Trotsky: the Hero as Symbol

I would like to suggest that what most characterizes Leon Trostky, and the revolutionary generation he symbolizes, are: 1) the dominance of ideas; 2) the need and willingness to act on them; and 3) the fanatic belief in ideological purity. Any of these can be overdone and lead to distortions. Given,, however, the intensity of the first two that one would expect in the life of a genius like Trotsky, together with the circumstance of isolated frustration of the revolutionary, and it seems to me that the pressure of all this on the third element would create—and in Trotsky’s case, did create—a highly distorted revolutionary purism, which in turn contributed substantially to his political failures.

Since I realize that tempers are quickly touched when old political coals are raked over, let me try to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding by stating immediately that I consider Trotsky to have been magnificent in failure; that by and large his failure was socialism’s failure; that it was a political and certainly not a moral or literary failure; and that, in failure, he remains one of the better reasons yet offered by the twentieth century for maintaining one’s integral humanity. But when all that is said, it remains true—and it is about time that we recognized it—that Trotsky was, in his own terms, a political failure: he lost out in the struggle to preserve the revolution in Russia, and he did not succeed in building an effective new Internat...