The Impermanent Revolution (Page 2)

To read Deutscher's trilogy today is to undertake one of those several-month journeys that we begin with pleasure, and then continue joyfully and even obsessively until we reach its gripping end. Its protagonist, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was born in southern Ukraine in 1879 to an illiterate but enterprising Jewish farmer and his more cultured and religious wife. Raised in a world of hard work and upward striving, the boy was sent to a cosmopolitan school in Odessa, where he lived with literary-minded cousins who belonged to that city's small and timid liberal intelligentsia. Eagerly absorbing their culture, the country cousin excelled in school, displaying the competitiveness and sense of superiority that would mark the man.

Sent in 1896 to Nikolayev to complete his secondary schooling and study mathematics at the university, Bronstein first encountered socialist ideas and soon became enamored of the fading Narodnik socialism that romanticized the peasantry and endorsed acts of terrorism by intellectuals. Joining old and young radicals in a discussion group meeting at an orchard near town, he met his first serious intellectual interlocutor and future wife, a young Marxist named Alexandra Sokolovskaya. Within a year, Russian students and workers were in rebellion and the 18-year-old had converted to Marxism, confidently assuming the leadership of the Southern Russian Workers' Union. The group of old Narodniks, Marxists, students and workers grew to more than 200 members and feverishly engaged in agitation in the port city until the czarist police crushed them. Imprisoned for the next two and a half years, Bronstein was then carted off to Siberia along with his bride.

The precocious revolutionary had also discovered the power of the written word. Prison and exile now became his university, and he began to shape himself into one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century--reading the Bible and religious tracts, studying Marx and Lenin, and writing self-assured essays on Nietzsche, Zola, Ibsen, Ruskin and Gorky. Like Deutscher, Bronstein believed that "revolutionary socialism was the consummation, not the repudiation, of great cultural traditions" in which he made himself at home. Leaving his wife and two daughters behind in Siberia and traveling under the name of a jailer, "Trotsky" found his way to the exile colonies of London. There he joined Lenin, his wife, Krupskaya, and Martov in the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. Addressing audiences of fellow exiles, he discovered a new gift, as a master of the spoken word. Deutscher writes:

He appeared, as it were, with the drama in himself, with the sense of entering a conflict in which the forces and actors engaged were more than life-size, the battles Homeric, and the climaxes worthy of demi-gods. Elevated above the crowd and feeling a multitude of eyes centered on him, himself storming a multitude of hearts and minds below--he was in his element.

In unabashedly grand prose Deutscher captures the people, movements and events that resulted in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. At their center was the Russian working class, "one of history's wonders":

Small in numbers, young, inexperienced, uneducated, it was rich in political passion, generosity, idealism, and rare heroic qualities. It had the gift of dreaming great dreams about the future and for dying a stoic death in battle. With its semi-illiterate thoughts it embraced the idea of the republic of the philosophers, not its Platonic version in which an oligarchy of pundits rules the herd, but the idea of a republic wealthy and wise enough to make of every citizen a philosopher and a worker. From the depth of its misery, the Russian working class set out to build that republic.

Twelve years after the rehearsal of 1905, in which Trotsky chaired the St. Petersburg Soviet, czarism collapsed. After a spring and summer of upheaval the workers and Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, were ready to seize power in what soon became known as the October Revolution. Trotsky served as the revolutionary government's first foreign minister and then, as the civil war began, he created and led the Red Army. After four years of battle the Bolsheviks vanquished their White Russian enemies, but the country lay in ruins, and, as Deutscher notes, another side of the working class had begun to assert itself, "side by side with the dreamer and the hero...the lazy, cursing, squalid slave, bearing the stigmata of his past." Mired in backwardness, the revolution's ostensible constituency sank into the passivity that made it possible, by Lenin's death in 1924, for the "batlike" Stalin, the Communist Party secretary, to slowly gain control. Despite Lenin's warnings to remove him, it was already too late by Lenin's death: The great revolutionaries of the Politburo--Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin--ultimately supported the unassuming Stalin over the brilliant and voluble Trotsky. (Remarkably enough, during the crucial months of struggle with Stalin, he drafted one of the major works of Marxist literary criticism, Literature and Revolution.) Although sidelined by Stalin, he continued to publish essays on every conceivable topic, from culture to science to Soviet development to foreign affairs. In 1928, however, the great revolutionary hero was sent into internal exile. A year later he was expelled from Russia and forced to wander the world.

In exile, Trotsky struggled to organize a Communist opposition to Stalin, to comment on world events such as the rise of fascism, to defend himself against Stalin's ever more bizarre accusations and to explain developments in the Soviet Union. As his name and stature grew in defeat he became a magnet for radicals, some serious, others dilettantes, notably Max Eastman, the editors of Partisan Review, Victor Serge, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (with whom he famously had an affair). And Trotsky continued to write, under near impossible conditions, producing the memoir My Life, the great History of the Russian Revolution, prescient essays on the rise of fascism and the classic indictment of Stalin, The Revolution Betrayed. As ever, these writings displayed an immense range, self-confident sweep, appreciation of detail, descriptive flair and interpretive power; in the most pathetic and humiliating circumstances Trotsky continued to think and act as if he was shaping history. He reached deeply into himself again and again for the courage to lead, write and analyze, although he was constantly preoccupied with finding a place to live and protecting his family, which was not spared Stalin's wrath. Harassed and hunted down, his children were murdered by Soviet agents or died prematurely, while his daughters' spouses ended up in concentration camps and their children vanished.

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