Trotsky: A Biography
By Robert Service
Macmillan £25, 624 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20
When Ramón Mercader drove an ice axe into Leon Trotsky’s skull at his Mexican home on August 20, 1940, he committed the world’s most spectacular assassination since the shooting of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Mercader, a Spanish communist, was recruited by Josef Stalin’s secret police for the purpose of killing a rival whom the Soviet dictator had loathed for 20 years and marked for elimination since at least the mid-1930s.
Trotsky, never one to underestimate his own talents, despised Stalin as a political mediocrity and intellectual nonentity. On the second point he was mostly correct. On the first he made a colossal misjudgement, was outmanoeuvred and paid for it with his life.
Trotsky’s brilliance as a polemicist, and the self-serving qualities of his autobiography and other writings, ensured that for several decades after his murder his interpretations of early Soviet history shaped the outlook even of non-communist historians. This gave rise to distortions which persisted thanks to an influential three-volume biography of Trotsky published between 1954 and 1963 by Isaac Deutscher, a Polish-born British Marxist.
Now comes a balanced and thoroughly researched life of Trotsky by Robert Service, a British scholar of Soviet communism. Service knows the period’s personalities inside out: he has already trawled the archives to write well-received biographies of Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state.
More than any other figures of their age, this blood-stained trio were responsible for the Soviet Union’s emergence as one of the world’s most lethal one-party dictatorships, relying on mass terror and denial of civil liberties as basic instruments of rule. Yet, Trotsky’s reputation has benefited from the fact that, unlike Lenin and Stalin, he lost power before he could run the country.
Stalin defeated Trotsky in the struggle for control after Lenin’s incapacition by a series of strokes that led to his death in 1924. In the 1930s millions were killed and sent to labour camps as part of Stalin’s crash collectivisation of farms.
Would Soviet history have been less violent had Trotsky rather than Stalin won the succession struggle? It is the great unanswerable question of Trotsky’s life.
But as Service writes: “It is difficult to believe he would not have reacted harshly to resistance to his policies. Violence was objectively built into the demands of his policies.”
The evidence comes from the ruthless methods Trotsky applied as Lenin’s war commissar in leading the Bolsheviks to victory in the 1917-21 civil war. Trotsky ordered the execution of Bolshevik deserters and the seizure of hostages from the families of ex-Tsarist officers who he had recruited into the Red Army; and he endorsed the shooting of thousands of prisoners held by the security police.
Trotsky also supported violent measures against peasants deemed guilty of hoarding grain and hindering the war effort. In 1922, he urged that a band of Socialist Revolutionaries, leftist rivals of the Bolsheviks, be tried in a case that foreshadowed the show trials of the 1930s, when Stalin put to death some of his oldest party comrades.
Trotsky’s ideological zealotry stood in contrast to his comfortable upbringing. Born Leiba Bronstein in 1879, he was the son of a well-off Jewish farmer in Ukraine. But he soon dabbled in radical circles and was imprisoned at the age of 19. There followed a spell of Siberian exile, a dramatic escape abroad, a prominent role in Imperial Russia’s abortive 1905 revolution, and then arrest, exile and escape again before 1917.
Service paints a perceptive portrait, emphasising how Trotsky, a lifelong advocate of world revolution, insisted on speaking grammatically correct Russian, and sported dapper three-piece suits and a pince-nez. He gave up smoking, drank sparingly and hated smutty stories, while “nearly all fellow Bolsheviks smoked, drank, swore and gossiped profusely”.
He was not one of the Bolshevik boys. He was late to join the party and never won, or even tried to win, the confidence of Bolshevik veterans whose support would have been useful had he sought the leadership in 1923-24. By contrast, Stalin took meticulous care to gain control of the party machinery. He had Trotsky expelled from the party in 1927, deported abroad in 1929 and condemned to death in absentia in 1936.
In today’s Russia, Service concludes, Trotsky is an antiquarian curiosity. “He was close to Stalin in intentions and practice. He was no more likely than Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism.”
Tony Barber is the FT’s Brussels bureau chief
