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ago ceased to have anything in common with the classic goals of
socialism.
Stalin's ruthlessness, his indifference to human suffering, and the
unprecedented scale of his autocratic sway certainly link him, as
Burnham remarks, to "the tradition of the most spectacular of the
Tsars, of the great Kings of the Medes and Persians," etc. But to
conclude on that account that he is a great man is to judge him
along purely aesthetic lines, that is, in the sense of the distinction
drawn between the aesthetic approach and the ethical one. The
aesthetic attitude is essentially that of the uncommitted person, of the
detached onlooker gratified by spectacles. It is an attitude exhausted
by the categories of the "interesting" on the one hand and
the "boring" on the other-categories as modern as they are in–
authentic. In 1905, in the midst of the tempestuous movement of
the masses against Tsarism, the symbolist Bruysov, a poet unpolitical
to the core, expressed the same viewpoint in the following lines:
"Beautiful in the splendor of his power is the Oriental King Assar–
haddon, and beautiful the ocean of a people's wrath beating to
pieces a tottering throne. But hateful-are half-measures." Thus
Bruysov found Tsarism in its pristine power and the power of the
masses in revolt equally entrancing.
It
is only in that sense that one
may speak of Stalin as great, precisely in the sense that this epithet
may be applied to Hitler. But in politics, as in morals, the criteria
of aestheticism are the least meaningful. In the historical struggle to
which we are committed Stalinism deploys enormous forces, and
the one thing we cannot afford to do is to abandon our interests and
values in order to convert, through an aesthetic sleight of hand, the
tragic struggle into a show of 'pure politics,' a show in which Stalin
inevitably appears as the star-performer. Pure politics, like pure art,
is a delusion. The committed man, that is the man who has accepted
the hazards of his political existence, can no more attend such a show
than he can attend his own funeral.
But if Trotsky is on the whole convincing in his analysis of the
human and political content of Stalin's personality and of the methods
devised by him to make himself dictator, he is not in the least con–
vincing in his general analysis of Stalinism. This book shows that
he held on until the end to his theory of the Stalinist bureaucracy as
representing "the first stage of bourgeois restoration." Events, how–
ever, in particular events since 1941, have demolished this theory.
For according to its logic the process of restoration should have been
