Never Forgive, Never Forget
by Stephen Lendman
Never Forgive, Never Forget - by Stephen Lendman
After covering Libya's rape since last winter in dozens of articles, no forgiving or forgetting is possible for one of history's great crimes.
Nor is ignoring those responsible, condemning them forthrightly, and explaining why all wars are waged.
NATO outdid Orwell on this one, killing truth by calling war the responsibility to protect - by terrorizing, attacking, and slaughtering civilians like psychopathic assassins.
As a result, honest historians will redefine barbarism to explain NATO's savagery. It includes ongoing crimes of war and against humanity for the most malevolent reasons.
When is war not war? It's when committing cold-blooded murder is called the right thing. When major media scoundrels cheerlead it, and when most people believe it because they're too indifferent, uncaring or lazy to learn the truth.
NATO's rape of Libya is too ugly for proper words to describe. Only honest images can do it, and lots of them.
Instead, the Big Lie substitutes for honest journalism, especially on television where real (not fake) visuals can show mangled bodies, mass destruction, and other evidence of NATO crimes.
Where civilian deaths can be shown graphically in living color. Where responsibility can be placed where it belongs. Where right and wrong can best be explained. Where repetition can arouse public outrage. Where proper analysis in advance perhaps can prevent all wars.
None are liberating, lawful, or virtuous. All are shamelessly exploitive. Libya's one of the worst - unscrupulously benefitting powerful interests criminally, ruthlessly, and diabolically.
It doesn't get any worse than that. Ask Lybians. They'll explain.
Leading America's Pack Journalistic Lying
The New York Times is America's lead propaganda instrument, its reports getting enough global coverage to make a difference.
From the start, it cheerled war with Libya. It played the same role in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all previous US wars, deceiving its readers by dishonest journalism, commentaries, and editorials.
August 26 was no different. Two articles among others stand out. David Kirkpatrick wrote one headlined, "As Qaddafi Forces Retreat, a Newly Freed Imam Encourages Forgiveness," saying:
Pro-NATO Sheik Abdul Ghani Aboughreis helped incite last winter's uprising "with a fiery Friday sermon at the Mourad Agha mosque. His words sent thousands of demonstrators pouring into the streets. (His) mosque and neighborhood became a center of revolt and resistance...."
After six months of shamelessly supporting death and destruction against his own people, he now encourages "forgiv(ing) each other, to make sure to leave it to the law and not take revenge on each other."
As in all his Libya war articles, Kirkpatrick left unexplained months of crimes of war and against humanity, committed by NATO and paramilitary killers.
Instead, he highlighted alleged evidence of ongoing Gaddafi loyalist crimes.
In times of war, both sides commit them, but whatever government forces did pale compared to NATO's savagery and its hired assassins. Kirkpatrick and other Times writers failed to notice.
Anthony Shadid and Kareem Hahim were no better headlining, "Grim Evidence of Fighting's Toll Becomes Clearer in Libya," saying:
"As the fighting died down in Tripoli on Friday, the scope and savagery of the violence during the nearly weeklong battle for control of the capital began to come into sharper focus."
Evidence he cites is a shameful Amnesty International report (based on freed Al Qaeda and other paramilitary prisoners), saying:
AI "uncovered evidence that forces loyal to (Gaddafi) have killed numerous detainees held at two military camps in Tripoli on 23 and 24 August."
Perhaps so if other insurgents freed them, attacked Gaddafi forces in the process, and they fought back.
Instead, AI said:
"Loyalist forces in Libya must immediately stop such killings of captives, and both sides must commit to ensuring no harm comes to prisoners in their custody."
Like UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, AI tries to have it both ways, ruining everything it gets right by reports like this - equating horrendous NATO crimes with lesser ones committed by Gaddafi forces, perhaps many less than imagined. The fog of war makes it hard to know precisely.
Instead, Shadid and Hahim's article was shamelessly one sided. While citing clear evidence of rebel-committed atrocities, their article claimed:
-- Tripoli violence is now subsiding when, in fact, it rages;
-- rebels say Gaddafi loyalists killed their own, an absurdity on its face;
-- it's hard "to ascertain the fate of....dead men" in hospitals, as well as chaos committed inside; AP and Reuters reported it resulted from rebel-committed terror;
-- Gaddafi's "cloak of secrecy (and) mercurial rule" are being revealed, leaving unexplained why Washington and its NATO partners wage all wars;
-- slogans are being displayed, saying "Libya is free" and "Misurata is steadfast," though still Gaddafi controlled, it's believed, what Shadid and Hahim ignored, as well as not debunking claims of Libya's freedom; and
-- documents in Gaddafi's compound "seemed to show that (his) adopted daughter Hana, who was supposedly killed at age 4 in (1986), was alive (and) working as a doctor;" the key words "seemed to show" both Times writers implied were proof, adding that Tripoli Central Hospital workers claimed "a spacious and well-appointed office" there was hers.
Throughout the conflict, Times articles, op-eds and editorials backed it. Their unstated message is war is good, the more the better when America wages them.
Sadly, that's the state of managed Western news and opinion. It's a shocking indictment of its support for wealth and power, no matter how lawless and harmful to billions exploited ruthlessly, shameless, and repeatedly.
Final Comments
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reports continued fighting in Tripoli, inflicting many casualties.
Moreover, many injured can't be treated because of ongoing violence, inadequate staff, and enough supplies and capacity at local hospitals.
In addition, "numerous arrests" were made, "including foreign nationals." Their welfare is very much at risk, especially those singled out for revenge.
Fierce fighting also continues around Misrata and elsewhere. The end of conflict is nowhere in sight. Brega "look(s) like a ghost town."
In different areas, people are endangered by unexploded ordinance, as well as shortages of food, clean water, drugs, other medical supplies, and spotty or no electricity.
Washington-led NATO turned Libya into a hellish inferno - step one before occupying and exploiting its resources and people. Months ago its wealth was stolen. Ahead will be its future if Libyans don't struggle and win their freedom.
On August 26 on Russia Today (RT.com), journalist Pepe Escobar said Abdelhakim Belhadj, a former Al-Qaeda insurgent/now CIA asset commands rebel forces in Tripoli.
He explained that he was trained in Afghanistan by a "very hardcore Islamist Libyan group." Earlier he was captured in Malaysia, detained and tortured in Bangkok, then transferred back to Libya and imprisoned.
In 2009, he made a deal for freedom, in return for serving Western interests, Escobar saying:
"I can say almost for sure with 95% certainty that this is the guy" heading insurgents in Tripoli.
It shows how Washington both demonizes and uses Al Qaeda advantageously, including bin Laden. He was a longtime CIA asset until his death in December 2001 - not from Obama's staged raid.
Notably, Al Qaeda was a 1980s CIA creation during the Soviet-Afghan war. Moreover, Washington both supports international terrorism covertly and battles it by imperial wars and persecuting Muslims for their faith.
It's part of the fog to scare people enough to believe waging wars remove threats that, in fact, don't exist. So they have to be invented to enlist public support, unaware of the harm caused abroad and at home.
Only war profiteers benefit, not taxpayers they steal from or victims they attack. At the same time, corrosive militarism, financial wars, and other destructive policies destroyed America's soul. Its future as a free country is next.
So focused on bread and circus distractions, most people don't notice. How else can Washington get away with murder!
Finally, the fate of independent journalists trapped in Tripoli's Corinthia Hotel remains unclear. They're still in harm's way because a chartered ship for their safe passage out either hasn't arrived or it's too unsafe to reach it.
Further updates will follow.
In conclusion, Law Professor Francis Boyle's morning email said the following:
"After Six Months of fighting by the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world, Ghadafy has now become the Greatest African Warrior since Hannibal against the Romans - predecessors to the Americans."
"Generations from now, people will sing songs, write poems, and compose odes to Ghadafy all over Africa, the Arab World, the Muslim World, and the Third World long after Obama is dead and disparaged and discredited."
Sic transit Gloria mundi (Thus passes the glory of the world)!"
Keep Libya's freedom flame alive no matter how imperial monsters try to destroy it!
We're all Libyans now! Their struggle is ours!
It's high time we matched their courageous spirit against the world's most pernicious/destructive force.
Bowed perhaps, they're not broken! Isn't that enough to raise our consciousness enough to support them!
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/Never
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
This work is in the public domain
Sunday, August 28, 2011
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 71st Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Lev Davidovich By Jean van Heijenoort
Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*******
Markin comment:
As I never tire of saying even seventy-odd years later I would not want to be on the pen/sword edge of one of Leon Trotsky's polemics. I would still be bleeding profusely from every pore.
******
Jean van Heijenoort
Lev Davidovich
Published: Fourth International, Winter 1959
When Engels, revered patriarch of international social-democracy, passed away peacefully in London, burdened with years, the end of the century was approaching which separated the revolutions of the bourgeoisie from those of the proletariat, Jacobinism from Bolshevism. The transformation of the world, announced by Marx, was to become the immediate task, and revolutionists were to know unparallelled vicissitudes. And in fact the heads of the three greatest revolutionary leaders since Engels sustained the blows of reaction. The historian of the future will not fail to see in this one of the characteristic marks of our epoch. Nor should he fail to note the source of these blows. Lenin's head was pierced by a bullet from the "Socialist Revolutionary" Fanny Kaplan. Rosa Luxemburg's head was shattered by the butt-ends of the guns of the "Social Democrat" Noske's soldiery. Trotsky's head was laid open by the pick-axe of one of the "Communist" Stalin's mercenaries.
Our epoch of crisis, with its abrupt jumps and feverish tempo, devours men and parties more and more rapidly. Those who only yesterday represented the revolution become the Instruments of the darkest reaction. This struggle between the head of the historic process and its leaden, dragging rump assumed its most dramatic form in the duel between Trotsky and Stalin, precisely because this struggle unfolded against the background of a workers' state already established. Trotsky, borne to the summits of power by the revolutionary explosion of the masses, persecuted and harassed when the defeats of the proletariat succeeded each other, became the very incarnation of the revolution.
He was aided by an astonishing physique. What struck you first was his forehead--phenomenally lofty, vertical, and not heightened by baldness. After that his eyes, blue and deep, with a gaze powerful and sure of its power. During his stay in France Lev Davidovich very often had to travel incognito in order to simplify the problem of guarding him. Then he would shave off his goatee and brush his hair to one side dividing it by a part. But when it came to his leaving the house and mingling with the public I was always worried: "No it's really impossible ... the first one to pass by will recognize him, he can't change that gaze of his ... " Then, when Lev Davidovich began to speak, what attracted attention was his mouth. Whether he spoke in Russian or a foreign language his lips constrained themselves to shape words distinctly. He was irritated at hearing confused and precipitate speech from others, and always compelled himself to enunciate with complete distinctness. It was only in addressing Natalia Ivanovna in Russian that on occasion his enunciation became more hurried and less articulate, descending sometimes into a whisper. In conversations with visitors in his study his hands, resting on the edge of his work-table at first, would soon begin moving with large, firm gestures, as though aiding his lips in molding the expression of his thought. His face with its halo of hair, the set of his head, and the whole carriage of his body were always proud and stately. His stature was above medium, with a powerful chest and a broad, stalwart back, and in comparison his legs appeared somewhat slender. it is undoubtedly easier for someone who paid him one visit to say what he saw in Trotsky's face than for one who was at his side for many years in the most variegated circumstances.
The one thing I never saw was the faintest expression of vulgarity. Nor was there any greater likelihood of finding what is called bonhomie. But a certain sweetness was not lacking, which no doubt originated in the formidable intelligence of whose readiness to understand everything you were always aware. What you usually saw was a youthful enthusiasm which joyously undertook everything, and at the same time was strong enough to induce others to cooperate in the undertaking. When it was a question of cudgeling an opponent this sort of gaiety swiftly changed into irony, biting and malicious, alternating with an expression of contempt, and when the enemy was particularly swinish, you would, for a moment, almost find a hint of malevolence. But his vivacity returned quickly. "We'll fix 'em!" he would say then with animation. In the isolation of exile the most dramatic circumstances where I could see Lev Davidovich were his conflicts with the police, or incidents with adversaries of bad faith. At these times his face would harden, and his eyes would flash, as though in them had suddenly been concentrated that vast will-power which ordinarily could be measured only by the labors of his entire life. Then it was obvious to everyone that nothing, nothing in the world could make him budge an inch.
How Trotsky Worked
In daily life this will-power expended itself in strictly organized labor. Any unmotivated disturbance irritated him extremely: he hated pointless conversations, unannounced visits, disappointments or delays in keeping engagements. To be sure there was nothing pedantic in any of this. If an important question turned up he would not hesitate a moment in upsetting all his plans, but it had to be worth it. If it had the slightest interest for the movement he would heedlessly give his time and energy, but he showed himself all the more miserly of them when the carelessness, lightmindedness, or bad organization of others threatened to waste them. He bearded the smallest particles of time, the most precious material of which life is made. His whole personal life was rigidly organized by the quality called singleness of purpose. He set up a hierarchy of duties, and brought to a conclusion whatever he undertook.
As a rule he did not work less than twelve hours a day, and sometimes, when it was necessary, much more. He remained at table as briefly as possible, and after sharing his meals for many years I could not say that I ever noticed on his face any mark of enjoyment for what he ate or drank. 'Eating, dressing, all these miserable little things that have to be repeated every day ... " he once said to me.
He could find his only diversion in great physical activity. Merely walking was scarcely a relaxation. He walked actively and in silence, and you could see that his mind was always at work. Now and then he would ask a question: "When did you answer that letter?" "Can you find me that quotation?" Only violent exercise gave him repose. In Turkey this consisted of hunting, and especially fishing, deep-sea fishing, complicated and agitated, where the body had to spend itself recklessly. When the fishing had been good, that is, very fatiguing, he began work on his return with redoubled enthusiasm. In Mexico, where fishing was impossible, he invented the gathering of cacti, of enormous weight, under a blazing sun.
Of course the necessity for security created certain obligations. During the eleven and a half years of his third emigration it was only for a few months, at certain times during his stay in France and in Norway, that Lev Davidovich could walk about freely, that is, unguarded, in the countryside around his house. As a rule each one of his excursions constituted a minor military operation. It was necessary to make all arrangements in advance, and fix his route carefully. "You treat me as though I were an object," he sometimes said, jokingly dissimulating whatever impatience there might have been in this remark.
He demanded the same methodical spirit he observed in his own work from the comrades who assisted him. The closer they were to him, the more did he demand of them and the less did he trouble himself with formalities. He desired precision in everything: an undated letter, an unsigned document always irritated him, as did in general anything easygoing, slipshod, or happy-go-lucky. Do whatever you're doing well, and do it till you finish. And in this rule he made no distinction between petty day-to-day chores and intellectual work: conduct your thoughts to their conclusion, is an expression that often sprang from his pen. He always displayed great solicitude for the health of those around him. Health is revolutionary capital that must not be wasted. He grew angry at seeing someone read in a bad light. It's necessary to risk your life for the revolution without hesitating, but why ruin your eyes when you can read comfortably and intelligently?
Trotsky's Conversations
In conversations with Lev Davidovich what visitors were struck by chiefly was his capacity to find his bearings in a novel situation. He was able to integrate it in his general perspective, and at the same time always give immediate and concrete advice. During his third emigration he often had the opportunity of conversing with visitors from countries he was not acquainted with directly, perhaps from the Balkans or Latin America. He did not always know the language, did not follow their press and had never had any particular interest in their specific problems. First of all he would allow his interrogator to speak, occasionally jotting down a few brief notes on a sliP of paper in front of him, sometimes asking for a few details: "How many members has this party?" "Isn't this politician a lawyer?"
Then he would speak, and the mass of information that had been given him would be organized. Soon one could distinguish the movements of different classes and of different layers within these classes, and then, bound up with these movements, there would be revealed the play of parties, groups and organizations, and then the place and the activities of various political figures, down to their profession and personal traits, would be logically fitted into the picture. The French naturalist Cuvier used to boast of his ability to reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone. With his vast knowledge of social and political realities Trotsky could devote himself to a similar work. His interrogator was always astounded at seeing how deeply he had been able to penetrate the reality of the particular problem, and would leave Trotsky's study knowing his own country a little better.
At every moment you felt in Trotsky a huge fund of experience, not merely engraved in his memory but organized and reflected on lengthily and profoundly· You could also see that the organization of this experience had taken place around indestructible principles. Though Lev Davidovich hated routine, though he was always anxious to discover new trends, the least attempt at innovation in the realm of principles made him prick up his ears. "Trimming Marx's beard," was his expression for all these attempts to put Marxism in line with the current fashion, and he did not dissimulate his contempt for them.
Trotsky's Style and Writing Methods
Trotsky's style is universally admired. It is undoubtedly to be best compared with that of Marx. However, Trotsky's sentences are less spacious than those of Marx, in whom one is aware of a wealth of scholarly resources, especially in the youthful works. Trotsky's style achieves its effects by extremely simple means. His vocabulary, especially in his more properly political writings, is always rather limited. The sentences are short, with few subordinate clauses. Their power arises from a sturdy articulation, most often with strongly marked but always well balanced oppositions. This temperance of means gives his style a great freshness and, one might say, youthfulness. In his writing Trotsky is considerably more youthful than Marx.
Trotsky knew how to take advantage of that Russian syntax whose inflections permit the word-order within a sentence to be upset, giving the expression of the thought a force and emphasis difficult to attain with the limited means of modern western languages. And also difficult to translate. Lev Davidovich demanded a mathematical fidelity from his translators, and at the same time kicked against the rules of grammar in the foreign language which forbade a similarly concise and direct rendition of his thought. Compared to that of Lenin, Trotsky's style is superior, by a large margin, in its lucidity and elegance, without any loss of power. Lenin's sentences occasionally become cumbrous, too heavy, disorganized. It seems as though the thought sometimes cripples its expression. Trotsky once said that in Lenin you could discover a Russian mushik, but one raised to the level of genius. Even though Lenin's father was a provincial functionary and Trotsky's a farmer, it is Trotsky who is the city-dweller, as opposed to Lenin, doubtless because of his race. This may be seen at once in the difference of styles, without any attempt being made here to uncover this opposition in other aspects of these two giant personalities.
When Trotsky was deported to Turkey, the passport the Soviet authorities gave him put down his profession as writer. And in truth he was a great, an exceedingly great writer. If the bureaucrats's inscription causes a smile it is because Trotsky was so much more than a writer. He wrote with ease, being able to dictate several hours at a sitting. But then he would go over the manuscript and correct it carefully. For some of these great writings, such as the History of the Russian Revolution, there are two successive drafts behind the definitive text, but in the majority of cases there is only one. His enormous literary production, in which are to be found books, pamphlets, innumerable articles, letters, hurried statements to the press, and notes of all sorts is, needless to say, uneven. Some parts are more worked over than others, but not a sentence in any of them has been neglected. You can take any five lines in this ponderous accumulation of writing and you will always recognize the inimitable Trotsky.
Their volume is also impressive, and would alone bear testimony to a very rare will and capacity for labor. Thirty volumes of Lenin's complete works have been collected, in addition to thirty-five volumes of correspondence and odd notes. Trotsky lived seven years longer than Lenin, but his writings, from his long books to his brief personal notes, would undoubtedly come to triple that amount. In the eleven and a half years of his third emigration he amassed a labor which would honorably fill an entire lifetime. It may be said that the pen never abandoned his hand, and what a hand it was!
He Lives in His Books
Trotsky has put all of himself into his books. personal contact with the man himself did not modify the portrait that emerged from a reading of his works, but deepened it and made it more precise: passion and reason, intelligence and will, all carried to an extreme degree, but at the same time blending into one another. In everything Lev Davidovich did one had the feeling that he had given his whole being. He often repeated Hegel's words: Nothing great is done in this world without passion; and he had nothing but contempt for the philistines who object to the "fanaticism" of the revolutionaries. But intelligence was always present, in miraculous harmony with the fire. Nor could one dream of discovering a conflict: the will was indomitable because the mind saw very far. Hegel would have to be quoted once again: Der Wille ist eine besondere Weise des Denkens. Will is a specific function of thought.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*******
Markin comment:
As I never tire of saying even seventy-odd years later I would not want to be on the pen/sword edge of one of Leon Trotsky's polemics. I would still be bleeding profusely from every pore.
******
Jean van Heijenoort
Lev Davidovich
Published: Fourth International, Winter 1959
When Engels, revered patriarch of international social-democracy, passed away peacefully in London, burdened with years, the end of the century was approaching which separated the revolutions of the bourgeoisie from those of the proletariat, Jacobinism from Bolshevism. The transformation of the world, announced by Marx, was to become the immediate task, and revolutionists were to know unparallelled vicissitudes. And in fact the heads of the three greatest revolutionary leaders since Engels sustained the blows of reaction. The historian of the future will not fail to see in this one of the characteristic marks of our epoch. Nor should he fail to note the source of these blows. Lenin's head was pierced by a bullet from the "Socialist Revolutionary" Fanny Kaplan. Rosa Luxemburg's head was shattered by the butt-ends of the guns of the "Social Democrat" Noske's soldiery. Trotsky's head was laid open by the pick-axe of one of the "Communist" Stalin's mercenaries.
Our epoch of crisis, with its abrupt jumps and feverish tempo, devours men and parties more and more rapidly. Those who only yesterday represented the revolution become the Instruments of the darkest reaction. This struggle between the head of the historic process and its leaden, dragging rump assumed its most dramatic form in the duel between Trotsky and Stalin, precisely because this struggle unfolded against the background of a workers' state already established. Trotsky, borne to the summits of power by the revolutionary explosion of the masses, persecuted and harassed when the defeats of the proletariat succeeded each other, became the very incarnation of the revolution.
He was aided by an astonishing physique. What struck you first was his forehead--phenomenally lofty, vertical, and not heightened by baldness. After that his eyes, blue and deep, with a gaze powerful and sure of its power. During his stay in France Lev Davidovich very often had to travel incognito in order to simplify the problem of guarding him. Then he would shave off his goatee and brush his hair to one side dividing it by a part. But when it came to his leaving the house and mingling with the public I was always worried: "No it's really impossible ... the first one to pass by will recognize him, he can't change that gaze of his ... " Then, when Lev Davidovich began to speak, what attracted attention was his mouth. Whether he spoke in Russian or a foreign language his lips constrained themselves to shape words distinctly. He was irritated at hearing confused and precipitate speech from others, and always compelled himself to enunciate with complete distinctness. It was only in addressing Natalia Ivanovna in Russian that on occasion his enunciation became more hurried and less articulate, descending sometimes into a whisper. In conversations with visitors in his study his hands, resting on the edge of his work-table at first, would soon begin moving with large, firm gestures, as though aiding his lips in molding the expression of his thought. His face with its halo of hair, the set of his head, and the whole carriage of his body were always proud and stately. His stature was above medium, with a powerful chest and a broad, stalwart back, and in comparison his legs appeared somewhat slender. it is undoubtedly easier for someone who paid him one visit to say what he saw in Trotsky's face than for one who was at his side for many years in the most variegated circumstances.
The one thing I never saw was the faintest expression of vulgarity. Nor was there any greater likelihood of finding what is called bonhomie. But a certain sweetness was not lacking, which no doubt originated in the formidable intelligence of whose readiness to understand everything you were always aware. What you usually saw was a youthful enthusiasm which joyously undertook everything, and at the same time was strong enough to induce others to cooperate in the undertaking. When it was a question of cudgeling an opponent this sort of gaiety swiftly changed into irony, biting and malicious, alternating with an expression of contempt, and when the enemy was particularly swinish, you would, for a moment, almost find a hint of malevolence. But his vivacity returned quickly. "We'll fix 'em!" he would say then with animation. In the isolation of exile the most dramatic circumstances where I could see Lev Davidovich were his conflicts with the police, or incidents with adversaries of bad faith. At these times his face would harden, and his eyes would flash, as though in them had suddenly been concentrated that vast will-power which ordinarily could be measured only by the labors of his entire life. Then it was obvious to everyone that nothing, nothing in the world could make him budge an inch.
How Trotsky Worked
In daily life this will-power expended itself in strictly organized labor. Any unmotivated disturbance irritated him extremely: he hated pointless conversations, unannounced visits, disappointments or delays in keeping engagements. To be sure there was nothing pedantic in any of this. If an important question turned up he would not hesitate a moment in upsetting all his plans, but it had to be worth it. If it had the slightest interest for the movement he would heedlessly give his time and energy, but he showed himself all the more miserly of them when the carelessness, lightmindedness, or bad organization of others threatened to waste them. He bearded the smallest particles of time, the most precious material of which life is made. His whole personal life was rigidly organized by the quality called singleness of purpose. He set up a hierarchy of duties, and brought to a conclusion whatever he undertook.
As a rule he did not work less than twelve hours a day, and sometimes, when it was necessary, much more. He remained at table as briefly as possible, and after sharing his meals for many years I could not say that I ever noticed on his face any mark of enjoyment for what he ate or drank. 'Eating, dressing, all these miserable little things that have to be repeated every day ... " he once said to me.
He could find his only diversion in great physical activity. Merely walking was scarcely a relaxation. He walked actively and in silence, and you could see that his mind was always at work. Now and then he would ask a question: "When did you answer that letter?" "Can you find me that quotation?" Only violent exercise gave him repose. In Turkey this consisted of hunting, and especially fishing, deep-sea fishing, complicated and agitated, where the body had to spend itself recklessly. When the fishing had been good, that is, very fatiguing, he began work on his return with redoubled enthusiasm. In Mexico, where fishing was impossible, he invented the gathering of cacti, of enormous weight, under a blazing sun.
Of course the necessity for security created certain obligations. During the eleven and a half years of his third emigration it was only for a few months, at certain times during his stay in France and in Norway, that Lev Davidovich could walk about freely, that is, unguarded, in the countryside around his house. As a rule each one of his excursions constituted a minor military operation. It was necessary to make all arrangements in advance, and fix his route carefully. "You treat me as though I were an object," he sometimes said, jokingly dissimulating whatever impatience there might have been in this remark.
He demanded the same methodical spirit he observed in his own work from the comrades who assisted him. The closer they were to him, the more did he demand of them and the less did he trouble himself with formalities. He desired precision in everything: an undated letter, an unsigned document always irritated him, as did in general anything easygoing, slipshod, or happy-go-lucky. Do whatever you're doing well, and do it till you finish. And in this rule he made no distinction between petty day-to-day chores and intellectual work: conduct your thoughts to their conclusion, is an expression that often sprang from his pen. He always displayed great solicitude for the health of those around him. Health is revolutionary capital that must not be wasted. He grew angry at seeing someone read in a bad light. It's necessary to risk your life for the revolution without hesitating, but why ruin your eyes when you can read comfortably and intelligently?
Trotsky's Conversations
In conversations with Lev Davidovich what visitors were struck by chiefly was his capacity to find his bearings in a novel situation. He was able to integrate it in his general perspective, and at the same time always give immediate and concrete advice. During his third emigration he often had the opportunity of conversing with visitors from countries he was not acquainted with directly, perhaps from the Balkans or Latin America. He did not always know the language, did not follow their press and had never had any particular interest in their specific problems. First of all he would allow his interrogator to speak, occasionally jotting down a few brief notes on a sliP of paper in front of him, sometimes asking for a few details: "How many members has this party?" "Isn't this politician a lawyer?"
Then he would speak, and the mass of information that had been given him would be organized. Soon one could distinguish the movements of different classes and of different layers within these classes, and then, bound up with these movements, there would be revealed the play of parties, groups and organizations, and then the place and the activities of various political figures, down to their profession and personal traits, would be logically fitted into the picture. The French naturalist Cuvier used to boast of his ability to reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone. With his vast knowledge of social and political realities Trotsky could devote himself to a similar work. His interrogator was always astounded at seeing how deeply he had been able to penetrate the reality of the particular problem, and would leave Trotsky's study knowing his own country a little better.
At every moment you felt in Trotsky a huge fund of experience, not merely engraved in his memory but organized and reflected on lengthily and profoundly· You could also see that the organization of this experience had taken place around indestructible principles. Though Lev Davidovich hated routine, though he was always anxious to discover new trends, the least attempt at innovation in the realm of principles made him prick up his ears. "Trimming Marx's beard," was his expression for all these attempts to put Marxism in line with the current fashion, and he did not dissimulate his contempt for them.
Trotsky's Style and Writing Methods
Trotsky's style is universally admired. It is undoubtedly to be best compared with that of Marx. However, Trotsky's sentences are less spacious than those of Marx, in whom one is aware of a wealth of scholarly resources, especially in the youthful works. Trotsky's style achieves its effects by extremely simple means. His vocabulary, especially in his more properly political writings, is always rather limited. The sentences are short, with few subordinate clauses. Their power arises from a sturdy articulation, most often with strongly marked but always well balanced oppositions. This temperance of means gives his style a great freshness and, one might say, youthfulness. In his writing Trotsky is considerably more youthful than Marx.
Trotsky knew how to take advantage of that Russian syntax whose inflections permit the word-order within a sentence to be upset, giving the expression of the thought a force and emphasis difficult to attain with the limited means of modern western languages. And also difficult to translate. Lev Davidovich demanded a mathematical fidelity from his translators, and at the same time kicked against the rules of grammar in the foreign language which forbade a similarly concise and direct rendition of his thought. Compared to that of Lenin, Trotsky's style is superior, by a large margin, in its lucidity and elegance, without any loss of power. Lenin's sentences occasionally become cumbrous, too heavy, disorganized. It seems as though the thought sometimes cripples its expression. Trotsky once said that in Lenin you could discover a Russian mushik, but one raised to the level of genius. Even though Lenin's father was a provincial functionary and Trotsky's a farmer, it is Trotsky who is the city-dweller, as opposed to Lenin, doubtless because of his race. This may be seen at once in the difference of styles, without any attempt being made here to uncover this opposition in other aspects of these two giant personalities.
When Trotsky was deported to Turkey, the passport the Soviet authorities gave him put down his profession as writer. And in truth he was a great, an exceedingly great writer. If the bureaucrats's inscription causes a smile it is because Trotsky was so much more than a writer. He wrote with ease, being able to dictate several hours at a sitting. But then he would go over the manuscript and correct it carefully. For some of these great writings, such as the History of the Russian Revolution, there are two successive drafts behind the definitive text, but in the majority of cases there is only one. His enormous literary production, in which are to be found books, pamphlets, innumerable articles, letters, hurried statements to the press, and notes of all sorts is, needless to say, uneven. Some parts are more worked over than others, but not a sentence in any of them has been neglected. You can take any five lines in this ponderous accumulation of writing and you will always recognize the inimitable Trotsky.
Their volume is also impressive, and would alone bear testimony to a very rare will and capacity for labor. Thirty volumes of Lenin's complete works have been collected, in addition to thirty-five volumes of correspondence and odd notes. Trotsky lived seven years longer than Lenin, but his writings, from his long books to his brief personal notes, would undoubtedly come to triple that amount. In the eleven and a half years of his third emigration he amassed a labor which would honorably fill an entire lifetime. It may be said that the pen never abandoned his hand, and what a hand it was!
He Lives in His Books
Trotsky has put all of himself into his books. personal contact with the man himself did not modify the portrait that emerged from a reading of his works, but deepened it and made it more precise: passion and reason, intelligence and will, all carried to an extreme degree, but at the same time blending into one another. In everything Lev Davidovich did one had the feeling that he had given his whole being. He often repeated Hegel's words: Nothing great is done in this world without passion; and he had nothing but contempt for the philistines who object to the "fanaticism" of the revolutionaries. But intelligence was always present, in miraculous harmony with the fire. Nor could one dream of discovering a conflict: the will was indomitable because the mind saw very far. Hegel would have to be quoted once again: Der Wille ist eine besondere Weise des Denkens. Will is a specific function of thought.
The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States- 1930s American Socialist Workers Party Leader Max Shachtman-Prospects for a Labor Party(1937)
Click on the headline to link to a Max Shachtman Internet Archives online copy of Prospects for a Labor Party(1937)
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
********
Markin comment on this article:
Max Shachtman knew how to "speak" Marxism back in the 1930s and believe it. Later he could speak that language only at Sunday picnics and the like as he drifted back into the warm embrace of American imperialism.
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
********
Markin comment on this article:
Max Shachtman knew how to "speak" Marxism back in the 1930s and believe it. Later he could speak that language only at Sunday picnics and the like as he drifted back into the warm embrace of American imperialism.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 71st Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Leon Trotsky: Organizer Of Victory By Karl Radek
Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*************
Markin comment:
No question that all of Leon Trotsky's political and organization skills and the strong side of his personality came through as he set out to defense the nascent Soviet state against the Whites. Radek does a pretty good job here of hitting the highlights of those efforts.
****
Karl Radek
Organizer of Victory
Source: Fourth International, August, 1944
History has prepared our party for various tasks. However defective our state machinery or our economic activity may be, still the whole past of the party has psychologically prepared it for the work of creating a new order of economy and a new state apparatus. History has even prepared us for diplomacy. It is scarcely necessary to mention that world politics have always occupied the minds of Marxists. But it was the endless negotiations with the Mensheviki that perfected our diplomatic technique; and it was during these old struggles that Comrade Chicherin learned to draw up diplomatic notes. We are just beginning to learn the miracle of economics. Our state machinery creaks and groans. In one thing, however, we have been eminently successful – in our Red Army. Its creator, its central will, is Comrade L.D. Trotsky.
Old General Moltke, the creator of the German army, often spoke of the danger that the pen of the diplomats might spoil the work of the soldier’s sabre. Warriors the world over, though there were classical authors among them, have always opposed the pen to the sword. The history of the proletarian revolution shows how the pen may be re-forged into a sword. Trotsky is one of the best writers of world socialism, but these literary advantages did not prevent him from becoming the leader, the leading organizer of the first proletarian army. The pen of the best publicist of the revolution was re-forged into a sword.
Marxist Military Literature Was Scant
The literature of scientific socialism helped Comrade Trotsky but little in solving the problems which confronted the party when it was threatened by world imperialism. If we look through the whole of pre-war socialist literature, we find – with the exception of a few little-known works by Engels, some chapters in his Anti-Düehring devoted to the development of strategy, and some chapters in Mehring’s excellent book on Lessing, devoted to the war activity of Frederick the Great – only four works on military subjects: August Bebel’s pamphlet on militia, Gaston Moch’s book on militia, the two volumes of war history by Schulz, and the book by Jaurès, devoted to the propaganda of the idea of the militia in France. With the exception of the books of Schulz and Jaures, which possess high value, everything which socialist literature has published on military subjects since Engels’ death has been bad dilettantism. But even these works by Schulz and Jaures afforded no reply to the questions with which the Russian Revolution was confronted. Schulz’s book surveyed the development of the forms of strategy and military organizations for many centuries back. It was an attempt at the application of the Marxian methods of historical research, and closed with the Napoleonic period. Jaurès’ book-full of brilliance and sparkle – shows his complete familiarity with the problems of military organization, but suffers from the fundamental fault that this gifted representative of reformism was anxious to make of the capitalist army an instrument of national defense, and to release it from the function of defending the class interests of the bourgeoisie. He therefore failed to grasp the tendency of development of militarism, and carried the idea of democracy ad absurdum in the question of war, into the question of the army.
I do not know to what extent Comrade Trotsky occupied himself before the war with questions of military knowledge. I believe that he did not gain his gifted insight into these questions from books, but received his impetus in this direction at the time when he was acting as correspondent in the Balkan war, this final rehearsal of the great war. It is probable that he deepened his knowledge of war technique and of the mechanism of the army, during his sojourn in France (during the war), from where he sent his brilliant war sketches to the Kiev Mysli. It may be seen from this work how magnificently he grasped the spirit of the army. The Marxist Trotsky saw not only the external discipline of the army, the cannon, the technique. He saw the living human beings who serve the instruments of war, he saw the sprawling charge on the field of battle.
Trotsky is the author of the first pamphlet giving a detailed analysis of the causes of the decay of the International. Even in face of this great decay Trotsky did not lose his faith in the future of socialism; on the contrary, he was profoundly convinced that all those qualities which the bourgeoisie endeavors to cultivate in the uniformed proletariat, for the purpose of securing its own victory, would soon turn against the bourgeoisie, and serve not only as the foundation of the revolution, but also of revolutionary armies. One of the most remarkable documents of his comprehension of the class structure of the army, and of the spirit of the army, is the speech which he made – I believe at the first Soviet Congress and in the Petrograd Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council – on Kerensky’s July offensive. In this speech Trotsky predicted the collapse of the offensive, not only on technical military grounds, but on the basis of the political analysis of the condition of the army.
“You” – and here he addressed himself to the Mensheviki and the SR’s – “demand from the government a revision of the aims of the war. In doing so you tell the army that the old aims, in whose name Czarism and the bourgeoisie demanded unheard-of sacrifices, did not correspond to the interests of the Russian peasantry and Russian proletariat. You have not attained a revision of the aims of the war. You have created nothing to replace the Czar and the fatherland, and yet you demand of the army that it shed its blood for this nothing. We cannot fight for nothing, and your adventure will end in collapse.”
The secret of Trotsky’s greatness as organizer of the Red Army lies in this attitude of his towards the question.
All great military writers emphasize the tremendously decisive significance of the moral factor in war. One half of Clausewitz’s great book is devoted to this question, and the whole of our victory in the civil war is due to the circumstance that Trotsky knew how to apply this knowledge of the significance of the moral factor in war to our reality. When the old Czarist army went to pieces, the minister of war of the Kerensky government, Verkhovsky, proposed that the older military classes be discharged, the military authorities behind the front partly reduced, and the army reorganized by the introduction of fresh young elements. When we seized power, and the trenches emptied, many of us made the same proposition. But this idea was the purest Utopia. It was impossible to replace the fleeing Czarist army with fresh forces. These two waves would have crossed and divided each other. The old army had to be completely dissolved; the new army could only be built up on the alarm sent out by Soviet Russia to the workers and peasants, to defend the conquests of the revolution.
When, in April 1918, the best Czarist officers who remained in the army after our victory met together for the purpose of working out, in conjunction with our comrades and some military representatives of the Allies, the plan of organization for the army, Trotsky listened to their plans for several days – I have a clear recollection of this scene – in silence. These were the plans of people who did not comprehend the upheaval going on before their eyes. Every one of them replied to the question of how an army was to be organized on the old pattern. They did not grasp the metamorphosis wrought in the human material upon which the army is based. How the war experts laughed at the first voluntary troops organized by Comrade Trotsky in his capacity as Commissar of War! Old Borisov, one of the best Russian military writers, assured those Communists with whom he was obliged to come in contact, time and again, that nothing would come of this undertaking, that the army could only be built up on the basis of general conscription, and maintained by iron discipline. He did not grasp that the volunteer troops were the secure foundation pillars upon which the structure was to be erected, and that the masses of peasants and workers could not possibly be rallied around the flag of war again unless the broad masses were confronted by deadly danger. Without believing for a single moment that the volunteer army could save Russia, Trotsky organized it as an apparatus which he required for the creation of a new army.
Utilizing the Bourgeois Specialists
But Trotsky’s organizing genius, and his boldness of thought are even more clearly expressed in his courageous determination to utilize the war specialists for creating the army. Every good Marxist is fully aware that in building up a good economic apparatus we still require the aid of the old capitalist organization. Lenin defended this proposition with the utmost decision in his April speech on the tasks of the Soviet power. In the mature circles of the party the idea is not contested. But the idea that we could create an instrument for the defense of the republic, an army, with the aid of the Czarist officers – encountered obstinate resistance. Who could think of re-arming the White officers who had just been disarmed? Thus many comrades questioned. I remember a discussion on this question among the editors of the Communist, the organ of the so-called left communists, in which the question of the employment of staff officers nearly led to a split. And the editors of this paper were among the best schooled theoreticians and practicians of the party. It suffices to mention the names of Bukharin, Ossonski, Lomov, W. Yakovlev. There was even greater distrust among the broad circles of our military comrades, recruited for our military organizations during the war. The mistrust of our military functionaries could only be allayed, their agreement to the utilization of the knowledge possessed by the old officers could only be won, by the burning faith of Trotsky in our social force, the belief that we could obtain from the war experts the benefit of their science, without permitting them to force their politics upon us; the belief that the revolutionary watchfulness of the progressive workers would enable them to overcome any counter-revolutionary attempts made by the staff officers.
Trotsky’s Magnetic Energy
In order to emerge victorious, it was necessary for the army to be headed by a man of iron will, and for this man to possess not only the full confidence of the party, but the ability of subjugating with his iron will the enemy who is forced to serve us. But Comrade Trotsky has not only succeeded in subordinating to his energy even the highest staff officers. He attained more: he succeeded in winning the confidence of the best elements among the war experts, and in converting them from enemies of Soviet Russia to its most profoundly convinced followers. I witnessed one such victory of Trotsky’s at the time of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. The officers who had accompanied us to Brest-Litovsk maintained a more than reserved attitude towards us. They fulfilled their role as experts with the utmost condescension, in the opinion that they were attending a comedy which merely served to cover a business transaction long since arranged between the Bolsheviki and the German government. But the manner in which Trotsky conducted the struggle against German imperialism, in the name of the principles of the Russian revolution, forced every human being present in the assembly room to feel the moral and spiritual victory of this eminent representative of the Russian proletariat. The mistrust of the war experts towards us vanished in proportion to the development of the great Brest-Litovsk drama.
How clearly I recollect the night when Admiral Altvater – who has since died – one of the leading officers of the old regime, who began to help Soviet Russia not from motives of fear but of conscience, entered my room and said: “I came here because you forced me to do so. I did not believe you; but now I shall help you, and do my work as never before, in the profound conviction that I am serving the fatherland.” It is one of Trotsky’s greatest victories that he has been able to impart the conviction that the Soviet government really fights for the welfare of the Russian people, even to such people who have come over to us from hostile camps on compulsion only. It goes without saying that this great victory on the inner front, this moral victory over the enemy, has been the result not only of Trotsky’s iron energy which won for him universal respect; not only the result of the deep moral force, the high degree of authority even in military spheres, which this socialist writer and people’s tribune, who was placed by the will of the revolution at the head of the army, has been able to win for himself; this victory has also required the self-denial of tens of thousands of our comrades in the army, an iron discipline in our own ranks, a consistent striving towards our aims; it has also required the miracle that those masses of human beings who only yesterday fled from the battle-field, take up arms again today, under much more difficult conditions, far the defense of the country.
That these politico-psychological mass factors played an important role is an undeniable fact, but the strongest, most concentrated, and striking expression of this influence is to be found in the personality of Trotsky. Here the Russian revolution has acted through the brain, the nervous system, and the heart of its greatest representative. When our first armed trial began, with Czecho-Slovakia, the party, and with its leader Trotsky, showed how the principle of the political campaign – as already taught by Lassalle – could be applied to war, to the fight with “steel arguments.” We concentrated all material and moral forces on the war. The whole party had grasped the necessity of this. But this necessity also finds its highest expression in the steel figure of Trotsky. After our victory over Denikin in March 1920, Trotsky said, at the party conference: “We have ravaged the whole of Russia in order to conquer the Whites.” In these words we again find the unparalleled concentration of will required to ensure the victory. We needed a man who was the embodiment of the war-cry, a man who became the tocsin sounding the alarm, the will demanding from one and all an unqualified subordination to the great bloody necessity.
It was only a man who works like Trotsky, a man who spares himself as little as Trotsky, who can speak to the soldiers as only Trotsky can – it was only such a man who could be the standard bearer of the armed working people. He has been everything in one person. He has thought out the strategic advice given by the experts and has combined it with a correct estimate of the proportions of social forces; he knew how to unite in one movement the impulses of fourteen fronts, of the ten thousand communists who informed headquarters as to what the real army is and how it is possible to operate with it; he understood how to combine all this in one strategic plan and one scheme of organization. And in all this splendid work he understood better than anyone else how to apply the knowledge of the significance of the moral factor in war.
This combination of strategist and military organizer with the politician is best characterized by the fact that during the whole of this hard work, Trotsky appreciated the importance of Demian Bedny (communist writer), or of the artist Moor (who draws most of the political caricatures for the communist papers, posters, etc.) for the war. Our army was an army of peasants, and the dictatorship of the proletariat with regard to the army, that is, the leading of this peasants’ army by workers and by representatives of the working class, was realized in the personality of Trotsky and in the comrades co-operating with him. Trotsky was able, with the aid of the whole apparatus of our party, to impart to the peasants’ army, exhausted by the war, the profoundest conviction that it was fighting in its own interests.
Inseparably Linked in History
Trotsky worked with the whole party in the work of forming the Red Army. He would not have fulfilled his task without the party. But without him the creation of the Red Army and its victories, would have demanded infinitely greater sacrifices. Our party will go down in history as the first proletarian party which succeeded in creating a great army, and this bright page in the history of the Russian revolution will always be bound up with the name of Leon Davidovitch Trotsky, with the name of a man whose work and deeds will claim not only the love, but also the scientific study of the young generation of workers preparing to conquer the whole world.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*************
Markin comment:
No question that all of Leon Trotsky's political and organization skills and the strong side of his personality came through as he set out to defense the nascent Soviet state against the Whites. Radek does a pretty good job here of hitting the highlights of those efforts.
****
Karl Radek
Organizer of Victory
Source: Fourth International, August, 1944
History has prepared our party for various tasks. However defective our state machinery or our economic activity may be, still the whole past of the party has psychologically prepared it for the work of creating a new order of economy and a new state apparatus. History has even prepared us for diplomacy. It is scarcely necessary to mention that world politics have always occupied the minds of Marxists. But it was the endless negotiations with the Mensheviki that perfected our diplomatic technique; and it was during these old struggles that Comrade Chicherin learned to draw up diplomatic notes. We are just beginning to learn the miracle of economics. Our state machinery creaks and groans. In one thing, however, we have been eminently successful – in our Red Army. Its creator, its central will, is Comrade L.D. Trotsky.
Old General Moltke, the creator of the German army, often spoke of the danger that the pen of the diplomats might spoil the work of the soldier’s sabre. Warriors the world over, though there were classical authors among them, have always opposed the pen to the sword. The history of the proletarian revolution shows how the pen may be re-forged into a sword. Trotsky is one of the best writers of world socialism, but these literary advantages did not prevent him from becoming the leader, the leading organizer of the first proletarian army. The pen of the best publicist of the revolution was re-forged into a sword.
Marxist Military Literature Was Scant
The literature of scientific socialism helped Comrade Trotsky but little in solving the problems which confronted the party when it was threatened by world imperialism. If we look through the whole of pre-war socialist literature, we find – with the exception of a few little-known works by Engels, some chapters in his Anti-Düehring devoted to the development of strategy, and some chapters in Mehring’s excellent book on Lessing, devoted to the war activity of Frederick the Great – only four works on military subjects: August Bebel’s pamphlet on militia, Gaston Moch’s book on militia, the two volumes of war history by Schulz, and the book by Jaurès, devoted to the propaganda of the idea of the militia in France. With the exception of the books of Schulz and Jaures, which possess high value, everything which socialist literature has published on military subjects since Engels’ death has been bad dilettantism. But even these works by Schulz and Jaures afforded no reply to the questions with which the Russian Revolution was confronted. Schulz’s book surveyed the development of the forms of strategy and military organizations for many centuries back. It was an attempt at the application of the Marxian methods of historical research, and closed with the Napoleonic period. Jaurès’ book-full of brilliance and sparkle – shows his complete familiarity with the problems of military organization, but suffers from the fundamental fault that this gifted representative of reformism was anxious to make of the capitalist army an instrument of national defense, and to release it from the function of defending the class interests of the bourgeoisie. He therefore failed to grasp the tendency of development of militarism, and carried the idea of democracy ad absurdum in the question of war, into the question of the army.
I do not know to what extent Comrade Trotsky occupied himself before the war with questions of military knowledge. I believe that he did not gain his gifted insight into these questions from books, but received his impetus in this direction at the time when he was acting as correspondent in the Balkan war, this final rehearsal of the great war. It is probable that he deepened his knowledge of war technique and of the mechanism of the army, during his sojourn in France (during the war), from where he sent his brilliant war sketches to the Kiev Mysli. It may be seen from this work how magnificently he grasped the spirit of the army. The Marxist Trotsky saw not only the external discipline of the army, the cannon, the technique. He saw the living human beings who serve the instruments of war, he saw the sprawling charge on the field of battle.
Trotsky is the author of the first pamphlet giving a detailed analysis of the causes of the decay of the International. Even in face of this great decay Trotsky did not lose his faith in the future of socialism; on the contrary, he was profoundly convinced that all those qualities which the bourgeoisie endeavors to cultivate in the uniformed proletariat, for the purpose of securing its own victory, would soon turn against the bourgeoisie, and serve not only as the foundation of the revolution, but also of revolutionary armies. One of the most remarkable documents of his comprehension of the class structure of the army, and of the spirit of the army, is the speech which he made – I believe at the first Soviet Congress and in the Petrograd Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council – on Kerensky’s July offensive. In this speech Trotsky predicted the collapse of the offensive, not only on technical military grounds, but on the basis of the political analysis of the condition of the army.
“You” – and here he addressed himself to the Mensheviki and the SR’s – “demand from the government a revision of the aims of the war. In doing so you tell the army that the old aims, in whose name Czarism and the bourgeoisie demanded unheard-of sacrifices, did not correspond to the interests of the Russian peasantry and Russian proletariat. You have not attained a revision of the aims of the war. You have created nothing to replace the Czar and the fatherland, and yet you demand of the army that it shed its blood for this nothing. We cannot fight for nothing, and your adventure will end in collapse.”
The secret of Trotsky’s greatness as organizer of the Red Army lies in this attitude of his towards the question.
All great military writers emphasize the tremendously decisive significance of the moral factor in war. One half of Clausewitz’s great book is devoted to this question, and the whole of our victory in the civil war is due to the circumstance that Trotsky knew how to apply this knowledge of the significance of the moral factor in war to our reality. When the old Czarist army went to pieces, the minister of war of the Kerensky government, Verkhovsky, proposed that the older military classes be discharged, the military authorities behind the front partly reduced, and the army reorganized by the introduction of fresh young elements. When we seized power, and the trenches emptied, many of us made the same proposition. But this idea was the purest Utopia. It was impossible to replace the fleeing Czarist army with fresh forces. These two waves would have crossed and divided each other. The old army had to be completely dissolved; the new army could only be built up on the alarm sent out by Soviet Russia to the workers and peasants, to defend the conquests of the revolution.
When, in April 1918, the best Czarist officers who remained in the army after our victory met together for the purpose of working out, in conjunction with our comrades and some military representatives of the Allies, the plan of organization for the army, Trotsky listened to their plans for several days – I have a clear recollection of this scene – in silence. These were the plans of people who did not comprehend the upheaval going on before their eyes. Every one of them replied to the question of how an army was to be organized on the old pattern. They did not grasp the metamorphosis wrought in the human material upon which the army is based. How the war experts laughed at the first voluntary troops organized by Comrade Trotsky in his capacity as Commissar of War! Old Borisov, one of the best Russian military writers, assured those Communists with whom he was obliged to come in contact, time and again, that nothing would come of this undertaking, that the army could only be built up on the basis of general conscription, and maintained by iron discipline. He did not grasp that the volunteer troops were the secure foundation pillars upon which the structure was to be erected, and that the masses of peasants and workers could not possibly be rallied around the flag of war again unless the broad masses were confronted by deadly danger. Without believing for a single moment that the volunteer army could save Russia, Trotsky organized it as an apparatus which he required for the creation of a new army.
Utilizing the Bourgeois Specialists
But Trotsky’s organizing genius, and his boldness of thought are even more clearly expressed in his courageous determination to utilize the war specialists for creating the army. Every good Marxist is fully aware that in building up a good economic apparatus we still require the aid of the old capitalist organization. Lenin defended this proposition with the utmost decision in his April speech on the tasks of the Soviet power. In the mature circles of the party the idea is not contested. But the idea that we could create an instrument for the defense of the republic, an army, with the aid of the Czarist officers – encountered obstinate resistance. Who could think of re-arming the White officers who had just been disarmed? Thus many comrades questioned. I remember a discussion on this question among the editors of the Communist, the organ of the so-called left communists, in which the question of the employment of staff officers nearly led to a split. And the editors of this paper were among the best schooled theoreticians and practicians of the party. It suffices to mention the names of Bukharin, Ossonski, Lomov, W. Yakovlev. There was even greater distrust among the broad circles of our military comrades, recruited for our military organizations during the war. The mistrust of our military functionaries could only be allayed, their agreement to the utilization of the knowledge possessed by the old officers could only be won, by the burning faith of Trotsky in our social force, the belief that we could obtain from the war experts the benefit of their science, without permitting them to force their politics upon us; the belief that the revolutionary watchfulness of the progressive workers would enable them to overcome any counter-revolutionary attempts made by the staff officers.
Trotsky’s Magnetic Energy
In order to emerge victorious, it was necessary for the army to be headed by a man of iron will, and for this man to possess not only the full confidence of the party, but the ability of subjugating with his iron will the enemy who is forced to serve us. But Comrade Trotsky has not only succeeded in subordinating to his energy even the highest staff officers. He attained more: he succeeded in winning the confidence of the best elements among the war experts, and in converting them from enemies of Soviet Russia to its most profoundly convinced followers. I witnessed one such victory of Trotsky’s at the time of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. The officers who had accompanied us to Brest-Litovsk maintained a more than reserved attitude towards us. They fulfilled their role as experts with the utmost condescension, in the opinion that they were attending a comedy which merely served to cover a business transaction long since arranged between the Bolsheviki and the German government. But the manner in which Trotsky conducted the struggle against German imperialism, in the name of the principles of the Russian revolution, forced every human being present in the assembly room to feel the moral and spiritual victory of this eminent representative of the Russian proletariat. The mistrust of the war experts towards us vanished in proportion to the development of the great Brest-Litovsk drama.
How clearly I recollect the night when Admiral Altvater – who has since died – one of the leading officers of the old regime, who began to help Soviet Russia not from motives of fear but of conscience, entered my room and said: “I came here because you forced me to do so. I did not believe you; but now I shall help you, and do my work as never before, in the profound conviction that I am serving the fatherland.” It is one of Trotsky’s greatest victories that he has been able to impart the conviction that the Soviet government really fights for the welfare of the Russian people, even to such people who have come over to us from hostile camps on compulsion only. It goes without saying that this great victory on the inner front, this moral victory over the enemy, has been the result not only of Trotsky’s iron energy which won for him universal respect; not only the result of the deep moral force, the high degree of authority even in military spheres, which this socialist writer and people’s tribune, who was placed by the will of the revolution at the head of the army, has been able to win for himself; this victory has also required the self-denial of tens of thousands of our comrades in the army, an iron discipline in our own ranks, a consistent striving towards our aims; it has also required the miracle that those masses of human beings who only yesterday fled from the battle-field, take up arms again today, under much more difficult conditions, far the defense of the country.
That these politico-psychological mass factors played an important role is an undeniable fact, but the strongest, most concentrated, and striking expression of this influence is to be found in the personality of Trotsky. Here the Russian revolution has acted through the brain, the nervous system, and the heart of its greatest representative. When our first armed trial began, with Czecho-Slovakia, the party, and with its leader Trotsky, showed how the principle of the political campaign – as already taught by Lassalle – could be applied to war, to the fight with “steel arguments.” We concentrated all material and moral forces on the war. The whole party had grasped the necessity of this. But this necessity also finds its highest expression in the steel figure of Trotsky. After our victory over Denikin in March 1920, Trotsky said, at the party conference: “We have ravaged the whole of Russia in order to conquer the Whites.” In these words we again find the unparalleled concentration of will required to ensure the victory. We needed a man who was the embodiment of the war-cry, a man who became the tocsin sounding the alarm, the will demanding from one and all an unqualified subordination to the great bloody necessity.
It was only a man who works like Trotsky, a man who spares himself as little as Trotsky, who can speak to the soldiers as only Trotsky can – it was only such a man who could be the standard bearer of the armed working people. He has been everything in one person. He has thought out the strategic advice given by the experts and has combined it with a correct estimate of the proportions of social forces; he knew how to unite in one movement the impulses of fourteen fronts, of the ten thousand communists who informed headquarters as to what the real army is and how it is possible to operate with it; he understood how to combine all this in one strategic plan and one scheme of organization. And in all this splendid work he understood better than anyone else how to apply the knowledge of the significance of the moral factor in war.
This combination of strategist and military organizer with the politician is best characterized by the fact that during the whole of this hard work, Trotsky appreciated the importance of Demian Bedny (communist writer), or of the artist Moor (who draws most of the political caricatures for the communist papers, posters, etc.) for the war. Our army was an army of peasants, and the dictatorship of the proletariat with regard to the army, that is, the leading of this peasants’ army by workers and by representatives of the working class, was realized in the personality of Trotsky and in the comrades co-operating with him. Trotsky was able, with the aid of the whole apparatus of our party, to impart to the peasants’ army, exhausted by the war, the profoundest conviction that it was fighting in its own interests.
Inseparably Linked in History
Trotsky worked with the whole party in the work of forming the Red Army. He would not have fulfilled his task without the party. But without him the creation of the Red Army and its victories, would have demanded infinitely greater sacrifices. Our party will go down in history as the first proletarian party which succeeded in creating a great army, and this bright page in the history of the Russian revolution will always be bound up with the name of Leon Davidovitch Trotsky, with the name of a man whose work and deeds will claim not only the love, but also the scientific study of the young generation of workers preparing to conquer the whole world.
Friday, August 26, 2011
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 71st Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Father And Son By Natalia Sedova Trotsky
Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*******
Natalia Sedova Trotsky
Father and Son
Written:1940
First Published: 1941 (English translation)
Source: Fourth International
Online Version: Natalia Sedova Internet Archive, December 2001
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Mike Bessler
"I can therefore say that I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule but as on exception to the rule."
June 8, 1940
Trotsky
Night. Darkness. I awaken. Pale patches of light flicker and then disappear. I raise myself...The sound of shots breaks upon my ears. They are shooting here, in our room. I have always been a light sleeper, and on awakening can quickly orient myself as to what is happening. Lev Davidovich was a sound sleeper in his younger years. Insomnia beset him for the first time when attacks against the Opposition began in the USSR, when the pages of Pravda began to overflow with black slander, unimaginable, fantastic slander which overwhelmed and dumbfounded the reader. To defend and justify themselves the slanderers used lies: they had no other weapon at their disposal.
Did the reading public believe them? Yes and no. The colossal tide of raging malice swept over them, engulfed them and they became disoriented... Tired, worn-out by the heroic years of the revolution, filled with fears about the future of its conquests, they began to believe the calumny, just as people begin to place faith in miracles during periods of decline and prostration. I used to see how the hands of readers would tremble as they held up the huge pages of Pravda; their hands would drop and then would be upraised again.
Our boys also lost sleep. The younger one, in bitter perplexity, would ask me: "What is it? Why do they say these things about papa? How dare they?" The older one, Leon, became frantic and was in a constant state of excitement. With a pale face he would tell me of his impressions in the circles of the youth and of his struggle against the buffets of the torrent of filth. "Brave little tailor," (a hero of one of Andersen's fairy tales), his father would say observing him with approbation.
"The brave little tailor" took pride in his health, and was not a little upset during that period by the unexpected insomnia, but he did not give in. He remained proud of his health until the last two years of his life, when suddenly it worsened quickly. The black years of the cynical Moscow trials mowed him down. For our son Leon was, though ill absentia, one of the chief defendants. The venom of criminal slander entered like poison into his young body. His entire nervous system was affected by the murders of Zinoviev, Piatakov, Muralov, Smirnov, Kamenev, Bukharin and many others; Kamenev and Bukharin he knew from his childhood, with the others he became acquainted later on, and he knew them all as honest revolutionists, he learned from them, loved them, respected them and connected them with the revolution, with its heroism, with its Lenin and Trotsky.
Nights of sleeplessness returned and he did not have the strength to fight them off. Sleeping drugs worked poorly on him. He would doze off only towards morning. And he had to get up between seven and eight in order to begin work, which was rendered still more difficult by the surveillance of the ever-wakeful GPU whose agents, as was later revealed, occupied quarters next to his. He lived at No. 26; they at No. 28.
Father and Son During the Moscow Trials
Our arrest in Norway aroused our son to the very core of his being: he was fully aware of what it meant. Our departure for Mexico, the three weeks' journey on board the oil tanker surrounded only by enemies introduced mortal alarm into his life. When we were at Gourum--the place of our incarceration in Norway--he sent us directions written in invisible ink and in code how to organize our trip. It was not discovered by our enemies and we received it. He sent friends to us from France. But no one was permitted to see us. And none of our friends was allowed to accompany us. Those three weeks of complete uncertainty were a great trial for Leon.
His father raged like a caged tiger. Delayed newspaper accounts of the then famous and first staging of the Moscow trials, his inability to answer it and expose the liars, were the greatest torture for Lev Davidovich. To defend himself against slander, to fight it--after all, this was his native element, the organic passion of his being; he found refuge in furious labor and in the struggle against all his contemptible enemies. But here in Gourum where he was doomed to silence, he fell ill.
Our son Leon understood this: his despair knew no bounds. He applied himself to the task which his father could not fulfill. In order to ease the latter's burden he came out himself with the exposure of the vile masters of the "Moscow Trials" whom he branded for what they were and who have written into the annals of history its most shameful and most revolting pages. Leon fulfilled this task brilliantly. In our jail we read his "Red Book" with great excitement. "All very true, all very true, good boy," said his father with a friend's tenderness. We wanted so much to see him and to embrace him!
In addition to his revolutionary activity and his literary work, our son occupied himself with higher mathematics which greatly interested him. In Paris he managed to pass examinations and dreamed of some time devoting himself to systematic work. On the very eve of his death he was accepted as a collaborator by the Scientific Institute of Holland and was to begin work on the subject of the Russian Opposition He was the only one among the youth who had had an enormous experience in this field and who was exhaustively acquainted with the entire history of the Opposition from its very inception.
Our economic instability used to worry him a great deal. How he yearned for economic independence! He once wrote me about his prospective earnings. The possibilities were good but he did not yet have definite assurance. "It would be a remarkable thing" (i.e., work in the Scientific Institute), he said and then added facetiously, "I would be in a position to assist my aging parents." "Why not dream?" he asked. His father and I often recalled these words of our son with love and tenderness. Mr. Spalding--assistant supervisor of the Russian Department in Stanford University-conducted some negotiations with our son in Paris concerning a prospective work, and here is what he later wrote about Leon: "The news of Sedov's death came to me as a shock. He impressed me as an extremely able and attractive personality, his future would undoubtedly have been brilliant. We are quite unclear about the circumstances of his death: some sources of our information indicate that it was due to medical negligence, or even something more terrible. Could you find it possible to write a brief note summarizing the conversation I had with Sedov last October (1937), including the tentative agreement which I had concluded with him. I could use such a note in ease it is possible to obtain certain information from Trotsky concerning the Russian civil war and war communism."
Leon entered the revolution as a child and never left it to the end of his days. The semi-conscious loyalty of his childhood toward the revolution later matured into a conscious and firmly intrenched devotion. Once in the summer of 1917, he came from school with a bloody hand into the office of the Woodworkers Trade Union (Bolshevik) where I was then working as editor and proof-reader of its organ, "Woodworkers Echo." It was the time of hot debates which took place net only in the Tauride Palace, the Smolny, or the Circus but also in the streets, the streetcars, schools and at work. Early in the morning, as a rule, a multitude of workers milled in the officer of our union, discussing current questions, i.e., the questions involving the impending seizure of power by the proletariat For the mass of workers these questions were indissolubly bound up with the personality of L.D. They discussed his speeches--and in these discussions could be felt the unity and inflexibility of will: a burning desire to march forward, summoning for a decisive struggle with unconquerable faith in victory.
The children were permitted to have their meals together with me in the union's dining room. Lev Davidovich was at the time sitting in the jail of the Provisional Democratic Government. To the queries of comrades concerning his hand Leon replied that he had been bitten by Kerensky (the Premier's son). How come? "I gave him one in his teeth." We all understood what had happened. The same school was also attended by the children of Skobelev, the then Minister of Labor. Fights were a daily occurrence.
By a blow from ambush the GPU cut short the young and dented life of our son and friend. This price was exacted for the upward flight unprecedented in history of the October revolution. Those responsible for its decline are now bringing their despicable work to its conclusion. The Second October will come; it will conquer the whole world and it will mete out their deserts both to the heroes of its predecessor as well as to its grave-diggers.
Lev Davidovich did not pore over the filthy pages of the Communist Party's paper "Pravda". He would quickly glance over it, and toss it aside with aversion. They are shooting...Lev Davidovich is now also awake. I whisper in his ear: "They are shooting here, in our room." And pressing close to him, I push him very, very gently, and drop down together with him from the low bed on to the floor.
"They are shooting." I uttered this with the self-same feeling as in the July days of 1917 I had said, "they have come." This was in Petrograd--it was later named Leningrad --when the police of Kerensky's government came to arrest L.D. We had expected arrest at the time--it was inevitable. The attack of Stalin was likewise expected by us. It was also inevitable. Nevertheless the expected came more unexpectedly on the night of May 24, 1940 than did the arrest in 1917.
When Kerensky Arrested Lev Davidovich
Kerensky's government had at that time scored a victory, not for long, but it did nonetheless succeed in arresting the Bolshevik leaders. I recall the manner in which the crisis of the Provisional Democratic Government was resolved. A stormy session was going on in the beautiful Hall of Columns in the Tauride Palace. I was sitting in a box, very close to the speakers' platform which was filled to overflowing with all the Lieberdans (this was how Demyan Bedny had labelled the Mensheviks in one of his poems which gained wide popularity). Suddenly there came the blare of triumphant music. A military band marched into the palace to the accompaniment of deafening applause and ecstatic greetings. The Government had secretly transferred from the front, regiments loyal to it and, as the future proved, these regiments were the last loyal ones. But at the time, they were sufficient. Those in power began to feel firm ground under their feet. I saw how those who tilled the platform, the conquerors, were covertly shaking each other by the hand, how they with great difficulty tried to restrain their transports of joy--their faces glowed, they were unable to preserve even an outward appearance of calm as was dictated by the circumstances.
In a few days the arrests began. L.D. and I occupied at the time a small room in the apartment of Comrade Y. Larin. Our boys were in Terioki with some friends. L.D. had spent that entire day as, incidentally, he spent all previous ones, at meetings until late into the white Petersburg night.
At five o'clock in the morning I heard a cautious tramping of feet on the asphalt in the courtyard and when I ran to the window and opened a chink in the shutters, I saw in the early white light uniforms in gray and guns slung across the arms. It was a military detachment of the Provisional Democratic Government. Beyond any doubt, this was for us. And touching L.D. on the shoulder I said, "They have come." He jumped up and began to dress himself swiftly. The bell rang. Comrade Larin, whom I had warned, did not open the door immediately. They rang again. They asked for Lunacharsky, this was a subterfuge. Then they presented an order for Trotsky's arrest. Larin did not give in. He forced them to wait. He tried to get the responsible Lieberdans on the telephone. But there was no answer anywhere. We said goodbye. Lev Davidovich did everything to keep up my spirits. They led him away. The general political situation was very grave at the time. The struggle was out in the open, direct actions were already being employed. It was a life and death struggle. But the last look L.D. gave me before he was taken away war full of confidence and challenge. That glance said to me: "We shall see who will vanquish whom."
There were visits to jail to arrange, the sending of packages to attend to, and so forth. I had the assistance of Leon and Sergei who undertook the delivery of packages (food, and so on) and transformed it into a game: "Who'll get there first." The overfilled street cars presented them with a great difficulty, but they hitched on and always arrived in jail exactly at the appointed hour.
They were greatly aroused by their father's second arrest. But the entire situation bore the promise of swift liberation and victory. It was quite different from the time when we were taken off the ship enroute to Russia by the English and separated, in 1917 in Halifax. The boys then remained with me in the status of prisoners not in jail but in a filthy room of a Russian spy in whose house a room was assigned to us. But L.D. was taken away with the others without a word of explanation. Complete uncertainty and isolation oppressed us extremely at the time.
The Attempted Assassination
We are lying on the floor, beside the wall in a corner and away from the cross-fire which proceeded without interruption for several minutes. Afterwards we took count of the holes in the walls and the doors of our bedroom: they numbered sixty. Pressing our bodies to the wall, we waited...l raised myself a little in order to shield L.D. because it seemed to me that the shots were being directed at him, but he stopped me. "Grandfather!" We both heard the cry of our grandson who slept in the neighboring room into which the criminals had entered. His voice rang out as if part in warning of the danger threatening us and part in a plea for help. Our grandson forgot about it, forgot his outcry, and no matter how I tried to remind him of his experiences and memories, he could not recall it. But this cry chilled us to the marrow. Everything became silent ... "They have kidnapped him," said his grandfather to me quietly. On the threshold which separated our bedroom from that of our grandson, illuminated by the flare of an incendiary bomb, a silhouette flashed: the curve of a helmet, shining buttons, an elongated face flashed by me as in a dream, and then 1 lost sight of the intruder. The shooting in the room stopped. We heard the sound of gunfire at a distance in the patio.
Quietly, slowly I crossed our bedroom and walked into the bathroom where a window gave to the patio. The little house could be seen where our friends, our guard lived. There also stood an enormous eucalyptus tree, and it was from there that they were firing! Beside this eucalyptus tree, as we later learned, the enemies had placed a machine gun. By a steady stream of fire they thus strategically cut off the guards from us. Investigating magistrates later found on the premises a bomb containing one and a half kilos of dynamite. A record of this is to be found in the minutes of the court in the case of the assault by Siqueiros, who was subsequently released on March 28, 1941: for lack of material and incriminating evidence! How monstrous! "The Master of the Soviet Land," "The Father of the Peoples," etc., etc., paid out lavishly from the proletarian treasury. According to the records, there was some sort of technical defect in the bomb and it could not be used by the criminals. But the investigation brought out the fact that it had sufficient power to blast the entire house to its foundation.
The shooting in the patio also ceased. Then, all was silence. Silent... intolerably silent. "Where can I hide you safely?" I was losing my strength from the tension and the hopelessness of the situation. Any moment now, they will come to finish him. My head spun around...And suddenly there came again the same voice, the voice of our grandson, but this time it came from the patio and sounded completely different, ringing out like a staccato passage of music bravely. joyously: "Al--fred! Mar--gue--rite!" It returned us to the living. A moment before we had felt the stillness of the night after firing ceased as in a grave, as with death itself..."They are all killed."
"Alfred! Marguerite!" No, they are alive...alive! But why then does no one come? Why does no one call us? After all, the others had left. Perhaps they are afraid, afraid of coming face to face with the irreparable. I seized the handle in the door which leads from our bedroom into L.D.'s workroom. It was closed, although we never locked it as a rule. The door was riddled by bullets like a sieve. They had fired through it into the bedroom. Through the interstices I could see the room suffused with a soft golden light from the shaded lamp on the ceiling; I could see the table covered with manuscripts in complete order; the books on the shelves were not touched. everything was tranquil there; the very background of the reign of thought, of creativeness was there. It was exactly as it had been left on the eve... How strange that was: order, tranquillity, light, everything on the table intact... Only the door with its black yawning holes bespoke the crime just committed.
I began pounding on the door. Otto came running. "The door is jammed for some reason." With our joint forces we opened the door. We walked into this wonderful, and at that time undisturbed room.
Robert Sheldon Harte
Seva, Alfred, Marguerite, Otto, Charlie, Jack, Harold--they were all there. Only Bob Sheldon was not with us. He, poor boy, had been on night duty and they had kidnapped him. A few of his belongings, some clothes and parts of his equipment remained in the empty garage... These made one's heart constrict in pain; one wanted to ask them what had happened to our friend, our guard? where was he? what had they done to him? Bob's things shrouded in mystery spoke to us of his doom. Sheldon had behind him altogether 23 years. How many hopes, how much idealism, faith in the future, readiness to struggle for it had perished with this young life! Exotic Mexico enthralled him. He was fascinated by the brightly colored little birds, acquired a few of them, kept them in our garden, and tended them so touchingly. Twenty three years: they lacked in the experience of life: they had not yet been moulded to an awareness of danger, the urgency of keeping on guard, but they were so sensitive as to have acquired all this presently, in a very short time. Sheldon loved to take walks. In his free hours he took walks around the environs of Coyoacan and brought back bouquets of field flowers.
Shortly after his arrival, he received a lesson from Lev Davidovich. Our place was being rebuilt, and it was necessary to open the gates every 15-20 minutes in order to let a worker with a wheelbarrow out into the street and then let him in back again. Bob was so carried away by building a bird cage that in order not to tear himself away from his work he handed the gate-key to the worker. This did not escape the notice of L.D. The latter explained to Bob that this was very careless on his part and added, "You might prove to be the first victim of your own carelessness." This was said about a month or six weeks before Bob's tragic death.
The day of May 24 began for us early and was full of excitement. The more we probed into an analysis of the bulletriddled walls and mattresses all the more did we become imbued with the realization of the danger that had threatened us, and all the more did we feel ourselves saved. The nervous tension of the night discharged itself into a state of high excitement kept in check by efforts to remain calm. This absence of dejection later served as one of the arguments in sup port of the senseless and shameless "theory of self-assault." As I recounted the events of the GPU's night assault to friends who visited us during that day, I felt that I was relating this almost with joy. But those who listened heard me with alarm, they cast frightened glances towards the heads of the two beds, where the wall was dotted with bullet holes, and I would say to myself as if in justification: "But after all the enemies did suffer failure."
The following days strengthened more and more in us the conviction that the failure suffered by our enemies on this occasion must be remedied by them; that the inspirer of this crime would not be deterred. And our joyous feeling of salvation was dampened by the prospect of a new visitation and the need to prepare for it.
L.D.'s Work During the Last Months
At the same time, Lev Davidovich was taking part in the conduct of the investigation of the case of May 24. Its slothful pace worried L.D. exceedingly. He followed the developments patiently and tirelessly, explaining the circumstances of the case to the court and to the press, making superhuman efforts to force himself to refute the self-evident and hopeless lies or malicious equivocations, doing all this with the intense perspicacity peculiar to him, and not allowing a single detail to escape his notice. He attached the proper significance to every single thing, and wove them all into a single whole.
And he grew tired. He slept poorly, dozing off and awakening with the self-same thoughts. Sometimes heard Lev Davidovich, when alone, say from his innermost depths, "I am tired...tired." A feeling of greatest alarm would seize me: I knew what this meant. But I also knew something else: I knew of the influx of vitality, inspiration and energy he would feel if he only could return quietly to his real work. He had outlined an analytical work on the Red Army for which he had been collecting material, another on the international situation; still others on world economy, and the latest period of the war. The day-to-day occurrences and the successive crimes of Stalin made it necessary to relegate these tasks to the second plane.
His book on Stalin had been forced on him by extraneous circumstances: financial necessity and by his publishers. Lev Davidovich more than once expressed a desire to write a "popular" book, as he called it, in order to earn some money thereby and then rest up by working on subjects of interest to him. But he could not bring this about, he was incapable of writing "popular" books. For a long time he hesitated to accept the publisher's offer, but our friends insisted on it. L.D. finally agreed. He planned to finish this work in a short while. But once he undertook it, he began to surround it with a conscientiousness peculiar to him and with a spirit of meticulousness and pedantism of which he often used to complain to me. Nevertheless he proposed to have it finished completely by March-April 1940. He was not able to. First the controversy in our party --its American section-distracted him, and then the events of May 24.
One of L.D.'s secret and most cherished desires was to depict the friendship between Marx and Engels, their "romance" which, as he told me, had never been investigated in his opinion as he wanted to do it. Lev Davidovich was very much in love with Engels, his whole profoundly human personality. He was greatly enthralled by the coupling of the two great and utterly different personalities of the two friends bound together by their striving for a single goal.
His Projected Book On Lenin
It was not without sorrow that he had to renounce for the time being the continuation of his book on Lenin. His deep and burning desire was to show Lenin as he was in reality as against all those who had written about Lenin self-obstrusively and measuring him by their own yardstick. No figment of the imagination of the epigones, however brilliant, could compare with the original. Lenin must appear before history, he had every right to it, in all his genius and with all his human weaknesses. The epigones, on the other hand, had endowed Lenin with good nature, modesty, simplicity, etc.,--but what did all this mean with reference to Lenin? They depicted him "in their own image." And Vladimir Ilyich was not one to be squeezed into a common mould. Lev Davidovich would demand also of me the most minute and insignificant recollections, but those which corresponded with reality, and he was very happy when I would recount to him or jot down for him various details he had not known and in which he was able to discern the real Lenin.
In 1917, in Petrograd, in the Smolny, our apartment was in the same corridor with the apartment of Lenin and his family. They used the bathroom located on our living area. We used to meet each other often in passing. Lenin was always brimful of energy, cheerful, polite. Once he walked in and seeing the boys, placed them side by side, stepped back a little, and putting both hands in his pockets, astonished me by saying cheerily: "Say, I like this!" The costume of the children had suddenly caught his eye. In those days, textiles were unobtainable and it never entered my mind to get a special order to obtain material for some shirts. We had a velvet tablecloth, with a flowery pattern, which I had cleaned and then cut up and sewed into blouses for the children. The boys were not much pleased. "Why go and make us shirts out of a rug?" I justified myself ... but it did not do any good. To be sure, they wore them. but not without grumbling. After Vladimir Ilyich's praise, the boys quieted down.
L.D.'s Health
During our ten years in the USSR, there were no great variations in L. D.'s health. in exile, or rather in emigration, his physical condition began to ebb and flow. In exile (Alma-Ata) Lev Davidovich's life was swallowed up by correspondence--in its way this was a continuation of our life during the last period in Moscow; current political and tactical questions were ever under discussion. We received such a quantity of mail as to make it impossible sometimes to read all the letters during the day. Our son Leon Sedov used to reply to a part of them, his father answered the greater portion. During the last months (of our stay in Alma-Ata) all correspondence, as is well known, was prohibited. It passed into illegal channels and its volume was greatly reduced.
At Prinkipo (Turkey) L.D. found it very hard at first. Inactivity and isolation oppressed him. The questions arose of the means of livelihood, funds for defense, funds for the foreign oppositional groups. All this compelled him to accept a publisher's offer to write his autobiography. It was very difficult for L. D. psychologically to enter into this work. It was so sharply out of harmony with the general bent of his being. He had to force himself to "recollect." This reacted on his nerves and his health on the whole became impaired.
A revival of his moral and physical condition occurred with the establishment of ties with European co-thinkers. Visitors from abroad, discussions with them, correspondence, writing political articles for oppositional organs in Europe--all this restored L.D. to his native element. And this in turn eased for him the compulsory labor over the autobiography.
At the dinner table or during fishing trips in the Sea of Marmora, no one suspected "low tide." Conversations on political topics, jokes, perking up this or that somewhat crestfallen comrade, all these invariably testified to the equanimity of L.D.'s moods. Only our son, when he lived with us, was able to guess that this was not so. How I loved the periods of "floodtide," how happy I was during them! Freshness, youthfulness, joyfulness returned in these periods to L.D. He would then passionately dictate political letters, and suggestions to friends, he would dictate his autobiography and various articles, and go fishing in the blue waters of the sea... He seethed in a frenzy. And all this in complete isolation. Behind four walls.
Our life near Royan (France) on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in the isolated villa "Sea-Spray" which our friends had rented for us, had a turbulent beginning. Friends and co-thinkers from different countries would arrive daily to visit L.D. We had from 15 to 20 visitors a day. L.D. would hold two or three discussions daily. Full of inspiration, vitality and seemingly inexhaustible energy, he astonished and gladdened our friends by his tirelessness and vigor. And here in France the financial aspect of our life again arose very sharply. There was a lull. I had to go to Paris for medical care. Lev Davidovich insisted on it. In his own physical condition there came the alterations of ebb and flow.
From Royan, L.D. once wrote me that despite his poor health he had carried through a discussion, and did it very successfully, with some friends who had arrived and in the presence of our son. "I watched Lyovik," he wrote. "His eyes were shining. He was radiant." After the discussion L.D. went to bed early, because of fatigue and he heard the stormy ocean flinging its spray to the windows of his room, dashing drops against the window panes. Leon came in to bid his father goodbye. He had to return that night to Paris. They exchanged a few warm remarks about the discussion that had just concluded. Our son was very excited and aroused. He approached his father's bed, and dropping his head, "like a child," as his father wrote, on his father's breast, he pressed closely and said, "Papa, I love you very much." They embraced each other and parted with tears.
The ocean continues to live with its stormy ebbs and flows. It seethes in a frenzy. The great fighter might have also lived on... Violence. The dealers of violence will meet with vengeance. Violence will wither away. Free mankind of the future will bow its head in memory of its innumerable victims.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*******
Natalia Sedova Trotsky
Father and Son
Written:1940
First Published: 1941 (English translation)
Source: Fourth International
Online Version: Natalia Sedova Internet Archive, December 2001
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Mike Bessler
"I can therefore say that I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule but as on exception to the rule."
June 8, 1940
Trotsky
Night. Darkness. I awaken. Pale patches of light flicker and then disappear. I raise myself...The sound of shots breaks upon my ears. They are shooting here, in our room. I have always been a light sleeper, and on awakening can quickly orient myself as to what is happening. Lev Davidovich was a sound sleeper in his younger years. Insomnia beset him for the first time when attacks against the Opposition began in the USSR, when the pages of Pravda began to overflow with black slander, unimaginable, fantastic slander which overwhelmed and dumbfounded the reader. To defend and justify themselves the slanderers used lies: they had no other weapon at their disposal.
Did the reading public believe them? Yes and no. The colossal tide of raging malice swept over them, engulfed them and they became disoriented... Tired, worn-out by the heroic years of the revolution, filled with fears about the future of its conquests, they began to believe the calumny, just as people begin to place faith in miracles during periods of decline and prostration. I used to see how the hands of readers would tremble as they held up the huge pages of Pravda; their hands would drop and then would be upraised again.
Our boys also lost sleep. The younger one, in bitter perplexity, would ask me: "What is it? Why do they say these things about papa? How dare they?" The older one, Leon, became frantic and was in a constant state of excitement. With a pale face he would tell me of his impressions in the circles of the youth and of his struggle against the buffets of the torrent of filth. "Brave little tailor," (a hero of one of Andersen's fairy tales), his father would say observing him with approbation.
"The brave little tailor" took pride in his health, and was not a little upset during that period by the unexpected insomnia, but he did not give in. He remained proud of his health until the last two years of his life, when suddenly it worsened quickly. The black years of the cynical Moscow trials mowed him down. For our son Leon was, though ill absentia, one of the chief defendants. The venom of criminal slander entered like poison into his young body. His entire nervous system was affected by the murders of Zinoviev, Piatakov, Muralov, Smirnov, Kamenev, Bukharin and many others; Kamenev and Bukharin he knew from his childhood, with the others he became acquainted later on, and he knew them all as honest revolutionists, he learned from them, loved them, respected them and connected them with the revolution, with its heroism, with its Lenin and Trotsky.
Nights of sleeplessness returned and he did not have the strength to fight them off. Sleeping drugs worked poorly on him. He would doze off only towards morning. And he had to get up between seven and eight in order to begin work, which was rendered still more difficult by the surveillance of the ever-wakeful GPU whose agents, as was later revealed, occupied quarters next to his. He lived at No. 26; they at No. 28.
Father and Son During the Moscow Trials
Our arrest in Norway aroused our son to the very core of his being: he was fully aware of what it meant. Our departure for Mexico, the three weeks' journey on board the oil tanker surrounded only by enemies introduced mortal alarm into his life. When we were at Gourum--the place of our incarceration in Norway--he sent us directions written in invisible ink and in code how to organize our trip. It was not discovered by our enemies and we received it. He sent friends to us from France. But no one was permitted to see us. And none of our friends was allowed to accompany us. Those three weeks of complete uncertainty were a great trial for Leon.
His father raged like a caged tiger. Delayed newspaper accounts of the then famous and first staging of the Moscow trials, his inability to answer it and expose the liars, were the greatest torture for Lev Davidovich. To defend himself against slander, to fight it--after all, this was his native element, the organic passion of his being; he found refuge in furious labor and in the struggle against all his contemptible enemies. But here in Gourum where he was doomed to silence, he fell ill.
Our son Leon understood this: his despair knew no bounds. He applied himself to the task which his father could not fulfill. In order to ease the latter's burden he came out himself with the exposure of the vile masters of the "Moscow Trials" whom he branded for what they were and who have written into the annals of history its most shameful and most revolting pages. Leon fulfilled this task brilliantly. In our jail we read his "Red Book" with great excitement. "All very true, all very true, good boy," said his father with a friend's tenderness. We wanted so much to see him and to embrace him!
In addition to his revolutionary activity and his literary work, our son occupied himself with higher mathematics which greatly interested him. In Paris he managed to pass examinations and dreamed of some time devoting himself to systematic work. On the very eve of his death he was accepted as a collaborator by the Scientific Institute of Holland and was to begin work on the subject of the Russian Opposition He was the only one among the youth who had had an enormous experience in this field and who was exhaustively acquainted with the entire history of the Opposition from its very inception.
Our economic instability used to worry him a great deal. How he yearned for economic independence! He once wrote me about his prospective earnings. The possibilities were good but he did not yet have definite assurance. "It would be a remarkable thing" (i.e., work in the Scientific Institute), he said and then added facetiously, "I would be in a position to assist my aging parents." "Why not dream?" he asked. His father and I often recalled these words of our son with love and tenderness. Mr. Spalding--assistant supervisor of the Russian Department in Stanford University-conducted some negotiations with our son in Paris concerning a prospective work, and here is what he later wrote about Leon: "The news of Sedov's death came to me as a shock. He impressed me as an extremely able and attractive personality, his future would undoubtedly have been brilliant. We are quite unclear about the circumstances of his death: some sources of our information indicate that it was due to medical negligence, or even something more terrible. Could you find it possible to write a brief note summarizing the conversation I had with Sedov last October (1937), including the tentative agreement which I had concluded with him. I could use such a note in ease it is possible to obtain certain information from Trotsky concerning the Russian civil war and war communism."
Leon entered the revolution as a child and never left it to the end of his days. The semi-conscious loyalty of his childhood toward the revolution later matured into a conscious and firmly intrenched devotion. Once in the summer of 1917, he came from school with a bloody hand into the office of the Woodworkers Trade Union (Bolshevik) where I was then working as editor and proof-reader of its organ, "Woodworkers Echo." It was the time of hot debates which took place net only in the Tauride Palace, the Smolny, or the Circus but also in the streets, the streetcars, schools and at work. Early in the morning, as a rule, a multitude of workers milled in the officer of our union, discussing current questions, i.e., the questions involving the impending seizure of power by the proletariat For the mass of workers these questions were indissolubly bound up with the personality of L.D. They discussed his speeches--and in these discussions could be felt the unity and inflexibility of will: a burning desire to march forward, summoning for a decisive struggle with unconquerable faith in victory.
The children were permitted to have their meals together with me in the union's dining room. Lev Davidovich was at the time sitting in the jail of the Provisional Democratic Government. To the queries of comrades concerning his hand Leon replied that he had been bitten by Kerensky (the Premier's son). How come? "I gave him one in his teeth." We all understood what had happened. The same school was also attended by the children of Skobelev, the then Minister of Labor. Fights were a daily occurrence.
By a blow from ambush the GPU cut short the young and dented life of our son and friend. This price was exacted for the upward flight unprecedented in history of the October revolution. Those responsible for its decline are now bringing their despicable work to its conclusion. The Second October will come; it will conquer the whole world and it will mete out their deserts both to the heroes of its predecessor as well as to its grave-diggers.
Lev Davidovich did not pore over the filthy pages of the Communist Party's paper "Pravda". He would quickly glance over it, and toss it aside with aversion. They are shooting...Lev Davidovich is now also awake. I whisper in his ear: "They are shooting here, in our room." And pressing close to him, I push him very, very gently, and drop down together with him from the low bed on to the floor.
"They are shooting." I uttered this with the self-same feeling as in the July days of 1917 I had said, "they have come." This was in Petrograd--it was later named Leningrad --when the police of Kerensky's government came to arrest L.D. We had expected arrest at the time--it was inevitable. The attack of Stalin was likewise expected by us. It was also inevitable. Nevertheless the expected came more unexpectedly on the night of May 24, 1940 than did the arrest in 1917.
When Kerensky Arrested Lev Davidovich
Kerensky's government had at that time scored a victory, not for long, but it did nonetheless succeed in arresting the Bolshevik leaders. I recall the manner in which the crisis of the Provisional Democratic Government was resolved. A stormy session was going on in the beautiful Hall of Columns in the Tauride Palace. I was sitting in a box, very close to the speakers' platform which was filled to overflowing with all the Lieberdans (this was how Demyan Bedny had labelled the Mensheviks in one of his poems which gained wide popularity). Suddenly there came the blare of triumphant music. A military band marched into the palace to the accompaniment of deafening applause and ecstatic greetings. The Government had secretly transferred from the front, regiments loyal to it and, as the future proved, these regiments were the last loyal ones. But at the time, they were sufficient. Those in power began to feel firm ground under their feet. I saw how those who tilled the platform, the conquerors, were covertly shaking each other by the hand, how they with great difficulty tried to restrain their transports of joy--their faces glowed, they were unable to preserve even an outward appearance of calm as was dictated by the circumstances.
In a few days the arrests began. L.D. and I occupied at the time a small room in the apartment of Comrade Y. Larin. Our boys were in Terioki with some friends. L.D. had spent that entire day as, incidentally, he spent all previous ones, at meetings until late into the white Petersburg night.
At five o'clock in the morning I heard a cautious tramping of feet on the asphalt in the courtyard and when I ran to the window and opened a chink in the shutters, I saw in the early white light uniforms in gray and guns slung across the arms. It was a military detachment of the Provisional Democratic Government. Beyond any doubt, this was for us. And touching L.D. on the shoulder I said, "They have come." He jumped up and began to dress himself swiftly. The bell rang. Comrade Larin, whom I had warned, did not open the door immediately. They rang again. They asked for Lunacharsky, this was a subterfuge. Then they presented an order for Trotsky's arrest. Larin did not give in. He forced them to wait. He tried to get the responsible Lieberdans on the telephone. But there was no answer anywhere. We said goodbye. Lev Davidovich did everything to keep up my spirits. They led him away. The general political situation was very grave at the time. The struggle was out in the open, direct actions were already being employed. It was a life and death struggle. But the last look L.D. gave me before he was taken away war full of confidence and challenge. That glance said to me: "We shall see who will vanquish whom."
There were visits to jail to arrange, the sending of packages to attend to, and so forth. I had the assistance of Leon and Sergei who undertook the delivery of packages (food, and so on) and transformed it into a game: "Who'll get there first." The overfilled street cars presented them with a great difficulty, but they hitched on and always arrived in jail exactly at the appointed hour.
They were greatly aroused by their father's second arrest. But the entire situation bore the promise of swift liberation and victory. It was quite different from the time when we were taken off the ship enroute to Russia by the English and separated, in 1917 in Halifax. The boys then remained with me in the status of prisoners not in jail but in a filthy room of a Russian spy in whose house a room was assigned to us. But L.D. was taken away with the others without a word of explanation. Complete uncertainty and isolation oppressed us extremely at the time.
The Attempted Assassination
We are lying on the floor, beside the wall in a corner and away from the cross-fire which proceeded without interruption for several minutes. Afterwards we took count of the holes in the walls and the doors of our bedroom: they numbered sixty. Pressing our bodies to the wall, we waited...l raised myself a little in order to shield L.D. because it seemed to me that the shots were being directed at him, but he stopped me. "Grandfather!" We both heard the cry of our grandson who slept in the neighboring room into which the criminals had entered. His voice rang out as if part in warning of the danger threatening us and part in a plea for help. Our grandson forgot about it, forgot his outcry, and no matter how I tried to remind him of his experiences and memories, he could not recall it. But this cry chilled us to the marrow. Everything became silent ... "They have kidnapped him," said his grandfather to me quietly. On the threshold which separated our bedroom from that of our grandson, illuminated by the flare of an incendiary bomb, a silhouette flashed: the curve of a helmet, shining buttons, an elongated face flashed by me as in a dream, and then 1 lost sight of the intruder. The shooting in the room stopped. We heard the sound of gunfire at a distance in the patio.
Quietly, slowly I crossed our bedroom and walked into the bathroom where a window gave to the patio. The little house could be seen where our friends, our guard lived. There also stood an enormous eucalyptus tree, and it was from there that they were firing! Beside this eucalyptus tree, as we later learned, the enemies had placed a machine gun. By a steady stream of fire they thus strategically cut off the guards from us. Investigating magistrates later found on the premises a bomb containing one and a half kilos of dynamite. A record of this is to be found in the minutes of the court in the case of the assault by Siqueiros, who was subsequently released on March 28, 1941: for lack of material and incriminating evidence! How monstrous! "The Master of the Soviet Land," "The Father of the Peoples," etc., etc., paid out lavishly from the proletarian treasury. According to the records, there was some sort of technical defect in the bomb and it could not be used by the criminals. But the investigation brought out the fact that it had sufficient power to blast the entire house to its foundation.
The shooting in the patio also ceased. Then, all was silence. Silent... intolerably silent. "Where can I hide you safely?" I was losing my strength from the tension and the hopelessness of the situation. Any moment now, they will come to finish him. My head spun around...And suddenly there came again the same voice, the voice of our grandson, but this time it came from the patio and sounded completely different, ringing out like a staccato passage of music bravely. joyously: "Al--fred! Mar--gue--rite!" It returned us to the living. A moment before we had felt the stillness of the night after firing ceased as in a grave, as with death itself..."They are all killed."
"Alfred! Marguerite!" No, they are alive...alive! But why then does no one come? Why does no one call us? After all, the others had left. Perhaps they are afraid, afraid of coming face to face with the irreparable. I seized the handle in the door which leads from our bedroom into L.D.'s workroom. It was closed, although we never locked it as a rule. The door was riddled by bullets like a sieve. They had fired through it into the bedroom. Through the interstices I could see the room suffused with a soft golden light from the shaded lamp on the ceiling; I could see the table covered with manuscripts in complete order; the books on the shelves were not touched. everything was tranquil there; the very background of the reign of thought, of creativeness was there. It was exactly as it had been left on the eve... How strange that was: order, tranquillity, light, everything on the table intact... Only the door with its black yawning holes bespoke the crime just committed.
I began pounding on the door. Otto came running. "The door is jammed for some reason." With our joint forces we opened the door. We walked into this wonderful, and at that time undisturbed room.
Robert Sheldon Harte
Seva, Alfred, Marguerite, Otto, Charlie, Jack, Harold--they were all there. Only Bob Sheldon was not with us. He, poor boy, had been on night duty and they had kidnapped him. A few of his belongings, some clothes and parts of his equipment remained in the empty garage... These made one's heart constrict in pain; one wanted to ask them what had happened to our friend, our guard? where was he? what had they done to him? Bob's things shrouded in mystery spoke to us of his doom. Sheldon had behind him altogether 23 years. How many hopes, how much idealism, faith in the future, readiness to struggle for it had perished with this young life! Exotic Mexico enthralled him. He was fascinated by the brightly colored little birds, acquired a few of them, kept them in our garden, and tended them so touchingly. Twenty three years: they lacked in the experience of life: they had not yet been moulded to an awareness of danger, the urgency of keeping on guard, but they were so sensitive as to have acquired all this presently, in a very short time. Sheldon loved to take walks. In his free hours he took walks around the environs of Coyoacan and brought back bouquets of field flowers.
Shortly after his arrival, he received a lesson from Lev Davidovich. Our place was being rebuilt, and it was necessary to open the gates every 15-20 minutes in order to let a worker with a wheelbarrow out into the street and then let him in back again. Bob was so carried away by building a bird cage that in order not to tear himself away from his work he handed the gate-key to the worker. This did not escape the notice of L.D. The latter explained to Bob that this was very careless on his part and added, "You might prove to be the first victim of your own carelessness." This was said about a month or six weeks before Bob's tragic death.
The day of May 24 began for us early and was full of excitement. The more we probed into an analysis of the bulletriddled walls and mattresses all the more did we become imbued with the realization of the danger that had threatened us, and all the more did we feel ourselves saved. The nervous tension of the night discharged itself into a state of high excitement kept in check by efforts to remain calm. This absence of dejection later served as one of the arguments in sup port of the senseless and shameless "theory of self-assault." As I recounted the events of the GPU's night assault to friends who visited us during that day, I felt that I was relating this almost with joy. But those who listened heard me with alarm, they cast frightened glances towards the heads of the two beds, where the wall was dotted with bullet holes, and I would say to myself as if in justification: "But after all the enemies did suffer failure."
The following days strengthened more and more in us the conviction that the failure suffered by our enemies on this occasion must be remedied by them; that the inspirer of this crime would not be deterred. And our joyous feeling of salvation was dampened by the prospect of a new visitation and the need to prepare for it.
L.D.'s Work During the Last Months
At the same time, Lev Davidovich was taking part in the conduct of the investigation of the case of May 24. Its slothful pace worried L.D. exceedingly. He followed the developments patiently and tirelessly, explaining the circumstances of the case to the court and to the press, making superhuman efforts to force himself to refute the self-evident and hopeless lies or malicious equivocations, doing all this with the intense perspicacity peculiar to him, and not allowing a single detail to escape his notice. He attached the proper significance to every single thing, and wove them all into a single whole.
And he grew tired. He slept poorly, dozing off and awakening with the self-same thoughts. Sometimes heard Lev Davidovich, when alone, say from his innermost depths, "I am tired...tired." A feeling of greatest alarm would seize me: I knew what this meant. But I also knew something else: I knew of the influx of vitality, inspiration and energy he would feel if he only could return quietly to his real work. He had outlined an analytical work on the Red Army for which he had been collecting material, another on the international situation; still others on world economy, and the latest period of the war. The day-to-day occurrences and the successive crimes of Stalin made it necessary to relegate these tasks to the second plane.
His book on Stalin had been forced on him by extraneous circumstances: financial necessity and by his publishers. Lev Davidovich more than once expressed a desire to write a "popular" book, as he called it, in order to earn some money thereby and then rest up by working on subjects of interest to him. But he could not bring this about, he was incapable of writing "popular" books. For a long time he hesitated to accept the publisher's offer, but our friends insisted on it. L.D. finally agreed. He planned to finish this work in a short while. But once he undertook it, he began to surround it with a conscientiousness peculiar to him and with a spirit of meticulousness and pedantism of which he often used to complain to me. Nevertheless he proposed to have it finished completely by March-April 1940. He was not able to. First the controversy in our party --its American section-distracted him, and then the events of May 24.
One of L.D.'s secret and most cherished desires was to depict the friendship between Marx and Engels, their "romance" which, as he told me, had never been investigated in his opinion as he wanted to do it. Lev Davidovich was very much in love with Engels, his whole profoundly human personality. He was greatly enthralled by the coupling of the two great and utterly different personalities of the two friends bound together by their striving for a single goal.
His Projected Book On Lenin
It was not without sorrow that he had to renounce for the time being the continuation of his book on Lenin. His deep and burning desire was to show Lenin as he was in reality as against all those who had written about Lenin self-obstrusively and measuring him by their own yardstick. No figment of the imagination of the epigones, however brilliant, could compare with the original. Lenin must appear before history, he had every right to it, in all his genius and with all his human weaknesses. The epigones, on the other hand, had endowed Lenin with good nature, modesty, simplicity, etc.,--but what did all this mean with reference to Lenin? They depicted him "in their own image." And Vladimir Ilyich was not one to be squeezed into a common mould. Lev Davidovich would demand also of me the most minute and insignificant recollections, but those which corresponded with reality, and he was very happy when I would recount to him or jot down for him various details he had not known and in which he was able to discern the real Lenin.
In 1917, in Petrograd, in the Smolny, our apartment was in the same corridor with the apartment of Lenin and his family. They used the bathroom located on our living area. We used to meet each other often in passing. Lenin was always brimful of energy, cheerful, polite. Once he walked in and seeing the boys, placed them side by side, stepped back a little, and putting both hands in his pockets, astonished me by saying cheerily: "Say, I like this!" The costume of the children had suddenly caught his eye. In those days, textiles were unobtainable and it never entered my mind to get a special order to obtain material for some shirts. We had a velvet tablecloth, with a flowery pattern, which I had cleaned and then cut up and sewed into blouses for the children. The boys were not much pleased. "Why go and make us shirts out of a rug?" I justified myself ... but it did not do any good. To be sure, they wore them. but not without grumbling. After Vladimir Ilyich's praise, the boys quieted down.
L.D.'s Health
During our ten years in the USSR, there were no great variations in L. D.'s health. in exile, or rather in emigration, his physical condition began to ebb and flow. In exile (Alma-Ata) Lev Davidovich's life was swallowed up by correspondence--in its way this was a continuation of our life during the last period in Moscow; current political and tactical questions were ever under discussion. We received such a quantity of mail as to make it impossible sometimes to read all the letters during the day. Our son Leon Sedov used to reply to a part of them, his father answered the greater portion. During the last months (of our stay in Alma-Ata) all correspondence, as is well known, was prohibited. It passed into illegal channels and its volume was greatly reduced.
At Prinkipo (Turkey) L.D. found it very hard at first. Inactivity and isolation oppressed him. The questions arose of the means of livelihood, funds for defense, funds for the foreign oppositional groups. All this compelled him to accept a publisher's offer to write his autobiography. It was very difficult for L. D. psychologically to enter into this work. It was so sharply out of harmony with the general bent of his being. He had to force himself to "recollect." This reacted on his nerves and his health on the whole became impaired.
A revival of his moral and physical condition occurred with the establishment of ties with European co-thinkers. Visitors from abroad, discussions with them, correspondence, writing political articles for oppositional organs in Europe--all this restored L.D. to his native element. And this in turn eased for him the compulsory labor over the autobiography.
At the dinner table or during fishing trips in the Sea of Marmora, no one suspected "low tide." Conversations on political topics, jokes, perking up this or that somewhat crestfallen comrade, all these invariably testified to the equanimity of L.D.'s moods. Only our son, when he lived with us, was able to guess that this was not so. How I loved the periods of "floodtide," how happy I was during them! Freshness, youthfulness, joyfulness returned in these periods to L.D. He would then passionately dictate political letters, and suggestions to friends, he would dictate his autobiography and various articles, and go fishing in the blue waters of the sea... He seethed in a frenzy. And all this in complete isolation. Behind four walls.
Our life near Royan (France) on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in the isolated villa "Sea-Spray" which our friends had rented for us, had a turbulent beginning. Friends and co-thinkers from different countries would arrive daily to visit L.D. We had from 15 to 20 visitors a day. L.D. would hold two or three discussions daily. Full of inspiration, vitality and seemingly inexhaustible energy, he astonished and gladdened our friends by his tirelessness and vigor. And here in France the financial aspect of our life again arose very sharply. There was a lull. I had to go to Paris for medical care. Lev Davidovich insisted on it. In his own physical condition there came the alterations of ebb and flow.
From Royan, L.D. once wrote me that despite his poor health he had carried through a discussion, and did it very successfully, with some friends who had arrived and in the presence of our son. "I watched Lyovik," he wrote. "His eyes were shining. He was radiant." After the discussion L.D. went to bed early, because of fatigue and he heard the stormy ocean flinging its spray to the windows of his room, dashing drops against the window panes. Leon came in to bid his father goodbye. He had to return that night to Paris. They exchanged a few warm remarks about the discussion that had just concluded. Our son was very excited and aroused. He approached his father's bed, and dropping his head, "like a child," as his father wrote, on his father's breast, he pressed closely and said, "Papa, I love you very much." They embraced each other and parted with tears.
The ocean continues to live with its stormy ebbs and flows. It seethes in a frenzy. The great fighter might have also lived on... Violence. The dealers of violence will meet with vengeance. Violence will wither away. Free mankind of the future will bow its head in memory of its innumerable victims.
“First Let’s Kill All The Lawyers”-Not- “The Lincoln Lawyer”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film The Lincoln Lawyer.
DVD Review
The Lincoln Lawyer, starring Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tormei, based on the novel by Michael Connelly, Liongate, 2011
Yes, I know, everybody, everybody including Richard III, I think, who uttered some variation of that idea in William Shakespeare’s play of the same name, hates lawyers. Hates them until old justice time comes along and everyone, including this writer, hopes to high heaven that their lawyer is up to the task of representing them zealously, and in some desperate cases more than zealously. And that combination of sentiments, that hate/love thing, is what drives this film which according to my usually reliable sources follows the Michael Connelly novel pretty closely.
Needless to say, except for the thugs, pimps, dope dealers, hellish motorcycle angels, bail bondmen, public servant grifters and grafters and a bewitching lawyer ex-wife (played by Marissa Tormei) nobody, no viewer anyway, is suppose to like the Lincoln lawyer at the outset. (Named the Lincoln lawyer, by the way, not for his ethical resemblance to Father Abraham but because he rides around in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln.) His wheeling and dealing just this side of the law is what makes him the darling of that rogue’s gallery of characters listed above (except, of course, the fetching ex-wife, and maybe her a little too) and the bane of the District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Police Department establishment.
That deft and ruthless maneuvering is what also draws him to the attention of a vicious killer of women, women of the night to use a quaint phrase, and a surefire way to commit the “perfect murder” and like so many before him said murderer thought he was scot-free as is the usual case once the Lincoln lawyer was on the case. But see, said Lincoln lawyer “got religion” along the way after he and those around him were slated to take the fall if that vicious killer (a mommy’s boy to boot) got tripped up.
So you know damn well pretty early on that our trusty Lincoln lawyer is not taking the fall and, moreover, is going to see that an actual piece of real justice occurs in the process by the freeing a framed man who was sitting in stir through his negligence (and disbelief in innocence) by seeing that that vicious killer gets his jolt up at Q. Therefore you see we had it all wrong. There is some rough justice in the world. And one had better not kill off all those lawyers if there is going to be even that amount. The twists and turns getting there, although fairly well-worn by now in movie-dom, are what make this film one to see.
DVD Review
The Lincoln Lawyer, starring Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tormei, based on the novel by Michael Connelly, Liongate, 2011
Yes, I know, everybody, everybody including Richard III, I think, who uttered some variation of that idea in William Shakespeare’s play of the same name, hates lawyers. Hates them until old justice time comes along and everyone, including this writer, hopes to high heaven that their lawyer is up to the task of representing them zealously, and in some desperate cases more than zealously. And that combination of sentiments, that hate/love thing, is what drives this film which according to my usually reliable sources follows the Michael Connelly novel pretty closely.
Needless to say, except for the thugs, pimps, dope dealers, hellish motorcycle angels, bail bondmen, public servant grifters and grafters and a bewitching lawyer ex-wife (played by Marissa Tormei) nobody, no viewer anyway, is suppose to like the Lincoln lawyer at the outset. (Named the Lincoln lawyer, by the way, not for his ethical resemblance to Father Abraham but because he rides around in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln.) His wheeling and dealing just this side of the law is what makes him the darling of that rogue’s gallery of characters listed above (except, of course, the fetching ex-wife, and maybe her a little too) and the bane of the District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Police Department establishment.
That deft and ruthless maneuvering is what also draws him to the attention of a vicious killer of women, women of the night to use a quaint phrase, and a surefire way to commit the “perfect murder” and like so many before him said murderer thought he was scot-free as is the usual case once the Lincoln lawyer was on the case. But see, said Lincoln lawyer “got religion” along the way after he and those around him were slated to take the fall if that vicious killer (a mommy’s boy to boot) got tripped up.
So you know damn well pretty early on that our trusty Lincoln lawyer is not taking the fall and, moreover, is going to see that an actual piece of real justice occurs in the process by the freeing a framed man who was sitting in stir through his negligence (and disbelief in innocence) by seeing that that vicious killer gets his jolt up at Q. Therefore you see we had it all wrong. There is some rough justice in the world. And one had better not kill off all those lawyers if there is going to be even that amount. The twists and turns getting there, although fairly well-worn by now in movie-dom, are what make this film one to see.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
***In The Matter Of The Zen Western- Johnny Depp’s Dead Man- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Johnny Depp’s Dead Man.
DVD Review
Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum, eerily edgy music by Neil Young, Miramax 1995
Sure, I have taken plenty of shots at variations on the great American West, past and present, from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove to The Last Picture Show from The Wild Bunch to Crazy Hearts and everything in between. As well, I have always been glad, glad as hell, to review any movie starring Johnny Depp that might come my way. So here we have the combination of Johnny Depp as, well, Johnny Depp as usual (except maybe for those seemingly endless Pirate sequels) taking on an edgy role that less talented or more timid male actors would have walked away from, way a way from.
No one doubts that the old Hollywood (and dime store novel) vision of the old John Wayne "howdy, partner" American West is long gone. And with the ground-breaking work of The Wild Bunch back in the 1970d we have seen, well we have seen, more plausibly views of that old time West, including some pretty unsavory characters in search of fame and fortune around the edges of the great frontier before it melted at the turn of the 20th century. That pasting of the frontier, of course, did not stop anybody with the least carefree spirit or who was just plain tired of the “civilized” East from heading by anyway they could to the great expanses of the old-time West. And that is where William Blake (played by Johnny Depp), no not the 18th century mad man English poet and supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution (although that mistake plays a part in the plot), but an accountant, for god’s sake, enters the story.
William Blake’s transformation into a man of the West complete with notches on his revolver, seemingly in slow-motion at times and all in black and white, is what drives this curious film. We have an educated “savage," Native American, savage white man bounty-hunters, a twisted rich land-owners (played by the late Robert Mitchum) and every mangy "old dog" who made it, or did not make it in the West. And every pathology known to humankind showed its face in this fierce portrayal of the West but also, a very surprising positive portrayal of Native American culture and its demise with the advance of the white man. William Blake, accountant, is one of Johnny Depp’s edgier performances, no question, and if you can stay with the zen aspect of the thing a very well done performance. Not for everyone, and certainly not for those who might still be clinging to some John Wayne idea of the West.
DVD Review
Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum, eerily edgy music by Neil Young, Miramax 1995
Sure, I have taken plenty of shots at variations on the great American West, past and present, from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove to The Last Picture Show from The Wild Bunch to Crazy Hearts and everything in between. As well, I have always been glad, glad as hell, to review any movie starring Johnny Depp that might come my way. So here we have the combination of Johnny Depp as, well, Johnny Depp as usual (except maybe for those seemingly endless Pirate sequels) taking on an edgy role that less talented or more timid male actors would have walked away from, way a way from.
No one doubts that the old Hollywood (and dime store novel) vision of the old John Wayne "howdy, partner" American West is long gone. And with the ground-breaking work of The Wild Bunch back in the 1970d we have seen, well we have seen, more plausibly views of that old time West, including some pretty unsavory characters in search of fame and fortune around the edges of the great frontier before it melted at the turn of the 20th century. That pasting of the frontier, of course, did not stop anybody with the least carefree spirit or who was just plain tired of the “civilized” East from heading by anyway they could to the great expanses of the old-time West. And that is where William Blake (played by Johnny Depp), no not the 18th century mad man English poet and supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution (although that mistake plays a part in the plot), but an accountant, for god’s sake, enters the story.
William Blake’s transformation into a man of the West complete with notches on his revolver, seemingly in slow-motion at times and all in black and white, is what drives this curious film. We have an educated “savage," Native American, savage white man bounty-hunters, a twisted rich land-owners (played by the late Robert Mitchum) and every mangy "old dog" who made it, or did not make it in the West. And every pathology known to humankind showed its face in this fierce portrayal of the West but also, a very surprising positive portrayal of Native American culture and its demise with the advance of the white man. William Blake, accountant, is one of Johnny Depp’s edgier performances, no question, and if you can stay with the zen aspect of the thing a very well done performance. Not for everyone, and certainly not for those who might still be clinging to some John Wayne idea of the West.
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 71st Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky- A Speech To The Youth On Trotsky By Joseph Hansen
Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*******
Joseph Hansen
A Speech To The Youth on Trotsky
(August 1941)
Source: Fourth International, Vol.2 No.8, October 1941, pp.239-242.
Excerpts from a speech delivered at the Trotsky Memorial Meeting on August 22, 1941, in New York City.
Public Domain: Joseph Hansen Internet Archive 2005; This work is completely free. In any reproduction, we ask that you cite this Internet address and the publishing information above.
In her article in the August, 1941 issue of the Fourth International, Natalia Sedov Trotsky tries to give us a more intimate picture of Leon Trotsky, to let us see something of the man whose name stands for Marxism today. Natalia’s contributions not only have a priceless historical value for those unborn generations who will comb the records of the past in order to get a better picture of the founders of the classless society, but they have a political value as well. Natalia has solid political judgment in her own right. She is a woman in every respect worthy of Trotsky.
Her writings give us a deeper insight into Trotsky’s character and enable those who aspire to become leaders in the revolutionary struggle of the working class to better shape their talents in conformity with the great aim they have chosen.
One of the quickest ways of learning an art is to take a master-craftsman in that art and imitate him closely. Every apprentice anxious to learn selects someone whom he knows or a great name in his field and strives to reach the perfection of the model he has chosen. Writers when they first begin usually imitate a great writer or a series of great writers of the past. Painters and sculptors do likewise. Military men select Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon.
It is only natural that a youth joining the revolutionary movement should take Trotsky as his model and hope that some day he can be as adept in the science and art of proletarian revolution, granting his more modest talents, as was Trotsky. Such a goal is wholly normal and praiseworthy. It is reported that John Keats, who became one of the great romantic poets of England, would content himself with no one less than Shakespeare as a model when he set out to become a poet, and in that he was correct.
The danger in choosing Trotsky as one’s model lies in the possible discouragement which can come when one has reached that stage of development were he can begin to appreciate Trotsky’s true stature as a revolutionist.
Trotsky’s titanic intellect and his vast political experience during some of the most turbulent decades of human history are compressed into a relatively few volumes. Trotsky’s works are so polished, their logic so unshakeable, their insight into characters, events, movements of parties and classes so profound, that the revolutionary apprentice is inclined to throw up his hands and say, “No one can ever hope to equal that – it is better to choose a pattern of more modest scope.” When he recalls that Trotsky was renowned as best of the best, as an orator, as an organizer, as an administrator – when he understands Trotsky’s role in leading the armed insurrection of October – when he appreciates Trotsky’s colossal work in building the Red Army, in directing the armed defense of the Soviet Union against the interventionist armies of the imperialist world, and adds on top of this his work in founding with Lenin the Third International, and then the Fourth International, the young comrade is ready to say, “Such a man occurs only once.”
And he will be saying the truth. There can be only one Trotsky.
But that is not the whole truth. Trotsky did not walk off a farm near Odessa and immediately sit down to write his History of the Russian Revolution. Besides those of his own personal characteristics which he could shape to one degree or another, there was the past which he could use as a foundation and there were world events to do the final molding.
We Stand on Their Shoulders
The higher development of the class struggle made it possible for Lenin and Trotsky to begin where the founders of scientific socialism were forced by death to leave off. Trotsky developed his theory of the permanent revolution, through which he was able to predict the course of the 1917 revolution, more than twelve years before the event. Lenin developed his concept of a professional revolutionary party which made the success of that revolution possible.
That is why Trotsky could predict that the future development of socialism, and especially in the United States, will bring forth dialectical materialists – those who profess the revolutionary philosophy of Marx – superior to those of the past, great as they have been.
When one stops to think why this must obviously be so, with the increase of knowledge and experience available to the new generations, then it begins to seem strange that anyone among the youth should feel discouraged about trying to develop his talents in the pattern furnished by Trotsky. The rich heritage of our party in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky will provide the material for theoretical grounding. If we stop to recall the revolutionary movement at the beginning of the past war and especially in the United States in 1918, we can say that the revolutionaries at the beginning of the Second World War are far richer in theory and experience.
And the crisis of capitalism in its death agony provides one revolutionary situation after another. Even though the immediate period may isolate us still further, that period will be followed by tremendous expansion of all the forces of the Fourth International.
The youth of today enjoy the privilege of standing higher on the rungs of history than their predecessors. We have not only the revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune, we have 1905 and October. We have not only Marx and Engels, we have Lenin and Trotsky.
How Trotsky Joined the Movement
Trotsky entered the revolutionary movement in much the same way that many of us have entered. He rebelled against the oppression which existed on every side. He was filled with protest that had no outlet and which he himself undoubtedly did not understand at the time. He felt it as an urge to “perfect himself.” When he encountered socialists, he ridiculed them, considered them utopians, counted himself as conservative, argued vehemently with them. In fact, the more he was convinced by their arguments, and the more he felt the ground crumbling under his feet, the harder he argued to maintain himself – just like the rest of us began.
When he finally became convinced that the only hope for humanity lay in the working class, he joined wholeheartedly in spreading these new ideas. He wrote leaflets, ran them off on a home-made duplicator, got his fingers as thoroughly inked as if it were the most modern mimeograph.
Trotsky next found himself up against the ideology of Marxism, and he was not easily convinced of its correctness. Just as he had struggled against accepting socialism in general, so he struggled against Marxism. It seemed too rigid to him, too finished a philosophy, too closed a system. But in arguing with Marxism, he discovered that he was ignorant. Not a few of us, no doubt, have experienced that same embarrassment at one time or another, especially the first time we encountered a well-equipped Marxist.
Trotsky set about to remedy his ignorance. He read desperately, at first with little system, skipping haphazardly from one author to another. During his first imprisonment, he had the opportunity to read at his leisure, and in the development of the events of the past, he discovered for himself the truth of the laws formulated by Marx and Engels.
Trotsky’s third great hurdle was Lenin’s “organizational methods.” His struggle over accepting Lenin’s concepts took the longest time. This is understandable, since Lenin’s theories on organization were a basic innovation in the international socialist movement and had not been proved in practise. In addition Lenin met the opposition of the great figures of the European socialist movement, who spoke with tremendous authority as disciples of Marx and Engels and leaders of the huge Social Democracy.
For some years, Trotsky did not hesitate to deal stiff polemical blows against Lenin and his organizational methods. What is important, however, is that during the war and in the crucible of the Russian revolution, Trotsky recognized the correctness of Lenin’s views and joined Lenin’s party.
The knowledge that it was necessary for Trotsky to go through the same internal struggles that everyone experiences in his development as a Marxist should prove a source of encouragement to all of us. Trotsky even had to break with his family at the beginning, although the rupture was later healed. He had to disappoint his father who wanted him to take up a career as an engineer. He had to disappoint his mother who wanted him to be a good boy and who came to see him behind the bars at Kherson after his first arrest and cried over his conduct.
For some years Trotsky was held up as the bad example in the family circle. His cousin who made a fortune in Siberia during the Russo-Japanese war was held up as the good example. But Trotsky was not out to make himself a rich bourgeois – he was out to expropriate the entire class. After the revolution, his cousin called Trotsky up by telephone. He had lost everything and wanted Trotsky to do something for him.
What Made Trotsky Great?
What qualities gave Trotsky his pre-eminence? What did he have which ordinary men do not possess or do not possess to such a striking degree as Trotsky? Let me enumerate a few of the more prominent characteristics of Trotsky.
He was gifted with a prodigious memory, and especially a memory for theories. His practise of reading over his previous articles coupled with his perception of the logic of events sharpened this memory still further. In 1938 for example, he translated a speech which he had made in 1924 in a scientific congress. We took the finished draft to Trotsky for his approval. He returned it shortly with a question mark on one of the pages. “What is wrong with the translation?” we asked him. “I think there is a sentence missing here.” he responded. Trotsky was correct. We had missed a sentence in a speech he had made fourteen years before.
He was gifted with remarkable quickness of perception. He was completely honest – by that 1 mean honest to the working class. He was a fighter.
But there were others of his generation who had similar gifts – men who became famous as theoreticians, journalists, politicians – such men as Plekhanov, Parvus, who had a brilliant career before him, and Martov. None of them reached the heights of Trotsky, however, despite the fact they lived through the same great events and were even revolutionaries. All of them lacked one quality that was the characteristic of Trotsky – will power.
Trotsky’s will was absolutely indomitable. It radiated from his very presence, his bearing, his vigorous manner of speech, his impatience of opposition if he was certain that he was correct. More than once I had occasion to feel this iron trait of Trotsky when I had not succeeded in convincing him that he had taken an incorrect position on some small issue.
His writings are permeated with this unbreakable will. It is especially apparent in the scathing sarcasm he heaps upon the enemies of the working class. His whole life’s course speaks of this will – nothing could break him, prisons, exile, expulsions, persecution, slander, death itself.
Trotsky was undoubtedly endowed with an unusual amount of energy. He learned to use this energy in a highly disciplined manner, concentrating and directing its firing power where it would be most effective. Ordinary people dissipate what energy they begin with and stifle any possibility of increasing its flow by splitting their interests into contradictory channels. They no sooner begin an enterprise than they are halted in their tracks by the paralyzing thought that maybe they should be doing something else.
Trotsky, once having made up his mind, threw himself with complete abandon into the project. This was true of the smallest things. His secretaries tell how in France Trotsky insisted on helping with the housework. The comrades did not wish him to leave his study, but the best deal they could make with him was that he should do no more than wipe the dishes. However, he proved to be a bottleneck in the production line of the kitchen as he would insist upon bringing the dishes to such a high polish that they glistened like jewels and the rest of the work had to await his completion of this task. It was the same in his recreation. In Turkey his secretaries tell me stories of being dragged from bed at 3:30 and 4 o’clock in the morning, their eyes still glued with sleep, to go out fishing with Trotsky who was all dynamic energy after a previous hard day’s work. In Mexico many of the American comrades had the privilege of climbing up and down the hot Mexican hills, acting as burros to carry the cactus which Trotsky dug from the countryside.
How Trotsky Worked
But this tremendous energy was especially apparent at his work desk. He chained himself here, working from early in the morning until late at night with just brief periods of rest and time out for meals. He worked like this no matter what the task at hand might happen to be, whether it was the disagreeable work of combatting the GPU, writing Stalin’s biography, or something which he enjoyed such as writing for the press of the Fourth International.
During the last Moscow trial he organized the work of his secretariat down to the least detail. I remember him walking up and down with a New York Times in his hand which had been airmailed from New York with the complete indictment. He had covered it with notations in red and blue pencil, studied it from end to end, and he organized his secretariat as if it were a small army. We stood at attention while he outlined what we should do, asked for proposals and discussion. We divided up the work, this comrade and that comrade to work on translations, this one to take care of press relations, this one to do research work, etc., etc.
This done, we all went on the firing line and Trotsky himself worked harder than any of us. In one day I recall he made five press releases, one of them a long article for a London paper. Some of his secretaries worked 22 hours at a stretch. It was through such work, in collaboration with others who provided material from New York and other cities, that Trotsky was able to completely expose the falsity of this frameup as he had the previous Moscow trials.
When I see our comrades on the street gathering signatures on the petitions to place James P. Cannon on the ballot for mayor of New York, I think how Trotsky would have plunged into such a campaign, how he would have enjoyed organizing an all-out battle to put James P. Cannon on the ballot in New York. He would have blocked out all the districts on the map, held meetings, consulted comrades, and then seen to it that everyone carried out his assignment. He himself would have been everywhere, checking this neighborhood and that neighborhood. I can see him even standing on a street corner with petition blanks in his hand, arguing in a kindly but vehement tone with the crowd about him, but at the same time not losing a single opportunity for signatures.
Trotsky’s whole life was like that. He chose his main objective – one single objective – to fight for the socialist revolution. From the time he made that decision, everything he did had no other purpose but to further this one aim. This singleness of purpose made it possible for Trotsky to focus his energy and to so thoroughly synthesize it with his other gifts that they in turn received a richer development and he became the very incarnation of the proletarian revolution.
But even such a man is subject to the ebb and flow of the tides of the class struggle. In the final analysis no one can do more than give expression to one or another force of the contending camps. Creatures embodying all the vilest dregs of the past can rise to power when a revolution subsides. After the upheaval, a period of reaction sets in, and it is in such periods that the sternest tests are placed upon a revolutionary. He is deserted, isolated, hounded, slandered, imprisoned, tortured, sometimes faces death. The labor movement seems like a vast tomb during gloomy years until a new upturn begins.
Some of Trotsky’s greatest work was done in such a period – the period climaxed by the Second World War the period in which Trotsky became the target upon which every reactionary force in the world vented its furious hatred During this period he laid down the theoretical structure for a new International of the working class. He exposed the crimes of the monstrous Stalinist bureaucracy before the eyes of the whole world. And he taught and hardened the cadres who will continue the Marxist movement.
The founding of the Fourth International may well go down in history as Trotsky’s crowning achievement. Trotsky’s unflinching struggle in the teeth of the most terrible persecution is one of the most valuable lessons he has given us.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*******
Joseph Hansen
A Speech To The Youth on Trotsky
(August 1941)
Source: Fourth International, Vol.2 No.8, October 1941, pp.239-242.
Excerpts from a speech delivered at the Trotsky Memorial Meeting on August 22, 1941, in New York City.
Public Domain: Joseph Hansen Internet Archive 2005; This work is completely free. In any reproduction, we ask that you cite this Internet address and the publishing information above.
In her article in the August, 1941 issue of the Fourth International, Natalia Sedov Trotsky tries to give us a more intimate picture of Leon Trotsky, to let us see something of the man whose name stands for Marxism today. Natalia’s contributions not only have a priceless historical value for those unborn generations who will comb the records of the past in order to get a better picture of the founders of the classless society, but they have a political value as well. Natalia has solid political judgment in her own right. She is a woman in every respect worthy of Trotsky.
Her writings give us a deeper insight into Trotsky’s character and enable those who aspire to become leaders in the revolutionary struggle of the working class to better shape their talents in conformity with the great aim they have chosen.
One of the quickest ways of learning an art is to take a master-craftsman in that art and imitate him closely. Every apprentice anxious to learn selects someone whom he knows or a great name in his field and strives to reach the perfection of the model he has chosen. Writers when they first begin usually imitate a great writer or a series of great writers of the past. Painters and sculptors do likewise. Military men select Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon.
It is only natural that a youth joining the revolutionary movement should take Trotsky as his model and hope that some day he can be as adept in the science and art of proletarian revolution, granting his more modest talents, as was Trotsky. Such a goal is wholly normal and praiseworthy. It is reported that John Keats, who became one of the great romantic poets of England, would content himself with no one less than Shakespeare as a model when he set out to become a poet, and in that he was correct.
The danger in choosing Trotsky as one’s model lies in the possible discouragement which can come when one has reached that stage of development were he can begin to appreciate Trotsky’s true stature as a revolutionist.
Trotsky’s titanic intellect and his vast political experience during some of the most turbulent decades of human history are compressed into a relatively few volumes. Trotsky’s works are so polished, their logic so unshakeable, their insight into characters, events, movements of parties and classes so profound, that the revolutionary apprentice is inclined to throw up his hands and say, “No one can ever hope to equal that – it is better to choose a pattern of more modest scope.” When he recalls that Trotsky was renowned as best of the best, as an orator, as an organizer, as an administrator – when he understands Trotsky’s role in leading the armed insurrection of October – when he appreciates Trotsky’s colossal work in building the Red Army, in directing the armed defense of the Soviet Union against the interventionist armies of the imperialist world, and adds on top of this his work in founding with Lenin the Third International, and then the Fourth International, the young comrade is ready to say, “Such a man occurs only once.”
And he will be saying the truth. There can be only one Trotsky.
But that is not the whole truth. Trotsky did not walk off a farm near Odessa and immediately sit down to write his History of the Russian Revolution. Besides those of his own personal characteristics which he could shape to one degree or another, there was the past which he could use as a foundation and there were world events to do the final molding.
We Stand on Their Shoulders
The higher development of the class struggle made it possible for Lenin and Trotsky to begin where the founders of scientific socialism were forced by death to leave off. Trotsky developed his theory of the permanent revolution, through which he was able to predict the course of the 1917 revolution, more than twelve years before the event. Lenin developed his concept of a professional revolutionary party which made the success of that revolution possible.
That is why Trotsky could predict that the future development of socialism, and especially in the United States, will bring forth dialectical materialists – those who profess the revolutionary philosophy of Marx – superior to those of the past, great as they have been.
When one stops to think why this must obviously be so, with the increase of knowledge and experience available to the new generations, then it begins to seem strange that anyone among the youth should feel discouraged about trying to develop his talents in the pattern furnished by Trotsky. The rich heritage of our party in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky will provide the material for theoretical grounding. If we stop to recall the revolutionary movement at the beginning of the past war and especially in the United States in 1918, we can say that the revolutionaries at the beginning of the Second World War are far richer in theory and experience.
And the crisis of capitalism in its death agony provides one revolutionary situation after another. Even though the immediate period may isolate us still further, that period will be followed by tremendous expansion of all the forces of the Fourth International.
The youth of today enjoy the privilege of standing higher on the rungs of history than their predecessors. We have not only the revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune, we have 1905 and October. We have not only Marx and Engels, we have Lenin and Trotsky.
How Trotsky Joined the Movement
Trotsky entered the revolutionary movement in much the same way that many of us have entered. He rebelled against the oppression which existed on every side. He was filled with protest that had no outlet and which he himself undoubtedly did not understand at the time. He felt it as an urge to “perfect himself.” When he encountered socialists, he ridiculed them, considered them utopians, counted himself as conservative, argued vehemently with them. In fact, the more he was convinced by their arguments, and the more he felt the ground crumbling under his feet, the harder he argued to maintain himself – just like the rest of us began.
When he finally became convinced that the only hope for humanity lay in the working class, he joined wholeheartedly in spreading these new ideas. He wrote leaflets, ran them off on a home-made duplicator, got his fingers as thoroughly inked as if it were the most modern mimeograph.
Trotsky next found himself up against the ideology of Marxism, and he was not easily convinced of its correctness. Just as he had struggled against accepting socialism in general, so he struggled against Marxism. It seemed too rigid to him, too finished a philosophy, too closed a system. But in arguing with Marxism, he discovered that he was ignorant. Not a few of us, no doubt, have experienced that same embarrassment at one time or another, especially the first time we encountered a well-equipped Marxist.
Trotsky set about to remedy his ignorance. He read desperately, at first with little system, skipping haphazardly from one author to another. During his first imprisonment, he had the opportunity to read at his leisure, and in the development of the events of the past, he discovered for himself the truth of the laws formulated by Marx and Engels.
Trotsky’s third great hurdle was Lenin’s “organizational methods.” His struggle over accepting Lenin’s concepts took the longest time. This is understandable, since Lenin’s theories on organization were a basic innovation in the international socialist movement and had not been proved in practise. In addition Lenin met the opposition of the great figures of the European socialist movement, who spoke with tremendous authority as disciples of Marx and Engels and leaders of the huge Social Democracy.
For some years, Trotsky did not hesitate to deal stiff polemical blows against Lenin and his organizational methods. What is important, however, is that during the war and in the crucible of the Russian revolution, Trotsky recognized the correctness of Lenin’s views and joined Lenin’s party.
The knowledge that it was necessary for Trotsky to go through the same internal struggles that everyone experiences in his development as a Marxist should prove a source of encouragement to all of us. Trotsky even had to break with his family at the beginning, although the rupture was later healed. He had to disappoint his father who wanted him to take up a career as an engineer. He had to disappoint his mother who wanted him to be a good boy and who came to see him behind the bars at Kherson after his first arrest and cried over his conduct.
For some years Trotsky was held up as the bad example in the family circle. His cousin who made a fortune in Siberia during the Russo-Japanese war was held up as the good example. But Trotsky was not out to make himself a rich bourgeois – he was out to expropriate the entire class. After the revolution, his cousin called Trotsky up by telephone. He had lost everything and wanted Trotsky to do something for him.
What Made Trotsky Great?
What qualities gave Trotsky his pre-eminence? What did he have which ordinary men do not possess or do not possess to such a striking degree as Trotsky? Let me enumerate a few of the more prominent characteristics of Trotsky.
He was gifted with a prodigious memory, and especially a memory for theories. His practise of reading over his previous articles coupled with his perception of the logic of events sharpened this memory still further. In 1938 for example, he translated a speech which he had made in 1924 in a scientific congress. We took the finished draft to Trotsky for his approval. He returned it shortly with a question mark on one of the pages. “What is wrong with the translation?” we asked him. “I think there is a sentence missing here.” he responded. Trotsky was correct. We had missed a sentence in a speech he had made fourteen years before.
He was gifted with remarkable quickness of perception. He was completely honest – by that 1 mean honest to the working class. He was a fighter.
But there were others of his generation who had similar gifts – men who became famous as theoreticians, journalists, politicians – such men as Plekhanov, Parvus, who had a brilliant career before him, and Martov. None of them reached the heights of Trotsky, however, despite the fact they lived through the same great events and were even revolutionaries. All of them lacked one quality that was the characteristic of Trotsky – will power.
Trotsky’s will was absolutely indomitable. It radiated from his very presence, his bearing, his vigorous manner of speech, his impatience of opposition if he was certain that he was correct. More than once I had occasion to feel this iron trait of Trotsky when I had not succeeded in convincing him that he had taken an incorrect position on some small issue.
His writings are permeated with this unbreakable will. It is especially apparent in the scathing sarcasm he heaps upon the enemies of the working class. His whole life’s course speaks of this will – nothing could break him, prisons, exile, expulsions, persecution, slander, death itself.
Trotsky was undoubtedly endowed with an unusual amount of energy. He learned to use this energy in a highly disciplined manner, concentrating and directing its firing power where it would be most effective. Ordinary people dissipate what energy they begin with and stifle any possibility of increasing its flow by splitting their interests into contradictory channels. They no sooner begin an enterprise than they are halted in their tracks by the paralyzing thought that maybe they should be doing something else.
Trotsky, once having made up his mind, threw himself with complete abandon into the project. This was true of the smallest things. His secretaries tell how in France Trotsky insisted on helping with the housework. The comrades did not wish him to leave his study, but the best deal they could make with him was that he should do no more than wipe the dishes. However, he proved to be a bottleneck in the production line of the kitchen as he would insist upon bringing the dishes to such a high polish that they glistened like jewels and the rest of the work had to await his completion of this task. It was the same in his recreation. In Turkey his secretaries tell me stories of being dragged from bed at 3:30 and 4 o’clock in the morning, their eyes still glued with sleep, to go out fishing with Trotsky who was all dynamic energy after a previous hard day’s work. In Mexico many of the American comrades had the privilege of climbing up and down the hot Mexican hills, acting as burros to carry the cactus which Trotsky dug from the countryside.
How Trotsky Worked
But this tremendous energy was especially apparent at his work desk. He chained himself here, working from early in the morning until late at night with just brief periods of rest and time out for meals. He worked like this no matter what the task at hand might happen to be, whether it was the disagreeable work of combatting the GPU, writing Stalin’s biography, or something which he enjoyed such as writing for the press of the Fourth International.
During the last Moscow trial he organized the work of his secretariat down to the least detail. I remember him walking up and down with a New York Times in his hand which had been airmailed from New York with the complete indictment. He had covered it with notations in red and blue pencil, studied it from end to end, and he organized his secretariat as if it were a small army. We stood at attention while he outlined what we should do, asked for proposals and discussion. We divided up the work, this comrade and that comrade to work on translations, this one to take care of press relations, this one to do research work, etc., etc.
This done, we all went on the firing line and Trotsky himself worked harder than any of us. In one day I recall he made five press releases, one of them a long article for a London paper. Some of his secretaries worked 22 hours at a stretch. It was through such work, in collaboration with others who provided material from New York and other cities, that Trotsky was able to completely expose the falsity of this frameup as he had the previous Moscow trials.
When I see our comrades on the street gathering signatures on the petitions to place James P. Cannon on the ballot for mayor of New York, I think how Trotsky would have plunged into such a campaign, how he would have enjoyed organizing an all-out battle to put James P. Cannon on the ballot in New York. He would have blocked out all the districts on the map, held meetings, consulted comrades, and then seen to it that everyone carried out his assignment. He himself would have been everywhere, checking this neighborhood and that neighborhood. I can see him even standing on a street corner with petition blanks in his hand, arguing in a kindly but vehement tone with the crowd about him, but at the same time not losing a single opportunity for signatures.
Trotsky’s whole life was like that. He chose his main objective – one single objective – to fight for the socialist revolution. From the time he made that decision, everything he did had no other purpose but to further this one aim. This singleness of purpose made it possible for Trotsky to focus his energy and to so thoroughly synthesize it with his other gifts that they in turn received a richer development and he became the very incarnation of the proletarian revolution.
But even such a man is subject to the ebb and flow of the tides of the class struggle. In the final analysis no one can do more than give expression to one or another force of the contending camps. Creatures embodying all the vilest dregs of the past can rise to power when a revolution subsides. After the upheaval, a period of reaction sets in, and it is in such periods that the sternest tests are placed upon a revolutionary. He is deserted, isolated, hounded, slandered, imprisoned, tortured, sometimes faces death. The labor movement seems like a vast tomb during gloomy years until a new upturn begins.
Some of Trotsky’s greatest work was done in such a period – the period climaxed by the Second World War the period in which Trotsky became the target upon which every reactionary force in the world vented its furious hatred During this period he laid down the theoretical structure for a new International of the working class. He exposed the crimes of the monstrous Stalinist bureaucracy before the eyes of the whole world. And he taught and hardened the cadres who will continue the Marxist movement.
The founding of the Fourth International may well go down in history as Trotsky’s crowning achievement. Trotsky’s unflinching struggle in the teeth of the most terrible persecution is one of the most valuable lessons he has given us.
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