Soviet Apologists

It's mighty hard to find apologists for Bolshevism these days, so I was surprised to find the following in the December 2 issue of the London Review of Books (in Neal Ascherson's review of the recently republished books on Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher):

The Bolshevik Revolution was more "authentic" and popular than we currently admit; to see Soviet history merely as inherited homicide is an excuse for not thinking about it. . . . If Lenin had set up a political tradition that could only achieve its ends by force, would it have made any significant difference whether Trotsky or Stalin succeeded him? Given Trotsky's impetuous nature and his practice of Red Terror during the Civil War, might he not have been even more ruthless? In terms of public attention, Trotsky's stock has fallen even faster than Lenin's. After all, if the three giants of the Revolution were, in the current view, "as bad as each other," why should Trotsky �Ethe one who never held the leadership �Ebe of special interest?

Why indeed? But this is the kicker:

"As bad as each other." . . . An average British history graduate today will have been taught to evaluate revolutions on a simple humanitarian scale. Did they kil a lot of people? Then they were bad. Showing that some of those killed were even more bloodthirsty than some of their killers is no extenuation. Neither is the plea that violence and privation, the sacrifice of the present, may be the price of breaking through to a better future. George Kine dismissed this in The Trotsky Reappraisal (1992) as "the fallacy of historically deferred value . . . a moral monstrosity." Monstrous or not, it's a bargain with the future, as anyone over 60 will remember, Europeans of all political outlooks were once accustomed to strike. But today "presentism" rules, and the young read the "short 20th century" as the final demonstration that evil means are never justified by high ends.

Whew! Anyone who still thinks that anti-communist talk about a "religion of revolution" or "regeneration through mass killing" is exaggerated should take another close look at that last paragraph.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 13, 2004 at 07:09 PM

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