Has anyone nowadays heard of Isaac Deutscher? He was a Polish (Jewish) Communist who, in the later 1930s, had the prudence to go not to the Soviet Union, where he would no doubt have been liquidated along with the rest of the Polish Communist Party, but to England. There, he was looked after by David Astor, the great editor of The Observer, and wrote sympathetically about communism. He was not a Stalinist and instead advertised himself as a Trotskyist of sorts. Lev Trotsky had, of course, been Stalin’s great rival who lost the battle for Lenin’s succession, was expelled from the Party in 1927, then was thrown out of the country in 1929. Later, Stalin went on a killing spree of his old rivals and associates, but Trotsky had been too big a figure, so he was prudently packed off to Turkey. He stayed there for four years before ending up in revolutionary Mexico, where Stalin’s assassin reached him in 1940.

Trotsky has left a legend of permanent revolution, without the “shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and gun-men” whom George Orwell associated with Stalin. He was a sort of Che before his time and would no doubt today adorn a T-shirt or two, except that in looks he was beard-waggingly professorial. So was Deutscher.

His three-volume Trotsky, probably not now much read, was greatly admired by Graham Greene, who wrote, “surely this must be counted among the greatest biographies in the English language.” Writers are generally rather bad on politics: someone misinformed them that they were the unacknowledged legislators of mankind; you are better off listening to the taxi driver.

Deutscher could certainly craft a paragraph. His Trotsky comes across as a romantic revolutionary, all barricades and liberation. As such, he had something of a vogue in the 1960s. Deutscher, by 1966 an old warhorse, was invited to give some temper-of-the-times lectures at Cambridge and delivered himself of “The Unfinished Revolution,” which went down quite well—students crowded round, saying, “Professor, that was a wonderful lecture,” and were told, “Yes, I thought so, too.”

Trotsky certainly had some interesting and influential allies in the West because they saw in him that socialism with a human face that resurfaced with Gorbachev in the 1980s. Besides, Trotsky’s was quite a life. Robert Service’s new book about him is a diligent work, but quite early on you guess that, unlike Trotsky’s more admiring biographers, he cannot quite wait for the ice pick. Service has written before on Lenin and Stalin and knows his way around the archives that have become available in Moscow—though, as happens so often with these allegedly revelatory archives, I am not sure that they add much.

Trotsky was born in 1879, and his formative experience was that turn of the century when so many bright people looked forward to the shock of the new in a 20th century that was obviously going to be dominated by the machine. The first aircraft lifts off; the first sky-scraper goes up and up; one Tsiolkovsky in provincial Russia concocts the equations that will, 50-odd years later, lift a satellite into space; Picasso, Freud, and Schoenberg are breaking up the eye, the soul, and the tune; new political parties emerge, with congresses of a few dozen people—Russian Communists, then called Bolsheviks, in 1903, Italian Fascists-to-be, even the Young Turks, who will construct modern Turkey out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

Young Trotsky, his father a well-off Jewish farmer in what is now southern Ukraine, picked up the new socialist ideas. When still a schoolboy in Odessa, he was arrested for sedition. Prison, Siberia, and escape followed, then exile in the West, whether in Switzerland or Vienna, where Trotsky felt most at home. He met Lenin, and they got on well, although Trotsky did not much like Lenin’s dogmatic ways or his insistence on training Party membership to obey the orders of the Central Committee. Lenin endlessly fussed about details, trying to control everything about the Bolsheviks—their finances mattered to him (apparently he was good at fixing marriages with rich girls as well as bank-robberies), as did their voting behavior in the Russian sort-of parliament and who wrote what article in which style. Here, Trotsky came into his own: he could write. In those days, you made a lot of money at that. Prime Minister Gladstone’s animadversions as to papal infallibility, Bulgarian horrors, etc. sold in the hundreds of thousands and made him rich. Lenin was a very boring, plodding writer—poor old Soviet citizens, compulsorily having to plough through the stuff—and Trotsky was not.

Service does not make nearly enough of the articles, but I happen to have on my shelves Trotsky’s essays on the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and he is un-put-downably good. Here are these Balkan peasants, pushed into war with each other—Serbs and Bulgarians, lacking a native aristocracy, egalitarian, egged on into cruelty by gruesome priests and professors, Rumanians pushed into battle by henna-eyed colonels wittering in French, with some hired Hohenzollern as king. Trotsky detested tin-pot nationalism because he had seen the horrible results with his own eyes. In Istanbul, after the Turks’ defeat, there were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of refugees, old men parked philosophically on oxcarts, pregnant women waddling alongside, small children dying of typhus and cholera, and, back home, a set of burned villages and the corpses of any male over the age of 12. In the great Hagia Sophia church and its precincts, there were 10,000 refugees, a foretaste of what was to come for the Armenians. Later, the Bolsheviks won their Civil War not only because Trotsky was a superb (and very harsh) organizer of the Red Army but because they won the support of peoples for whom the Whites had no time—Ukrainians, assorted Muslim “Toilers of the East,” and even Chechens.

What did most to wreck Trotsky in Russia was that he did not like the place. People from the Communist International, the Comintern, probably did mutter to each other in the Hotel Lux, now operating as “Tsentralnaya” in the Tverskaya (once “Gorky”) Street leading down to Red Square—the restaurant still has the gilded Jugendstil caryatids of yore—that the problem with the Russians was that they were a bit crude and drank too much. In the end, Trotsky thought that Russia had by chance become the launching pad for a revolution in a more important country, Germany. It was a terrible mistake. The Comintern did indeed send its agents to Germany to foment revolution, and—Service misses this—set up the first Popular Front regime in Saxony in 1923. The preposterous Béla Kun from Hungary read out inflammatory stuff in that awful Magyar accent in German, in the rain, in Dresden, and the uninspired workers went away. The Comintern challenge did excite a response in Bavaria, however: Hitler’s. Three weeks later, Hitler took up an alliance with the German Right and launched the coup in Munich, which eventually made him a national figure. The sheer silliness and vanity of the Left realized its own nightmare. Ten years on, the Comintern made the same absurd blunders. The German Communist Party could have kept a non-Nazi government in office in 1932. Instead, it voted against, and decent Social Democrats and Catholics—the makers of subsequent West Germany—lost power to a silly ass, Papen, who thought that he could touch Hitler and not be defiled. True, the Communist strategy worked in the end: 50 million corpses later, there was an East German People’s Democracy.

In other words, Trotsky caused Fascism. If you look into the earlier revolutions of 1848, again the real story is the stupidity of the Left, the way in which it provoked opponents into alliance. That same theme was displayed in the Chile of Pinochet. Niall Ferguson, like Service an old student of mine, wrote the superb Ascent of Money (not a well chosen title) in which he explained, hesitantly, that Allende had made a royal mess of things, more or less inviting Pinochet to take over. As coups go, Pinochet’s was bloodless, but the Chilean Left never forgave him and to this day harasses his family. Coups in the Argentine or Brazil, let alone Spain, were far worse and were also, on the whole, pointless, whereas Chile went on to become the model state for Latin America. Professor Ferguson told me at the World Bank summit in Istanbul recently that he has had to put on his tin hat for saying this.

Trotsky had his moment in history in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. It was, someone said, Jewish brains, Latvian rifles, and Russian fools. Trotsky was a superb orator—quite early on he had read Schopenhauer on rhetoric, which goes onto my reading list—and went around the country in his armored train galvanizing the fools. He was mightily helped by the foolishness of his opponents. The Western powers, fighting the First World War in the name of whatever was then the equivalent of free markets and democracy, were planning to take over the Middle East. Trotsky just published the treaties.

When the Bolsheviks won, the success went to Trotsky’s head. He probably believed what an American said of him, that he was the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ. The only man who could really control him was Lenin. Quite why and how, who knows? Service cannot explain. Lenin, whether on the page or on film, comes across as a prodigious bore. Yet as he disappeared by stages, with strokes after 1922, you can see the creativity draining out of Trotsky. He was no good with ordinary people—prim, non-drinking, non-smoking, non-swearing. He even refashioned his Ukrainian accent, which Gorby used to aplomb in his time, into a variant of educated Moscow. The peasant thugs who came up in the Party under Stalin’s aegis did not like him. They did not see why Russians should be used as cannon fodder for a revolution in Germany or China or wherever. Trotsky lost battles and was thrown out. But was he really an alternative to Stalin? He hated peasants and maybe would have killed many more than Stalin. Like Lenin, he did not hesitate to wipe out people—or for that matter peoples. “Permanent revolution” means nothing unless it refers to Marx turning in his grave.

There is one element in this story that nobody has ever written: you can only get at it through stray references on the Internet and in Turkish press articles here and there. Trotsky, it is well known, went to Turkey in 1929. We still do not know why the Turks took him in, but concurrently, they were given two factories by the Soviet Union, one making textiles in Kayseri, the biblical Caesarea Augusta. Trotsky spent four years in a rather ugly house on Büyük Ada, the largest of the islands in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul. It was there that he wrote his major books. That house had belonged to the hatchet man of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, one Izzet Pasha, Arab by origin, and had also been occupied by Gen. Sir Charles Townshend, who was captured in 1916 at Kut el Amara, south of Baghdad. This is stuff for a Stoppard play. Trotsky’s first visitor was Georges Simenon, then a leftish journalist from Belgium. Simenon found Trotsky reading Céline, who went on to be the nastiest Nazi propagandist on the Vichy French radio. The surrealism goes on and on. Trotsky paid his way by advances from American publishers and spent his spare time fishing. He discovered a fish, a red creature, with gills vaguely in hammer-and-sickle shape. He called it Sebastes Leninii. Stalin, probably handed Trotsky’s correspondence by Turkish Intelligence as part of the deal was furious: how could Trotsky, stranded on an island, have surpassed him in this way? He apparently took time off from the geopolitics of the Second War to write an article about said fish in the Zoologichesky Zhurnal. Orwell in Animal Farm got all of this absolutely right.

You feel at the end of Robert Service’s book that he murders Trotsky with anticlimactic relief. He certainly misses the tricks that he might have taken with the finale. The Trotsky story closes in the Mexico of Graham Greene’s Power and the Glory. The Party of Institutional—is that the Mexican for “permanent”?—Revolution was looking after him. To penetrate the well-guarded Trotsky household, Stalin’s assassins recruited a very handsome Catalan Communist with a rich background, Ramon Mercader. He was instructed to make up to a girl of the household, Silvia. He did so with seducer’s ingenuity, in small, barely noticeable, increments—picking up a dropped something, helping with a shopping bag, bunches of flowers, until, finally trusted, he was allowed into the small fortress at Coyoacan. Could he consult the master on a difficult dialectical point? Yes, yes. The master bent over the manuscript. The ice axe, sawn off so as to fit into Mercader’s pocket, bit into Trotsky’s brain. (In the film of this, Alain Delon was cast as Trotsky, quite absurdly: he would have been absolutely right for Mercader, when younger, and Burt Lancaster would have been absolutely right as Trotsky.)

The killing of Trotsky was an extraordinary revelation of Stalin’s character, that endless vengefulness and hatred of a rival who in many ways was far better than him. Trotsky despised Russia: “icons and cockroaches,” he said. Stalin, a Georgian, was more astute. Modern Russia, Putin and all, is much better off without the lot of them. Trotsky, in death, said more about communism than anything in his life.  
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Norman Stone is head of the department of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara. His latest book is World War One: A Short History.

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