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the capacity for "to4ghness" in the service of the cause, with–
out the slightest sadistic overtones;
a sense of life integrated with both thought and action which
is the antithesis of the after-dinner heroism of Western socialists.
The formation of this great social type-the highest reach of
modem man, I think-ceased after 1917, and most of its surviving
representatives were massacred at Stalin's orders in 1936-7. As I
write these lines, as names and faces crowd in on me, it occurs to
me that this kind of man had to be extirpated, his whole tradition
and generation, before the level of our time could be sufficiently
lowered.
Men like Trotsky suggest much too uncomfortably the
human possibilities of the future to be allowed to survive in a
time of sloth and reaction.
And so his last years were lonely ones. I am told that he
often paced up and down his study in Coyoacan, talking to him·
self. (Like Tchemichevsky, the first great thinker of the Russian
revolutionary intelligentsia, who, brought back from Siberia where
he had spent twenty years in exile, "talked to himself, looking at
the stars," as his police-guards wrote in their reports.) A Peruvian
poet brought him a poem entitled, "The Solitude of Solitudes,"
and the Old Man set himself to translate it word for word, struck
by its title. Alone, he continued his discussions with Kamenev–
he was heard to pronounce this name several times. Although he
was at the height of his intellectual powers, his last writings were
not on the level of his earlier work. We forget too easily that
intelligence is not merely an individual talent, that even a man of
genius must have an intellectual atmosphere that permits him to
breathe freely.
Trotsky~s
intellectual greatness was a function of
his generation, and he needed contact with men of the same temper,
who talked his language and could oppose him on his own level.
He needed Bukharin, Piatakov, Preobrajensky, Rakovsky, Ivan
Smirnov, he r.eeded Lenin in order to be completely himself.
Already, years earlier, among our younger group-and yet among
us there were minds and characters like Eltsin, Solntsev, lakovin,
Dingelstadt, Pankratov (are they dead? are they alive?)-he
could no longer stride ahead freely; ten years of thought and
experience were lacking in us.
He was killed at the very moment that the modem world
entered, through the war, a new phase of his "permanent revolu-
