The Russian Revolution: A New History By Sean McMeekin Basic Books. $30. Illustrated. 445 pp.
It is usually the case that you cannot tell a book by its cover. What is written on the back is a different matter. Whoever is enlisted to praise a book gives you a good idea about the author's politics. McMeekin’s book is no different. The fact that the publisher asks two of the most right-wing historians known to mankind in the form of Niall Ferguson and Simon Sebag Montefiore tells the reader a lot. The book is also praised by the right-wing Tory MP Michael Gove, who wrote in his review for the London Times, "The Russian Revolution was the most successful criminal conspiracy in history. The takeover of an entire nation by a shameless huckster supported by a hostile foreign power. And the revolution was also an object lesson in how liberals can lose, and lose catastrophically, from a position of great advantage, if they are divided in the face of a ruthlessly ideological foe."[1]
Although Ferguson, Sebag Montefiore and Tory MP Michael Gove all share McMeekinn’s right-wing political and historical outlook, they are not responsible for this hack work, which contains falsifications and slanders from the first page to the last.
Let us start at the beginning. In chapter one, Mcmeekin makes the stupid and wrong assertion that the split in the RSDLP in 1903 was over the so-called “Jewish Question”. He writes “ Contrary to the common belief, expounded in most history books, that the famous Bolshevik-Menshevik split of July 1903 occurred because Lenin’s advocacy of a professional cadre of elites (sometimes called vanguardism), outlined in his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done?, was opposed by Mensheviks who wanted mass worker participation in the party, the real fireworks at the Brussels Congress surrounded the Jewish question. Party organisation was not even discussed until the fourteenth plenary session. Lenin’s main goal in Brussels was to defeat the Bund—that is, Jewish—autonomy inside the party. His winning argument was that Jews were not really a nation, as they shared neither a common language nor a common national territory. Martov, the founder of the Bund, took great umbrage at this, and walked out to form the new Menshevik (minority) faction. He was followed by nearly all Jewish socialists, including, notably, Lev Bronstein (Trotsky), a young intellectual from Kherson, in southern Ukraine, who had studied at a German school in cosmopolitan Odessa, which helped prime him for the appeal of European Marxism. With Lenin all but mirroring the arguments of Russian anti-Semites, it is not hard to see why Martov, Trotsky, and other Jews joined the opposition.”[2]
The Marxist writer David North answers this foul slander in his two-part review of McMeekin’s book.[3] He writes, “The problem with this account is that it is completely false, both in terms of facts and political interpretation. Putting aside his incorrect dating of the split (it occurred in August, not July), McMeekin concocts, with the intention of slandering Lenin as an anti-Semite, an account of the break between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks that has nothing to do with historical and political reality. The RSDLP did not split over the issue of the Jewish Bund. Far from being the “founder” of the Bund, let alone walking out of the Congress to protest Lenin’s opposition to the Bund’s autonomy within the party, Martov wrote the RSDLP resolution that provoked the Bund’s walkout. Martov’s opposition to Jewish autonomy within the Revolutionary Workers’ Party was far more strident than Lenin’s. As the late Leopold Haimson, the leading authority on the history of Menshevism, wrote in his important scholarly work The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism, “Martov clashed violently with the Bund representatives when this issue arose at the Second Party Congress. There was greater acerbity in his polemical tone during these discussions than that of any other members of his camp.” [3] As for McMeekin’s claim that Trotsky also walked out of the 1903 Congress in support of the Bund’s demand for autonomy, this is another incredible display of ignorance. Trotsky was an uncompromising opponent of the Bund, and the transcript of the debates (available in English) show that Trotsky intervened repeatedly in support of Martov’s resolution.”[4]
There is nothing new in McMeekin’s book that has not already been vomited by other right-wing historians such as Richard Pipes et al. McMeekin’s main argument is that the revolution took place merely by chance and fell into the Bolshevik's laps again by chance. Pipes, like McMeekin, rejects the view that the revolution was the result “of social movements from below”; instead, Pipes and others often characterise the revolution as a mere putsch or coup by “identifiable men pursuing their advantages.”
The book is a complete rewrite of an entire revolutionary epoch. McMeekin writes, “The salient fact about Russia in 1917 is that it was a country at war. Knowing how the story of the czars turns out, many historians have suggested that the Russian colossus must always have had feet of clay. But surely, this is hindsight. Despite growing pains, uneven economic development and stirrings of revolutionary fervour, imperial Russia in 1900 was a going concern, its size and power a source of pride to most if not all of the czar’s subjects.”
So, what is the driving force behind McMeekin’s revisionism and his rejection of any Marxist or liberal historiography? In his book, he does not mention important historians such as E H Carr or Alexander Rabinowitch.
The answer is to be found in ideology, not history. McMeekin is rapid in his hatred of socialism. He warns his readers of what he calls a resurgence of Marxist-style philosophy, warning readers to be wary of “openly avowed socialists” like Bernie Sanders, who, in reality, has nothing to do with socialism.
North asks, “Why did he write the book? Aside from the lure of easy money (anti-communist works are usually launched with substantial publicity and guaranteed positive reviews in the New York Times and many other publications), McMeekin has a political motive. At the start of this year, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “A spectre is haunting world capitalism: the spectre of the Russian Revolution.” McMeekin is among the haunted. He writes in the book’s epilogue, “The Specter of Communism,” that capitalism is threatened by growing popular discontent, and the appeal of Bolshevism is again on the rise. “Like the nuclear weapons born of the ideological age inaugurated in 1917, the sad fact about Leninism is that once invented, it cannot be uninvented. Social inequality will always be with us, along with the well-intentioned impulse of socialists to eradicate it.” Therefore, “the Leninist inclination is always lurking among the ambitious and ruthless, especially in desperate times of depression or war that seem to call for more radical solutions.” McMeekin continues: “If the last hundred years teach us anything, we should stiffen our defences and resist armed prophets promising social perfection.”
While it is not in the realm of possibility to cover every lie, falsification and slander contained in the book, it would be remiss of me not to refute the old slander that is rehashed in the book that Vladimir Lenin was a German agent. Again, I will quote David North not because I am a bit lazy but, to put it bluntly, he is at the moment the greatest authority in the world on the Russian Revolution. He writes, “ There is not a single serious historian who has treated the allegations against Lenin as anything other than a slander. From the moment of Lenin’s return to Russia via Germany aboard the “sealed train,” the anti-revolutionary right attempted to portray the Bolshevik leader as an agent of the Kaiser. In the initial months of the revolution, this libel gained no support outside liberal and fascistic circles. It was well understood that the possibility of a speedy return by a man widely recognised by the Russian workers as one of their most courageous and brilliant leaders required that he find the fastest route to revolutionary Petrograd. One month later, Martov, after much dithering, also used the German route.
Moreover, Trotsky’s experience in March–April 1917 further validated Lenin’s decision. Trotsky, travelling across the Atlantic from New York City, was forcibly removed from his ship off the coast of Halifax by British authorities. Attempting to prevent the return of the much-feared revolutionary to Russia, who many believed to be “worse than Lenin,” the British interned Trotsky in a prisoner-of-war camp for one month. In the face of protests by the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government’s reluctant demand that he be released, Trotsky was finally allowed to continue his journey back to Russia. He arrived one month later than Lenin.”.
Normally, even the worst history books have a few pearls of wisdom and some redeeming features. This has none. It is kind to call it revisionist history, but in reality, McMeekin has vomited up every single falsification, slander and outright lie printed on the Russian Revolution and then some. As North correctly writes, “Sean McMeekin stands exposed as a falsifier of history.”
[1] Gove, Michael (3 June 2017). "The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin". The Times.
[2] THE Russian revolution: A New History By Sean McMeekin
Basic Books. $30. Illustrated. p22/23
[3] Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html
[4] Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html
The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution-by Tariq Ali-Verso publications-2017
“Before 30, a revolutionary. After 30, a swine!”
French expression,
Gentlemen, we can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future. I would like to warn you against the mistake that causes people to advance the hands of their clocks, thinking that thereby they are hastening the passage of time. My influence on the events I took advantage of is usually exaggerated, but it would never occur to anyone to demand that I should make history. I could not do that even in conjunction with you, although together, we could resist the whole world. We cannot make history; we must wait while it is being made. We will not make fruit ripen more quickly by subjecting it to the heat of a lamp, and if we pluck the fruit before it is ripe, we will only prevent its growth and spoil it.
Otto Von Bismark
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution
It has been one hundred years since the death of Vladimir Lenin. I had intended to mark the occasion with a review of one of his books. Therefore, I must apologise to my readership that I chose instead to review a book by such a political scoundrel and political opportunist of the worst sort.
Ali was born into a prominent family in Lahore. His uncle was the chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence. While studying at Oxford, he joined the International Marxist Group in 1968. The hallmark of the IMG was the British section of the Pabloite movement, a group specialising in political provocation.
Ali is Verso’s go-to man on anything connected with Lenin. This says more about Verso’s politics than it does about Ali. Given Ali's close association with Stalinism, he should not be allowed anywhere near Vladimir Lenin. Ali supported Gorbachev and Perestroika in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
He believed Perestroika was a great advance for socialism. He even dedicated his book Revolution From Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going?, published in 1988, to Boris Yeltsin, who later presided over capitalist restoration in the USSR. He said of Yeltsin that his “political courage has made him an important symbol throughout the country and that “The scale of Gorbachev’s operation is, in fact, reminiscent of the efforts of an American president of the nineteenth century: Abraham Lincoln.”
The Dilemmas of Lenin contains no new research and a very limited insight into the mind and actions of Lenin. Ali is correct in saying that the Russian Revolution would not have happened without the brain of Lenin, as Ali points out in his introduction, “ First things first. Without Lenin, there would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much, we can be certain. Fresh studies of the events have only hardened this opinion. The faction and later the Party that he painstakingly created from 1903 onward was not up to the task of fomenting revolution during the crucial months between February and October 1917, the freest period ever in Russian history. A large majority of its leadership, before Lenin’s return, was prepared to compromise on many key issues. The lesson is that even a political party – specifically trained and educated to produce a revolution – can stumble, falter and fall at the critical moment.”[1]
Ali deals at length with the “Lenin cult” and the attempt by the Stalinists to turn Lenin into a harmless liberal icon. Lenin believed this would happen to all the leaders of the Bolshevik party, writing, “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”[2]
While Ali deals with the early attack on Lenin’s revolutionary edge, his failure to examine more modern-day attempts to bury Lenin under many dead dogs is unforgivable and hard to understand. However, when one starts to investigate Ali’s political trajectory, only one conclusion can be drawn: Ali has no interest in defending Lenin’s “revolutionary edge”. The only ones interested in re-establishing Lenin’scontemprary importance are the Trotskyists of the International Committee of the Fourth International(ICFI).
In a two-part Series, the Marxist David North defends Lenin’s revolutionary edge from the blunt blade of Professor Sean McMeekin. McMeekin wrote an article for the New York Times in which he accused Lenin, amongst other things, of being a German Spy.[3] His article was based on his 2017 book The Russian Revolution: A New History, which North said” cannot be described as a work of history because McMeekin lacks the necessary level of knowledge, professional competence and respect for facts. McMeekin’s book is simply an exercise in anti-communist propaganda from which no one will learn anything.”[4]
He continued, “Why did he write the book? Aside from the lure of easy money (anti-communist works are usually launched with substantial publicity and guaranteed positive reviews in the New York Times and many other publications), McMeekin has a political motive. At the start of this year, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “A spectre is haunting world capitalism: the spectre of the Russian Revolution.” McMeekin is among the haunted. He writes in the book’s epilogue, “The Specter of Communism,” that capitalism is threatened by growing popular discontent, and the appeal of Bolshevism is again on the rise. “Like the nuclear weapons born of the ideological age inaugurated in 1917, the sad fact about Leninism is that once invented, it cannot be uninvented. Social inequality will always be with us, along with the well-intentioned impulse of socialists to eradicate it.” Therefore, “the Leninist inclination is always lurking among the ambitious and ruthless, especially in desperate times of depression or war that seem to call for more radical solutions.” McMeekin continues: “If the last hundred years teach us anything, we should stiffen our defences and resist armed prophets promising social perfection.” [5]
In some ways, Ali and McMeekin are two sides of the same coin. Both attempt to bury Lenin's revolutionary struggle, his true legacy and contemporary importance. The only organisation on the planet that can truly celebrate and thank Lenin for his insight and revolutionary struggle and bring him to a new audience is the orthodox Marxists of the ICFI.
[1] https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/3230-tariq-ali-asks-why-lenin
[2] ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution
[3] Was Lenin a German Agent?By Sean Mcmeekin-June 19, 2017-https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/was-lenin-a-german-agent.html
[4] Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders (Part I)- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html
[5] Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders (Part I)- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html
David North-Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century.Mehring Books -2023
I firmly believe that Leon Trotsky remains a colossal figure in the history of revolutionary socialism in the twentieth century. It beholds anyone interested in this revolutionary giant to carefully study this collection of writings on the great man by David North.
North believes Trotsky’s greatest achievement was founding the Fourth International (FI) in 1938 after the Third International under Stalin facilitated the coming to power of Hitler in Germany without a fight by the multi-millioned working class.
Trotsky opposed Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” he wrote in the founding document of the FI that “the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”
North’s book covers forty years of revolutionary struggles. This collection of essays is designed to remind the older reader of Trotsky’s rich heritage and “bring the rich historical lessons to a new generation of workers and young people, to resolve the “historical crisis of mankind.”
My favourite essay is Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism, published in 1982. It was written during the months when the sick Stalinist leader Leonid Brezhnev passed power to Yuri Andropov, who died. Power was then transferred to Konstantin Chernenko—who, within two years, joined their predecessor alongside the Kremlin Wall— and, finally, in March 1985, to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Reading that essay was one of the reasons for my joining the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1983. It had a profound effect on my political development. The essay is written as a tribute to Tom Henehan, who was assassinated on October 16, 1977. The four articles by David North, originally published in 1982 on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Tom Henehan, provide a remarkably concise introduction to Trotskyism, the Marxism of today.
The essay "Trotsky's Last Year" is extraordinarily good. Trotsky was at the height of his powers before a Stalinist Agent murdered him. It contains an appreciation of one of my favourite essays, “Trotsky’s Place in History,” by C.L.R. James, the Caribbean socialist intellectual and historian, who wrote:
“During his last decade he [Trotsky] was an exile, apparently powerless. During those same ten years, Stalin, his rival, assumed power like no man in Europe since Napoleon wielded. Hitler has shaken the world and bids fair to bestride it like a colossus while he lasts. Roosevelt is the most powerful president who has ever ruled in America, and America is the most powerful nation in the world. Yet the Marxist judgment of Trotsky is as confident as Engels’s judgment of Marx. Before his period of power, during it, and after his fall, Trotsky stood second only to Lenin among contemporary men, and after Lenin died was the greatest head of our times. That judgment we leave to history.”
Workers and youth should carefully study this book to prepare for future struggles. It is a vital guide and provides the strategy and tactics necessary for a successful fight against capitalism.
Vasily Grossman: The People Immortal, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, New York Review Books Classics, 2022, 352 pages.
"He had achieved nothing. He would leave behind him no books, no paintings, no discoveries. He had created no school of thought, political party, or disciples. Why had life been so hard? He had not preached, he had not taught; he had remained what he had been since birth – a human being."
"let's put God—and all these grand progressive ideas—to one side. Let's begin with man; let's be kind and attentive to the individual man—whether he's a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let's begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual—or we'll never get anywhere.
Anton Chekhov
"In those difficult days, people wanted only the truth, however difficult and cheerless it might be. And Bogariov told them this truth."
Vasily Grossman
A work not only of considerable literary significance but also an important historical document. As a new world war is brewing in Ukraine, and the vilest nationalism, xenophobia and historical lies are being promoted by the ruling classes everywhere, works like this will help reconnect the generations that have to wage the revolutionary battles of today with the socialist traditions of 1917.
—Clara Weiss, World Socialist Website
"There are also other aspects of Grossman's work that are becoming important today. During the last 20 years, the Anglophone world has gradually recognised that the second world war was fought between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and that the Western allies played a secondary role in it. There are many, many reasons why Grossman seems more relevant today than when I was first translating him over 40 years ago."
Robert Chandler
In September 2022, The Immortal People, the Soviet author Vasily Grossman's first of three superb novels chronicling the Second World War, was published with a new English translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. The recent re-publication of the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman's book reflects a renewed surge of interest in his books. Grossman has a journalist's eye for detail coupled with a novelist's empathy. His work has been compared to that of Erich Remarque and Stephen Crane.
Perhaps the most significant thing about this extraordinary new translation by Robert Chandler, who called Grossman's political stance "revolutionary romanticism", is that it contains never before-published passages from Grossman's original manuscript. It, therefore, represents the complete edition of this work published so far in any language, including Grossman's native Russian. As Claire Weiss correctly states, "The result is a work of considerable literary significance and an important historical document." Weiss's interview with Robert Chandler can be seen on the wsws.org.[1]
Grossman's novel opens with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The fact that the Nazis could overrun large swathes of the Soviet Union was down to the fact that The Red Army and Soviet people had been left completely unprepared for the Nazi invasion. According to Weiss, Stalin had not only rejected dozens of warnings of the impending attack but had also murdered the leadership of the Red Army and large portions of its ranks in the Great Terror of 1936-1938.
Weiss states in her book review, "As a result, the Red Army of 1941 was poorly led militarily and politically, and vastly under-equipped to confront the highly sophisticated weaponry and mass assault of German imperialism. In the first months of the war, millions of Red Army soldiers were captured—about two million of them would be starved to death by spring 1942—and many more were killed and wounded on the battlefield". [2]
The book is a fascinating look at the brutal nature of the Nazi invasion and the extraordinary sacrifice of The Red Army and the Russian Working Class. Grossman includes many important and politically fascinating characters. Such as the political commissar, Bogariov; the commander Babadjanian; and the soldier Ignatiev.
Bogariov doesn't appear to be modelled on any particular individual but is probably an amalgam of many people met by Grossman. The Marx-Engels Institute mentioned in the book was a refuge for many oppositionists to the |Stalin regime. Mikhail Liftshitz and the Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács carried out work there. While Lukacs and Lifshitz managed to survive, many leading Bolsheviks, such as Isaak Rubin, were shot in 1937, and the leader of the Institute, Ryazanov, suffered the same fate. Grossman was aware of what was happening and added characters such as Bogariov, who opposed the Stalin regime.
As Clara Weiss writes, "Bogariov is a former employee of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, devoted to the legacy of Lenin and the early Russian socialists, who now take to the art of war as much as he did to the writings of Marx and Engels. Bogariov becomes the embodiment of what good political leadership means for Grossman. In what can only be read as a blatant rebuke of the Stalinist effort to dull the population and the soldiers into unconsciousness in the face of the immense dangers they were facing and of the bureaucracy's constant lies during the war, Grossman writes, "In those difficult days, people wanted only the truth, however difficult and cheerless it might be. And Bogariov told them this truth." [3]
One might add that Grossman told the truth, and his novels, including Stalingrad and Life and Fate, were in opposition to the Stalinist falsifications of this history. As Weiss points out, the material also provides a sense of how the soviet bureaucracy's constant political and historical lies impacted the cultural and socio-political climate at the time. To fully appreciate the book, the reader will need to familiarise themselves with what Weiss says was the "political and ideological crackdown by the Stalinist bureaucracy of the 1930s. "[4]
To conclude, Grossman's books should be a must for every worker and young person and should be on every university reading list. Grossman, although long overdue, is correctly seen as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. His best works are regarded as masterpieces. Grossman states, "I wrote the book out of love and pity for ordinary people, and I still believe in them." Despite living through what the poet Osip Mandelstam called the "wolfhound century", Grossman retained this sentiment to his dying day.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/02/ljhh-n02.html
[2]
[3] The People Immortal: Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s first novel about World War II-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/14/auih-o14.html
[4] The People Immortal: Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s first novel about World War II-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/14/auih-o14.html
Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women by Kristen Ghodsee-Verso publications -2022
"The followers of historical materialism reject the existence of a special woman question separate from the general social question of our day. Specific economic factors were behind the subordination of women; natural qualities have been a secondary factor in this process. Only the complete disappearance of these factors, only the evolution of those forces which at some point in the past gave rise to the subjection of women, is able in a fundamental way to influence and change their social position. In other words, women can become truly free and equal only in a world organised along new social and productive lines."[1]
Alexandra Kollontai
"We in Russia no longer have the base, mean and infamous denial of rights to women or inequality of the sexes, that disgusting survival of feudalism and medievalism which is being renovated by the avaricious bourgeoisie ... in every other country in the world without exception."
V. I. Lenin
"The most important distinguishing feature of socialist schools should be the child's fullest possible and most comprehensive development. They must not suppress his individuality but only help develop it. Socialist schools are schools of freedom in which there is no room for regimentation, rote learning and cramming."
Nadezhda Krupskaya
"Until the old forms of family life, domestic life, education and child-rearing are abolished, it is impossible to obliterate exploitation and enslavement. It is impossible to create the new person, impossible to build socialism".
Inessa Armand
"Much better to die in open combat, among comrades, with weapons in their hands. That's how I want to die. That's how hundreds and thousands die for this republic every day."
Larissa Reisner
"Only a Socialist society will solve the conflict that is nowadays produced by the professional activity of women. Once the family as an economic unit will vanish and its place will be taken by the family as a moral unit, the woman will become an equally entitled, equally creative, equally goal-oriented, forward-stepping companion of her husband; her individuality will flourish while at the same time, she will fulfill her task as wife and mother to the highest degree possible.[2]
Clara Zetkin
Kristen Ghodsee's new book examines the lives of three revolutionary women and two non-revolutionary women between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the consolidation of Stalinism in the former USSR.
One assumes that Ghodsee chose these five women, which were not handed to her by her editor. Strangely, she leaves out two women revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg and Larissa Reissner. They were far more deserving of appreciation than the two apologists for the Stalinist regime, Ludmila Pavlichenko and Elena Lagadinova.
Red Valkyries is a limited attempt to counteract the recent narrative of liberal feminism and the #Me too movement and replace it with a revolutionary tradition espoused by "socialist women", many of whom have been largely ignored or turned into harmless icons.
Ghodsee's choice of Alexandra Kollontai is a logical and welcome one. If young women today looking to fight against capitalism wanted a role model, they should stop doing their TikTok dances and study the work and life of Kollantai.
Kollontai was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. She broke decisively with her aristocratic upbringing and dedicated her life to the revolution. Like many of her generation, she well conversed with the work of the great Marxist writers Karl Marx, Frederick Engles and August Bebel. Kollantai specialised in the study of women's oppression.
She was one of only a handful of Bolsheviks that wrote extensively about sexual relationships. She opposed bourgeois feminism and understood that the emancipation of women was a class question and could only be carried out in partnership with the male working class, as this quote shows: "The feminists see men as the main enemy, for men have unjustly seized all rights and privileges for themselves, leaving women only chains and duties. For them, a victory is won when a prerogative previously enjoyed exclusively by the male sex is conceded to the 'fair sex.' Proletarian women have a different attitude. They do not see men as the enemy and the oppressor; on the contrary, they think of men as their comrades, who share with them the drudgery of the daily round and fight with them for a better future."[3]
Like all good revolutionaries, she lived by what she wrote. She formed a close political relationship with Vladimir Lenin, who appointed her social welfare minister in the new Bolshevik government. Kollantai and her staff made legal changes that put the rights of Russian women light years ahead of any western capitalist government.
Ghodsee correctly restores Nadezhda Krupskaya, who historians often portray as only Lenin's companion, to her rightful place as a revolutionary. She not only supported Lenin but looked after the family household and, at the same time, played a crucial role in building the Bolshevik Party.
Like Kollantai, Krupskaya believed that the fate of the woman worker was closely tied to that of the male working class. Her pamphlet, The Woman Worker, states, "The woman worker is a member of the working class, and all her interests are closely tied to the interests of that class."
She had a passion for education matched only by a few others. She advocated a child-centred pedagogy, saying, "The most important distinguishing feature of socialist schools should be the child's fullest possible and most comprehensive development."They must not suppress his individuality but only help develop it. Socialist schools are schools of freedom in which there is no room for regimentation, rote learning and cramming."One can only hope that the attention paid to Krupskaya by Khodsee is the beginning of a revival in the interest of this important Bolshevik.
One striking aspect of this book is the failure to mention the second most important revolutionary in the Bolshevik Party that of, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky knew and worked with these three revolutionary women and held them in high esteem. Krupskaya was particularly fond of Trotsky even when it was very dangerous.
In a letter to Clara Zetkin, Zetkin relays what Krupskaya thought of Trotsky "She said to me recently that it is false what [Lev] Kamenev and [Gregory] Zinoviev assert, that Lenin had never trusted Trotsky. On the contrary, at the end of his days, Lenin was fond of Trotsky and held him in high regard. After his death, she wrote to Trotsky."
Dear LEV DAVYDOVICH, I write to tell you that about a month before his death, as he was looking through your book, Vladimir Ilyich stopped at the place where you sum up Marx and Lenin and asked me to read it over again to him; he listened very attentively, and then looked it over again himself. And here is another thing I want to tell you. The attitude of Vladimir Ilyich toward you at the time when you came to us in London from Siberia had not changed until his death. I wish you, Lev Davydovich, strength and health, and I embrace you warmly."
Leon Trotsky returned the compliment when he wrote a letter upon hearing about her death in 1939 "Nothing can be further from our mind than to blame Nadezhda Konstantinovna for not having been resolute enough to break openly with the bureaucracy. Political minds, far more independent than hers, vacillated, tried to play hide and seek with history – and perished. Krupskaya was, to the highest degree, endowed with a feeling of responsibility. Personally, she was courageous enough. What she lacked was mental courage. With profound sorrow we bid farewell to the loyal companion of Lenin, to an irreproachable revolutionist and one of the most tragic figures in revolutionary history."[4]
Inessa Armand was an extraordinary woman, and few others matched her work rate. She carried out many translations for Lenin and was often sent by him to represent the Bolsheviks at numerous congresses.
In a short time, she became a leading Bolshevik. She was in Lenin's sealed train when he returned during the height of the war to partake in the revolution. After the Revolution, Armand was elected to the Moscow Soviet (workers' council) and was in the All Russian Central Executive Committee, the highest body in the new workers' state. She taught in party schools and organised conferences for working women.
Despite working under the conditions of Covid 19, Ghodsee manages to carry out important research into the life of this important revolutionary. It would be important to know more about the 1918 national congress for working women held 1918. After which she wrote, "Until the old forms of family life, domestic life, education and child-rearing are abolished, it is impossible to obliterate exploitation and enslavement, it is impossible to create the new person, impossible to build socialism".[5]
Armand herself had led a complicated personal life with five children, the last by her young brother-in-law. Ghodsee correctly pays little attention to her alleged intimate relationship with Lenin. After her tragic death from cholera, Lenin and Krupskaya looked after her two young children.
As Vladimir Volkov writes "Women played an important role in this milieu. Such vivid and versatile figures as, Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand were best known, of course, but they were not exceptions. Behind these stood dozens and hundreds of other women who entered the history of the revolution and left their own indelible traces.If we remember the classic phrase of Charles Fourier that the degree of society's progress may be measured by its attitude to women, then the Russian Revolution must be considered a great leap forward towards social liberation of that part of humanity that over the centuries was considered the most dependent and deprived.Informed by knowledge rather than outdated prejudices, free revolutionary attitudes towards the family were inseparable from the revolution's political perspective. This morality had a real material existence and was expressed in personal relationships between the men and the women who made the revolution.[6]
The three chapters about the three revolutionaries are well worth reading. The book has several major weaknesses: the most important being the lack of differentiation between the period of the Bolshevik revolution and the counter-revolutionary period dominated by the Stalinist bureaucracy. There is Nothing wrong with deeply appreciating the three leading Russian revolutionary women, but it is another thing lionising two women that largely supported the Stalinist regime. With this reservation, I recommend this book for a wide readership and hope it provokes further study into these important revolutionaries.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is a prolific and award-winning Russian and East European Studies professor and a Graduate Group in Anthropology member at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of eleven books, including Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books, 2018 and 2020.
[1] The Social Basis of the Woman Question- https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm
[2] Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious(1896)
[3]The Social Basis of the Woman Question Alexandra Kollontai 1909- https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm
[4] Krupskaya’s Death-(March 1939) https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/03/krupskaya.htm
[5] https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/red-valkyries-feminist-lessons-from-five-revolutionary-women-by-kristen-ghodsee/
[6] The letters of Natalia Sedova to Leon Trotsky- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/07/sedv-j01.html
Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 by Antony Beevor published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£30)
"Books have their destinies."
"Lenin despised anybody who disagreed with him, even – especially – within his own party"
Anthony Beevor
"Just as a blacksmith cannot seize the red hot iron in his naked hand, so the proletariat cannot directly seize the power; it has to have an organisation accommodated to this task. The coordination of the mass insurrection with the conspiracy, the subordination of the conspiracy to the insurrection, and the organisation of the insurrection through the conspiracy constitutes that complex and responsible department of revolutionary politics which Marx and Engels called "the art of insurrection." It presupposes a correct general leadership of the masses, a flexible orientation in changing conditions, a thought-out plan of attack, cautiousness in technical preparation, and a daring blow."
History of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 30 (1930) Leon Trotsky
“ Arguments to the effect that all violence, including revolutionary violence, is evil and that Communists, therefore, ought not to engage in "glorification" of armed struggle and the revolutionary army amount to a philosophy worthy of Quakers and the old maids of the Salvation Army. Permitting such propaganda in a Communist Party is like permitting Tolstoyan propaganda in the garrison of a besieged fortress.”
Introduction to the Military Writings (1923) of Leon Trotsky
The Russian Revolution and the Civil War 1917-1921 are two events that, even after over one hundred years, are still buried under layers of myths, lies, distortions and a few hundred dead dogs.[1]
Hopefully, a new book covering both subjects written by Anthony Beevor would counter the lies and myths perpetrated by historians and writers who belong to the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification. It has proven not to be the case. Beevor, despite having one of the foremost researchers in Russia, Lyubov Vinogradova, who used the most up-to-date scholarship and archival research, tends to repeat largely verbatim previous lies and falsifications.
Antony Beevor is a military historian best known for his books Stalingrad and Berlin. His books have sold in the millions. His latest book takes pride of place amongst the already large pile of anti-Marxist literature from the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification. Beevor is now vice president of that elite group.
He believes the Russian Revolution was a putsch or coup d’état carried out by a few ruthless, deranged people determined to impose a totalitarian dictatorship upon the people. Beevor asserts, "Lenin was the only one within the Bolshevik party who believed a coup was possible, and even Trotsky was nervous. Lenin perceived – and he was absolutely right – that the success of a coup depends on the apathy of the majority, not on how many real supporters you have."[2]
If one is to take this analysis at face value or without one's tongue in cheek, you would have to conclude that Beevor has a very low intellectual understanding or interest in complex political and historical processes. Beevor continues this lack of knowledge by arguing that the Bolshevik Party was a small sect and utilised the great confusion created by the revolution to grab power. Beevor's lies and distortions are nothing new and merely repeat what previous historians, such as the right-wing historian Richard Pipes, have said.
Pipes, too, believed that the revolution was carried out by a group of crazed intellectuals who he defines as "intellectuals craving power. They were revolutionaries not for the sake of improving the conditions of the people but for the sake of gaining domination over the people and remaking them in their image."[3]
Most of the capitalist press has sided with Beevor, with one person saying, "Beevor is not interested in the revolutionaries' ideology (rightly so, since hatred and vengeance were the underlying motive forces, and Marxist or anarchist slogans were mere rallying cries). Nor does he delve deep into revolutionary psychology, though he denounces Lenin's mix of cowardice, callousness and obstinacy and singles out Trotsky's hypnotic charisma. He chronicles Stalin's brutal and often disastrous military interventions without comment."
According to Beevor, revolutionaries like Lenin carried out their work in secret behind the backs of the people. He leaves out that Lenin wrote enough books, articles, and letters to fill fifty-one volumes, none of which Beevor quotes. Beevor's stupid assertion can be easily refuted. As the Marxist writer David North does very easily asking us to "Consider this: To produce fifty-five volumes of political literature, each volume between 300 and 500 pages, means that Lenin, in the course of his thirty-year political career, had an average annual written output of between 600 and 1,000 pages (in printed form). This output included economic studies, philosophical tracts, political treatises, resolutions, newspaper commentaries and articles, extensive professional and personal correspondence, innumerable memoranda and private notes, such as the Philosophical Notebooks, which enable us to follow the intellectual development of Lenin's conceptions. Much of Lenin's working day, for years on end, was spent at the writing desk. And yet all this writing was nothing more than the means by which Lenin skilfully concealed what he was really thinking!"[4]
I somehow doubt if Beevor studied a single page of Lenin's collected works. The same can be said of the co-leader of the Russian revolution and leader of the Red Army Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, without military training, won a stunning victory over White reactionaries and seventeen capitalists and still found time to write five volumes of military writings again, none of which Beevor consults. If Beevor had read Trotsky, it would have been very uncomfortable for him because he refutes all his arguments.
Take this quote on the need for revolutionary violence "Arguments to the effect that all violence, including revolutionary violence, is evil and that Communists, therefore, ought not to engage in "glorification" of armed struggle and the revolutionary army, amount to a philosophy worthy of Quakers and the old maids of the Salvation Army. Permitting such propaganda in a Communist Party is like permitting Tolstoyan propaganda in the garrison of a besieged fortress."[5]
The reader of this book will need a strong stomach because large chunks of the text contain lurid tales of violence committed on both sides. The Guardian writer Andrew Anthony backs up Beevor's squeamishness stating, "the violence committed by all sides was unconfined, with torture and executions widespread, and it was not uncommon for people to be thrown alive into blast furnaces. As Lenin saw any opposition as tantamount to treason, he demanded that all signs of resistance be met with brutal force. Trotsky, charming intellectual though he could be, was no less willing to issue orders that opponents should be shot on sight."[6]
The reader must ask whether Beevor makes a serious attempt to understand the objective causes of the Civil War when Beevor states, "What has stood out is the sheer horror of the civil war? There's savagery and sadism that is very hard to comprehend; I'm still mulling it over and trying to understand it. It was not just the build-up of hatred over centuries but a vengeance that seemed to be required. It went beyond the killing; there was also the sheer, horrible inventiveness of the tortures inflicted on people. We need to look at the origins of the civil war: who started it, and was it avoidable? But one also needs to see the different patterns seen in the "Red Terror" [the campaign of political repression and violence carried out by the Bolsheviks] and the "White Terror" [the violence perpetrated by that side in the war] – and consider the question: why are civil wars so much crueller, so much more savage than state-on-state wars?"[7]
Beevor continues in the same mode when he asserts that "Lenin wanted the civil war. Civil war is the sharpest form of class struggle. In his view, it was the only way for the Bolsheviks to take power. The other socialist parties – the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks – were horrified by his plans because they knew that after he had smashed the liberal and conservative parties, he would turn on them – and he certainly did. Lenin despised anybody who disagreed with him, even – especially – within his own party. The less-extreme members who warned against this complete seizure of power, this total dictatorship that Lenin was planning, were either more or less rejected from the party or kept in a kind of subservient position." Beevor turns events on their head and is guilty of falsifying the historical record. Counter-revolutionaries caused the civil war with the aid of seventeen capitalist powers seeking to drown the revolution in blood.
The book presents no objective understanding of the complexities of the revolution or civil war. We get a cataloguing of violence in the Civil War that does not enlighten the reader one iota. Beevor quite deliberately downplays the fact that much of the violence, such as the execution of Czar Nicholas II and other examples in the book {which should be taken with a large pinch of salt and on many occasions, are not factual and have no supporting evidence} were extreme measures forced upon the revolution when it was fighting for its life against a savage and ruthless enemy, backed by the armies of all the major imperialist powers. Beevor is forced to admit that the counter-revolutionary White officers "wanted to bring back the punishments used by the tsarist army, which meant that they would be allowed to punch soldiers in the face on a summary charge, whip them using rifle-cleaning rods, things like that."
The War In Ukraine
Although the book concentrates on the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War, much of the media interest has centred on Beevor's attitude towards the current war in Ukraine, the war in Ukraine has mistakenly been compared to the Rusian Civil War. Beevor holds the same position as other capitalist media. Beevor's analysis of Russia's war with Ukraine is shallow, chaotic and wrong. He equates Putin with Hitler and Stalin and says, "Putin Wants to Be Feared – Like Stalin and Hitler, and he sees Russia as a "prisoner of its past."
Christoph Vandreier writes that while the Russian invasion of Ukraine is politically reactionary, "it cannot be compared to the Wehrmacht's war of annihilation, let alone the Holocaust. The forces deployed by the Putin regime against Ukraine are minuscule compared to the invasion force hurled by Hitler against Russia in 1941.
Vandreier, in his article, quotes Historian Stephen G. Fritz, who made the following remarks "Deploying over 3 million men, 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorised vehicles (as well as 625,000 horses), 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft (a number that was smaller than that employed during the invasion of France), the Germans had launched the largest military operation in history. Germany's "Operation Barbarossa," Fritz continued: was not only the most massive military campaign in history, but it also unleashed an unprecedented campaign of genocidal violence, of which the Holocaust remains the best-known example. This Judeocide, however, was not an isolated act of murder; rather, it formed part of a deliberate, comprehensive plan of exploitation, a utopian scheme of racial reorganisation and demographic engineering of vast proportions.[8]
Conclusion
The author is an accomplished historian, and his book is accessible and written in a vivid style. However, the book is no masterpiece. Beevor's tendency to ignore politics and his lack of understanding of complex historical processes weakens the book beyond rescue. The book is too short, given the magnitude of the subjects covered. Beevor's references and notes are virtually nonexistent, as is his use of previous historiography. As the great historian E.H Carr once said, "Great history is written precisely when the historian's vision is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present" [9] . Beevor's book is not great history. It would be precise to say that his historical falsification is bound up with his efforts to obscure an understanding of the present.
Notes
Melvyn Bragg and historians discuss Lenin on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time at bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00546pv
Letter to a Young Trotskyist in Russia- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/30/oqgd-j30.html
Imperialism and the lie of the soul- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/24/rach-m24.html
The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky-Volume 1, 1918-How the Revolution Armed- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/index.htm
[1] Thomas Carlyle, who had complained that his study of Cromwell had required that he “drag the Lord Protector from out of a mountain of dead dogs, a huge load of calumny and oblivion.”
[2] https://www.pressreader.com/uk/bbc-history-magazine/20220609/282239489241759
[3] Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 495.
[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/01.html
[5] Introduction to the Military Writings (1923)-Leon Trotsky
[6] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/05/russia-revolution-and-civil-war-1917-1921-antony-beevor-review
[7] https://www.pressreader.com/uk/bbc-history-magazine/20220609/282239489241759
[8] Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East- Stephen G. Fritz
[9] [E.H. Carr, What is History? p. 37].
The Hammer and the Anvil: Dispatches from the Frontline of the Russian Civil War, 1918-1919 By Larissa Reisner, translator Jack Robertson.London: Bookmarks Publications, 2021
Along that path, your steps shall never fade.
Tower like a mighty peak above my thoughts;
For they are quite at home in your great shade.
In Memory of Reissner-by Boris Pasternak
"Larissa Mikhailovna Reissner's work on newspapers and her presence on the newspaper staff made us - newspaper labourers as compared with that great craftsman in style - somehow more wary and tense. How can you treat style and form with disdain when sketches like Reissner's are printed alongside your own? Even someone who never thinks especially much about form starts to reflect. For my part, let me say that none of the seekings of the Formalists (i.e. the advocates of formalism in literature) have made an impression on me. But the last articles of Larissa Mikhailovna Reissner made me learn a thing or two. I believe, too, that more than one generation of pupil-trainees at the State Institute of Journalism will learn the model of a good revolutionary style from her sketches".
In Memory of Reissner-by Lev Sosnovsky
"Having dazzled many, this beautiful young woman swept like a hot meteor against the backdrop of the Revolution. With the appearance of an Olympic goddess, she combined a subtle ironic mind and the courage of a warrior. After the capture of Kazan by the whites, under the guise of a peasant woman, she went to the enemy camp for reconnaissance. But her appearance was too unusual. She was arrested. A Japanese intelligence officer interrogated her. During the break, she slipped through the poorly guarded door and disappeared. Since then, she has worked in intelligence. She later sailed on warships and took part in battles. She devoted essays to the Civil War that will remain in literature. She wrote with the same vividness about the Ural industry and about the workers' uprising in the Ruhr. She wanted to see and know everything, to participate in everything. In a few short years, she grew up to be a first-class writer. Having passed unharmed through fire and water, this Pallas of the Revolution suddenly burned out from Typhus in the calm atmosphere of Moscow before reaching thirty".
My Life-Leon Trotsky
"Much better to die in open combat, among comrades, with weapons in their hands. That is how I want to die. That is how hundreds and thousands die for this republic every day."
Larissa Reisner
This new collection of work containing the writings of the outstanding Russian revolutionary Larissa Reisner was put together and published by Bookmarks which is the publishing arm of the British Socialist Workers Party. Despite having fundamental political differences with this group, the SWP and especially the translator Jack Robertson deserve significant recognition and commendation for this book.
This new book concentrates on battles fought by the Red Army against White armies supported by Western imperialist governments. Reisner shows what a bloody conflict it was. The White counter-revolutionaries committed mass murder against anyone suspected of Communist sympathies, including the elderly, women and children.
Reisner refers to many key Bolshevik leaders of the era. Many held her in high regard. None more so that Leon Trotsky, commander in chief of the Red Army. In his autobiography My Life, he wrote about Reisner, saying she "flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor, blinding many... Her sketches about the civil war are literature. With equal gusto, she would write about the Ural industries and the rising of the workers in the Ruhr. She was anxious to know and see all and participate in everything."
Amid the death and destruction of the Russian Civil War, this highly educated young woman managed to write in an informative, pulsating and almost poetic way. She writes, "It is a strange feeling to be moving about in an unfamiliar building with windows and doors slammed shut, knowing full well that a battle to the death is about to take place in this godforsaken hotel. It is a racing certainty that someone will be killed, some will survive, some will be taken, prisoner. At such moments, all the words and all the rationalisations that help preserve your presence of mind go out the window. All that remains is an acute, penetrating sorrow — and underneath it, barely perceptible, a disorienting question: whether to flee or stand your ground. In the name of what? Face screwed up, choking with tears, the heart reiterates: stay calm, do not panic, no humiliating exodus." (36-37)
Her description of a particular event in which she witnessed the brutal slaughter by White troops of innocent bystanders as being something out of a Goya painting will stay in mind for a long time. Her work compares favourably with another outstanding chronicler of the Russian Revolution, John Reed, whose book Ten Days That Shook The World is required reading for anybody interested in this period of history.
One of the most important things that come out of her portrayal of the events of the Civil War is that she believed that the Revolution was a mass event. People were prepared to fight and die for this Revolution because a great cause inspired them. This was not just some coup organised by a handful of conspirators.
Particularly striking are Reisner's comments about the importance of the Red Army leader Leon Trotsky. In addition to Reisner's writings, the book contains two pieces from Leon Trotsky's My Life, A Month in Sviyazhsk and The Train. Reisner attaches great importance to Trotsky's leadership in defence of Sviyazhsk, which turned out to be a turning point in the civil war.
One facet of her character that permeates the book is her bravery. She thought nothing of risking her own life in order to save others. One such example is when The Red Army, along with thousands of others in Kazan, fled to Sviyazhsk in 1918. Reisner believed that her husband, the Bolshevik Fyodor Fyodorovich Raskolnikov, had been taken prisoner by the Whites. She risked her neck by trying to rescue him by returning to Kazan. Her problem came when because she was such a high profile Bolshevik, she was easily recognised by a White officer. As she writes in the book, she managed to escape when a driver of a horse cab who was sympathetic to the Bolsheviks helped her, saying he "saved people like me, humbly and resolutely, just like they saved thousands of other comrades scattered all over the Russian highways." (62)
Larissa Reissner died on 9 February 1926, in the Kremlin Hospital, Moscow, from typhoid; she was 30 years old. There is no small element of tragedy in this life cut so short. To produce such an important body of work at such a tender age is remarkable. No doubt, had she lived, she would have been able to add substantially to that work.
It is also clear that had she lived, that work would have taken on a much different character. Her close association with Leon Trotsky (she worked on Leon Trotsky's Commission for Improvement of Industrial Products) would have undoubtedly led to her arrest and possible execution at the hands of Joseph Stalin's counter-revolution. One thing is certain she would have defended not only herself but the Revolution from Stalinism.
It is perhaps fitting to end this review with a quote from a close associate of Leon Trotsky- Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky, who wrote, "she died at the height of her powers, intellect and beauty. She died in a clinic from an unexpected, absurd and accidental illness after long-suffering had worn her out. She should have lived, however, and she should have died somewhere on the Steppes, at sea, or in the mountains, clutching a rifle or Mauser in her hands, for she was renowned for her spirit of adventure, her unceasing restlessness, her courage, greed for life and strong will. This was a fighting spirit, and, without sparing herself, she gave herself completely to the revolution".[4]
Further Reading.
Trotsky, Leon, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (Harmondsworth, 1979). X.708/22026.
[1] www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/reissner/works/hamburg/ch02.htm[2] See Svyazhsk ... An epic of the Russian Civil War-1918. Maradana : Hashim Press, 1948.LLSP [Extracted from “The Front.” Translated by John G. Wright and Amy Jensen.Larissa Reisner- From Fourth International, vol.4 No.6, June 1943, pp.184-189. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol04/no06/reissner.htm[3] See also Trotsky, Sri Lanka and an ‘Olympian goddess-https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2016/10/trotsky-sri-lanka-and-an-olympian-goddess.html[4] Aleksandr Voronsky-Art as the Cognition of Life-$24.95-Mehring Books
A Reply To Ella Whelan’s The 21st century Bolshevik.
The subheading for Ella Whelan’s article is “Brexit showed
the ruling elite is still terrified by Trotsky’s ideas of working-class
upheaval”. At the same time, Whelan is correct in this assumption but off the
mark on the rest of the article.[1]
Calling Trotsky a 21st Century Bolshevik while correct is
only done so from the standpoint of negating his revolutionary ideas in order
to align him with one or more faction of the British ruling elite. Whelan is
not the first writer to link Trotskyism to one or more sections of the ruling
elite.[2]
Whelan’s article contains a degree of flippancy and cynicism
you would expect from a writer who writes for a magazine that makes the
Spectator magazine look like the Communist Manifesto. She also seems to have a
fixation with Leon Trotsky having written a previous article for the Critic
entitled: Trotsky’s lesson for dealing with Covid-19.[3]
Whelan is not the only former radical to warn of the dangers
to the ruling elite of Trotsky’s ideas. Another journalist who now writes for
the Daily Telegraph Janet Daly warned a good while back that Trotsky and his
ideas should not be allowed to save socialism.
Daly was a radical in the sixties but soon shed that cloak
of radicalism and like a number of her generation shifted very far to the
right. Daly writes “In the 1970s, as I clung to my Marxist convictions, I heard
an interview with Sir Keith Joseph, one of the great architects of the
Thatcherite revolution. He described the dangers of what he called “the
pocket-money society.” If the state provided all of the basic human
needs—housing, health care, education, care for the elderly—, it left nothing
for people to provide for themselves, other than the more trivial recreational
things. Their earnings became like children’s pocket money, to be spent on toys
or self-indulgence. The state took all of the significant economic choices of
adult life out of their hands, diminishing them as responsible, moral beings.
Joseph’s words did not convert me on the spot, but they shook my beliefs to the
roots because they chimed so convincingly with the evidence that I saw around
me”.[4]This blind political stupidity does not need any comment to suffice to
say if Whelan wants to know where she is going to end up politically, she
should look no further than to Janet Daly.
Whelan has now assumed Daly’s mantle writing “And so it is
unsurprising that 80 years after his assassination at the hands of a
pick-axe-wielding Stalinist mole, Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein). Trotsky was
killed by a Stalinist agent, not a mole and why the need to put his former
Jewish name in brackets. A name that he has not been associated with for over
ninety years.
The article shows the author’s laziness and political proclivities in this next quote when she writes that Trotsky “has somewhat fallen out of favour. While his revolutionary career and unwavering polemics against the Stalinist regime won him support among lefties from Birmingham to Bolivia during the twentieth century, the slow (and painful) death of the left has all but killed off Trotskyism”.
I am afraid Trotsky ideas and influence are very much alive
and kicking in the 21st century. Since its founding in 1940, the Fourth
International has defended and then expanded the ideas and program that Trotsky
fought for all his life. The modern-day form of this organisation is embodied
in the form of the World Socialist Website (wsws.org).
Whelan seems to have been so distracted by her attempt to
rubbish Trotsky’s legacy and that of his modern-day followers that she has not
paid too much attention to the fact that the wsws.org has just undertaken a
massive technological and political transformation of its website. It can
safely be said that for the last 19 years this website has not only defended
Leon Trotsky’s ideas but has expanded them to the degree that perhaps not even
the Old Man could have envisaged.[5]
There is a degree of nervousness and silliness in her
article that comes from the fact that Whelan who has read some of Trotsky’s
writings but does not believe what she writes is true. She writes “For many of
today’s wannabe revolutionaries, ideas such as the dictatorship of the
proletariat or even the transformative power of the working class is not as
attractive as jam-making socialists and knighted lawyers in the Labour Party or
farting about in fancy dress for”the climate”.
Her comment is just silly, hardly worth commenting on and is
not true. The significant number of new members that are coalescing around the
Fourth International are very serious people, and they are looking for answers
to extremely pressing pollical and social problems faced by millions of people
all over the world.
Whelan’s article is not without insight when she writes
“Communism has been so warped by historical inaccuracy it is easy for people to
project their prejudices onto it. But not so when she writes “But even so, if
all hope of revolutionary Communism has been dead in the water for decades, and
all that’s left is crass characterisations, why should we remember a man like
Trotsky?”.
Whelan does say some correct things about Trotsky’s life
such as this “perhaps the most important thing to know about Trotsky is that
his real strength lay in his desire to inspire the masses to take control for
themselves. In chapter 24 of My Life, he pays tribute to Nikolay Markin — a shy
sailor” with the sullenness of a force-driven in dee” who became an important figure
in the revolution and a close friend to Trotsky's own family. Trotsky
describes how Markin quietly took charge of small things at first — such as the
hostility Trotsky's family was facing in the”big bourgeois” house they were
lodging in — and then larger tasks, including establishing printers to publish
The Worker and the Soldier. Inspired by the revolutionary politics of the
Bolshevik Party, and the rousing speeches given by Trotsky, workers like Markin
realised they had the ability and the ambition to seize control of the means of
production.
Trotsky describes how Markin became, for a time,” an
unofficial minister of foreign affair”, writing pamphlets that Baron von
Kühlmann and Count Czernin” read eagerly” at Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky writes that
it did not matter that he” had no academic degree, and his writing was not free
from grammatical error” or that” his comments were sometimes quite unexpected”
because Markin” drove the diplomatic nails in firmly, and at the very points
where they were most need”.
She is wrong however when she writes that Trotsky’s writing
and aspirations were specific to the historical moment and says “some things
have not changed so much. Capitalism might have evolved and transformed itself
beyond anything Bolsheviks might recognise, but its inherent weaknesses and
limits remain the same. What has changed is our unwillingness to mount a
challenge to it.”
Trotsky’s writings are being looked at now because they
still have a contemporary feel to them. The problems that Trotsky grappled with
in his day are still ones we have to deal with today.
Whelan in her excitement to bury the influence of Leon
Trotsky she repeats one of the old Stalinist slanders of Trotsky that has been
repeated down the years and are used by modern-day charlatans to besmirch his
revolutionary record.
She writes “But if Trotsky's strengths lay in his capacity
to organise and defend the revolution, his failings in part contributed to its
downfall. Unlike Lenin, who was so adept at managing internal party manoeuvring,
Trotsky was incapable of working out what to do with the power struggle
following Lenin's death. His refusal to take the deputy leadership of the
party after 1924, and his blindness to the threat that Stalin posed, were
disastrous for the Bolsheviks”.
On this occasion, Whelan is really out of depth and shows a
simplistic understanding of the history of the Bolshevik revolution and
Trotsky’s battle with Stalin. As an article in the wsws.org points out “The conflict that emerged between Stalin and
Trotsky was not a subjective fight between two individuals over personal power,
but a fundamental battle waged between irreconcilable political programs. The
consolidation of power by Stalin, and the bureaucratic dictatorship that he
personified, was not the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution. It
developed out of the conditions of an economically backward workers’ state that
was surrounded by world imperialism and isolated by the delay of the
international and European revolution. A series of revolutionary upheavals were
defeated due to the political immaturity of the revolutionary leadership
internationally.[6]
Whelan to a limited extent understands that the revolution
needed to spread internationally which was at the heart of the battle between
Trotsky and Stalin when she writes “But
ultimately it was the failure of the revolution to spread internationally that
led to the collapse of the first working-class revolution in history. Where
Stalin destroyed the gains of the revolution, enforcing socialism in one
country, Trotsky was a firm believer in the need for workers of the world — not
just Russia — to unite. So why repeat the slander.
To conclude, Whelan asks Why is Trotsky still relevant
today? A question she is politically incapable of answering without slandering
Trotsky and his modern-day supporters and attempting to tie him to one wing of
the British bourgeoisie. She is correct in saying that Trotsky had an
“unshakeable belief in a working-class revolution” and it is this that is
inspiring millions today”.
It is also true as Whelan writes “Unlike other historical
figures who live to regret their intervention in history, Trotsky remained
resolute in his belief in working-class independence to the end. That is what
made him such a threat”. So what better than to leave the final word to Trotsky
when he wrote: “I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a
dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist . . .
life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil,
oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full”.[7]
________________________________________
[1]
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2020/the-21st-century-bolshevik/
[2] See-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/07/misi-j31.html
[3]
https://thecritic.co.uk/trotskys-lesson-for-dealing-with-covid-19/
[4] http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1350404/posts
[5]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/02/pers-o02.html
[6]
https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/_beta/left-opposition-stalinism-1923-1933
[7] The Testaments of Trotsky-(February/March 1940)Fourth
International, No. 7, Autumn 1959, p. 30.
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi-is/no7/testaments.htm
Review: Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and
His Influence translated and edited by Alan Woods, London: Wellred Books, 2016
“I can therefore state that I live on this earth not in
accordance with the rule, but as an exception to the rule.”
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.
Trotsky’s book is a classical example of how to place historical
figures in the “grand scheme of things”. Unlike Issac Deutscher’s biography
that tended to give Stalin a lot more credit than he was due to Trotsky’s
estimation of Stalin is stunning and wholly accurate. As Trotsky explains “In this respect, Stalin represents a
phenomenon utterly exceptional. He is neither a thinker, a writer, nor an
orator. He took possession of power before the masses had learned to
distinguish his figure from others during the triumphal processions across Red
Square. Stalin took possession of power, not with the aid of personal
qualities, but with the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who
created the machine, but the machine that created him”.
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 the 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 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
1937-Stalin’s Year of Terror-By Vadim Z Rogovin-Mehring
Books, 1998- £25
“Material from the
Soviet archives which has become available in recent years, as well as the
publication of many new memoirs, has helped the author accomplish the tasks set
by this book: to investigate the mechanism of the origin and the relentless
spread of the Great Terror, and to discover the reasons why this mass terrorist
action became not only possible but also so successful”.
Vadim Rogovin
“The director is not appealing to reason or criticism. He
wants to crush the rights of reason with the massive scale of the frame-up,
reinforced with executions.”
Leon Trotsky
“Trotsky was a hero of the revolution. He fell when the
heroic age was over.”
E. H Carr
Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin’s 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror was one of a seven-volume study that set out to prove that there “Was An Alternative to Stalinism and that alternative came from Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition.
If there was one figure, Stalin feared the most it was Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition. Trotsky without the resources of state power exposed the treachery of the Stalinist bureaucracy and advocated a political revolution to overthrow Stalinism.
Stalin could not defeat Trotsky politically hence the need for the Moscow Trials which according to Rogovin the main goal “was to create the conditions for politically discrediting and physically exterminating the entire communist opposition in order to behead the population, to deprive it for many years of a political avant-garde and therefore of the ability to resist the totalitarian regime. The class struggle in the USSR assumed, essentially, its sharpest form – civil war. This civil war, unlike the civil war of 1918-20, took the specific form of state terror directed at precluding any political activity by the masses”.[1]
In this book, Rogovin cites numerous myths that surround the events of 1937 that were regurgitated over the following decades. In a lecture given in the United States, he says “there were two basic forms. The first could be called the Stalinist school of falsification.
A second school we could call the anti-communist school of falsification. It is quite curious that in many places the explanation of our history coincides when presented both by the Stalinists and by the anti-communists. For instance, one central thesis they agree upon is that Stalin was the natural continuation of Lenin’s cause. Earlier there was one slight difference when they said that Stalin was the good continuation of a good cause, the cause of Lenin. Now they say, on the contrary, that Stalin was the wretched continuation of an evil policy by the evil Lenin”.[2]
With the development of “glasnost” [openness], Rogovin hoped that these myths would be vanquished. During Glasnost and Perestroika, millions of people in the USSR sought answers to complex historical questions. This led to a sharp increase in sales of mass-circulation newspapers, as well as literary and political journals. It soon became very clear to Rogovin that issues of the Great Terror and Stalinism were far from being clarified but were instead being used by many anti-communists to sully the name of socialism.
As Rogovin points out the origins of many of the so-called new myths were peddled at the time of Khrushchev’s 1956 report at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. While many communists and socialists thought this action by Khruschev would open up the possibilities of a struggle against the bureaucracy prompting the poet and writer Bertolt Brecht to write “The liquidation of Stalinism can take place only if the party mobilises the wisdom of the masses on a gigantic scale. Such a mobilisation lies along the road to communism”.[3]
Brecht would be disappointed as any figure that was capable of opposing Stalinism had all but been wiped out in the purges. The 1956 speech was not a political break with Stalinism but a mechanism in which to deal with the raging political and economic crisis that washed world Stalinism.
Khrushchev delivered his speech with blood dripping from his hands. He was as Rogovin points out implicated in all the major crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Khrushchev said “We must affirm that the party fought a serious fight against the Trotskyists, rightists and bourgeois nationalists and that it disarmed ideologically all the enemies of Leninism. The ideological fight was carried on successfully … Here Stalin played a positive role.”[4]
Rogovin’s book, while examining the political implications of the Great Terror also expands on the significant interest shown by many figures who stood aloof from socialist politics. In the novel Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak used his hero to express the following thoughts: “I think that collectivisation was a mistaken and unsuccessful measure, but it was impossible to admit the mistake. In order to hide the failure, it was necessary to use all means of terror to make people forget how to think and to force them to see what did not exist or to prove the opposite of what was obvious. Hence the unbridled cruelty of the Yezhov period, the declaration of a constitution never intended to be applied, and the introduction of elections not based on elective principles.” [5]
Rogovin points out that Pasternak’s statements bear a significant resemblance to the ideas of Trotsky. Rogovin also points out that” Pasternak’s explanation of the tragedy during the “Yezhov period” also displays unmistakable proximity to Lenin’s prognoses made in 1921. In referring to the alternatives Soviet Russia faced at that time, Lenin saw two outcomes from the contradictions which had accumulated by then: “ten to twenty years of correct relations with the peasantry and victory is guaranteed on a world scale (even given delays in the proletarian revolutions which are growing).[6]
Rogovin’s mention of writers like Pasternak is interesting in that it highlights the gap between people like Pasternak who were non-political but would stand up for a principle against a coterie of Soviet writers led by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who would not[7]. Solzhenitsyn’s work was hardly a bastion of objectivity on the matter of the Great Terror. His book ‘Gulag Archipelago’ fails even to mention the main defendants in the Moscow Trials
Leon Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov. He writes next to nothing of the heroic struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism. Solzhenitsyn started as a radical critic of Stalinism but ended up being a virulent anti-communist and a Great Russian chauvinist.
He vomited up all the old Stalinist lies that Stalinism was an ‘outgrowth’ of Bolshevism and was the true face of the Russian revolution. Rogovin’s book thoroughly shatters these lies and with it Solzhenitsyn’s thesis and reputation.
Rogovin’s thoroughness stretches throughout the book. For the general reader, this might make reading a little daunting. The perseverance of the reader is rewarded with a detailed study of what happened after the Russian revolution. The book is hard sometimes going not because of Rogovin’s writing which is stunning and lucid but because he does not spare the reader any detail as to what happened to not only the old Bolsheviks but anyone who came into contact with them.
Group shootings with almost daily tens of prisoners sent into the wilderness. According to Rogovin, “they shot not only the Trotskyists themselves, but any members of their families who were with them”. He goes on: “When a husband was shot, his imprisoned wife was automatically sent to be shot; with the most significant oppositionists, their children who had reached the age of 12 were also subject to shooting.”
The New Stalin School of Falsification.
At the same, this book was translated by Fred Choate on behalf of Mehring books there appeared a new Stalin school of falsification. As Rogovin correctly states: “These ideological operations served the same purpose as the historical falsifications produced by the Stalinist school: to cauterise, deceive, distort and poison the historical memory and social consciousness of the Soviet people.”[8]
The release of the book happened to coincide with as one writer puts it with an “orgy of capitalist propaganda which flooded the post-1989 Russia has for the time being crowded out those voices like Rogovin, demanding a real examination of the Moscow Trials. The bourgeois heirs of the Stalinist bureaucracy that led society to the impasse of the late 1980s cannot carry through this examination. Therefore, in the land of the October revolution and the giants which are produced, the real lessons of these events and its subsequent degeneration along the lines of Stalinism remain unknown by the majority. Trotsky is a slandered figure in modern-day Russia, particularly by the pro-capitalist parvenus who have arisen from the bureaucracy. In their enthusiastic embrace of capitalism, they wish to obliterate all of the real lessons of Stalinism and the heinous purge trials. Rogovin’s book provides us with the political ammunition to counter this”.
Much of this orgy of Stalinist falsification came from academia and in particular from the pen of Ian Thatcher and Geoffrey Swain. The Marxist writer David North points out “The years since the fall of the USSR have seen the emergence of what can best be described as The Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification. The principal objective of this school is to discredit Leon Trotsky as a significant historical figure, to deny that he represented an alternative to Stalinism, or that his political legacy contains anything relevant in the present and valuable for the future. Every historian is entitled to his or her viewpoint. But these viewpoints must be grounded in a serious, honest and principled attitude toward the assembling of facts and the presentation of historical evidence. It is this essential quality; however, that is deplorably absent in two new biographies of Leon Trotsky, one by Professor Geoffrey Swain of the University of Glasgow and the other by Professor Ian D. Thatcher of Brunel University in West London. These works have been brought out by large and influential publishing houses. Swain’s biography has been published by Longman; Thatcher’s by Routledge. Their treatment of the life of Leon Trotsky is without the slightest scholarly merit. Both works make limited use of Trotsky’s writings, offering few substantial citations and even ignoring major books, essays and political statements.[9]
After Swain and Thatcher, there came a veritable flood of books that sought to further The Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification. One particular is worth mentioning is Grover Furr’s Stalin Waiting For The Truth!. Furr believes that Stalin committed no crimes; the charges against him are a fabrication. Not a single accusation holds up. On the evidence, according to Furr, Stalin committed no- atrocities. One of Furr’s books if you could call them that was entitled “Khrushchev Lied”.
It is hard to know where to start with Furr’s unhinged writings. The American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University is an unrepentant Stalinist but the fact that Furr can even get a hearing is down to gentlemen like Swain, Thatcher and Robert Service. Furr is “only a pawn in their game”. A terrible price continues to be paid for the falsification of history and the denial of objective truth.To conclude, it is hoped that people will read Rogovin’s work in Russia and throughout the world, not just to honour but to fight for what he believed in.
[1] 1937-Stalin’s Year of Terror-By Vadim Z Rogovin-Mehring Books, 1998(page 145)
[2] lecture given by Professor Vadim Rogovin on February 27
at Michigan State University in East Lansing-
http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/russ/rogov1.html
3]Inostrannaia literatura [Foreign Literature], no. 4
(1988), p. 170
[4] Murry Weiss-The Vindication Of Trotskyism
[5] 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror By Vadim Z.
Rogovin-Mehring Books-1998
[6] 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror By Vadim Z.
Rogovin-Mehring Books-1998
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
[8] http://www.capitalh.org.uk/134/rogovin.html
[9] A review of two Trotsky biographies, by Geoffrey Swain
and Ian Thatcher-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/05/lec1-m09.html
Review: A People’s History of the Russian Revolution-Neil
Faulkner-Pluto Press-£11.50-2017.
Neil Faulkner’s book was one of many books released in time for the celebration of the centenary of the Russian revolution in 2017. A large number of new books broke no new ground and contained little new research. Unfortunately, Faulkner’s book was one of these.
The book gives the reader only a basic account of the Russian revolution. Faulkner, a former member of the Psuedo Left, group SWP(Socialist Workers Party), maintains the SWP’s viewpoint that after the first workers’ state succumbed to Stalinism a state capitalist regime appeared.
This viewpoint is not an orthodox Marxist one. Leon Trotsky wrote extensively on the betrayal of the Russian revolution by Stalin. In his most famous of works on Stalinism, he wrote:” We often seek salvation from unfamiliar phenomena in familiar terms. An attempt has been made to conceal the enigma of the Soviet regime by calling it “state capitalism.” This term has the advantage that nobody knows exactly what it means. The term “state capitalism” originally arose to designate all the phenomena which arise when a bourgeois state takes direct charge of the means of transport or industrial enterprises. The very necessity of such measures is one of the signs that the productive forces have outgrown capitalism and are bringing it to a partial self-negation in practice. But the outworn system, along with its elements of self-negation, continues to exist as a capitalist system.
But if a socialist government is still necessary for the preservation and development of the planned economy, the question is all the more important, upon whom the present Soviet government relies on, and in what measure the socialist character of its policy is guaranteed. At the 11th Party Congress in March 1922, Lenin, in practically bidding farewell to the party, addressed these words to the commanding group: History knows transformations of all sorts. To rely upon conviction, devotion and other excellent spiritual qualities – that is not to be taken seriously in politics.” Being determines consciousness. During the last fifteen years, the government has changed its social composition even more deeply than its ideas. Since of all the strata of Soviet society, the bureaucracy has best solved its own social problem and is fully content with the existing situation, it has ceased to offer any subjective guarantee whatever of the socialist direction of its policy. It continues to preserve state property only to the extent that it fears the proletariat. This saving fear is nourished and supported by the illegal party of Bolshevik-Leninists, which is the most conscious expression of the socialist tendencies opposing that bourgeois reaction with which the Thermidorian bureaucracy is completely saturated.
As a conscious political force, the bureaucracy has betrayed the revolution. But a victorious revolution is fortunately not only a program and a banner, not only political institutions but also a system of social relations. To betray it is not enough. You have to overthrow it. The October revolution has been betrayed by the ruling stratum, but not yet overthrown. It has a great power of resistance, coinciding with the established property relations, with the living force of the proletariat, the consciousness of its best elements, the impasse of world capitalism, and the inevitability of world revolution.[1]
While he debunks several myths and outright lies surrounding
Vladimir Lenin, he opposes one of Lenin’s most important contributions to the
success of the revolution that is the development of a revolutionary party.
Like many radicals, Faulkner is hostile to the conception of such a party.
It was one of the reasons he broke with the SWP in 2010. He describes the revolutionary party as a “small organisation run by a self-appointed ‘vanguard’ that seeks to insert itself into a mass movement in order to grow parasitically like a tic”.[2]
He then talks about when he left the SWP, since 2010, I have formed many new and rewarding political friendships, and these have contributed, I believe, to a richer, more nuanced understanding of the Russian Revolution. Not least, the degeneration of the British Left over the last two or three decades- which is a generic process, not something restricted to the SWP-has given me a clearer understanding that the masses build revolutionary parties themselves in a struggle; that is, they do not arise from voluntarism, from acts of will by self-appointed revolutionary ‘vanguards’; they do not arise from what has sometimes has been called ‘the primitive accumulation of cadre. Revolutionaries should organise, but they should never proclaim themselves to be the party”.[3]
I might add that the SWP only pays lip service to the concept of the revolutionary party and exhibits similar economism that Lenin fought against.[4] As mentioned earlier, there is no original research in Faulkner’s book. It does not offer any new significant interpretation of the revolution as it developed. Relying on Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution is not enough for an established historian. Given the size of the subject, it is extraordinary that the bibliography is only two and one-half pages, and most of that consists of books by and about Lenin and Trotsky. No letters, newspapers or interviews or personal accounts are cited. For a people’s history, it is light on people.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of the book is that it contains no analysis of the rise of the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification. Contained within this school is a sub-genre that seeks to bury the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky under a new set of lies and calumny.
The representatives of the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification—from the Stalinist military historian Dmitry Volkogonov to the British historians Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain and Robert Service have through their books sought to lie, distort and produce the same Stalinist lies from previous anti-Marxist historiography. The purpose of these attacks is to deny the younger generation access to the views, analyses and perspectives of Leon Trotsky.
One of the leading proponents of the Post-Soviet School of
Historical Falsification is Robert Service. Service in 2009 said, “There is
life in the old boy Trotsky yet—but if the ice pick did not quite do its
job-killing him off, I hope I have managed it.”
Robert Service London, October 2009.
Service has not accomplished his job, which is no thanks to Faulkner. Outside of the Marxists of the World Socialist Website, not a single political tendency calling itself Trotskyist has presented a consistent body of work that attacks Service and his friends in the Post Soviet School of Falsification. Given the crude political level of this “school”, it is not a difficult thing to do as the Marxist writer David North said of Service’s biogeography of Trotsky it “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.[5]
To conclude, as I said before, Faulkner’s book is a basic history of the Russian revolution and contains nothing in it that would merit a recommendation. It is hoped that Faulkner’s next book on the Russian revolution is a better one that takes on the Post Soviet School of Falsification. I will not hold my breath.
1]The Revolution Betrayed-Chapter 9-Social Relations-in the
Soviet Union-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch09.htm#ch09-1
[2]
http://socialistreview.org.uk/425/peoples-history-russian-revolution
[3]A Peoples History of the Russian Revolution. Neil
Faulkner. Pluto 201 A[
4] See-What Is To Be Done?Burning Questions of Our
Movement-https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iv.htm
[5] In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of
Robert Service’s Trotsky
By David North-11 November 2009-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/11/serv-n11.html
Review : The Girl From The Metropol Hotel-Growing Up in
Communist Russia-By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya-Translated by Anna
Summers-Illustrated. 149 pp. Penguin Books.
Withhold publication—but don’t lose track of the author.”Novy Mir,
Generally speaking, art is an expression of man’s need for a
harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits
of which a society of classes has deprived him. That is why a protest against
reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or
pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new
tendency in art has begun with rebellion.
Leon Trotsky-Art and Politics in Our Epoch (1938)
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s The Girl from the Metropol Hotel
is a powerful memoir of her childhood in Stalinist Russia. In an already
overcrowded market of memoirs emanating from the Stalinist betrayal of the
October revolution and the rise of a Stalinist totalitarian state, this is one
of the better ones. Anna Summers excellently translates the book.
Petrushevskaya’s slim memoir is beautifully written, which
is all the more surprising given the level of brutality she and her family
suffered as“an enemy of the people to our neighbours, to the police, to the
janitors, to the passers-by, to every resident of our courtyard of any age. We
were not allowed to use the shared bathroom, to wash our clothes, and we didn’t
have soap anyway. At the age of 9, I was unfamiliar with shoes, with
handkerchiefs, with combs; I did not know what school or discipline was.”
Petrushevskaya’s family was no ordinary family for it
contained many leading Bolsheviks who were either murdered or left to rot in
prison, six of her family were convicted and given 10-year sentences at hard
labour, on the order of Joseph Stalin. Petrushevskaya’s grandfather, Nikolai
Yakovlev, was a world-renowned linguistics scholar. Her grandmother married
Yakolev after turning away the romantic assignations of the revolutionary poet
Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Petrushevskaya’s great-uncle was a leading organiser of the
1905 revolution a curtain-raiser to the 1917 October Revolution. Her
great-grandfather, Dedya, joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party in
1898.
Yakolev is of particular interest because he crossed swords
with Stalin over linguistics. Yakolev was an early advocate of Marrism. What
should have been a comradely discussion over their differences ended when
Stalin sent Yakolev to the Gulag. Stalin justified his differences with the
Marrist’s in a Pravda article entitled Marxism and questions. He denounced
Marrism and accused its adherents of being anti-Marxists. Yakovlev was one of
the lucky ones in the sense that he could have been shot straight away.
It is clear from Petrushevskaya work that she is not overtly
political and never really understood the political nature of Stalin’s purges.
Petrushevskaya is fortunate that she lives in a country that produced one of
the greatest Marxists scholars who wrote extensively on Stalin’s purges. The
great Russian historian Vadim Rogovin described why “in the struggle for power
and income, the bureaucracy (was) forced to chop off and crush those groups who
(were) connected with the past, who know and remember the program of the
October Revolution, who are sincerely devoted to the tasks of socialism. The extermination
of the Old Bolsheviks and the socialist elements of the middle and younger
generations is an important link in the anti-October reaction” [1]
Petrushevskaya survived the Stalin period but found it
impossible to get published during the Brezhnev years. Petrushevskaya had
described this as a time when truth was in general forbidden.”Her books which
tackled crime, domestic violence, alcoholism, and illness were way too radical
for a government whose very anti-working policies caused so much social
inequality. Even Novy Mir, the supposed liberal journal refused to publish her
stories, saying Withhold publication—but don’t lose track of the author” During
the era of Gorbachev’s perestroika, she had a measure of success in that her
books were being published. She continued to write about issues that
highlighted social inequality in Soviet society. As Sophie Pinkham put it “Her
characters were preoccupied, as were citizens under Stalin, with food, housing,
and violent death”.[2]
Her exposure of social inequality angered the bureaucracy.
Her phone was tapped, and she was under constant surveillance. She was indicted
for six months after criticizing Gorbachev’s military actions in Latvia and
Lithuania.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is still alive and long may she
continue writing her books. They are worth reading and deserve a wide
readership. The issues emanating from her difficult childhood and issues
surrounding her family especially the debate over Soviet linguists should
provoke further study. It is for that reason that I have added a recommendation
for further reading.
Further Reading
N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics
Author(s): Yuri Slezkine Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Winter, 1996),
pp. 826-862
Marr, Marrism, and Stalinism-V. M. Alpatov- Russian Studies
in History- Volume 34, 1995 – Issue 2
________________________________________
[1] Vadim Z. Rogovin: Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938.
Political Genocide in the USSR, Mehring Books 2009, p. 186[2]
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2305/a-fiction-writer-sprinkles-her-deprived-soviet-childhood-with-fairy-dust-17198
Just Send Me Word, a True Story of Love and Survival in the
Gulag, By Orlando Figes- – Allen Lane- 352 pages -24 May 2012
“How many times have I wanted to nestle in your arms but could only turn to the empty wall in front of me? I felt I could not breathe. Yet time would pass, and I would pull myself together. We will get through this, Lev.”
Svetlana Ivanov
No, I do not see any grounds for pessimism. One must take history as she is. Mankind moves like some pilgrims: two steps forward, one step back. During the movement back, it seems to sceptics and pessimists that all is lost. Nothing is lost. Mankind has risen from the ape to the Comintern. It will rise from the Comintern to genuine socialism. The sentence of the commission shows once again that a correct idea is stronger than the most powerful police. In this conviction lies the indestructible foundation of revolutionary optimism.
Leon Trotsky
“We wanted nothing for ourselves, we all wanted just one thing: the world revolution and happiness for all. And if it were necessary to give up our lives to achieve this, then we would have done so without hesitating.”
Nadezhda Joffe
There is a strong cultural tradition in Russia of recording memoirs as a form of political protest. Unfortunately, the memoirs of Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanov recorded by Orlando Figes’s 2012 book Just Send Me Word does not fall into this category.
Memoirs from this time can in the words of J.J. Plant “serve many purposes, personal, political and literary. For the survivors of the Stalin terror, it has been particularly important to set the record straight, to rescue and preserve the memories and knowledge which Stalin and his regime set out to expunge and to name the criminals and collaborators who thought the Stalinist regime would last forever”.[1]
Just Send Me Word is a narrative-based study that has become one of many of the “‘survivors of Stalinism memoirs” that they have in the words of the Marxist writer David North become a “literary genre”.
This is not to say that Just Send Me Word has no merit. The book is well written and researched. The archive of Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanov should contain a goldmine if a historian mines it well. Figes appears to found what he looked for in that the book is mainly absent of any politics.
What kind of enemy was Lev Mishchenko? Mishchenko studied physics and was heavily influenced by quantum physics. Ordinarily would have been a death sentence straight away given Joseph Stalin’s ignorant hostility to bourgeois physics. Lev survived and served in the army during the war and was captured by the Nazis.
After the war he offered work in the US as a nuclear physicist He turned this down preferring to be with his girlfriend, Svetlana. It was a wrong decision given that he was arrested for “betraying his homeland”.
During his time in the gulag, he exchanged more than 1,200 letters with Svetlana. These letters quite unbelievably have been preserved thus creating “the only known Gulag correspondence collection of such size and scope”.
Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanov were part of the nightmare years of the late 1930s, during which Stalin oversaw the physical extermination of socialist intellectuals and workers in the USSR. The flower of the October revolution, Left Oppositionists, intellectuals, workers and peasants died by the hundreds of thousands in conditions of back-breaking labour and deprivation. The political nature of the opposition to Stalinism is a problem for Figes. In the book this struggle is absent.
Why is this a problem for Figes? Is it because the scale of the crimes are so big that they are difficult to comprehend. The key to understanding Figes position appears on page 18 when Figes laments that “no one ever knew what this calculated policy of mass murder was about “. This is not true as there was an opposition to Stalin in the form of the Left Opposition.
Figes blames Stalin’s “Paranoic killing of potential enemies”. This is very vague and is not a satisfactory answer. If Figes elaborated he would be forced to explain that there was a socialist alternative to Stalinism in the form of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky.
A point elaborated by Russian Marxist historian Vadim Rogovin who states ” Stalin’s repressive campaigns flowed from his fear not only of the peasantry but of the working class and above all, its revolutionary vanguard—the Left Opposition. The ever-growing wave of mass violence was directed not against enemies of the October Revolution, but against enemies that the Stalinist regime itself created: the peasantry resisting forced collectivisation and participants in the communist oppositions.[2]
Conclusion
Both Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanov lives are a triumph of principle and human decency over repression caused by Stalinism. As Helen Halyard states “The memoirs of survivors of the Stalin terror are central in shedding personal light on the process of the long civil war which Stalin waged against the revolution. They illuminate and add force to the historical research of writers such as Conquest and Rogovin. However, they do more than this. They can, at their best, demonstrate the survival of some tiny kernel of humanity in the face of the most immeasurable oppression”.Both Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanov had spirits they did not have a revolutionary spirit.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol6/no4/plant2.html
[2] Author’s introduction to Bolsheviks Against Stalinism
1928-1933: Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition
By Vadim Z. Rogovin-30 August 2019-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/30/intr-a30.html
Lenin, Machiavelli and History Today Magazine
“Some medieval courts not only condemned their worst
opponents to death, but they also prescribed a series of extremely cruel and
bloody forms of execution to be carried out one after the other. The thirst for
revenge and urge to deter others mixed with the fear that those subjected to
torture could return and take revenge. The Russian Revolution and its
best-known leader, Vladimir Illyich Lenin, have suffered a similar fate over
the past 90 years. Up to this day, propagandistic efforts have not ceased to
strike dead this most important revolution of the twentieth century”.
While this quote from Peter Schwarz is taken from his
article on the German Magazine Der Spiegel[1] the same could be said of the
History Today Magazine. It would appear that not a month goes by without an
article attacking in some form Marxist conceptions or leading Marxist figures.
It would appear that History Today has a particular grievance against Vladimir
Lenin.
A simple search of the History Today archive would bring to
the attention of the reader over thirty articles, and one must say very few of
these are worth the paper they are printed on. The latest one in the November
issue is no exception. Its title Lenin: The Machiavellian Marxist by Graeme
Garrard gives its intentions away. It also follows a similar pattern; it is
almost like History Today has a template for these kind of articles.
One problem that arises with these type of articles is the
choice of writer. Graeme Garrard who is a reader at Cardiff University and is
an established historian but like many who write on revolutionary politics has
little or no grasp of what life in a revolutionary party today or yesterday was
like. It was not always like this.
While Lenin studies are not in a very good place at the
moment as the Marxist writer David North points out the situation in Trotsky
studies is worse and has “deteriorated in the 1990s. American and British
scholarship produced nothing substantial in this field during the entire
decade. The only published work that perhaps stands out as an exception, though
a minor one, is a single volume of essays, produced by the Edinburgh University
Press in 1992 under the title The Trotsky Reappraisal. During this decade, a
disturbing trend emerged in Britain, which consisted of recycling and
legitimising old anti-Trotsky slanders. This trend was exemplified by the
so-called Journal of Trotsky Studies, which was produced at the University of
Glasgow. The favourite theme of this journal was that Trotsky’s writings were
full of self-serving distortions”.[2]
In many ways, Garrads is characteristic of the approach to
historical and political issues taken by other writers. Comparing revolutionary figures such as Lenin and Trotsky to religious fanatics is not
new.
Another distortion peddled is that the October revolution
was a coup. First, the establishment of the first worker’s state was not a coup
carried out by a small group of supporters of Lenin. “The October revolution
was the product of the struggle of millions of workers, impoverished peasants
and war-weary soldiers, who joined the Bolsheviks because they regarded the
party as the most consistent defender of their interests.”
A further point which again is not new is that Karl Marx and
Vladimir Lenin were only able to live as revolutionaries off the backs of
Russian Peasants and English workers. This is a cheap and very right-wing
approach to historical questions. , Lenin and Marx lived under capitalism, not
socialism.
Garrards use of only one other historian is a little
strange. Ullam is a gifted historian but has certain baggage regarding the
Russian revolution, and Garrard should have drawn on other sources.
The reference Garrard makes to Lenin being Machiavellian is
absurd and would take too long to expose the stupidity of such a comment. Again
he is not alone in making this remark, and the company he keeps is not very
pleasant.
The last point the author makes is perhaps the most
perplexing. Much of the article is given over to what happens to the state
under Socialism. Lenin’s and Trotsky position was clear as day it would wither
away mankind would live under a society based on need, not profit. His last
sentence is strange given that what happened to the Soviet Union after Lenin
died is common knowledge. Why did Garrard not mention the betrayal of the
Russian Revolution by Stalinism?
Why are these articles being written? After all, we have had
the “Death of Marxism, “The End of History”, why to bother with figures such as
Lenin, Marx, Trotsky. The reason being is that many workers and young people
are looking for a socialist alternative. Many are now turning to a systematic
study of the October Revolution.
They are being met with a web of lies and distortions left
by bourgeois and Stalinist propaganda. It explains why 90 years on History
Today continues to vilify the Russian Revolution and its revolutionaries
[1]Der Spiegel churns out old lies on the October
Revolution- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/12/spie-d15.html
[2] Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of
Classical Marxism
By David North1 December 2008
Lenin and the Russian Revolution -Christopher Hill-English
Universities Press-248 pp. 1947
During the current celebrations of the Centenary of the 1917 October Revolution, the attack on Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution, in general, has been particularly severe even by common media standards. According to them, Lenin was a brutal dictator, and the revolution was a disaster.
In his article, [1]The denunciation of the Russian Revolution in Germany the Marxist writer Peter Schwarz makes this point “In Germany’s criminal code there is a paragraph declaring the slandering of the memory of the dead to be a criminal offence. Punishment for such crime ranges from a fine to two years imprisonment. This appears not to apply to historical figures. If one reviews the articles, contributions on radio and television, and films to mark the centenary of the October Revolution in Russia, the principal rule that applies is: “anything goes.”
This brief review of Christopher Hill’s book on Lenin and the Russian Revolution is my contribution to the celebration of such a seminal event in world history. The October revolution despite what the highly paid lackeys in the media say is an essential lesson for working people to study and learn from, as Schwarz says “that one of the most significant transformations in world history, which influenced the 20th century more than any other event, could not be dismissed with a tirade of insults against Lenin and the Bolsheviks but required a serious study of its social and political driving forces”.
So when writing on such a controversial subject, a serious historian must make an objective assessment of both the revolution and one of its leaders. Hill despite being hampered by his membership of a Stalinist party attempted to make just that. He did not always make it. After all writing about the Russian Revolution in the middle part of the 20th century was a dangerous exercise for any of the historians in the Communist Party Historians Group(CPHG) To insulate himself from attack Hill states that he took advantage of the collaboration between Britain and the USSR during wartime to write the book.
“I wrote Lenin and the Russian Revolution in 1945-46, during the brief period when it appears the wartime friendship between England and the Soviet Union would continue to prosper, painful though it is to think so today”.Despite not being his best work the book nonetheless laid down some markers that would be examined in later works of a much higher standard. Hill makes this point “In writing the book I made a point of drawing parallels between the 17th-century English Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789, and the Russian Revolution of 1917. In England after 1660, and in France after 1815, there was a severe reaction against the preceding revolutions; but 1688 in England and 1830 in France showed that there was to be no restoration of the old regimes”.[2]
The book was part of a series called “Teach Yourself History” with the historian AL Rowse the general editor. Apparently, Hill became a bête noir of A L Rowse who states “When it arrived, I was taken aback – a work of stone-walling Stalinist orthodoxy, not a whit human.”While being friends with Hill, Rowse’s vituperation towards Hill’s research on the radical groups of the English Revolution shows a man hostile to the genre of “History from below”.This quote is taken from Historians I have Known “ As if the thinking of people who don’t know how to think has any value Hobbes, Milton, Selden, Clarendon, Halifax, Locke ! Yes; but not of the people at Large”.shows a level of class hatred that would not look out of place in the most right-wing academic circles.
While it was bought in large quantities by the general public, the book was attacked both inside and outside of academia. John Gollan in his short review manages to attack Hill from the right by heavily criticising him for his relatively light-minded treatment of Leon Trotsky. He accused Hil of “utterly insufficient attention was paid to the history of the Communist Party and the struggle around policy in the period immediately before and during Lenin’s illness and death. Hence the role of Stalin as Lenin’s successor, his struggle against Trotskyism is not brought out. In his references to Trotsky, Comrade Hill correctly presents Lenin’s criticism of Trotsky’s role at specific periods of the revolution. However, Lenin did not and could not know that Trotsky and his confederates, already in those days were wreckers and plotters criminally associated with foreign powers.
He continues “Stalin succeeded to Lenin’s leadership, not only because of his mastery of Lenin’s teachings, but because of his record in the pre-revolutionary days, his editorship of Pravda, his work on the national question, his leadership in the insurrection, the decisive role entrusted to him by Lenin in the Civil War, and above all, his leadership of the Party in the critical tense period of Lenin’s illness and death. If this had been done Trotsky’s “History” could never have been included in the bibliography”.[3]Gollan was not the only person to attack Hill’s contribution to our understanding of Lenin and the Russian Revolution. A Particularly nasty one came from the pen of Adam B. Ulam, in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Ullam wrote “ I have hitherto never sought to reply to or to polemicize with reviewers of my books. However, the review article on Stalin which appeared in your magazine on January 24 raises an issue of such importance that I am forced for the first, and I hope the last, time to break this rule. The issue is: how legitimate is it for a magazine of your standing to commission a review from a person, and for him to write it, on a subject in which he has demonstrated his utter disregard or ignorance of facts? I could adduce several examples to support this judgment, but one, I trust, will be enough. Mr Hill is ironic about my assessment of the Mensheviks. Yet, let me put it to you, your readers, and the Master of Balliol whether one should take seriously any judgment about the Mensheviks or any other facet of Soviet and Russian history coming from a man who can write: “[after January 1918] …the leaders of the Menshevik party disappeared from history as the coadjutors of the White Guards trying with the aid of foreign bayonets to demonstrate the impossibility of the socialist experiments of the Bolsheviks.”
Anybody with a superficial acquaintance with modern Russian history will recognize the outrageous untruthfulness of this statement, but let me rehearse the facts. “In mid-1918 when the Soviet government was locked in military combat against the counterrevolutionaries and the interventionist armies… [the Mensheviks] moved closer to the Bolsheviks by pledging ‘unqualified support’ to the government and calling on their followers to join the Red Army…. Apparently, in return for this loyalty, the Bolsheviks legalized the Menshevik party in November 1918.” The Mensheviks’ most prestigious leaders, Martov and Dan, called for “unconditional support of Bolshevism in its resistance to international imperialism and its internal and counterrevolutionary allies.”
Were I to write and then maintain in print for over twenty years that the Levellers were agents of the French government, would Mr Hill grant that I was a suitable reviewer for his books on English history?”In the interest of fairness, it is worth noting Christopher Hill’s reply “I agree with some of Professor Cameron’s points. In my review I noted as an interesting fact that the authors of two serious books on Stalin, written from very different viewpoints, agreed in rejecting the Trotskyist myth without accepting the Stalinist myth; and I observed that freedom to reject one of these myths without having to rely on the other gave the historian writing now about the Russian Revolution an advantage over even so great a historian as Isaac Deutscher. Professor Cameron, I gather, prefers the Trotskyite myth. This is fair enough, but one does not have to choose, and if one did have to choose literary merit would not necessarily be the best criterion. Any myth with the survival power of Stalinism must surely bear some relation to reality, which the historian should investigate: this has nothing to do with whether one likes it or not. I agree about the literary power and distinction of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, as of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion; but the literary power of the latter is no reason for preferring his myth to—say—Oldmixon’s.
With reference to Mr Ulam’s letter, it is not for me to defend your choice of a reviewer. I willingly admit to being no expert on the Russian Revolution. Mr Ulam has to go back twenty-seven years to find anything written by me on the subject. For this reason, I tried to concentrate on methodological questions raised by the two interesting books I was asked to review. The reductio ad absurdum argument of Mr Ulam’s last sentence, however, suggests an ironical addition to what I called the “recurrent situations” of revolutions: after their defeat, some of the Leveller leaders did in fact attempt to overthrow the Cromwellian régime in agreement with the Spanish government[4].
From an orthodox Marxist perspective, there are many more important and better criticisms of this book and Hill’s outlook. Like I said earlier the Russian revolution was dangerous territory not only for Hill but the other distinguished historians in the Communist Party.Before 1956 these historians were lightly policed by the Communist Party Cultural Committee this not to say they could write anything they wanted. As Edward Thompson explained the CPHG largely policed their own work. As John McIlroy explains they “ by and large, knew and respected the rules of the game. The CP leadership’s unspoken interdict on researching into recent history, particularly the history of their own party, was on the whole accepted by the group. Allegiance to Stalinism moulded their Marxism, and, if it did not entirely stifle good scholarship, it undeniably constrained their history. As Hobsbawm remarked, ‘in the years 1946-56 the relations between the Group and the Party had been almost entirely unclouded. [The Historians]… were as loyal, active and committed a group of Communists as any…’[5]
Hill continues the Stalinist tradition of attacking Trotsky’s role and political outlook during the Revolution. As Ann Talbot relates “Hill’s sole attempt at modern history, his study of Lenin is undoubtedly his weakest book. It is marred by repeated attacks on Trotsky, who is dismissed as one of the “Westernising theoreticians” of the revolutionary movement. Discussing whether Trotsky could ever have become the leader of the Bolshevik Party after Lenin’s death, Hill concludes, “Such a view exaggerates, I think, the importance of Trotsky in the party.”
As Hill should have known, the British government were well aware of Trotsky’s importance since they would not allow him into the country when he requested asylum. However, still, Hill’s historical faculties would not let him deny that Trotsky was a great orator, that he organised the insurrection which brought the Bolsheviks to power, and nor does he avoid giving Trotsky more references in the index than Stalin. At no point does Hill repeat the false charges that the Stalinists made against Trotsky and his followers at the Moscow trials. Even in this book, which certainly hacks work, Hill did not make himself fully a Stalinist hack. His criticisms of Trotsky are ill-judged and betray an ignorance of his subject, rather than being malicious and dishonest. He retained a core of intellectual honesty in a work that was written in 1947 as the lines were being drawn for the Cold War, which was designed to defend the Russian Revolution and not to win him friends in high places at home or in the Kremlin.[6]
Like any Christopher Hill book, I would recommend the book. Unlike Hill’s other work I would say the reader sometimes needs to hold their nose. As Talbot says, it is a hack work but is a decent read and worth reading to see how far Hill as a historian moved away from the book.
[1] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/11/revo-n11.html
[2]
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/books-second-thoughts-dont-blame-lenin-for-stalin-christopher-hill-looks-back-on-his-study-of-the-5431224.html
[3] A Historian on the Russian Revolution-
https://www.marxists.org/archive/gollan/1948/02/historian.htm
[4] Stalin, Trotsky, & Cromwell-Adam B. Ulam, reply by
Christopher Hill March 21 1974- http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1974/03/21/stalin-trotsky-cromwell-2/
[5]
http://www.revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/index.php/187-articles/articles-of-rh0903/8299-mclroy
[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
A Critical Review of Trotsky, Downfall of a Revolutionary by
Bertrand M. Patenaude’s -New York HarperCollins, 2009
“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 of 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 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 he 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 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”
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 is not immune to this right-wing shift in
academia. His book despite being better than some others does sufferer from 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 as 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 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 saying 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
1917: Before and After by Edward Hallett Carr,
Macmillan,1969
Trotsky was a hero of the revolution; He fell when the
heroic age was over.” E H Carr.
This collection of articles, reviews and lectures deal
predominantly with Carr’s assessment of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and its
revolutionaries. To say that Carr had a contradictory attitude to the
Revolution and for that matter, Marxism, in general, would be an understatement.
The items that make up this slim volume were written before
1950 and give me a welcome opportunity for a limited survey of his work and the
place it occupies in the field of Soviet studies.
The themes of the lectures are broad in scope. Ranging from
figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky and literary figures such as
Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Like all Carr’s work, his style of writing is clear and
straightforward and explains complex historical and political events in a
language untainted by jargon.
However, one major criticism of Carr’s work and perhaps the
biggest charge against him is that he was only interested in writing about the
victors in history. This is simply not true while he did not deal with the
defeat suffered by Leon Trotsky and others on the scale of say Isaac Deutscher
he did nonetheless deal with the defeated in a precise and not unsympathetic
manner.
The first chapter The Russian Revolution; its place in
History is a well-written attempt to place the revolution in its historical
context. This is a solid piece of writing which is free of the usual cynicism
that permeates Soviet historiography today. Carr correctly observes that the
Russian revolutionaries learned the lessons from previous revolutions including
the French and English bourgeois revolutions.
The second chapter is a preface to a translation of the
novel What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The novel was highly
thought of by Vladimir Lenin. One of Lenin great works What is to be Done,
written in 1902 took the name of this book. He called the author a “great
Russian socialist”. This a very sympathetic portrait of Chernyshevsky. The
novel is highly thought of in academic circles. Joseph Frank wrote “No work in
modern literature, with the possible exception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, can
compete with What Is to Be Done? in its effect on human lives and its power to
make history. For Chernyshevsky novel, far more than Marx’s Capital, supplied
the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.”[1]
Carr’s third chapter is called Red Rosa. As Carr admits it
is very difficult to do justice to Luxemburg in the space of eleven pages of
text. A full-length biography and then some is needed. It is clear that
Luxemburg was held in high esteem amongst the Bolsheviks leaders. Lenin
especially commented that “Although the eagles do swoop down and beneath the
chickens fly, chickens with outspread wings never will soar amid clouds in the
sky”.[2]
Carr properly designates Luxemburg as an equal of any
leading Marxists of the time. She played a crucial role in the attack on Eduard
Bernstein’s revision of Marxism. Her Accumulation of Capital written in 1915
was among other things an attack on Bernstein’s revisionism. Luxemburg, it is
true did not hold back any criticism especially of the Bolsheviks if she felt
it was warranted.
The paragraph below quoted in Carr’s book has been
interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on the Bolsheviks but I am not sure Carr’s
reads it that way.
“The essence of socialist society consists in the fact that
the great labouring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the
entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a
conscious, free, and autonomous direction. The proletarian revolution requires
no terror for its aims; it hates and despises killing. It does not need these
weapons because it does not combat individuals but institutions because it does
not enter the arena with naïve illusions whose disappointment it would seek to
revenge. It is not the desperate attempt of a minority to mould the world
forcibly according to its ideal, but the action of the great massive millions
of the people, destined to fulfil a historic mission and to transform
historical necessity into reality.[3]“
Carr’s fourth chapter is called The Bolshevik Utopia. This
is a very misleading piece of writing, in that it gives the impression that
Marxism has utopian content. Given that Carr is usually very precise in his
writing this is not a mistake or slip of the pen. Carr really did identify with
this characterization of the Bolsheviks. It is a little strange given that Carr
would have been familiar with the decades-long struggle the Marxist movement
carried out in opposing the utopian socialists.
The Tragedy of Trotsky is by far the most interesting piece
of this collection. The chapter is a multi-layer review of Isaac Deutscher’s
biography of the Russian revolutionary. Carr it must be said was one of the
first historians to carry out a major attempt at restoring Trotsky to his
rightful place in Soviet and international history. Using sources from the
soviet archives he was one of the first historians to write a detailed account
of the political struggles inside the leadership of the Communist Party of the
USSR 1923-24.
Carr clearly thought that there was an alternative to
Stalinism in the form of Leon Trotsky and his Left Opposition. 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’s account made clear that Trotsky became the
target of an unprincipled attack that was, in its initial stages, motivated by
his rivals’ subjective considerations of personal power. While Carr found much
to criticize in Trotsky’s response to the provocations of Stalin, Zinoviev and
Kamenev, the historian left no doubt that he viewed Trotsky as, alongside of
Lenin, the towering figure of the Bolshevik Revolution”. [4]
Carr’s Place in Soviet Historiography
Carr was part of that generation of historians although not
Marxist who sought to make an objective evaluation of the October revolution
and its aftermath. As one writer commented, “not exactly a Marxist, but strongly
impregnated with Marxist ways of thinking, applied to international affairs”.
Carr, who worked under difficult circumstances throughout
his career had to come to terms with the debilitating effect of Stalinism had
on his field of historical study. According to Deutscher “The Stalinist state
intimidated the historian and dictated to him first the pattern into which he
was expected to force events and then the ever new versions of the events
themselves. At the outset, the historian was subjected to this pressure mainly
when he dealt with the Soviet revolution, the party strife which had preceded
and which had followed it, and especially the struggles inside the Bolshevik
Party. All these had to be treated in a manner justifying Stalin as the Leader
of monolithic Bolshevism”. [5]
Since Carr’s time, there has been a distinct and traceable
decline in the historical study of the Russian revolution. The failure of
today’s historians to produce an objective and intelligent account of the
revolution has more to do with current politics than it does with just bad
academic standards and this is despite having access to archives that Carr
could have only dreamed of. In fact, outside the confines of the International
Committee of the Fourth International, there has been no historian that has
bettered Carr’s work.
It is not within the realm of this review to examine the
current state of soviet historiography suffice to say it is at a very low ebb.
Far from being objective historical studies, many of the books appearing lately
have been hagiographies and very right-wing ones at that. Many of them do not
even retain minimal academic standards.
One such book is Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky
according to David North “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”.[6]
In conclusion, I am not saying Carr is without flaws and
limitations. His work however will “remain a great and enduring landmark in
historical writing devoted to the Bolshevik revolution. “It will take a very
great historian to better his work. In today’s climate, I for one am not holding
my breath.
Notes
1. Heretics and
Renegades and Other Essays, Isaac Deutscher, Hamish and Hamilton, London,
1955).
2. EH Carr, The
Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1921 (three volumes, London, 1950, 1952, 1953); The
Interregnum, 1923-1924 (London, 1954).
[1] Joseph Frank, The Southern Review
[2] Leon Trotsky- Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg! (June 1932)
[3] Rosa Luxemburg-What Does the Spartacus League Want?
(December 1918)
[4] North, David, In defence of Leon Trotsky, Mehring Books,
Detroit,2015
[5] Isaac Deutscher’s, Heretics and Renegades and Other
Essays (Hamish and Hamilton, London, 1955). Scanned and prepared for the
Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
[6] In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of
Robert Service’s Trotsky-David North
The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky-Bertrand M. Patenaude
There is life in the
old boy Trotsky yet—but if the ice pick did not quite do its job-killing him
off, I hope I have managed it.”
Robert Service London, October 2009,
“Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.” Leon Trotsky
The last few years have seen a spate of biographies examining the life of the co-leader of the Russian Revolution 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. Robert Service’s book on Trotsky as can be seen from the quote above is one of many disgraceful examples.
Patenaude’s book is not quite the same as Service’s hatchet job, but it does not measure up to others from previous decades. The former Stanford lecturer doors attempt to set the record straight, and opposes Service’s attempt to assassinate Trotsky all over again but he does retain a political hostility to Trotsky and his supporters. The book appears at the end of a decade of which has seen a relentless campaign to promote the death of Marxism. It is perhaps then a little surprising that over the corresponding period we saw a plethora of biographies on the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
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 “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 papers at Harvard and of course to documents held at the Hoover archives. Even this privileged access has not prevented him from repeating some 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 excellent and in most cases, objective books. It is not possible to examine all of them, E.H. Carr is one of those historians. Carr was one of the first major historians 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 summarised and analysed the complex issues of program, policy, and principle with which Trotsky grappled in a challenging and critical period of Soviet history.”[1]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. While 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 work on the figures of the Russian Revolution should adhere to Marxism but is it too much to ask for some objectivity or even real serious history. 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. In the preface of his book Service boasts that he is “the first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside of Russia who is not a Trotskyist.”[2] 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.
Patenaude correctly criticises 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 backward 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 entirely 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.”[3]
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 study would lead him away from other tasks. “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?
Patenaude would later retract his sharp opinion of North who after all is a leading authority on Leon Trotsky. 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 criticism of Service’s book 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 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.”[4]
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, utilising slanders and fabrications of old Stalinist vintage in the interest of contemporary anti-communism”.[5]
Thatcher’s Trotsky 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 the right-wing shift in academia. His book, despite being better than some others, does sufferer by 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 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 entirely 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 throwaway lines such as 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 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 use this method when encountering Trotsky’s revolutionary past.
The primary 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 saying before. Not much is said about Trotsky’s followers around the world. Next, nothing is written in the preparation and discussion following the publication of the Transitional Programme.
Patenaude also tends to repeat a lot of the salacious gossip surrounding Trotsky which there is no reason to do other than to sell books his description of |trotysk’s affair with Freida Kahlo being one example Writes Patenaude: “It is no mystery why Trotsky was attracted to Frida Kahlo. The daughter of a German-Jewish immigrant father and a Mexican mother, at 29 she was a striking and exotic beauty with black hair, audacious almond eyes beneath batwing eyebrows, and sensuous lips.” Or this piece of irrelevance “Dressed in a tweed suit and knickerbockers, carrying a cane and a briefcase, he projected an image of civilised respectability, looking not at all like a defiant revolutionary. And at five feet eleven inches tall, he hardly resembled the Soviet cartoon image of him as ‘the little Napoleon,'” Patenaude notes.
Conclusion
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] Leon Trotsky & the Post-Soviet School of Historical
Falsification
By David North
[2] Robert Service, Trotsky, A Biography (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009)
[3] The American Historical Review (2011) 116 (3): 900-902
[4] In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of
Robert Service’s Trotsky
By David North-11 November 2009- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/11/serv-n11.html
[5] In Defense of Leon Trotsky-By David North-Mehring Books
