Trotsky and Stalin

[angrysoba]

I'm wending my way through Robert Service's fairly new biography on Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, which is interesting if a little dry but I also sneaked a look at a couple of reviews of the book to find out how it would end...

Of course, I knew already that Trotsky ended up at the wrong end of an ice pick after being sent into exile by the tyrant Stalin but also Service apparently argues that Trotsky was not the relatively humane and wise sage who could lead the Soviet Union to a utopia but a bloodthirsty authoritarian personality himself who demurred against taking absolute power for himself for practical rather than principled reasons.

Some reviewers have found this hard to take believing that there is no way Trotsky could have turned out like Stalin. One of them even, sarcastically, asks if Trotsky would have become paranoid about Jews towards the end of his life in the way Stalin did. I wrote about that here:

http://angrysoba.blogspot.com/2010/05/no-more-heroes.html

Two questions:

Has the myth of a "saintly" Trotsky been put to rest for good?

Does anyone have any recommendations for good biographies of Stalin? (I know that Robert Service has written one but if it is as dry as his Trotsky biography I think I'll skip it).

Thanks

 

[headscratcher4]

Trotsky's own personality flaws were as responsible as Stalin's manouvering in preventing Trotsky from acsendency in the USSR. He was nearly as pedantic and intollerant of those who would contradict him as Stalin and he had none of Stalin's more wilely charms.

But more importantly, he never conceeded that the brutality that Stalin employed had its origens in the brutality that Lenin and Trotsky employed in the Revolution. Trotsky was not a democrat. He did not believe in free press or the free expression of ideas. He believed in brutal retaliation of those who opposed the revolution and in the use of terror to force the bourgoisie (sp?) to conform to the needs/demands of the revolution. He was a strict party man -- in fact, one of the reasons he got caught with his revolutionarly pants down was his adherence to the belief that the party was all, the vangaurd of the revolution and had to be defended against all enemies at all costs. He was sanquine about the murder and death of millions of people that resulted from his and Lenin's policies while condeming Stalin's atrocities.

He was also a worshiper of dialectical materialism as an almost mystical religion and brutally attacked any and all Communists who questioned the purest Marxist cant.

Trotsky became the darling of revolutionaries who opposed Stalin specifically because he was out of power and powerless.

In the end, if Lenin is the Father of Communist Terrror and the system that allowed Stalin to emerge, than Trotsky is certainly the god-father.

Sure, Trotsky couldn't have been as anti-semetic as Stalin, but he was quite capable of both paranoia and killing lots of otherwise innocents in order to further the party and the cause.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Does anyone have any recommendations for good biographies of Stalin? (I know that Robert Service has written one but if it is as dry as his Trotsky biography I think I'll skip it).

I enjoyed (if that's the word where Stalin's concerned) Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It'll take up a fair bit of your time, but it's worth it.

Dave

 

[timhau]

Some reviewers have found this hard to take believing that there is no way Trotsky could have turned out like Stalin. One of them even, sarcastically, asks if Trotsky would have become paranoid about Jews towards the end of his life in the way Stalin did.

Maybe he would have gone after Georgians.

 

[dudalb]

If Trotsky had won the power struggle he would have behaved little differently then Stalin as far as being a power mad ,cruel, tryant goes.
He might have been much more aggresive in foreign policy, with his obssesion with "Spreading the Revolution" as quickly as possible, as opposed to Stalin's belief that the Soviet Union needed to become a strong Military power before attempting that.

 

[dudalb]

He was also a worshiper of dialectical materialism as an almost mystical religion and brutally attacked any and all Communists who questioned the purest Marxist cant.

A tradition that modern day Trotskyites maintain with fervor,as anybody who has encountered them knows.

 

[jskowron]

Does anyone have any recommendations for good biographies of Stalin?

Though not truly a biography (actually a work of fiction) The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A Novel by Richard Lourie is a very compelling read. It focuses primarily on Stalin's paranoia related to Trotsky. Though I'm not well versed in soviet or bolshevik history, reviews I've read indicated that Lourie does not stray from the historical facts.

 

[headscratcher4]

The Court of the Red Czar was not bad. Montefoirie's Young Stalin was interesting as well. I read Service's more recent full bio, thought it ok.

I love Conquest, so try his Stalin: Breaker of Nations. Conquest was right about the brutality of Stalin and the Soviet Regime long before it was fashionable in academic circles (His: The Great Terror is a spectacular history).

I seem to remember that Adam B. Ulam had a bio of Stalin, had to be in the 80s. Ulam is always good on the Soviet era.

 

[angrysoba]

Thanks for the Stalin biography suggestions.

I actually own a copy of Alan Bullock's Hitler and Stalin which I started reading in my high school/secondary school days and never finished. Alan Bullock is primarily an expert on German history, I believe so he may not be an expert historian when it comes to Stalin.

I did start reading a biography by a writer called Alex de Jonge which began, if I remember correctly, with a very odd piece of pop psychology about the different temperaments of people from countries that primarily drink vodka compared to those who primarily drink wine. He seemed to be driving at the idea that because Stalin was from the Georgian wine-belt his way of thinking was out of step with the Russian vodka drinkers (does anyone know the book I am talking about and whether I have given an accurate exposition of the ideas?)

As bizarre as that idea one truly awful book on Stalin is Martin Amis' "Koba the Dread" which is really about Martin Amis and his literary friends and his literary feuds in which he has read up about Stalin to show that some people were very wrong to preach Communism to him.

The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montifiore sounds good and, of course, Robert Conquest who is often cited as one of the experts on Stalin.

 

[dudalb]

I might pick up Service's book on Trotsky, since St.Leon (and that is how a lot on the extreme left feel about him) needs knocking off his pedestal.

 

[angrysoba]

I might pick up Service's book on Trotsky, since St.Leon (and that is how a lot on the extreme left feel about him) needs knocking off his pedestal.

Here's a good review of the book by John Gray:

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/gray_10_09.html

From what I understand the first person to skewer Trotsky (aside from Ramon Mercader) in print was Dmitir Volkogonov who wrote a triptych of biographies on the Russian leaders. When his book on Stalin came out he was still a general in the Soviet army and his book was so subversive he was sacked. His book on Trotsky must be floating around somewhere but I'm not sure if he's well-regarded as an academic historian. Service, on the other hand, seems to have impeccable credentials and naturally gets a lot of flak from witless nostalgics for the Soviet era such as in this review of another of his books:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview8

Extract: "If the Chinese leader Zhou en-Lai felt it was too soon to assess the French revolution nearly two centuries after the event, it's certainly too much to expect any definitive - let alone politically detached - judgment on 20th-century communism less than two decades after its European collapse."

Right! I wonder if he would make such glib statements like that about the Khmer Rouge's seizure of power in Cambodia (possibly, actually!) or believe it is too soon to tell if the Nazi regime in Germany was a bad thing?

 

[MG1962]

If Trotsky had won the power struggle he would have behaved little differently then Stalin as far as being a power mad ,cruel, tryant goes.
He might have been much more aggresive in foreign policy, with his obssesion with "Spreading the Revolution" as quickly as possible, as opposed to Stalin's belief that the Soviet Union needed to become a strong Military power before attempting that.

Yeah I think that is a pretty good reading of Trotsky

 

[HansMustermann]

If Trotsky had won the power struggle he would have behaved little differently then Stalin as far as being a power mad ,cruel, tryant goes.
He might have been much more aggresive in foreign policy, with his obssesion with "Spreading the Revolution" as quickly as possible, as opposed to Stalin's belief that the Soviet Union needed to become a strong Military power before attempting that.

Actually, while he probably wouldn't have been any better as a leader, I don't think one can simply put an equals sign between the two. Stalin didn't seem to have done much out of die-hard belief in some ideal, but mostly out of paranoia. He seemed to have been thoroughly the petty backstabber type, and he ended up fearing that everyone around him is equally just planning to backstab him on the way up. The man who had basically betrayed everyone who had trusted or even served him faithfully, expected nothing less than to be betrayed by everyone.

And consequentially most of Stalin's excesses had nothing to do with spreading the revolution or believing in the Party or anything. Pretty soon he was just getting rid of anyone who might conceivably have enough claim or prestige to ever challenge him, and then it went downhill: he started seeing conspiracies everywhere.

The doctors' purge, for example had nothing to do with spreading the revolution or with favouring a certain kind of communism or anything. It was just something born of paranoid fear that his doctor might be trying to kill him.

In the other purges, a lot of the people purged were in no way opposed to his ideology or views. Probably the best example is Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who despite an old difference of opinions, was nevertheless the guy whose vision shaped Stalin's reform of the industry and army, and the guy whose doctrines they would use in WW2. But he got killed by Stalin anyway.

Even his faithful dogs at the head of the NKVD got purged regularly, as well as some other of Stalin's lieutenants, lest they get enough power to conceivably challenge him. Genrikh Yagoda, the faithful doggie who who had sent millions to slave labour camps and extracted confessions from whoever Stalin wanted killed, was killed himself at Stalin's orders. His successor, Yezhov, the man who not just was wellknown as a Stalin loyalist, and whose paper formed the ideological basis for the purges, was executed too. Etc.

Ironincally the act that would doom Yagoda also revealed the madness of it all. In one show trial basically he inadvertently managed to extract and use a confession about those men's traitorous views that... were identical to the party ideology and Stalin's stated ideology. They were convicted anyway. And that I feel says everything about Stalin's purges.

Violence was promoted by Stalin and his choice of lieutenants often as a means in itself. For a start it was already known that if you just want a confession, other means produce results faster, but Stalin favoured beating someone black and blue anyway.

But it didn't even just have to do with extracting confessions. Yagoda was stripped and savagely beaten before his execution, in a senseless act, since he was to be executed anyway and the execution wasn't public or anything. There was no deterrence factor, no teaching someone a lesson, no anything. It was just the senseless act of beating someone up just because it's the last time they could. In an act of poetic injustice, Yezhov, the guy who had ordered and supervised this, would suffer the same before his own execution later.

Basically, I'm sorry, but you can't ascribe Stalin's brutality and excesses to just commie ideology or anything. They had very little to do with marxist class struggle views, or dialectical materialism, or views about spreading the revolution. It was more like one part paranoid fear of everyone and everything, and one part terror and brutality for terror and brutality sake.

Would Trotsky end up doing the same? Maybe, but really it doesn't follow from the supplied premises. Just being an authoritarian and fanatical to an ideology don't necessarily mean he'd share Stalin's madness and love of senseless violence.

 

[soikins]

Basically, I'm sorry, but you can't ascribe Stalin's brutality and excesses to just commie ideology or anything. They had very little to do with marxist class struggle views, or dialectical materialism, or views about spreading the revolution. It was more like one part paranoid fear of everyone and everything, and one part terror and brutality for terror and brutality sake.

Would Trotsky end up doing the same? Maybe, but really it doesn't follow from the supplied premises. Just being an authoritarian and fanatical to an ideology don't necessarily mean he'd share Stalin's madness and love of senseless violence.

I disagree.
First, I don't think USSR under the rule of Trotsky would be much different. It would have a different approach to the problem of World Revolution, but I don't think there is any basis to assume that one person would make a big difference.

I know this is a thread about biographies, but in the case of Soviet Union, I don't think that a personality would matter much - the system itself was totalitarian. Mindless terror was an essential part of it.

IMHO Hannah Arendt captured the essence of totalitarianism very well in her The Origins of Totalitarianism and Milovan Djilas in his The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System described the nature of communism very precisely. Senseless violence is at the heart of terror. Terror is one of the tools of total power. It wouldn't matter much if Stalin of Trotsky would have ruled.

P.S.
IMHO Robert C. Tucker is very good author to read if one wants to understand Stalin and stalinism.

 

[HansMustermann]

Except the exact same USSR could very well function with more subtle ways of keeping its citizens in check after Stalin. Oversimplifying it to the point of "totalitarianism = senseless violence and terror" makes some great political BS, but is rarely a good description of reality.

 

[headscratcher4]

What would have been different, IMO, is the whys of the destruction of human life, but not the destruction. First, millions would likely still have died due to famine under Trotsky, because his "economic solutions" were no more grounded in real life or real need than Stalin's. Second, Trotsky would certainly have been as apt to repress all competing instutions. There is no chance that the press, indipendent business, science, academia, etc. would have been allowed to challenge the single party state...thus while Trotskyite purges might not have been so blatently "false" as the Stalinist purges, they would have occured. Third, Trotsky was a terrible leader in non-war situations. While he was a sometimes brilliant war commander, he was ruthless. But, when not fighting a war -- a situation which even for Communists required strict adhence to chain of command -- Trotsky was hard pressed to get along with his colleagues. Sure, he could out intellectualize them, but he didn't inpire confidence or great love and admiration. Had he been in charge, he would have had to have learned to be ruthless in his party managment as he was in his Red Army managment and would have had to purge discent, and I would argue given his history, it would have been brutal.

The one great change of a Trotsky lead USSR I think has been pointed out...likely propensity to internationalize the revolution...though the practicalities of running a poor, starving country might have made Trotsky turn inward just as it did Stalin... consolidation of the revoution would have been paramount to spreading the revolution and even Trotsky, IMO, would have had to conceed the point with time. However, it would seem unlikely that there would have been a Trotsky/Hitler pact..Trotsky's Jewish ancestry would have made that match-up inpossible. It is also hard to see Trotsky failing to react better to invasion than the essentially incapacitated Stalin.

However, I think those who somehow envision an alternative, softer USSR run by a more thoughtful, less brutal Trotsky are fooling themsleves. He along with Lenin was completely responsible for the brutal excesses of the civil war and at least one national famine. He was completely capable of brutatlity and arrogance...his biggest problem was that he simply didn't know how to work the levers of bureaucatic machinery the way Stalin did.

 

[timhau]

Except the exact same USSR could very well function with more subtle ways of keeping its citizens in check after Stalin. Oversimplifying it to the point of "totalitarianism = senseless violence and terror" makes some great political BS, but is rarely a good description of reality.

Actually, I have the impression that totalitarianism is rarely good with subtle. In fact, I can't think of an example of that right now; can you? The USSR tried subtle in the late 1980s, and look what happened to them.

 

[HansMustermann]

Actually, I have the impression that totalitarianism is rarely good with subtle. In fact, I can't think of an example of that right now; can you? The USSR tried subtle in the late 1980s, and look what happened to them.

Well, I don't mean "more subtle" as in "you'll think you're actually free" or anything. I mean "more subtle" as in, basically, they didn't need sheer senseless terror.

Since Brezhnev or so, they went more for "chilling effect" than for Stalin's kind of massacres. The idea was that someone somewhere has a dossier on you, and each time you say something even remotely subversive, or each time you drink with comrade Piotr who loses it and curses the government, etc, it might go into that dossier. And maybe comrade Piotr is actually an agent provocateur of the government. And it might bite you in the arse when you least expect it. You might earn an all expense trip to Siberia after all, but maybe just none of your family will be ever allowed to travel abroad any more, or maybe your son will no longer find a job in Moskow, or whatever.

Stalin's kind of predictable terror also served as a check. You could know if they had something on you or not. The more disconnected way actually created more paranoia.

And basically people just learned to hold their tongue and not rock the boat much.

Probably Sakharov is the best example of how well it worked. For all of his vocal dissent, they could just "exile" him to a large city instead of Siberia and, other than some occasional passive-aggressive intimidation attempts, mostly let him shout against the government all he wants. He just didn't matter. Those around him were already so well trained to avoid any potential agents provocateur, that everyone avoided him anyway and his ideas simply had no traction.

So basically, yes, there's an example of a dictatorship that worked in a more "subtle" way than Stalin's brutal terror.

Again, I'm not saying it was good or freedom. It was not. Just that Stalin's kind of brutal terror for brutal terror sake was not the only and inevitable way to do things. A different leader could do things a lot differently.

 

[soikins]

Except the exact same USSR could very well function with more subtle ways of keeping its citizens in check after Stalin. Oversimplifying it to the point of "totalitarianism = senseless violence and terror" makes some great political BS, but is rarely a good description of reality.

Where did I oversimplify to "totalitarianism = senseless violence and terror"? I said that terrorism is one of the tools of power used by totalitarianism. This by no means is the only tool.

Total state power was necessary for the survival of the ruling class of Soviet Union. There is no reason to believe that under Trotsky the Party would not seize and use such power. Trotsky was quick to use violence when in power and advocated for use of it even when in exile.

 

[soikins]

Just that Stalin's kind of brutal terror for brutal terror sake was not the only and inevitable way to do things. A different leader could do things a lot differently.

But wasn't this "more subtle" method used only after several decades of senseless terror and brainwashing? After the old hierarchy was completely destroyed and society was melded into one mass.

The point of seemingly senseless terror is that none can feel safe, for there are no rules obey to be safe. Whatever you do, nothing protects you - whoever you are, wherever you are - at any time they could come after you. Living for decades in such conditions, turned the nation into a nation of slaves. After that, simpler methods worked. But also for few decades.