Leon Trotsky
Allan Todd wrote Trotsky: The Passionate Revolutionary
(2022) to provide a more comprehensive, humanised, and nuanced portrait of Leon
Trotsky, moving beyond the one-dimensional, often heavily biased, or overly
academic portrayals in existing literature. Todd aimed to capture the intense,
multi-faceted "passions" that drove Trotsky, including his
revolutionary, intellectual, and romantic sides.
Alan Todd’s epithet “the passionate revolutionary” points to
an honest and inspiring aspect of Trotsky. But passion must be understood
dialectically as passion informed by scientific Marxism: programmatic rigour,
historical analysis, and an international perspective. For workers studying
revolutionary Marxism today, Trotsky’s life offers both an example of moral and
intellectual courage and a method. His writings are responses to material
realities. He sought to measure leaders and programs by their relation to class
interests.
Todd rejects an overtly political or academic examination of
Leon Trotsky’s life as a professional revolutionary. Instead, he explores
Trotsky as a complete human being, covering not only his political and military
roles (the 1905/1917 revolutions, the Red Army) but also his love of
literature, personal life, and his relationships with his family and
companions.
The book examines Trotsky's intellectual and literary side
and his "passionate" personal relationships—including his
relationship with Frida Kahlo and his long-term partner, Natalya Sedova—which
are often overlooked in standard, purely political biographies. The book
documents his "Passionate" Activism and how it fueled his
revolutionary work, his ability to organise the Red Army, and his role as a
leading opponent of Stalin.
As a teacher rather than a historian, Todd tends not to evaluate
Trotsky from a political perspective. I have always believed that as a
historian, you should orient research toward questions that matter politically,
especially when you write a biography of such a political man as Trotsky. Since
Trotsky remains politically contentious, many recent books are overtly
polemical. There has been a massive revival of anti‑Trotsky
falsifications in the post‑Soviet period. Todd’s book offers
little more than a superficial or unsystematic rebuttal. While he does not recycle
all the political slanders aimed at Trotsky, the author does not engage deeply with
Trotsky’s primary texts,
and it would appear that no archives have been consulted.
Having said that, Alan Todd’s portrait of Leon Trotsky as
“the passionate revolutionary” does capture a truth, but that truth must be
grasped in scientific, historical terms. Trotsky was not merely an energetic
personality but a theorist and strategist whose ideas arose from concrete
social struggles and the objective crises of early 20th-century capitalism. To
understand Todd’s emphasis on passion correctly requires placing Trotsky’s life
and ideas within the materialist conception of history, the dialectical method,
and the programmatic legacy of the Fourth International.
Trotsky’s “passion” was inseparable from his commitment to
revolutionary Marxism: the theory of permanent revolution, the insistence on
the international character of socialist transformation, and the principled
critique of bureaucratic degeneration. Trotsky’s writings and interventions on
the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, on the organisation and strategy of the Red
Army, and on the tasks of the working class under conditions of isolation, are
not romantic gestures but scientific responses to concrete class relations and
world-historical contradictions. His method treated political programs as the
working out of objective social contradictions, not as personal rhetoric.
Trotsky lived through the decisive turning points of the
capitalist and imperialist crisis: World War I, revolution, civil war, the
bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state, and the rise of fascism. His
theory of permanent revolution emerged from an analysis of how capitalist
development and the world market shaped class alliances in backward countries;
it insisted that the fate of socialist gains could not be separated from the
international movement of the proletariat.
Equally important was Trotsky’s struggle against the
Stalinist bureaucracy. He understood Stalinism not as an aberrant personality
cult but as the political expression of objective isolation and the defeat of
working-class movements internationally.
This scientific content is often obscured by bourgeois or
post‑Soviet
revisionism that reduces Trotsky to caricature. Todd’s uncritical use of the
historian Robert Service, who is one of the leading attack dogs of the
Post-Soviet School of falsification, is problematic, to say the least.
Robert Service is a contemporary British historian best
known for biographies of Soviet leaders, most notably his works on Stalin and
Trotsky, and for a widely read history of world communism. For anyone committed
to a scientific, materialist study of history, Service’s work must be examined
critically: it is essential to understand both what he contributes (archival
work and narrative synthesis for a broad audience) and where he fails, both methodologically
and politically.
Historiography shapes political consciousness. Service’s
approach illustrates how ostensibly scholarly writing can function as
ideological weaponry either to rehabilitate bureaucratic regimes, as in his
treatment of Stalin, or to discredit revolutionary leadership, as in his
treatment of Trotsky.
David North writes: Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and
offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of
scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been
conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history but rather an exercise in
character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify
Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a
grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal
life. Among his favourite devices is to refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s
intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumour’s source, let
alone substantiate its credibility.
Trotsky once declared, as he defended himself against the
slanders of Stalin’s regime: “There is not a stain on my revolutionary honour.”
Service, however, portrays Trotsky as an individual without any honour. He
attempts to discredit Trotsky not only as a revolutionary politician, but also
as a man. Service’s Trotsky is a heartless and vain individual who used
associates for his own egotistical purposes, a faithless husband who callously
abandoned his wife, and a father who was coldly indifferent to his children and
even responsible for their deaths. “People did not have to wait long before
discovering how vain and self-centred he was,” Service writes of Trotsky in a
typical passage. Service’s biography is loaded with such petty insults. Trotsky
was “volatile and untrustworthy.” “He was an arrogant individual” who
“egocentrically assumed that his opinions, if expressed in vivid language,
would win him victory.” “His self-absorption was extreme. As a husband, he
treated his first wife shabbily. He ignored the needs of his children,
especially when his political interests intervened.”[1]
Although Todd does not go as far as Service in his hatred of
Trotsky, the book contains numerous lies, misunderstandings, and outright
political opposition to Trotsky’s politics and behaviour. The first thing that
strikes you about Todd is that he has never been in or around a revolutionary
party or movement. Otherwise, he would not have dared to print that Trotsky
suffered from “Intellectual Overconfidence”. Despite recognising "the
power of the written word", he spends some time arguing that this was his primary
political weakness. He suggests that Trotsky overestimated the extent to which
"clarity of ideas" would prevail within the Bolshevik Party.
As noted at the beginning of this article, Todd fails to situate
Trotsky and his struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy within its broader
social and political context. As I said, it is vitally important to study Trotsky’s
writings as responses to material realities, measure leaders and programs by
their relation to class interests, and organise political independence rooted
in the international unity of the working class. Otherwise, you understand
nothing about the political conflicts inside and outside of the Bolshevik Party
during and after its rise to power. Certainly, he understands nothing of the
objective basis that played a crucial role in Trotsky’s fall from power. If
Todd believes that words are not as important as actions, why did Stalin have
Trotsky murdered?
The assertion that Trotsky failed to identify Stalin as a
serious threat early on is not only laughable but a lie. Trotsky did not simply
“fail to see” Stalin as a threat in the sense of being blind to the danger.
Rather, he identified early the growth of bureaucracy and the risks to the
revolution. Still, he misjudged how quickly and effectively that social layer
could consolidate power through control of the Party apparatus. That
combination of correct diagnosis and political miscalculation shaped the tragic
outcome.
Todd’s lack of political insight and historical knowledge leads
him to assert that Trotsky’s so-called inability to build alliances was merely
personal. While Trotsky’s difficulties in building long-lasting political
alliances were real and consequential, they stemmed from objective class and
institutional conditions within the Soviet state, from the social rise of a
bureaucracy, and from the international isolation of the revolution, not from
any perceived personal failings.
To sum up, it would appear that the central thesis of Todd's
work is that Trotsky was a "literary" figure and that had the
revolution not intervened, he would have remained so. Todd’s attempt at counterfactuals
falls flat on its arse. Leon Trotsky was far more than a “literary figure.”
While his gifts as a writer and polemicist were extraordinary, his historical
role flowed from objective class struggles and particular material conditions.
The October Revolution both revealed and required Trotsky’s capacities as organiser,
military leader, strategist and theorist. Reducing him to an aesthetic talent
divorced from politics misunderstands how theory, leadership, and social forces
interpenetrate under capitalism and revolution.
AUTHOR: Allan Todd was a teacher, exam workshop leader, and
senior examiner in 20th-century/Modern World History for over 25 years. He also
lectured in Modern European and World History for the Extra-Mural Boards of
Cambridge University and the University of East Anglia, and has written
numerous GCSE, A Level, and IB History textbooks and revision guides, including
Revolutions, 1789-1917.
[1]
In The Service of Historical Falsification A Review of Robert Service’s
Trotsky: A Biography Socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewTrotskyABiography.html
