Max Shachtman 1964
Source: Dissent, Volume 11, no 3, Summer 1964. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929-1940 (Oxford University Press, London and New York, 1963, pp 523)
Now the author brings to its sorrowful end the story of Leon Trotsky, the biography begun with The Prophet Armed, continued with The Prophet Unarmed, and here concluded. As biography, it is an achievement unsurpassed by anything written in this century; as political biography, it is unequalled; and if there are few or meagre landmarks in this literary domain to compare it with, this still does not diminish its outstanding merit. Deutscher has brought to his work uncommon advantages. He was active for years in the movements Trotsky once led, first the Communist Party and then the Trotskyist organisation, and he gained a feeling for their realities, for which even the best academic research cannot substitute. He has admiration and affection for his protagonist but also critical independence. His knowledge of Trotsky’s ideas is thoroughgoing and, so to say, ‘professional’, and he is perfectly at home in the spectrum of the radical world. He has studied and portrayed the private life, the family life, the personal characteristics of Trotsky in a way never before publicly treated, so that his subject comes alive not only in mind but in spirit and in flesh. This is all the more remarkable in an author who never saw the contemporary who is his hero. Given a personal acquaintance with Trotsky, he might have been able to deal with characteristics and attributes he does not seem to be aware of. Even then, while the portrait would have been somewhat richer and more vivid, the main dimensions would remain as they are. To complete the portrait Deutscher fortified his extensive general knowledge of the subject with immense and minute research, which included the combing of Trotsky’s confidential political correspondence and the private correspondence among the members of the family. [1]
And the result of all this is served to the reader in a splendorous prose which seems especially suitable for the aim of this work: to give life, light and coherence to the interplay of a highly dramatic personal record, a vast conflict of men, ideas and movements, and some of the most tempestuous events of our time.
The last volume of the trilogy covers the period from Trotsky’s deportation from Russia to Turkey to the time of his murder in Mexico. Stalin’s was the hand that directed both the banishment and the assassination. This already indicates that the biography deals as it must with the life of both antagonists, their ideas and deeds, and the clash between them. A triumph of the book is the truly pulsing and unforgettable picture it gives of the meaning, realised in Trotsky, of devotion to ideals and ideas regardless of personal consequences, of defiance of a most powerful vindictive tyrant, of confidence in the perseverance, the capacity for recuperation and for self-emancipation of the disinherited. There was not an iota of posturing or ritual pietism in these characteristics. They were his nature and his true convictions. He sustained them in the face of such political and personal adversity as no contemporary was forced to endure.
In the last dozen years of his life, every one of his political or personal friends, intimates, associates in Russia was imprisoned and driven to his death, or just plain murdered – except for the very few allowed to die a natural death. The victims of Stalin’s massacres included virtually every leader and prominent militant of the Bolshevik revolution and the Communist International. Except for his wife and one grandson, Trotsky saw every member of his family hounded to death or murdered: all four of his children, his two sons-in-law and their children, his sister and her husband, his first wife – and then he himself was murdered by the same hand. I know of no other person in history who was subjected to such a long-lasting and systematically planned campaign of personal and political vilification as Trotsky suffered. No government in Europe would grant Trotsky the secure asylum (more-or-less) that Western Europe granted all Russian revolutionists in defiance of the Romanov Tsars, but which none of them would grant him in defiance of the ‘socialist’ Tsar.
In his last dozen years, every one of Trotsky’s political hopes was cruelly dashed. The events in Russia, Germany, Austria, the Saar, France, Spain followed their dismal course in every direction save the one he worked for. The gulf between him and the parties of the Communist International became unbridgeable. His manoeuvres with the parties of the Socialist International yielded no glory and no fruit. His efforts to establish his own worldwide movement failed completely. The Fourth International, which was to be the regenerated movement of Communism, was still-born. It exerted no influence whatever on events, it exercised no political influence in any country up to the time of Trotsky’s death or for the quarter century afterward, except, to a tiny extent, in two countries which are as far from each other as they are from importance in the world today. As Deutscher notes, Trotsky did not even mention the Fourth International in the will he left behind. (It is most strange: both leaders of the Bolshevik revolution left ‘testaments’ which are unique in the annals of the revolutionary movement and, by coincidence, although for different reasons, the documents were in both cases concealed for years not only from the public but from their own followers.)
Trotsky often repeated that he knew no personal tragedy, and in the thought he tried to convey he was right. But personal tragedy knew him, intimately and bitterly and to his last hour.
Here two questions arise. Was the tragic element in Trotsky’s life only personal? Was the tragedy his alone?
Deutscher does not fail – quite the contrary – to bring Trotsky to life as a human being. But, primarily, it is a political biography he has written. The two questions are therefore his main province. All the elements for the answers are provided in the work, even if the proportions allotted, the relative emphasis placed upon them, are not always satisfactory.
The last two decades of Trotsky’s life are devoted overwhelmingly to his fight against the rise of Stalinism. It is on the basis of this fight that Trotsky should be judged, at least for the period in question.
Almost from the very beginning of the open fight against his opponents in 1923, Trotsky suggested that they were abandoning the basic principles of the Bolshevik revolution and of Marxism in two fields: at home, in domestic policy, and internationally, in foreign policy. By 1925, the suggestions were accusations, precise and unequivocal, and they were thereafter pressed with rising sharpness.
* At home, the Bolshevik revolution could either advance towards socialism or fall back to capitalism. Stalinism represented a reaction against the principles and achievements of the revolution. The quintessential social nature of this reaction, stripped of all verbiage, ideology, deception and self-deception, was the restoration of the rule of capitalism in its most brutal form. The Stalinist bureaucracy, the Stalinist faction, is the channel for the return of bourgeois rule in Russia.
This was the central theme of literally dozens of articles, theses, resolutions, platform speeches, faction circulars and the like which formed the indictment of Trotsky and his supporters against the Stalinists.
* The bureaucracy – sometimes it was the bureaucracy as a whole, sometimes it was the right wing of the bureaucracy with the Stalino-Centrists inexorably following suit – is capitulating to the kulak and the NEP-man, to the bourgeoisie or the neo-bourgeoisie. It is already taking steps to undermine the nationalisation of the land, the state monopoly of foreign trade, and is prepared to take other steps which will destroy all the foundation stones of socialism in Russia. It is resisting planning, industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture because it is more and more the helpless instrument of capitalist elements in town and country, at home and abroad.
When the leadership began disclosing the split in its ranks between the Bukharinists and the Stalinists, Trotsky regarded the development as a mighty confirmation of his analysis and the course of his fight. By 1928, already expelled from the party, he sounded the tocsin that the revolution itself was in imminent danger of destruction. The Bukharinist ‘right’ wing is openly yielding to the restorationist forces; it is the agency of the bourgeois counter-revolution. The Stalinists – the ‘bureaucratic centrists’ – are heedless and headless and helpless. The Left Opposition alone clearly and consciously defends the imperilled revolution. The final battle in which the fate of the revolution is to be decided is about to be fought!
In a sensational article which was one of the formal pretexts for his deportation to Turkey, he brought this analysis to its peak. What is happening in the country now is the unwinding of the October film backwards – Kerenskyism in reverse. Under Kerensky there was a dual power situation, in which the power and rule of the bourgeoisie was overturned by the power and rule of the proletariat. Once again there is a dual power situation in the country – except that now the power and rule of the proletariat is being overturned by the power and rule of the counter-revolutionary propertied classes. The proletarian class is represented by the Opposition; the bourgeois elements by the Bukharin-Rykov-Tomsky right wing. The Stalinist faction in the decisive battle that lies ahead will count for next to nothing. It represents only the bureaucratic apparatus. It seems to be powerful, but because it does not represent any of the decisive classes, it is doomed to capitulate to the right wing. Time and again – as in this article – Trotsky reiterated: the right-wing ‘tail’ will come down upon the centrist head and smash it. He even saw the immediate prospect of a Bonapartist coup d'état and even named two possible candidates for the man on horseback – Voroshilov and Tukhachevsky.
For all that was true and brilliant in this analysis, its flaw was that it was fundamentally wrong. There was no ‘dual power’ situation in the country, and if there was, Trotsky never explained what happened to it; indeed, he never mentioned it again. The Stalinists did not capitulate to the ‘right wing’, but destroyed it root and branch, with very little effort, in very little time, and for good and aye. The Stalinists did not capitulate to the bourgeoisie, the NEP-man and the kulak, but wiped them out as no one before had ever dreamed, let alone proposed, to wipe them out. The Stalinists did not restore capitalism or undermine state property in industry or agriculture but rather expanded them on a scale and at a pace that still fills most of the world with awe.
For all the subsequent rationalisation, the fact remains that Trotsky (and of course not he alone) had no room in his analysis or programme for this stupefying development. During the entire first period of Stalin’s crucial changeover which was to disclose the true social nature of the collectivist bureaucracy, Trotsky persisted desperately but helplessly in his basic analysis. To keep his followers from going over to Stalin, he bombarded them with polemical insistences that Stalin’s policy did not represent a left course but only a left zigzag which would, any minute now, be over-compensated by a long and lasting zigzag to the right, and that this was in the unchangeable nature of Stalinism. This too was fundamentally wrong, and the apparently air-tight arguments of this brilliant and forceful mind began to have less and less effect upon his followers. Some resisted Stalinism to the end, to the grim and grisly end. But practically all the leaders of the Opposition, by twos and threes, then by dozens and scores, capitulated to Stalin. It was their tragedy: and even though he would not and did not capitulate, it was Trotsky’s tragedy too.
His whole intellectual formation, all that he had acquired of the doctrine, the politics of Marxism, told Trotsky and his followers that the Stalinist bureaucracy was moving away from socialism, from its ideals, its policies, its internationalism and democratism, its altogether working-class character, its standards of conduct, its values and traditions. The same formation told Trotsky that the sole alternative to socialism is capitalism. If you are not moving in the one direction, you are moving in the other. He was therewith predisposed, so to say, to see in the Stalinist departure from the road to socialism the first and then the next and then the next step along the road back to capitalism. He could not conceive of the real prospect – who could? who did? – that the historical dilemma as posed originally by Marx and Engels – socialism or barbarism – might, under certain conditions, be resolved for a time in the emergence of a barbarism that was not only anti-proletarian and anti-socialist but no less anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist.
Because this possibility was outside his range, the profound and durable turn made by the Stalinist bureaucracy at the crucial moment left Trotsky disarmed in the terms in which he had posed and for long persisted in posing the social dilemma, namely, socialism or capitalism. In every important respect, Stalin moved Russia further and further away from socialism – yet at the same time further and further away from capitalism.
One end of a trap thus sprang shut on Trotsky. He continued to denounce the deceits and the appalling barbarities of Stalinism, but a trap had half closed on him. The course of this new bureaucracy had completely refuted his basic analysis of its social and political nature. He was compelled, so reluctantly and with so much unacknowledged self-repudiation, to transcribe the ‘channel of capitalist restoration’ into the ‘guardian of the economic foundations of socialism’ – the bad guardian, the bureaucratic guardian, the despotic and bloody guardian, but guardian just the same. And no matter what this guardian did to debase, to exploit, to oppress, even to massacre the working class – even when it exceeded the most reactionary bourgeois regime of its time in these respects – Trotsky did not tire of repeating that he would defend its regime ‘unconditionally’ in war.
No Communist could be won to such a banner once Stalin’s course became definite, and from the early 1930s onwards the Trotsky movement did not win any. In exchange, it lost many of its own followers.
With the beginning of the World War, the other end of the trap sprang shut on Trotsky. The integral corollary to Trotsky’s charge that in domestic policy Stalinism was capitulating to the native bourgeoisie, was that in foreign policy Stalinism was capitulating to the world bourgeoisie and its well-known labour lieutenants, the Social Democracy. The world revolution was completely abandoned by Stalinism and replaced by the national-socialist conception embodied in the notorious theory of ‘socialism in a single country’. None of Trotsky’s charges seemed, for years, to be as well-grounded as this one. It was no less wrong, and certainly as misleading and disorienting, as the analysis of the nature of Stalinism inside Russia. Beginning with Poland and the Baltic countries, Stalin did not ‘capitulate to the bourgeoisie’ abroad, but destroyed it and along with it all private ownership.
What remained of the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism outside Russia – if counter-revolution could only mean, as it did to Trotsky, the restoration or preservation of capitalist property? At first, Trotsky, pinned by the horns of his dilemma, sought to fit the reality into a new and startling category: the Stalinist bureaucracy was carrying out a ‘counter-revolutionary social revolution’. This was pretty strong tobacco, and Trotsky must have felt in some way the disaster it connoted from every conceivable standpoint.
This is more than amply indicated by the thoughts Trotsky set down right after the proclamation of the grotesque counter-revolutionary revolution. For the first time in his life, he acknowledged that the Stalinist bureaucracy might soon prove to have been the representative of a new ruling class and its regime the forerunner of a new barbarism, the exploitive society of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’. Whatever else could be said about this statement, which left all his followers speechless, it sufficed, by itself, to free Trotsky from the noose of the dogma which he had improvised late in life, namely, that the mere existence of statified property in Russia justified designating the Stalinist regime as a workers’ state deserving the allegiance of all socialists, regardless of all other considerations. Trotsky was never given, or he never gave himself, the opportunity to return to more extensive reflections on the seminal theme he had opened up.
All this seems to me to be overridingly central to an understanding and an appraisal of Trotsky’s magnificent resistance to Stalinism, and of how the axis of the resistance was so very understandably misplaced. It seems to me to provide a key, if not the key, to the calamitous misjudgement of Stalinism displayed by Roosevelt and Churchill towards the end of the war: were they too not convinced, in their own way, that Stalin was ‘capitulating’ to the world bourgeoisie and ready, if thrown a sop, to confine himself to ‘socialism in a single country'? It seems to me to provide one of the keys to an understanding of axial problems of the ‘emerging nations’. It seems to me to help rid socialist thought of the incubus of the nationalisation-dogma, the view that the mere statification of property, even if accompanied by a tyranny over the people, makes a regime working-class or socialist. It seems to me of some aid in reducing the proportions of the absurdities of the ‘socialist revolution’ carried out against the working class, or without its support and or even without its existence, as let us say in China or Cuba, or in Egypt or Ghana or Zanzibar.
Yet Deutscher treats the entire question of the basic and fatal flaw in Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism only in a few passing words, briefly, incidentally, almost like a bagatelle. This is less puzzling than it may seem.
Deutscher creates the impression that the events in Russia and elsewhere are not so much a case of Trotsky having misjudged the nature of Stalinism as it is of the Stalinists having misjudged, you might say, the nature of Trotskyism. It is not that Deutscher is a Stalinist. He is too ‘civilised’, too much the gentleman-socialist, for that. He knows the iniquities and monstrosities of Stalinism as well as the next man, or better. But facts are facts and it is better to be objective than not. And the fact, the big historical and decisive fact is that although Stalin denounced Trotsky as a counter-revolutionist and a Fascist agent, it was after all Trotsky’s programme he carried out, at home and abroad. Indeed, ‘Stalin acted as the unwitting agent of permanent revolution within the Soviet Union’ (Deutscher dixit – p 111); and outside of it as well. The agent was bureaucratic, despotic, Asiatic, bloodthirsty, but he was the agent. And come to think of it, was the despotism all bad? Stalin, we now know, murdered more Communists than were killed by the bourgeois reaction in all of Europe, Hitler included, between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second. Among other things this is what his purges meant literally: and Deutscher is appalled by their horror. Yet – facts are still facts – ‘It was one of the effects of the purges that they prevented the managerial groups from consolidating as a social stratum.’ (p 306) So, during the universalised massacre in Russia, Stalin saved it from... capitalism! Deutscher must have an irrepressible strain of cheerfulness in him. Some people find a silver lining in every cloud. Deutscher can find one even in the hecatombs of Stalin.
He suffers, and in a highly aggravated and perverted form, from the effects of the same dogma, a quarter century later, that Trotsky was on the verge of reconsidering a year before his death. In the 1920s Trotsky saw the bureaucracy moving away from the socialist direction; therefore it was moving towards capitalism. As the Latin scholars say: Tertium non datur. [2] In his own time, Deutscher saw the bureaucracy moving away from the capitalist direction; therefore it was moving towards socialism. Tertium non datur. Therefore Stalin was ‘the unwilling agent’ of Trotsky’s permanent revolution. Therefore Deutscher has been proclaiming ‘Trotsky’s victory in defeat’, because Stalin’s successors have to and will liquidate the evil of Stalin’s heritage and restore the spirit of democracy and internationalism incarnate in Trotsky. This assurance may be taken seriously in Washington or London. After ten years of these assurances by Deutscher, the bureaucracy has indeed made great strides towards democratism: Molotov and friends have not been shot, but only expelled from the party without anyone hearing their side or knowing where they stand; a prominent poet has been criticised but not shot, even though he attacked anti-Semitism in Russia; [3] Khrushchev has not been shot, even though he openly attacks Mao.
Deutscher is no Stalinist. Indeed, he proclaims himself to be a Marxist on every possible occasion, so that none is left for him to explain what that means to him. The idea that socialism is and can only be the product of the political activity of a self-controlled and democratically-organised working class is, it would seem, the heart and soul of Marxism. It may be true, it may be false, it may be valid or obsolete. But without it Marxism is literally meaningless. It is this idea that Deutscher seems to have in mind when he refers, somewhat airily, to ‘Classical Marxism’. But Deutscher knows from experience and study that the idea is unrealistic and unrealisable. In its place he has put forth his own law that applies to all revolutions: the enthusiastic mass is led into a revolution but the subsequent hardships bring a loss of faith; the idealistic but naïve-utopian prophets of the revolution cannot sustain the faith by persuasion; so the revolutionary despot replaces them and makes the mass have faith against its silly will; thus the revolution is saved by the despots, without the erratic mass and against it. Trotsky (the ‘Classical Marxist’) was the utopian. The Marxism of Stalin, despotic saviour of the revolution, was not so classical. Neither is Deutscher’s. His modest fame as an apologist of Stalinism is well deserved. It vitiates his judgement of Trotsky. If the errors in Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism were twice as grave as they now seem to me, it nevertheless remained a brave, unflagging fight against an infamy that disgraced the name of socialism, a fight that was at all times infused with the spirit of solidarity with the oppressed against the oppressor, that looked for an end of the tyranny not from the tyrant but from the conscious action of his victims. In his biographer you do not feel that spirit or see that fight.
1. Which makes some of his errors in fact all the more surprising: the Sobelovicius-Soblen brothers ('Roman Wall’ and ‘A Senine’) who abandoned Trotskyism to become GPU agents were not Latvians but Lithuanians, as the family name indicates.
‘Mill’, the first secretary of the International Left Opposition, who also was or became a GPU agent, was not an American, but a Frenchman of Russo-Jewish origin.
Andres Nin was not ‘the founder’ of the Spanish Communist Party.
The leader of the Norwegian Labour Party and, earlier, of the Communist Party, who befriended Trotsky in Norwegian exile was not ‘Schöffle’ but Olav Scheflo.
Writers of the Jewish-American press ‘who had hitherto described themselves’ as Trotsky’s admirers did not turn upon him during the Moscow Trials, as Deutscher suggests. BZ Goldberg to whom alone he refers was the notorious exception. All the Yiddish press here condemned the trials, with the exception of course of the Stalinist daily.
It is not quite correct that Walter Krivitsky, who broke with the GPU, ‘sought contact’ with Trotsky. I tried for hours to urge Krivitsky during a secret visit to my rooms to see Trotsky in Mexico. Despondent, demoralised, almost suicidal, Krivitsky refused. ‘I know what will happen. The Old Man will seek to convince me... I am too old to start a second political life.’
And so on. But these are little things. Not so little, however, is Deutscher’s account of the split in the Trotskyist movement upon the outbreak of the war. Like other references of the same type, it is invention, not discovery. Deutscher should stick to history, at which he is talented; and eschew fiction, at which he is trivial.
2. Tertium non datur – no third is given; that is, that an assertion is either true or false, with no third option being allowed – MIA.
3. A reference to Yevgeny Yevtushenko – MIA.