lSI
GEORGE LlCHTHEIM
is unlikely for many reasons. The Soviet intelligentsia may indeed
gradually become more curious about its past, and
if
it does it
will
certainly discover in Trotsky's writings-notably in his non-political
essays composed during the mid-twenties-an interesting anticipa–
tion of some of its own demands for greater intellectual freedom.
But
as
a political doctrine Trotskyism is
as
dead
as
Anarchism. It
may linger on in places like Ceylon and the more remote parts of
Latin America, but its contribution to post-Stalinist thinking in
Eastern Europe is virtually
nil.
Trotsky stands for the myth of the
October Revolution, rather than the reality of Soviet Communism,
and myths, though potent in their own domain, cannot serve
as
guideposts to action.
In his preface Mr. Deutscher suggests that Stalin's heirs still
walk in fear of Trotsky's shade "because they are afraid of coming
to grips with the issues with which he, so much ahead of his time,
did come to grips." It would be curious to know what he thinks
those issues are. A possible glimpse
is
afforded by his remark that
around 1921 "the proletarian dictatorship was triumphant, but the
proletariat had vanished."
If
after all these years he still believes
that the Bolshevik party rule in some sense represented, or incor–
porated, the "proletarian dictatorship" proclaimed (but not estab–
lished) by Lenin and Trotsky
in
1917, it would seem reasonable to
suppose that he regards the present regime
as
a stage on the road
to a genuinely socialist democracy in which the heritage of Trot–
sky's thought will at last flower, side by side with the material ac-
' complishments of the Stalin epoch; and indeed he more or less says
so. Unfortunately there is no evidence that the Soviet Union is
turning into a democracy, though
it
is a fact that the increasingly
numerous privileged stratum is beginning to elude the totalitarian
straightjacket, while keeping it firmly strapped upon the "toiling
masses." Even on the unlikely assumption of a radical break with
the doctrine and practice of Stalinism, it is not altogether clear
what benefits post-Stalinist regime is to derive from the contempla–
tion of Trotsky's losing fight against totalitarianism.
It is odd that Mr. Deutscher, who is so conscious of the many
analogies between
J
acobinism and Bolshevism, cannot quite bring
