“There’s life in the old boy Trotsky yet—but if the ice
pick didn’t quite do its job-killing him off, I hope I’ve managed it.” Robert Service London, October 2009,
“Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but
Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege”. Leon Trotsky
Over the last decade or so we have seen a relentless
campaign to promote the death of Marxism. It is perhaps then a little
surprising that over the corresponding period we have seen a plethora of
biographies on the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Over the past ten years, we have seen four
English-language novels and four English-language academic books. This is not
counting books produced in other languages.
Bertrand M. Patenaude’s book is one of the better ones.
The book, 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
has been widely reviewed in both the capitalist press and various pseudo-left
publications. One has sympathies with any historian who attempts a biography of
Trotsky since he or she will have to with apologies to Thomas Carlyle “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 personal papers at Harvard and of course to
papers held at the Hoover archives. Even this privileged access has not
prevented him from repeating a number of distortions and fabrications about
Trotsky and the Russian revolution. It is unfortunate but Patenaude’s book is not the only
one to give an inaccurate and politically driven portrait of Leon Trotsky. Many
of these recent books do not have even the most basic academic integrity.
Recent Historiography
The current low standard of books on Leon Trotsky has not
always been the case. A significant number of historians who while not being
close to Trotsky’s politics have written very good and in most cases objective
books. It is not possible to examine all of them but perhaps the historian
worth reading the most is E H Carr.
Carr was one the first major historian to attempt a
rehabilitation of Trotsky. His publications on the history of Soviet Russia are
“monumental”. According to the Marxist writer David North, “Carr was not
politically sympathetic to Trotsky, but he brilliantly summarized and analyzed
the complex issues of program, policy and principle with which Trotsky grappled
in a difficult and critical period of Soviet history”.
Carr was followed by the writer and historian Isaac
Deutscher who had close links with Trotsky’s Fourth International. He published
three biographical trilogies: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The
Prophet Outcast. Unlike Carr Deutscher was sympathetic to Trotsky and his
ideas. Deutscher was expelled from the Polish Communist Party for Trotskyism in
the 1930s. He was a delegate to the
first conference of the Fourth International. However, he disagreed with
Trotsky over the founding of the Fourth International in a period of defeats
and believed that the new group was too weak.
His books are still standard reading for anyone interested in the topic.
This cannot be said of the current spate of biographies?
These books are in many ways a useful barometer to the growing shift to the
right in academia. After all, academics do not live not in a vacuum and are
subject to the many ideological pressures that rage throughout society. It is churlish to say that every writer who produces a
work on the figures of the Russian Revolution should adhere to Marxism but is
it too much to ask for some objectivity or even good serious history. It is
hard not to notice that most history departments have become little more than
production lines for anti-Marxist books.
Many of these books are as Oscar Wilde said “hitting
below the intellect”. By far the worst of these books is Robert Service’s
biography of Trotsky[1] In the preface of his book Service makes the boast that
his is "the first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone
outside of Russia who is not a Trotskyist." This is simply not true. It is
hard to believe that the editor of this book would have let this comment pass
without checking it.
Leon Trotsky
Patenaude correctly criticizes Service’s book for its
level of factual inaccuracies. Writing in the American Historical Review he
says “I have counted more than four dozen [mistakes],”. he continues, “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
backwards 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
completely 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.”[2]
Patenaude goes on to explain how he came to review the
book saying he was “initially inclined to turn down the review request”. He
felt that working on the review would lead him away from other work.
“Nonetheless, after checking to make sure that David North's book did not
mention my own recent book on Trotsky, I accepted the invitation, fully
expecting that I would add my voice to the chorus of praise for Service's
biography.”
“I wrote the
review at the request of the editors of the AHR,” They asked me to review both
Service's book and North's book. I did find this a little curious, because
Service is a major figure in the field of Soviet history and his Trotsky has
been hailed by several reviewers as the definitive biography -- so why dilute
the effect by combining it with a slender, essentially self-published volume
written by an avowed Trotskyist who devotes most of his pages to criticism of
Service and his book?”
Bertrand M. Patenaude
Patenaude would later retract his sharp opinion of North
who after all is a leading authority on Leon Trotsky and has written
extensively on him. Patenaude wrote “Enter David North. David North is an
American Trotskyist whose book collects his review essays of Service’s volume
and of earlier biographies of Trotsky by Ian Thatcher and Geoffrey Swain. (He
does not mention my 2009 book, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary.) Given
North’s Trotskyism, he might reasonably be suspected of hyperbole in his brief
against Service. But a careful examination of North’s book shows his criticism
of Service to be exactly what Trotsky scholar Baruch Knei-Paz, in a blurb on
the back cover, says it is: ‘detailed, meticulous, well-argued and
devastating.’”
North has his own deep-seated criticism of Service’s work
on Trotsky. In his review, he writes that Service’s book “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 favorite devices is to refer to “rumors” about Trotsky’s
intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumor’s source, let
alone substantiate its credibility”
Swain and Thatcher
North has also been heavily critical of other biographies
of Trotsky by Geoffrey Swain and Ian Thatcher. Thatcher from Leicester
university produced his Trotsky in 2003 published by Routledge. In his opinion “Thatcher and Swain belittled Deutscher
for creating the “myth” of Trotsky. The Thatcher-Swain biographies set out to
create a new anti-Trotsky narrative, utilizing slanders and fabrications of old
Stalinist vintage in the interest of contemporary anti-communism”.
Thatcher’s Trotsky as North says is little more than
character assassination. The book is also heavily pregnant with undocumented
assertions. Like Service’s book both make it exceedingly difficult for the
average reader to trace articles and evaluate for themselves Thatcher’s and
Swain’ comments. Even something basic as footnotes are not very accurate and
sometimes misleading.
Patenaude
Patenaude is not immune to this right wing shift in
academia. His book despite being better than some others does sufferer from the
repeating the same myths and mistakes of previous books. Patenaude’s use of
sources close to Trotsky who were either hostile or had broken with his
politics is not really useful and Patenaude is far too uncritical of them.
Patenaude relies a great deal 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.
It is clear that Patenaude is not fully 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 that did. Patenaude does portray a certain amount of sympathy for
his subject which is done so from a liberal, not Marxist standpoint. He also
has the annoying habit of using throw away lines such 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 viewpoint on other struggles inside the
Bolshevik party is predominantly impressionistic.
'Warts and all'
On the plus side, Patenaude’s account is important
because it brings together a wide range of sources on Trotsky’s murder. Some of these sources have not been available in English before. He also makes use of
the personal papers of the Alexander Buchman, Albert Glotzer and the FBI and
the GPU agent Joseph Hansen.
Patenaude employs a novelist type writing style. It is a
shame that this style does not work when he tries to employ this method when
encountering Trotsky’s revolutionary past.
The main focus of the book centres on the last decade of
Trotsky's life and work. Patenaude 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 to say politically that has not been said before. Very
little 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.
Conclusion
It is clear that Patenaude has no sympathy for the
Trotskyist movement. He believes it is full of “sects” and is riddled with
“splits and mergers”. Trotskyist’s will need a strong stomach if they read this
book. The book is likely to gain a wide readership, but young people and
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 a much
earlier period these should be read in conjunction with this book.
[1] Robert Service, Trotsky, A Biography (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009)
[2] The American Historical Review (2011) 116 (3):
900-902
