Trotsky Is Dead
An
Attempt at an Appreciation
Dwight Macdonald
0
NE HAS CONSTANTLY
to remind one's self that Trotsky is
dead. One had somehow taken it for granted that "the Old Man"
would always be there,
in
Coyoacan, representing the Marxist revo–
lutionary tradition. Even after the wild machine-gun raid organ–
ized by the Stalinists earlier in the summer, one's sense of Trotsky's
permanence did not change. It seemed natural that he should
miraculously escape the storm of bullets. How could a conscious–
ness as lofty and all-embracing as Trotsky's, a career and a per–
sonality constructed on such a scale, how could these be dependent
on the mere survival of a mortal body? How could a whole culture
be
murdered?
It is hard to understand that Trotsky is dead for another
reason: because it is hard to realize he died only a few weeks ago.
He was the last of the giants of revolutionary Marxism. Already it
seems incredible that the man who died in a suburb of Mexico City
last
month made the October revolution with Lenin, headed the
Soviet of St. Petersburg Workers in the 1905 revolution, and edited
Iskra
with Lenin, Martov, Axelrod, and Vera Zassulitch, who in
1878,
a year before Trotsky was born, had assassinated the Czar's
prime minister. Jackson's axe set a period to a long chapter of
history.
But the atrocious act-atrocious in the love affair Jackson
carried on for two years merely in order to prepare the murder,
atrocious in the double betrayal of human and political confidences,
atrocious in the peculiarly brutal method used in the actual mur–
der-this act had more than symbolic significance. When Trotsky
was
killed, he was no old man, living in the past, remembered only
because he once played a great role. He was, as he had been all
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