[Rabinowitch is an English-born American educator and historian who specializes in the history of the Bolshevik Revolution. In the review below, he praises Leon Trotsky as a "highly stimulating contribution to the literature about Trotsky and early Soviet history."]

Among the two dozen or so writers and political figures who are the subjects of Viking's "Modern Masters" biographical studies ("men who have changed and are changing the life and thought of our age") surely history has been cruelest to Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's central role in the Russian Revolution has been completely obliterated in Soviet historical works and sorely mangled even in many recent Western studies. Moreover, until the last few years, apart from the now classic work of the late Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky's life and thought have been virtually ignored as a subject for serious scholarship. Framed against this background of misrepresentation and neglect, Irving Howe's illuminating short study about, in Howe's words, "one of the titans of our century," is especially welcome.

Howe makes it clear [in Leon Trotsky] that he does not intend to be comprehensive. He has barely touched on those developments which are essential to an informed understanding of the fate of Bolshevism and of Trotsky personally. Fortunately, these events have been dealt with extensively in other recent studies, most valuably in Stephen F. Cohen's brilliant biography: Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. Howe's book is instead a carefully focused, interpretive essay, a retrospective re-examination of Trotsky's ideas and historical importance by a leading literary scholar who was himself a Trotskyist as a City College student during the depression. On its own terms it is of immense general interest, a highly stimulating contribution to the literature about Trotsky and early Soviet history.

Perhaps the most admirable characteristic of Howe's endeavor lies in the balance struck between Trotsky's great strengths and brilliant achievements as theoretician, revolutionary leader and political and social critic on one hand and, on the other, those failings of character, action and perception that contributed to his downfall.

Trotsky's moments of greatest international glory came, of course, during the civil war, as organizer of the Red Army, and in Petrograd in 1917 as the unsurpassed orator and tactician of the October Revolution. In his The History of the Russian Revolution, written many years after the event, Trotsky paid tribute to Lenin's predominant importance in the October Revolution. This emphasis, accepted by Howe, is well taken, since upon his return to Russia from exile in April 1917 Lenin, almost single-handedly, pointed his followers in the direction of a socialist revolution. Barely five months later Lenin's voice was decisive in orienting the Bolshevik leadership toward the earliest possible overthrow of the liberal provisional government. But it is at least arguable that if Trotsky had not been present in Petrograd and if he, along with other local leaders basically sympathetic to Lenin's point of view, had not intervened to adapt Lenin's directives to the realities of the existing political situation, the Bolsheviks would have committed political suicide. In mid-September 1917, Lenin dispatched a series of frantic appeals to the Bolshevik Central Committee for the immediate organization of a popular armed uprising. More sensitive than Lenin to the attachment of most workers and soldiers to the Soviets as legitimate democratic institutions, party leaders on the spot, among whom Trotsky was the most prominent, stubbornly pursued the ultimately successful tactic of masking the provisional government's overthrow as a defensive act on behalf of the Soviets and linking the establishment of a Soviet national government with the decisions of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

Not only did Trotsky help mastermind the "politics of October" but his theory of "Permanent Revolution," first propounded following the revolution of 1905 and adopted by Lenin in 1917, was the theoretical underpinning for the seizure of power. Historians have tended to ignore the counter-arguments of such "Right Bolshevik" opponents of Lenin and Trotsky in October as Kamenev and Zinoviev but as Howe aptly observes, in 1917 their relatively moderate political aspirations, envisioning the formation of an exclusively socialist, democratic coalition government in which all parties and groups in the Soviet would be represented, were very widely shared both inside and outside the party. Moreover, in retrospect, much of their thinking as it relates to the long-term dangers of an exclusively Bolshevik assumption of power in backward Russia, appears quite wise. In line with their pessimistic predictions, the decisive risings of the European proletariat which according to Trotsky were the precondition for the building of a socialist society in Russia did not materialize. To retain power, the Bolsheviks were forced to fight a devastating civil war, during which the democratic and decentralized character of the party, which was integral to its success in 1917, was lost; the independence of the Soviets was destroyed; an oppressive centralized bureaucracy was reimposed throughout the country, and Russian political and economic life became harnessed to the dictates of the Bolshevik leadership. Isolated and overtaxed, the dictatorship of the party degenerated into Stalinist totalitarianism.

As Howe's thoughtful account of the power struggle to succeed Lenin suggests, at its inception the one sure bet in Soviet politics seemed to be that Trotsky, then still war commissar and world-renowned hero of the revolution and civil war, would ultimately triumph. Howe's analysis points out some of the more obvious sources of Trotsky's failure: his brusque and arrogant personal manner; his aversion, by contrast with Stalin, to the nitty-gritty of organization politics and intra-party maneuvering; his erratic, often self-defeating behavior at especially crucial moments; and, along with most others, his failure to appreciate Stalin as a serious threat until too late. Yet Howe speculates that such frequently cited factors may well have been of secondary importance, that at bottom the realities of post-revolutionary Russian life, "social weariness, endless poverty, lack of culture, asphyxiation of independent thought, [and] loss of spirit among Bolshevik cadres," may have made it almost inevitable that Trotsky would fail, even had he been tactically cannier.

In analyzing the complex connection between Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism, Howe rightly sees some of the seeds of the mature Stalinist system in Bolshevik thought and behavior during Lenin's lifetime. And he is justifiably critical of Trotsky's complicity in the early development of the tough Bolshevik one-party dictatorship. Upon assuming the chairmanship of the Petrograd Soviet in September 1917, Trotsky had declared that "in directing the Petrograd Soviet's work we will observe the individual rights and complete freedom of all factions: the arm of the Presidium will never be used to stifle a minority." Nonetheless, soon after the revolution, Trotsky stood out among the party officials as a zealous proponent of and apologist for centralization and political repression. Having superintended the bloody suppression of the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921, Trotsky justified this and other similarly arbitrary acts on the grounds that the Soviet Government was a "worker's government." To Howe, this haughty, authoritarian side of Trotsky is plainly abhorrent.

At the same time, with good reason, Howe is sharply critical of Deutscher's tendency to equate Trotsky's thought with Stalin's and to venerate the latter as a despot who carried out the cruel imperatives of history. Howe also takes pains to dispute the notion of liberal Western writers who implied that Stalin, having embarked on crash industrialization, had "stolen Trotsky's thunder." Here Howe underscores fundamental differences in conception and purpose between Trotsky's economic views in the mid-1920s and the horrendous economic transformation upon which Stalin embarked in 1929. Indeed, Howe argues a bit tenuously that in important ways the policies propounded by Trotsky (for example, in regard to the encouragement of foreign trade) were more akin in philosophy and purpose to Bukharin's moderate economic program than they were to the drastic measures subsequently pursued by Stalin.

Few major figures of the 20th century have written as voluminously and authoritatively on such a wide range of subjects as has Trotsky. Howe bestows lavish praise on Trotsky for his literary criticism, especially Literature and Revolution, written in the early 1920s. "Had he devoted himself systematically (or better yet unsystematically) to literature," Howe avers, "Trotsky might have become one of the great critics of our century." In Howe's estimation, Trotsky deserves similar admiration as an intellectually brilliant historian and trenchant political observer—The History of the Russian Revolution being in his view "the single greatest work of history in the Marxist vein." As Howe also points out, in the 1930s probably no one was more bold, steadfast, and informed than the exiled Trotsky in crusading for a united Left front to curb Hitler and in exposing the bloody excesses of forced collectivization and the Stalinist terror in Russia. Yet his sustained critique of Stalin notwithstanding, right up to the time of his assassination in Mexico in 1940 Trotsky did not question the validity of his prerevolutionary assumptions regarding the prospects for socialism in Russia. Writes Howe regretfully of this last stage in Trotsky's tragic life. "The man who emerges in these concluding ten or twelve years is a figure of greatness, but flawed greatness: a man great in personal courage and intellectual resources, but flawed in self-recognition, in his final inability or refusal to scrutinize his own assumptions with the corrosive intensity he brought to those of his political opponent."