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IRVING HOWE
herent purpose or
will.
With an excess of revolutionary hopefulness,
he saw the French working class as an historical agent striving
toward revolutionary action but restrained by its corrupted leaders.
Trotsky's most important political commentary of the thirties-–
a commentary which has influenced and been used by even those
writers who sharply disagree with him-was devoted to the problem
of Stalinism. Step by step he followed the transformation of the
Stalin dictatorship into a full-scale totalitarian state, denouncing the
economic policies by which the regime aggravated the exploita–
tion of the masses in behalf of its mania for super-industrialization,
enriching (though sometimes also confusing) his description of
Stalinism with historical analogies drawn from the decline of the
French Revolution, and riddling the claims of those Western liberals
who had begun to praise the Soviet Union only after it had sunk
into totalitarianism. Again and again Trotsky was accused of exag–
geration and spite in
his
attacks on the Stalin regime; the American
liberal weeklies printed recondite discussions of the "psychological
causes" behind his attacks, but almost everything he wrote would
later be confirmed by the revelations that started coming out of the
Soviet Union after Stalin's death. In the mid-thirties Trotsky was
also forced to devote his time to refuting the lies of the Moscow
Trials; he did not live long enough to hear Khrushchev admit they
had been frame-ups contrived by the state, though he did live long
enough to hear some American liberals accept them as truth and
praise them as therapy.
All the while Trotsky kept working to create a new movement
of the revolutionary left, the Fourth International; which would be
loyal to the original principles of Marxism-Leninism. This effort
failed. The masses of radical workers in Europe remained attached,
however passively, to the traditional parties of the left and showed
no interest in the tiny Trotskyist groups, while those intellectuals who
broke away from Stalinism often found themselves reconsidering and
then abandoning the whole Leninist outlook.
As
a political leader
in those years Trotsky tended to be fractious and inflexible, perhaps
because his imagination was still caught up with the myth of the
Russian Revolution and could not easily adapt itself to the reduced
scale of political action within which he was now confined. Among
