After listening to parts of the Econtalk podcast with Robert Service about his new biography of Trotsky, I found this noteworthy review by John Gray where he ridicules the romancing of Trotsky by the new left (and the former left like Hitchens):
“Rigorously researched, covering Trotsky’s education and upbringing, his life as an émigré before the revolution, his time as a military leader, his losing battle with Stalin, his women, his life as an exile and his assassination, Robert Service’s new biography discloses a man very different from the one celebrated by bien pensants. The author of distinguished biographies of Lenin and Stalin, Service is eminently qualified to set Trotsky in his historical context. Here Service surpasses himself, and produces a life that is genuinely revelatory. Trotsky’s lifelong effort to distance himself from his Jewish background – ‘The workers are dearer to me than all the Jews,’ Service reports him saying – is carefully and sensitively examined. There is an interesting discussion of Trotsky’s attempt to fashion a distinctive philosophical position for himself (despite having a commendably unorthodox interest in Freud, he was no more successful than Lenin in this regard). The book is rich in telling detail. The young Trotsky liked to dominate the independent-minded women revolutionaries in his circle, and to this end studied carefully Schopenhauer’s The Art of Controversy, a guide to debating tricks. Trotsky was ‘an intellectual bully’, Service writes, who ‘relished wounding his opponents’. None of this is flattering to Trotsky, but Service is always scrupulously balanced. The result is a powerfully demystifying biography of one of the most heavily mythologised figures of twentieth-century history.
Western historians have largely accepted Trotsky’s self-serving account of his opposition to Stalin’s policies and methods, but the differences between the two leaders were more limited than has been commonly believed. Trotsky favoured moving quickly to central planning and collective farming, and shared Stalin’s view of the need to isolate the kulaks (richer peasants). Far from being more liberal than Stalin, during the New Economic Policy (NEP) he blamed Stalin for sheltering Menshevik economists. It was Trotsky who pushed ahead with the ‘militarisation of labour’, which imposed army-style discipline and punishment on Soviet workers. Hailed as an apostle of cultural freedom because of his interest in the arts, Trotsky believed as much as Stalin did that culture must be assessed (and policed) in terms of its political correctness. Trotsky’s influential essay Literature and Revolution, Service writes, ‘was essentially a work of political reductionism. When all is said and done, it was Trotsky who laid down the philosophical foundations for cultural Stalinism.”
One would expect nothing less from someone who grew up in the Baal Shem Tov’s Podolia (Kherson province really). The cultural Stalinism existed in the Chassidik towns of Ukraine long before Trotsky informed his revolutionary friend (see my comments on Assaf’s book). The idea that the cult of personality ideology must be tightly and ruthlessly controlled was the lasting legacy of the Baal Shem Tov in Ukraine, it still endures today. The poor Jews of Ukraine, enraged by the inequalities, provided the foot soldiers of the revolution. The well to do Trotskys provided the rhetoric and the propaganda of the enduring love for the simple workers in order to enslave them. All according to the tired and true post Baal Shem Tov model.
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