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PARTISAN REVIEW
All the superiority of Marxist to bourgeois culture is implicit
in
the comparison.
When the young Trotsky arrived at the Lenins' flat in London,
fresh from Siberia, he was greeted with: "The Pero has arrived!"
"Pero" means "pen" in Russian; it was Trotsky's nickname in the
movement. And towards the close of his career, asked by the Dewey
Commission to state his occupation, Trotsky answered: "Author."
Almost all the great Marxist revolutionaries have been talented as
writers, but with no other, neither Lenin nor Marx nor Luxemburg
nor even Engels, was the fusion of literary man and revolutionist
so complete as with Trotsky. His natural element was language,
spoken or written. Those who heard him addressing the crowds
in
Red Square or the Party congresses, say he was one of the great
orators of the century. But a politician in exile-and thirty-one
out of the forty-five years of Trotsky's adult life were passed either
in
prison or in exile-doesn't have many opportunities to make
speeches. During three-fourths of his career, Trotsky was able to
take part in events only through the written word.
It
was enough,
however. Up to 1927, when publication was discontinued, the
State Publishing House in Moscow had issued eighteen volumes of
Trotsky's "Collected Works." A formidable harvest, and yet the
most famous writings were still to come:
The Real Situation in
Russia, The Third International After Lenin,
My
Life, The History
of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed,
not to men·
tion literally dozens of pamphlets on political developments in
England, France, Spain, Germany, and the biographies of Lenin
and of Stalin on which he was working when he was murdered.
"Beginning with 1897," he wrote in his autobiography, "I have
waged the fight chiefly with a pen in my hand."
As leader, organizer, administrator, technician, Trotsky was
easily first among his comrades of 1917, excepting Lenin; as a
writer he was even more easily first, and here Lenin is included.
This man of furious action was also an intellectual, a student
"rather pedantic and conservative in my habits." This passionate
doer, this incarnation of revolutionary will and energy who
planned and directed the October revolution and created the Red
Army which beat back the counter-revolution on a dozen fronts,
