Checking In

 I've taken a long break from posting here, but wanted to just briefly check in.  I believe my break from this blog, and from my almost single-minded focus on Russian history and literature, was a result of COVID.  During the first year of the pandemic, I felt like I need a change and so dived into many non-Russian literary rabbit holes. At first, I just read all of George Eliot novels, which certainly took a long while, but then I read all sorts of things, including Greek and Roman history, non-Russian classic novels, etc.  

But this week I will teach a topic course in the Russian Revolution and I've decided to finally tackle Trotsky's classic book(s), The Russian Revolution.  So far, so good!  I loved Trotsky autobiography, and even tried to visit his home in exile when I visited Turkey a couple of years ago, although I don't think I actually found his home even though I was wondering around the right island.  

Of course, I never veer too far away from Russia.  I recently read Creating Anna Karenina:  Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine, for instance, a wonderful biography and piece of literary criticism about Tolstoy's life at the time he was focused on Anna Karenina.   I've posted about this book, and some other works related to Russia, on Goodreads, but I hope to get back to posting here more regularly too.

Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky

 I have a shelf of Leon Trotsky biographies so I was not in a hurry to read Irving Howe's small, yellowing, and seemingly dated biography.  However, Howe's book is a brilliant overview of Trotsky's life and theoretical contributions to Bolshevism and Marxist theory and practice.  In fact, this short book goes a long way toward explaining many of the fundamental mistakes of the Soviet experiment.  Perhaps Howe's greatest strength as an historian of the Soviet Union is his balanced approach to his subject matter.  He is deeply sympathetic to socialist project, and yet willing to critique almost every mistake Trotsky and other Bolshevik (and Menshevik) leader made.  

According to Howe, Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution was a genuinely important contribution to socialist thinking.  It essentially predicated the course of events in post-revolutionary Russia by pointing out that a fragile working class would necessarily depend on ongoing, global revolution to avoid counterrevolution or degeneration.  On the other hand, Trotsky flipped sides on this question after the February Revolution, arguing that the Bolsheviks had every reason to overthrow the Provisional Government and even socialist democracy in the service of the working class.  Thus, Trotsky (who was of course not alone in this) ironically came to be responsible for working against the very theory he had once proposed, and would propose again once he had left power.  

Howe's Trotsky was a deeply ambivalent figure.   He was in a sense a deeply divided thinker.  On the one hand, he produced relatively sensitive works that advocated for some level of social  and intellectual plurality.  Literature and Revolution is a case in point.  Trotsky admitted here that Proletarian culture was not yet rich enough to afford Russia or the world with a rich literary culture. In fact, Trotsky believed that the Russian Revolution would eventually mean that the Proletariat, qua class, should wither away.  When workers created enough wealth, they would have ample opportunity to stop behaving as workers.  They would have enough leisure time to produce worthy literary and artistic creations.  Until then, Russian workers should appreciate the great bourgeois works of the  previous century.   On the other hand, Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism celebrates authoritarianism, and defends the Bolshevik's rather outrageous claim that the Party could fully represent Russia's workers.  

In the end, Howe agrees with the Menshevik position that Russia was not yet ready for a socialist revolution.  Like the Mensheviks who seemingly abandoned the field of combat, Howe thinks Stalinism was the almost inevitable result of the Bolsheviks' decision to prematurely eliminate both the bourgeois parties and competing socialist parties from political life.  Indeed, Howe believes that once Lenin and Trotsky convinced their reluctant comrades to take power, the Party was doomed to rely on ever increasing levels of compulsion and terror to maintain their fragile grip on power.  

 

Robespierre

In a recent post, I mentioned above six or seven books that delve into the nature of terror and its relationship to revolution.  I maintained that terror and revolution couldn't be separated, and indeed that terror and modern Russian history couldn't be disentangled.  I would be remiss if I didn't say something about Maximilien Robespierre in this context.  Robespierre, of course, was the both the chief architect and loudest champion of revolutionary violence.  His influence on generations of revolutionaries and would-be revolutionaries is impossible to overestimate.  You can hear shades of Robespierre in Marx, but more especially in Lenin and Trotsky and Mao.  Slavoj Zizek's book on the subject, a collection of Robespierre's most representative speeches, is an excellent introduction to Robespierre.  Virtue and Terror gives Robespierre a chance to speak for himself, without the rancor and condemnation modern historians so often attach to his name.  The unmediated Robespierre is shockingly prescient about the nature of power.  Like Machiavelli, Robespierre seems to have an excellent grasp on politics:  he knows how and why the Committee of Public Safety's Reign of Terror is functioning, and he seems to know also how vulnerable that power is to both internal and external enemies.  One appreciates Robespierre's articulateness.  In the midst of chaos, Robespierre the Incorruptible is able to translate Enlightenment philosophy into a clear governmental program.  One also appreciates Robespierre's boldness:  here is a man who seems to have honestly assessed the costs of revolution.  If one wants to overthrow centuries of despotism, one should be prepared to overthrow God, king, aristocracy, and even peace.  Trotsky, in his 1920 defense of revolutionary violence, Terrorism and Communism, echoes Robespierre's brave logic.  Revolutionary terror is, ironically, the shortest way to peace.  Irresolution in the midst of civil war means a longer civil war, not a shorter one.  Of course, the consequences of Robespierre's ethics have been influential, and their impact on subsequent revolutionary movements far-reaching.

Below are are a few quotations drawn from Robespierre, as presented by Slavoj Zizek.  In a subsequent post, Soviet Roulette will look at Leon Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism.  The similarities between Robespiere and Trotsky demonstrate a clear line of thinking between the two great revolutionaries.


"The theory of revolutionary government is as new as the revolution which brought it into being.  It should not be sought in the books of the political writers, who did not foresee that revolution, nor in the laws of tyrants who, satisfied with abusing their power, are not much concerned with its legitimacy.."

"The function of government is to direct the moral and physical forces of the nation towards the goal of its appointing."

"The goal of constitutional government is to preserve the Republic; that of revolutionary government is to found it."

"Revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies:  the constitution is the system of liberty victorious and at peace."

"Revolutionary government needs extraordinary activity, precisely because it is at war.  It is subject to less uniform and less rigorous rules, because the circumstances in which it exists are stormy and shifting, and above all because it is continual forced to deploy new resources rapidly, to confront new and pressing dangers."

"Revolutionary government owes good citizens full national protection; to enemies of the people it owes nothing but death."

"Temples to the gods are not meant to provide sanctuary for the sacrilegious who come to profane them;  not is the constitution supposed to protect the plots of tyrants who seek to destroy it."

"Above all we must be careful not to kill patriotism by trying to cure it.  Patriotism is ardent by its nature.  Who can love the homeland coldly?"

"The foundation of the French Republic is not a game for children."

"All the vices are fighting for them:  the Republic only has virtues on its side."

"And with what rapidity the seeds of division they throw among us could develop, if we do not hasten to stifle them!"

"And for some time, the foreign courts have been vomiting over France all the cunning scoundrels they have in their pay."

"Yesterday they were murdering the defenders of liberty;  today they are attending their funerals, and demanding divine honours for them..."

"So that France, once illustrious among enslaved countries, eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples that have existed, may become the model for all nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe;  and that in sealing our work with our blood, we may at least glimpse the shining dawn of universal felicity."

"In the French Revolution's system, that which is immoral is impolitic, that which is corrupting is counter-revolutionary."

"Perhaps the most dangerous reef we have to avoid is not the fervour of excessive zeal, but rather the lassitude of well-being".

Lion Feuchtwanger and the Festival of Revenge

"There can be no question that in the great majority of cases this exaggerated veneration is genuine. The people feel the need to express their gratitude, their infinite admiration. They do in truth believe that they owe to Stalin all they are and have, and however incongruous and at times distasteful this idolatry may seem to us of the West, no where have I found anything to indicate that is in the least artificial or ready-made."

"The future lies before them like a well-defined and carefully tended path through a beautiful landscape."

"They are unable to repress the happiness which fills them."

"[Moscow is a] city built from its foundations in accordance with the dictates of sound sense, and the first of its kind since man wrote history."

"Everything is from the first an essential part of an intelligently conceived plan."

"In itself there is nothing remarkable in the unanimous optimism of the Soviet people."

"Stalin laughed a little at those who demanded many written documents before they could bring themselves to believe in a conspiracy; practiced conspirators, he said, were not in the habit of leaving their documents lying around for all to see."

"Many of my friends, who are otherwise intelligent people, find these [the Show Trials], from beginning to end, in substance and in form, tragic-comical, barbaric, incredible, and appalling."

"But when I attended the second trial in Moscow, when I saw Pyatakov, Radek, and his friends, and heard what they said and how they said it, I was forced to accept the evidence of my own senses, and my doubts melted away."

"It at once becomes as clear as daylight that this modest, impersonal man cannot possibly have committed the colossal indiscretion of producing with the assistance of countless performers so coarse a comedy, merely for the purpose of holding a sort of festival of revenge with Bengal lights to celebrate the humiliation of his opponents."

"There is one eternally true legend," [Stalin] said, "that of Judas."

Lion Feuchtwanger, author of Moscow, 1937: My Visit Described for My Friends, was one of Stalin's chief international apologists. To apologize for the apologist, one should remember that the Jewish-German theater critic, novelist, and playwright was one of NAZI German's earliest and most vociferous enemies. With intimate knowledge of Hitler's monstrous villainy, Feuchtwanger is at pains to explain the Soviet Union's antidemocratic shortcomings as a natural outcome of its struggle against fascist Germany and Italy.

Feuchtwanger's description of his ten week visit to the "Union"--his pet name for the U.S.S.R.--is an aggressive, comprehensive defense of the world's first experiment in socialism. Feuchtwanger's apologia makes extensive use of economic and social statistics to tell the story of the revolutionary regime. Although the author admits that Russia suffers from a deplorable lack of adequate housing, he praises Russia for its alleged progress in public transportation, education, new housing construction, electrification, food production, water usage, good reserves, wage levels, and access to consumer goods.

Russia's superiority over its fascist and capitalist competitors is manifested in countless ways. Most importantly, Feuchtwanger believes that Soviet citizens appreciate their place in a fair, secure, rational, and planned society. While even wealthy Westerners suffer from the knowledge of their neighbors' poverty and joblessness, Soviet citizens understand that their modest prosperity is not purchased at the expense of the less fortunate. They know, or at least Feuchtwanger says they know, that they are organically connected to the whole of society, and that Party decisions are made on their behalf, and not on behalf of wealthy individuals. According to Feuchtwanger's vision, capitalist planning--if we overlook the oxymoron inherent in the term--is disorganized, unfair, irrational, and inefficient. But most importantly, capitalist planning is soulless and cruel.

For Feuchtwanger, the 1930s were an exciting time for Russians. Led by leaders of genius such as Stalin, Soviet citizens had just received one of the most progressive constitutions in the world in 1935. While the German writer admits that the 1935 Constitution is not yet fully implemented--a spectacular understatement to say the least--he admires the extent to which the Soviet legal framework asserts broad civil rights and demonstrates the way in which they will be guaranteed. If the Russian people had the right to freedom of expression, the Soviet government ensured that this right was tangible by maintaining public ownership over the press organs. It's a strange logic, but Feuchtwanger is generally content that the Soviet state is at least acting in the interest of its citizens.

Of course, the German playwright is impressed most of all by Stalin. Although claiming to be dissatisfied with crude Stalin-worship, Feuchtwanger argues that Soviet citizens merely seek to praise their country's accomplishments by heaping honor upon honor upon a concrete symbol of their good fortune. Stalin is allegedly a steady man and a builder, in touch with both the peasants and the proletarians. Feuchtwanger claims Stalin is Augustus to Lenin's Caesar, responsible for the defense of Tsaritsyn in the Civil War, and several brilliant socialist theories, such as Socialism in One Country, and the reconciliation of nationalism with socialist internationalism.

Most bizarrely, the author also credits Stalin with magnanimity. In the contest with Trotsky, Stalin claims that Stalin ordered that Trotsky be included in the official, Gorky-edited History of the Civil War, while pointing out that Trotsky spitefully uses all of his writings to defame the great Stalin. We know of course that Stalin erased Trotsky from the history books, and was ultimately responsible for Trotsky's death, as well as his children's deaths, but Feuchtwanger's test belies Stalin's pretensions to goodwill. In this same chapter on Stalin and Trotsky, Feuchtwanger allows that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rydek and others were executed. And yet, he's not ashamed to write: "[Stalin] is supposed to be ruthless, but for many years he has been striving to win over competent Trotskyists rather than destroy them, and it is in a way affecting to see how doggedly he is endeavoring to use them for his work."

Trotsky in Mexico

The case of Trotsky decline and fall has been told many times, and why not? The story is one of the most compelling ones of modern history. Leon Trotsky, one of the most gifted and talented men of the twentieth century, was one of the most influential men of both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions, to say nothing of the Russian Civil War, which he personally helped to bring to a close as Commissar of War and military chieftain of the Red Army. Although a Menshevik before the October Revolution, Trotsky quickly became the most visible Bolshevik leader during the 1917 insurrection, the principle lieutenant of Lenin.

Trotsky’s career as an agitator, revolutionary hero, and finally Politburo member has been well documented by Isaac Duetcher and others. It’s a tragic story insofar as Trotsky’s dynamism, personal courage, revolutionary fame, intellectual prowess, and oratorical gifts, were ultimately no match for Stalin’s political gifts and bloodthirsty tenacity. However, as Bertrand Patenaude, author of Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, makes clear: Trotsky never really had a chance. Notwithstanding his public grandeur and ability to perform heroic feats in a revolutionary context, Lenin’s right hand man had severe limitations when it came to factional struggle. He could be vain, haughty, inflexible, and unfriendly—utterly incapable of forming political groups or even maintaining many close friendships. His past as a European revolutionary won him few friends among the Party’s rank and file, most of whom—and especially those promoted by Stalin--had never left Russia. Neither Trotsky’s Jewish ethnicity nor his fetish for Party unity helped him either. Patenaude ascribes this fetish—which prevented him from trying to make any overt bids for personal power--to Trotsky’s attempt to overcome his well-known past as a Menshevik.

Trotsky’s defeat at the hands of Stalin may therefore have been foreordained. What’s perhaps more interesting is the way he operated in exile. Banished from Russia, Trotsky did some things extremely well, and failed at others. Until his death at the hands of Stalin’s assassin in 1940, Trotsky maintained an extraordinarily vigorous schedule as a professional revolutionary and intellectual. His historical and autobiographical writing were inspired. His political analysis was sometimes trenchant (he predicted that Nazi Germany and Communist Russia would become temporary allies), sometimes convoluted--twisted by the strange imperative of defending the Soviet Union as a proletarian state while attacking Stalinism, the historical manifestation of bureaucratic degeneration. His attempts to form a new political order—a Fourth International—hampered by his uneven interpersonal skills and limited organizational capacities as well as by his political isolation in exile.

Nothing about Trotsky’s years in exile are as interesting as his time in Mexico. In Mexico, Trotsky learned of the disappearance of a beloved son, held an affair with Frida Kahlo right under the nose of his benefactor, Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, and contested Stalin’s Show Trials by means of the Dewey Commission and a relentless series of articles, speeches, and press releases. His time in Mexico revealed all of the celebrity’s strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, Trotsky managed the affairs of the Fourth International ineptly, alienating many of his American followers by ideological blindness and interpersonal insensitivity. On the other hand, Trotsky continued to fight Stalinism and Nazism (but also liberal democracy of course) even as he was forced to live a highly regimented and restricted life due to the constant threat of political assassination at the hands of the GPU or even the Mexican Communist Party and its allies.

The threat to Trotsky’s personal safety, as well as that of his wife and grandson, was always very real, if not always believed by his myriad political traducers. Near the end of his life, Trotsky almost fell victim to a paramilitary assault led by the famous muralist Siquieros. In retrospect, it seems almost incredible that Trotsky’s fairly unprofessional security regime could have protected him for so long. One wonders why Stalin didn’t kill him earlier, although Patenaude seems at one point in the text to allow for the possibility that at some point Stalin may have tolerated a living Trotsky to act as scapegoat for everything that went wrong in Communist Russia or abroad.

In the end, Trotsky died courageously, true to his reputation as a man of courage and action. Struck in the head with an icepick by his alleged friend, Jacson, Trotsky cried out and did battle with his assailant. Sadly, the attacker outlived his time in a Mexican jail and eventually found his way to the Soviet Union, where he was rewarded in secrecy for his treachery. The talented Siquieros too outlived his act of cowardice, even today known to the world as a revolutionary artist of the highest order.

Of course, Trotsky is no innocent martyr. He took the sins of October to his grave. As Patenaude remarks, in his last days he protested against the American government for presuming to meddle in his personal affairs, appalled at the thought that a mighty state might take an intrusive interest in the personal affairs of a private individual. One of the leading architects of the Soviet police state saw no irony in his protest. Trotsky’s legacy was at least partially redeemed by his wife, who outlived him by twenty years. Over time, and despite Trotsky’s defense of the Soviet Union—even in its attack on Finland—Natalia, Trotsky’s great love, defected from Trotskyism, denouncing the Soviet Union and its many client states in Eastern Europe in the process.

What Would Trotsky Do?

There's a quaint little Canadian movie--and what Canadian movie, with its reverential references to Alice Munro or the Cowboy Junkies--isn't quaint--entitled, The Trotsky. It's a film that makes a playful attempt to reconcile the communist revolutionary tradition and contemporary, bourgeois Canadian society. The film is about a young man, 17 or 18, who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. What would a real revolutionary do when confronted with contemporary social conditions? Would comfortable, wealthy, quasi-socialist Canada warrant revolutionary activity? Leon Trotsky's young avatar never doubts his calling. Notwithstanding a comfortable upbringing, he sets out to organize the workers at his father's business and then eventually attempts to organize the students at his school. His indefatigble efforts to oppose authority in the service of justice bare fruit, reminding viewers that courage, conviction, and the ability to see injustice (whether it's there or not) can have profound effects, even today.

The film has a brilliant leading man, but doesn't quite work. Is the problem that communism isn't very funny? This explanation seems implausible, as a subsequent post on communist humor and the book, Hammer and Tickle, will make clear. But certainly it's difficult to calibrate mirth with a real social message, as this film tries, heroically sometimes, to do. On the one hand, the film's protagonist is a wonderful pastiche of the historical actor, whose encounters with ordinary Canadian high school students and authority figures are often awkward, unexpected, and exceedingly funny. On the other hand, the film is ultimately about how young people can or should organize for social justice in a world of post-modern malaise. (By the way, I didn't invent that term; rather, I was accused of "post-modern malaise" by a job interviewer who thought I was being to flippant about the rhetoric of education and empowerment.)

Using the Bolshevik example in this context can seem perverted against the historical background of communist brutality and democide. The incongruity is more or less disturbing at various points in the film. Take, for example, the scene in which Trotsky's father finally acknowledges his love for his wayward son by giving him a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. It's signed, "From your favorite fascist," or words to that effect. One wants to laugh, but Mao (to say nothing of Hitler) was responsible for so much twentieth century tragedy, one doesn't.

In fact, this film makes one doubt whether the radical revolutionary tradition has anything at all to recommend it. Certainly the Trotsky's successful kidnapping of the school principal doesn't dispel any doubts one might have about this style of school reform. Even so, the film deserves some credit for sketching out a portrait of a modern radical, as opposed to the modern reformer we all know so well. It's still useful to ask questions about the role of radical opposition even after such opposition has become so endangered by parliamentarianism, financial stability, and (Canadian) socialized medicine.