Trotsky's Attack on StalinThe Revolution Betrayed by Leon TrotskyReview by: Bernard ParesThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 16, No. 46 (Jul., 1937), pp. 227-228Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4203338 .

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REVIEWS TROTSKY'S ATTACK ON STALIN.

The Revolution Betrayed. By Leon Trotsky. Faber and Faber, London. I937.

ONE cannot think that Trotsky's last book will increase his reputation as a political leader, though it bears new evidence of his caustic wit. Witte completely spoilt his Memoirs through his incessant and un- controlled malice against his successor, Stolypin. Trotsky has Stalin on the brain; and the defect is not mended by the fact that it is a very clever brain. Speeches seldom run well as books, and this is a speech of a belated demagogue with an uncertain audience. We are called upon to argue over again not very profitable quarrels and to plunge ourselves back into the moods of a period that is over.

The book is valuable to us for certain important confrontations and verifications. Trotsky, like others of us, insists on the " zigzag " course of the Communist experiment; and, with an inside knowledge which is denied to most of us, he maps out the different contrasting periods very much as we do. He confirms the degeneration of the spirit of the young during the NEP (p. 156). He marks the peace policy of the Soviets, as from the surrender of the Chinese Eastern Railway (p. I84). He now admits the enormous acquisitions of the industrial five year plan, and states, on page 2I4: " The planned economy has up to this time . . . given its greatest advantages from the military point of view." In criticising the new formula " to everyone according to his work " (formerly " to everyone according to his need ") he not unjustly remarks that the authors of the new constitution "have mechanically hitched on ... the capitalist norm of peace-work payment," though his suggestion that in the happy socialist future, nothing except need will have to be considered is anything but convincing.

Trotsky's charge, as his title states, is that Stalin has betrayed the world revolution. It is natural enough that an international Jew, who has lived so much of his life abroad, should put the emphasis which Trotsky places on propaganda outside Russia, and that one, like Stalin, whose life has lain in his own country, should take a different view. "The struggle for a favourable change in the correlation of world forces," writes Trotsky on page 185, "puts upon the workers' State a continual obligation to come to the help of the liberative movements in other countries." " In the coming world war, no military allies can compensate the Soviet Union for the lost confidence of the colonial peoples and of the toiling masses in general." (Page 187.) " If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be in- evitable" (page 216). Stalin might reasonably reply that nothing had done so much to recover the enthusiasm of the youth of the Union or the

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228 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

interest and respect of foreign critics as his vast plans of construction for developing what is probably the richest sixth of the world, not for enterprisers and millionaires, but for the community as a whole, and that there would be no greater recommendation of socialism in the world in general than its success over such a wide area. Whether we approve or not of the achievement or of its methods, Stalin could claim that he had done what Trotsky had done no more than talk of: that he had collectivised what is overwhelmingly the most important industry in Russia-agriculture. As he truly said, a socialist industry and an industrialist agriculture meant, in agricultural Russia, the failure of socialism. But he might also turn round upon Trotsky and ask in what foreign country communist propaganda had produced anything else but fascism. Other countries do not enjoy foreign interference, es- pecially with such flimsy and misty arguments as Trotsky produces in this book. In this country, anyhow, the only successful propaganda will be successful achievement in Russia.

Trotsky throughout represents the present phase in the Soviet Union as " Thermidor." This was said with a good deal more justice at the beginning of the NEP, when Trotsky was still a great power in Russia; for then the Government was dragged back by the country, and now it itself controls the changes which it is introducing. He follows out his misleading analogy with the French Revolution by describing the present policy as "Bonapartism." Here there are certainly some similarities, but, taken as a whole, this interpretation may prove to be even more misleading.

It is interesting to one who radically disagrees with Trotsky's views to find that his account of what has happened, as distinct from his inter- pretation of it, is in general the same as one's own. But the difference is that where Trotsky curses, the reader will often bless. Let us take this passage on the family:- " Only a little while ago, in the course of the first five year plan, the schools and the Communist Youth were using children for the exposure, shaming, and in general ' re-educating ' of their drunken fathers or religious mothers-with what success is another question. At any rate, this method meant a shaking of parental authority to its foundations. In this not unimportant sphere too, a sharp turn has now been made. Along with the seventh, the fifth commandment is also fully restored to its rights-as yet, to be sure, without any reference to God." (Page 148.)

Perhaps, coming so soon after a notable national crisis, this passage will help us to form an estimate of the intimacy of Trotsky's knowledge of the " toiling masses " of this country and of his claim to their leadership, to repair any gaps in the defences of the Soviet Union.

BERNARD PARES.

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