Trotsky (29 page)

Lunacharsky based this judgment on Trotsky’s career since 1902, after his first escape from Siberia and arrival in London. It was Lenin who arranged for him to be brought to western Europe and who introduced him into the émigré circle of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In March 1903, at Lenin’s suggestion, Trotsky was co-opted onto the editorial board of the party’s organ and power center,
Iskra.
Lenin sized up the twenty-three-year-old Trotsky as “a man of exceptional abilities, staunch, energetic, who will go further.”

The honeymoon ended abruptly four months later, at the second congress of the Russian Social Democrats. The delegates assembled in Brussels, but then transferred to London to escape the attentions of the Russian secret police. The congress was attended by forty-three delegates representing twenty-six Marxist organizations. Trotsky held the mandate of the Siberian social democrats. Several issues divided the delegates, most importantly the definition of party membership. Lenin advocated a strictly centralized party, with all members participating in revolutionary activity—participating, as opposed to merely cooperating, which was the less restrictive formula proposed by Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod, close colleagues of Lenin who now closed ranks against him.

This fundamental disagreement was compounded by others. When Lenin proposed to reduce the
Iskra
editorial board from six members to three, the move was seen by his opponents as a further attempt to consolidate his control over the party. After a vote taken toward the end of the conference was won by Lenin’s supporters, they became known as
Bolsheviki,
Russian for Majoritarians, while Martov, Axelrod, and the others were labeled
Mensheviki,
the Minoritarians. On the crucial votes, Trotsky was with the Mensheviks.

Trotsky’s reaction to the split was self-contradictory. He declared himself in favor of party unity yet launched extremely bitter polemical
strikes at Lenin, whom he accused of behaving imperiously and of advocating a dangerous centralism. The most violent of these attacks took the form of a lengthy pamphlet called
Our Political Tasks,
published in Geneva in 1904. Here Trotsky called Lenin “malicious,” “hideous,” “dissolute,” “demagogical,” and “morally repulsive,” among other epithets. He compared Lenin to Robespierre and, more trenchantly, a “slovenly lawyer.”

A strong proponent of social democracy as a mass movement, Trotsky was genuinely repulsed by Lenin’s centralism, which placed professional revolutionaries in the vanguard and seemed to assume that workers were a hindrance to the revolution. Trotsky was thus a proponent of Menshevism against Bolshevism, yet in September 1904 he announced his break with the Mensheviks. The Russian Revolution of 1905, which catapulted him to fame as a leader of the short-lived St. Petersburg Soviet, validated his status as a revolutionary free agent.

As Czar Nicholas II called in the army and the police to crush the revolution, Trotsky was arrested, tried, and sentenced to a second term of exile in Siberia, from which he again escaped, landing in Vienna in 1907. There, for the next seven years, he made his living from journalism, much of it devoted to bringing about a reconciliation of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, who remained factions of the same party. His ineptitude as a conciliator served to isolate him further. Although he had closer personal ties to the Mensheviks, he managed to alienate them, even as he continued to earn the animosity of the Bolsheviks. After Lenin consummated the schism in 1912 by declaring the Bolsheviks to be a separate party, Trotsky bitterly denounced him: “The entire structure of Leninism is at present based on lies and falsification, and carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own destruction.”

Then came the world war and a string of catastrophic defeats for the Russian army led by Czar Nicholas, resulting in the collapse of the Russian autocracy in the February Revolution of 1917. Trotsky arrived in Petrograd in May, not long after Lenin. At first Trotsky turned down Lenin’s offer to join the Bolsheviks, but changed his mind in July, a few weeks before he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. It was
Trotsky’s idea to cloak the Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government in democratic legitimacy by timing it to coincide with the opening of a national Congress of Soviets about to gather in Petrograd. On the night of October 25, the congress was informed about the seizure by the Red Guards of the Winter Palace. Some delegates walked out of the hall. The Mensheviks accused the Bolsheviks of carrying out a putsch, and protested that some kind of political compromise ought to be agreed.

Trotsky showed no sympathy for his vanquished former comrades, only mockery and disdain. Taking the platform, he delivered History’s cruel verdict. The Bolshevik triumph, he declared, was a mass insurrection, not a conspiracy. “Our rising has been victorious. Now they tell us: Renounce your victory, yield, make a compromise. No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: You are bankrupt. You have played out your role. Go where you belong from now on: into the dustbin of history!”

From that moment on, Trotsky held tightly to the myth of Red October as a workers’ revolution. Try as he might, however, he could not obscure his long history of anti-Bolshevism, which his enemies in the Party preferred to characterize as his “Menshevism.” This goes a long way toward explaining Trotsky’s passivity in the struggle to succeed Lenin: as an outsider, he made a fetish of Bolshevik unity. He was, in any case, poorly equipped to lead a Party faction. He could not overcome his isolation. He had never acquired the habits necessary for working within a political organization, let alone for maneuvering in the corridors of power.

Max Eastman, who was electrified by the description of Trotsky in John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World
and who then had the opportunity to watch Trotsky in action as head of the Left Opposition in Moscow, sized him up much the way Lunacharsky had done back in 1919. “In the time of revolutionary storm, he was the very concept of a hero,” Eastman observed. “But in calmer times he could not bring two strong men to his side as friends and hold them there.” In Eastman’s view, this more than anything else explained Trotsky’s loss to Stalin in the factional fight, and then the hopelessness of his efforts to organize
an international opposition to Stalinism. “He could no more build a party than a hen could build a house.”

Cast out of the Communist Party and then the Soviet Union, Trotsky saw no irony in the fact that he ended up “sharing the bitter fate he had meted out to the Martovs and the Axelrods,” as one historian has put it. On the contrary, Trotsky’s account of the October events in
The History of the Russian Revolution
dramatized his banishment of the Mensheviks as a moment of triumph, showing no trace of remorse.

Eastman carried with him the section of Trotsky’s
History
that contained this passage—in the form of the publisher’s proofs of his English translation—when he and his wife visited Prinkipo in the summer of 1932. The Eastmans were paying a social call, but the visit would also give Trotsky an opportunity to verify the accuracy of Eastman’s version of the book. At forty-nine years of age, Eastman was strikingly handsome: tall, trim, and tan, with a shock of white hair and dark, pensive eyes. He had not seen Trotsky for several years, and once again he remarked on the pale blue color of his eyes, which a long line of journalists mysteriously kept insisting were black. On the second day of Eastman’s visit, they were incandescent with anger.

Trotsky had been disturbed by Eastman’s unorthodox views of Marxist theory, notably his debunking of the concept of dialectical materialism. Eastman’s visit to Prinkipo was an opportunity for Trotsky to set the amateur philosopher straight. When Eastman stood his ground, their argument threatened to spiral out of control, as neither man allowed the other to finish a sentence. “Trotsky’s throat was throbbing and his face was red; he was in a rage,” Eastman wrote in his diary. Natalia became worried as the altercation spilled over from the tea table into the study: “she came in after us and stood there above and beside me like a statue, silent and austere. I understood what she meant and said, after a long, hot speech from him: ‘Well, let’s lay aside this subject and go to work on the book.’ ‘As much as you like!’ he jerked out, and snapped up the manuscript.”

Eastman was a contrarian by nature. Born in upstate New York to two unconventional, liberal-minded Congregationalist ministers, he was educated at Williams College, and then studied philosophy at Columbia University under John Dewey, completing the requirements for a doctorate. He chose not to accept the degree, evidently because doing so might compromise his self-image as a revolutionary poet. He settled in Greenwich Village and became an influential figure in American radical politics and culture. In 1913 he published
Enjoyment of Poetry
and became an editor of
The Masses,
the pioneering magazine of socialist politics, art, and literature.

In 1917
The Masses
was forced to close as a result of the tightening wartime censorship, and the following year Eastman and his fellow editors were twice tried and twice acquitted for violation of the Sedition Act, in connection with the magazine’s outspoken opposition to U.S. participation in the world war. He and his sister and fellow suffragist, Crystal, then founded a successor,
The Liberator,
which published John Reed’s initial reports from Petrograd on the Bolshevik Revolution. The first of these conveyed an invitation from Lenin and Trotsky: “Comrades! Greetings from the first proletariat republic of the world. We call you to arms for the international Socialist revolution.”

In 1922 Eastman went to Soviet Russia to see the experiment for himself. There he met the leading Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, who agreed to help Eastman write his biography. In 1924, Trotsky and the Oppositionists provided Eastman with the text of Lenin’s still-secret political testament, which Eastman then published in the West, creating a sensation. In the aftermath, Trotsky felt compelled to disavow Eastman in order to placate Stalin, but thereafter the two men were closely identified in the West, even before Eastman became his translator.

That explains why Trotsky was so disturbed by Eastman’s public repudiation of the dialectic, a principle of change conceived by Hegel in the early nineteenth century. Hegel believed that history unfolds in a logical process of inner conflict, in which change occurs because antagonistic forces collide and their antagonism is resolved in new, higher forms. Marx applied Hegel’s concept to human society, where this inner conflict takes the form of class struggle.

In Marx’s theory, the material base determines the relations of pro-
duction—technology, inventions, systems of property—and these in turn determine the philosophies, governments, laws, cultural tastes, and moral values that dominate a society. As material conditions evolve, tensions build up until a point is reached where quantitative changes have qualitative consequences. That, said Marx, was how society advances. The great breakthroughs took the form of revolutions, which he called “history’s locomotives.” Marx labeled his philosophy “historical materialism” the term “dialectical materialism” was introduced after Marx’s death by Engels to denote an extension of dialectics beyond society to the world of nature.

Even before he went to Soviet Russia, Eastman was puzzled by the connection between Marx’s social theory of class struggle and the concept of the dialectic, which Marx claimed made his philosophy scientific and proved the inevitability of socialism. If that were the case, Eastman thought, then all one had to do was sit back and wait for socialism to arrive. Yet Eastman knew that Marxism was about changing the world, not just understanding it. Otherwise, why did Marx and Engels, in the
Communist Manifesto
of 1848, call upon the workers of the world to unite and throw off their chains? And why did Lenin, in the seminal pamphlet
What Is to Be Done?
published in 1902, call for a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries? Surely Lenin did not believe in socialism’s inevitability?

In Moscow, Eastman sat down in the library of the Marx-Engels Institute and applied his as yet rudimentary Russian to a study of the influence of the Hegelian dialectic on Marxism and on Bolshevism. To his dismay, he discovered that the Bolshevik leaders, Lenin included, were indeed true believers in the “science” of dialectical materialism as a universal law of motion, despite the fact that it was based on no empirical observation and, as Eastman saw it, belonged to the realm of metaphysics or religion rather than science.

Leaving the Soviet Union for the West, Eastman became obsessed with the idea of exposing Hegelian dialectics as a pseudo-scientific fraud. He made his case in a 1927 book called
Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution,
a work that predictably came under attack from the left. Eastman’s most formidable and relentless critic was Sidney Hook, a protégé of John Dewey, ally of the Communist Party, and Marxist pro
fessor of philosophy at New York University. Hook and Eastman were Dewey’s “bright boys” and two tenacious combatants, and their dispute over Marxist theory continued for several years.

Trotsky monitored the Eastman-Hook debate from Turkey. As he saw it, both men were afflicted with that peculiarly American disease, a pragmatist conception of empirical science. It was no mere coincidence, he thought, that both men were students of Dewey, one of pragmatism’s founding philosophers. In Trotsky’s eyes, Hook’s attempt to reduce Marxism from a science to a social philosophy was bad enough. Much worse, though, was Eastman’s outright dismissal of Hegel’s dialectic as an example of pre-Darwinian speculation and wishful thinking.

This is what provoked Trotsky’s fury when Eastman visited Prinkipo. As Eastman describes the action, “he became almost hysterical when I parried with ease the crude clichés he employed to defend the notion of dialectic evolution. The idea of meeting my mind, of ‘talking it over’ as with an equal, could not occur to him. He was lost.” For Trotsky there could be no meeting of the minds about Marxism. Those who sought to revise Marxist theory, he said, wished “to trim Marx’s beard.” Eastman was trying to decapitate him.