Who follows in his train?
Anne Applebaum
TROTSKY: THE ETERNAL REVOLUTIONARY by Dimitri Volkogonov HarperCollins, f25.00, pp. 254 It was not the brilliance of his argu- ments, nor even his famed rhetorical gifts which ultimately brought Leon Trotsky near to the pinnacle of the Bolshevik hier- archy in revolutionary Russia; it was his train. Writes Dmitri Volkogonov of this nearly mythical contraption,
Red Army men came to expect that it would bring them long-awaited reinforcements, artillery and ammunition . . . Commanders and commissars, on the other hand, awaited Trotsky's peremptory orders with trepida- tion. Everyone, however, believed that Trot- sky's arrival meant that 'things would get going'.
This, of course, was the military train from which Trotsky, the People's Commis- sar for War, led the Red Army to victory against the remnants of the old regime during three years of civil war. In Trotsky's own words a 'flying apparatus of adminis- tration,' the armour-plated train began with twelve carriages and 250 people. By the end of the three-year long civil war, the train had become two trains, complete with cooks, secretaries, political agitators, guards in leather uniforms, machine-gun crews, a printing press, an aviation unit of two aeroplanes, several cars and a band.
Along with the transformation of the train came a change in Trotsky's status. The train travelled from front to front, and at every station local dignitaries were expected to greet Trotsky with due hon- ours. Instructions were issued by the train's chief conductor: 'When People's War Commissar Trotsky leaves his carriage, he should not be accompanied by an indis- criminate heap of comrades who just hap- pen to turn up, but by people appointed for this purpose.' Although this was a time of terrible famine in Russia, special foods were ordered for train passengers; Trotsky personally wrote a letter to obtain a warm coat for a member of his staff.
In time, the train became the emblem of Trotksy's genius: with no military experi- ence, Trotksy — son of a Jewish farmer, educated in Marxist philosophy and little else — managed to rise to the very top of the Bolshevik hierarchy, and to conquer a great power. But Trotsky's train, with its `special privileges' and elaborate rules, also came to stand for everything that was wrong with his philosophy, and everything that was wrong with his revolution. 'Trot- sky's train', writes Volkogonov, 'acquired the attributes that would become charac- teristic of one-man rule.'
The descriptions of Trotsky's train are also among the best passages in the new biography, and characteristic of Volko- gonov's historical method. As the author of two previous biographies of Lenin and Stalin, and as a former Red Army general himself, he is (or was: he died recently) a practised debunker of myths. In writing all three books, he also had unprecedented access to Soviet military and secret police archives, documents which in some cases no one else has yet been able to use. In this, his final book, he makes use of these sources not be provide any spectacular new I find pulling my wooden duck into the office sets me up for the day.' revelations, but to add telling details to the well-known outlines — revolutionary youth, exile, triumphant return, and exile again — of Trotksy's life.
Over and over again, Volkgonov returns to the myth that Trotksy was 'different' from other Bolsheviks. He points out many times, for example, that Trotsky approved of his own fledgling personality cult (indeed encouraged it, as on his train). He notes that the Stalinist methods which Trotksy is sometimes mistakenly thought to have condemned were often those he him- self had advocated: Trotksy's murderer, the ice-pick-wielding Stalinist agent Ramon Mercador, defended himself by announcing that 'terrorism is necessary in the struggle for Communism', a virtual quotation from Trotsky's own book, Terrorism and Com- munism. Trotksy approved the use and manufacture of poison gas; he planned the murder of Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian Anarchist leader, even while Makhno was technically an ally. For all his rhetorical brilliance, he was never able to inspire or to organise a powerful anti-Stalinist oppo- sition: certainly he was no advocate of free- dom or 'bourgeois' democracy of the Western kind.
Volkogonov does not spend much time analysing the philosophy of Trotksyism as such, but he clearly does not feel that he needs to: by the end of this book, it is hard to see how the three greatest Bolsheviks really differed, philosophically, at all. Despite the fame he obtained in exile, and despite the vilification which Stalin heaped upon him, and despite the once powerful cult of Trotksy as a 'legitimate' communist alternative to Stalinism, Trotksy's eco- nomics are primitive, his concept of 'per- manent revolution' vague, his belief in the `world revolution' utopian to the point of stupidity. Like Lenin, Trotksy firmly believed in the dictatorship of one party, and its monopoly on ideas. Like Stalin, he argued in favour of forced industrialisation and the liquidation of the kulaks, the wealthy peasants (his own parents among them). In fact, Trotksy's agitation may have spurred Stalin on to carry out this pro- gramme:
While responsibility for the tremendous suf- ferings imposed on the Soviet people belongs squarely with the Communist Party under Stalin and his circle, the ideological origins of the policy of coercion and the forcing of social change should be laid at the door of Trotksy's Left opposition.
What Volkogonov does not explain, perhaps cannot explain, are Trotksy's psy- chological motivations. For the sake of the revolution, Trotksy left what might have been a brilliant academic career; went hap- pily to Siberia; abandoned his first wife; neglected his children; suffered exile not once but twice; wrote hundreds of books, letters and speeches; endured constant ill- ness and, finally, constant persecution from Stalin's secret police. Yet until the very end he refused to understand the nature of the revolution he had helped launch. He con- tinued to believe that History would justify all sacrifices, and that if only he had been in charge of the Soviet Union and not Stal- in, everything would have been different. Why? There is no answer in his uninterest- ing but not unhappy childhood, in his volu- minous writings, in his powerful speeches, in the recollections of those who knew him, at least those who are still alive: near- ly all were murdered.
Perhaps Trotsky was, in the end, simply a fanatic, perhaps a more profound analysiis possible. 'We, Comrades, love the sun which illuminates us,' he once told a cheering audience in Kazan: tut if the rich and the oppressors wanted to monopolise the sun, we would say, let the sun go out and let darkness reign, eternal gloom!'
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