Stalin’s Nemesis

Title: Stalin’s Nemesis – The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky

Author: Bertrand M Patenaude

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2009 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-571-22875-1

Pages: 273

Vladimir Ilych Lenin and Lev Davidovich Trotsky led the October Revolution in 1917 to establish the first socialist state on to the feudal political landscape of Russia. The two men fought together in the civil war which ensued and by 1919, the fledgling workers’ empire was strong enough to walk on its own. It proved to be an example worth imitating for the numerous labour movements in other parts of the world and a process of exporting revolution piecemeal began in right earnest. Soviet Union provided the theoretical, moral, political and financial backbone of other revolutionary parties and bankrolled them. However, everything was not right at the heart of revolution. Lenin’s health was deteriorating and struggle for succession began among the remaining top leadership. Stalin, a one-time seminary student who turned man of steel crushed all opposition to his leadership and stepped to the throne as a dictator. His opponents, Trotsky being the prominent among them, were devastated and framed under false charges. Stalin’s vindictiveness was exhibited on nobody more cruelly than Trotsky. He was exiled and assassinated, and all of his family members were also hunted down and shot. The gruesome story of a hunted man banished to a foreign land is narrated in the book written by Bertrand M Patenaude who is a lecturer at Stanford University and the author of several books on Russian and Soviet history.

Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879 in Ukraine. He was the intellectual figurehead of the party due to his fine oratory and fiery speeches which coaxed the masses to rise in revolt. Fighting against all slander due to his Jewish origins, Trotsky was indispensable to Lenin, though he joined the party only in 1917 – the year of the revolution. After the revolution installed Lenin’s government in Moscow, Russia plunged into a civil war between Bolsheviks, the rulers and White Guards. Trotsky became the War Commissar and travelled everywhere the war raged in a train which housed his offices, accommodation, weapons, soldiers and a printing press. He energised the revolutionaries and was merciless against deserters. His draconian measures included holding one’s relatives responsible for his good conduct – a measure to which Trotsky himself would fall victim later. He was imprisoned in 1926 and sent to Kazakhstan. Stalin was itching for more severe reprisals which led to Trotsky’s deportation to Turkey in 1929. He was never to return to the USSR.

Trotsky organized his supporters in prominent European capitals and carried out propaganda against the dictatorial regime of Stalin. He termed it dictatorship over the proletariat in a mocking paraphrase of the credo of Communism, dictatorship of the proletariat. GPU, Stalin’s secret service was behind the exiled old man who found it wise to relocate himself to Paris. Security concerns drove him to Norway. However, he found the country too vulnerable to Russian intimidation. When the trial of Trotsky’s onetime confidantes began in Moscow in August 1936 on trumped up charges, he was even put under house arrest as per Stalin’s instructions. Trotsky sought asylum in Mexico where influential painter Diego Rivera intervened on his behalf and asylum was granted. He reached Mexico in January 1937.

The author paints the true picture of an exiled revolutionary marshalling his allies and catering to the theoretical mess created by Trotskyism’s split from mainline Communist ideology. He refused to lend weight to the idea that Stalinist regime has lost its legitimacy as a representative of the proletariat. He was extremely reluctant to sling mud on the system he himself had fought hard to install over the unwilling majority. The Mexican communists, who were dancing to the tunes composed in Moscow protested, often violently, against providing a haven for Trotsky. Dark clouds of World War II was looming over the horizon of Europe. Hitler made a non-aggression pact with Stalin and invaded Poland. The Nazi-Communist coalition quickly subjugated Poland in 1939. Stalin also annexed Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and invaded Finland. The sudden friendship with Nazis made the Mexican communists change the language of ridicule they used against Trotsky. Instead of accusing him as an agent of Gestapo, Hitler’s secret police, they now charged him in the payroll of American imperialists. Trotsky’s steadfast allegiance to communist ideals are expressed in his reaction to Russian annexation of Eastern European countries. Even though directed by Stalin, he hailed the overpowering of Poland and its neighbours as a victory for socialist revolution and urged the Russians to secure the means of production from private hands in these states.

NKVD, Stalin’s newly constituted secret service was leaving no stone unturned in infiltrating Trotsky’s Mexican household. Several operatives tried and at last, a Belgian agent managed to sneek in and hit Trotsky fatally on the head. He died two days later in a hospital on August 21, 1940. Trotsky’s legacy lived till the world war ended, but thereafter, the party he established exploded into numerous insignificant splinter groups. Khrushchev made life easier for his allies living in USSR, after Stalin’s death. Then Gorbachev came and presided over the dismantling of the failed workers’ empire in 1991. Even Gorbachev, who rehabilitated Bolsheviks hunted and killed by Stalin termed Trotsky as irrelevant and as marked by Lenin as ambitious. Trotsky’s assassin served twenty years in Mexican prison and was released in 1960. He was secretly awarded an ‘Order of Lenin’ in Moscow for carrying out the ‘special task’ wonderfully. The house in which Trotsky lived in Mexico is now a museum.

The author presents delightful insight into the nature and style of Trotsky that differed from established principles earmarked for socialist leaders. The single most objectionable principle of Communist regimes is its insistence that arts and literature should serve as another front of the revolution. Individualism and mysticism as expressed in literature are anathema to them. All totalitarian regimes used arts and literature as instruments of state education and propaganda. Patenaude lucidly portrays Trotsky’s opposition to such servility who always maintained that art must make its own way and by its own means and that the domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. The author’s unique style of occasionally going back to Trotsky’s revolutionary past in USSR in response to his remininscences and utterances to his companions provide the only interest in the long narrative.

The book has miserably failed to describe the reign of terror and suppression which raged Stalinist Russia in full. Instead of stressing on the finer points of departure between Trotsky and Stalin, Patenaude is more interested in titillating the readers with Trotsky’s affairs with his benefactor’s wife in Mexico and boring them with unnecessary details of his residences and of his correspondence. The book falls to pitiable depths when all the author could illustrate about Trotsky’s exiled life is about the menu for his lunch and how it seemed bland to the supporting crew. Unnecessary reproduction of the contents of the letter written by Trotsky to his estranged wife after formally ending one of his affairs makes the book stoop to the level of voyeurism. His description of their intimate moments together given in page 62 is nothing but pornography. It is really terrible that the author has chosen to produce the contents verbatim!

The book is reluctantly recommended.

Rating: 2 Star