LENIN'S HEIR
69
are also categories through which we organize areas of experience
which remain impenetrable to other modes of systematization. In this
there need not be too strained a falsification. Every sensible person
knows that he has learned far more of the human psyche from the
great myths or the great poems and novels than from any texts yet
presented by the psychologists-who themselves tell us matters of
importance only when they, too, like Freud, mythologize. And we
can recognize that history, without its heroes, would be as flat and
dull as unilluminating. All great historians confirm this in practice,
whatever their theories. Trotsky, so doctrinaire in theory, cannot
dispense with Nicholas and Alexandra and Rasputin when he wants
to show the decadence of the Russian ruling classes; and
all
his pe–
dantic abstractions about "molecular movements among the masses"
do not succeed in explaining changes
in
classes and class relations
half so well as, say, the obviously quite mythical Cossack, who, at a
crisis, gives a worker, instead of a bullet, a wink.
4.
Trotsky believed that he made, independently, an estimate of
Stalin as an individual; and he believed that this independent estimate
was a confirmation of his general analysis of the Russian revolution.
In fact, he did nothing of the sort. He had his general analysis; and
his
estimate of Stalin was derived from the analysis. He was forced
to conclude that Stalin was a mediocrity, a cipher, unintelligent and
without creative political imagination, because, granted his theory
of the relation between individuals and the movements they lead,
any other estimate of Stalin would have compelled him to reconsider
and revise his general analysis. "The power of 'leaders' and of
'heroes'," he writes in
The Revolution Betrayed,
"consists more than
anything else in the correspondence between them and the class
character of the social strata which support them; this correspondence
alone, and not any absolute superiority, permits each of them to
stamp a certain historical period with his personality."
Trotsky's general analysis of the revolution is well known, and
comparatively simple in outline. The international proletarian revolu–
tion broke to the surface in Russia in 1917. It was concretized, most
purely, in the controlling section of the Russian Bolshevik party,
above
all
in Lenin and in Trotsky himself. After several years of
triumphant existence
in
Russia, the course of the revolution was
al–
tered. In Russia itself, the revolution was distorted, corrupted, and
betrayed-though
not wholly crushed out of existence-by a process
