Trotsky: A Biography
By Robert Service
Harvard, 648 pages, $35

Leon Trotsky is the paradigmatic revolutionary. More than any other Bolshevik, it was Trotsky, the penseur with the pince-nez, who became the brand of the revolution, and not just the revolution in Russia—revolution everywhere. Charismatic, fiery, arrogant, convinced of the moral and intellectual superiority of his ideas, Trotsky embodied, and embodies, the conviction of the whole Marxist enterprise. He had read Capital, and he had an extensive knowledge of history, philosophy, political economy, and contemporary literature. A latter-day Danton, he was the obvious counterpoint to Josef Stalin, the Georgian peasant who was never a revolutionary so much as a totalitarian dictator. In the struggle for power, Stalin was unconquerable, and in retrospect Trotsky’s exile from the Soviet Union and his assassination, in Coyoacan, Mexico, in 1940, seem inevitable. But in the struggle that preceded the struggle, in the realm of revolution, of waging war against the ancien régime, it was Trotsky who defined the cause.

The subtext of this tired Trotskyist trope is that had the Old Man, as he took to calling himself, prevailed—had he beaten back not only the Romanovs but also the Stalinists—the Soviet Union would never have strayed from its first principles, and the world would have been an infinitely better place: Collectivization would have happened without famine; industrialization would not have led to massive want and dislocation; there would have been revolution in Western Europe, not politically expedient popular fronts; and there would not have been a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and, therefore, World War II. Instead of executing the poets, Trotsky would have celebrated them. (He was an admirer, for example, of the great symbolist Osip Mandelstam, whom Stalin sent to the Gulag.) And instead of creating a gargantuan, medusa-like bureaucracy meant to enforce the will of the Politburo, Trotsky would have backed democratic soviets, or councils, across the country that would have enforced the will of the dialectically anointed proletariat.

In Trotsky: A Biography, the third installment of Robert Service’s trilogy on the Soviet leadership, the Oxford historian lays bare both confusions at the heart of this mirage: the “first principles” behind the Soviet project, Service reminds us, were a hodgepodge of contradictions and obfuscations that had little to do with democracy or a more equitable distribution of the wealth; and even if that had not been the case, even if Sovietism had been born of a morally sound governing theory and a coherent economics, Trotsky’s interpretation of those principles was so dogmatic (his support for Lenin’s New Economic Plan notwithstanding) that it’s unclear that, as supreme leader, he would have been markedly better than his mass-murdering nemesis.

It’s not until chapter 49 of this 52-chapter tome, “Confronting the Philosophers,” that we learn just how rigid—and vapid—the chief articulator of Soviet mythology was. Trotsky was accustomed to outsmarting and outspeaking his fellow Communists in Moscow, but by the late 1930s, long after he’d been forced to flee Russia, younger leftists in the West, and especially the United States, were questioning the ontological basis of dialectical materialism. Sidney Hook, James Burnham, and Max Shachtman were among those who questioned the epistemological theory put forth by Marx and Engels and sought a more durable philosophical edifice to support their politics. Ironically and tellingly, it was this good-faith effort to strengthen the intellectual foundation of Trotskyism that prompted Trotsky, in 1938, to write his intellectually unsound booklet “In Defense of Marxism: Their Morality and Ours,” in which he dismissed the “fictions” of democracy and “transcendental morality” and declared that the “welfare of the revolution . . . is the supreme law!” This led Burnham to write, on February 1, 1940: “You are on treacherous ground, comrade Trotsky. The doctrine of ‘class truth’ is the road of Plato’s Philosopher Kings, of prophets and Popes and Stalins. . . . You issue many warnings to the young comrades of our movement. I add an ominous warning to the list: beware, beware, comrades, of anyone or any doctrine that tells you that any man, or group of men, holds a monopoly on truth, or on the ways of getting truth.”

None of this should come as a surprise. (That it did surprise Burnham et al. speaks volumes about their ideology and myopia, and more generally the failure of Marxists, Leninists, socialists, social democrats, and leftist thinkers everywhere to anticipate or make sense of the depths of the “Soviet tragedy,” to use historian Martin Malia’s term.) Trotsky, as Service makes clear, was yet another very smart, angry young man who was consumed by the revolutionary idea and never surrendered it. He was Turgenev’s Yevgeny Bazarov—quick-witted and highly articulate but, more than that, alienating, hurtful, and politically naive. Like other revolutionaries, Trotsky comes across here as strangely sapped of so many basic, human traits—empathy, sympathy, filial devotion, loyalty to one’s friends, loyalty to anything other than a theory that was never realized in his lifetime or anyone else’s. Service cites a conversation between the American writer Max Eastman, who visited the Soviet Union in the early 20s, and the French Communist Alfred Rosmer: “Eastman was to tell Alfred Rosmer in Paris that there was a basic lack of ‘a feeling for others as individuals’ [in Trotsky],’ ” Service writes. “Rosmer agreed: ‘That’s quite true. He has no humanity. It’s entirely absent from him.’ ”

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While Trotsky’s ideology is clearly demarcated in Trotsky, the basis for that ideology is foggy. This is the most serious criticism of the book: we never learn how it is that Lev Davidovich Trotsky, or Leiba Bronstein, as he was known until his early 20s, born into a prosperous Jewish farming family near Odessa, evolved into a real-life Bazarov. How is it that the fifth child of David and Aneta Bronstein, lavished with love and education and opportunity, morphed into the archetype revolutionary? The Bronsteins, of course, were hardly unique in their plight. The rise of the Jewish bourgeoisie over the past two centuries unfolds in perfect Hegelian fashion. It is the story of a great accumulation of wealth and power that spawned an arguably equal and opposite rejection of that wealth and power; it is the dialectical migration from David Bronstein, possessor of the means of production, to Lev Trotsky, reappropriator of the means of production. This is a tragic, violent, highly emotional story, and it requires at least some psychological analysis. It cannot be irrelevant that Trotsky, as Service points out, had a keen interest in Sigmund Freud.

Nowhere is this omission more deeply felt than in Service’s handling of Trotsky’s Jewish identity and his early interest in socialism. Service suggests in chapter 21, “Trotsky and the Jews,” that Judaism provided a ripe culture medium for future revolutionaries. “Young Jewish men and women, trained in the rigors of Torah, found a congenial secular orthodoxy in Marxist intricacies,” he argues. “Hair-splitting disputes were common to Marxism and Judaism (as they were to Protestantism). Secular rivalries were a feature of shtetl life. Faith in a perfect future, once exclusively a religious phenomenon, entered the radical socialist movement.” There may be a broader anthropological point here: scholarship and debate were very much part of Jewish life; it’s only natural that future Marxists, many of whom were Jewish, were analogously keen on scholarship and debate. But this doesn’t explain any causal relationship binding Jewish and Marxist consciousness. Nor does it explain how the same person could be drawn to Jewish and Marxist exegesis; it simply explains why so many Marxists thought the way they did. This is interesting, if not terribly insightful, but it doesn’t tell us why Leiba Bronstein, who was never religious and did not come from a religious family, became Lev Trotsky.

Trotsky is fascinating, detailed, highly intelligent, and meticulously researched but less satisfying than Service’s previous two biographies on the Soviet high command. (Lenin: A Biography was published in 2000; Stalin: A Biography, in 2004.) This is probably to be expected. Service is among the very best living historians of the Soviet Union and Russia, and he is supremely good at stitching together the broad outlines of complex lives and developments—his chapters usually run a compact 10 to 12 pages and have the feel of densely packed snapshots—but he is not an intellectual historian. His thinking and research are not geared toward interior spaces, meaning not only the psychological or spiritual but also the cultural-philosophical tissue that connects seemingly disparate peoples and movements. In the case of Lenin and Stalin, this emphasis on the more visible contours of their chronologies proved effective. But with Trotsky, who took his ideas very seriously, it would have been helpful had Service delved deeper into his subject’s thinking and the connections between that thinking and the many overlapping ideologies and developments that he must have been suffused with—in Nikolayev, as a young man; or Petrograd or Moscow, as a revolutionary; or when he was consigned to internal exile in Siberia or Almaty; or when he was living as an exile in Turkey; or later, in France and Norway; or in the last years of his life, in Mexico. There were so many writers, radicals, and artists who flitted in and out of the Trotsky orbit—Vladimir Mayakovsky, Antonio Gramsci, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, André Breton, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, John Dewey, and on and on—that it seems incumbent on the author to tell us something about how their politics and ideas intermixed with those of Trotsky.

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Propelled by an overwhelming sense of his own rightness, Trotsky was remarkable for his lack of dynamism: from his late teens on, he was driven by a deep desire to overthrow the established order and install a dictatorship that, magically, would deliver the workers from their plight. That was it. Over the decades, the cause would assume different colorings or accents, but the basic thrust was always the same. Never mind the indefinable goal: Who would lead this dictatorship? How would the “deliverance” of the workers take place? And what of the peasantry with their ancient agrarian habits? Did Trotsky really foresee the revolution, which Marx had intended for heavily industrialized Germany, liberating the worker-farmers of the Russian steppe? What was most stunning about Trotsky’s ideology was its unchanging nature. How was it possible that a man who read and wrote so widely on revolution, natural rights, social contracts, economic determinism, and, above all, history could be so oblivious to the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the historical process? How was it that he never appeared to grow or morph or adapt, or to integrate all the accumulated knowledge and opinions that we necessarily encounter over the course of a lifetime?

The inevitable conclusion is that Trotsky, from a young age, was steered by a powerful cognitive dissonance. His ideas, instead of becoming more nuanced or thought through, ossified under the weight of ideology. As Service puts it, “He gave no thought to the possibility that he might be wrong and that other ways of organizing society should be canvassed.” Information, books, and other people’s opinions were useful only in so far as they serviced the beliefs he had imbibed as an angry and malleable teenager who knew almost nothing except that he did not want to be his father. Trotsky qua psychological profile or literary figure was fascinating. Trotsky qua thinker was a bore. That there was a whole school of thought that would later take its name from him is laughable; the microscopic shadings that separated Trotsky from his fellow travelers hardly point to substantive differences. Nor were his tactics obviously more humane. Stalin, his only serious rival, was a monster whose monstrousness served his personal empowerment. Trotsky was less bloodthirsty—he was more practical than ruthless—but he had monstrous tendencies. Consider the 1918 Panteleyev affair, in which Trotsky as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs ordered the execution of Red Army soldiers following the battle for Sviyazhsk; and his endorsement, later that year, of the Cheka’s Red Terror, following the attempt on Lenin’s life. “Trotsky was feared and admired in equal proportions by commanders,” Service notes. “Summary executions were one of his favored measures. He once chided subordinates who omitted to hold a field court-martial before ordering a shooting; but the rebuke was a gentle one since he too wished to terrorize his forces into obedience.” Just as troubling was his family life. Trotsky’s commitment to the cause always outweighed the emotional and medical needs of those around him, including his first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya; his second wife, Natalya Sedova; and his two sons and two daughters. None of Trotsky’s children outlived him. For all intents and purposes, the movement and the ideology that bore his name suffered much the same fate.