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The life and death of Trotsky
Tariq Ali on Trotsky by Robert Service and Stalin's Nemesis by Bertrand M Patenaude
Tariq Ali
The Guardian, Saturday 31 October 2009
Trotsky with his wife Natalia Sedova in 1937 Photograph: Faber
Trotsky: A Biography
by Robert Service 600pp, Macmillan, £25
Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
by Bertrand M Patenaude 352pp, Faber, £20
For over half a century, Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of Trotsky, a literary-historical masterpiece in its own right, was regarded as the last word on the subject. Many who were deeply hostile to the Russian revolution and all its leading actors nonetheless acclaimed these books: in 1997, asked to nominate his favourite book for National Book Day, the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, nominated the trilogy. Twelve years later the culture in this country has become so overwhelmingly conformist that any alternative to capitalism is considered outlandish.
The Service industry has now produced a stodgy volume on Trotsky to add to a collection that includes Lenin and Stalin. Unlike Deutscher, as he tells us, Service is hostile to the revolution and its leaders, but he is irritated by the fact that Trotsky has had such a good press in the west (news to me). He was just the same as the others except that he wrote very well and this appealed to New York intellectuals. The Service view can be summarised in a sentence: Trotsky was a ruthless and cold-blooded murderer and deserves to be exposed as such.
This counter-factual approach is nothing new and was the stock-in-trade of most anti-communist and pro-Stalin ideologues for much of the last century. Service informs us that Winston Churchill backed Stalin against Trotsky during the show trials. The old warhorse certainly knew how to distinguish between conservatives and radicals. He had little time for Gramsci either, and almost drowned Mussolini in praise as a bulwark against the evil tide of Bolshevism.
Churchill's essay denouncing Trotsky as the "ogre of Europe" is written with a brio and passion that almost matches that of his target. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Service's plodding account in which some of the allegations are so trivial that they are best ignored. On most of the important issues – the danger of substituting the party for the state in Russia, the necessity of uniting with social-democrats and liberals to defeat Hitler, the futility of forcing the communists into an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek in China, the fate that awaited the Jews if Hitler came to power and constant warnings that the Nazis were preparing to invade the Soviet Union – he was proved right time and time again.
Unsurprisingly, the counter-factual school of historians rarely discusses what might have happened had Generals Kornilov, Denikin and Yudenich triumphed instead of Lenin and Trotsky. One thing is virtually certain: since the revolution was portrayed as the work of Jewish-Bolsheviks, a wave of pogroms would have decimated the Jews.
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