Trotsky’s Self-Destructive Ambivalence (article)

Trotsky’s tragic career as first victor and then victim has attracted less attention from psychohistorians than one might imagine. In fact, his biographers have done very little with the psychological material offered in Trotsky’s autobiography.* Descriptions of childhood scenes of humiliation, weakness, and failure, of his conflicts with his parents and their own conflicts, of his identification with his father’s victimized employees, surely have a purpose. One wonders why he offered that sort of material for public consumption. Joseph Stalin, who had called Trotsky

Page 1

a “hero with fake muscles,” but still feared him as a rival, was probably bemused by a passage in My Life which describes the two- or three-year-old Trotsky wetting his pants. Viacheslav Molotov made fun of Trotsky’s story in an interview in 1977 that was later published: “I read his autobiography. He begins with his mother and himself going to visit a neighboring landlord in Khershchina [sic]. He was about five [sic] years old, and he played with a girl of the same age there and peed in his pants. To describe that! What a man!” (Albert Resis, ed., Molotov Remembers, Conversations with Felix Chuev [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993], p. 131; See also Leon Trotsky, My Life [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970], p. 2). Stalin and his cronies undoubtedly had some collective fun at Trotsky’s expense when the book first appeared. Trotsky had on numerous occasions handed “dirt” to his opponents, with which they betrayed him and this is surely part of the self-destructive pattern to be examined here.

Trotsky knew something about psychoanalysis from his stay in Vienna in 1907-1914. He found Freudian theory praiseworthy, but would not seek psychoanalytic help for his schizophrenic daughter and described psychoanalytic clinical practice to his son as “ninety-per cent charlatanism.” In letters written during 1931 to Leon Sedov, preserved in the Nicolaevsky Collection in the Hoover Institution, Trotsky reveals doubts about psychoanalysis as a therapy, even though he respected its theoretical findings.

When Wilhelm Reich invited Trotsky to join his movement, Trotsky politely declined and pled ignorance of psychoanalysis. Reich’s letters to Trotsky of 1933-1935 and Trotsky’s replies are preserved in the Trotsky Archives in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. Yet the notebooks he kept in exile suggest that Trotsky continued to read psychoanalytic literature. A number of striking passages convey in Marxian, evolutionary and Freudian terms Trotsky’s appreciation of the power of the unconscious mind. I believe that he intended to convey psychoanalytic messages, but was ambivalent about that too. In presenting my analysis here I draw freely on my own earlier work on Trotsky, but attempt to synthesize the ideas into a somewhat modified and also more compact and coherent picture.

As his autobiography progressed he changed course from revelation of childhood and adolescent weakness to revolutionary-heroic images with a psychoanalytic-evolutionary theoretical subtext. To be sure, Trotsky injected Marxian class analysis and his sympathy for the downtrodden into the early part of his autobiography, but its psychological content changes from self-revelation to self-exaltation and the unmasking of his opponents. Moreover, he largely suppressed the impact of his Jewish background on his self-image and on the way he was treated by others and sanitized the picture of his very complex relationship with Lenin. Even so, My Life offers plenty of material for psychoanalytically oriented biographers. The book has to be supplemented by clues in Trotsky’s other writings and in the pattern of his political career. In both My Life and his other writings in exile, Trotsky consciously cast himself as a tragic hero of the world socialist revolution and perhaps unconsciously pursued a tragic end as the revolution’s chief martyr. But why did he cast himself as a tragic hero and seemingly place himself in no-win situations? Perhaps the role of tragic hero permitted him to resolve his ambivalence about his own fitness to be a leader. He presents this ambivalence quite starkly in his autobiography in stories about his inferiority to his father in the eyes of the peasants and workers on their farm; in later stories that reveal ambivalence about his relationship to Lenin; in several situations in which he duels with opponents in contexts that virtually guarantee his defeat or death; and in his descriptions of other revolutionaries, in which one sees debilitating self-doubt beneath the grandiose self-image.

Page 16

Trotsky’s most revealing statements about himself in his years in exile are embedded in comparisons with Lenin and Martov in which he portrayed Lenin as a decisive and effective leader and Martov as Hamletic anti-hero. Naturally, Trotsky promoted himself as rightful heir to Lenin’s position of leadership after the latter’s death in 1924. At a conscious level, he knew that his Menshevik past and his earlier criticisms of Lenin had put him in bad odor with the old Bolsheviks and he did everything possible to show that he had become a super-Bolshevik, a fighting man rather than one of those effeminate and indecisive intelligentsia types one found in abundance in the Menshevik camp. In the end, of course, he failed, at least partly because the old Bolsheviks trusted their fate to a man of few words, a Georgian who had spent little time in emigration and whose skills as a fighter and schemer they fully appreciated. The role of ethnic stereotypes as well as personal histories surely played more than a small role in a struggle in which the émigré Jews lost to the old Bolshevik underground committeemen.

The burden of being Jewish in the Russian Empire had a more profound impact on Trotsky than he felt comfortable writing about. He dealt with the negative stereotypes of Jews “scientifically,” but his acceptance of Marx’s characterization of Jews in “The Jewish Question” may have served Trotsky’s unconscious self-hatred as well as a conscious “objective” revolutionary orientation. Marxism allowed Jews to become something else, to shed their negative identity at a conscious level, but it did not erase the negative identity elements they had internalized: effeminacy, cowardice, avarice, and so on. Trotsky’s behavior suggests reaction formations and overcompensation. He rejected the bourgeois career his parents laid out. Despite his outstanding performance as a student, he dropped out of school and joined the bohemian world of adolescent revolutionaries. Later writings suggest that he experienced his life as a series of catastrophic changes—and no doubt designed it along those lines. (Philip Pomper and Yuri Felshtinsky, eds., Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933-1935 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986]). Trotsky’s version of dialectics emphasized catastrophic change—the “law” of the transformation of quantity into quality— and made a virtue of it, as one might expect of a Marxian revolutionary. The theoretical position affirmed his life choices. Like history itself, Trotsky’s life showed continuous development punctuated by revolutionary breaks that furthered rather than disrupted the process.

At each step, Trotsky shed earlier weaknesses described in his autobiography—and also his Jewishness. The inept and weepy little boy who was a misfit on his father’s farm grew into the intrepid man who rode into battle on a horse and saved Petrograd from the White onslaught in October 1919. Moreover, in the process of successfully defending the city, Trotsky humiliated its party boss, Zinov’ev—like him, a Jew, but also a coward and hysteric—who failed to defend the city. Trotsky, not unlike the biblical Joseph, played the role of the favored child who provoked the jealousy of his brothers. Trotsky had become a Bolshevik only quite late compared to the party oligarchs who had been Lenin’s lieutenants long before 1917. Jewish Bolsheviks like Zinov’ev and Kamenev (the latter Trotsky’s brother-in-law) fought against Trotsky’s ascendancy in the party. On his side, Trotsky seemed intent on humiliating his opponents and in his historical writings dismissed them as “epigones” rather than worthy successors of Lenin. Oddly enough, Lenin, too, had Jewish ancestors on his mother’s side. Although Lenin probably knew this by 1917 he never publicized it. Those who knew about Lenin’s Jewish grandfather on his mother’s side evidently agreed to suppress the information. It is impossible to know when Lenin himself found out about his Jewish ancestry. When Lenin’s older sister Anna Ul’ianova-Elizarova implored Stalin to fight growing anti-Semitism in 1932 by revealing that Lenin had a Jewish grandfather, Stalin forbade any mention of it.

Trotsky played the Jewish card in his own career when it suited him, but he claimed that he did it for political considerations—that he had absorbed “internationalism into my very flesh and blood.” For example, in My Life he wrote that Lenin had offered him the Commissariat of the Interior, a role that would have made him the head of state security. Trotsky refused the position on the grounds that it would not be good for a Jew to head internal affairs (My Life, pp. 340-41). Yet Jews played prominent roles in the Cheka, and Yakov Sverdlov, the first Chair of the Supreme Soviet, in effect the head of state, was a Jew. The party bosses of Leningrad and Moscow were Jews. Lenin flaunted Russian prejudices by giving Jews, Poles, Georgians, and other oppressed and despised minority nationalities promi-

Page 17

nent roles in the party and state. It is not fully clear why Trotsky turned down the Commissariat of the Interior and what role he preferred to play. In My Life he claimed that he had wanted to continue to play a role in the press rather than in politics. The role that made him internationally famous, that of Commissar of War, surely was even more of a lightning rod for anti-Semitism and, of course, the Whites made full use of caricatures of Trotsky that exaggerated his “Jewish” features.

The rapid entry of Jews into prominent roles in public life (all helping to provoke the virulent anti-Semitism of the early twentieth century) gave plenty of models to aspiring Jewish heroes. In the revolutionary movement Trotsky served with Jewish fighters, some of whom were his closest collaborators. Trotsky’s writings suggest that he identified with strong Jews like Marx (whose family had converted to Lutheranism) and Lassalle. Nonetheless, Trotsky retained the psychic wounds inflicted during a Jewish childhood. His struggle against the stereotype of Jews as effeminate and cowardly led to overcompensations that, on the one hand, served him well in the arenas of conflict in which he played the role of leader and, on the other, needlessly put him in harm’s way. Trotsky’s ambivalent attitude toward Jews, and thus toward his self-identity, strongly affected his relationship to Lenin.

Ambivalence toward Lenin shows, for example, in an odd passage in My Life where Trotsky tried to show that Whites in the Civil War failed in their attempts to spread anti-Semitism:

A Cossack who came to see us was hurt by someone’s taunt that he not only served under, but actually fought under the command of a Jew—Trotsky—and retorted with warm conviction: “Nothing of the sort. Trotsky is not a Jew. Trotsky is a fighter. He’s ours . . . Russian! . . . It is Lenin who is a communist, a Jew, but Trotsky is ours . . . a fighter . . . Russian . . . our own! (Trotsky, My Life, pp. 360-361).

The Cossack’s remark is anti-Semitic and it seems odd that Trotsky doesn’t see it as such. Moreover, the passage is patently self-serving and contrasts Trotsky with Lenin, to the former’s advantage.

Trotsky’s many fights with Lenin had undoubtedly left him embittered. Like the other Bolsheviks whom Lenin had humiliated and defeated in intra-party strife, Trotsky had many reasons to resent him. But Trotsky’s position in the party depended on Lenin’s sponsorship. Only the “we’re all in the same lifeboat” mentality of the Party oligarch’s after Lenin’s death and their fears of instability kept them from taking drastic measures against a prominent figure like Trotsky. They not only had to suppress their true feelings, but to exalt Lenin’s image and claim their heirship to the Leninist legacy. Trotsky’s late entry into the party and his well-known contempt for the top figures made him a perfect target for the resentment of the party oligarchs. Moreover, during 1922-1923, while suffering from the effects of strokes, Lenin used Trotsky to conduct politics from his sickbed and composed his “Testament.” The other members of the Politburo expressed their feelings about Lenin privately and it seems odd that Trotsky should put into a letter (when asked for it) “a winged phrase” attributed to Stalin: “Lenin has shit on himself and shit on us” (Trotsky to Max Eastman, June 7, 1933, Trotsky Mss., Lilly Library). The “winged phrase” had, as the term implies, circulated widely and it probably expressed their truest feelings not only about Lenin’s candid assessment of them in his “Testament” but of Lenin’s treatment of them on many other occasions. After Lenin’s permanent incapacitation in March, 1923 (he died in January, 1924) the party oligarchs seized the opportunities Trotsky gave them to expel him from the party and then exile him. Moreover, they used material from his disagreements with Lenin and dredged up an extremely vivid letter of 1913 expressing Trotsky’s true feelings about Lenin.

Trotsky felt superior to the others, yet ambivalent both about Lenin and playing Lenin’s role. Despite his own claim to heirship, in My Life alongside unambiguous expressions of identification with Lenin he expresses doubts about stepping into Lenin’s shoes. Trotsky gives a number of clues to his discomfort about aspiring to leadership. He imbeds them in stories of betrayal by his inferiors and in the early years by resentful classmates who envy his achievement. After describing one such betrayal he commented:

These were the groups that resulted from the episode: the talebearers and the envious at one pole, the frank, courageous boys at the other, and the neutral vacillating mass in the middle. These three groups never quite disappeared even during the years that followed. I met them again and again in my life, in the most varied circumstances (Trotsky, My Life, p. 72).

This and other obvious efforts to find the fu-

Page 18

ture in the past suggest that Trotsky is doomed to be a political failure, that his efforts to unite a group and to lead them will fail. Elsewhere he provides clues that he himself is a misfit. He tells the story of a night at the Opéra Comique in Paris in the fall of 1902. Trotsky needed a pair of shoes for the outing and Lenin lent him a pair of his own that fit him ill, but that seemed to fit Trotsky “perfectly.” All went well on the trip to the opera, but the shoes began to give him great pain during the performance and produced “agonies” on the way home. The symbolic meaning of this will be all the clearer below (Trotsky, My Life, p. 149). Alongside the effort to identify himself with Lenin he suggests in the story that he shouldn’t have tried to step into Lenin’s shoes (perhaps the party—the shoes—served both of them ill). The same notion appears in somewhat different form in his account of the “accident” during a hunting trip that laid him up in October 1923.

There was a light frost that night. I sat in the tent in felt boots. But in the morning the sun was warm and the bog thawed . . . From the canoe to the automobile I had to walk about a hundred steps, not more. But the moment I stepped onto the bog in my felt boots my feet were in cold water. By the time I leaped up to the automobile, my feet were quite cold . . . I took off my boots and tried to warm my feet by the heat of the motor. But the cold got the better of me. I had to stay in bed. After the influenza, some cryptogenic fever set in. The doctors ordered me to stay in bed, and thus I spent the rest of the autumn and winter. This means that through all the discussion of “Trotskyism” in 1923, I was ill. One can foresee a revolution or war, but it is impossible to foresee the consequences of an autumn shooting-trip for wild duck. . . Lenin was laid up at Gorkii; I was in the Kremlin. The epigones were widening the circle of conspiracy (Trotsky, My Life, p. 498).

This resembles another incident of May, 1922 recounted in the autobiography. In this version, Trotsky slips and injures ligaments in one of his feet while on a fishing trip. During his convalescence he learns that Lenin had a paralytic stroke on the same day as his own accident. This is unlikely because Trotsky’s trip was in early May, Lenin’s stroke on May 25 (Trotsky, My Life, p. 470).

Both he and Lenin here are victims, but Trotsky is a victim of fate and of a mysterious illness. The undiagnosed illness (very likely psychosomatic) came at a time when he had to face political conflict and to make a play for the position of leadership that Lenin had vacated. In his campaign against the oligarchs, Trotsky called for a leader like Lenin and made it perfectly clear that he alone fit that description. None of them, however, wanted another Lenin, much less the despised Trotsky. Indeed, Trotsky betrayed Lenin by not fulfilling all of Lenin’s last political commissions. On January 18, 1924, Trotsky left Moscow for Sukhumi on the Black Sea to recuperate from his mysterious illness and, no doubt, to avoid the opening of the Thirteenth Party Congress. Lenin died three days later.

Despite the fact that he received a telegram in Tbilisi on January 21, 1924 informing him of the death and the date of the funeral, Trotsky did not rush back to Moscow to attend the funeral. This verged on political suicide. When he did go back he politically martyred himself at the Thirteenth Congress. Trotsky elevates “accident” in his narrative to evolutionary laws and in the so doing alters the impact of individual agency, of his personal failure. His is the typical, though completely unconvincing rationalization of a mind trained to translate the personal psychologically driven event into the world historical process:

I am not dealing here with the philosophy of history, but recounting my life against the background of the events with which it was bound up. But I cannot help noting how obligingly the accidental helps the historical law. Broadly speaking, the entire historical process is a refraction of the historical law through the accidental. In the language of biology, one might say that the historical law is realized through the natural selection of accidents. On this foundation, there develops that conscious human activity which subjects accidents to a process of artificial selection (Trotsky, My Life, pp. 494-495).

In fact, the Lenin-Trotsky alliance was temporary and fragile. All of the vignettes that Trotsky deploys to convince readers of his solidarity with Lenin carry little conviction. No one put much stock in Lenin’s last maneuvers and his sickbed alliance with Trotsky. He had gone head-to-head with Trotsky in 1920-1921 in the ferocious debate over Trade Unions—their relationship remained strained. Trotsky quickly passes over their intense struggle in his autobiography and emphasizes their reconciliation.

In 1921-1922, Lenin’s maneuvers during these years brought Stalin to the fore, although no one suspected that the latter had big ambitions. Then Lenin’s illness led Lenin to seek an alliance with Trotsky in late 1922 and early 1923 against the Politburo dominated by Zinov’ev, Kamenev, and Stalin.

Page 19

Trotsky found himself in an awkward position. Should he use Lenin’s last irrational political thrashings against the “trio” or try to smooth the way for reconciliation with them after Lenin’s death? In fact, he did both, but ineffectively. The unconscious ambivalence and the conscious double bind no doubt contributed to the “accidental” illness that the oligarchs then subjected to “artificial selection.” Trotsky later rationalized that if he had acted too vigorously on Lenin’s behalf they would have believed he “was casting dice for Lenin’s chasuble.” At the Thirteenth Party Congress, Trotsky tried to act like the good party man by accepting party discipline, but he had further alienated the party oligarchs by his campaign to succeed Lenin. After arrogance, he showed both weakness and hypocrisy. Trotsky was politically dead by 1924. The rest was a political postscript.

Trotsky’s avowal that Lenin had made him his political heir rings false. But did Trotsky believe it? It seems likely that Trotsky practiced a great deal of denial as well as rationalization to explain his downfall to himself. He planned to write a biography of Lenin and to display their partnership insofar as was possible. But he did not get very far with the biography—only up to 1893, in fact. He did write about Lenin’s role in the revolutions and Civil War in other works and emphasized whenever he could his closeness to Lenin, yet sometimes allows the reader to infer his superiority to Lenin. In several remarkable passages about 1905 and 1917, Trotsky showed his most grandiose self at the peak moments in his life. Such was October 1905 when Trotsky proved to himself that he had overcome his adolescent indecisiveness and had become a heroic man of action:

In October [1905], I plunged headlong into the gigantic whirlpool, which in a personal sense, was the greatest test for my powers. Decisions had to be made under fire. I can’t help noting here that those decisions came to me quite obviously. I did not turn back to see what others might say, and I very seldom had opportunity to consult anybody; everything had to be done in such a hurry. Later I observed with astonishment and a sense of estrangement how every event caught the cleverest of the Mensheviks, Martov, unawares and threw him into confusion. Without thinking about it—there was little time left for self-examination—I organically felt that my years of apprenticeship were over, although not in the sense that I stopped learning (Trotsky, My Life, p. 184).

Here one notes that he puts Martov in the role of counter-player. If Lenin represents the very things that Trotsky believes about himself and affirms, then Martov represents the very things about himself that he would like to repudiate. Trotsky explained his “organic” ability to lead, to make decisions under fire, by an innate intuitive capacity that worked at a subconscious level. A gift rather than acquired trait, it gave leaders their capacity to orient themselves quickly, something that no amount of practical experience or theoretical background could provide (Trotsky, My Life, p. 185).

Similarly, the passages about 1917 in which Trotsky portrays Martov reinforce the impression that he is using Martov to exorcise his own youthful weakness and to assert his own fitness to lead. Throughout his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky makes it quite clear that October would not have occurred without his and Lenin’s leadership, an odd position for a Marxian dialectician, but explicated in a passage in My Life. The following highly un-Marxist psychobiological passages strikingly illuminates Trotsky’s efforts to define the relationship of leader and led at critical moments of the revolutionary process:

The creative union of consciousness with the unconscious is what we usually call inspiration. Revolution is the violent inspiration of history. Every real writer knows moments of creativity when someone else, stronger than he, speaks through his lips. This is “inspiration.” It issues from the greatest creative tension of all one’s powers. The unconscious climbs up from its deep lair and subjects the conscious effort of thought to itself, merging with it in some kind of higher unity. The latent powers of the organism, its deepest instincts, its flair, inherited from animal ancestors, all of this rose up, smashed down the doors of psychic routine and—together with the highest historico-philosophical generalizations—stood in the service of the revolution. Both of these processes, individual and mass, were based on the combination of consciousness with the unconscious, of instinct, the mainspring of will, with the highest forms of generalizing thought (Author’s modified translation of material in My Life from Moia zhizn’ [Berlin, 1930] Vol.2, p. 56).

Trotsky merges Marx with Freud and Darwin. He never fully articulated this theoretical departure but even in its sketchiness it nicely rationalized his positive identity. It made the unconscious mind a reservoir of strength rather than of neurosis and in some ways anticipates Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. The impression is strengthened in still another striking passage about his performances in 1917:

Page 20

I usually spoke in the Circus [Cirque Moderne in Petrograd] in the evening, sometimes quite late at night. My audience was composed of workers, soldiers, hard-working mothers, street urchins—the oppressed under-dogs of the capital. Every square inch was filled, every human body compressed to its limit. Young boys sat on their fathers’ shoulders; infants were at their mothers’ breasts. No one smoked. The balconies threatened to fall under the excessive weight of human bodies. I made my way to the platform through a narrow trench of bodies, sometimes borne on peoples’ hands. The air, tense with breathing, exploded with shouts, with the peculiar passionate cries of the Cirque Moderne. Around and above me were densely compressed elbows, chests, heads. I spoke as if out of a warm cavern of human bodies. Whenever I made a sweeping gesture, I always brushed someone, and a grateful movement in response would let me understand that I should not worry, should not break off, but should continue. No kind of fatigue could resist the electric tension of this passionate human throng. At times it seems as though you felt with your lips the insistent searching of this crowd that had fused into a whole. It wanted to know, to understand, to find its way. Then all the arguments and words outlined beforehand gave way, receded before the imperative pressure of sympathy, and from a secret place there came forth fully prepared other words, other arguments, unexpected by the orator but needed by the mass. And then it seemed as if you were listening to the orator yourself, just a little bit off to the side, trailing behind his thought and being anxious about only one thing, that he, like a somnambulist, might lurch from the edge of the roof from the sound of your reasoning. (Author’s modified translation of material in My Life from Moia zhizn’, Vol. 2, pp. 5-16).

The distinctly erotic imagery suggests several kinds of love, with Trotsky’s ego finding harmony with his own id through the inspiration of fusion with the revolutionary mass—a kind of collective id. Trotsky finds a Marxian formula for this in the previous passage quoted above. I’ve consulted a manuscript version of the above passage in Moia zhizn’ preserved in the Houghton Library. Trotsky had originally written “you physically felt in your entire body” but replaced it with “you felt on your lips the physical pressure” before he settled on “you felt with your lips the insistent searching….” He seems to have started with a phallic image—Trotsky himself making love to the crowd—and transmuted it into a maternal image, in that he goes on to compare the crowd to infants sucking at the breast of the revolution. “The whole crowd was like that, like infants clinging with their dry lips to the nipples of the revolution” (See the Trotsky Archives, T3264 [2 of 6, p. 15], Houghton Library). To what extent this is a striving for effect or authentic psychoanalytic insight and self-revelation is difficult to determine.

This exalted eroticism, however, had an aggressive component, as is suggested by the references to violence and force in the previous passage and another contrasting Trotsky and Martov in the History of the Russian Revolution. “The Hamlet of democratic socialism, Martov would make a step forward then the revolution fall back as in July; but now when the revolution was ready for a lion’s leap Martov would fall back” (Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 3 vols. [Ann Arbor, Michigan:1932], pp. 311-312). Max Eastman mistranslated lion’s leap as “tiger’s leap.” The word for lion in Russian is “lev,” and that is, of course, Trotsky’s name. Eastman’s translation therefore misses the point.

Trotsky sometimes simply referred to will as the driving force for thought, and he found in the Mensheviks and the intelligentsia in general a deficiency of will power that rendered them impotent as revolutionaries. He found other qualities as well: “pliancy, receptivity, sensitivity, feminine features of the psyche” which “trimmed away the physical power of thought.” Remarks about Martov in Trotsky’s notebooks strengthen the impression. “Martov’s delicate fragile thought halted, powerless in the face of major events. . . . Martov’s intellect, psychology [was] feminine” (Trotsky’s Notebooks, p. 83).

A constellation of images—softness, femininity, lack of potency, indecisiveness, small scale activity forms around Martov and the Mensheviks. Whenever he compares Martov to Lenin in the notebooks one knows that he is talking about himself in the guise of Lenin. For example, “Martov’s thought was the thought of a watchmaker in politics. Lenin’s though worked on the scale of [the giant] Dneprostroi” [hydroelectric plant championed by Trotsky] (Trotsky’s Notebooks, p. 95). The image of the watchmaker not only signifies small-scale activity, but petty-bourgeois character—and Jewishness. In another essay Trotsky compared another Menshevik, Pavel Aksel’rod, to Lenin and uses similar imagery. He calls Aksel’rod “a homeopath of pre-revolutionary politics” and in the same essay compares Aksel’rod to Spinoza, a man whose work as a lens grinder required similarly fine measurements. It was

Page 21

probably no accident that Trotsky thought of Spinoza, who was also Jewish. (Trotsky’s Notebooks, p. 81).

Trotsky sprinkles his attacks on Mensheviks and Menshevism with references to petty shopkeepers, to hucksters and misers, at one point to Sancho Panza, whose vulgarity tinged with romanticism called to mind a certain kind of petty-bourgeois mentality (Philip Pomper, “Trotsky and Martov,” in Terry Brotherstone and Paul Dukes, eds., The Trotsky Reappraisal [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992], p. 170).

 The Childhood Origins of Trotsky’s
Ambivalence and Martyrdom

Trotsky provides us with enough material about his childhood in My Life to infer the weaknesses that produced both the inner conflict and the defense mechanisms that, together with Trotsky’s innate gifts, produced the historical figure. He described his adolescent indecisiveness, his absence of will power, his self-doubt, and a fainting spell in the spring of 1896 when he struggled with his father’s efforts to force him to become an engineer, to his first biographer, Max Eastman (Max Eastman, Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth [New York: Greenberg, 1925], pp. 32, 54). In another work, Eastman, an admirer of Freud, describes Trotsky’s insecurity (“he was almost hysterical”) when challenged. In the published version of their conservations in July, 1932, Eastman wrote: “Like many great men I have met he does not seem altogether robust. There is apt to be a frailty associated with great intellect” (Max Eastman, Einstein, Trotsky, Hemingway, Freud, and Other Great Companions [New York: Collier, 1962], p. 113). In unpublished notes taken shortly after these conversations he wrote instead of “robust,” “strong, not altogether masculine.” Eastman also wrote, “I wonder about Lenin” (The manuscript is preserved in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Trotsky Collection, “Two impressions after living three days in Trotsky’s house,” July 10, 1932, pp. 1-2). Eastman astutely sensed the overcompensations underlying the “hardness” of the Bolshevik leadership.

Despite moments of self-affirmation, Trotsky’s ambivalence toward Lenin and self-doubt about his fitness as a leader remained. Why, for example, did Trotsky put himself in harm’s way if he believed in his central importance for the fate of the revolution? In 1905, he got himself arrested and subject to the tender mercies of the Tsarist regime. He did the same in July, 1917, this time after asserting his new commitment to Bolshevism at a time when the Provisional Government had put out a warrant for Lenin’s arrest. Lenin, on the other hand, fled and hid in Finland. In fact, it was Lenin who had the supreme confidence that only he could lead the revolution and he consistently treated himself as a precious commodity. Trotsky seemed to be playing out a scenario in which the tragic hero appears before the revolutionary crowd, makes a glorious speech, and then dies in a duel with a more powerful adversary. Did he want to imitate his models, Danton and Lassalle, two of the most theatrical figures in revolutionary history? On the one hand, he asserted his fitness to lead and on the other acted as if he had to die at the hands of an adversary less worthy than he. But Trotsky all the while set the stage so that his accusations against his adversary could reach a huge audience.

The source of Trotsky’s well known staginess is suggested in his autobiography, where he told of a bright moment in his “grayish childhood of a lower-middle-class family,” a visit by a group of mummers to the farm during Christmas week, 1886. Trotsky had turned seven in October. The early pages of the autobiography provide several stories of the boy’s ineptitude in a rural environment—misadventures with horses, his inability to work the drag on a mechanical thresher and an accident with it in which the boy’s finger is crushed. Trotsky recounts failures, minor transgressions, and his inability to measure up to his father’s masterful performances on the farm. His first experiments with independent writing—an area in which he bested his father—involved scribbling the obscenities he’d heard from farm workers and mechanics. His older sister revealed his sin to their parents—and he suffered the consequences. The mummers’ performance and rhymed speeches opened the boy’s eyes to the possibilities of language as performance: “For the first time a fantastic world was revealed to me, a world transformed into a theatrical reality” (Trotsky, My Life, p. 40). The world of fantasy immediately drew him in, but his father prevented him from copying down one of the play’s monologues dictated by one of the mummers. Later, however, his parents showed pride in his childhood experiments with verse and forced him to perform for friends and relatives. Eventually, he far outdistanced his barely literate father and kept the farm’s accounts for him. In short, the stories reveal that his father

Page 22

tried to exploit the child’s talent for the family’s narrow and mean bourgeois purposes. The boy, however, was drawn first to a theatrical world and then to the world of revolution that allowed him to combine both writing and theatre. Yet Trotsky still felt that he had to justify himself to his parents. His story of his trial after the revolution of 1905 is quite revealing in this respect.

In December, 1905, Trotsky did not avoid arrest but counseled non-resistance to the members of the St. Petersburg Soviet who carried arms. After a long incarceration he was tried in September, 1906. The reformed Russian judiciary permitted the defendants to exploit the situation and to accuse their accusers. Trotsky, a youth of 26 with a wavy mass of black hair standing out like a lion’s mane, dressed impeccably in a frock coat, high starched collar, and bow tie, might have been a theatrical lawyer or spiffy young professor, the impression strengthened by his pince-nez. His parents attended the trial and he performed so well on this stage that he made revolution seem respectable to them. The trial gave him the opportunity to justify himself to his parents as well as to defend the revolution. He had proved himself as a man. Perhaps now he felt that he had a charmed life.

It was now impossible to explain away my conduct as a boy’s foolishness, as they had in my Nikolaev days . . . I was an editor of newspapers, the chairman of the Soviet, and I had a name as a writer. The old couple were impressed by all this. . . . My mother was sure that I would not only be acquitted, but even given some mark of distinction. I tried to persuade her to prepare for a sentence of hard labor (Trotsky, My Life, pp. 190-191).

Although the need to justify himself to his parents is quite out in the open in this passage, Trotsky’s autobiography offers other clues to the importance of costume in his psychic makeup. His account of another childhood trauma suggests a complicated constellation of feelings around exhibitionism.

The nine-year-old Trotsky set out for his first day of school in Odessa all splendid in the regalia of St Paul’s realschule when a boy of the streets, “Stopped, looked me up and down, hawked deeply and spat on my sleeve. It was as if a lightning bolt had struck from a clear sky and reduced me to ashes” reports Trotsky, who goes onto write, “It seemed especially unfathomable, that he could spit on this wonderful new uniform, which signified a profound change in my life.” (Trotsky, My Life, p. 47 and translated from a manuscript version as well. See Trotsky Mss., “Otvet na voprosy t. Istmena,” 26 Feb. 1923, Lilly Library).

Things got worse. When he arrived in St. Paul’s schoolyard the school monitor stripped him of his regalia—braid, buckle, buttons and all. Trotsky was only a preparatory student—so an impostor. Later in his career he faced similar charges at the hands of the Bolsheviks—he was a windbag, a “hero with fake muscles,” a betrayer of Lenin, a Menshevik in disguise, an enemy of the people. Although at a conscious level he fought such accusations, a sense of being an impostor seemed to haunt him and probably produced overcompensations—extreme behaviors to demonstrate that he was indeed the person he claimed to be. Trotsky’s late commitment to Bolshevism and the old Bolsheviks’ suspicions that beneath his radical exterior there lurked a “soft” Menshevik no doubt fed his already existing tendency to overcompensate. He had to be the very best, the hardest Bolshevik of all.

On the one hand, he was anxious, lest his achievements not be recognized and felt compelled to exhibit them. On the other, he feared that he would be punished for exhibiting his superiority. On the other, he feared that he would be punished for exhibiting his superiority. In a near repetition of the story about the humiliation for wearing the splendid school uniform, Trotsky wrote about another incident involving a uniform and a kind of imposture: “In a freshly laundered duck suit, with a leather belt that had a brass buckle, and a white cap with a glittering yellow badge, I felt that I was simply magnificent. And I had to show everybody. Together with my father, I drove into the field on a day when the harvesting of winter wheat was at its peak.” Trotsky then described his humiliation when he tried to wield a scythe alongside the peasants and was told by the head mower: “You’d better learn from your father.” To complete the humiliation another peasant said: “Go and eat cakes with your mother” (Trotsky, My Life, pp. 80-81).

The theatres of self-justification that Trotsky created to allay his self-doubt also put him in harm’s way, but as he moved farther into the realm of historical action his conduct of revolutionary theatre had increasingly serious consequences. Typically, he entered into a duel with a superior opponent, but tried to seize the moral high ground and to exhibit the justice of his position in a court of public opinion. Trot-

Page 23

sky’s last appearance in a court of public opinion occurred in Mexico during 1937 under the auspices of the Dewey Commission. Here he exposed Stalin’s lies and vindicated himself; it was Stalin, not he, who had betrayed the revolution. The risks of revolution were high and Trotsky accepted the possibility of defeat or death. He knew well the French saying that revolutionaries had a pact not with victory but with death. One might read Trotsky’s behavior during the crisis surrounding the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in this light.

In February-March, 1918 as Commissar of Foreign affairs, Trotsky had to negotiate a treaty with the Germans and Austrians, whose military superiority required a realistic approach that Lenin grasped immediately. Trotsky and a majority of the party leadership wanted to sustain the momentum of the revolution, but the complex struggle in the Party forced Trotsky into a vicious compromise reminiscent of 1905. Offering the invaders neither war nor peace, Trotsky opened the way for uncontested occupation of Soviet territory. He seemed to believe that the justice of the revolutionary cause and the spectacle of a helpless opponent struggling to create socialism bullied and threatened by a brutal imperialist-capitalist regime would rouse the international proletariat. In the end, the German advance forced him to yield to Lenin’s more realistic policy. Had Trotsky and other left-wing Bolsheviks played out this scenario or seriously tried to export revolution to the West, world history would no doubt have been seriously changed. Lenin, however, consolidated Bolshevik power, “saved” the revolution, and shrewdly used Trotsky’s gifts without losing sight of Trotsky’s tendency to take things too far and in doing so to jeopardize the Bolshevik hold on power.

Lenin forced his colleagues to compromise, retreat, adapt, and survive in power, but to prepare for the next attack. Trotsky and other self-destructive members of the left wing of the party had not prepared for that scripting of their lives. In his “Testament” of December 24, 1922, in which he damned all of the leading contenders for power in the Party with faint praise and points out their weaknesses, Lenin peevishly brought up Trotsky’s non-Bolshevik past in a back-handed way:

I shall not give any further appraisals of the personal qualities of other members of the C.C. [Central Committee]. I shall just recall that the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non-Bolshevism can upon Trotsky (Robert Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology, [New York: W.W. Norton, 1975], p. 727).

Like a disapproving father or teacher, Lenin had a way of making them feel that they simply didn’t measure up. Not only Trotsky, but also all of the top leaders, probably felt some sort of ambivalence toward Lenin. After Lenin’s death, for good political reasons they felt compelled to create a cult of Lenin, but their personal ambivalence toward him showed in different ways. Stalin, of course, established his own cult alongside Lenin’s. Trotsky maintained the image of Lenin as leader in his writings, but when he wrote his own brief political testament a few months before he was murdered in 1940, he mentioned the articles of his “faith.” It reads: “I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today than it was in the days of my youth…. This faith in man and his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion” (Leon Trotsky, Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935, Trans. E. Zarudnaia [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976], pp. 166, 167). Note that Lenin and Leninism are conspicuously absent. Feelings, however repressed or disguised, do find a way to be expressed.

There are several exceptions to this general lack of psychohistorical interest. E. Victor Wolfenstein, The Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi which is quite perceptive, although the author did not have access to Russian sources (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). One should also mention the work of Steven Englund and Larry Ceplair, “Un essai de psycho-histoire: portrait d’un jeune révolutionnaire, Léon Trotsky” Revue D’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 24 [October-December, 1977), pp. 524-542.] and Ralph Colp, “Trotsky’s Dream of Lenin,” Clio’s Psyche 5 #2 [September, 1998], pp. 50-54).

Page 24