Leon Trotsky My Life Preface to the Norwegian Edition

 

Leon Trotsky

My Life

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Preface to the
Norwegian Edition

(October 1, 1935)

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Source: Leon Trotsky, Mitt Liv, Tiden, Oslo 1935.
Translation: Frans-Arne Stylegar.
HTML Markup: Jonas Holmgren.
Proofreader: Einde O’Callaghan.
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit Marxists Internet Archive as your source.

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I write these lines in Norway or, more specifically, in the community hospital in Oslo. A surprising chapter! One can often predict great historical events, but it is difficult to predict one’s own destiny. I recollect one situation: After the French government had expelled me from France to Spain because of my insufficient patriotic enthusiasm for the tsar and the Entente, I was without any reason whatsoever arrested by the government of Alfons XIII; as I lay on the bench in Madrid’s “model” prison I asked myself, laughing: how and why had I ended up here? A surprising chapter! But the serious answer is: However capricious the course of my personal life may seem, in the final instance it is shaped under the influence of weighty historical factors such as war, revolution and counter-revolution. One has to accept one’s destiny as it is being forged by the hammer of history ... And it is no exaggeration when I say that with a book in hand I felt just as confident as a year or a year and a half later in the Smolny or the Kremlin.

Almost twenty years have passed since then: quite a period in a single person’s life – especially when one considers that those very two decades have been filled with huge happenings in the history of the whole of humanity. But through all vicissitudes and upheavals I have happily managed to keep my inclination and readiness to laugh at the annoyances of my personal life intact. And the fact that I now, as the 18th anniversary of the October revolution approaches, lie ill in the Norwegian capital, can least of all make me feel “offended” by the course of history or delude me into complaining about my personal lot. True, the transition from the present, definitively bankrupt social system to a new and more harmonious one is much slower than I had believed and wished for; the conservatism and gullibility of the masses, the dullness and treason of their leaders has thrown humanity backward and is demanding innumerable further sacrifices – but the victory of the new society is certain, and that is the main point. Fais ce que doit, advienne que pourra ... [Do what you have to, come what may ...]

* * *

My first exile was so short (October 1903-February 1905) that it barely qualifies as an exile at all: between two periods of underground work, between two prison terms and two banishments in Tsarist Russia, a young revolutionary simply spent one and a half years in Western Europe, where from a circle of seasoned émigrés from two generations (Plekhanov and Axelrod, Lenin and Martov) he learnt Marxism and revolutionary politics.

My second exile lasted for ten years. It coincided with the dark and deep reactionary retreat between the two Russian revolutions (1905 and 1917). The latter phase of this exile stretches into the war years with their chauvinistic divisions and poisonings, which werre a major setback for the world proletariat.

My third exile began in January 1929, following a year of internal exile in Central Asia, and has now lasted for almost seven years. This period is characterised by the terrible sharpening of capitalist contradictions all over the world, by the growth and advance of fascism, by the heavy losses of the European proletariat (Germany, Austria, Spain). There is nothing accidental about these parallels between the periodisation of my personal life and that of history’s development. The destiny of many revolutionary generations, not only in Russia but in every country that has experienced major social upheavals has followed this curve: from prison and exile to power, and from power to prison and exile.

But this inevitably raises one objection: In the Soviet Union the counter-revolution has, after all, not been victorious; there the present social development is taking place on the basis created by the October revolution. But it was from this very same Soviet Union, which the author of this book had helped create, that he had to leave for his third exile. How can he explain this contradiction?

There is nothing enigmatic about it. The capitalist counter-revolution has not succeeded in the Soviet Union, that is true enough. Only very short-sighted people or those directly involved can overlook the deep degeneration which the party that carried through the victorious October revolution and the state that the victorious working class created have undergone during the last ten or twelve years. Over the Soviet state a bureacracy now rules. It has collected in its own hands unlimited power and innumerable material privileges. Incidentally, it would have been very instructive to calculate the part of the national income being devoured by the ruling, privileged caste; but these statistics belong to the great state secrets. As it definitively freed itself from the control of the masses and rose up above the community of a working class declared incapable of managing their own affairs, the bureaucracy unavoidably had to crystallise from its own ranks a chief arbitrator, a sealer of destinies, an absolute and infallible “leader”. In this thoroughly byzantine ideology the bureaucracy’s demand to play the role of the eternal, irremovable and well-paid legal guardian of the people finds its highest (more properly: lowest) expression. But this enlightened absolutism has nothing in common, and cannot have anything in common with a workers’ state, not to mention with “the classless, socialist society”.

The technical, economic and cultural conquests of the Soviet state are indeed magnificent. This is an indisputable fact. These results were accomplished through the nationalisation of the means of production and the heroic sacrifices of the working masses. But only the so-called “friends of the Soviet Union” (in reality the friends of the bureaucratic Soviet chiefs) can believe that socialist construction must rely on personal dictatorship, on a regime of bureaucratic irresponsibility, and on the merciless oppression of the thought and criticism of the advanced workers. In reality the Bonapartist arbitrariness, which follows from the struggle of the bureacracy to keep its position, is steadily coming into stronger and sharper conflict with the conditions neccessary for the construction of the new society. Through its sense of untenability of its own position against the mass of the people, which economically and culturally is becoming progressively stronger, the bureaucracy has introduced into its own circles a system of reciprocal assurance and mercilessly condemns anybody who dares doubt that its usurped privileges are of divine ..., nay, of “revolutionary” origin. Thus the furious oppression of the tens of thousands of older and younger revolutionaries who remain faithful to the banner of the October revolution. In this sense I can say that my third exile parallels the deep bureaucratic reaction in the Soviet Union.

Only a few days ago Le Temps, the leading organ of the French bourgeoisie, wrote on the occasion of the reintroduction of military ranks in the Red Army: “The outer change is one of the characteristics of the thoroughgoing changes currently taking place in the whole Soviet Union. The newly secured regime is starting to take solid shape. Revolutionary habits and customs are retreating, in the family as well as in society, before values and practices that still dominate in the so-called capitalist countries. The Soviets are getting more and more bourgeois (les sovjets s’embourgeoisent)” (Le Temps, September 25, 1935). This statement from a serious, careful and thoroughly conservative paper needs no comment. Statements like this occur by the thousand. They show incontestably that the bourgeois degeneration among the heads of Soviet society has advanced very far. At the same time they prove that the further development of the Soviet Union is unthinkable without freeing the socialist base of society of its bourgeois-bureaucratic and bonapartist superstructure. Here, in a few words, is the reason for my third exile ...

For four and a half year I lived with my wife, my steady comrade-in-arms and travel-mate, in Turkey on the island of Prinkipo; then two years in France; and finally the last months in Norway.

* * *

Before finishing this preface I cannot avoid mentioning that my stay at Ullevål hospital has given me an unexpected and rare opportunity to meet a particular category of Norwegians: doctors, nurses, female and male nursing students. In all these people I have encountered nothing but attentiveness, compassion, and straightforward, sincere humanity. I will forever remember and cherish my stay at Ullevål hospital.

On the table where I am writing these lines lies one of the hospital’s bibles in Norwegian. Thirty-seven years ago I had on my table in the solitary cell of Odessa prison – I had not yet reached my twentieth birthday – the same book written in different European languages. By comparing the parallel texts I practiced linguistics – the style of the gospel and the conciseness of the translations make the learning of foreign languages easier. Unfortunately, I cannot promise anybody that my new encounter with the old and well-known book will contribute to the salvation of my soul. But reading the Norwegian bible text can nonetheless help me learning the language of the country which has offered me its hospitality, and whose literature I already in younger years learnt to treasure and love.

Oslo Community Hospital October 1, 1935 L. Trotsky

Leon Trotsky My Life forward

 

Leon Trotsky

My Life

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FOREWORD

Our times again are rich in memoirs, perhaps richer than ever before. It is because there is much to tell. The more dramatic and rich in change the epoch, the more intense the interest in current history. The art of landscape-painting could never have been born in the Sahara. The “crossing” of two epochs, as at present, gives rise to a desire to look back at yesterday, already far away, through the eyes of its active participants. That is the reason for the enormous growth in the literature of reminiscence since the days of the last war. Perhaps it will justify the present volume as well.

The very fact of its coming into the world is due to the pause in the author’s active political life. One of the unforeseen, though not accidental, stops in my life has proved to be Constantinople. Here I am camping – but not for the first time – and patiently waiting for what is to follow. The life of a revolutionary would be quite impossible without a certain amount of “fatalism.” In one way or another, the Constantinople interval has proved the most appropriate moment for me to look back before circumstances allow me to move forward

At first I wrote cursory autobiographical sketches for the newspapers, and thought I would let it go at that. And here I would like to say that, from my refuge, I was unable to watch the form in which those sketches reached the public. But every work has its own logic. I did not get into my stride until I had nearly finished those articles. Then I decided to write a book. I applied a different and infinitely broader scale, and carried out the whole work anew. The only point in common between the original newspaper articles and this book is that both discuss the same subject. In everything else they are two different products.

I have dealt in especial detail with the second period of the Soviet revolution, the beginning of which coincided with Lenin’s illness and the opening of the campaign against “Trotskyism.” The struggle of the epigones for power, as I shall try to prove, was not merely a struggle of personalities; it represented a new Political chapter – the reaction against October, and the preparation of the Thermidor. From this the answer to the that I have so often been asked – “How did you lose power?” – follows naturally.

An autobiography of a revolutionary politician must inevitably touch on a whole series of theoretical questions connected with the social development of Russia, and in part with humanity as a whole, but especially with those critical periods that are called revolutions. Of course I have not been able in these pages to examine complicated theoretical problems critically in their essence. The so-called theory of permanent revolution, which played so large a rôle in my personal life, and, what is more important, is acquiring such poignant reality in the countries of the East, runs through this book as a remote leitmotif. If this does not satisfy the reader, I can say that the consideration of the problem of revolution in its essence will constitute a separate book, in which I shall attempt to give form to the principal theoretical conclusions of the experiences of the last decades.

As many people pass through the pages of my book, portrayed not always in the light that they would have chosen for themselves or for their parties, many of them will find my account lacking the necessary detachment. Even extracts that have been published in the newspapers have elicited certain denials. That is inevitable. One has no doubt that even if I had succeeded in making my autobiography a mere daguerreotype of my life – which I never intended it to be – it would nevertheless have called forth echoes of the discussion started at the time by the collisions described in the book. This book is not a dispassionate photograph of my life, however, but a component part of it. In these pages, I continue the struggle to which my whole life is devoted. Describing, I also characterize and evaluate; narrating, I also defend myself, and more often attack. It seems to me that this is the only method of making an autobiography objective in a higher sense, that is, of making it the most adequate expression of personality, conditions, and epoch.

Objectivity is not the pretended indifference with which con firmed hypocrisy, in speaking of friends and enemies, suggests indirectly to the reader what it finds inconvenient to state directly. Objectivity of this sort is nothing but a conventional trick. I do not need it. Since I have submitted to the necessity of writing about myself – nobody has as yet succeeded in writing an autobiography without writing about himself – I can have no reason to hide my sympathies or antipathies, my loves or my hates.

This is a book of polemics. It reflects the dynamics of that social life which is built entirely on contradictions. The impertinence of the schoolboy toward his master; the pin-pricks of envy in the drawing-room, veiled by courtesies; the constant competition of commerce; the frenzied rivalry in all branches of pure and applied science, of art, and sport; the parliamentary clashes that reveal the deep opposition of interests; the furious struggle that goes on every day in the newspapers; the strikes of the workers; the shooting down of participants in demonstrations; the packages of explosives that civilized neighbors send each other through the air; the fiery tongues of civil war, almost never extinguished on our planet – all these are the forms of social “polemics,” ranging from those that are usual, constant and normal, almost unnoticed despite their intensity, to those of war and revolution that are extraordinary, explosive and volcanic. Such is our epoch. We have all grown up with it. We breathe it and live by it. How can we help being polemical if we want to be true to our period in the mode of the day?

But there is another and more elementary criterion, one that relates to plain conscientiousness in stating facts. Just as the most bitter revolutionary struggle must take account of time and place, the most polemical work must observe the proportions that exist between objects and men. I hope that I have observed this demand not only in its entirety, but also in its particulars.

In certain cases – although these are not very numerous – I relate long-ago conversations in dialogue form. No one will demand a verbatim report of conversations repeated many years after. Nor do I claim such accuracy. Some of these dialogues have rather a symbolic character. Everyone, however, has had moments in his life when some particular conversation has impressed itself indelibly on his memory. One usually repeats that sort of conversation to one’s personal or political friends; thanks to this, they become fixed in one’s memory. I am thinking primarily, of course, of all conversations of a political nature.

I may state here that I am accustomed to trust to my memory. Its testimony has been subjected to verification by fact more than once, and it has stood the test perfectly. But a reservation is necessary. If my topographic memory, not to mention my musical one, is very weak, and my visual memory and my linguistic memory fairly mediocre, still my memory of ideas is considerably above the average. And, moreover, in this book ideas, their evolution, and the struggle of men for these ideas, have the most important place.

It is true that memory is not an automatic reckoner. Above all, it is never disinterested. Not infrequently it expels or drives into a dark corner episodes not convenient to the vital instinct that controls it – usually ambition. But this is a matter for “psychoanalytic” criticism, which is sometimes very ingenious and instructive, but more often capricious and arbitrary.

Needless to say, I have persistently checked my memory by documentary evidence. Difficult as the conditions of my work have been, in the business of making inquiries in libraries or searching out archives I have been able to verify all the more important facts and dates that were needed.

Beginning with 1897, I have waged the fight chiefly with a pen in my hand. Thus the events of my life have left an almost uninterrupted trail in print over a period of thirty-two years. The factional struggle in the party, which began in 1903, has been rich in personal episodes. My opponents, like myself, have not withheld blows. All of them have left their scars in print. Since the October Revolution, the history of the revolutionary movement has held an important place in the research work of young Soviet scholars and of entire institutions. Everything of interest is sought out in the archives of the revolution and of the Czarist police department and published with detailed factual commentaries. In the first years, when there was as yet no need of disguising anything, this work was carried on most conscientiously. The “works” of Lenin and some of mine were issued by the State Publishing House, with notes that took up dozens of pages in each volume and contained invaluable factual material concerning both the activities of the authors and the events of the corresponding period. All this of course facilitated my work, helping me to fix the correct chronological pattern and to avoid errors of fact, at least the most serious ones.

I cannot deny that my life has not followed quite the ordinary course. The reasons for that are inherent in the conditions of the time, rather than in me. Of course certain personal traits were also necessary for the work, good or bad, that I performed. But under other historical conditions, these personal peculiarities might have remained completely dormant, as is true of so many propensities and passions on which the social environment makes no demands. On the other hand, other qualities today crowded out or suppressed might have come to the fore. Above the subjective there rises the objective, and in the final reckoning it is the objective that decides.

My intellectual and active life, which began when I was about seventeen or eighteen years old, has been one of constant struggle for definite ideas. In my personal life there were no events de serving public attention in themselves. All the more or less unusual episodes in my life are bound up with the revolutionary struggle, and derive their significance from it. This alone justifies the appearance of my autobiography. But from this same source flow many difficulties for the author. The facts of my personal life have proved to be so closely interwoven with the texture of historical events that it has been difficult to separate them. This book, moreover, is not altogether an historical work. Events are treated here not according to their objective significance, but according to the way in which they are connected with the facts of my personal life. It is quite natural, then, that the accounts of specific events and of entire periods lack the proportion that would be demanded of them if this book were an historical work. I had to grope for the dividing line between autobiography and the history of the revolution. Without allowing the story of my life to become lost in an historical treatise, it was necessary at the same time to give the reader a base of the facts of the social development. In doing this, I assumed that the main outlines of the great events were known to him, and that all his memory needed was a brief reminder of historical facts and their sequence.

By the time this book is published, I shall have reached my fiftieth birthday. The date coincides with that of the October Revolution. Mystics and Pythagoreans may draw from this what ever conclusions they like. I myself noticed this odd coincidence only three years after the October uprising. Until I was nine years old I lived in a remote little village. For eight years I studied at school. I was arrested for the first time a year after I left school. For universities, like many others of my time, I had prison, Siberia, and foreign exile. In the Czar’s prisons I served four years in two periods. In the Czarist exile I spent about two years the first time, a few weeks the second. I escaped from Siberia twice. As a foreign immigrant, I lived for about twelve years altogether in various European countries and in America – two years before the revolution of 1905, and nearly ten years after its defeat. In 1915, during the war, I was sentenced in my absence to imprisonment in Hohenzollern Germany; the next year I was expelled from France and Spain, and after a brief stay in the Madrid prison, and a month in Cadiz under the surveillance of the police, I was deported to America. I was there when the February Revolution broke out. On my way from New York I was arrested by the British in March, 1917, and detained for a month in a concentration camp in Canada. I took part in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and I was the chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet of delegates in 1905, and again in 1917. I took an intimate part in the October Revolution, and was a member of the Soviet government. As the People’s Commissary for foreign affairs, I conducted peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk with the delegates of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. As People’s Commissary for military and naval affairs, I devoted about five years to organizing the Red Army and restoring the Red Navy. During the year 1920 I added to that the direction of the country’s disorganized railway system.

The main content of my life, however, except for the years of the civil war, has been party and literary activity. In 1923 the State Publishing House began the publication of my collected works. It succeeded in bringing out thirteen volumes, not counting the previously published five volumes on military subjects. Publication was discontinued in 1927, when the persecution of “Trotskyism” became especially intense.

In January, 1928, I was sent into exile by the present Soviet government; I spent a year on the Chinese frontier; in February, 1929, I was deported to Turkey, and I am now writing these lines from Constantinople.

Even in this condensed synopsis, the outward course of my life could hardly be called monotonous. On the contrary, counting the number of turns, surprises, sharp conflicts, ups and downs, one might say that my life was rather full of “adventures.” But I must say that, by natural inclination, I have nothing in common with seekers after adventure. I am rather pedantic and conservative in my habits. I like and appreciate discipline and system. Not to provide a paradox, but because it is a fact, I must add that I cannot endure disorder or destruction. I was always an accurate and diligent schoolboy, and I have preserved these two qualities all my life. In the years of the civil war, when I covered by train a distance equal to several times round the earth, I was greatly pleased to see each new fence constructed of freshly cut pine boards. Lenin, who knew this passion of mine, often twitted me about it in a friendly way. A well-written book in which one can find new ideas, and a good pen with which to communicate one’s own ideas to others, for me have always been and are today the most valuable and intimate products of culture. The desire for study has never left me, and many times in my life I felt that the revolution was interfering with my systematic work. Yet almost a third of a century of my conscious life was entirely filled with revolutionary struggle. And if I had to live it over again, I would unhesitatingly take the same path.

I am obliged to write these lines as an immigrant – for the third time – while my closest friends are filling the places of exile and the prisons of that Soviet republic in whose creating they took so decisive a part. Some of them are vacillating, withdrawing, bowing before the enemy. Some are doing it because they are morally exhausted; others because they can find no other way out of the maze of circumstances; and still others because of the pressure of material reprisals. I had already lived through two instances of such mass desertion of the banner: after the collapse of the revolution of 1905 and at the beginning of the World War. Thus I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change. I have grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective not from the stand point of my personal fate. To understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one’s own place – that is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, it is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for a man who does not limit his tasks to the present day.

L. Trotsky. 1929