Leon Trotsky and the Russian Revolution

Here are some interesting passages from Leon Trotsky's The Russian Revolution. (Originally published in 1939 by Simon & Schuster.)

The history of a revolution, like every other history, ought first of all to tell what happened and how.

But at those crucial moments when the old order, because it’s no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime.

The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny

These words are found in the introduction to Trotsky's book.

The first sentence is what this 450 page account is about. The second explains the motivation for revolution. The "situation" is no longer endurable. Hence, the powerless masses erupt, and take control by force.

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Most Americans have little understanding of the situation in Russia at the time of the revolution. Nor do they know what really happened. I'd be curious how many people know there were actually two revolutions in 1917. The first took place in February/March. The Tsar was brought down and the whole structure of government around the Monarch system of rulership. Then in the late fall Lenin and the Bolsheviks pushed out the first wave of revolutionaries and crafted a Totalitarian-ruled Soviet Union.

These things didn't happen overnight. Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 was written to show the history that preceded these revolutions and set them up.

Leon Trotsky

Trotsky adds:

The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which are already formed themselves before the revolution. (Emphasis mine)

The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime.

* * * *
Under Lenin's administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party Marxist-Leninist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Leninism.

Regarding Trotsky's role in all these things Vladimir Cherniaev, a leading Russian historian, summarized it in this manner:

Trotsky bears a great deal of responsibility both for the victory of the Red Army in the civil war, and for the establishment of a one-party authoritarian state with its apparatus for ruthlessly suppressing dissent... He was an ideologist and practitioner of the Red Terror. He despised 'bourgeois democracy'; he believed that spinelessness and soft-heartedness would destroy the revolution, and that the suppression of the propertied classes and political opponents would clear the historical arena for socialism. He was the initiator of concentration camps, compulsory 'labour camps,' and the militarization of labour, and the state takeover of trade unions. Trotsky was implicated in many practices which would become standard in the Stalin era, including summary executions.

Despite all this, Trotsky overstepped and made enemies. As a result, by 1929 he found himself exiled from the State he helped create. He first went to Turkey, then Italy, then France. When France signed an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1935, Trotsky was no longer welcome there either, in part because of his rabble-rousing writings and the encouragement of mass strikes.

From there he went to a farm in Norway, then left for Mexico where he worked for a while with painter and muralist Diego Rivera. Together with Andre Breton he helped write the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art.

Trotsky continued to write and agitate, and became such a burr in Stalin's butt that Stalin sent an NKVD hit squad to eliminate him. The first attempt in May 24, 1940 failed. The second attempt was more successful, by means of a mountaineer's ice axe in August. Even so, he survived the initial blow for a day before succumbing under surgery.

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TRIVIA
I probably first noticed and took interest in Leon Trotsky in sixth grade because his name was Leon. (My birth name is Leon Edward. I later took interest in Leon Russell for the same reason.) I believe it was while reading about Rasputin's assassination, which Trotsky covers somewhat in The Russian Revolution.

When my wife and I prepared to go to Mexico in 1980 to work at an orphanage we studied some of the history of that nation South of the Border. I learned that after the Communists failed in the Spanish Civil War more than 40,000 found refuge in Mexico. Hence, we occasionally saw graffiti featuring the hammer and sickle, international symbol of the Party.

Irving Kristol, RIP

“If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” ~Winston Churchill

I’m trying to make a few remarks about Irving Kristol who passed away this past week. Kristol is one of the pre-eminent names in the neo-conservative movement. Some went so far as to call him the Godfather of Neoconservatism.

It should be noted that conservatism is not a homogeneous worldview. There are numerous subgroups within the conservative perspective, chief of these being neoconservatives, theoconservative and paleoconservatives. Pat Buchanan is representative of the latter, a view that desires to return to the Founding Fathers in all their Constitutional glory, to maintain or reinvigorate his interpretation of the worldview that was dominant during that time. Even the theoconservatives are split between the Neuhaus intellectuals and the report card politics of the Religious Right.

Irving Kristol was from neither of these camps. Rather, he was global in his thinking, and conservative by dint of having been immersed in liberal idealism he could not stomach the bi-products of these idealists, chiefly exemplified in Stalinism and later the Sixties radicalism of the New Left

Adam Bernstein’ s Washington Post obituary/tribute to Kristol began in this manner: Irving Kristol, 89, a forceful essayist, editor and university professor who became the leading architect of neoconservatism, which he called a political and intellectual movement for disaffected ex-liberals, like himself, who had been "mugged by reality," died Friday at Capital Hospice in Arlington County.

Kristol himself had been a Troskyite in his youth and a believer in the socialist dream. (I myself liked Leon Trotsky for a spell while in Junior High School because my first name is likewise Leon, which led me to do an essay on his life at the time.)

I find it interesting that many significant voices in the conservative movement were once liberal and socialists. Kristol and neoconservative Norman Podhoretz cited George Orwell’s disaffection with communism as a start point for this movement. (Much more can be said in that regard.) In point of fact, many people who came late to political awareness with regard to beltway politics had no idea that some of the leading conservative voices during the Reagan era, such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and William J. Bennett, had once been liberals.

Citing Bernstein again, Mr. Kristol and many of his followers were dubbed neoconservatives. It was a term introduced by social critic Michael Harrington to describe the rightward turn of onetime liberals such as Mr. Kristol, whose extraordinary political odyssey had taken him from Depression-era socialist to anticommunist Cold Warrior and Vietnam War hawk.

Although Harrington's use of the term neoconservative was not intended as a compliment, Mr. Kristol embraced the name and became its widely accepted godfather. An Esquire magazine cover story on him in 1979 helped legitimize Mr. Kristol as the leader of a full-fledged movement, even as he downplayed the idea that such a formal faction existed.

Despite the move from left to write of many influential writers and thinkers this past century, the Churchill quote at the beginning of this article is not entirely accurate. There are writers and thinkers whose "mugging by reality" drove them right to left. I think here of David Brock, author of Blinded by the Right, who was a conservative insider during the Clinton years.

Essentially history is ever in the making. Whoever wields power at the moment has an opportunity to influence. That influence can attract or repel based on the consequences of actions and ideas. The part that Winston got right is that things do not forever remain the same, and neither do people.