The political suicide of Leon Trotsky 

Leon Trotsky needs no introduction. At one time his was a household name as the second principal player, after Lenin, in the Russian Revolution. Today, his name mainly comes up in the context of far-Left parties full of revolutionary fervour. Although vilified in his native country during Stalin’s time, that’s no longer the case. There is now a consensus among historians, both in Russia and in the West, on his character, on his role in the October Revolution, on his military exploits in defence of the Revolution and on the causes of his fall from power.

I agree with all of that, except on the last issue. I argue that his fall was due to his desire to keep away from the scramble for power. He wanted to lose. He wanted to be remembered as a hero who was defeated by the conspiracy of the epigones.

What were the principal traits of his character? Look no further than his defiance. That explains everything. In his youth, while serving a sentence as a political prisoner, he defied the prison governor in Odessa. He defied the illustrious assembly of generals and diplomats at the peace negotiations with the Germans at Brest Litovsk. He defied the White Armies in the Civil War, and the same desire drove him to defy the burgeoning Communist Party bureaucracy.

Did he really want to lose? Is that likely? If X is a politician in the middle of a crucial political campaign, there is not much interest in asking the question: “Does X want to win?” Of course he wants to, otherwise he would not be in the fray. I wish to suggest, however, that under the unique historical circumstances of the early Soviet Union, combined with having personal characteristics like intelligence, courage, hard-headedness, arrogance, conceit, vanity, and an intuitive sense of history, a man like Trotsky could come to the conclusion that his best strategy was to play to lose. 

What was the political situation after Lenin’s death in 1924? There was a collective leadership of a sort, with Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin at the helm. Historians call it the rule of the triumvirs. Trotsky, although still a member of the Politburo, was by this time already an outsider. His next step was decisive. He published a set of essays about the Bolshevik Revolution, with a preface entitled Lessons of October. His main point was that, at the time, Zinoviev and Kamenev had opposed Lenin’s plan for an uprising. 

Did Trotsky want to discredit Zinoviev and Kamenev? Obviously, yes. Historical justice demanded that those who hesitated at the crucial hours and days in October 1917 should not reap the rewards of success. Did he want to pave the way for Stalin’s rise? He must have appreciated that if two of the triumvirs were discredited, that could only benefit the third one. But he did not care. The Party and the Soviet state, headed by Zinoviev, was as repellent to him as the victory of Stalin. He regarded Stalin as the “outstanding mediocrity of the Party”. The rise of Stalin appealed to his sense of humour, to his sense of irony. It presented a spectacle to him not unlike the theatre of the absurd.

If we think of John Reed’s vivid description of the days of October 1917, Ten Days That Shook the World, and Trotsky’s role in the events, we may easily imagine him as conducting experiments on a giant scale, smiling maliciously when the results confirmed his expectations and caring little whether the outcome brought his downfall nearer or not. He fired a few salvos, in the shape of the Lessons of October, and gleefully watched the consequences. When the ripostes came he must have looked at each one of them with intense intellectual curiosity. I believe he resented more the sloppiness of a particular argument than the fact that it happened to be directed against himself. What do Trotsky’s biographers say about this period in his life? Let us examine the views of three of them.

On the Left, Isaac Deutscher reproaches him: “… unwittingly, he helped to defeat his future allies and promote his chief adversary”. On the Right, Leonard Shapiro, in his study of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, states: “The publication of the Lessons of October was a political blunder.” The Soviet historian Dmitri Volkogonov wrote: “He (Trotsky) had still believed he would ultimately triumph even after Lenin’s death, and he was not prepared for the personal defeat that was moving inexorably upon him.” Surprisingly to me, these views are shared by all the historians I have read who have ever written on the subject, regardless of their own political backgrounds.

I believe that Trotsky did indeed foresee the consequences of writing those essays, but he went ahead nevertheless. In his own terms he did not make a political blunder, he just initiated the first phase of a long drawn out political suicide. 

Why would anyone commit suicide? There are two main reasons: first, life might no longer offer anything worth living for, and second, the attractions of a wonderful after-life might prove irresistible. The former reason is the usual explanation for most suicides, whereas the latter is usually used to explain the action of a fanatical believer in a cause (like suicide bombers). I would argue that Trotsky’s political suicide sprang from both motives: he had nothing to look forward to as one of the leaders of the Soviet state. Socialism in one country? He regarded that as a betrayal of the Revolution. By playing to lose, he had a chance to be reborn as a rebel, the profession at which he particularly excelled.

Complete defeat was inevitable and it did come in due course, but at least Trotsky’s consistency earned him eleven years in exile — a rare privilege by Soviet standards. It enabled him to play a little longer on the stage of history in his familiar role of a rebel fighting against tremendous odds. He was murdered in Mexico in 1940 by one of Stalin’s henchmen — a fitting end. If he were to look down now from the heavens above, he would be pleased to see that his ideas are still alive, that Trotskyist parties are the scourge of capitalism all over the world.

One might argue that my depiction of Trotsky is far too romantic. I would counter this by saying that the revolutionary profession does attract a fair number both of romantics and lunatics. 

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