Lenin's Heir
JAMES BURNHAM
WITH THE
exception of the anarchists, who have been always
and consistently against any form of Bolshevism, most of us who
developed an opposition to Stalinism from what we have regarded as
the left were taught our first lessons by Trotsky. This primary instruc–
tion has influenced not only our subsequently reached opinions but,
more enduringly, the categories and presuppositions through which
we try to understand political events. Among these ideas of Trotsky's
that have expanded widely beyond the narrow circles of those who
have recognized any allegiance to Trotsky himself or his movement,
one by no means least in consequence for the structure of political
thought is his estimate of the person o£ Stalin.
The G. P. U. did not permit Trotsky to complete the work which
he regarded
as
at least equal in importance to anything he had writ–
ten: the biography of Stalin. Agreeing, it would seem, with the
G. P. U. judgment, Harper
&
Bros.,
after
printing, binding and
dis–
tributing to someJ reviewers the unfinished manuscript, decided not to
risk exposure of the then tender bud of the Four FreedolllS to the
intellectual virus that might have slipped with the words across the
border. Nevertheless, Trotsky's estimate of Stalin, not altered in this
final manuscript, which I was by chance enabled to read, is well
known.
Stalin, in Trotsky's rather heavily outlined portrait, is the quint–
essence of mediocrity, the triumphant Babbitt of the revolution, a
suburban Caesar. Crude, ignorant, provincial, uncultured, empty of
creative political ideas, without imagination, he
rises
only because the
revolution falls, he triumphs through his very lack of talent, with the
help of his rudeness, his treachery, his absence of scruples, and,
finally, his doggedly ambitious
will.
Stalin is the bureaucracy per–
sonified, the victorious "apparatus man" who, as scavenger, feasts
on the scraps left behind and scorned by the heroes of the revolution.
"His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive.
. . . His mind
is ...
devoid of creative imagination.... Stalin
is
the
outstanding mediocrity in the party . . . the Thermidor demands
