The World of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria and Lev Davidovich Bronstein
Amy Knight's biography of Beria, who Stalin
referred to as his Himmler, was written at a transitional point in the
historiography of the Soviet imperium, between the Cold War history
created out of guesswork and propaganda and the post-perestroika opening
up of Russian archives. It is an excellent book in that context.
Beria the man is not very interesting. He is the type of the
intelligent corporate psychopath who helps keep complex and otherwise
chaotic systems in place but Beria as part of the construction of a
unique form of totalitarian governance is much more fascinating.
The
weakness of the book is that Knight still had to rely on a number of
very unreliable 'testimonies' (whether Khrushchev's, Svetlana
Alliluyeva's, Sergo Beria's and many others) for lack of data at key
periods and that she still cannot entirely escape the preconceptions of 'her
side' in the 'war' in the early 1990s. This can, however, be put to one side to a
considerable degree because she was able to access important original
research in the Soviet archives that added considerably to our picture
of how the Soviet regime operated and the undoubted crimes perpetrated
to ensure its survival.
She was perhaps one of the first to
demonstrate that the Soviet regime could not be reduced to the tyranny
of one man (Stalin), any more than you could explain national socialism
by reference only to the Fuhrer. It was also a system with surprising
stability of personnel between purges. Russians know this. Westerners tended not to. Similarly she argues
cogently for Beria as an eventual reformer along the lines of Andropov
when he was able to acquire serious power, arguing, though this is not
quite fully demonstrated, that both men could see the flaws in the Soviet
system precisely because of their intelligence role.
The first
'discovery' has tended to be confirmed as the years have gone by. Men
like Kaganovitch or Malenkov were not mere cyphers but exercised,
alongside others, a form of collective leadership centred on
intermediation between party and state that operated independently of
Stalin. Stalin would, of course, have the last word, could
trigger decisive policy change, could remove anyone at any time,
demanded total loyalty as head of state and party and would play people
off against each other but the system was run by a surprisingly stable
collective after the 1930s.
Beria entered this collective as one
of the 'new men' after the purges of the 1930s had destroyed the
potential for a collective in which Stalin was only one member rather
than ultimate arbiter. Lavrentiy Pavolovich was rapidly positioned as one of the top two
or three - in charge of state security and so much else. He
entered as a loyal brute who had shown his mettle in handling purges in
Transcaucasia (notably Georgia, Stalin's original homeland), first
against Menshevik resistance to Bolshevik rule and then those secondary purges designed
to consolidate Stalin's power. He knew how to handle 'intellectuals'.
During
these years he established what can only be described as a propensity
towards 'evil', not merely doing the corporate psychopath's job of
implementing what his boss wanted but exceeding instructions to (by all
acounts) satisfy private Georgian vendetta claims and sexual desires. The
book is limited on the context for such criminality which tends to be down to the
necessity for authority to be not too choosy about the sort of men it
would make use of in meeting political and ideological needs and then
turning a blind eye to their methods. Success was what counted.
Beria
was successful. Transcaucasia was turned from a potential centre of
insurrection against central authority into a secure asset, valuable as
centre of the oil industry, barrier to Turkey geostrategically and, of
course, as no threat to the reputation of the Georgian-origin Soviet
leader. The rest of the story is one of Beria's rise to power and
dramatic fall in Moscow as he solved practical problems - including the
creation and oversight of Russia's equivalent to the Manhattan Project -
until he 'got too big for his boots'.
Whether he was
instrumental or not in the curious story of Stalin's death by medical
neglect or not, his shift from problem-solving under policy direction to
becoming a policy-maker for six months alienated the 'collective' (or
at least part of it) that succeeded Stalin. For a brief period
(the comic film 'The Death of Stalin' is, of course, a travesty of
history even if it is very very funny) Beria pursued policies related to
East Germany, Yugoslavia, the West and economic reform as well as the
nationalities question that undermined 'collective' orthodoxy.
Knight
seems to think that Beria redeemed himself somewhat (though not too
much) by adopting policies that would have brought the Soviet Empire
into more alignment with Western norms but that is the special pleading
of an American academic. The truth is that the Soviet Union still
saw itself in an existential struggle for survival based on ideological
positions for which huge amounts of blood had been spilled. Beria was
beginning to threaten the consensus in a way that might create a 'split
in the ruling order'.
Led by Khruschev, whose nerve at taking on
the monster with his security state resources must be regarded as
courageous, a faction of the 'collective' persuaded the rest to
collaborate in a 'coup' that would result in Beria's swift arrest and
extra-judicial (to all intents and purposes) murder. Khruschev
had at his disposal a closer connection to the Party and brought the
military into play as well as greater Russian feeling at the risks of
letting loose the nationalities and weakening control of Eastern Europe
in the middle of the Cold War.
The American view was and seems
to be (if Knight can represent the post-Cold War present) that Beria got
what he deserved but for the wrong reasons and that he should have been
tried and shot for his murderous role in the transcaucasian and
subsequent purges and the Gulag. The list of crimes is tremendous
- the deportation of peoples, purgation by quotas dictated by Stalin
personally, the murders of the Polish elite (of which Katyn Wood is the
one that we are all aware of), extra-judicial arrests and executions. To
that extent, the 'Americans' are right.
The 'collective'
post-Stalinist leadership were also no angels and were all complicit in
the events of the 1930s and toleration of the Gulag slave labour system
(very similar to Himmler's) so their list of crimes charged against
Beria carefully avoided that era. However, we can say that,
although Beria should have been charged with all those crimes in any
decent and stable society and that some of the charges against Beria
invented by the Kruschev gang were absurd, the deeper substance of the
charge against Beria was probably correct.
For Knight, the
destruction of the Soviet system looked inevitable because of what
happened in 1991. Therefore, the centrifugal tendencies of the empire
looked equally inevitable because that is what happened in stages after
the fall of Ceaucescu and the Berlin Wall. But that is not how it
looked in 1953 and it might have been reasonable to believe that
centralised authority could deliver the economic goods under communism
in peace time after the destruction of revolution, civil war,
consolidation of power and invasion.
Beria's position on the
nationalities question (especially given his own favouritism to his
Mingrelian minority group and the ambiguity of his
quasi-nationalist-communist approach to transcaucasia), then on East
German reform, might have looked very threatening. It might have
suggested a major new policy turn. Much as Trotsky (see below) had promoted the
export of revolution in one direction, Beria might have been suggesting
in some eyes a complete abandonment of the revolution in favour of a
collective of national communisms.
We have to remember the time
scales here. The great purges took place only two decades after the
revolution (that is, the time from now to well after the Millennium) and Stalin's
rule ended only 36 years after it. In other words, people could still
remember a time before communism. Communism was extremely
vulnerable to memory, especially nationalist memory carried through
family or clan lines. Think of South Yorkshire communities still nursing
grudges over pit closures today. Or, more pertinently, Ukrainian neo-nationalist memories of the attempt to create a nation under German aegis during the Second World War. The regime was not actually as secure
as the totalitarian narrative likes to make us believe and the most critical narrative remains something almost totally ignored in the West - Western intervention on Russian soil during the Civil War.
There is
not enough information in this particular book to make a judgement here
but it is fatal, in our view, to assume any inevitabilities in the
trajectory of history because the final fall of the Soviet Empire was to
be more complex than a simple failure to 'reform'. Perhaps we
should look more at an unintended consequence of the Khruschev coup -
the introduction of the military into Soviet politics alongside party
and executive. This shifted expenditures into a wasteful
military-industrial complex and economic promises were not met.
Knight's
book is already thirty years' old. A great deal of work has been
done since but it remains an excellent starting point for an
understanding of the Soviet system (almost certainly flawed and doomed
from inception for reasons that have more to do with the underdeveloped state of the Russian Empire than the intrinsic flaws in communism) through the biography of one of its leading figures. The
research into Beria's network within the Soviet security apparat and the
close attention to its origins within Georgia is exemplary. It builds a
picture of a totalitarian security system that managed to be
simultaneously oppressive and chaotic. This is much the picture that we now have of Himmler's empire as well. Indeed, I tend to look at the national security aspects of the current American Empire and also see chaos tending to instinctive repression, fortunately moderated by American historical conditions.
Overall, the biography
continues to contain many of the unfortunate prejudices of American
historiography but it remains an achievement in outlining the reality of
the psychopathic exercise of 'corporate' power in the Soviet Union and
something of the complexity of its ruling system. The 'Soviet
experiment' was a disaster but a disaster constructed out of the
incompetence of the previous Tsarist regime and of the 'bourgeois'
revolutionaries who succeeded it, compounded by the insistence of
Western interests in interfering and creating a siege mentality. As with the problems we face to today, a revolutionary elite struggled to deal with complexity and seized the tools at hand - including ambitious men like Beria.
This was a tragedy of epic proportions as the new ideological elites (both post-1917 and post-1936) seemed to have no alternative for their survival than Chekist-style terror and the employment of ruthless 'new men' to enforce their will while trying to maintain the administrative capability to defend the country and feed the people. Beria was a creature of this system - a ruthless and rather vile opportunist of undoubted natural intelligence, hard-working, socially skilled, manipulative and ambitious. He is a symbol of the moral degradation that inevitably follows from inherent system weakness.
The point here is that all this terror and totalitarianism designed to
show strength was actually a sign of an inherently weak regime that had
no room for manouevre if it was to survive. The only existential
alternative to its survival at all costs was its total destruction. When
it crashed in 1991, it crashed because of that inherent weakness. Beria's 'reforms' would simply have crashed it earlier. Maybe it would
have been good if Beria had crashed it then but only if you assume that what
would have replaced it would have been preferable. That is
unclear. After all, the US hegemony that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union turns out to have been a grim catalogue of failure for much the same reason - weak elites struggling with a complexity they barely comprehend.
Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis looks at the regime from another angle altogether. It tells the story of Leon Trotsky and
his years of exile and eventual assassination in Mexico from 1937 to
1940. Unfortunately it is marred by an extremely eccentric approach to
story-telling with over-clever cutting between times and places. This is
intended to tell the background to the main story but it soon gets out
of hand. It is as if someone suggested to Patenaude that the story might
make an art film one day and that he should cut and shape the story
with that in mind. The result is that the core of the story is
often not entirely clear. Every time that you think you have a firm
grasp of the narrative, the author goes hurtling off into a disconnected
account of either Trotsky's role in the Bolshevik movement or the early
history of Trotskyism. It is like a rambling conversation where the
professor suddenly says, "Ah, that reminds me ..."
So what we
have is a mish-mash - part entertainment like those romantic lives of
princesses that graced the history shelves of my local library forty
years ago, part disconnected noddy-and-big-ears account of the Russian
revolution and early Soviet history and part (most of it, fortunately) a
genuinely informative history of three vital years in (strangely) the
intellectual history of what was soon to be the greatest global power
the world has ever seen - of which more in a moment. The real
value of this book lies in the fact that Patenaude's specialism is not
Russia or communism at all but in American responses to Russia and
communism. His previous book was on the American Relief Expedition to
Russia during the Famine of 1921. This new story takes place in a
context where the largest concentration of followers of Trotsky was to
be found in the US in the wake of the New Deal.
Why this should
be so is not covered in much detail by the author although we might cite
the legacy of the IWW and radical syndicalism after the collapse of
Eugene Debs' challenge to the system in 1918, the attraction towards
Trotskyism of cosmopolitan New York liberal and Jewish intellectuals,
the negative fact that interwar fascism and Stalinist aggression did for
most Trotskyists in Europe and the fact that Trotsky (not actually
doing much real dictating other than into a dictaphone or to a
secretary) could combine the attributes of proletarian war hero with
ostensible free thinker and modernist to the libertarian and machismo
culture of the American Left. That he would have been any less repressive than Stalin in office is very much to be doubted - ideas tend to collapse in the face of social forces and objective conditions/
Trotsky certainly had a remarkable
ability to seem a tad more liberal than he actually was. Stalin's brutal
and obviously manufactured war on the Left Opposition (the Purges) in
Russia made Trotsky the underdog and American 'bourgeois' progressive
liberals tend to make careers out of defending underdogs. Meanwhile,
operating in a milieu where surrealists and muralists found Trotskyism a
more amenable artistic model than Stalin's simplistic socialist realism
(essentially, offering art as mass propaganda along different lines in both cases), Trotsky's writings on
art implied an openness to modernism (probably more apparent than real)
that was attractive to forward-thinking intellectuals. Patenaude also
refers to a certain snobbisme and orientalism that may be relevant -
"[Trotsky was:] the cultivated, Western, internationalist alternative to
the peasant, Asiatic and nationalistic Stalin".
Although you can certainly buy intellectuals with cash as
the State Department discovered in the 1950s, flattery is much cheaper.
The illusion that you could be both free and Left in Trotsky's world
(especially as news emerged of the growing repression within Russia
itself and the vicious assault on the POUM in Catalonia by Communist
operatives) drew in what can only be described as worshippers. In
fact, the remarkable achievement of this book is to present us not with
a true hero (Patenaude is not biased or a polemicist) but with a
narcissist of exceptional moral blindness who one soon understands
(whether the author intends this or not) would probably have been a
disaster for Russia - probably worse than Stalin if civil war and chaos
is worse than internal tyranny and the gulag.
Only Trotsky can
possibly make this reviewer sympathetic to Stalin. The man lacked
judgement and he possessed an ego the size of the Kremlin. The fact that
a brutal choice lay between the Man of Steel and this over-intellectual
egotist suggests just what a wrong turn the Bolshevik Revolution proved
to be and how much the weak Kerensky, perhaps more than Lenin who was
'only doing his job' as a revolutionary, must take responsibility for
allowing it to happen. Kerensky's blind refusal to bring Russia
out of the war and mobilise workers and peasants for democratic
socialism led to an unnecessary revolution that gave Russia the eventual
choice between two monsters. We only had the chance to consider Stalin
the worse monster because Trotsky failed to get his chance to show what
he could do with the full force of the State behind him. His treatment of the
Kronstadt mutineers alone tells us what Russian workers, peasants and
intellectuals had to fear from this man - a round of executions without
trial to 'save the revolution'.
However, Patenaude does manage to
bring the man to life. He is very good at interconnecting family
concerns (Trotsky was proof positive of ideological obsession as a
biological dead end as his gene pool was systematically wiped out by his
opponent), the left-wing politics of Mexico (in which artistic concerns
and rivalries loomed large in the squabbles of the world class
muralists), the distrust and espionage undermining the networks of
Trotskyists in Europe and the often very young circles of workers and
intellectuals in North America who provided money and muscle to his
court in exile. Patenaude's narrative style may make it
difficult to follow the plot sometimes but his research and judgements
appear sound. He plays a straight bat in not taking sides and in letting
the facts speak for themselves - which makes the narrative complexity
all the more unnecessary.
What we have here is not a story of
ideology and politics so much as one of trans-national gang warfare in
which our hero is a defeated don, holed up in a near-fortress, with
inexperienced young political hoodlums who were facing, by 1940, direct
murderous assaults on the compound and, eventually, the most brutal and
fanatic personal attack imaginable on the Old Man himself. Only in
Mexico would a leading artist launch a murderous attack by an assault
team on a political figure! Only Soviet Communism could find a killer
like Mercader to do the deed and take the rap in the way that he did -
subsequently awarded great honours in the Soviet Union after many years
in a Mexican jail.
The fact that this war was conducted over the
supply of ideas and power rather than guns, contraband, drugs or
prostitutes does not change the essential manner in which business was
being conducted. Trotsky was just a less competent gangster than his
rival while Stalin had the massive reserves of Russian state power to
ensure the eventual elimination of not only Trotsky but of any future
leaders with his 'brand'. Despite the existence of the Fourth
International, Trotskyism effectively died with Trotsky in 1940 as
anything more than an irritant and pot-stirrer to capitalists and
communists alike. Oh, and useful poitical playground for students who would later become the standard bearers for the Third Way, Guardian commentary pieces and the sad vestiges of Eurocommunism.
Having successfully disposed of one dynasty,
the Romanovs, Stalin certainly seemed determined not to allow a new
Soviet one to appear, the Trotskys - anyone connected to Trotsky within
reach of Stalin simply disappeared. At a human level, the story of the
killing and disappearances of Trotsky's family is heart-rending. He
is by no means immune to the pain of loss - a sympathy rendered a little
less likely to cause a sleepless night by the sure knowledge that he
seems to have had few such nights himself over those he had murdered for
equally valid reasons of state in the Civil War.
Perhaps Trotsky
might only have survived if the US had permitted him entry. To murder a
political opponent in Mexico is one thing, to do so within the rising
superpower is another - poison would probably have had to have been
substituted for an ice pick. You get the impression that Trotsky was
seriously concerned towards the end about moderating his position to
effect such an entry but, equally, that, the Old Man (as he was called) ,
being an acquired taste for only a small section of American political
society, there was no interest in giving him sanctuary or creating a
centre for revolutionary subversion to the Left of the New Deal
settlement or unnecessary diplomatic problems at a time of global
instability.
As for American Trotskyists, their numbers may have
been small but the ideological squabbles of these years proved to have
unintended consequences many decades later. The hatred of Stalin and
Communism within America may be associated with the American Right but
it was at its most virulent in the disappointed American Left. Whereas
in Europe, the challenge of fascism was immediate and put many radical
socialists firmly into the Communist camp despite repeated political
monstrosities (the purge trials of the 1930s, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and,
later, the systematic colonisation of Eastern Europe), in the US a
combination of free worker resentment of Communist practice and
Trotskyist rage against Stalin placed much of the American Left in a
position of aggressive universalism which privileged the export of
American liberal values against the claims of what came to be called the
'evil empire'.
Dialectical materialism, already intellectually
under severe pressure to Trotsky's dismay during his last years amongst
his US followers, crumbled under liberal pressure and anti-Communist
virulence. Although Patenaude does not go into much detail on events
after 1940, the debates surrounding the purge trials, the invasion of
Finland and the Nazi-Soviet Pact and around Marxist philosophy, led to
the Minority breakaway and to the eventual trajectory of key
intellectuals all the way across to what would become the hardest form
of Reaganite anti-Sovietism.
Not all the 'Partisan Review' mob
ceased to be socialists but the trajectory was clearly from late 1930s
Trotskyism through Cold War Liberalism to the origins of
neo-conservatism for many - and the common denominator in all these
positions was anti-Stalinism and anti-nationalism. The ideology of the
modern Anglo-American imperium was born to a surprising degree out of
Trotsky's circle in those last years of his life. James Burnham,
for example, the most extreme example, moved from a central position in
the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party across to Reaganite groupie over
thirty or forty years and the move seems, in retrospect, surprisingly
natural. Often but not always Jewish East Coast intellectuals, filled
with righteous indignation at Stalin's crimes and replacing the
inevitable victory of the proletariat with the inevitable victory of
liberal capitalism and 'freedom', moved across the political spectrum
and influenced, eventually and alongside European conservative
nationalists, the circles that also eventually coalesced as neo-conservatism.
Ironically, the high point of Idealism in politics was probably
not the furthest extent of the Nazi or Soviet Empires but the furthest
extent of the Anglo-American Imperial tradition in the post-invasion
occupation of Iraq. If you consider that Saddam Hussein modelled his
methods on Stalin, then the Iraq War might be regarded as the Marxist
struggles of the 1930s replayed once again as both tragedy and farce! If
you really are determined on black humour, you can see the funny side
of this. Two sides without the nonsensical philosophy of their ancestors
playing radical internationalist and nationalist roles no different
from those of Trotsky and Stalin during the struggle for policy and
power in Russia in the 1920s. As before, so later - the one with the
most firepower wins.
However, we should not exaggerate the importance of
Anglo-Saxon intellectual Trotskyists as representatives of the
international revolutionary Left. The opposing Majority Fourth
International continues to this day with a strong base in France
(inheriting opportunities created by the collapse of Communism as
ideological home for the left trades unions) and the numbers active in
the Minority Trotskyist Movement were always very small. But, in
American intellectual history, these were 'players'! The
revolutionary vanguardism inherited from Lenin (which Trotsky had
actually opposed at the time) and the intellectualism of the circle
around the Partisan Review created a fairly vibrant politically active
set who came to live their hates and anger and who redirected their
universalism and idealism into forms that were imbued with a typically
American pragmatism. The numbers of former Trotskyists who supported the
Iraq adventure and who underpinned the transformation of New Labour (a
deeply transtlantic project) is more than chance would permit. The
mentality is consistent.
Trotsky himself gives us a clue to this
thinking when he stubbornly insisted, against the evidence, that the
Soviet Union was a progressive state, refusing to condemn the Soviet
attacks on Poland and Finland and advocating full American support for
Britain against the Nazi threat. It would not take much, once Trotsky
was murdered, for increasing numbers of former followers who disagreed
with him on the Soviet invasions and who had their doubts about
dialectical materialism and on the ability of a bureaucratic workers
state to be progressive to shift that 'tide of history' commitment to a
different state power as vector for global revolution - the United
States. This may be unhinged perhaps but it is consistent in its insane
way. The key figure, of course, is James Burnham who argued as
early as 1937 that the Soviet bureaucracy was not a caste (as Trotsky
suggested) but a new exploiting class so that the Soviet Union was not a
degenerate workers' state but represented bureaucratic collectivism. He
was almost certainly right but this revisionism which caused major
splits in the Movement showed how Trotsky's use value in America was not
as independent Marxist thinker at all but as an anti-Communist.
If
you condemn bureaucratic collectivism, it soon gets to mean that you
are inclined to prefer individualism if you cannot de-bureaucratise
collectivism. The trajectory to free market internationalism which is
central to the current Western project was embedded even at this very
early stage in the thinking of the Marxist revisionists of the late
1930s. Patenaude must be thanked for helping to elucidate some of the
background to the transformation of American ideology under conditions
of empire. Max Eastman, initially a great admirer of Trotsky and
always a friend, represented the tendency, you might call it
romantic-radical, to be moved deeply by the revolution itself but to
hold great doubts about its results and about the German Idealist theory
of dialectical materialism, especially that of Engels, that underpinned
it. Yet as Trotsky understood things, there was no Marxist-Leninist revolution
without dialectical materialism and that's why the Kronstadt mutineers
had to be executed.
But Eastman must be seen in the context of
Dewey and American pragmatism and progressivism. Trotsky intellectually
feared American pragmatism with great justification. In the end, we have
a problem for Trotsky that could not be resolved in his favour - the
largest number of Trotskyists were in the US, Americans were indelibly
pragmatist, ergo Trotskyism could either be dialectical materialist or
it could be at the heart of the American Left but it could not be both.
The
struggle went on for some years (most notably in the debates between
Eastman and Sidney Hook) but, with dialectical materialism captured for
the global Communist Party, Trotskyism did not stand a chance as a
credible political movement in the American century. As I suggested
above, Trotsky was trying to be a better Communist than the Communists
when history wanted him to be a better anti-Communist. In the
end, Eastman, Hook, Burnham, Dewey, Wilson, Shachtman - all the leading
thinkers of the American Left of Trotsky's last years who were opposed
to the Stalinist capture of the Revolution from their different
perspectives - rejected dialectical materialism as a credible
philosophy. End of game for Trotsky intellectually. The Old Man was past
it!
I have not written much of Trotsky himself in this review
because we want to avoid spoiling the strength of the book, the
characterisation of a man who comes out of the pages of this book as a
real person, warts and all. There are some excellent photographs from
these years in exile. I think I would have enjoyed meeting a man
who was undoubtedly exceptionally intelligent - a political Einstein in
some respects - but this was not a man to be followed unless you were
prepared for your bones to whiten on some far off plain. This was a man,
like Napoleon or Hitler, who saw other persons as adjuncts to his
ideas, expendable in a cause in which he, supreme egotist, must live
regardless of others because of the values and beliefs he embodied.
British
intelligence agent Bruce Lockhart cruelly wrote of Trotsky in full-on
revolutionary mode: "He strikes me as a man who would willingly die
fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him
do it." The surprise is not that people like him exist but that
there are so many mugs in the world prepared to subsume themselves under
such people. It's much more than the banality of evil expressed in
Milgram's depressing experiments, it is also about the determination of
many people to embody their myth of the world in a person (whether Pope
or dictator) to whom they give up their autonomy as an act of 'heroic'
self denial.
For a husband or wife to do this may be simple love
but for a man to sentence his children (in effect) to death for his
ideals (why does Zelensky spring to mind at this point?) strikes me as either wilfully stupid or inhuman while for fit
young bright men and women to throw themselves, their labour value and
their lives at the feet of others in the way that they did for Trotsky
is just plain stupid if the price is a complete suspension of their
critical faculties. But is it any more stupid than joining the military
for patriotic reasons? I suppose there may be a marginally greater
reason in dying for a better world than the profits of Wall Street - but
not that much! The relationship between Trotsky and Natalia (his
wife) is touching and that between Trotsky and Frida Kahlo amusing but
his relationships with the rest of the world were often as exploitative
as those of the capitalists and feudalists against which he warred.
By
1937, though he fought on gallantly, clinging to his already outmoded
beliefs, Trotsky was already an utter political failure whose death in
1940 possibly came at the right time to maintain his credibility for his
remaining supporters. He was running out of money, increasingly
politically irrelevant, with supporters who were beginning to walk away
from ideas honed in the struggle against feudalism at the turn of the
century. Had he lived through to the late 1940s, his fate might
have been to have been picked up by the anti-communists of the Cold War
era and be turned into a political Vlasov - a convenient tool to goad
Stalin and split the Left, an old and weak king with a subsidised court,
a Jacobite in a world of Hanoverians. Maybe it was best that he was
forced to move on and died a martyr to his cause.