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It will be seen that the Marxist movement had arrived by the beginning of the century at a point 
where it could provide a base and frame for an ambitious and gifted young man.
Trotsky is not, like Marx, a great original thinker; he is not a great original statesman, like 
Lenin; he was perhaps not even inevitably a great rebel: the revolution was, as it were, the
world ni which he found himself living. He is one of those men of the first rank who flourish 
inside a school, neither creating, nor breaking out of its system.

The young studentwhohadimpressed his fellows by the eloquence and force of his reasoning at a time 
when he did not yet know what he was talking about, because he had at any
cost to play a role, found his place in the army of Marxisma€”in the drama of progress, on the 
stage of the earth, conceived in a certain way. This is not, of course, to imply that
there has been anything insincere or specious about the relation of Trotsky to this role. On the 
contrary, he has staked upon it not only such things as comfort and peace of mind, but
his own life and the lives of his followers and family, and that enjoyment of political power 
itself which is the only worldly satisfaction that Marxism allow sto its true priesthood;
and he has learned in the Marxist academy a perfection of revolutionary form and standards of 
revolutionary honor that seem almost intended to rival that of the Tsar's dueling
officers.

There is a passage in which Trotsky tells of the effect on him of reading the Marx-Engels 
correspondence which is worth quoting as a description of the tradition that Marx and
Engels had founded. Trotsky had been trying to work with the Austrian Social Democrats, who had 
been both stultified by the Germanic academicism-a€”the workers sometimes a
dressed them as "Genosse Herr Doktor," and demoralized by the Viennese skepticism: Victor Adler had 
once shocked Trotsky by declaring that, as for him, he preferred political
predictions based on the Apocalypse to those based on Dialectical Materialism.

"In this atmosphere," says Trotsky:

the correspondence between Marx and Engels was one of the books that I needed most, and the one 
that stood closest to me. It supplied me with the
principal and most unfailing test for myown ideas as well as for my entire personal attitude toward 
the rest of the world. The Viennese leaders of the Social
Democracy used the same formulas that I did, but one had only to turn any of them five degrees 
around on their own axes to discover that we gave quite
different meanings to the same concepts. Our agreement was a temporary one, superficial and unreal.

The correspondence between Marx and Engels was for me not a theoretical, but a psychological 
revelation. Toutes proportions gardAOes, I found proof on
every page that I was bound to these two by a direct psychological affinity. Their attitude to men 
and ideas was mine. I guessed what they did not express,
shared their sympathies, was indignant and hated as they did. Marx and Engels were revolutionaries 
through and through. But they had not the slightest
trace  of sectarianism or asceticism. Both of them, and especially Engels, could at any time say of 
themselves that nothing human was strange to them. But
their revolutionary outlook lifted them always above the hazards of fate and the works of men. 
Pettiness was incompatible not only with their personalities,
but with their presences. Vulgarity could not stick even to the soles of their boots. Their 
appreciations, sympathies, jestsa€”even when most
commonplacea€”are always touched by the rarefied air of spiritual nobility. They may pass deadly 
criticism on a man, but they will never deal in tittle-
tattle.

They can be ruthless, but not treacherous. For outward glamor, titles or rank they have nothing but 
a cool contempt. What philistines and vulgarians
considered aristo cratic in them was really only their revolutionary superiority. Its most 
important characteristic is a complete and ingrained independence
of official public opinion at alltimes and under all conditionsa€!.

We who of recent years have seen the State that Trotsky helped to build in a phase combining the 
butcheries of the Robespierre Terror with the corruption and reaction of the
Directory, and Trotsky himself figuring dramatically in the role of Gracchus Babeuf, may be tempted 
to endow him with qualities which actually he does not possess and with
principles which he has expressly repudiated. We have seen the successor of Lenin undertake a 
fabulous rewriting of the whole historya€! to cancel-out Trotskya€™ s part, pursue
Trotsky from country to country, persecuting even his children and hounding them to their deaths; 
and at last, in faked trials and confessions more degrading to the human spirit
than  the frank fendishness of IvAjn the Terrible, try to pin upon Trotsky the blame of all the 
mutinies, mistakes and disasters that have harassed his administrationA±till he has
made the world conscious of Trotsky as the Accuser of Stalina€™ s own bad conscience, as if the 
Soviet careerists of the thirties were unable to deny the socialist ideal without
trying to annihilate the moral authority of this one homeless and hunted man.

It is not Trotsky alone who has created his role: his enemies have given it a reality that no mere 
self-dramatization could have compassed. And as the fires of the Revolution have
died down in the Soviet Union at a time when the systems of thought of the West were already in an 
advanced state of decadence, he has shone forth like a veritable Pharos, rotating
a long shaft of light on the seas and the reefs all around.

But we must try to see the man inside the role and to examine his real tendencies and doctrinesa€!.

There has been, so far as I know, no other first-rate Marxist for whom the Marxist conception of 
History, derived from the Hegelian idea, plays so frankly teleological a role as it
does in the work of Trotsky. Here are some references from his book on the 1905 revolution, written 
soon after the events it describes.

a€oelf the prince was not succeeding in peacefully regenerating the country, he was accomplishing 
with remarkable effectiveness the task of a more
general order for which history had placed him at the head of the government: the destruction of 
the political illusions and the prejudices of the middle
class.a€D

a€oeHistory used the fantastic plan of Gapon for the purpose of arriving at its ends, and it only 
remained for the priest to sanction with the priestly
authority its [historya€™ s] revolutionary conclusions."

a€oeWhen one rereads the correspondence of our marvelous classics [Marx, Engels and Lassalle], who 
from the height of their observatoriesa€”the
youngest in Berlin, and his two ranking seniors in the very center of world capitalism, 
Londona€’’observed the political horizon with never-relaxing
attention, taking note of every incident, every phenomenon, that might indicate the Revolution^™ s 
approach; when one rereads these letters, in which the
revolutionary lava is boiling up, when one breathes this atmosphere of an expectancy impatient but 
never weary, one is moved to hate that cruel dialectic of
history which, in order to attain momentary ends, attaches to Marxism raisonneurs totally devoid of 
talent in either their theories or their psychology, who
oppose their a€~reasona€™ to [what they regard] as the revolutionary madness.a€D

History, then, with its dialectical Trinity, had chosen Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky to disillusion the 
middle class, had propounded revolutionary conclusions which it had compelled
Father Gapon to bless, and will cruelly discredit and destroy certain Pharisees and Sadducees of 
Marxism before it summons the boiling lava of the Judgment.

These statements make no sense whatever unless one substitutes for the words history and the 
dialectic of history the words Providence and God. And this Providential power of
history is present in all the writing of Trotsky. John Jay Chapman said of Browning that God did 
duty in his work as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection and preposition; and
the same is true of History with Trotsky. Of late, in his solitude and exile, this History, an 
austere spirit, has seemed actually to stand behind his chair as he writes, encouraging,
admonishing, approving, giving him the courage to confound his accusers, who have never seen 
History a€™ s face.

What it may mean in moments of action to feel History towering at onea€™ s elbow with her avenging 
sword in her hand is shown in the remarkable scene at the first congress of
the Soviet dictatorship after the success of the October insurrection of 1917, when Trotsky, with 
the contempt and indignation of a prophet, read Martov and his followers out of the
meeting.

"You are pitiful isolated individuals ,a€D he cried at this height of the Bolshevik triumph. 
a€oeYou are bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you
belong from now ona€”into the rubbish-can of history !a€D

These words are worth pondering for the light they throw on the course of Marxist politics and 
thought.

Observe that the merging of yourself with the onrush of the current of history is to save you from 
the ignoble fate of being a a€oepitiful isolated individuala€D; and that the failure


so to merge yourseit win relegate you to me ruoDisn-can ot History, wnere you can presumably be ot 
no more use.

Today, though we may agree with the Bolsheviks that Martov was no man of action, his croakings over 
the course hey had adopted seem to us full of far-sighted intelligence. He
pointed out that proclaiming a socialist regime in conditions different from those contemplated by 
Marx would not realize the results that Marx expected; that Marx and Engels had
usually described the dictatorship of the proletariat as having the form, for the new dominant 
class, of a democratic republic, with universal sufA-«frage and the popular recall of
officials; that the slogan a€oeAll power to the Sovietsa€D had never really meant what it said and 
that it had soon been exchanged by Lenin for a€oeAll power to the Bolshevik
Party.a€D

There sometimes turn out to be valuable objects cast away in the rubbish-can of history a€’’things 
that have to be retrieved later on.

From the point of view of the Stalinist Soviet Union, that is where Trotsky himself is today; and 
he might well discard his earlier assumption that an isolated individual must needs
be a€oepitifula€D for the conviction of Dr. Stockman in Ibsena€™ s Enemy of the People that a€oethe 
strongest man is he who stands most alone.a€Ua€!

After the Moscow trials of March, 1938, he wrote a long article called Their Morals and Oursagainst 
persons who had been asserting that the systematic falsehoods of the Kremlin
and its remorseless extermination of the old Bolsheviks had grown quite logically out of the 
Jesuitical policy pursued by the Bolsheviks themselvesa€!. Trotskya€! bitterly
complain[s] of the a€oehypocrisya€n and the a€oeofficial cult of mendacitya€D of the Kremlin and 
denouncing one of his calumniators of the GPU as a a€oebourgeois without
honor                                                                                     or 
conscience.a€D When the Bolsheviks calumniated the Mensheviks, then, the reader is moved to 
inquire, this did not imply anything derogatory to their conscience or their
honor? One finds the answer in another passage: a€oeThe question does not even lie in which of the 
warring camps caused or itself suffered the greatest number of victims. History
has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in 
the [American] Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles
a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning and violence breaks the chainsa€”let not the 
contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality !a€D

There is, then, a court of morality above the warring classes, and this court is presided over by, 
precisely again, the Goddess Historya€!. The shell of party polemics, that convention
which is in itself an abrogation of peacetime relations and an obstacle to serious discussion, 
interposes itself here between Trotsky and the real problems at issue. There is a good
deal  of the mere argument ad hominema€”or rather, argument to social classa€”of the kind exploited 
first by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifestoa€!. Who are these
creatures who dare to probe our morality? They are the a€cepetty pickpockets of history,a€D etc. 
The very title Their Morals and Ours attempts to divert attention by putting the
debate                                                                                 on a 
polemical plane.

But again he invokes Lenin: a€oeThe a€~amoralisma€™ of Lenin,a€D he says:

that is, his rejection of super-class morals, did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and 
the same ideal throughout his whole life; from devoting
his whole being to the cause of the oppressed; from displaying the highest conscientiousness in the 
sphere of ideas and the highest fearlessness in the
sphere of action, from maintaining an attitude untainted by the least superiority to the 
a€~ordinarya€™ worker, to a defenseless woman, to a child. Does it
not seem that a€~amoralisma€™ in the given case is only a pseudonym for higher human morality?a€D

It is true, of course, that Lenin followed a moral logic of his own; but he lived it, and we can 
see how he was tom in feeling, if not perplexed in decision, by its difficulty. Even less
than Trotsky did Lenin examine it or try to formulate it; yet today the best that Trotsky can do is 
to point into the past toward Lenina€”that is, to show that there was once a great
Bolshevik who was a humane and dedicated person.

It cannot be said that Trotsky has shown himself particularly humane. It seems to have been 
principally the planning side of socialism, the opportunity for increasing efficiency, and
the ruthless side of Marxism, that attracted him when he was actually in power. The whole Bolshevik 
dictatorship, of course, was fundamentally undemocratic. With a people quite
untrained in political democracy, it was inevitable that a revolutionary government should itself 
have to resort to despotism. And it is true that during the years of civil war the brutal
methods of war-time imposed themselves as a matter of life or death for the Revolution itself.

It is true that the first impulses of the Bolsheviks to be generous with their political enemies 
brought extremely disillusioning results: when they had released the monarchist general
Krasnov, after his raid on Petrograd, in return for his word of honor that he would cease to fight 
the Bolshevik regime, he immediately returned to the attack. But through this crisis,
which called forth Trotskya€™ s best, he did not respond in any very sensitive way to the feelings 
and needs of the people. Read the pamphlet, The Defense of Terrorism, published
in 1920, in reply to a pamphlet by Kautsky that attacked the Bolshevik regime, in which he defends 
both the Bolshevik shooting of military and political enemies and his own
project for a compulsory labor army. True it was written a€oein the car of a military train and 
amid the flames of civil wara€D and Trotsky begs us to bear this in mind; but what we
feel in it is the terrific force of a will to domination and regimentation with no evidence of any 
sympathy for the hardships of the dominated and regimented.

For when he had whipped the Red Army into shape at the cost of many drumhead executions and 
definitely routed the Whites, he proceeded, against Lenina€™ s advice, to turn his
admirable military machine into a conscript army of labor. But the soldiers, who had stuck it out 
against the enemies of the Revolution, began to vanish when they were put on
public works. So, also, the Commissar of War was opposed to allowing trade unions, insisting that 
since trade unions were by definition class weapons against the employees and
since they were living in a workersa€™ republic, they had no longer any need for such instruments. 
Lenin pointed out to him that the Bolshevik regime was not yet really wholly a
workersa€™ republic, but rathera€’’since the workers were to a considerable extent directed by 
officials not of working-class origina€”a a€oeworkersa€™ republic with
bureaucratic distortions .a€D

The inauguration of the New Economic Policya€! relieved the whole situationa€!. It is to the credit 
of Trotskya€™ s sagacity that he had advocated the adoption of such measures
in February, 1020, at a time when they were rejected by Lenin. But there had in the meantime taken 
place an incident which, instead of being eventually forgotten, has come to take
on a more sinister significance in view of subsequent developments in Russia. In February, 1921, 
the sailors of the Kronstadt fortress, who had played an heroic part in the 1917
revolution, rebelleda€!

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