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.
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
