Trotsky
or Stalin is the "Prince of Heaven" and
which is the "Lord of the Powers of Darkness."
2. Mr. Wolfe puts the slanders against Trotsky on an equal footing with Trotsky's truthful and proven record of Stalin's crimes.
3. Mr. Wolfe denies the objectivity of Stalin and claims that the book can only be understood as an allegation pro domo sua. Besides being false, this is a commonsense vulgarity which could be offered by any man in the street.
4. Mr. Wolfe attributes to Trotsky the same dogmatism which he finds in Stalin; this is another commonsense vulgarity: Marxists are dogmatic, Trotsky is a Marxist, therefore....Nevertheless, it is enough to read a little of Trotsky's theoretical work to understand his nonconformism and the freedom of his thought.
5. Mr. Wolfe likes truculent contrasts. He presents Trotsky as obsessed with writing a biography of his adversary Stalin. This is false. Leon Trotsky committed himself to write it because at that moment it was the work which in the judgment of his literary advisers and editors could most surely provide money in his exile. To work on this book he had to suspend his Lenin, which interested him more. Mr. Wolfe himself guessed this when he wrote that Stalin is written “with disgust, as a disagreeable duty."
6. Mr. Wolfe puts a fantasied drama into Trotsky's stage setting while he wrote Stalin: a house which was half fortress, machine guns, etc. This is not true. The reinforcing of security in the house came after the first assassination attempt, only a few months before the assassination. Stalin was written ina simple study, with a window opening on the small house garden.
7. Mr. Wolfe is ignorant of the fact that it was not Trotsky who, on the night of the first attack, pushed Natalia Sedova out of bed; on the contrary, she pushed Leon Trotsky out of bed and, after putting his head under a night table, she threw herself on top of him to protect him. Trotsky was hardly awake, because before going to bed he had taken a sleeping tablet and he was under its effects. This is only an incidental clarification.
8. Mr. Wolfe tells a Judas—Jesus type story of the relations between the assassin and Leon Trotsky. This is false. The assassin infiltrated the house through Trotsky's friends and guests, and not through Trotsky himself, who had not seen him more than twice, for a few minutes each time, while the assassin waited for Trotsky's friends. If Trotsky did not refuse to read the assasin's manuscript it was so as not to offend his guests; this is what he told Natalia Sedova after he was wounded.
9. Mr. Wolfe asserts that the assassin "exploited the vanity" of Trotsky and was able to be esteemed by him as a "disciple." False, as is implied above in point 8.
10. I do not see why Mr. Wolfe should allude in this text to the supposed utility that the publication of Stalin during the war of 1939-45 might have held for the United States.
11. Mr. Wolfe thinks he demonstrates that Stalin was not mediocre because he was successful in his struggle for personal power; and he implicitly rejects Trotsky's opinion that successes of this type are more the result of the fit-~ ness of a man for a role that the development of the situation demands at a partic-— ular moment. Let us remember that General Eisenhower was president of the most powerful nation on earth for eight years.
12. The historical necessity which Trotsky perceived in the Russian "Thermidorian Reaction" did not impede him from continuing to struggle for the revolution, because Leon Trotsky was not a Russian politician in the sense that a senator from California is an American politician. Trotsky struggled to prepare an international revolutionary leadership for the next outbreak of popular rebellion which would appear somewhere in a certain future, although the time and place could not be predicted. Trotsky used to say that politics were a matter of "great patience." During the last months of his life, he thought that this next revolutionary wave would come from colonial areas.
13. Mr. Wolfe presents as a single equation, of what perhaps he would like to call dogmatic dictatorial Marxism, three concepts: the Leninist concept of the party with its democratic centralism, Stalin's reactionary bureaucratic machine, and the application of the permanent revolution manifest in Trotsky's refusal to conform. This is an unacceptable confusion.
14. What Trotsky would have thought of the Stalin of the war and postwar is so much conjecture. No one has the right -in the prologue to a work by Trotsky -- to suppose that this Stalin would have sealed the 1ips of the great revolutionary (pp. 11 an .
15. I will not dwell on Mr. Wolfe's confusion in regard to the permanent revolution, the April Theses, the Leninism of Trotsky and the Trotskyism of Lenin.
16. On page 16 of his text one finds the epitome of Mr. Wolfe's rancor to the point of calling Trotsky not a critic but
a spiteful "pretender" who denounces the usurper who defeated hin.
Given what I have expressed I believe it is an insult to Leon Trotsky to ut Mr. Wolfe's text before Trotsky's talin.
For this reason I refuse my authorization for and radically oppose the plan to publish this prologue. In addition the work does not need a prologue, nor does Trotsky need an introduction by Mr. Wolfe or any other. The name of the author would be enough, his text and the opinion of the readers.
I urgently request, therefore, that you omit Mr. Wolfe's text from the Stalin book that is being printed and published.
In your letter of July 20, you say that “Wolfe has agreed to make the factual corrections which you point out as being necessary, and I gather this means that he will correct the points brought up in paragraphs six, seven, eight, and nine of your letter of July 13th. Maybe there are other corrections which he will make as a result of some of your other objections, but I can't be sure until we see it."
In addition, in the same letter, you said: "I do think, however, that an outright refusal on your part to the publication of the book with the Wolfe introduction would not actually stop Stein and Day from publishing. They do have a signed contract, and they are sincerely trying to have the introduction corrected as much as possible and they are also providing you with an opportunity to speak your mind. They are, in other words, making a reasonable effort to satisfy you. It is my guess that Mr. Stein's legal advisers have probably told him that a reasonable attempt to satisfy you is enough to make it possible for him to go ahead and publish. I have no way of knowing this, of course, but I have a feeling from some of the things that have been said that this is what we have in store for us." (I suppose you mean you and I.
I think that the section of my letter reproduced above and the sections of your last letter to which I have referred above, reflect accurately the situation in which Mr. Wolfe's introduction to Stalin is being published, and the value that should be attributed to it.
let me only add the following words about the Moscow Trials, taken from Isaac Deutscher: "...and a man like Romain Rolland, the admirer of Gandhi, the enemy of violence, the ‘humanitarian conscience' of his generation, used his sweetly evangelical voice to justify the massacre in Russia and extol the master hangman -- with such zeal that Trotsky thought of suing him for defamation. Where Gorky and Rolland gave the cue, hosts of minor humanitarians and moralists followed suit with little or no scruple. Their manifestoes and appeals in support of Stalin make strange reading. In the United States, for instance, they declared a boycott on the Commission of Inquiry set up under John Dewey's auspices. They warned ‘all men of good will' against assisting the Commission, saying that critics of the Moscow trials were interfering in domestic Soviet affairs, giving aid and comfort to fascism, and ‘dealing a blow to the forces of progress.' The manifesto was signed by Theodore Dreiser, Granville Hicks, Corliss Lamont, Max Lerner, Raymond Robins, Anna Louise Strong, Paul Sweezy, Nathanael West, and many professors and artists, quite a few of whom were to be in the forefront of the anticommunist crusades of the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties.
“Louis Fischer and Walter Duranty, popular experts on Soviet affairs, vouched for Stalin's integrity, Vyshinsky's veracity, and the G.P.U.'s humane methods in obtaining confessions from Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, and Radek. Even Bertram D. Wolfe, a member of the Lovestonite Opposition long expelled from the Communist party, still gave Stalin credit for saving the revolution from the Trotskyite-Zinovievite conspiracy."
Deutscher* goes on to cite the following from Wolfe's past writings: "'Today, whatever his [Trotsky's] subjective intentions may be, and I shall not try to judge them, his objective role is to mobilize labour sentiment against the Soviet Union. He has departed ever further from communist fundamentals....He has even come out for civil war in the Soviet Union and thus become an open enemy of the class and land he once served so faithfully.' Thus Bertram D. Wolfe wrote about Trotsky in 1936! ('Things we want to know,' Worker's Age Publications.) Only when the Great Purges were coming to a close, shortly before Bukharin appeared in the dock, did Wolfe, the ‘Communist fundamentalist,' express (in the New Republic of 24 November 1937) his regret at having given moral support to the purges. This led Trotsky to remark that Wolfe still had a lot of things to learn and unlearn in order to avoid commnitting grievous mistakes in the future. In later years Wolfe attacked other writers (who had always denounced the Stalinist purges) as ‘apologist for Stalin'!"
I ask you, Mr. Knowlton, to arrange for this letter of mine to appear in extenso after the "introduction" by Mr. Wolfe to the book by Leon Trotsky.
Very sincerely,
Esteban Volkov B.
*Tsaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast.