DAVID TWERSKY
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questioning to CrItICism to left-wing opposition - after all, Trotsky
praised
Ten Days that Shook the World
in
History of the Russian Revolution
for Reed's ability to see, hear and faithfully record what was going
on around him . Even Warren Beatty puts some creeping doubt into
his characterization of Reed, which he bases on disputes with
Zinoviev. Of course, if Reed was falling out with Zinoviev, could he
have survived Stalin with his faith as a communist intact?
Along the same lines of inquiry, Norman Podhoretz has in–
sisted that if George Orwell were alive, he would have renounced his
democratic socialism for Podhoretz's neoconservative faith. Is Or–
well turning over in his grave at the suggestion, or chuckling to
himself in heaven? The question is not only of theological import.
How Orwell's powerful and original mind would have dealt with the
events of the sixties and seventies, with the de- and re-Stalinization
of Russia, the rise of the American New Left, and Vietnam, is a
fascinating subject for speculation; and laying claim to his legacy by
one or another contemporary intellectual/political camp is a useful
ploy. Podhoretz is mobilizing history in order to argue that other
backsliding liberals and leftists can "come over" safe in the know–
ledge that they pursue the inner logic of Orwell's blessing, according
to Norman.
For many of the intellectuals on the move from Stalin, Leon
Trotsky provided a temporary shelter, a kind of halfway house for
revolutionists on the run . The fact that he was an intellectual and
Jewish (and therefore outsider both to the revolution and to the
Jews), and had lost but still stood for the revolution unbetrayed, all
combined to create an attractive space for those independent minds
not blinded by the horrors of the Nazis or the horrors of Stalin .
Trotsky himself lived a full life, richer and more colorful than
any ten ordinary people (although he would have hotly contested the
existence of "ordinary people"). Still, it is interesting to speculate on
the possible developments of his extraordinary, though fallible, in–
tellect as it took in the crushing of fascism and the entrenchment and
evolution of Soviet (Stalinist) power, not to mention the collapse of
Marxism, so unthinkable in the first part of the century, as a viable
ideological framework and guide.
With the final defeat of his dreams and schemes would he , the
most public of men , have withdrawn from the platform of history to
a private solitude? Would he have clung like a drowning man to the
rotting life raft of dogma, or might he have allowed for history's bag
