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PARTISAN REVIEW
theories. The war brought a crisis both in Trotsky's thinking and
in the movement he led. The two great surprises of the war so far:
the imperialist role played by the Soviet Union, and the quick and
overwhelming success of the Nazi blitzkrieg in Europe-for neither
of these was Trotsky prepared. He rejected the idea that a "work·
ers state" (degenerated)
could
play an imperialist role in war,
insisting that, come what may, the Red Army must be supported,
and permitting the American section of the Fourth International–
the only sizable Trotskyist group left in the world-to split in half
on the issue. And his reaction to the blitzkrieg was simply to write
a lengthy manifesto denouncing the "imperialist war" in tradi·
tiona! terms, a document which could have been written just as well
five or ten years ago.
In his little book,
Reminiscences of Tolstoy,
Maxim Gorky,
describing his feelings on first hearing the news of Tolstoy's death,
tells of watching the old man ("his smallish, angular figure
in
a
gray, crumpled ragged suit") sitting one day by the seashore,
"looking into the distance out to sea":
... I cannot express in words what I felt rather than thought
at that moment; in my soul there was joy and fear, and then
everything blended in one happy thought: "I am not an orphan
on the earth, as long as this man lives on it."
Then I walked on tiptoe away, in order that the pebbles might
not scrunch under my feet, not wishing to distract his thoughts.
And now I feel I am an orphan, I cry as I write--never before
have I cried so inconsolably and in such bitter despair. I do not
know whether I loved him; but does it matter, love of him or
hatred? He always roused in me sensations and agitations which
were enormous, fantastic; even the unpleasant and hostile feel–
ings which he roused were of a kmd not to oppress but rather to
explode the soul; they made it more sensitive and capacious.
So it is, making allowances for a certain amount of mysticism
and sentimentality in Gorky's account, that even those of us who
came to disagree most sharply with Trotsky on important matters,
felt about him. "Even the unpleasant and hostile feelings which
he roused were of a kind not to oppress but rather to explode the
soul." And he was a father to many of us in the sense that he
taught us our political alphabet and first defined for us the prob–
lems to be solved, so that even when, in the manner of sons, we
