|
|
April 11, 2004
REVIEWS: A life of struggle
Life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.
— Kierkegaard
Leon Trotsky was born on November 7, 1879 in a Jewish farming family in Ukraine. He refused to study engineering as his father wanted and preferred mathematics. Arrested before he could take his exams, he never completed his education, unlike Lenin who qualified as a lawyer. Thereafter, it was arrests, escapes and exiles.
Trotsky shot into the limelight in the revolution of 1905, when he became the president of the St Petersburg Soviet at the age of 26. Its failure was followed by his “theory of permanent revolution”.
Trotsky had differed with Lenin on the question of the party organization from the time in 1903 when Lenin split the Russian Sociat Democratic Party, though he never joined the Mensheviks and kept striving for the re-unification of the party. It was only in July 1917 when the Mensheviks had, in his view, thoroughly compromised themselves, that he joined the Bolsheviks. And, only four months later, he carried them to power. He then organized the Red Army to defeat the local enemies and foreign interventionists. During this period, his armoured train, on which he used to rush from one front to another, did more than 150,000 kilometres.
Meanwhile, Stalin had consolidated his power within the party organization and easily defeated Trotsky after Lenin’s death. He was first banished to Alma Ata, then abroad to Turkey, when he began to be hounded by the Soviet secret agents. He moved to France, then Norway until Mexico’s leftist President, General Cardenas, gave him asylum. By now, Stalin had gone over to terror, murdering the veteran Bolsheviks at home in farcical trials and having those abroad assassinated. Trotsky was killed with a pick-axe on August 2, 1940, by a Spanish Communist, Mercader.
Trotsky did not like to talk about himself. He never used the first person in his major work The History of the Russian Revolution when having to refer to his own role in the affair. He would, therefore, not be expected to write an autobiography. However, as he says in the introduction to the work under review, he regards it as a continuation of the practical activity of which he had been deprived by exile.
Writing on the isle of Prinkipo in the sea of Marmora, he traces primarily his political development since the age of eighteen. He also reveals for the first time some of the details of his struggle against the triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev and Zhinoviev — the last two were digging their own graves by strengthening Stalin.
This struggle is often referred to us one for power, which is far from the truth. Stalin was deadly serious about power. But Trotsky never reached out for it. He was happy to be a part of the leadership where he would be the most important and, of course, the most brilliant. But he was not ready to take the responsibility of power. He was essentially a number-two man. The problem was that there was no one after Lenin to whom he could be a number two. Stalin, though certainly with a will to power, had risen from the murky depths of his backward Russia. His victory was thus the victory of Russia’s backwardness, as Deutscher put it.
Trotsky’s services to the revolution in the period up to 1924 cannot be effaced. Even Stalin’s massive and crude efforts have not succeeded in it. But his activity in exile in the last eleven years of his life has, in some ways, been equally important. His Fourth International, founded in 1938, may never have taken off. But he stood as a sort of permanent opposition to the Stalinists; criticizing their actions from a Marxist point of view. He was so effective in it that Stalin arranged to have him killed, although the Bolsheviks had always sworn that they rejected terrorism. And Stalin being a primitive man, he had Trotsky’s two sons, a daughter, his first wife and, later, his sister, who was married to Kamanev, also liquidated.
Trotsky, in declining Lenin’s proposal, on the morrow of the seizure of power, to make him head of the revolutionary government, explained that he had always wanted to be a writer and would revert to it once the work of the revolution was out of the way. He was making serious contributions to revolutionary theory at an age when most people do not have cogent political thought. In 1904, he wrote Our Political Tasks criticizing Lenin’s concept of a centralized revolutionary party. Later, in his unfinished biography of Stalin, he conceded that the backwardness of the Russian working class necessitated such an avant-garde. Interestingly, in the preface of Our Political Tasks, he presages his “theory of permanent revolution”. He says the Russian bourgeoisie would be unable to even make a bourgeois revolution without the aid of the workers. Simply put, he said that the Russian capitalist class was still too weak to overthrow autocracy, while the working class was strong politically due to its concentration. Therefore, the bourgeois revolution would have to be made by the workers, which put the revolution immediately on the agenda. However, he added, the workers, after they completed the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, would perforce go on to socialist measures. Here they would be opposed by the peasantry, which was bourgeois and in overwhelming majority. The workers’ power could, therefore, not survive in Russia unless there were socialist revolutions in western Europe and these socialist states came to the aid of Russian workers.
Trotsky’s second important theoretical contribution is his analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union, described by Lenin as a “bureaucratically deformed workers’ state”. Trotsky said the bureaucracy was not a class, since it had not brought a new mode of production. It was a parasitic growth on the working class. It had expropriated the working class politically. Therefore, the Soviet society could not “degenerate” into capitalism. It could only be overthrown in an armed counter-revolution. But he recognized that this society being, by its nature, one in transition, could be thrown back to capitalism by such a counter-revolution.
Trotsky made other theoretical contributions too, some of which may be noted here:
(a) a proletarian culture cannot be created because the dictatorship of the proletariat is not organized to produce a new culture, only to prepare for it
(b) while a movement can use guerrilla tactics, a workers’ state must have regular armed forces
(c) what gives stability to a fascist regime is the mass base provided to it by the lower middle class.
My Life has been very ably rendered into Urdu, though I suppose, it was done from English and not directly from Russian. One can feel here both the superb flow of Trotsky’s pen and his powerful expression. Javed Shaheen has done an excellent job. Lal Khan’s “Introduction” links the narrative to the modern period.
One would have thought that since the Soviet Union and the communist movement were both finished, these discussions among the communists would have no more interest for today’s young than the theological disputes of the early Christians. But apparently the question of distribution of wealth is still alive. And man is not reconciled to inequality. He demands it as a right. The translation of this book into Urdu (the first time, I think) proves it.
Meri Zindagi
By Leon Trotsky
Translated into Urdu by Javed Shaheen
Tabqati Jidd-o-Jehed Publications, 105 Mangal Mansion, Royal Park, Lakshmi Chowk, Lahore
Tel: 042-6316214
618pp. Rs395
|
|
|
