READING: Edmund Wilson on Leon Trotsky
READING: Edmund Wilson on Leon Trotsky
From “To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing & Acting of History"
It will be seen that the Marxist movement had arrived by the beginning of the century at a point where it could provide a base and frame for an ambitious and gifted young man. Trotsky is not, like Marx, a great original thinker; he is not a great original statesman, like Lenin; he was perhaps not even inevitably a great rebel: the revolution was, as it were, the world ni which he found himself living. He is one of those men of the first rank who flourish inside a school, neither creating, nor breaking out of its system.
The young studentwhohadimpressed his fellows by the eloquence and force of his reasoning at a time when he did not yet know what he was talking about, because he had at any cost to play a role, found his place in the army of Marxism—in the drama of progress, on the stage of the earth, conceived in a certain way. This is not, of course, to imply that there has been anything insincere or specious about the relation of Trotsky to this role. On the contrary, he has staked upon it not only such things as comfort and peace of mind, but his own life and the lives of his followers and family, and that enjoyment of political power itself which is the only worldly satisfaction that Marxism allow sto its true priesthood; and he has learned in the Marxist academy a perfection of revolutionary form and standards of revolutionary honor that seem almost intended to rival that of the Tsar's dueling officers.
There is a passage in which Trotsky tells of the effect on him of reading the Marx-Engels correspondence which is worth quoting as a description of the tradition that Marx and Engels had founded. Trotsky had been trying to work with the Austrian Social Democrats, who had been both stultified by the Germanic academicism-—the workers sometimes a dressed them as "Genosse Herr Doktor," and demoralized by the Viennese skepticism: Victor Adler had once shocked Trotsky by declaring that, as for him, he preferred political predictions based on the Apocalypse to those based on Dialectical Materialism.
"In this atmosphere," says Trotsky:
the correspondence between Marx and Engels was one of the books that I needed most, and the one that stood closest to me. It supplied me with the principal and most unfailing test for myown ideas as well as for my entire personal attitude toward the rest of the world. The Viennese leaders of the Social Democracy used the same formulas that I did, but one had only to turn any of them five degrees around on their own axes to discover that we gave quite different meanings to the same concepts. Our agreement was a temporary one, superficial and unreal.
The correspondence between Marx and Engels was for me not a theoretical, but a psychological revelation. Toutes proportions gardées, I found proof on every page that I was bound to these two by a direct psychological affinity. Their attitude to men and ideas was mine. I guessed what they did not express, shared their sympathies, was indignant and hated as they did. Marx and Engels were revolutionaries through and through. But they had not the slightest trace of sectarianism or asceticism. Both of them, and especially Engels, could at any time say of themselves that nothing human was strange to them. But their revolutionary outlook lifted them always above the hazards of fate and the works of men. Pettiness was incompatible not only with their personalities, but with their presences. Vulgarity could not stick even to the soles of their boots. Their appreciations, sympathies, jests—even when most commonplace—are always touched by the rarefied air of spiritual nobility. They may pass deadly criticism on a man, but they will never deal in tittle-tattle.
They can be ruthless, but not treacherous. For outward glamor, titles or rank they have nothing but a cool contempt. What philistines and vulgarians considered aristo cratic in them was really only their revolutionary superiority. Its most important characteristic is a complete and ingrained independence of official public opinion at alltimes and under all conditions….
We who of recent years have seen the State that Trotsky helped to build in a phase combining the butcheries of the Robespierre Terror with the corruption and reaction of the Directory, and Trotsky himself figuring dramatically in the role of Gracchus Babeuf, may be tempted to endow him with qualities which actually he does not possess and with principles which he has expressly repudiated. We have seen the successor of Lenin undertake a fabulous rewriting of the whole history… to cancel-out Trotsky’s part, pursue Trotsky from country to country, persecuting even his children and hounding them to their deaths; and at last, in faked trials and confessions more degrading to the human spirit than the frank fendishness of Iván the Terrible, try to pin upon Trotsky the blame of all the mutinies, mistakes and disasters that have harassed his administration±till he has made the world conscious of Trotsky as the Accuser of Stalin’s own bad conscience, as if the Soviet careerists of the thirties were unable to deny the socialist ideal without trying to annihilate the moral authority of this one homeless and hunted man.
It is not Trotsky alone who has created his role: his enemies have given it a reality that no mere self-dramatization could have compassed. And as the fires of the Revolution have died down in the Soviet Union at a time when the systems of thought of the West were already in an advanced state of decadence, he has shone forth like a veritable Pharos, rotating a long shaft of light on the seas and the reefs all around.
But we must try to see the man inside the role and to examine his real tendencies and doctrines….
There has been, so far as I know, no other first-rate Marxist for whom the Marxist conception of History, derived from the Hegelian idea, plays so frankly teleological a role as it does in the work of Trotsky. Here are some references from his book on the 1905 revolution, written soon after the events it describes.
“If the prince was not succeeding in peacefully regenerating the country, he was accomplishing with remarkable effectiveness the task of a more general order for which history had placed him at the head of the government: the destruction of the political illusions and the prejudices of the middle class.”
“History used the fantastic plan of Gapon for the purpose of arriving at its ends, and it only remained for the priest to sanction with the priestly authority its [history’s] revolutionary conclusions."
“When one rereads the correspondence of our marvelous classics [Marx, Engels and Lassalle], who from the height of their observatories—the youngest in Berlin, and his two ranking seniors in the very center of world capitalism, London—observed the political horizon with never-relaxing attention, taking note of every incident, every phenomenon, that might indicate the Revolution’s approach; when one rereads these letters, in which the revolutionary lava is boiling up, when one breathes this atmosphere of an expectancy impatient but never weary, one is moved to hate that cruel dialectic of history which, in order to attain momentary ends, attaches to Marxism raisonneurs totally devoid of talent in either their theories or their psychology, who oppose their ‘reason’ to [what they regard] as the revolutionary madness.”
History, then, with its dialectical Trinity, had chosen Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky to disillusion the middle class, had propounded revolutionary conclusions which it had compelled Father Gapon to bless, and will cruelly discredit and destroy certain Pharisees and Sadducees of Marxism before it summons the boiling lava of the Judgment.
These statements make no sense whatever unless one substitutes for the words history and the dialectic of history the words Providence and God. And this Providential power of history is present in all the writing of Trotsky. John Jay Chapman said of Browning that God did duty in his work as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection and preposition; and the same is true of History with Trotsky. Of late, in his solitude and exile, this History, an austere spirit, has seemed actually to stand behind his chair as he writes, encouraging, admonishing, approving, giving him the courage to confound his accusers, who have never seen History’s face.
What it may mean in moments of action to feel History towering at one’s elbow with her avenging sword in her hand is shown in the remarkable scene at the first congress of the Soviet dictatorship after the success of the October insurrection of 1917, when Trotsky, with the contempt and indignation of a prophet, read Martov and his followers out of the meeting.
"You are pitiful isolated individuals,” he cried at this height of the Bolshevik triumph. “You are bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the rubbish-can of history!”
These words are worth pondering for the light they throw on the course of Marxist politics and thought.
Observe that the merging of yourself with the onrush of the current of history is to save you from the ignoble fate of being a “pitiful isolated individual”; and that the failure so to merge yourself will relegate you to the rubbish-can of history, where you can presumably be of no more use.
Today, though we may agree with the Bolsheviks that Martov was no man of action, his croakings over the course hey had adopted seem to us full of far-sighted intelligence. He pointed out that proclaiming a socialist regime in conditions different from those contemplated by Marx would not realize the results that Marx expected; that Marx and Engels had usually described the dictatorship of the proletariat as having the form, for the new dominant class, of a democratic republic, with universal suf¬frage and the popular recall of officials; that the slogan “All power to the Soviets” had never really meant what it said and that it had soon been exchanged by Lenin for “All power to the Bolshevik Party.”
There sometimes turn out to be valuable objects cast away in the rubbish-can of history—things that have to be retrieved later on.
From the point of view of the Stalinist Soviet Union, that is where Trotsky himself is today; and he might well discard his earlier assumption that an isolated individual must needs be “pitiful” for the conviction of Dr. Stockman in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People that “the strongest man is he who stands most alone.”…
After the Moscow trials of March, 1938, he wrote a long article called Their Morals and Oursagainst persons who had been asserting that the systematic falsehoods of the Kremlin and its remorseless extermination of the old Bolsheviks had grown quite logically out of the Jesuitical policy pursued by the Bolsheviks themselves…. Trotsky… bitterly complain[s] of the “hypocrisy” and the “official cult of mendacity” of the Kremlin and denouncing one of his calumniators of the GPU as a “bourgeois without honor or conscience.” When the Bolsheviks calumniated the Mensheviks, then, the reader is moved to inquire, this did not imply anything derogatory to their conscience or their honor? One finds the answer in another passage: “The question does not even lie in which of the warring camps caused or itself suffered the greatest number of victims. History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the [American] Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning and violence breaks the chains—let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
There is, then, a court of morality above the warring classes, and this court is presided over by, precisely again, the Goddess History…. The shell of party polemics, that convention which is in itself an abrogation of peacetime relations and an obstacle to serious discussion, interposes itself here between Trotsky and the real problems at issue. There is a good deal of the mere argument ad hominem—or rather, argument to social class—of the kind exploited first by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto…. Who are these creatures who dare to probe our morality? They are the “petty pickpockets of history,” etc. The very title Their Morals and Ours attempts to divert attention by putting the debate on a polemical plane.
But again he invokes Lenin: “The ‘amoralism’ of Lenin,” he says:
that is, his rejection of super-class morals, did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same ideal throughout his whole life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed; from displaying the highest conscientiousness in the sphere of ideas and the highest fearlessness in the sphere of action, from maintaining an attitude untainted by the least superiority to the ‘ordinary’ worker, to a defenseless woman, to a child. Does it not seem that ‘amoralism’ in the given case is only a pseudonym for higher human morality?”
It is true, of course, that Lenin followed a moral logic of his own; but he lived it, and we can see how he was tom in feeling, if not perplexed in decision, by its difficulty. Even less than Trotsky did Lenin examine it or try to formulate it; yet today the best that Trotsky can do is to point into the past toward Lenin—that is, to show that there was once a great Bolshevik who was a humane and dedicated person.
It cannot be said that Trotsky has shown himself particularly humane. It seems to have been principally the planning side of socialism, the opportunity for increasing efficiency, and the ruthless side of Marxism, that attracted him when he was actually in power. The whole Bolshevik dictatorship, of course, was fundamentally undemocratic. With a people quite untrained in political democracy, it was inevitable that a revolutionary government should itself have to resort to despotism. And it is true that during the years of civil war the brutal methods of war-time imposed themselves as a matter of life or death for the Revolution itself.
It is true that the first impulses of the Bolsheviks to be generous with their political enemies brought extremely disillusioning results: when they had released the monarchist general Krasnov, after his raid on Petrograd, in return for his word of honor that he would cease to fight the Bolshevik regime, he immediately returned to the attack. But through this crisis, which called forth Trotsky’s best, he did not respond in any very sensitive way to the feelings and needs of the people. Read the pamphlet, The Defense of Terrorism, published in 1920, in reply to a pamphlet by Kautsky that attacked the Bolshevik regime, in which he defends both the Bolshevik shooting of military and political enemies and his own project for a compulsory labor army. True it was written “in the car of a military train and amid the flames of civil war” and Trotsky begs us to bear this in mind; but what we feel in it is the terrific force of a will to domination and regimentation with no evidence of any sympathy for the hardships of the dominated and regimented.
For when he had whipped the Red Army into shape at the cost of many drumhead executions and definitely routed the Whites, he proceeded, against Lenin’s advice, to turn his admirable military machine into a conscript army of labor. But the soldiers, who had stuck it out against the enemies of the Revolution, began to vanish when they were put on public works. So, also, the Commissar of War was opposed to allowing trade unions, insisting that since trade unions were by definition class weapons against the employees and since they were living in a workers’ republic, they had no longer any need for such instruments. Lenin pointed out to him that the Bolshevik regime was not yet really wholly a workers’ republic, but rather—since the workers were to a considerable extent directed by officials not of working-class origin—a “workers’ republic with bureaucratic distortions.”
The inauguration of the New Economic Policy… relieved the whole situation…. It is to the credit of Trotsky’s sagacity that he had advocated the adoption of such measures in February, 1020, at a time when they were rejected by Lenin. But there had in the meantime taken place an incident which, instead of being eventually forgotten, has come to take on a more sinister significance in view of subsequent developments in Russia. In February, 1921, the sailors of the Kronstadt fortress, who had played an heroic part in the 1917 revolution, rebelled…