BEHIND THE MYTH
Trotsky: A Biography
By Robert Service (Macmillan 624pp £25)
Trotsky has always been something of an icon for the intelligentsia, and it is not hard to see why. He fitted the perception that dissenting intellectuals like to have of themselves. Highly cultured, locked in struggle with a repressive establishment, a gifted writer who was also a man of action, he seemed to embody the ideal of truth speaking to power. The manner of his death solidified this perception, which has shaped accounts of his life ever since.
Trotsky was a charismatic leader whose appeal extended across the political spectrum. When Trotsky was on the run from Stalin, H L Mencken offered to give him his own library (Trotsky refused because he did not want to be indebted to a reactionary).
The Bishop of Birmingham signed a petition on Trotsky's behalf, and he was invited to become rector of Edinburgh University. Maynard Keynes tried to secure asylum for him in England, a campaign supported even by the power-worshipping Stalin-lover Beatrice Webb. Literary notables like Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy joined the chorus of adulation. A hero-martyr in the cause of humanity, Trotsky deserved the support of every right-thinking person.
This has never been a terribly plausible view of the man who welcomed the ruthless crushing of the Kronstadt workers and sailors when they demanded a more pluralist system of government in 1921, and who defended the systematic use of terror against opponents of the Soviet state until his dying day. Introducing a system of hostage-taking in the Civil War and consistently supporting the trial and execution of dissidents (Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, liberal Kadets, nationalists and others), Trotsky never hesitated to endorse repression against those who stood in the way of communist power. This much has long been clear, but the full extent of Trotsky's role in building Soviet totalitarianism has not been detailed - until now.
Rigorously researched, covering Trotsky's education and upbringing, his life as an émigré before the revolution, his time as a military leader, his losing battle with Stalin, his women, his life as an exile and his assassination, Robert Service's new biography discloses a man very different from the one celebrated by bien pensants.
The author of distinguished biographies of Lenin and Stalin, Service is eminently qualified to set Trotsky in his historical context. Here Service surpasses himself, and produces a life that is genuinely revelatory. Trotsky's lifelong effort to distance himself from his Jewish background - 'The workers are dearer to me than all the Jews,' Service reports him saying - is carefully and sensitively examined. There is an interesting discussion of Trotsky's attempt to fashion a distinctive philosophical position for himself (despite having a commendably unorthodox interest in Freud, he was no more successful than Lenin in this regard). The book is rich in telling detail. The young Trotsky liked to dominate the independent-minded women revolutionaries in his circle, and to this end studied carefully Schopenhauer's The Art of Controversy, a guide to debating tricks. Trotsky was 'an intellectual bully', Service writes, who 'relished wounding his opponents'. None of this is flattering to Trotsky, but Service is always scrupulously balanced. The result is a powerfully demystifying biography of one of the most heavily mythologised figures of twentieth-century history.
Western historians have largely accepted Trotsky's self-serving account of his opposition to Stalin's policies and methods, but the differences between the two leaders were more limited than has been commonly believed. Trotsky favoured moving quickly to central planning and collective farming, and shared Stalin's view of the need to isolate the kulaks (richer peasants). Far from being more liberal than Stalin, during the New Economic Policy (NEP) he blamed Stalin for sheltering Menshevik economists. It was Trotsky who pushed ahead with the 'militarisation of labour', which imposed army-style discipline and punishment on Soviet workers. Hailed as an apostle of cultural freedom because of his interest in the arts, Trotsky believed as much as Stalin did that culture must be assessed (and policed) in terms of its political correctness. Trotsky's influential essay Literature and Revolution, Service writes, 'was essentially a work of political reductionism. When all is said and done, it was Trotsky who laid down the philosophical foundations for cultural Stalinism.'
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