Books

Imposing his order

Christopher Booker

The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky Baruch Knel-Paz (Clarendon press £15.00)

The Life and Death of Trotsky Robert l'ayne (W. H. Allen E8.95) In recent years, we in the West have smiled fairly indulgently on poor Trotsky —cut short so treacherously by Ramon Mercader's iceaxe. Because he became the sworn enemy of the monster Stalin, and because he was a brilliant Jewish intellectual, fond of French novels, there is a widespread view that Trotsky was the most sympathetic of all the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost 4 libertarian who, if things had fallen out differently, might have guided Russia after the inevitable turmoils of revolution into the Peaceful ways of a social democracy. Trotsky has been played by Richard Burton in a Hollywood film, and made the sUbject of an adulatory picture book by one °I our leading colour supplement journalists. His declared followers in this couerrY have included well-known actors and actresses, and the just-retired Political Correspondent of the New Statesman. And there Is even a fat, 600-page book, published by our leading university press and written by a lecturer in social sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, respectfully discussing Trotsky's contribution to 'social and Political thought' ('the most far-reaching and original of all theoretical attempts to deal with the relationship between Marxism and Social Democracy on the one hand, and b. aekwardness and the problems of preIndustrial or underdeveloped society on the °thee). On all sides, in short, we see Trotsky flae mythic hero, Trotsky the philosopher, even Trotsky the man of practical com

Passion, concerned with 'the problems of the

underdeveloped society'. In 1920, when the subject of all this 4.dulation was still wandering through Rus 4,ta in his legendary armoured train, he took tune off to proclaim in Terrorism and Corn41unism his vision of how industry should be ?r, ganised in the Communist State of the 'inure. The way to ensure maximum production, he thought, was to station behind !very worker a soldier with a gun. 4ortly afterwards, Trotsky was called back t° Petrograd to deal with the demand by the s, oldiers and sailors of Kronstadt (whom he n,ad often described as 'the finest flower of tile Revolution') for free elections and free

Speech. His answer was to order a massacre

S o bloody that the Finnish Government had t,2 implore the Soviet regime to clear. the `nousands of bodies from the Baltic ice, lest ‘vben the thaw came they should be washed UP on the coast of Finland.

One of the most alarming things about one of those great social upheavals we call a revolution is that it enables certain men, who might otherwise live out comparatively harmless, if mentally unbalanced lives, to flower into complete psychotics — giving them the power, at worst, to sacrifice millions of their fellow human beings to their raging psychosis. Almost more alarming still (from the days of Hazlitt's adulation of Napoleon on) is the way in which other weak, potentially unbalanced people can then happily continue to glamorise and to justify these psychopaths, taking them as serious thinkers, as fighters for 'liberty' and the 'overthrow of tyranny' — drifting as they do so ever further into that same schizophrenia which enabled 'Field Marshal Trotsky' himself, less than two weeks after the Kronstadt massacres, to make a speech savagely denouncing Thiers for the slaughter of the Paris Commune rebels in 1871.

It is typical of the 'dissociation' so characteristic of our culture that, of these two books, it is Dr Baruch Knei-Paz's solemn, 'scholarly' discussion of the various crazed rationalisations thrown out by Trotsky's fevered brain, which has so far been glowingly received by American reviewers — while the other, a 'life' turned out by the same efficient popular biographical mill that gave us The Life and Death o fLenin and The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, has been academically scorned. For my money, it is Mr Payne's highly readable 'flesh and blood' portrait which at least keeps us vaguely in touch with the real world, and gives us the chance to form a threedimensional conception of one of the most sinister figures of our century.

From early in his life, as the son of a philistine, rich South Ukrainian farmer, whose sole ambition was to get even richer, Lev Davidovich Bronstein's personality was marked above all by two things. He was vainly obsessed with neatness, with order — and he detested the order imposed by others; in other words, any kind of authority. As the most brilliant pupil in his Odessa high school, he was always showing off, `cheeking' and bullying the teachers. He wanted 'order' all right — on his own terms.

Perhaps the most interesting single thing about young Bronstein was the extent to which, by his psychological make-up he seemed eager to take on the fashionable revolutionary colouring of his times (a la Verkovensky or Stavrogin), long before he had the slightest conception of the cause or ideology in whose name the revolution should be made. To the first actual Marxist he met, a dogmatic girl who later became his first wife, he scornfully exclaimed on a famous occasion 'a curse upon all Marxists, and upon those who want to bring dryness and hardness into all the relations of life'. Shortly afterwards, playing at coups d'etat, he and his friends 'took over' the local library association, for the sheer hell of it, just because it had raised the annual subscription from five to six roubles a year. Some time later, he and a middle-class friend decided that it was time they met a 'worker' — his friend, who thought he had once known a nightwatchman, went off to find one. Eventually they set up the grandiosely titled 'South Russian Workers Association', a device to enable them to play revolutionaries in even deadlier fashion. Typically, Bronstein loved the machinery of it all — the secret organising, the passwords, the illicit duplicating. The medium was strictly the message. But this playacting was still enough to get Bronstein arrested. The chief gaoler in Odessa, a weighty figure who looked grimly down on his charges from the centre of his cruciform gaol, was called Trotsky. There might have been various reasons why, on his escape from Siberia a few years later, Bronstein should have chosen this nom de guerre (in German trotz means 'defiance, insolence'). But he could scarcely have forgotten the most impressive holder of the name he had ever met— and it is revealing that, asa man who wished to impose order on the world on his terms, he should have taken the name of a prison-keeper.

This was the remarkable young man who, having met Lenin in London on his escape from Siberia in 1902, was three years later to play such a conspicious part, as speechmaker and organiser, in the events in St Petersburg which followed the January massacre (by the end of the year, aged twenty-six, he was chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet); and who, twelve years after that, was to play arguably an even more crucial role than Lenin in the Bolsheviks' final seizure of power (it was Trotsky who gave the key orders for the takeover of Petrograd on 6 November 1917, and who then, by his brilliant generalship over the next two years, secured the final Bolshevik triumph in the Civil War).

His fire, his will were astonishing—always dedicated to the sole end of imposing his version of order on a chaotic world (he even dreamed at one point of a Red Army conquest of India). When Lenin asked him what had most pleased him about the Russia he had seen in the course of his 150,000 mile journeying in the armoured train, he replied 'the neat fences'. But with the end of fighting, the tension snapped. Trotsky spent three years restlessly compiling a series of vapid fantasies about what the new Russia would be like. He was worried by the continued hold of religion over the people, and thought that 'the cinema' would replace Christianity. In Literature and Revolution (a book which has even Dr Knei-Paz sucking embarrassedly at his pipe), he opined that, under Communism, 'man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler . . . the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx'. If his writing had lost its fire, it was because there was no longer in Trotsky's imagination an authority-figure, a real enemy to hit at. Who? Whom? had become 'Us, They'. But of course there was still an enemy. And the last sixteen years of Trotsky's life, movingly described by Payne, are like the closing scenes of a great tragedy as, inexorably, the shadow of the despised, non-intellectual Stalin slowly darkens the whole of Trotsky's sky. Exiled first to Alma-Ata, then to an island off Constantinople, to France, Norway and finally Mexico, Trotsky wanders the face of the earth as the ultimate pariah — hated, feared and distrusted by the regime he had created, by the White Russian emigres, by every government, and above all by the man who, borrowing from a technique of Ivan the Terrible, was determined to spin out his victim's death agonies to the last. Trotsky had to see his daughter commit suicide, one son disappear into a slave camp, the other assassinated; his old revolutionary colleagues, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, all chopped down, one by one, after the great show trials in which they were arraigned as `Trotskyites'. He had become the Goldstein of Orwell's 1984, the hated 'shadow' which every totalitarian regime psychologically

needs to bolster up its own one-sided identity. But Trotsky too had learned nothing, no love, no truth had entered his soul. He continued to dream dreams of another revolution, in Russia, in America, to the very day when the ice-pick entered his brain.

If there is one thing which the twentieth century finds it hard to accept it is that the Russian Revolution could never have been anything other than an unparallelled human catastrophe; that its 'betrayal' was not just the fault of Stalin, but was written in the very nature of revolution, and of those who made this one, right back from the first revolutionary stirrings in the nineteenth century. The foolish minds of men continue to be haunted by the eternal dream that another revolution, another explosion of chaos and blood, might end differently. So, incomprehensibly except in terms of the iron laws of the human unconscious, the massmurderer Trotsky has been elevated into a darkly shining symbol. All over the world, men continue to fill their hearts with hatred, inspired by Trotsky with the thought that if only they can impose their order on their fellow men, it will be an order somehow just and humane, and bringing liberation to the oppressed. Poor Footy. Poor BaaderMeinhof. Poor humanity.