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unyielding, caustic and proud, a solitary promethean figure; he con–
tinued to write his trenchant analyses of the totalitarian regime in
Russia, its terrorism directed against defenseless millions, its byzantine
deification of the dictator, its blundering ventures into European
politics. One need not accept in whole or part the ideas of Trotsky
in order to recognize that during his last decade he rose to an intel–
lectual eminence and personal strength surpassing anything he had
shown during his years of power. His productivity as a writer was
amazing. Unburdened by office, he was once again the independent
political analyst, historian and literary man; it was the role in life,
as he had once said, that he most enjoyed; and he wrote now with
an authority of statement, an incisiveness of structure, a cutting sharp–
ness of phrase, a brilliant freedom of metaphor which require that
he be placed among the great writers of our time.
Trotsky's writings on Germany in the immediate pre-Hitler
years are a model of Marxist polemic and analysis, but also of polemic
and analysis that can be valuable to the non-Marxist as well. With
blazing sarcasm and urgency- he was never patient toward fools–
he attacked the insane policy of the German Communists, which
declared the Social Democrats to be "social fascists" representing a
greater danger than the Nazis, and thereby prevented the formation
of that united front of the left which he kept insisting was the one
way to stop Hitler. Had his advice been followed ( the Stalinists
attacked him for "capitulating" to Social Democracy!), the world
might have been spared some of the horrors of our century; at the
very least, the German working class would have gone down in bat–
tle rather than allowing the Nazi thugs to take power without re–
sistance. Only a little less important are Trotsky's writings on Spain
during the thirties, writings in which he analyzed the difficulties
of modernizing a stagnant country, the way the Spanish bourgeoisie,
out of social greed and cowardice, would block measures toward re–
form or even a dynamic economy, thereby opening the way to
fascism-in short, that complex of problems which in a few years
would lead to the Spanish Civil War. Equally incisive, though, as it
now seems, marred by dogmatic rigidity, are the writings Trotsky
devoted to the social crisis of France during the late thirties, in which
he analyzed the Popular Front as an unstable, inherently pusillanim–
ous amalgam of bourgeois, socialist, and Stalinist parties lacking co-
