Sunday 4 October 2020

Review: Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence translated and edited by Alan Woods, London: Wellred Books, 2016

"I can therefore state that I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule, but as an exception to the rule."

Leon Trotsky

"In a reactionary epoch such as ours, a revolutionist is compelled to swim against the stream. I am doing this to the best of my ability. The pressure of world reaction has expressed itself perhaps most implacably in my personal fate and the fate of those close to me. I do not at all see in this any merit of mine: this is the result of the interlacing of historical circumstances".[1]

"Stalin's rise to power was bound up with the crystallisation of the bureaucratic apparatus and its growing awareness of its specific interests. "In this respect, Stalin presents a completely exceptional phenomenon. He is neither a thinker, nor a writer, nor an orator. He assumed power before the masses had learned to discern his figure from others at the celebratory marches on the Red Square. Stalin rose to power not thanks to personal qualities, but to an impersonal apparatus. And it was not he who created the apparatus, but the apparatus that created him."

While Leon Trotsky's place in history endures, his contemporary relevance grows by the day. Not only because he was a superb writer but because the basic currents and features of modern capitalism and imperialism that Trotsky wrote about in his day still need to be grappled with today.

As one writer put it "His writings—indispensable for an understanding of the contemporary world—remain as fresh as the day they were written. Trotsky's life and struggles, his unyielding devotion to the liberation of mankind, will live on in history.[2]

The translator and editor of this new edition of Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence is Alan Woods. Woods is associated with the International Marxist Tendency. Despite having fundamental political differences with this group Woods' efforts in producing this edition of Trotsky's Stalin deserve significant and widespread recognition and commendation.

Woods has done important work to restore Leon Trotsky's biography of Stalin to its rightful place in the pantheon of Marxist literature. The new edition of Leon Trotsky's biography of Joseph Stalin, published in 2016 by Wellred Books, is a significant contribution to our understanding of Trotsky's thinking in the last years before his assassination in August 1940.

In this revised English translation, woods correctly made the decision not to change the content of the first part of the book, Chapters 1 through 7. Trotsky had corrected and approved these chapters during his life.

The majority of new work concentrated on the second half of the book. A radical overhaul of the remaining chapters was needed and undertaken. Chapters 8 through 12 were replaced with new chapters 8 through 14. An extraordinary 86,000 words were added to the 106,000-word length of the original.

As Woods writes "If Trotsky had lived, it is very clear that he would have produced infinitely better work. He would have made a rigorous selection of the raw material. Like an accomplished sculptor, he would have polished it and then polished it again until it reached the dazzling heights of a work of art. We cannot hope to attain such heights. We do not know what material the great man would have selected or rejected. But we feel we are under a historic obligation at least to make available to the world all the material that is available to us."

The well-known problems with this book began when the Russian manuscript was given to Charles Malamuth to translate and edit. Despite having political sympathy with Trotsky Malamuth was "incompetent".

Malamuth not only created a mess of a book but altered and added political formulations that Trotsky did not agree with. Trotsky was unhappy with the choice of Malamuth saying "Malamuth seems to have at least three qualities: he does not know Russian; he does not know English, and he is tremendously pretentious".[3]

Malamuth was exposed to the Trotskyist movement through his experience as a foreign correspondent in 1931, Malamuth considered himself a convinced admirer of Trotsky and his comrades. He was never a member of a Trotskyist party. There were many objections to Malamuth changes two of the most glaring severely contradicted Trotsky's long-held political beliefs. These concepts were: (1) that Stalinism was the inevitable outcome of Bolshevism; and (2) that the Soviet Union under Stalin was no longer a workers' state.

The finished book was due for publication in 1941. Due to the war and the fact that America did not want to disrupt the wartime alliance with Soviet Russia the book was only published after the war in 1946.

It is clear that Malmuth's insertions and "necessary' adjustments' which were politically motivated suited US imperialisms struggle against Bolshevism. Malamuth's commentary and misleading insertions of content, some of which stood in contradiction to Trotsky's views, were severely criticised by Natalia Sedova, Trotsky's widow. Sedova charged that "unheard-of violence" had been "committed by the translator on the author's rights" and declared that "everything written by the pen of Mr Malamuth must be expunged from the book."

While it is hard to place this book amongst Trotsky's other great work, this is no lesser book. For the modern reader, this "new" work shows his unparalleled genius for analysing political phenomena and political developments.

Trotsky's book is a classical example of how to place historical figures in the "grand scheme of things". Unlike Issac Deutscher's biography that tended to give Stalin a lot more credit than he was due to Trotsky's estimation of Stalin is stunning and wholly accurate. As Trotsky explains  "In this respect, Stalin represents a phenomenon utterly exceptional. He is neither a thinker, a writer, nor an orator. He took possession of power before the masses had learned to distinguish his figure from others during the triumphal processions across Red Square. Stalin took possession of power, not with the aid of personal qualities, but with the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who created the machine, but the machine that created him".

He continues "that machine, with its force and its authority, was the product of the prolonged and heroic struggle of the Bolshevik Party, which itself grew out of ideas. The machine was the bearer of the idea before it became an end in itself. Stalin headed the machine from the moment he cut off the umbilical cord that bound it to the idea and it became a thing unto itself. Lenin created the machine through constant association with the masses, if not by oral word, then by the printed word, if not directly, then through the medium of his disciples. Stalin did not create the machine but took possession of it. For this, exceptional and special qualities were necessary. But they were not the qualities of the historic initiator, thinker, writer, or orator. The machine had grown out of ideas. Stalin's first qualification was a contemptuous attitude toward ideas. "[4]

Trotsky's Stalin along with his other major work on Stalinism such as The Revolution Betrayed attack the so-called "myth of Stalin" revealing the socioeconomic and class relations from which it emerged. This myth, Trotsky wrote, "is devoid of any artistic qualities. It is only capable of astonishing the imagination through the grandiose sweep of shamelessness that corresponds completely with the character of the greedy caste of upstarts, which wishes to hasten the day when it has become master in the house." [5]

Trotsky's description of Stalin's relationship to his fellow bureaucrats is damning in the least bringing to mind the satires of Juvenal: Trotsky writes "ligula made his favourite horse a Senator. Stalin has no favourite horse, and so far, there is no equine deputy sitting in the Supreme Soviet. However, the members of the Supreme Soviet have as little influence on the course of affairs in the Soviet Union as did Caligula's horse, or for that matter even the influence his Senators had on the affairs of Rome. The Praetorian Guard stood above the people and in a certain sense even above the state. It had to have an Emperor as final arbiter. The Stalinist bureaucracy is a modern counterpart of the Praetorian Guard with Stalin as its Supreme Leader. Stalin's power is a modern form of Caesarism. It is a monarchy without a crown, and so far, without an heir apparent. [6]

While Trotsky in the realm of politics was "the greatest mind of his age". Stalin suffice to say was no political genius, but he knew that while Trotsky was alive and was exposing his treachery, he was a political threat to his regime. The regime could not allow him to live. Trotsky understood very well the forces aligned against him: "I can therefore state that I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule, but as an exception to the rule." 

Trotsky was alive to the danger posed by Stalin but retained a staggering level of personal objectivity: writing "In a reactionary epoch such as ours, a revolutionist is compelled to swim against the stream. I am doing this to the best of my ability. The pressure of world reaction has expressed itself perhaps most implacably in my personal fate and the fate of those close to me. I do not at all see in this any merit of mine: this is the result of the interlacing of historical circumstances."[7]

Isaac Deutscher

Isaac Deutscher's biography of Stalin leaves a lot to be desired, and that is being very generous. I am afraid I have to disagree with Isaac Deutscher, who wrote "that the biography of Stalin—even if the author had lived to complete it—"would probably have remained his weakest work." He continues that it did not contain the "ripeness and balance of Trotsky's other works" and included "many tentative statements and overstatements."

This criticism was not an aesthetic quibble but arose from Deutscher's political objections to Trotsky's clear assessment of Stalinism as counterrevolutionary.

According to the Marxist writer David North, "Trotsky's Stalin is a masterpiece. Countless biographies of Stalin have been written, including one by Deutscher that presented Stalin as a political giant. None of these works comes close to matching Trotsky's biography in terms of political depth, psychological insight and literary brilliance.[8]

Deutscher in one part of the book repeats a time-honoured attack on Trotsky by the Stalinists that he and other leading "elite" Bolsheviks did not understand the Peasantry and that Stalin who was close to this class was more adept at understanding their political needs.

Boris Souvarine.

To be truthful Boris Souvarine' biography on Stalin is not unlike that of Deutschers. Numerous academic reviewers have placed both versions above that of Trotsky's. Sourvarine who in his early career was relatively close to Trotsky and supported the Bolshevik revolution, unfortunately, ended his days a bitter opponent of both Lenin and Trotsky as this quote shows he repudiated the October revolution as well.

"Such was the actual result of the work of the man who, in The State and Revolution in 1917, had affirmed that the state must begin to wither away on the morrow of the socialist revolution. It had been created in stages to incorporate a refractory population and subject it to the new regime. For even the minority who had voted for the Bolsheviks in the elections to the Constituent Assembly had not voted for the Cheka and the terror, or even for Communism; they thought they were voting for peace, for the distribution of land, and for free soviets. To this monstrous etatist construction corresponded an aberrant ideology, a verbal pseudo-Marxism, simplistic and caricatural, of which Lenin was equally the theoretical and practical creator. Stalin only carried to extremes what Lenin had invented, though the latter was sincere in his socialist intentions, for which his epigones cared nothing.

As for Trotsky, anxious to obliterate his former disagreements with Lenin, recoiling in the face of the treacherous suspicion of "Bonapartism", and haunted by the historical precedent of "Thermidor", he had to rival the so-called "Bolshevik-Leninist" orthodoxy of his opponents, whilst denouncing to the utmost and quite rightly "the apparatus's system of terror", but in circumstances in which this apparatus, of which he was part, was now capable of stifling all dissident voices and mercilessly punishing any inclination towards dissidence. Along with Lenin, Trotsky had contributed to forging the baleful myth of the infallibility of the party, in defiance of the real ideas of Marx, which were invoked indiscriminately. Both of them, intoxicated by their doctrinal certainties, and perched at the top of the bureaucratic-soviet pyramid, were ignorant of what was being elaborated in the levels below, evincing a lack of awareness that handed over all the levers of command to Stalin.

Such are, in a hasty and necessarily bare outline, the why and the how of Stalin's enigmatic career. It is a summary that does not allow us to identify, as all too many are inclined to do, the founder of the so-called soviet state with its inheritor, so different in their characters and motives, without mentioning the rest. When Victor Adler, teasing Plekhanov, said to him "Lenin is your son", he replied tit for tat, "If he is my son, he is an illegitimate one". Lenin could have said the same for Stalin. For the latter was not another Lenin. Those who think so are deceiving themselves. But that is another story.[9]

Jean van Heijenoort

Alan Woods is correct in his assessment of the Jean van Heijenoort's edition of Trotsky's biography of Stalin saying "In 1948 an edition of Stalin was published in French, edited by Jean van Heijenoort, a former secretary of Trotsky's, in conjunction with Trotsky's friend Alfred Rosmer. Although believed by some to be a more authentic rendition of Trotsky's words, a subsequent comparison of the published French edition to Trotsky's original manuscript revealed the deletion of many pages of Trotsky's writing, the addition of little of import, and a blurring of Malamuth's commentary with the words of Trotsky through the editorial removal of square brackets from the English edition".

Throughout his life and after his death, Trotsky was attacked for using the historical materialist method to analysed political phenomena. His biography of Stalin is no different.

Of his method, Trotsky wrote "numerous of my opponents have conceded that the latter book is made up of facts arranged in a scholarly way. True, a reviewer in the New York Times rejected that book as prejudiced. But every line of his essay showed that he was indignant with the Russian Revolution and was transferring his indignation to its historian. This is the usual aberration of all sorts of liberal subjectivists who carry on a perpetual quarrel with the course of the class struggle. Embittered by the results of some historical process, they vent their spleen on the scientific analysis that discloses the inevitability of those results. In the final reckoning, the judgment passed on the author's method is far more pertinent than whether all or only a part of the author's conclusions will be acknowledged to be objective. And on that score, this author has no fear of criticism.

This work is built of facts and is solidly grounded in documents. It stands to reason that here and there partial and minor errors or trivial offences in emphasis and misinterpretation may be found. But what no one will find in this work is an unconscientious attitude toward facts, the deliberate disregard of documentary evidence or arbitrary conclusions based only on personal prejudices. The author did not overlook a single fact, document, or bit of testimony redounding to the benefit of the hero of this book. If a painstaking, thoroughgoing and conscientious gathering of facts, even of minor episodes, the verification of the testimony of witnesses with the aid of the methods of historical and biographical criticism, and finally the inclusion of facts of personal life in their relation to our hero's role in the historical process—if all of this is not objectivity, then, I ask, What is objectivity?

Political power, like morality, by no means, develops uninterruptedly toward a state of perfection, as was thought at the end of the last century and during the first decade of the present century. Politics and morals suffer and have to pass through a highly complex and paradoxical orbit. Politics, like morality, is directly dependent on the class struggle. As a general rule, it may be said that the sharper and more intense the class struggle, the deeper the social crisis, and the more intense the character acquired by politics, the more concentrated and more ruthless becomes the power of the state and the more frankly [does it cast off the garments of morality]".[10]

To conclude, Trotsky' biography of Stalin is a fine example of the historians and biographers craft. Not only was he able to place Stalin's role within a cognisant account of the October Revolution, but he was also able to clarify the social basis of Stalin's power. The book was not finished because Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent who murdered him with an ice pick to the head. Although his physical life ended as this edition proves not only does his legacy remain his work on Stalin and Stalinism is as relevant today as it was when he wrote this book. Again despite having political differences with the editor of this new edition, I would recommend and hope this book gets a wide readership it deserves and should be on the desk or tablet of every young revolutionary.



[1]https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/trot-a25.html- Trotsky's Last Year-Part Three-By David North-25 August 2020

[2]https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/08/ann6-s08.html

[3] wikipedia

[4][4] Stalin-By Leon Trotsky-2019

[5] Stalin-By Leon Trotsky-2019

[6] Stalin-By Leon Trotsky-2019

[7] Stalin Seeks My Death- The Fourth International, Vol. 2 No. 7, August 1941, pages 201-207

[8] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/trot-a25.html

[9] Stalin: Why and How-1978-Boris souvarine-https://marxists.catbull.com/history/etol/writers/souvar/works/1978/stalin.htm

[10] Leon Trotsky-Stalin –An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/stalin/intro.htm