Q&A with Bertrand M. Patenaude
Bertrand M. Patenaude’s new book is the story of one of the twentieth century’s most notorious political murders: the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Here he reveals what drew him to writing about Trotsky, how his interest in Trotsky goes back to his days as an undergraduate, and how the book took shape.
What drew you to writing about Trotsky?
I became interested in the Russian Revolution and Soviet history from reading Isaac Deutscher’s classic biographical trilogy of Trotsky (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast) when I was an undergraduate at Boston College in the 1970s. When I studied in Vienna in 1975-76, I visited Trotsky’s old neighborhoods and the cafés he frequented during the seven years he lived in the Austrian capital before World War I.
A seminar paper I wrote about Trotsky during my senior year at Boston College helped me to get into the PhD program in history at Stanford in 1987. I arrived at Stanford intending to write a dissertation about Trotsky. But graduate school turned out to be more about the impersonal forces of history than about historical personalities, so I dropped the idea, only to pick it up again a few years ago.
Why did you decide to focus on this period in his life?
The idea for a book about Trotsky in Mexico, with flashbacks to his earlier life and career, was suggested to me in the summer of 2004 by Donald Lamm, the former chairman of the American publishing house W. W. Norton, whom I met at a book fair at Stanford and who subsequently became my literary agent. The idea appealed to me because it did not involve writing a straightforward biography of Trotsky. No historian had investigated the Mexico period in detail, and certainly no one had had the idea to use the Mexico years, with all their color and drama, as the basis for a book about Trotsky’s rise and fall.
Focusing on the details of his daily life in Mexico, including his tumultuous friendship with Diego Rivera and his romantic liaison with Frida Kahlo, gave me the opportunity me to protray Trotsky’s character and personality up close; the flashbacks enabled me to trace the arc of his meteoric career.
One major factor in my decision to undertake the project was the presence on the Stanford University campus, near my home, of enormously rich collections of letters, diaries, manuscripts, and photographs documenting Trotsky’s final years in Mexico. Much of this material had never before been researched. It was an opportunity I could not pass up.
Do you think that Stalin, to a degree, succeeded in erasing Trotsky from history?
Stalin succeeded in completely erasing Trotsky from the history books in the Soviet Union. And although post-Soviet Russia has seen Trotsky’s return – in print, photographs and films – his reputation there remains tainted, even among Russians who regard Stalin’s reign as a disaster for the country. Russians, especially those of a certain age, cannot shake their image of Trotsky as the Satanic figure of Stalinist propaganda.
In the West, Trotsky never disappeared from the history books. Indeed, his own books published in the West in the 1930s – in particular his dazzling history of the Russian Revolution and his engrossing memoirs – brought him considerable respect as an author. Stalin succeeded in organizing Trotsky’s murder in 1940, but Western historians never stopped portraying Lenin and Trotsky as the twin stars of the revolutionary year 1917, with Stalin very much in the background.
During the course of your research, did you have access to previously unseen archive material, and what did you find most interesting about the material you uncovered?
I conducted extensive research in the Trotsky archives at Harvard and Stanford universities. The most fascinating collections I worked with were the papers of Trotsky’s American secretaries and guards in Mexico. These collections, located at the Hoover Archives at Stanford, had never been researched for any previous books about Trotsky. They allowed me to get up close to Trotsky the man – or the ‘Old Man’, as his acolytes affectionately referred to him – and to present the ageing revolutionary as a vulnerable human being, a not unsympathetic figure, however difficult and demanding he was with his family and staff. The effect is to create, in the book’s final section, when Trotsky’s assassin closes in, an almost unbearable tension. The outcome is already known, and yet somehow we find ourselves believing that the Old Man must escape.
Would he, do you think, have been much better than Stalin as a party leader and Soviet ruler, had he come to power after Lenin’s death?
This is, of course, one of the great counter-factual questions of Soviet history. We must start with the fact that Trotsky was a poor politician, and so it is hard to imagine him acquiring absolute power, let alone wielding it as effectively and as brutally as Stalin did.
We must also recognize that Trotsky never advocated the kind of crash industrialization drive that Stalin initiated at the end of the 1920s, after Trotsky had already been exiled from the Soviet Union. Would Trotsky, as Soviet leader, have been capable of carrying out the forced collectivization of agriculture, which under Stalin resulted in the deaths of millions of peasants? Would Trotsky, the sometime literary critic and avid reader of French novels, have taken steps, as Stalin did, to impose rigid ideological controls over Soviet art and literature? Would he have found reason to orchestrate purge trials and conduct a Great Terror, which in Stalin’s time led to the deaths of millions in jail cells and in the labor camps of the Gulag?
It hardly seems likely. Such questions are inextricably linked to a more fundamental question about the essential continuities between Bolshevism and Stalinism. And here one thing can be said with certainty: Trotsky’s own actions in creating and shaping the early Soviet regime helped paved the way for Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship.
The myth of Trotsky continued to inspire small political groups down to the seventies, and still does to a certain extent today. They usually gloss over the violence and authoritarianism of early Bolshevik rule and Trotsky’s part in it. Has his tragic end, and that of his family, contributed to this image of him as untainted by his time in power?
There is no doubt that Trotsky’s violent demise as Stalin’s victim, the last act of his tragic downfall, has benefitted his historical reputation. The persecution and deaths of his family members and comrades, both in the USSR and abroad, during the Great Terror and his treatment as a pariah by all the governments of Europe in the face of the Kremlin’s pressure – all of this unavoidably creates sympathy for the figure of Trotsky and, to many, serves as partial atonement for his own Soviet-era authoritarianism, not least as leader of the Red Army.
Trotsky’s belated championing of Soviet ‘democracy’ and his general image in Europe and America as the cultivated, Western, internationalist alternative to the peasant, ‘Asiatic’, and nationalistic Stalin made him a darling of anti-Stalinist radicals in the 1930s, and to some extent this perception continues today.
Trotsky’s first biographer, Isaac Deutscher, has proved to be enormously influential in perpetuating this image of Trotsky as the enlightened Bolshevik. Trotsky’s recent biographers in Russia, beginning with Dmitrii Volkogonov, have been far less forgiving. They emphasize Trotsky’s responsibility for the rise of Soviet totalitarianism.
August 25th, 2009 at 11:13 am
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August 1st, 2010 at 8:31 pm
[...] Stalin’s Nemesis, which I blogged about here, when it was Radio 4′s Book of the Week. More from Bookhugger, Ardmayle, The Tablet. More later today about the current Book of the Week, which also has a [...]