72
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
anyone betrayed Bolshevism, it was not Stalin but Trotsky.
Stalin was the best Bolshevik just for the reason that he did not try to
impose on history an
a priori
conception of the nature of the revolu–
tion, but was ready to accept the revolution, with
all
its historical
consequences, as it revealed itself to be in real life. Trotsky, who did
not even join the Bolsheviks organizationally until 191 7, though he
desperately tried thereafter, like all converts, to out-Bolshevik Bol–
shevism, never succeeded in making himself a total communist. He
remained, in the strict sense, a Platonic communist, greatest, like all
Platonists, in rhetoric and literature, not in action- and therefore not
great as a politician. The revolution was for him a Form, subsisting
in an independent, non-historical realm of Being. The Form had its
own eternal life; what happened in the historical world of Becoming
only occasionally "participated," as a Platonist would say, to one or
another extent, in the reality of the Form. The two realities, the his–
torical revolution and the Form of Revolution, came into full contact
only in the explosion of insurrection and Civil War-for Trotsky, that
is, only in 1905 and 1917-21. That
is
why it is only at these two
his–
torical moments that Trotsky, always great as a writer, appears as a
great historical figure. When the explosion subsided, Trotsky was in
each case left stranded.
To this destiny Trotsky never reconciled himself, nor did he
understand what his political trouble was. He was Lenin's temporari–
ly adopted son, left unremembered in the legal will. All his political
critique, after his ousting from the Soviet regime, was like a series of
brilliant briefs and petitions with which many another aggrieved
disinherited deluges the Court, seeking to prove undue influence, to
upset the provisions, to regain the lost legacy. The true heir, secure
in the binding text, upheld by the Court's unambiguous decision, does
not have to be so meticulous in the style and form of his replies.
Stalin is Lenin's heir. Stalinism is communism. These truths,
known in advance-and perhaps somewhat superficially for that
reason- by some, discovered by others at different turning points dur–
ing the last generation, by some, like myself, rather late in the day,
are, by the events of these five years of the second world war, estab–
lished now beyond reasonable doubt. They are very unpleasant truths,
they and their corollaries. They are also indispensable truths: indis–
pensable for an understanding of what is now happening in the world,
and for the choice of a viable attitude toward what
is
happening.
(Further discussions of the problems dealt with by Mr. Burnham
will appear in later issues of
PARTISAN REVIEW.)
