Paying the bill
Alan Brien
Trotsky Joel Carmichael (Hodder and Stoughton £5,95) When I first began studying the history of Communism, nobody had a good word to say for Trotsky. Churchill called him "the Ogre of Europe" — a term which his children, according to Joel Carmichael's new biography, Trotsky, used for their father as an affectionate nickname — and few commentators then seemed inclined to quarrel with the description.
Times have changed. None of us are Stalinists nowadays. Even the heirs of Stalin in the Kremlin, when they carry on his policies, do it in the name of de-Stalinisation. Even Leninists are being forced to fall back from their hero under pressure from writers like Solzhenitsyn who finger him as the originator of the secret police, the concentration camps, the censorship, the monolithic party dictatorship, even in the first heady, innocent, pragmatic first days of the Revolution. Only the Trotskyites are left with a claim to have been right from the beginning, or is it to have been right to be Left from the beginning?
The main sources for our post-Stalin knowledge of Trotsky, aided by the Soviet archives briefly opened and quickly closed again in the Krushchev era, are Trotsky's autobiography, My Life, and Isaac Deutscher's three volome biography, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. Trotsky' was probably the most gifted writer ever to have been a man of action, one of history's rarest combinations like an amalgam of Suetonius and Caesar, or Cromwell and Milton, so that is almost impossible when reading his version to doubt the truth and accuracy of an account which is so vivid, witty and precise. And Deutscher might also be Trotsky's alter ego, a critical but optimistic Marxist to the end, a scholar and historian of unimpeachable academic credentials, who gives the impression of breathing down his subject's neck throughout all the events he describes and analyses. It is difficult not to feel anxious on behalf of Joel Carmichael for having chosen to follow in such deep and ineradicable footsteps. '
But let me return for a moment to the name, "Trotsky." I knew that it Was a. nom de guerre and that he was born Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, a kind of Jewish cowboy brought up on the wheat plains above Odessa. But I also• assumed that it was a Jewish name, immediately recognisable as such to Russian. speakers as, say, Cohen would be to the British. And not surprisingly so. Were not the three great engineers of ideas in our last hundred years, who lifted up all the impacted assumptions of our society with their minds and turned them over, showing us an underside we had never suspected to exist — Freud, Einstein and Marx — also Jews?
Mr Carmichael, himself a Jew, is perhaps more sensitive to this aspect of Trotsky than most commentators. He quotes Trotsky, approached for help during the Civil War by the Moscow Chief Rabbi as saying: "I am a revolutionist and Bolshevik, and I am not a Jew." But he also adds that this produced the Chief Rabbi's epigram — "The Trotskys make the revolutions, the Bronsteins pay the bills." "Trotsky," Carmichael points out, was simply the name that Bronstein had on his forged passport when he escaped from Tsarist Russia. According to his account in My Life, it was chosen at random, but there seems to be some evidence that it was borrowed from a warder at his Odessa prison. Whether this was true or not, Carmichael is certainly correct in believing it served to "soft-pedal his Jewish origins . . . by selecting a neutral family name."
And his Trotsky makes the point I had not seen stressed before that Bolshevism cannot be, as it was at the time and in some quarters still is, "blamed on the Jews." A few untypical, "emancipated" individuals stand out — Trotsky himself, his brother-in-law Kamenev (a halfJew) and his partner Zinoviev (temporarily part of the triumvirate who ruled Russia with Stalin after Lenin's death) and Sverdlov, (Stalin's predecessor as General Secretary). But the Bolshevik seizure of the state apparatus, he demonstrates, "ruined the Jewish community."
Not very much of Joel Carmichael's Trotsky is new to anyone who has read the five volumes of Trotsky and Deutscher. On many occasions, his account is very near a paraphrase of Deutscher. In the opening chapter, out of twenty-eight source notes all but three refer to My Life, and the others have already been used by Deutscher. Nor is Mr Carmichael's style in the same league as either of theirs — three exclamation marks to a page are not unknown.
The rewards then are intermittent, delights for the traveller retracing his steps rather than for the tourist on his first visit. One example I have cited is his comment on Jews and the Revolution. This leads on to what the author and his publishers regard as the book's major revelation which Mr Carmichael sums up thus:
It is also, no doubt, a crowning irony that the Jews, often held 'responsible' for the Bolshevik putsch by people outside Russia, were destroyed by it, while, German General Staff and Foreign Office, which had played a vital role in supporting the Bolsheviks, both before and after the putsch, never admitted this. Ludendorff himself, a prime mover in this partnership was later to become a follower of Hitler's..
The claim that the Bolsheviks and the German Government were silent partners, "each one gambling on the destruction of the other," is not new. But Mr Carmichael believes the subsidy was on a massive scale amounting to what he estimates as £135 million in modern money — a sum I would have thought impossible to lose without trace. And he provides scarcely more than a trace, padding out his case with many a "might-have" and "must-have" to establish the links. He points out that when Eduard Bernstein, a renegade Marxist in the Weimar Finance Ministry, first published the story in 1921, he was called a liar by the German Communist party but they failed to take up his challenge to prove his accusation before any court they chose. He goes on to admit that Bernstein then abandoned his expose, adding that "no doubt" this was at the urging of the German Social Democratic Government to "avoid damaging relations with the Soviet Union." •
If indeed such a deal was made at such vast expense, it would hardly damage the reputations of a Lenin or a Trotsky. Their enemies regard them as criminals who stole a country, no embezzlement however huge can blacken 'those portraits. Their admirers accept that revolutionaries eat with long spoons, and Lenin often said he would accept help from the Devil if it suited his aims. All the world knows that the Germans allowed Lenin passage to the • Finland Station in a sealed train (like a poisonous bacillus, said Churchill). But, if any deep complicity is to be proved between Lenin and Ludendorff, Mr Carmichael might have mentioned, as Deutscher does, that this was not a unique transaction. About five hundred Russian emigres travelled the same route from Switzerland, and of these four hundred were anti-Bolsheviks and supporters of the Russian patriotic war. And nothing remains to suggest that Trotsky, then not even accepted by Lenin as a genuine Bolshevik, played a role in this supposed relationship which was, in Mr Carmichael's oddly inflated word, "primordial."
Alan Brien writes regularly for The Sunday Times
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