“There is life in the old boy Trotsky yet—but if the ice
pick did not quite do its job, killing him off, I hope I have managed
it.”
Robert Service, London, October 2009,
The murder of Trotsky was not merely the elimination of one
individual; it symbolised the political triumph of Stalinism’s bureaucratic machine
and the weakening of proletarian political leadership on an international
scale. For contemporary workers and militants, the lesson is clear: when
revolutionary gains become isolated and institutionalised into privileges for
an elite, the result is political degeneration, repression and murder.
Bertrand M. Patenaude’s The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
is a significant rebuttal of the current crop of books, whose primary goal is
to discredit Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism in general. One of the leading figures
in this post-Soviet School of Falsification is Robert Service.
Patenaude wrote a principal review of Robert Service’s
biography of Leon Trotsky in The American Historical Review, whose appraisal
was collected and published by the International Committee of the Fourth
International as part of the documentation rebutting anti-Trotskyist lies.
Patenaude’s review exposes the political distortions, factual errors and
methodological failures of Service’s book and thereby plays an important role
in the defence of Trotsky’s historical reputation.
Writing in the American Historical Review, he says, “I have
counted more than four dozen [mistakes]. Service mixes up the names of
Trotsky's sons, misidentifies the largest political group in the first Duma in
1906, botches the name of the Austrian archduke assassinated at Sarajevo,
misrepresents the circumstances of Nicholas II's abdication, gets backward
Trotsky's position in 1940 on the United States' entry into World War II, and
gives the wrong year of death of Trotsky's widow. Service's book is entirely
unreliable as a reference…. At times, the errors are jaw-dropping. Service
believes that Bertram Wolfe was one of Trotsky's ‘acolytes’ living with him in
Mexico (pp. 441, 473), that André Breton was a ‘surrealist painter’ whose
‘pictures exhibited sympathy with the plight of the working people’ (p. 453),
and that Mikhail Gorbachev rehabilitated Trotsky in 1988, when in fact, Trotsky
was never posthumously rehabilitated by the Soviet government.”[1]
Patenaude’s engagement highlighted two essential
historiographical lessons: first, the accuracy of archival methods matters;
second, political conclusions must be grounded in documentary evidence, not ad
hominem polemic.
The Marxist writer David North welcomed Patenaude’s review:
“Patenaude offers a damning assessment of Service’s basic competence as a
historian. “The number of factual mistakes in Service’s book is, as North says,
‘astonishing.’ I have counted more than four dozen.” He asserts that “Service’s
book is completely unreliable as a reference.” It is difficult to imagine
a more damning appraisal by one historian of another’s work. Attempting to give
readers a sense of his own disgust at the shoddiness of Service’s work,
Patenaude adds: “At times the errors are jaw-dropping.”[2]
From a Marxist, materialist viewpoint, the dispute over
Trotsky’s historical image is not an abstract quarrel over personalities but an
ideological battle rooted in class struggles and the political needs of ruling
strata. The post-1917 Soviet bureaucracy and its defenders sought to erase or
distort the memory of Trotsky because his program—international proletarian
revolution and democratic workers’ control—threatened the privileges of a new
ruling caste. After the USSR’s collapse, bourgeois and petit-bourgeois
intellectual currents had renewed reasons to discredit Trotskyism: to
delegitimise the possibility of socialist alternatives and to close off
historical debate that might inspire working-class resistance. Patenaude’s
methodological critique therefore performs an important political function: it
defends a historical record that preserves the evidence necessary for a
scientific critique of Stalinism and for the revival of a revolutionary program.
To come back to Patenaude’s book, it is one of many
biographies or books about Trotsky published over the last two decades; we have
seen 4 English-language novels and 4 English-language academic books. This is
not counting books produced in other languages.[3]
The former Stanford lecturer's attempts to set the record
straight and oppose Service’s attempt to assassinate Trotsky all over again;
however, he does retain a political hostility to Trotsky and his supporters.
The book was published in Britain as Stalin’s Nemesis: The
Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky and in the United States as Trotsky: Downfall
of a Revolutionary. It has been widely reviewed in both the capitalist press
and various pseudo-left publications. One does have sympathies with any
historian who attempts a biography of Trotsky since they will have to “drag him
out from under a mountain of dead dogs, a huge load of calumny and oblivion.”
Patenaude, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, had
unprecedented access to Trotsky’s papers at Harvard and, of course, to
documents held at the Hoover archives. The Hoover Institution is well-known for
its anti-Communist, conservative agenda, and opposed everything that Trotsky
stood for. Patenaude adopts a novel-like style which does little to reconstruct
Trotsky from a historical perspective. He attacks Trotsky as “the man who
helped create the first totalitarian state, which even now [that is, in the late
1930s] he championed as the world’s most advanced country.”
Even his privileged access to Trotsky’s archive has not
immunised him from further distortions and fabrications about Trotsky and the
Russian Revolution. Patenaude’s use of sources close to Trotsky who were either
hostile or had broken with his politics is not useful, and Patenaude is far too
uncritical of them. Patenaude relies heavily on the testimonies of Trotsky's
bodyguards. These are mainly from the American Trotskyist movement. Many of
these people had broken with Trotskyism and should have been treated with
caution.
Patenaude is not entirely acquainted with Trotsky’s writings
and politics, and still less so with the major political, social, and cultural
subjects tackled by Trotsky. This limitation on his part could have been
rectified by quoting from writers who did. Patenaude does show a certain amount
of sympathy for his subject, from a liberal, not Marxist, standpoint. He also
has the annoying habit of using throwaway lines such as Trotsky attempted to
"cloak the Bolshevik coup" and that Trotsky "helped create the
first totalitarian state." Aside from not being true, Patenaude does
little to back up such a serious charge. His view of other struggles within the
Bolshevik party is predominantly impressionistic.
Patenaude employs a novel writing style. It is a shame that
this style does not work when he tries to use it to address Trotsky’s
revolutionary past. The book's primary focus is on the last decade of Trotsky's
life and work. Patenaude's portrayal of Trotsky’s life while 'imprisoned' in
Blue House would, in some instances, not look out of place in cheap adult books
and sometimes borders on the salacious. Having said that, he does
manage to show the element of tragedy in Trotsky’s life. Barely a member of Trotsky’s
family and close friends survived Stalin’s murderous clutches.
Despite having unpatrolled access to Trotsky’s archive,
Patenaude has nothing politically to say that has not already been said. Not
much is said about Trotsky’s followers around the world. Next to nothing is
written in the preparation and discussion following the publication of the
Transitional Programme.
Patenaude also tends to repeat much of the salacious gossip
surrounding Trotsky, for no reason other than to sell books. His description of
Trotsky’s affair with Freida Kahlo is one example. Patenaude: “It is no mystery
why Trotsky was attracted to Frida Kahlo. The daughter of a German-Jewish
immigrant father and a Mexican mother, at 29, she was a striking and exotic
beauty with black hair, audacious almond eyes beneath batwing eyebrows, and
sensuous lips.” Or this piece of irrelevance: “Dressed in a tweed suit and
knickerbockers, carrying a cane and a briefcase, he projected an image of
civilised respectability, looking not at all like a defiant revolutionary. And
at five feet eleven inches tall, he hardly resembled the Soviet cartoon image
of him as ‘the little Napoleon,'" Patenaude notes.
Patenaude has no sympathy for the Trotskyist movement. He
believes it is full of “sects” and is riddled with “splits and mergers.” The
reader will need a strong stomach if they read this book. The book is likely to
gain a wide readership. Still, young people, workers, and the general reader
interested in the life and ideas of Leon Trotsky, who struggled against
Stalinism, fascism, and capitalism, should read as much as possible of the
great man himself and at least a few biographies from earlier periods.
To sum up, the book focuses far too much on
"personalities and leaders" and offers no insight into revolutionary
movements or the ordinary people involved. Patenaude’s blinkered approach leads
him to "impressionistic" conclusions.
[1]
Review by Bertrand M. Patenaude in The American Historical Review-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/in-defense-of-leon-trotsky/12.html
[2]
The American Historical Review discredits Robert Service’s biography of Leon
Trotsky-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/06/pers-j28.html
[3]
See Trotsky, The Passionate Revolutionary by Allan Todd Pen & Sword History
Hardcover – 18 July 2022-keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2026/02/trotsky-passionate-revolutionary-by.html
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