Trotsky
Downfall of a Revolutionary
by Bertrand M. Patenaude
HarperCollins, 384 pp., $27.99
In 1939, while Stalin and Hitler were allied against the democratic West, the predecessor of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and its chairman, Texas Democratic congressman Martin Dies, sought testimony from one of the world's leading authorities on Soviet Communism. But the witness was living outside the United States, and a visa to cross the border and appear before the committee was denied him. Less than a year later, the prospective witness had been murdered in a brutal, flamboyant manner.
The man who desperately wished to "name names" to the House committee was Leon Trotsky, exiled in Mexico. Although his death had been ordered by Stalin since the mid-1930s, the invitation to appear before the committee--where Trotsky intended to disclose the full extent of Soviet financing and control of Communists in America and around the world--must have made his killing even more urgent to the Russian dictator. Certainly, had the exile been allowed to answer the committee's invitation, today's common wisdom about communism in America, about the House Committee on Un-American Activities, about testifying before it, and even about Leon Trotsky himself, might be very different.
Or perhaps not. The continued--or better, revived--discussion of Trotsky is mysterious. The Bolshevik political doctrine he adopted only months before the Leninist revolution of 1917 has been thoroughly discredited. In today's Russia his name is barely known, particularly among the young. His books are unread, out of print, or issued here and there, in various
languages, by obscure political sects. And yet his name remains vivid in modern history. At one end of an equally low spectrum of memory, he is recalled as the victim of an attack by a Soviet agent wielding, it is said, an ice-pick. (In reality, the fatal weapon was a mountaineer's climbing axe.) At the other end, he is viewed as an inspiration for neoconservatism--an equally garbled association.
Bertrand Patenaude's new book is not a biography, although it comes with a blurb from Misha Glenny claiming that it "gets closer to Trotsky's essential character than any of the vast tomes devoted to him in the past." What vast tomes are those? The only full-length biography, admittedly vast in its extent, is Isaac Deutscher's trilogy--The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast--still in print after more than 50 years. Although Deutscher's Trotsky has its failings, they are mainly ideological. The onetime Trotskyist Deutscher had made his peace with Stalin in the decades after Trotsky's death, and, following this course, he paralleled the action of most of Trotsky's surviving loyalists. The Trotskyist movement today consists mainly of uncritical enthusiasts for Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and, until his death, Slobodan Milo evic.
But the faults in Deutscher are perceptible only to a handful of initiates: One hesitates to use the term specialists, since after Deutscher little original in English on the subject has been written on the basis of primary sources. Patenaude himself is a researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and has availed himself of resources held there. Trotsky papers are also kept at Harvard, which Patenaude visited, and at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which he did not. (Russian archives, which must be extensive and definitive, have not been opened to scholars.) Patenaude's work so closely echoes Deutscher's, except for trivial details, that a reader is entitled to ask whether there is much that is really new to say about Trotsky. Far from being a biography of the man, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary is a kind of adventure-cum-mystery story, focusing on Trotsky's Mexican exile and assassination.
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