The Hell-Black Night

THE PROPHET OUTCAST by Isaac Deutscher. 543 pages. Oxford. $9.50.

THE BASIC WRITINGS OF TROTSKY edited by Irving Howe. 427 pages. Random House. $5.95.

He might have ruled the Communist world, but Joseph Stalin shouldered him aside. Ever since, Leon Trotsky has been the favorite martyr of those Marxists who feel that Communism was never given a fair trial because Stalin corrupted it.

Would Communism under Trotsky have been different? As a personality, Trotsky was far more appealing than Stalin. In some ways, this anti-individualist was a true Renaissance man: brilliant orator, tough administrator, incisive historian, spectacular general. But he was also a fanatic and almost as contemptuous of human freedom as Stalin. In power alongside Lenin, he hamstrung trade unions, conscripted labor, suppressed opposition, and drove the Mensheviks from office with words that would in time be used against him: "Go where you belong from now on--to the rubbish can of history!"

The difference is that the fanatic in power soon proves to be a monster; the fanatic who has lost his power sometimes assumes an aura of gallantry. Biographer Isaac Deutscher seems especially susceptible to this gallantry. An ex-Trotskyite and a respected writer on Communism, Deutscher has turned out an exciting, exacting biography that is very likely definitive, but he cannot prevent a touch of hero worship from creeping into his prose. Trotsky, Deutscher says, "strove to rally his fighters to the most impossible of causes. He sought to set them against every power in the world: against fascism, bourgeois democracy and pacifism; and against religion, mysticism and even secularist rationalism and pragmatism. He demanded unshakable conviction, utter indifference to public opinion, unflagging readiness for sacrifice and a burning faith in the proletarian revolution."

A Hounded Exile. As this third and last and most dramatic volume of Deutscher's biography opens, Trotsky has finally been ejected from the party by Stalin, and, with his wife Natalya, deported to Princes Islands off the coast of Turkey. There the pair set up house in a dilapidated villa they rented from a bankrupt pasha. Trotsky became friendly with the local fishermen and often went out to sea with them.

Trotsky was not lonely for long. Friends, reporters, curiosity seekers and a few GPU undercover agents flocked to the island. Trotsky plunged into an enormous correspondence with Trotskyites, who formed devoted, quarrelsome little groups in just about every country in the West. Trotsky did his best to unite them and boost their morale. He was genuinely appalled by Stalin's mass slaughter of Russia's peasantry and said so. But he confused his followers by scrupulously refusing to call for Stalin's overthrow and by defending Stalin's incredibly Machiavellian foreign policy--even the invasion of Finland. He was always afraid of a bourgeois restoration in Russia and would do nothing to jeopardize the regime, which was the only Communist government in operating condition.

Eventually Trotsky chafed at his isolation. He applied for visas to other countries. But at the time, Stalin was considered the "moderate" who was content to establish "socialism in one country," while Trotsky was the firebrand who wanted to spread revolution everywhere. Democratic governments were understandably reluctant to extend their hospitality to a man who would advocate their overthrow. Finally, in 1933, France agreed to admit him, provided he did not meddle in French politics. Trotsky complied, but local Stalinists, as well as Nazis, would not let him be. They pressured local authorities to keep him on the move, and he was hounded from town to town. He was given brief refuge in Norway when a socialist government came to power. But Stalin protested, and in 1936 Trotsky was packed off to Mexico--his last place of exile.

Trotsky was enchanted by the Mexican landscape. He was fascinated by cacti and took long hikes to search for rare specimens. The hard-bitten revolutionary also kept rabbits and chickens at his home in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, and spent hours feeding them according to the latest scientific methods.

Closing In. Back in Russia the monstrous purge trials were under way. One after another, the old Bolsheviks took the stand, confessed monotonously to fantastic plots and implicated Trotsky. The more of them the maniacal Stalin murdered, the more he seemed to fear Trotsky. "The frenzy with which Stalin pursued the feud, making it the paramount preoccupation of international Communism, beggars description," writes Deutscher. "There is in the whole of history hardly another case in which such immense sources of power and propaganda were employed against a single individual."

Trotsky fought back doggedly. He dashed off articles condemning the bloodbath; he wrote his great dogmatic book, The Revolution Betrayed. In 1937, Trotskyites in various countries set up a commission of reasonably impartial observers, with John Dewey at its head, to establish the facts. The commission held a week of hearings at Trotsky's home in Mexico. After months of sifting the evidence, it solemnly found Trotsky innocent of all the charges brought against him in Moscow.

Inexorably, Stalin closed in. He embarked on a policy of worldwide assassination of Trotskyites. One of Trotsky's sons was executed in Russia; the other was poisoned in a hospital in France, where he had been taken for an appendectomy. Had Trotsky stopped his attacks on Stalin, had he gone into hiding as his friends urged, he might have survived or at least lived longer. But he refused to knuckle under. "I will endure this hell-black night to the end," he said. One night a gang of Stalinists, led by the Mexican artist Siqueiros, broke into Trotsky's casually guarded home and sprayed 200 machine-gun bullets around his bedroom. But he and Natalya had flung themselves under the bed just in time and were not hit.

The Brutal Bon Vivant. The next assassin did better. Jacques Mornard was one of those dedicated Stalinists who were willing to devote a lifetime to one shabby crime (he was released from a Mexican prison in 1960 and returned to Russia for his reward). Mornard began his well-laid plot by courting a homely girl from New York who served as a courier for Trotsky. He played the part of a bon vivant, showed no interest in politics and got the bemused girl to marry him. The first few times his wife visited Trotsky, Mornard tactfully waited outside. After several months he was finally invited in. He turned out some clumsy Trotskyite pamphlets and gained Trotsky's confidence.

One day, when Trotsky was feeding his rabbits, Mornard caught him alone. He pulled an ice ax from his coat and drove it into Trotsky's head. Mornard had expected to kill him instantly and make a getaway. But the old man gave a mighty curse, threw books, inkwells, a Dictaphone at his assailant and grappled with him until help came. Trotsky died as he had lived--fighting fiercely but in vain.

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