Trotskyism and Bolshevism
Bolshevism : Theory and Practice. By Waldemar Gurian. (Sheed and Ward. 10s. 6d.)
ir is perhaps a lucky stroke for posterity that the most versatile genius thrown up by the Russian revolution should have
been .removed, -before reaching his fiftieth year, from the arena of politics and left with no other occupation or means of subsistence than the writing of history. Trotsky is a born writer. But we cannot suppose that he would, of his own volition, have preferred authorship to politics nor -.could he have written with the unembarrassed frankness which gives his present work its unique value if discretion had been imposed on him by official position or party allegiance. We have to thank Stalin for making Trotsky an historian tnalgre lui The -voliime nonk before us begins with the revolution which overthrew the Tsar early in March, 1917 (the so-called "February revolution-" of the old calendar), and brings the story down to the point, when, in July of the same year, the Kerensky government decided to take its courage in both hinds and employ measures of coercion against the recal- citrant Bolsheviks. It ,covers the period during which a baffling system of dual control prevailed in Russia, the ostensible power resting with the Provisional Government and much of the real authority being exercised by the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. The hero of the book is the Russian proletariat. Trotsky insists throughout—and Proves his case' by copious quotations—that the revolution was not the work of a band of fanatics or agitators inciting the mob ; again and again it was the Masses who drove their hesitating and temporizing leaders further _ and further along the path of revolution. Even Lenin, when he left Switzerland in the famous sealed train, did not yet believe in the possibility of a social revolution in Russia. His greatness is not that he created the revolution ; it is that he, and he alone, recognized—and made himself the interpreter of—the revolutionary spirit of the war-weary masses.
In one respect Trotsky is,. in this volume, on ground singularly favourable for himself. The February revolution found the Bolshevik party in Russia disorganized and leaderless, its chiefs in exile and its rank-and-file dispersed and disarmed by war conditions. The first prominent members of the party to reach Petrograd after the revolution were Kamenev and Stalin ; and they, in their public utterances and in the party newspaper the Pravda, correctly interpreted the sentiments of their comrades when they saluted the triumph of the bourgeois revolution and 'advocated support of the Provisional Government. In the first days of April, Lenin reached the capital. He at once set to work, almost single-handed, to attack the whole conduct of the Provisional Government, to preach defeatism in the war, and to urge on the Bolsheviks a policy of splendid isolation not only from the Provisional Government but from the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries. Trotsky, detainedat Halifax,
N.S., by the British Navy, failed to reach Petrograd till May 5th. By this time Lenin, regarded at first by his com- rades as a madman, had gone far to show how aeourately he had gauged the temper of popular feeling. Trotsky allied himself unhesitatingly with Lenin and was afterwards able to boast, quite correctly, that he was the only prominent Bolshevik leader who had not, during these first weeks of the revolution, stood in declared opposition to Lenin. It is possible that, even had he been in Petrograd from the first, Trotsky would have shown greater perspicacity than Eminency or Zinoviev or Stalin. But we are more inclined to believe that it was the British Admiralty which, by delaying his arrival till the psychological moment, laid the foundation of his fortunes. -From that moment till Lenin's death, his • position as Lenin's principal lieutenant was unchallenged.
For the story of the Bolshevik revolution Trotsky's book is essential more especially as the only other important history of these events by an eye-witness, the memoirs of the 'Menshevik- Sukkanov, is not available in English. But it is necessarily partial. Trotsky writes as a doughty defender of the revohttion in its. extremest forms ; and the reader in search of a corrective may turn to Dr. Gurian's able but critical work on the theory and practice of Bolshevism, which, published in Germany last year, now appears in English translation. Dr. Gurian, whose book is commendably brief but very closely packed, traces the growth of the Bolshevik party and the steps by which it attained power, and describes its present organization and ideology. Ile finds the essential Haw of Bolshevism in its failure to set before its devotees any permanent, static ideal. It fosters a war psychology ; and the Utopia which it preaches as the ultimate goal of present strife and -self-sacrifice is vague and ill-defined. Dr. Gurian seems to stumble here, without mentioning it, on one of the fundamental issues which divided Stalin and Trotsky. The famous doctrine of "permanent revolution" which was associated with Trotsky's name was turned against him. He was accused of maintaining that the triumph of the revolu- tion in Russia could not be realized in advance of the world revolution, whereas Soviet official opinion was, by about 1927, settling down to the more comfortable doctrine that revolution, like charity, might well begin at home. It was all a little unfair on Trotsky, who was penalized, ostensibly at least, for preaching a doctrine which had for many years been that of Lenin and of the whole party ; and Stalin is now face to face with the problem, which Dr. Gurian thinks so baffling, of finding new ideals and new "slogans" to substitute for those of world revolution.
It should be added that both books are well translated, though the translation of Bolshevism : Theory and Practice should have been revised by someone possessing a knowledge of Russian. The translator apparently lacks this qualification, and his intermittent use of the German system of transliterat- ing Russian terms and proper names is irritating to the
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