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Published: The End of an Epic: Reflections on Contemporary History, Macmillan, 1947 |
READING this book through from beginning to end – in itself no mean task, for there are three volumes of it and some thirteen hundred outsize pages – one feels that there is some consolation for the loss of such ability to the Revolution in Russia, when it is devoted to a task like this and so triumphantly achieves its purpose. Trotsky as Commissar of War at this moment might hardly add much to his political record; while with this book he opens up another field of influence to himself – a field that is often more important than a man’s achievement in actual politics. Bacon, as the author of the Novum Organum and the New Atlantis, was better occupied than as Lord Chancellor, though he did not appear to think so; and it is to political exile that we owe the History of the Peloponnesian War and Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion, no less than Paradise Lost to political defeat.
It is more difficult to define what kind of a book this is. Mr. Max Eastman, its translator, claims that “this is the first time the scientific history of a great event has been written by a man who played a dominant part in it”. There is no doubt about the “dominance”, but more doubt about the “science” For the real claim of this book is not that it is an impersonal, a scientific history; though, indeed, it is a brilliant example of a very rare species, a history that is inspired by the conception of society and the forces at work in it, implied by historical materialism. This, in short, is a Marxist history, but not the Marxist history of the Revolution; for that we shall have to wait for some future Pokrovsky, altogether more impersonal, more objective; but, no doubt, that will be a much duller affair. Whereas this is alive and tingling in every nerve. It has all the brilliant qualities, and the defects, of its author’s personality. It has extreme definiteness of outline, a relentlessness towards his enemies that goes with it, dramatic sense and visual power, a remarkable sympathy for the moods of the masses with a gift for vividly portraying them – the qualities we should expect from a great orator; and, in addition, the political understanding of a first-rate political figure.
It was noted by Macaulay how incomparably superior in the understanding of politics any political pamphlet of Swift’s was to one of Johnson’s; just because of the intimate contact of the former with politics, and hence his correct judgment of the forces that as a writer he was estimating. The same holds good of Trotsky as an historian. He may not be impartial (neither for that matter is anybody else); but what a political grasp is revealed on every page, in the chance remarks thrown out as he proceeds, compared with the laborious irrelevancies of academic historians. Louis Madelin, whom Trotsky tilts against on the subject of impartiality, is hardly worthy of his notice; but his contempt for those historians who confuse the symbol with the interests behind it, is both salutary and generally applicable. Are there not historians who think that the Bourbons failed to re-establish the monarchy in France after 1870 just because of Henry V’s attachment to a little white flag? Or historians of a party who write on the Tory or Whig parties without ever realising what a party is when you analyse it?
Not so Trotsky. He has an illuminating comment on the curious confusion of the July days, when both the Bolshevik insurrectionaries and the loyal troops of the Government wanted to submit to the Executive Committee of the Soviets as their sovereign authority. The fact was that the Committee represented both the petty-bourgeois and the workers, and the troops recognised it as the representative of the one, and the workers as the representative of the other. Two conflicting class interests were bound up in the same institution; it was symptomatic of the character of the Dual Power, and only time could resolve the conflict. But the fact that there was only one symbol, the Committee, did not mean that there was nothing to fight about; it only papered over the cracks. Trotsky comments :
If this conflict had taken place towards the end of the Middle Ages, both sides in slaughtering each other would have cited the same texts from the Bible. Formalist historians would afterwards have come to the conclusion that they were fighting about the correct interpretation of texts. The craftsmen and illiterate peasants of the Middle Ages had a strange passion, as is well known, for allowing themselves to be killed in the cause of philological subtleties in the Revelation of St. John, just as the Russian separatists submitted to extermination in order to decide the question whether one should cross himself with two fingers or three. In reality there lies hidden under such symbolic formulae – in the Middle Ages no less than now – a conflict of life interests which we must learn to uncover. The very same verse of the Evangelist meant serfdom for some, freedom for others.
He makes the point clearer in the case of the June days in Paris in 1848, when the cry Vive la République went up on both sides of the barricades:
To the petty-bourgeois idealist, therefore, the June conflict has seemed a misunderstanding caused by the inattention of one side, the hot-headedness of the other. In reality the bourgeoisie wanted a republic for themselves, the workers a republic for everybody. Political slogans serve oftener to disguise interests than to call them by name.
It was impossible to expect Trotsky to suppress his own personality in the book; not only for the reason that he is Trotsky, but because, after all, he played such an Important part in the Revolution. To have suppressed himself would be a falsification of history. But he does go much further towards impersonality than one would have thought possible from one of his temperament. He writes throughout in the third person; he keeps himself in the background of the picture. The book gives an impression of a highly exciting personality, but not one of egoism; and, with one notable exception, it leaves an impression of fairness, at least not of unfairness. In the light of events he seems justified in his merciless characterisation of the Tsar and Tsarina, Miliukov, Kornilov, Kerensky, and many of the Socialists. The exception is, of course, Stalin.
It is a pity that his personal feud with Stalin has prevented him from recognising Stalin’s part in the Revolution. Whenever he comes near the subject, the history tends to turn into a political pamphlet; and one is tempted to think that Trotsky writes history, as the celebrated Dr. Clifford was said to offer extemporary prayer, for the purpose of scarifying his enemies. Nobody would guess from his account that in the October Revolution, though Trotsky was the President of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet, which organised the insurrection, Stalin was responsible for the organisation of the Bolshevik Party, apart from the Soviet in which other parties were included, to the same end. Over the struggle within the party in October, when Lenin was forcing them into insurrection and the party was divided in opinion, it seems needless to attack Stalin, as the editor of Pravda, for trying to tone down the differences: it is the function of a party organ to gloss over the differences within the party, before the eyes of the outside world. Nor, though Trotsky allows that Stalin’s defects are not due to lack of character, as in the case of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the two opponents of the insurrection, is it reasonable to attack him on the ground of his caution. There are leaders and leaders. It is true that Stalin is not of the tempestuous, romantic type of revolutionary like Trotsky, but he is none the less a great leader. He reminds one rather of Burghley in our own history, who had a great gift for taking cover. But that did not prevent him from being bold and courageous in policy, as in the case of the great leap in the dark of 1559, when this country was committed finally and decisively to the Protestant Reformation. And so, too, Stalin is the man, after all, who has taken the plunge of committing Russia to the Five Years’ Plan.
That said, one can pay tribute to the extraordinary and original qualities of the work. It is a kind of prose-epic of the Revolution. The Revolution is Trotsky’s hero, and he displays an attitude of reverence towards it, very proper when one considers the vastness of the subject and the profundity of its issues, and singularly appropriate in so irreverent a character as the author. It is as if the Revolution were the one great revelation of his life, a kind of beatific vision which it must be very exasperating to be withdrawn from, even such a distance as Prinkipo is from Odessa. His sympathy with the masses, remarkable in so impatient a person, is surprising in its reality and imaginativeness. It is easy enough when, as in the February Revolution, the masses are on the up grade, feeling their way forward, carrying the soldiers with them he picks out vivid, significant little episodes of the “ struggle of the workers for the soul of the soldiers”, the fraternising of the men from the factories of the Vyborg district with the old and famous regiments quartered in the capital. But in the more difficult days of July, when the Bolsheviks were defeated and Lenin driven into hiding, when the workers and soldiers were stupid enough to believe the slanders that were sedulously propagated by the Provisional Government to the effect that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents, he still defends them. He argues that it was only a superficial change in the minds of the people; that if they “really did change their feelings and thoughts under the influence of accidental circumstances, then that mighty obedience to natural law which characterises the development of great revolutions would be inexplicable”. That, he implies with a superb rationalism, is quite inadmissible; in one place, he speaks of the “insulted reason of history” – a phrase so revealing in its optimism. The deeper the masses are caught up in the revolutionary process, he claims, “the more confidently you can predict the sequence of its further stages”. Only – and he gets out of the difficulty by adding – “you must remember that the political development of the masses proceeds not in the direct line, but in a complicated curve”.
Yet one wonders a little whether he does not over-estimate the intelligence and the willed activity of the masses as such whether he does not dramatise them too much, having seen them in action when stirred up from the depths and at the top of their form? But this has its good side; there is no facile scorn of the people; he calls even scepticism with regard to their latent potentialities for action, “cheap”. And he is fundamentally right: he remembers the source of their ineptitudes and mistakes, when one is tempted to think of their consequences in their own suffering. Even when the dregs of the population, the criminal element, see their chance and come out of their holes, he says a little pityingly, Here is the barbarism that the barbarism of the old order created ! When one considers the horror of a regime run by a Rasputin, the weak and cold-blooded Byzantinism of the Court, the criminal levity of the aristocracy, the disasters, the corruption, the repression, was not the Tsardom but a “crowned hooliganism”? Nor is the judgment of the masses so blind and credulous as is so commonly supposed, he says. They have a shrewd idea of the factors affecting their own action, he remarks concerning the conviction of the people that the responsibility for the July clashes was that of patriotic provocateurs. “Where it is touched to the quick, it gathers facts and conjectures with a thousand eyes and ears, tests rumours by its own experience, selects some and rejects others. Where versions touching a mass movement are contradictory, those appropriated by the mass itself are nearest to the truth.” He goes on to pour scorn on those historians typified by Taine, who, “in studying great popular movements ignore the voices of the street, and spend their time carefully collecting and sifting the empty gossip produced in drawing-rooms by moods of isolation and fear”. True enough; but the moods and thoughts of the people themselves are the most difficult of all historical material to collect; up to now, theirs has been a silent contribution, though their fate is the burden of history. Will the Revolution bring freedom and consciousness to them? Trotsky, with the Communists, believes so: it is for them, the whole justification for Revolution, the reward of intolerable effort and no less intolerable suffering – the end that he calls “the spiritualisation of the inert mass”.
It must be said that artistically the book is completely successful in developing its theme, the gradual self-realisation of the people under the pressure of revolutionary circumstances. It is as if one watches the people coming alive, thawing after the long winter of repression, shaking themselves free from the unmeaning and frozen gestures of the ages. It is a progress from the old Russia, when on the outbreak of war the Tsar went to find strength in prayer at the shrines of the Kremlin, and the people kissed the ground he trod on when the War Minister declared to the Duma, as the whole front was caving in, in 1915, “I place my trust in the impenetrable spaces, impassable mud, and the mercy of St. Nicholas Minikisky, Protector of Holy Russia”; a progress to the dream that inspired the whole lives of Marx and Lenin, that all these millions of beings might realise themselves as concrete conscious selves.
Intellectually, it is no less successful in its formulations, though here there is more scope for variety of interpretation and some dispute. He analyses the Revolution down to its roots in the backwardness of Russian economic development as a whole, cheek-by-jowl with the most advanced and concentrated industrialism in and around Petrograd and Moscow, the two great revolutionary centres. We all know the primitive agricultural conditions that prevailed so largely in Russia, and that form at once such an obstacle to Communism and such an objective to overcome. But one little realises the extraordinary concentration of the industrial proletariat; of a total of two millions, some half a million were concentrated in Petrograd, in a hundred and forty giant factories, of which the Putilov factory with forty thousand workers was the type. This proletariat had had from 1905 a long revolutionary experience and was constantly in the forefront of political action and engaged in strikes and lock-outs. Of the land, besides the enormous properties of the Crown and the Church, the great landlords owned a quarter. The whole stretch of arable land within the limits of European Russia was estimated at 280 million dessiatines; of this, seventy million dessiatines belonged to 30,000 great landlords. As Trotsky tersely puts it: “This seventy million was about what would have belonged to ten million peasant families. These land statistics constitute the finished programme of a peasant war.”
On the top of this economic substructure – in itself unstable, since there was no strong middle class to bind the whole thing together, and the major portion of the finance and industrial capital was held by foreign capitalists – there was a ramshackle political superstructure: a decadent aristocracy, at the head of which stood an exhausted and worn-out autocracy, the whole thing riven by the struggles of the past twenty years. After three years of the war, years of unmitigated disaster, everybody wanted to get rid of the hopeless Nicholas II and his entourage, Tsarina, Rasputin, and all; even the aristocracy was in favour of a Palace Revolution – as the genial Protopopoff admits, the very highest classes became frondeurs before the Revolution. The only question was, who was to make the Revolution and for whose benefit ? The impossibility of settling this question between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie might have meant the continuance of the Tsardom to this day if the people had not stepped in. It was the people who took the issue into their own hands with the February Revolution; but owing to their inexperience they allowed the power they had won to slip into the hands of the bourgeoisie, who used it to continue for their own benefit substantially the same system: the war, a foreign policy of annexation, capitalism in industry and the great estates on the land. It was this that necessitated the October Revolution before power could come into the hands of the workers, to be used for their benefit. The history of the intervening period, between February and October, is one of utter governmental and social instability, with power swaying now to this side, now to that, the Provisional Government now leaning on the bourgeoisie, now on the workers, staggering from crisis to crisis, until at length the Bolsheviks put a blessed end to it by bringing power to rest broad-based upon the workers.
One does not need to halt over Trotsky’s characterisation of the old regime; like the image of the stricken tree, in which Swift saw the premonition of his own fate, it was dying from the top downwards. What is more curious to observe is that Trotsky, who like all Communists would deny the primary importance of ethical motives, is really shocked by the putrescence at the top. The Emperor, who was unmoved when hundreds of people were crushed to death at his coronation, when thousands were shot down unarmed in the streets in 1905, but who wrote on a report that a certain officer was executing soldiers without any trial. “Ah, what a fine fellow”; the Empress, who right up to the end, against the remonstrances of all her own family, was pressing the Tsar for extreme measures: “Anything but this responsible ministry about which everybody has gone crazy. People want to feel your hand. How long they have been saying to me for whole years, the same thing: Russia loves to feel the whip. That is their nature.” Of the one, Trotsky writes: “This orthodox Hessian, with a Windsor upbringing and a Byzantine crown on her head, not only ‘incarnates’ the Russian soul, but also organically despises it. This German woman adopted with a kind of cold fury all the traditions and romances of Russian medievalism, the most meagre and crude of all medievalisms, in that very period when the people were making mighty efforts to free themselves of it.” Of the Tsar, he says: “This ‘charmer’, without will, without aim, without imagination, was more awful than all the tyrants of ancient and modern history.”
The real importance of Trotsky’s History does not lie in his power of word-painting, either of character or scene; though indeed his gift is so brilliant and incisive that one is continually reminded of Carlyle. There is something of the same technique, the same mannerism even, in the way the rapid lights shift across the scene and particular odd episodes are brought out in singular sharpness of relief and made to bear general significance ; something of the same difficulty in following the sequence of events – the lights are so blinding – one may add. But where Carlyle had but his magnificent powers of intuition to rely on, Trotsky has a theory of history at his command, which enables him to grasp what is significant and to relate things together. The same point can be illustrated more appositely by comparison with Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis, for the two men are not dissimilar in character and gifts of mind. But here again one notices the difference; for Mr. Churchill’s History, for all its personality, its vividness and vitality - points which it has in common with Trotsky – has not a philosophy of history behind it.
What distinguishes this work is the basic attempt Trotsky makes to define his subject, to make clear the methods appropriate to understanding it, and to see it in relation to the whole historical perspective opened up by Marxism. He states in his Preface: “ The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events”. He explains how, in normal times, when society is not shaken up from its foundations, the events that happen on the surface of society, more or less in political circles, come to be identified with the history of the whole society. A case of mistaken identity that is all very well in quiet times when the surface is not too unrepresentative of what is going on beneath, but is entirely inadequate in time of revolution, when the old order has become too atrophied for the forces that are boiling up underneath, and the masses break through its framework to create a new regime. “The history of a revolution is, then, first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.”
Trotsky explains that the changes that are brought about in the economic bases of society and in the social substratum of classes in the course of the revolution are not enough alone to explain its creative activity. There is nothing mechanical or schematic about the course of revolution: “ The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution “. On the other hand, neither is the process a spontaneous one, a sort of spontaneous combustion, arising for no known reason out of no discernible circumstances, as liberal idealism would give one to suppose. No; the revolution has its own logic, which is part and parcel of the logic of history, dynamic, living, flexible, capable of innumerable variants, but not without reason. The swift changes in the views and moods of the masses, so characteristic of revolutionary epochs, do not take place in the void, nor are they unrelated to the economic and social conditions that provide the field in which they move and which limits their effective variation.
The Marxist view of history provides a satisfactory correlation of these two elements – a correlation so close as to form one many-sided but homogeneous process. The danger lies in separating out the various strands in the one process, for the purposes of historical exposition. Nor has Trotsky entirely escaped criticism from other Marxists on this account. He sees the danger in the purely psychological approach, “which looks upon the nature of events as an inter-weaving of the free activities of separate individuals and their groupings”; and describes his own approach as that of the materialist method which disciplines the historian, compelling him to take his departure from the weighty facts of the social structure. For us the fundamental forces of the historic process are classes; political parties rest upon them; ideas and slogans emerge as the small change of objective interests. The whole course of the investigation proceeds from the objective to the subjective, from the social to the individual, from the fundamental to the incidental.
In the course of his treatment of the Revolution, his activism of temperament, perhaps also the fact that he was a participant in the action, leads him to put a stress upon the psychological factors that laid him open to the criticism of Pokrovsky on the score of idealism. Trotsky writes:
The immediate causes of the events of a revolution are changes in the state of mind of the conflicting classes. The material relations of society merely define the channel within which these processes take place ... It is impossible to understand the real significance of a political party or find your way among the manoeuvres of the leaders, without searching out the deep molecular process in the mind of the mass.
Does not this give the process too idealist a cast of character? Granted that the historian must search out the molecular changes and adaptations going on in the minds of the masses – since these things are happening to men, not blocks of wood; yet the changes in the course of events are determined by changes in the external situation – by the economic collapse between February and October, for instance, by the shortage of food, by the impossibility of carrying on the government on the old social foundations, i.e. by the inner contradictions of the existing order. This is the ground of Pokrovsky’s charge, who looks for the motive force of the Revolution to the objective shifts in society rather than to the mental processes of the masses.
The real problem is how to correlate the two; and it may be that Trotsky and Pokrovsky are not in such direct opposition as they supposed, that their views are complementary rather than antithetical, and that much of their controversy is simply due to their being at cross-purposes with one another. It is only to be expected that Trotsky, as an active participator in the events, would be altogether more activist in his sympathies and his interpretation than the Professor. The danger on the side of the Professor would be that of under-estimating the part played by the conscious and willed activity of the masses – a tinge, perhaps, of fatalism. Nevertheless, one is inclined to think that the Professor sees the whole thing in the better and more balanced historical perspective; Trotsky’s book is above all things a guide to action; the Professor is more concerned with adding to knowledge. Yet it is a great strength of Trotsky’s book that he never forgets that the figures behind these great events are human beings. “Let us not forget”, he says, “that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, acting man, but explains him.”
This very activism is a great asset when he comes to estimating the role of parties in the Revolution, in particular that of the Bolshevik Party, and the importance of Lenin’s leadership in it. He remarks at the outset:
Only on the basis of a study of political processes in the masses themselves, can we understand the role of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore. They constitute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organisation the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.
Later on, when he comes to the crucial question of what was Lenin’s contribution to the Revolution, how it would have developed without his leadership, Trotsky’s view wins our complete agreement; the question itself provides a kind of test of the satisfactoriness or not of his general historical conception. He emerges from it triumphantly, in one of the most memorable passages of the book (vol.i, pp.341-2); though, indeed, it is only a vulgar misconception of historical, materialism – alas, one that is all too common – that supposes it to exclude all possibility of individuals influencing the course of events. Of course, they have some scope of influence; the point is to know how far they may influence events. They cannot transcend the field of conditions within which they are acting; they do not start with a clean slate, as historical idealists suppose, upon which they may write anything; they are bound and limited at every turn by the forces that exist in the field of their action. But to understand this, is itself the greatest aid to effective action that there can be. It was the fact that Lenin understood what was possible on this basis, that his whole mentality was guided by this outlook and method, that made him incomparably superior to any other leading figure in the field.
One does not need to compare him with the Miliukovs and Kerenskys, there is a more useful comparison to make with the British ambassador, Buchanan, by no means an unimportant actor on the same scene. Buchanan, after a lifetime dealing with the surface events of history, as a diplomat, made an heroic effort to accommodate himself to the circumstances of a revolution; but one finds him forced to confess in mid-stream, “The situation is so obscure that I personally see no daylight” – an utterance that would be quite inconceivable for Lenin. Or again, Buchanan’s comment on the victory of the Bolsheviks in October: “The inability of Russians to work cordially together, even when the fate of their country is at stake, amounts almost to a national defect”.
The case was quite otherwise with Lenin, not so much because he had lived his whole life in the atmosphere of revolution, but because in Marxism he possessed a guide to the deeper shifts in society, and not merely the surface ripples of diplomatic circles, ambassadorial lunches, state banquets, the quarrels of crowned heads, the idiosyncrasies of Empresses. The masses are more important.
The chief strength of Lenin lay in his understanding the inner logic of the movement and guiding his policy by it. He did not impose his plan on the masses; he helped the masses to recognise and realise their own plan. When Lenin reduced all the problems of the Revolution to one – ”patiently explain” – that meant that it was necessary to bring the consciousness of the masses into correspondence with that situation into which the historic process had driven them.
How, then, would the Revolution have developed if Lenin had not reached Russia in 1917? Trotsky has no difficulty in allowing that the role of Lenin was one of decisive importance at that time; it was a case of the perfect conjunction of circumstances and the man. There is no question of the man creating possibilities that were not given in the situation; the situation itself was ripening for further stages in the development of the Revolution, and the leader and the party to take advantage of it were there. Trotsky sums up:
If our exposition proves anything at all, it proves that Lenin was not a demiurge of the revolutionary process, that he merely entered into a chain of historic forces. But he was a great link in that chain. Tile dictatorship of the proletariat was to be inferred from the whole situation, hut it had still to be established. It could not be established without a party. The party could fulfil its mission only after understanding it. For that Lenin was needed.
But without him, is it possible to say with certainty that the party would have found its road?
We would by no means make bold to say that. The factor of time is decisive here, and it is difficult in retrospect to tell time historically. Dialectic materialism has nothing in common with fatalism. Without Lenin the crisis, which the opportunist leadership was inevitably bound to produce, would have assumed an extraordinarily sharp and protracted character. The conditions of war and revolution, however, would not allow the party a long period for fulfilling its mission. Thus it is by no means excluded that a disorientated and split party might have let slip the revolutionary opportunity for many years. The role of personality arises before us here on a truly gigantic scale. It is necessary only to understand that role correctly, taking personality as a link in the historic chain.
It is no part of our task, even if it were possible, to sum up Lenin’s part in the Revolution. It is sufficient to say that the impression that arises from the wealth of detail with which his activity is treated here, is absolutely at one with all that we know of him from other sources. There is no more consistent character in modern history than Lenin; he is all of a piece, without a shadow of equivocation or question or doubt, with not a trace of the duplicity so necessary to the existence of ordinary leaders, utterly simple, unconscious of himself, completely devoted to one end. Of all the stories of him, one that is most revealing is that told by John Reed in his Ten Days that Shook the World; how in the crisis of the October Revolution, Lenin appeared, after months in hiding, to the Soviet Congress which under his guidance was constructing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Most of the deputies there had never set eyes on him, though his name had gone all over Russia; and when he appeared, there was a storm of cheering that lasted for minutes, at the end of which, quite unmoved, he said: “We will now proceed to construct the Socialist order.” There proceeded from that Congress, what might never have emerged without him, the three great decrees in which the Soviet regime announced its mission: the appeal to all the peoples to make peace on the basis of no annexations; the declaration of all the land as national property; the establishment of the rule of the working class. One is tempted to think there is something very un-Russian about Lenin: the intense practicability, the concentration upon action, his absorbing concern with what is possible and his insistence upon the neatest, shortest way of doing it. It is so unlike Zinoviev, all over the place, or Kamenev, never coming to the point, or so many other Russians without sense, as somebody said, of time or space. Lenin might be a really first-class Englishman (not Mr. Baldwin’s sort of Englishman) if it were not for his inexcusable concern with theory, and his (to us incomprehensible) determination to make action and his intellectual position march together.
And yet, for all Lenin’s devotion, and all his genius, nothing of the October Revolution might have come about when it did, if it had not been for a peculiarly fortunate concatenation of circumstances. It is a sobering, an ironical thought, to think that he might have gone on spending the last years of his life in exile, like the earlier ones, seeing in his own lifetime no fruit for his efforts. For, as Trotsky admits, “a coincidence of all the conditions necessary to a victorious and stable proletarian revolution has so far occurred but once in history: in Russia in October 1917”. If this is so, what is the point of the Communist complaints against German Social Democracy for not bringing off the Revolution in Germany in 1918? Lenin himself has said that the necessary condition for the seizure of power by the proletariat is “to have at the decisive moment, at the decisive point, an overwhelming superiority of force”. The Bolsheviks had this in Petrograd in 1917; but have the workers in any Western country, England or France or Germany, ever had a favourable situation for successful revolution? If not, then why the constant Communist recriminations against the failure of Western Socialism to have achieved revolution? These questions verge upon political issues; suffice it to say that the Communist position with regard to them can be met, and so far as I am concerned, will be dealt with elsewhere.
Trotsky’s great work draws to an end on a subdued note in which it is not difficult to detect a certain scepticism, or perhaps one should say, philosophical acceptance of the world’s ways. Was it, after all, worth all the sacrifice? Something seems to whisper in the intermittences of the heart. His first attempt to answer these promptings does not satisfy. “It would be as well to ask in face of the difficulties and griefs of personal existence: Is it worth while to be born?” These melancholy reflections are, he thinks, in general, unimportant. Perhaps so; but they may be important for certain exceptional people – as they must have been for Lenin himself at some stage of his life, before his decision was irrevocably made. But in general, since these things have to be, the only reasonable course is to direct them into the best channels and to minimise the suffering they involve. The suffering involved might have been greater if October had never been; and it need never have been so great if other forces had not prolonged the struggle needlessly against the solution that history itself indicated. For these forces had only a dead end, a blind alley, to offer; whereas, through the October Revolution, the future was made possible, and not for Russia alone.
That seems to be the answer Trotsky and the Communists would make. Nor can we doubt that the October Revolution is the most important world event of our time; it has the significance for us that the French Revolution had for the nineteenth century. It is evidently necessary to know where we stand in relation to it; and to know this we have to understand it. In spite of the deluge of literature on the Revolution produced to delude fools, there is now a reliable literature growing up, on the basis of which we may judge; and in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution we have had the unbelievable good fortune of a work worthy of that great event.
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