Vintage Red

By R.Z. Sheppard

1905

by LEON TROTSKY translated by ANYA BOSTOCK

488 pages. Random House. $15.

Now that the popular styles of the '20s, '30s and '40s have been recycled, why not some of the unpopular styles? Old Communists, for example. They really did make them better years ago. One of the best models was the brilliant, arrogant, vain, dogmatic, versatile Bolshevik, Lev Davidovich Bronstein. He called himself Trotsky, after a jailer at the czarist prison where he once served time. Trotsky was not without wit. When Nicholas II's troops came to break up a revolutionary meeting, the young radical ordered the commanding officer to sit down until recognized under Robert's Rules of Order.

Trotsky was as complete a revolutionary as one could find that side of Mao Tse-tung. He thrived equally on the chaos of armed insurrection and the enforced peace of prison life. It was in jail and during the doldrums of exile that Trotsky became a leading Socialist theoretician and defender of what he saw as the only true political faith --permanent, international revolution of the urban working class. As stage manager of the Russian Revolution's 1905 dress rehearsal, as founder of the Red Army and Commissar of War after 1917, Trotsky tasted his share of glory and power.

But he also knew the bile of defeat.

In the late '20s, as a Central Committeeman, Trotsky became one of the principal opponents of Stalin's byzantine bureaucracy. In 1929, he was banished from Russian territory; in 1936, Stalin had him sentenced to death in absentia.

It was nearly impossible to remain neutral about Trotsky. Stalin frothed on about him as the counterrevolutionary schemer. George Orwell personified him in Animal Farm as the loquacious pig Snowball, driven out by the dictator pig Napoleon and afterward blamed for everything that goes wrong on the farm. For decades, many liberal intellectuals have overheated their imaginations and their prose on an image of Trotsky as the unbending political outcast and talented literary man. To his closest followers, he was a saint who suffered his final martyrdom in Mexico on Aug. 20, 1940, when a Stalinist assassin buried an Alpine ax in the old Bolshevik's head.

Split Hairs. A dramatic life, in the eye of great events. A dramatic death, with the ink barely dry on the Stalin-Hitler Pact. No wonder interest in Trotsky has persisted into the new revolutionary age. His history of the Russian Revolution is a Marxist classic. My Life, his tendentious autobiography, is a perennial paperback. Since January, at least four new books have been published about him.

In Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed (Dutton) a panel of academic Marxists gives a New Left curl to the old split hairs. New York's Pathfinder Press continues its reprinting of Trotsky's massive body of political journalism with a volume, covering 1934-35. Peter Weiss's new play, Trotsky in Exile (Atheneum), is a worshipful piece of political theater in which vignettes of Trotsky's career are staged against the moments leading up to the assassination. In England, a new version of that Communist calvary is being written by Novelist Nicholas Mosley, and Director Joseph Losey is filming Trotsky's last days. Richard Burton, in spade beard and granny glasses, is playing the lead.

It is the young Trotsky, however, who cuts the heroic figure that may appeal most to contemporary audiences. This is the Trotsky to emerge from the pages of his own early work 1905 --brash, scornful, ambitious but as yet uncorrupted by the necessities of maintaining power. The book was first published in 1909 as Russia in the Revolution, then revised and widely translated under its present title in 1922.

Black Hundreds. After sweeping analyses of Russian history and economics, Trotsky swings into the highlights of the 1905 St. Petersburg uprising like a man directing a painter of social-realist murals. He describes the January massacre of peaceful petitioners in front of the czar's palace --the Bloody Sunday that snapped the last thread of respect for the monarchy. In the last three months of the year, anger and discontent erupted in workers' strikes and military mutinies in Russia's major cities. After 50 days of what Trotsky called "ruthless object lessons," the czar and his Black Hundreds restored a kind of order to their shaky autocracy. Trotsky and other revolutionaries were tried and sentenced to Siberian exile.

Despite the controversy of future events, 1905 was clearly Trotsky's year. At the time of the St. Petersburg uprising, he was 26 and highly regarded for his political journalism. ("The Pen is here," cried Lenin's wife when a fugitive Trotsky barged into her London apartment at dawn.) While other Russian socialists spent themselves in factional squabbles abroad ("Deal with Russians," said Marx, "and all hell breaks loose"), Trotsky made his way back to St. Petersburg and the action.

He whipped crowds with his polemical oratory, organized "flying print shops" to produce propaganda and became chairman of the first Soviet of Workers' Deputies.

Trotsky had special glands for invective, reserving the bitterest for liberals who did not share his theories of revolution. He emerges as a superrationalist technician to whom history was "an enormous machine in the service of our ideals." But he also felt he had unique intuitive powers.

In the recently published Let History Judge (TIME, Jan. 17), Roy Medvedev says that Trotsky's conceit was so famous that many of his own supporters called him barin (the lord).

1905 concludes with "There and Back," Trotsky's account of his Siberian escape in a reindeer sled driven by a drunken peasant. With politics temporarily given a back seat, the memoir is a literary achievement of great quality -- proving again that there is nothing like a subzero dash over the snow to bring out the best in a Russian writer.

qedR.Z. Sheppard

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.