I cannot say I follow
your articles for History Today on a regular basis, but when an article catches
my eye, I tend to read it. One such article was called Trotsky Offered Asylum.
As the title of your column suggests, you write about events from the near or
distant past.
If this particular article
was nothing more than a straight factual account of Leon Trotsky’s exile from
the former Soviet Union, I would have had nothing to complain about, but it was
not. I am sorry to say your article was a little dark and had a strong hint of conservative bias to it to say the least.
My first complaint is that
while you mention the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin for students and
people coming to this subject for the first time you would not garner from your
article that this was little more than just a personality clash that Trotsky
lost.
The life and death struggle
was deeply political and to no small extent decided the course of the 20th
century and not for the better. In fact, mankind paid a very heavy price for
Trotsky’s “fall” from power and subsequent murder.
Your article does not
mention a single political difference between Trotsky and Stalin. I admit you
have a lack of space, but your article would have been strengthened by at least
a cursory examination over the controversy over Stalin’s theory of building
socialism in a single country versus Trotsky’s insistence on global
revolution.
This aside, there are other
things in the article that I would like to address. One of your turn of phrase
left me a little cold and to say the least was a little sinister. To describe
Trotsky’s murderer as a “charming Spanish Communist painter “is a little
ridiculous.
He was a murderer who
pursued Trotsky and under Stalin’s personal order caved his skull with an ice
pick, perhaps you could explain what was charming about this.
While we are on the subject
of Trotsky’s murder to describe the act of murder as a “stab” of an ice pick is
just plain bizarre. Trotsky’s skull was caved in why you downplay this
horrendous assassination.
My last point is that while
it is difficult for a historian to come out of their comfort zone and write on
a subject, they know little about I must take exception to your description of
Robert Service as “Trotsky’s biographer”, given Service’s very right-wing
biography which is strewn with major errors it is simply not true. If readers
new to the subject of Trotsky's life would like to view a more balance view,
then they should look no further than Isaac Deutscher's three-volume trilogy.
The compliment you pay Service is not deserved.
Notes
1. Trotsky
offered asylum in Mexico by Richard Cavendish | Published in History Today
Volume: 61 Issue: 12 2011
http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/trotsky-offered-asylum-mexico
2.Trotsky: A Biography by Robert Service; In Defence of Leon Trotsky
by David North Review By Bertrand M.
Patenaude The American Historical Review Vol. 116, No. 3, June 2011
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.3.900
