Hark from the Tomb

STALIN (516 pp.)--Leon Trotsky-- Harper ($5).

It is as hard for a man to escape assassination as it is to lay a ghost. If the assassins know their trade, if they are backed by the resources and the implacable purpose of a powerful government, the victim may escape for a time, perhaps for years, but in the end, through carelessness, through inadvertence, or simply through weariness of the unremitting chase, quarry and hunters will meet.

In Mexico, in 1940, assassins had orders to lay a living ghost. He was Leon Davidovich Trotsky (real name Bronstein), organizer of the Bolshevik coup d'etat which overthrew Russia's democratic Provisional Government (1917), once Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Soviet Commissar of War, organizer and leader of the Red Army against the anti-Communist and Allied forces, and--after his expulsion from the Communist Party by Joseph Stalin--the world's No. 1 political D.P. From the safety of democratic countries (Norway, France, Mexico) which he longed to communize, this ubiquitous, political ghost had haunted Stalin for twelve years with loud and highly articulate shouts of: "Traitor to the Revolution!"

Trotsky took precautions. An old Bolshevik, he knew how assassinations are rigged. His house at Coyoacan was an arsenal. Searchlights played on it by night. The Mexican Government provided Trotsky with a 24-hour military guard. He had a private guard of revolver-toting secretaries (one of whom, an American, was kidnaped and murdered during the first attempt against Trotsky). But the assassin, allegedly an agent of the NKVD (Russian Secret Police), arrived in broad daylight, introduced to Trotsky's circle in the guise of a friend. One day as Trotsky sat reading a paper, this friend, Frank Jackson,*produced a small pickax (such as mountain climbers use), smashed Trotsky's skull and crunched into what a moment before had been one of the 20th Century's most exciting minds.

At last the bitter rivalry between the two great Commissars seemed ended. For the first time in their long struggle, the master of the Kremlin could turn to his mirror and ask with some assurance:

Mirror, mirror on the wall,

Who is fairest of us all? The mirror would have little choice but to answer: "You are, Comrade."

But the ghost had merely been laid, not silenced. The pen was still mightier than the pickax. From the crematorium, Trotsky hurled a last indictment. For he had left behind, two thirds completed, the rest in rather full notes, a devastating political biography of his archenemy.

The Book. This book/- was tactfully pigeonholed during the war, while Stalin was America's battle comrade. This week, as if in reward for this restraint (claimed by some to have been inspired by the U.S.

State Department), it was released. If not the most inspired of Trotsky's works (it was not in a class with his three-volume History of the Russian Revolution), circumstances made it one of the most dramatic books of the year.

It was a big (9 1/2 in. by 6 1/2 in.), fat book densely written, implacably polemical and streaked with the usual Communist gobbledygook about Permanent Revolution, anarcho-syndicalist deviations, petty bourgeois conceptions and the high political level of the masses.

About one thing which many readers would quickly look for, it said little: the great Soviet Purge trials, at which Trotsky (in absentia) was charged with making a deal with Hitler to overthrow Stalin.* Scores of Old Bolsheviks and a miscellany of nondescript political ganoids dredged from the NKVD prisons were convicted of the same charge and shot. Trotsky contended that this charge had been refuted ad nauseam in his own and other people's writings.

Political Paleontology. Trotsky's Stalin is an attempt at political paleontology. Says he: Stalin "seems to have no prehistory. The process of his rise took place somewhere behind an impenetrable political curtain. At a certain moment his figure, in the full panoply of power, suddenly stepped away from the Kremlin wall, and for the first time the world became aware of Stalin as a ready-made dictator." Trotsky's purpose is to supply this prehistory.

His attempt falls into two parts. The first part, which covers Stalin's dingy boyhood /- and his youth as a Greek Orthodox seminarist and, later, a revolutionary political organizer and jailbird, suffers from lack of documentation. Trotsky scrupulously indicates the variegated reliability of his scanty sources, most of them boy hood friends and later enemies of Stalin, whose comments suggest William Wordsworth's definition of lyric poetry: strong emotion recollected in tranquillity (usually in jail or exile). He also makes devastating use of the official encomiums* written (usually in fear of jail or exile) after Stalin became powerful. The happy paucity of source materials enables Trotsky to draw the same kind of brilliant character surmises, inferences and conclusions that he improvised (in his History of the Russian Revolution) from some scraps of Czar Nicholas II's journal. From it the young Stalin emerges as a parochial presence of lurking and furtive evil.

The rest of the book, Stalin's career, from the Bolshevik coup d'etat of 1917 to his final ousting of Trotsky, suffers from a glut of documents, letters, telegrams, secret official papers and memoranda. Only Trotsky, a superb pamphleteer, who is practically incapable of writing badly, could have made his insistent exegesis readable.

In Trotsky's version, Stalin emerges as a man of inspired mediocrity, perfidy and political depravity. Trotsky's most sensational (and newest) charge: Stalin probably hastened the dying Lenin's death by administering poison. More routine charges: Stalin is a traitor to the revolution and to Communism because 1) he seized control of the Bolshevik Party machine and substituted ward politics for the inspired dynamics of proletarian revolution; 2) he turned the dictatorship of the proletariat into a totalitarian state; 3) he declared himself Lenin's heir and best disciple though Lenin, before his death, had broken with Stalin and repudiated him; 4) he issued history a false passport by revising the entire record of the Russian revolution, eliminating Trotsky and making himself the military hero of the civil war and the political hero of the revolution; 5) he officially murdered a whole generation of Old Bolsheviks who knew the truth and might spill it.

To Americans, whose politics are less Dostoevskian, these charges may seem excessive. It .is as if President Truman were to rewrite all U.S. history books, claiming for himself full credit for the victories on the Western Front in 1918 and for the establishment of the League of Nations against the traitorous interference of General Pershing and Woodrow Wilson. Nevertheless, Trotsky's charges, if more coherent, are scarcely more excessive than those made against him and his comrades by Stalin and the Communist Party during the Purge trials.

Even the charge that Stalin poisoned Lenin is linked to the fact that during the Purge trials Stalin convicted his NKVD chief, Henry Yagoda, of poisoning Novelist Maxim Gorky and Soviet Control Commission Chairman Valerian Kuibyshev (as if President Truman were to charge FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover with poisoning the late Will Rogers and Chester Bowles). And two facts are indisputable: 1) a whole generation of Russian Communists was officially liquidated in circumstances that may gratify mankind's sense of poetic justice, but outrages its sense of human justice; 2) Trotsky was assassinated.

Tweedledum &Tweedledumber. Most U.S. readers will see in the struggle of Stalin and Trotsky a fight between ins & outs, a Tweedledum and Tweedledee dogfight for power, in which Trotsky, despite his brilliance, proved the Tweedledumber. The clash of their personalities, all but inevitable, was implicit even in the antagonists' physical appearance. Trotsky, haranguing his troops, his outsize, intellectual, goateed head cocked above his flaring military coat, looked like a blend of a broker who has just made a killing on the Paris bourse and an actor from the Yiddish Art Theater. Stalin, with his low forehead, ferally cautious manner, soft but searching eyes (says Trotsky: "The jaundiced glint of his eyes impelled sensitive people to take notice"), might but for his size (5 ft. 5 in.) have been a heavy from the Grand Guignol.

Trotsky was electric, impressive, imperious, cerebral and impatient of men whose thinking was slower than his own. Stalin was diffident (says Trotsky, from a sense of intellectual insecurity), deliberate (says Trotsky, from craftiness), grossly rude (says Trotsky, from an innate brutality). His mind was probing rather than comprehending, calculating rather than incisive, and its speed was that of a delayed fuse.

Each claimed to be a better Communist than the other. Each claimed to be a better disciple of Lenin than the other. Their immediate differences were in strategy, tactics and timing. Trotsky's attempts to find differences in principle with Stalin, as his life of his enemy proves again, consistently left him in the dilemma of having to attack Stalin without attacking Communism and Russia. It also kept his Fourth International as little more than a form of political schizophrenia.

One of the failures of Trotsky's Stalin is that he cannot admit one staring fact: Stalin won what Trotsky somewhat grandly calls "the grand polemic," because a majority of the Communist Party sensed instinctively that the nature of Stalin embodied, far more than the more brilliant Trotsky, something deep in the nature of Communism itself.

In the dogged persistence of Stalin's mind, free from the perils of individual inspiration, they sensed a character for whom organization and discipline are indispensable to achievement. In his craftiness, they sensed a personal expression of their organizational need for subterranean conspiracy. In his brutality, they sensed a capacity for the terrorism with which a revolutionary minority must always exert its rule over an overwhelming majority. In his intellectual aridity, they sensed an embodiment of that bleakness inseparable from a philosophy which makes man, even for his ultimate greater glory, the pawn of purely materialist forces.

Stalin might, as Trotsky wrote at the end of his preface, completely lack "the qualities of the historic initiator, thinker, writer or orator." Nevertheless, he knew how to make history, knew how to grasp and manage the forces, if not the ideas, of whose conflict history is the expression. No doubt it was true that Stalin's "first qualification was a contemptuous attitude toward ideas." No doubt "the idea had. . . ."

But Comrade Trotsky never finished explaining what "the idea had." For at that point in history, ideas, to which Trotsky was dedicated, were shattered forever by the force which Stalin epitomized. Before Trotsky could complete his sentence, Jackson's pickax had written finis to "the grand polemic" and the grander polemicist.

*Jackson, whose real name, according to the Mexican police, is Jacques van den Dreschd (he is a Belgian traveling on false Canadian papers), is still in a Mexico City jail. A month ago, Manhattan's socialist New Leader reported that the FBI, at the request of the Mexican Government, was working on his case. Jackson had committed an assassin's No. 1 crime: he had failed to escape. Said the New Leader: the Mexican police have discovered that the NKVD is now trying to liquidate Jackson; the operation is in charge of a little-publicized U.S. woman Communist who lives in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, f Translated and completed with surprising fidelity to Trotsky's tone and style by Charles Malamuth, onetime teacher of Russian at the University of California, onetime United Press Moscow Bureau chief.

*A handful of British and U.S. intellectuals a month ago petitioned Chief Justice Sir Geoffrey Lawrence at the Niirnberg trials for a question ing of Nazi prisoners, to clear Trotsky of the charge of dealing with them. Among the U.S. signers: Socialist Leader Norman Thomas, Critic Edmund Wilson, Novelist James Farrell. Among the British signers: H. G. Wells, Arthur Koestler.

/- Born (1879) in Gori, Georgia, Stalin was the son of an illiterate, hard-drinking peasant turned cobbler.

*Sample (an apostrophe to Stalin by the Soviet Union's late Novelist Alexey Tolstoy): Thou, bright sun of the nations, The unsinking sun of our times, And more than the sun, for the sun has no wisdom. .

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