Trotsky has always intrigued me. He was an intellectual, a superb writer, but also a brutal proponent of terror, an ideologue and propagandist. Robert Service has written a trilogy of biographies of the major figures of the Russian revolution, of which this is the final part. His biographies of Lenin and Stalin were good and included a wealth of new information from the now opened Soviet archives.
Robert Service
Macmillan 2009, Hardcover, 624 pages, £25.00
Trotsky’s reputation in the West relies in large part on his own highly partial accounts of the revolution and his colleagues and antagonists. Various lefties have kept his flame if not burning, then at least smouldering these last 60 years or so, but no Troskyist government has ever attained power. This distortion in our understanding of such a key figure needed correction, so Service’s book is very welcome indeed.
It’s well known that Trotsky was expelled from the USSR as an enemy of the people and eventually murdered on Stalin’s orders, and this famous death has clouded his biography in a haze of pro- and anti-Stalin internecine strife.
Service shows how Trotsky constantly amended his own legend to suit the political situation. Prior to the October revolution, Trotsky had been in almost complete disagreement with Lenin on several occasions and for at least some of the time between 1905 and 1917 considered himself closer to the Mensheviks than the Bolsheviks. This would, under Stalin, become a death sentence.
Trotsky was a man unto himself even after decisively joining the Bolsheviks and taking his place in Sovnarkom (i.e. a senior member of the Soviet government). His most famous role was as head of the Red Army during the Civil War that immediately followed Russia’s separate peace with the Central Powers. The brutality of the Civil War is notorious, but Trotsky seems to have won the respect of his troops. One oddity is that Service almost completely omits discussion of the famine that swept the USSR during and after the Civil War.
After Lenin’s illness and death, Trotsky was repeatedly outmanoeuvred by his rivals, now unleashed from their personal loyalty to Lenin. Service speculates that the core reason for Trotsky’s defeat was that he did not ultimately want the supreme leadership badly enough, and was not prepared to make the compromises – both physical and political – that an effective campaign would have required.
He belabours the point that Trotsky underestimated Stalin, who he thought of as an intellectual nullity. Stalin was many things, but he was not stupid, and was a far more effective politician than Trotsky. It’s a myth that Stalin was immediately vindictive towards his enemies; in fact it took almost ten years from Lenin’s death before the terror started, by which time Trotsky had been exiled for several years. Before his power was cemented, Stalin was constantly compromising and playing adversaries off against each other; playing politics, in other words.
Service finds a memorable phrase to sum up Trotsky’s inability to compromise or use the language that would have made his line more palatable to his colleagues: “He lacked the talent to manage his talent”, which could easily stand as his epitaph.
Somewhat against my expectations, the story becomes less interesting once it turns to Trotsky’s exile. His support in the Soviet Union was gradually snuffed out by a combination of executions and politicking, and his influence became almost non existent. Indeed he became the original un-person. Having lived for a time in Turkey, he passed through France and ended up, famously, in Mexico.
Here there’s a more exciting tale to tell – an affair with Frieda Kahlo, assassination attempts, and so forth – but by this time Trotsky’s involvement with the Russian revolution had completely ceased and not even his acolytes believed in some kind of glorious comeback.
It’s difficult to see an alternative history of the Soviet Union under Trotsky’s leadership, but especially to see how it would not have been brutal. Of course it’s unlikely that its brutality would have matched the almost unbelievable proportions of the Stalinist terror, but Trotsky was, above all else, utterly ruthless, and was in full agreement with Lenin’s ideas on the use of state terror. But what use are speculations on alternative histories?
This is a decent biography of a fascinating subject, but it never quite fires into life. Service’s prose is solid if uninspired, and this is constantly brought to the reader’s attention when the author praises Trotsky’s own exuberant prose style. Service’s writing is plagued with tics, which become wearing very quickly. One of these is to refer to Trotsky’s opponents following Lenin’s death as the ‘ascendant party leadership’, which is a technical term used by historians in this field, but it quickly becomes annoying as it is repeated time after time.
Nevertheless, this is an important addition to the literature on the endlessly fascinating subject of the Russian revolution, and one of its most important proponents.
