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totalitarianism. Joseph E. Davies, a puerile and ignorant bourgeois,
was treated with all the respect due to a scholar and a gentleman
when
Mission to Moscow
came out. But if psychology is to be em–
ployed as a political weapon, then it should be easy to demonstrate
that since Mr. Davies stands in a wholly extraneous relation to his
subject-matter-since actually he knows next to nothing about the
history of the Russian Revolution and of Communism-it must have
been other considerations, not integral to the subject of his book,
which prompted him to adopt certain views; and even a neophyte
in the science of psychology can tell that in Mr. Davies' character
inordinate self-esteem and sheer conceit play a preponderant part.
Nor are the motives of political hacks like Ella Winter, Anna Louise
Strong, and Maurice Hindus ever questioned in the liberal press.
But when Trotsky- a political thinker of genius, one of the greatest
revolutionists of all times and the man under whose direct leadership
the October insurrection was carried through-writes about Stalin
and his regime he is treated like a cheapskate politician obsessed with
hatred of his rival in a fight for power.
The tremendous struggle inside the Bolshevik Party to determine
the course of the Revolution is thus reduced to a question of personal
animus. That and nothing more. Trotsky is in effect denied the
right
to deal with the subject--and what is this subject if not the Russian
Revolution and its fate?- which alone identifies him for us and
without which
his
life has no meaning. He is not objective, we are
told. However, it takes but the slightest insight into historical processes
to discover that objectivity, in the usual sense of that term, is unat–
tainable in a serious political struggle; in politics knowledge is the
product of participation and involvement, and the spectator, though
he may retain
his
objectivity, is precisely the one whose ideas are the
least pertinent to the matter at hand; Trotsky, moreover, did not
write a literary biography nor an historical treatise a hundred years
after the event but a polemical work summing up and extending the
analysis of Stalin and Stalinism that he was engaged in for more than
fifteen years. Clearly, the real issue is whether Trotsky's analysis of
Stalin is true or false. Only people trying to evade
this
very plain
and obvious test would undertake to capitalize on such terms as
"objective" and "subjective."
And when it comes to that Mr. Schuman and his friends should
be reminded that murder is the most subjective of all human acts.
At the exhibition-trials in Moscow Trotsky was accused of plotting
to kill Stalin. Yet the only evidence the prosecution could muster was
