A Collection of Three Works

No calls today. Fabulous.  A few weeks back I finished a Lenin biography, which a friend had recommended and upon completion I impulse-bought the Trotsky biography, which the same author, Robert Service had more recently finished, as well.  But upon researching the book and the subject it became clear that the definitive biography was written by Isaac Deutscher in 1954.  Avoiding the sensible question:  How many Leon Trotsky biographies does a person need?  I procured the Deutscher tome as well.  A collection of three works: “The Prophet Armed”, “The Prophet Unarmed” and “The Prophet Outcast”, the three are bound as a set, suggesting a fifteen-hundred-page commitment, and it has sat imposingly on my shelf ever since I last returned home.  Today I pulled it down and began to make my way through. 

A few years back I’d gobbled up the Simon Monitfiorre Seabag “Young Stalin” and “In the Court of the Red Czar”, which suggest the rich, complicated evil of that unlikely dictator.  In Lenin, who plays Old Major to Snowball and Napoleon, we spend most of our time marvelling at his utterly uncompromising confidence, focus, insistence.  Lenin never strikes one as cuddly.  Nearly everyone he knew was at some point, sacrificed to his revolutionary goal.  The human sides of Vladimir, his mistress, his enjoyment of biking, or hiking, or chess are rare and one doesn’t imagine him laughing very often.  He was, of course, effective.

Trotsky however, only one hundred pages in, is a much more three-dimensional canvass.  Lenin did not bother to direct his writing to peasants or workers, or the bourgeoisie, the way Trotsky seemed to delight in.  Rather he was primarily concerned with debating theory with other Marxists.  Preaching beyond the choir was a waste of air.  Trotsky however seems to revel and excel at taking the conversation to wherever it is needed.   And where as the Lenin story builds to the 1917 climax, we know that Trotsky’s tale will twist its way through the U.S. and Turkey and Mexico until he meets his end at the hands of Ramón Mercade in Coyoacán, twenty-three years and much international Technicolor, later.

Eating my lunch salad, I asked my wife what she’d learned about Mssr. Bronstein when she was growing up.  Was he a hero or a villain?  I assume the CCP, tied, as it was through Mao’s lifespan to Stalinist hagiography, must have cast him as a “running dog” and a counter revolutionary.  She suggested quickly, that he was simply a noted Russian intellectual.  I suspect that things had mellowed some in the 80’s when she is most likely recalling things.  That or the name is being conflated with Tchaikovsky or Chekov, in the Cyrillic to Chinese to Romanization journey. 

Looking now, again quickly, on the English web it is hard to find anything definitive.  I wonder if there is a place where one can discern, at a glance or otherwise, but certainly officially, what Zhong Nan Hai’s official position is on Leon Trotsky.  There must be a “correct” way to understand him.  In lieu of this, Wiki informs me that the Trotskyites had tried to broker a peace between the KMT and the CCP during the civil war, and that after the revolution those who remained were rounded up and shot as KMT agents, while a few notable Trotskyites fled to Hong Kong and continued their activities, as Lenin and Trotsky once did themselves, under British rule. 

Thursday, 02/22/18