Leon Trotsky - Trotsky on Lenin

Family of Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov. Young Lenin seated front row right. (Culver Pictures Inc.)

Leon Trotsky

The Young Lenin The Lilly Library at Indiana University

Translated by Max Eastman

Previous edition published in the United States in 1972 by Doubleday and Company

On Lenin Estate of L. D. Trotsky, 1924

This translation George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1971

Introduction George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1971

Previous edition published in Great Britain in 1971

by George G. Harrap & Co Ltd

This edition published in 2017 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-293-3

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,

www.ingramcontent.com/contact

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Cover design by Eric Kerl.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

PART I

The Young Lenin

Translated from the Russian by

MAX EASTMAN

Edited and Annotated by

MAURICE FRIEDBERG

The Manuscript of this book disappeared from my files sometime in the 1930s. As there had been raids and rumors of raids by the Stalinists on Trotskys files and archives in Europe, I assumed that this was part of the same operation, and after a gloomy search, I said good-bye to Trotskys Lenin for good. By what odd circumstance it came back into my possession thirty years later and is here presented, I will explain.

First I want to tell how I came to be chosen for the task of translating this extraordinary document. I spent the two yearsor rather the year and nine monthsfrom September 1922 to June 1924 in Soviet Russia, and, sustained by a feeling that I was traveling hand in hand with history, I learned the Russian language. I had defended the Bolsheviks as a socialist editor in America, and these two facts gave me a good introduction to the leaders of the party in Moscow. I became well enough acquainted with Trotsky to suggest that he tell me his life story in leisure moments and let me write his biography.

His leisure moments and my patience both gave out when the book was half done, and it was published as Leon TrotskyThe Portrait of a Youth. One of its results was to establish a personal friendship between Trotsky and me, notwithstanding my heretical and sinful opinion that Marxs philosophy of dialectical materialism is nothing but a grandiose exercise in wishful thinking. We got along in spite of this obstacle, and I became Trotskys chief English translator. I translated the three volumes of his History of the Russian Revolution, a book called The Revolution Betrayed, and a number of articles for the American press that were his chief source of income after his expulsion from Stalins Russia in 1929.

Indeed, from 1929 to 1933 I functioned unofficially as Trotskys literary agent, selling his current articles to American publications that paid him some very handsome prices. Our correspondence during that period amounts to almost a hundred letters back and forth. There was no contract between us, but I was armed with an authorization to make without consulting him any editorial changes demanded by the technique of American journalism or by the digestion of the American brain.

Trotsky had in mind a book about Lenin for a long time. Indeed, in a letter of January 1929 telling me of the contract he had signed for his famous history of the revolution, he added:

By next fall I hope to finish another book: Lenin and the Epigones. This will be a sort of prolongation of the History. I am going to square accounts with a number of people. A little polemic with you about Marxism will be necessary. There will be theoretical chapters in the book, historical, psychological, personal characterizations, plenty of polemic.

After his world-famous career as a warrior and political leader was so rudely smashed and erased from Russian history, Trotsky turned to the job of earning his living as a writer with unquenched zeal and energy. Plans for books and articles flowed out of him, enough to fill a dozen young lives. Here is an example:

In a few words I want to let you know about a new book I am writing in the interval between two volumes of The History of the Russian Revolution. The book will perhaps be called They or We or We and They and will include a whole series of political portraits: representatives of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois conservatism on the one hand, proletarian revolutionaries on the other. For instance: Hoover and Wilson from the Americans; Clemenceau, Poincar, Barthou, and certain other Frenchmen. From the English: Baldwin, Lloyd-George, Churchill, MacDonald, and the Labourites in general. From the Italians I would take Count Sforza, Giolitti, and the old man Cavour. Of the revolutionaries: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Vorovsky, Rakovsky. Probably Krassin as a transitional type. Ive been working on this book throughout the past month. From that, you can see that it hasnt yet gotten very far forward, but its general physiognomy is already clear to me. Its character will be determined by a most serious study of all these figures in the context of the political conditions surrounding them, etc. When will this book be ready? That depends on how soon I must deliver the second volume of my history of the revolution. If the second volume is postponed for about eight months I might finish the book of portraits in the next four months.

It was well along in the thirties that this flood of projected miracles subsided enough to let him undertake the long-premeditated Lenin. I have a letter from him dated November 2, 1934, which says: I havent yet gone beyond Lenins youth, and adds, How about publishing two volumes: Volume ILenins Youthuntil, say 1905, and Volume IIfrom 1905 to 1924? This would give me an opportunity to do the theoretical part more thoroughly. I would deliver the first volumeabout 350 pagesby next January 1. What is your opinion?

My opinion on this question was soon outdated by financial pressure, which impelled Trotsky to postpone the second part of the Lenin and first write a brief life of Stalin.

I had finished translating the first twelve chapters of the Lenin and filed them in my little barn-study at Croton-on-Hudson; one day I went to make some small correction in the text and found it was missing. The place it had occupied was empty. There had been some question between Harper and Doubleday as to which one was to publish it, since Harper was publishing the Stalin. Perhaps a copy of the manuscript was in the hands of one publisher or the otherbut neither one had it. Nor did Maxim Lieber, a professional agent who had for a couple of years taken my place in marketing Trotskys writings.

To those who remember the diabolical intricacy and thoroughness of the efforts directed by Stalin to defeat the aims and frustrate the purposes and ultimately bring to a bloody end the life itself of Leon Trotsky, it will be no surprise that, after a glum search, I gave up hope of ever retrieving this unique work. It had been stolen and destroyed, I concluded, by Trotskys ingenious and implacable enemies.