The Prophet Armed/The Prophet Unarmed/The Prophet Outcast [antikvár]

PREFACE When I first contemplated the writing of a biographical trilogy on the leaders of the Russian revolution I intended to include a study of Trotsky in Exile, not a full-scale biography of Trotsky. Trotsky's later years and the tragic close of his life stirred my imagination more deeply than did the earlier and more worldly part of his story. On second thoughts, however, I began to doubt whether Trotsky in Exile could be made at all comprehensible if the earlier part of the story was not told. Then, pondering historical materials and biographical sources, some of them new to me, I came to realize more clearly than before how deeply the drama of Trotsky's last years was rooted in the earlier and even the earliest stages of his career. I therefore decided to devote to Trotsky two separate yet interconnected volumes: The Prophet Armed and The Prophet Unarmed, the first giving what might be described as Trotsky's 'rise', the second his 'fair. I have refrained from using these conventional terms because I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall. The titles to these volumes have been suggested to me by the passage from Machiavelli printed on page xii. The present study illustrates the truth of what is there said; but it also offers a somewhat ironical commentary on it. Machiavelli's observation that 'all armed prophets have conquered and the unarmed ones have been destroyed' is certainly realistic. What may be doubted is whether the distinction between the armed prophet and the unarmed one and the difference between conquest and destruction is always as clear as it seemed to the author of The Prince. In the following pages we first watch Trotsky conquering without arms in the greatest revolution of our age. We then see him armed, victorious, and bent under the weight of his armour—the chapter portraying him at the very pinnacle of power bears the title 'Defeat in Victory'. And when next the Prophet Unarmed is contemplated, the question will arise whether a strong element of victory was not concealed in his very defeat. My account of Trotsky's role in the Russian revolution PREFACE Carlyle once wrote that as GromweU's biographer he had to drag out the Lord Protector from under a mountain of dead dogs, a huge load of calumny and oblivion. My job, as Trotsky's biographer, has been somewhat similar, with this difference, however, that when I set out to assail my mountain of dead dogs great events were about to strike at it with immense force. I had concluded The Prophet Armed, the first part of my study of Trotsky, while Stalin was still alive, and while his 'cult' appeared as indestructible as the stigma attached to Trotsky seemed indelible. Most reviewers of The Prophet Armed agreed with a British critic who wrote that 'that single book undoes three decades of Stalinist denigration' ; but, of course, neither the book nor its documentation brought forth a single word of comment from the Soviet historians and critics, who usually devote an unconscionable amount of attention to every piece of'Sovietology', no matter how trashy, that appears in the West. Then came Stalin's death, the Twentieth Congress, and Khrushchev's 'secret' speech. An earthquake shook the mountain of dead dogs, scattering half of it far and wide; and for a moment it looked as if the other half too was about to be blown away. Historically truthful references to Trotsky's part in the Russian Revolution began to appear in Soviet periodicals for the first time in three decades, although the paucity and timidity of the references suggested how close the connexion between history and politics still was in this case, and how delicate the problem. When Stalin's idol was being smashed and the Stalinist falsification of history was being officially and emphatically denounced, the shade of Stalin's chief antagonist inevitably aroused fresh and lively, though bewildered, interest. In Moscow, iPeking, Warsaw, and East Berlin people wondered anew what had been the significance and the moral of Trotsky's struggle against Stalin. Young historians, to whom the archives, hitherto kept under lock and key, had suddenly been thrown open, avidly looked for an answer in the unfamiliar records of Bolshevism. Khrushchev having declared that Stalin had destroyed his PREFACE r i Ihis volume concludes my trilogy about Trotsky and I relates the catastrophic dénouement of his drama. At the dénouement, the protagonist of a tragedy is usually more acted upon than acting. Yet Trotsky remained Stalin's active and fighting antipode to the end, his sole vocal antagonist. Throughout these twelve years, from 1929 to 1940, no voice could be raised against Stalin in the U.S.S.R.; and not even an echo could be heard of the earlier intense struggles, except in the grovelling confessions of guilt to which so many of Stalin's adversaries had been reduced. Consequently, Trotsky appeared to stand quite alone against Stalin's autocracy. It was as if a huge historic conflict had become compressed into a controversy and feud between two men. The biographer has had to show how this had come about and to delve into the complex circumstances and relationships which, while enabling Stalin to 'strut about in the hero's garb', made Trotsky into the symbol and sole mouthpiece of opposition to Stalinism. Together, therefore, with the facts of Trotsky's life I have had to narrate the tremendous social and political events of the period : the turmoil of industrialization and collectivization in the U.S.S.R. and the Great Purges; the collapse ofthe German and European labour movements under the onslaught of Nazism; and the outbreak of the Second World War. Each of these events affected Trotsky's fortunes; and over each he took his stand against Stalin. I have had to go over the major controversies of the time ; for in Trotsky's life the ideological debate is as important as the battle scene is in Shakespearian tragedy: through it the protagonist's character reveals itself, while he is moving towards catastrophe. More than ever before I dwell in this volume on my chief character's private life, and especially on the fate of his family. Again and again readers will have to transfer their attention from the political narrative to what common parlance insists on describing as the 'human story' (as though public affairs were not the most human of all our preoccupations; and as if politics were not a human activity par excellence). At this stage Trotsky's