While I concede that in a
review of this brevity it is difficult, to sum up, a book that runs to close to
six hundred pages but your review of Robert Service-Trotsky is a travesty of
critical writing.(1)
In the opening sentence, you
declare the same hostility to the subject as the author. You remark
“Trotskyites who like to compare their man favourably to the murderous Stalin
will probably be disappointed by this bold and balanced biography”.
As a person who opposes
Stalin, I must say that your cynical belittling the major political differences
between Trotsky and Stalin contributes to the already right-wing, low level and
ideologically driven Soviet historiography.
Even in short review a
summation of the differences, such as the dispute over the Permanent
Revolution, Socialism in a single country as opposed to international socialism
to name just two would have given this review a balanced and informed look. But
that is not really your objective.
As Service observes, “If
ever Trotsky had been the paramount leader instead of Stalin, the risks of a
bloodbath in Europe would have been drastically increased.” The above quote
which you note verbatim is absurd as well as a funny. Did you even think to examine
what he said? Could you explain to me what Trotsky could have done that would
have been worse than the Gulags, and the murder of the entire Bolshevik cadre
as well as the killing of millions of peasants and workers during the reign of
Stalin? Could it really be worse than the Stalinist induced defeats of the
Spanish, German and French working class to name a few who led the rise of
Fascism which in turn led to the murder of six million Jews and fifty million
people killed in the Second World War?
“He also notes that
Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1923), in which writers are expected to
toe the party line, prepared the way for “cultural Stalinism”. I am not
expecting you to be an expert on Trotsky’s writings or for that matter the
Russian Revolution., but have you read Trotsky’s writing on Literature and
Culture. Like Service, you seem to be under the impression that the bigger the
lie the more easily it is believed. It is clear you have no comprehension of
the debate over “culture” that raged inside the Bolshevik Party of which Lenin
took a major interest. Trotsky opposed Stalin’s “Socialist realism” saying that
it had nothing to do with Marxism. If you are interested in this debate, I draw
to your attention the writings of Aleksandr Voronsky in his book Art as the
Cognition of Life, as a poet I am sure you will find this book rewarding.
Lastly, you cannot just
repeat verbatim the lies and slanders and outright distortions of Service
without any independent verification. After all, you are writing for the
Guardian, not the Sun. Even you must know that a number of your readers will be
familiar with this period of history and will not accept your lazy and slapdash
method of reviewing a book.
You go on “And he founded
and trained the Red Army. In short, he was "no angel”. He had a “lust for
dictatorship and terror”. Unfortunately, my friend, you cannot just state and
quote Service like him you have to prove your assertions.
“He also abandoned his first
wife and their two baby girls in Siberia, and later drove one of those
daughters to suicide”. This slander is repeated again by you. Did you look into
this?
Well, David North a Leading
authority on the Russian revolution did and had this to say on the matter
“Service devotes an enormous amount of space to blackguarding Trotsky as a
faithless husband who cruelly abandoned his first wife and their two children.
“As a husband,” writes Service, “he [Trotsky] treated his first wife shabbily.
He ignored the needs of his children especially when his political interests
intervened. This had catastrophic consequences even for those who were inactive
in Soviet public life—and his son Lev, who followed him into exile, possibly
paid with his life for collaborating with his father.” [p. 4]
One would hardly guess,
based on Service’s telling of the story, that either the oppressive conditions
of Tsarist Russia or, later, the persecutions of Stalin had anything to do with
the tragic fate of Trotsky’s family and loved ones. In fact, Service actually
criticizes Trotsky for assigning responsibility to the Soviet regime for the
death of his daughter Zina in 1933” (2)
1)Robert
Service-Trotsky-Guardian Newspaper
2)David North Historians in
the Service of the “Big Lie”: An Examination of Professor Robert Service’s
Biography of Trotsky. www.wsws.org.
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