TROTSKY
383
with interests of its own in opposition to both capitalism and social–
ism. Trotsky did not live long enough to follow this dispute into
the post-war years.
The last years of his life were difficult. Neither poverty nor
powerlessness seemed to trouble him as much as the constrictedness
of his daily existence; he worked under the constant protection of the
guard his friends provided him, and he chafed at being unable
to move about freely. For many years he had been living with his
second wife, Natalia Sedov, in a marriage that was a model of
mutual considerateness and devotion; together they now suffered
blow after bl'Ow, as the news came of the death or disappearance of
sons and friends. In his public conduct Trotsky remained firm and
vigorous; privately, he suffered from intervals of depression. Once
he apparently contemplated suicide. The indignity of needing to
defend himself against the slanders pouring out of Moscow, the
frustrations he suffered trying to rebuild a political movement ("I
give advice because I have no other way to act," he wrote to a
friend in France), the annoyance of having to write certain articles
and books for merely financial reasons, the pain he felt at seeing so
many people close to him persecuted by the Russian regime, the
anxiety that he might not live long enough to fulfill the tasks he had
set himself- all these left their mark. Trotsky was a man of enormous
self-discipline, with an unshakable conviction as to his place in
history and his responsibility to the idea of socialism; but he was also
a complex and sensitive human being, impatient with the turn of
history which had left him helpless- but 'Only for the moment, he
believed-to influence events. In the mid-thirties he kept a diary
which reveals sudden flashes of unhappiness and irritation, as if he
were rebelling against the disproportion between his intellectual
powers and his political opportunities. But the diary also reveals
capacities for human warmth and intensity of feeling, above all
toward his admirable wife. And there are sentences which open a
more intimate view of him: "Old age," he wrote, "is the most un–
expected thing that happens to a man."
Only sixty when he was murdered, Trotsky was still a vigorous
man who might otherwise have lived on for a number of years and
continued to write and work.
It
would have been profoundly interest–
:ng to see how he would have responded to the intellectual crises of
