70
PARTISAN REVIEW
which had as one phase the assumption of leadership by Stalin. The
true revolution, however, in pure embodiment, continued historical
exi~tence,
concretized now not in the Russian state but in the political
movement led by Trotsky, the Left Opposition which later called
itself the Fourth International.
The influence of this analysis is more widespread than might be
imagined, extended far beyond groups that have followed Trotsky
ot
even heard of him, extending well, even, into the ranks of Stalinist
sympathizers. It prompts the opinion that the Soviet Union has
thrown out, along with Trotsky, the "plans for world revolution."
The bourgeois diplomat or business man who thinks that today, un–
like in Lenin's time, he can sit in a Cabinet with communists or carry
on profitable long-term trade with the Soviet Union, is showing it,
no less than sentimental dilettantes of revolution, of the order of
Dwight Macdonald or David Merian, who permit themselves the
personal luxury o{ communist rhetoric by referring it, in their con–
sciences, to Lenin's Golden Age rather than the noisome Stalinist
present. And the vast (non-Stalinist) body of public opinion today
that champions so irresponsibly the communist leaders and troops of
the
"resi~tance
movements" and partisan armies is vaguely discounting
much of what it vaguely understands to have happened in Russia as
due to a Stalinist- or perhaps only Russian- deviation from the true
course of a "people's revolution" which-"this time"- will come out
with the happiest of endings.
Trotsky's estimate of Stalin was a powerful psychological rein–
forcement of his general analysis of the revolution.
So
long as we
believe that Stalin is a dwarf, it is hard to think that he can be the
heir of Lenin, who was certainly a giant. The events of these war
years help us to correct the one and the other error.
As
Stalin expands
in size before us, we can more readily grant his legitimate succession.
The truth- so weighty with consequence for our age- becomes more
plausible: that, under Stalin, the communist revolution has been, not
betrayed, but fulfilled. -
Trotsky called the major book of
his
mature years,
The Revolu–
tion Betrayed.
It
may be, however, that this whole notion of the
"betrayal" of a revolution is-like not a few other o£ Trotsky's
poli–
tical conceptions-a misplaced metaphor. How could Stalin, or any
other of the Bolshevik leaders, have betrayed the revolution? They
would have done so if they had acted as agents, say, of Kornilov in
1917, or of Denikin and Kolchak later, or of Hindenburg or Lloyd
George or Wilson; or, assuming the Soviet Union to be a revolution–
ary state, if still later they had literally sold out, as Stalin claimed in
