TROTSKY
385
stand it adequately; and for those purposes his intellectual outlook
did not, in the era of totalitarianism, suffice. Or again: can the
murder of six million Jews in Europe be satisfactorily explained
through his theory that Nazism represented the last brutal attempt
by the German bourgeoisie to retain power? Similarly, with his
treatment of the problem of democracy. He was extremely sensitive
to the numerous signs of the decay of European democracy during
the years between the two world wars, and his writings on Germany,
France and Spain often brilliantly register the ways in which the
crisis of capitalism endangered the survival of democracy. But the
"class analysis" of democracy, to which Trotsky was committed,
seems not at all sufficient for an era in which it has become so pain–
fully clear that freedom and liberty- far from being mere guises
of class domination-are the most precious values of human life
and that without them little remains but servitude.
Staying within the limits of Trotsky's ideology, it would be dif–
ficult to account for the considerable stability and the marked rise
in living standards that have characterized the life of Western
capitalism and that now call into question the whole revolutionary
perspective. This does not approximate what he called "the death
agony of capitalism," though there does of course remain the pos–
sibility that the crises he predicted have merely been delayed. Nor
have his prognoses concerning Russia been realized: the post-Stalin
society ruled by Khrushchev has achieved a relative stability; it is
neither threatened by bourgeois restoration nor within measurable
distance of socialist democracy, but maintains itself as an authori–
tarian dictatorship, keeping terror in reserve but not employing it
with the maniacal consistency of Stalin.
These apparent failures in historical prediction are not as dis–
turbing as Trotsky'S refusal or inability to reconsider some of his
intellectual premises.
In
his last book, the biography of Stalin, there
are perhaps one or two signs that he had begun to feel some un–
easiness about the Bolshevik heritage, but for the most part he con–
tinued to defend it to the last. His powers of mind operated within
the boundaries of a fixed political tradition, but not toward scrutin–
izing his own assumptions. One could hardly have expected him to
repudiate his lifework, and much of the anti-Bolshevism directed
against him in the late thirties must be acknowledged to have been
