Robert Service. Trotsky: A Biography.
David North. In Defense of Leon Trotsky.
Author(s): Bertrand M. Patenaude
The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 3 (June 2011), pp. 900–902
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
Robert Service, who authored biographies of V. I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin and a history of world communism, has now published a biography of Leon Trotsky. “This book’s purpose,” Service announces at the start, “is to dig up the buried life” (p. 4). It appears that he set out thoroughly to discredit Trotsky as a historical figure and as a human being. His Trotsky is not merely arrogant, self-righteous, and self-absorbed; he is a mass murderer and a terrorist, a cold and heartless son, husband, father, and comrade, and an intellectual lightweight who falsified the record of his role in the Russian Revolution and whose writings have continued to fool generations of readers—a hoax perpetuated by his hagiographer Isaac Deutscher. In his eagerness to cut Trotsky down, Service commits numerous distortions of the historical record and outright errors of fact to the point that the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise is open to question.
Enter David North. North is an American Trotskyist whose book collects his review essays of Service’s volume and of earlier biographies of Trotsky by Ian Thatcher and Geoffrey Swain. (He does not mention my 2009 book, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary.) Given North’s Trotskyism, he might reasonably be suspected of hyperbole in his brief against Service. But a careful examination of North’s book shows his criticism of Service to be exactly what Trotsky scholar Baruch Knei-Paz, in a blurb on the back cover, says it is: “detailed, meticulous, well-argued and devastating.”
Service, in his attempt to indict Trotsky, makes Exhibit #1 Trotsky’s autobiography, My Life (1930), which Service calls “a masterpiece of political fudging masked by the artifices of a literary alchemist” (p. 403). Service has examined what he says in one place is the “first draft” of Trotsky’s memoir in the Hoover Institution Archives, “which has much information he excluded from the printed version” (p. xix). Elsewhere he writes,
“By examining the drafts and proofs, we can catch glimpses of aspects of his upbringing that have long lain hidden” (p. 12).
Here, in the discussion of Trotsky’s youth, Service targets Trotsky’s alleged embarrassments about his parents’ wealth (Trotsky’s father was a prosperous farmer in southern Ukraine) and his Jewish origins (Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein). Yet neither here nor anywhere else is Service able to provide a single example of a significant discrepancy between the published memoir and the draft. In fact, in his depiction of Trotsky’s youth, Service relies almost entirely on the published version of My Life, not on earlier drafts. Service accuses Trotsky the memoirist of being “selective, evasive and self-aggrandizing” (p. xxi) (as if most memoirs do not fit this description), yet he reads other memoirs completely uncritically (for example, those of Gregory A. Ziv and Clare Sheridan) when they show Trotsky in an unfavorable light.
Service’s animus toward Trotsky is on clearest display in his treatment of Trotsky’s relationship with Alexandra Sokolovskaya, a comrade whom he married in prison in 1899 and whom he left behind with their two infant daughters when he escaped from Siberian exile in 1902. Trotsky later said that it was with her blessing that he fled Russia to join up with Lenin and other Russian Marxists in Western Europe. But in Service’s telling, “Bronstein was planning to abandon her in the wilds of Siberia … No sooner had he fathered a couple of children than he decided to run off. Few revolutionaries left such a mess behind them. Even so, he was acting within the revolutionary code of behaviour” (p. 67). Service felt it necessary to soften his criticism with that final sentence, yet later in the book he says outright that Trotsky “ditched his first wife” (p. 112).
In fact, Trotsky’s family in Russia helped support Sokolovskaya and their daughters, and she went to her death in the Great Terror as a Trotskyist. Not only does Service fail to furnish a single piece of evidence that contradicts Trotsky’s account, he tampers with the available evidence. He produces what he wants to present as a damning quote from Trotsky’s memoir: “‘Life,’ [Trotsky] said as if it was a simple matter of fact, ‘separated us’” (p. 67). In Service’s account, this amounts to a callous Trotsky shrugging his shoulders: Stuff happens. But as North notes, Service has cut off Trotsky’s sentence, which reads as follows: “Life separated us, but nothing could destroy our friendship and our intellectual kinship” (p. 125). So here we find Service excising inconvenient text from the autobiography he accuses Trotsky of having edited in order to suppress embarrassing passages.
The number of factual mistakes in Service’s book is, as North says, “astonishing” (p. 167). I have counted more than four dozen. Service mixes up the names of Trotsky’s sons, misidentifies the largest political group in the first Duma in 1906, botches the name of the Austrian archduke assassinated at Sarajevo, misrepresents the circumstances of Nicholas II’s abdication, gets backward Trotsky’s position in 1940 on the United States’ entry into World War II, and gives the wrong year of death of Trotsky’s widow. Service’s book is completely unreliable as a reference.
At times the errors are jaw-dropping. Service believes that Bertram Wolfe was one of Trotsky’s “acolytes” living with him in Mexico (pp. 441, 473), that Andre Breton was a “surrealist painter” whose “pictures exhibited sympathy with the plight of the working people” (p. 453), and that Mikhail Gorbachev rehabilitated Trotsky in 1988, when in fact Trotsky was never posthumously rehabilitated by the Soviet government.
Service fails to examine in a serious way Trotsky’s political ideas in his writings and speeches—nor does it appear that he has always bothered to familiarize himself with them. A striking case in point is his brief discussion of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1923). In trying to summarize what he dismisses as a “patchy survey of contemporary prose and poetry,” Service writes: “Like fellow communist leaders, Trotsky wanted a high culture subordinate to the party’s purposes. It would take many years, he assumed, before a ‘proletarian culture’ would be widely achieved” (p. 317). In fact, Trotsky emphatically rejected the concept of “proletarian culture,” which was his main purpose in taking up his pen against the communist radicals of Proletcult.
But Service is not about to let the facts get in the way of his exposing the “crudity of Trotsky’s judgements” (p. 318) about culture. He leaps from statements that Trotsky was “no liberal in affairs of culture” (p. 315) and “no advocate of complete artistic freedom” (p. 316) to a hard conclusion: “When all is said and done, though, it was Trotsky who laid down the philosophical foundations for cultural Stalinism” (p. 318). Nothing in Service’s book justifies such a statement.
With no way to prove his case, Service relies on cheap shots and slanderous asides to keep his readers convinced that Trotsky is a despicable man. Examining Trotsky’s marked-up copy of a book on Marxism by Sidney Hook, Service decides that “the exclamation marks he made in the margins testify to angry self-righteousness and intellectual self-regard” (p. 6). At times it is unclear to what degree Service’s writing is informed by ignorance or malice. His discussion of the Dewey Commission, the independent investigation into the veracity of the Moscow trials led by philosopher John Dewey in 1937, is an example. In Service’s error-strewn account, the Dewey Commission was a put-up job, with Trotsky manipulating the proceedings and engineering the eventual not-guilty verdict. The members of the commission, Service writes, were “blind to Trotsky’s contempt for their values … Like spectators at a zoo, they felt sorry for the wounded beast” (p. 466). This is a travesty of the actual facts. In reality, most members of the Dewey Commission, liberals together with socialists, had no sympathy for Trotsky’s ideas, but they believed he deserved a fair hearing after the sham justice handed down in the Moscow trials, which had effectively condemned Trotsky to death in absentia.
Service is on a crusade to place Trotsky alongside Stalin as one of the great bloodthirsty tyrants of the twentieth century. Because of the way the story turned out—Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940—Service has to huff and puff to try to convince his readers. “It is true that Stalin did things of a monstrosity which only a few dictators in the twentieth century matched,” Service writes. “But Trotsky was no angel” (p. 4). Indeed, “He was close to Stalin in intentions and practice. He was no more likely than Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism even though he claimed and assumed that he would. Trotsky failed to work out how to move from party dictatorship to universal freedom. He reveled in terror” (p. 497).
Service assures his readers that although Trotsky may have paid attention to Soviet culture, “This did not mean that he had gone soft in his politics. What still counted for him was world revolution, and no human price [sic!] was too great to pay in the interests of the cause” (p. 313). But insinuation and non sequiturs can get Service only so far, so he must fabricate evidence. Service writes of Trotsky: “He displayed his complete moral insouciance when telling his American admirer Max Eastman in the early 1920s that he and the Bolsheviks were willing ‘to burn several thousand Russians to a cinder in order to create a true revolutionary American movement.’ Russia’s workers and peasants would have been interested to know of the mass sacrifice he was contemplating” (p. 313).
Here North catches Service in an act of outright falsification. A look at Eastman’s memoir, Service’s source for the anecdote, reveals that Trotsky was reacting to Eastman’s lament that the American Communist movement was dominated by ex-Menshevik Russian Americans. Trotsky’s response to Eastman had nothing to do with Russian workers and peasants and was spoken in jest. But Service, pretending that he has found a spine-tingling passage about the monster Trotsky, delivers a solemn clincher: “If the ends were desired, the means had to be willed” (p. 313).
Service seeks to portray Trotsky as a man who was coldly indifferent to the births of his children and whose political obsessions make him ultimately responsible for the suffering and deaths of his family members. Trotsky, not Stalin, is the culprit here. Of the suicide in Berlin of Trotsky’s mentally ill daughter Zina in January 1933, Service writes: “Trotsky’s attempt to politicize the death was not his finest moment” (p. 386). Yet Service fails even to mention that the Kremlin had recently revoked Zina’s citizenship, cutting off the possibility for her to return to her mother, her daughter, and her husband—a fact that Trotsky had uppermost in mind in blaming Stalin for her death.
Meanwhile, the archival citations pile up in the back of Service’s book, lest anyone be inclined to question whether the biographer has hard proof of Trotsky’s moral and political bankruptcy. These citations are mostly from Moscow archives and the Hoover Institution Archives: oddly, there is very little from Harvard, where Trotsky deposited his papers on the eve of his assassination. Instead, Service has decided that this, the most important collection of Trotsky’s papers in the world, has been “mined long ago” (p. xix). Mined by whom? Surely Service does not assume that Deutscher, the man he says “worshipped at Trotsky’s shrine” (p. xxi), or Pierre Broué, whom he calls a Trotsky “idolater” (p. xxi), can be trusted to have researched the Harvard collection honestly and thoroughly. Service informs his readers: “The Houghton Library at Harvard University too contains letters in its holdings which have merited reconsideration, and I thank [name of research assistant] for obtaining the ones I requested” (pp. xix-xx). And how did Service decide which letters “merited reconsideration”?
North calls Service’s biography a “piece of hack-work” (p. 140). Strong words, but entirely justified. Harvard University Press has placed its imprimatur upon a book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship.
BERTRAND M. PATENAUDE
Stanford University