TROTSKY IS DEAD
349
vanced as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therefore, the revo–
lution must be "permanent" in the sense of spreading into the
more advanced European nations. Unless the newborn Soviet state
could break through the chain of capitalist nations surrounding it
and establish contact, on a socialist basis, with some more advanced
European nation, the battle was lost. "Without direct political aid
from the European proletariat," Trotsky had written in 1906, "the
workingclass of Russia will not be able to retain its power and to
turn
its temporary supremacy into a permanent Socialist dictator–
ship." The Russian revolution must be the spark that lit the fires
of world revolution. Failing this, the revolutionary regime would
degenerate. Against this theory, also accepted by Lenin, Stalin
later counterposed the conception of "building socialism in one
country." History has tested these opposing theories, and the ver–
dict is no longer in doubt.
The last years of Trotsky's life, for all the vigor and brilliance
of his fight against Stalinism and his comment on world events,
cannot be accounted a success. His movement not only failed to
win
the masses, but it also more and more lost prestige even with
the intellectual avant-garde. It is true that it is a reactionary
period, and that much is explained by this fact. But I think another
factor is also involved: the failure of Trotsky's political thinking
to
cope with the basic changes in politics and economics which have
come about since the last war. There is no space to go into this
fully here-in the last issue I indicated some of the ways I think
Trotsky's theories have become inadequate, and there will be more
to
say on the subject later-but, to give a rounded and honest view
of the man, a few words seem to be in order.
The tragedy of Trotsky as a political thinker seems to me to
be
that he understood so much and yet did not understand enough,
that he probed boldly and deeply and yet did not go deep enough.
As
Edmund Wilson observes in his interesting study of Trotsky in
To
the
Finland Station:
"He is one of those men of the first rank
who flourish inside a school, neither creating nor breaking out of
its
system." Tr0tsky was a great political thinker in the sense that
he
took a given body of doctrine, the revolutionary Marxism of
the
pre-1914 period, and used it to interpret events with the
