TROTSKY 100 TROTS NATALIA SEDOVA, Trotsky's widow, has left us with an extremely powerful and evocative description of one aspect of Trotsky which is not so well known. It continues to haunt one for it sums up the agony of isolation which the old revolutionary underwent, especially in his last exile in Mexico.
Natalia describes how Trotsky used to pace up and down in his study and talk to himself. On occasion he would have imaginary conversations with Zinoviev and COLCI old would go over struggles in the Soviet Union:
It is an image which both haunts and moves. It is far too easy to ignore the enormous personal sacrifice made by Trotsky — the emotional and mental upheavals on hearing of the suicide of his daughter, the assassination of his sons, the trials and executions of his old comrades, the torture of his supporters in the concentration camps of Stalin. And yet he did not falter.
It is hardly surprising that he felt politically isolated. He was the sole survivor of the classical Marxist tradition, but his ideas were kept from the masses by the most powerful slander machine in historv. What were the options tor this man?
He could have retired to the watch-tower and confined himself simply to writing books and articles, maintaining limited friendly intellectuals. But Trotsky rejected that choice: questions a st His mistakes on (his early organisational concepts) had aided his defeat at the hands of Stalin. His Socialist Challenge 8 November 1979 Page 8 Bolsheviks. He once again the old debates and the rightness victories...
contacts consciously 'organisational hostility close friend and fellow-revolutionary Adolph Joffe had committed suicide in 1927. Ill-health and political despair had exacted its price. But Joffe had left a last letter addressed to Trotsky. In it he wrote:
•..But I have always believed that you lacked Lenin's unbending will, his unwillingness •yield, his readiness even to remain alone on the path he thought right in the anticipation of a future majority, of a future recognition by every one of the rightness of his path.
'Politically you were always right, beginning with 1905, and I told you repeatedly that with my own ears I heard Lenin admit that even in 1905, you, and not he, were right. before his death, and now I repeat this to you... But you have often abandoned your rightness for sake of overvalued compromise.
"This is a mistake. I repeat: politically you have always been right, and now more right than ever. Some day the party will realise it, history will not fail to accord recognition... are right, but the guarantee of the victory of your lies in nothing but unwillingness to yield, forwardness, the absolute compromise in thislav the verv secret of lenin's Trotsky took these words to heart. From 1927 onwards he become a total Leninist in the real sense of the word. His remaining years were . spent 1n analysine politics, revolutionary organisations, and some of his most important works: History of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed, My Life, etc.
Abramovich more than justified:
Equality as historical materialism, One does not lie Trotsky's of a twentieth agreement, of internationalist and You A model the •extreme the strictest straightof all Germany were a building producing into MASK But his most powerful writings indictment of the Comintern and the German Communist Party in the years preceding Hitler's rise to power. Trotsky was the only strategist who offered a way to defeat Hitler. Perry Anderson's tribute in Considerations on Western Marxism is 'Isolated on a Turkish island, he wrote from a distance a sequence of texts on Germany, whose concrete studies • conjuncture is unmatched in the records 'In this field, Lenin himself never produced any work of comparable depth and complexity.
writings on German constitute, in fact, the first real Marxist analysis century capitalist state -the Nazi dictatorship. of his intervention, designed to arm the German working class against the mortal danger threatening maintained throughout the rest of his life.' One only need add that. the writings on model • of •Marxist analysis precisely because they sought to apply Marxism to alife and death struggle. They symbolised the unity of theory and a correct political practice.
The traditions of classical Marxism were upheld by Trotsky and his followers at a time when Europe was submerged in the 'hell-black night' of fascism in Germany and Stalinism in Russia. All Trotky's errors of perspective fade insignificance when realises magnitude of the tasks that faced him. After the Stalin, For counter-revolutionary witch-hunts and reminiscent of medieval barbarism. In the confessions of those exorcised were his her back with one's fists.
Torture and death political of kept alive the tascist and Fascism in Moscow itself. the The it, was possible alternative blood. But put an ice-pick in his skull.
And yet Trotsky lives on.
hard to build the OF THE fifteen members of the Politbureau during Lenin's lifetime, eight were executed by six died a natural death, disappeared. The majority of Lenin's Central the 'confessions' Middle Ages the stated: 'I am a satellite and disciple of Satan. For a long time I was a porter at the gate of hell, but Tukachevsky, a friend wrote and said that she revulsion? Yes. Even temporary weariness. All this is human, only too But I will not believe that you have succumbed to pessimism. This would be like and plaintively taking umbrage at history. How can one do that? History has to be taken as she is; and when she allows herself such extraordinary and filthy outrages, one must fight And the Trotskyists fought back. Despite the slanders heaped on them by Stalinism, despite the tortures and deaths suffered at the hands of the GPU and the Gestapo, thousands of militants Trotsky remained role oiay traditions the Marxist theoretician who could analyse both blannisi Will dispassionate lucidity. And his writings were read and studied In his monumental three-volume biography of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher writes that even in the Moscow of the Thirties senior party members could be heard whispering: What does the Old Man think?' Stalin's aim was to destroy every This rule. Trotskyism, Zinovievism and Bukharinism were drowned ir Trotsky was alive: His brain was functioning and his pen never ceased writing. In 1940 a Stalinist agent penetrated his study and Trotsky's ideas are even more powerful today than they were in his lifetime Dissidents in Prague and in Peking study his writings. The Soviet bureaucracy continues to produce dozens of books to denounce his ideas.
The Fourth International which he fought sc still confined to small organisations. It is not the mass International of which he dreamed. But such an International several yea I began to and As we wer wine and earth for th The In Mos were Satan. Lis defective I religious anti-Bolsh of demons arrived at fascism Trotskyisn
KY a a vital necessity. For Trotsky the very constructing a party only on •*iza scale was allen. a reflection neralisation which resulted from the Stalinist anation of the left wing of the workers The best way to study Trotsky is to read his I aritings. They have no equal in the Marxist Cement. The range of subjects discussed is, set. unique. But Trotsky, like Lenin and Marx, cold be studied critically.
Classical Marxism never presented itself as a agion, and those who view it as such are kely to go very far. Those who mummified enin and put his body on show in the Kremlin ad so to destroy the legacy of Lenin. Those who ock to do the same with Trotsky should know at he would have regarded idolatry evulsion.
Isaac Deutscher's concluding paragraphs in his biography of Trotsky remain as true today as when they were written, nearly two decades ago: Pilgrims Progress "Trotsky sometimes compared mankind's progress to the barefooted march of pilgrims who advance towards their shrine by moving only a few steps forward at a time, and then retreat or jump sideways in order to advance and deviate or retreat again; zigzagging thus all the time they approach laboriously their destination.
'He saw his role in prompting the "pilgrims" to advance. Mankind, however, when after some progress it succumbs to a stampede, allows those who urged it forward to be abused, vilified and trampled to death.
'Only when it has resumed the forward movement does it nav the victims, cherish their memory and piously collect their relics; then it is very grateful to them for every aros of biood inev gave — tor it knowsthat with their blood they nourished the seed of the Oppositionists in Moscow, 1927.- • bettom row, left to right, Istchenko, I. Smirnov, Trotsky, I. Smilga, Alsky. future.
1 of 1917
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