The History of the Russian Revolution, Vols. Ii and Iii

by Leon Trotsky, tr. by Max Eastman

[Simon & Schuster, $7.00]

TROTSKY’S chronicle is finished — the world’s first magnum opus on the dynamics of revolution. Trotsky’s rôle as chief leader of the insurrection is now denied in Moscow. His name has been systematically expunged from the records and blotted from the map of Russia. And yet, the exile of Prinkipo disclaims bitterness in writing with ‘scientific objectivity,’and in the third person, of facts which he ‘neither wishes nor is able to erase from history.’

Volume II picks up the narrative from Volume I¹(The Overthrow of Tsarism) at the July Rising, when the Bolsheviks played the fire hose on the impatient masses. The trouble with the counter-revolution, according to Trotsky, was that it had two would-be dictators, Kerensky and Kornilov, both of whom wished to ‘save’ Russia as Bonapartes. The conspiracy against the * people’ thus evolved two plans, which nullified each other, and spared the Bolsheviks in their only moment of real danger. Kerensky, ‘confusing himself with the revolution, and suffering from ‘psychic neurasthenia,’ was destined to flee under the cover of a little American flag — but not until after he had freed the revolting Kornilov generals, who laid the foundation for the civil war, ‘necessitating the imposition of the Red Terror upon the revolution.'

The third volume begins with Trotsky’s restatement of the peasant problem. He also shows how the Bolsheviks reconciled the doctrine of self-determination for nationalities (freedom to leave the Union) with the rigid centralism of the Communist Party. The most instructive chapter is on the Art of Insurrection. We learn that insurrection is never spontaneous, and cannot be evoked at will; but it can be organized in advance by revolutionary leaders who feel out the insurrection in good season and supplement it with a conspiracy. The key problem is to seize the right, moment, to strike at the ‘boiling point.'

The narrative ends with the actual seizure of power, the twenty-four hours of armed conflict., October 25-26, 1917. The real battle, however, comes in the appendices. In ‘Some Legends of the Bureaucracy,’Trotsky turns the full blast of his writing power against the ‘Epigones’ (the second generation of Bolshevik historians) who ‘drive facts into the required line of march,’ who revise history, and who canonize Lenin, so that they also may be canonized, and thus establish their infallibility ex post facto. Stalin, of course, gets a special pillory for his reversal in writings between 1918 and 1924 (thus after the death of Lenin) regarding Trotsky’s historic rôle.

Another reversal is treated under ‘Socialism in a Separate Country,’ the fundamental cause of schism in the Bolshevik ranks. The Comintern in 1926 set forth three ideas as hostile to Bolshevism: denial of the possibility of the Soviet Union’s maintaining itself for an indefinite length of time in a capitalist environment (the problem of military intervention); of its overcoming with its own power the contradiction between city and country (problem of economic backwardness); and of creating a shut-in socialist society (problem of world division of labor). The refusal to accept these three propositions is ‘Trotskyism,’ labeled heresy in 1926, but, according to Trotsky’s documents, the official Bolshevik policy in 1918. In asserting Lenin’s internationalism, he writes, ‘Only after pinning Lenin down under a mausoleum were the Epigones able to nationalize his views.'

The third appendix reads like a roll call of Bolsheviks by their writings since 1905 on the subject of Permanent Revolution. A Platonic dialogue between T and S (Trotsky and Stalin) brings the quarrel up to date.

How a revolution is prepared, how it develops, how it conquers — these are compelling subjects for all time. In the process of ’restoring his actual position in the events,’ Trotsky does perform an immense service in his exposition from first-hand knowledge of the laws of revolution, generalized from historical experience. These three volumes, with an excellent index for students, seem to be addressed to a generation in Russia still younger than the ‘Epigones.’ Upon putting them down one wonders if they will go underground into Russia, if the official historians will reply, and what Lenin would have said about it all. It probably remains for a foreigner to write the historian’s history of the revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky’s chronicle, rich in racy metaphor and historical allusion, smoking hot with the forensics of a great historic quarrel, and done into the powerful English of Max Eastman, will occupy a high and unique place in world literature.

BRUCE HOPPER