The Prophet Unarmed-Trotsky: 1921-1929 (Volume II)

Both who Trostsky was and the nature of the Russian Revolution are hotly contested subjects. I very much like both Marx and the idea of a workers revolution. It seems to me the Capitalist economic system or any of the economic systems that preceeded it were very unfair and exploitative, and the main stream of world history never knew anything else, at least in the most significant ways. It is as simple that. Also, what happened in America starting in 1776 was all about a recognition that every one should and must have rights for certain freedoms. These freedoms were addressed institutionally in very insightful ways in legal documents such as the Bill of Rights. However, other very profound human rights were also thouougly buried by the Ameican Revolution. The American revoution had less than nothing to say about any economic human rights. It may have taken firm measures against Monarchy and Aristocracy, but it savagely denied other fundamental human rights. For sure, our forefathers framed the rights of slave holders in our highest legal document, our Constitution, making certain that great numbers of our population would have no rights beyond being slave owners' property. In fact, the Constitution gave more power to slave holding states (the three-fifths provision, that made sure the slave holders would have power greater than their numbers, and would be granted, by state apportionment, for Presidential and Congressional elections would have increased power, including institutional power for the slave states as oppressors, directly over the people they oppressed (Gary Wills wrote an excellent book on the subject, The Negro President is). Also the Revolution did less than nothing to challenge great invisible legal institutions that kept ordinary working classes of people, women, and the native Americans at the very bottom, in many ways just a little above the slaves. To illustrate this great invisable but deep rooted customary law, no womean voted in America until almost 90 years after the Constitution was adopted, but the Constitution had no actual restiction against women voting. Also, there was no federally recognized labor law where workers had even the right to elect their own union representatives until the year Franlin Roosevelt was elected President, and there was no national labor law providing that employers had to recognize these labor unions, their right to collective bargaining, or the right to stike. This was after FDR became President, and well sfter the Russian Revolution. No wonder that so many workers wanted a workers revolution, and no wonder Marx exhorted workers to 'Unite' and 'You have nothing to lose but your chains' I am not saying that the American Revolution was worthless, as some do. It gave us some starting point to work from, and so many of the words of the Revolution either implied or spoke directly about great universal rights. It gave great number of Americans in the next 200 years good causes to fight for.

This second of three volumes in Deutscher's biography is an astonishing and captivating achievement. Deutscher weaves together character study, drama, and historical narrative to give an authoritative account of Trotsky's mortal struggles to uphold democracy and internationalism in the Soviet Union against Stalin's bureaucratic and totalitarian machinations. Deutscher's deft handling of the facts, personalities, ideas, and situations of the time is simply unparallelled, and makes for a tremendously enjoyable and informative read. Essential material for anyone exploring the question of where socialism went wrong in the 20th century, and the dilemma of authority and freedom in mass movements.

Any reprint of this classic work is better than none. And of course Deutscher grasps the gist of the matter as Trotsky's "middle" period is concerned : the fact that he was unable to lauch a decided bid for power aganst Stalin when he had still a chance to do so, but then managed to recover enough influence - almost solely by means of his intellectual acumen - to wage a brilliant but doomed in advance defensive political campaign in the late 1920s. Be as it is, if marxism is going to recover from the long reactionary eclipse of the last 30 years, it will have to pay attention to musch of what Trotsky said and wrote in the period covered by this work. Exactly because of that, I've to complain about the quality of this new Verso edition. Typos abound; the cover is good, but the paper used for the regular pages is of low quality - a highly absorbing, and I suppose perhaps of high acidity, variety of paper, something I discovered when my copy was exposed to humidity and became soaked like a sponge. Also, there lacks and introductory essay and a glossary. Frankly, I think Verso should value more having this work in its publishing list.

This is a fascinating book detailing the fall from grace of the Soviet Union's number 2 man in the revolution: Leon Trotsky. After Lenin's death, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, the ruling triumverate, did all that they could to eliminate this popular figure from the political arena. Deutscher does a great job illuminating one of the the major ideological conflicts in the Soviet Union during the 1920's: socialism in one country advocated by Stalin and permanent revolution supported by Trotsky. Deutscher's arguments make a strong case for Trotsky's position, since without a communist revolution in a more industrially advanced country, Soviet socialism faced the danger of becoming heavily bureaucratic and deformed. The other major difference between Stalin and Totsky was about the course of inustrialization in the Soviet Union. Trotsky warned about the danger of the New Economic Policy (NEP) slowly restoring capitalism in Russia. In Stalin's battle for power with Trotsky, he originally supported the NEP and a slow course of industrialization. When he finally defeated Trotsky (which begins the final book of Deutscher's trilogy) he almost completely stole Trotsky's program of rapid industrialization for the USSR. The question that the reader is left with is: would idustrialization in the USSR have been more peaceful under Trotsky than Stalin? Would we be talking about millions of dead Soviet citizens today and would the communist movement around the world still be a factor if Trotsky, not Stalin, would have won the power struggle in the 1920's. It's obvious that Deutscher is a big supporter of Leon Trotsky. Its hard not to be: he almost single handedly organized the Red Army with no military background which repelled foreign intervention during the Russian Civil War. He was matched only by Lenin as the supreme Marxist intellectual of the time. A supreme orator, he was the consumate revolutionary and internationalist. This trilogy is by far the best Trotsky biography to date. Any one interested in the Russian revolution or the Communist movement must read these books.

This is the second volume of a three-volume sympathetic biography of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher. This is Deutscher's most famous work. In this second volume the author gets about telling the story that he really wants to tell. Rather than a balanced tale of the life of Trotsky, the author really want to concentrate on the conflict between him and Joseph Stalin. This volume is where that tale begins in earnest. Nonetheless, Deutscher's style of writing grabs the reader's interest and holds her/him to the subject. This is a worthy addition to any library of any reader interested in Soviet history.