Irving Howe
LEON TROTSKY: THE COSTS OF HIST ORY
Has any major figure of the twentieth century left so
complete a record of his thought and experience as Leon Trotsky?
Perhaps Churchill, perhaps De Gaulle; but neither of these men
combined so fully or remarkably as did Trotsky the roles of historical
actor and historian, political leader and theorist, charismatic orator
and isolated critic. Trotsky made history, and kept an eye on
history. He was a man of heroic mold, entirely committed to the
life of action, but he was also an intellectual who believed in the
power and purity of the word. At no point in his career, whether
as
a revolutionary emigre or commander of revolutionary armies,
did
Trotsky allow his public activities or personal condition to keep
him long from his desk. "In my eyes," he once wrote, "authors,
journalists and artists always stood for a world that was more at–
tractive than any other, a world open only to the elect."
An exile in Siberia, he wrote .about the 1905 Russian Revolu–
tion, the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, the
rise
of the freemasons. An exile in Europe, he wrote about the contro–
versies of European Marxism, the special problems of Russian
society, and his own theory of "permanent revolution." A leader
of the Bolshevik regime, he wrote about military affairs, literary
disputes, the economics of statification, manners and morals in a
proletarian state, the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy. An exile
in
Turkey, France, Norway and finally Mexico, he wrote his monu–
mental history of the Russian Revolution, his political autobiography,
studies of Lenin and Stalin, .and a stream of books, pamphlets,
articles on the Chinese revolution of the late twenties, the tactics
of the German Left confronting Hitler, the anatomy of the new
despotism in Russia, the failure of the Popular Front in Europe,
problems of political morality, the need for Marxist reconstruc-
11
ti
a:
51
