Blair's books

There is a curious snippet (not online, so far as I can see) in the Books section of The Observer :

Left-leaning indy publisher Verso has experienced a dramatic run on its three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky ... following a surprise endorsement from the Prime Minister at a World Book Day event. He told an astonished gathering at the Commonwealth Institute that Isaac Deutscher's biography had 'made a very deep impression' on him as a young man. Previously, Mr Blair has confined his endorsements to books such as Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

I have no doubt Deutscher's Trotsky did make an impression on the young Tony Blair, but I suspect it's the impression rather than the book that the PM is recalling. In his biographies of both Trotsky and Stalin, Deutscher advanced an untenable notion that, while brutal, Stalin was an agent of historical progress. As the American Trotskyite leader Max Shachtman observed:

The alloy in Trotsky's argument was already a base one [the notion that nationalised property equated to a workers' state]; in Deutscher it is far worse because he mixes into it what was so absent in Trotsky - a wholesale capitulation to Stalinism historically, theoretically, and politically.

Shachtman's remarks are to be found in his book The Bureaucratic Revolution, and are quoted by Al Glotzer, a close associate of Trotsky in the 1930s, in his retrospective Trotsky: Memoir and Critique, 1989, p.300. My only quarrel with them is that 'capitulation' is too weak a description of Deutscher's treatment of the monstrosity of Stalin's tyranny.

Consider Deutscher's depiction, in the final volume of his Trotsky trilogy (The Prophet Outcast: 1929-1940) of Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture. The pitiless savagery of Stalin's campaign is a story whose details are difficult to grasp amid the monumental number of the victims. In August 1932 a law drafted by Stalin authorised imprisonment or death for peasants who took even a few sheaves of grain from a field that had been harvested. The policy of 'liquidating the kulak as a class', as Stalin had put it in December 1929, resulted directly in a famine in which more than five million died. (The figure comes from one of the most important books written since the end of the Cold War, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, 2002, p. 99, by Alexander Yakovlev. Yakovlev, who died last October, was a member of the Politbureau under Gorbachev, and dedicated his final years to serving as Chairman of Russia's Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.)

Read Deutscher's account of this monstrous episode, and you find that historical responsibility dissolves in a mass of verbiage, and that collectivisation was essentially a worthwhile end (p. 118):

Thus the impulses and influences that determined the peasantry's behaviour were intricate and contradictory, with the result that fear and faith, horror and hope, despair and reassurance wrestled in the muzhik's thoughts, leaving him unnerved, resentful yet unresisting, and nourishing his grievances in sluggish submission.

We find that the peasants 'took a fiercely insane plunge into dissipation', by which Deutscher means that they incomprehensibly refused to have their goods stolen from them:

The kulak began the carnage [i.e. slaughter of livestock] and incited others to follow suit. Seeing that he had lost all, that he, the nation's provider, was to be robbed of his property, he set out to rob the nation of its food supply; and rather than allow the collectivizers to drive away his cattle to communal assembly stations, he filled his own larders with the carcasses so as to let his enemies starve.

I usually try to avoid the term 'moral equivalence' as a disparaging description of particularly outlandish attempts to diminish the turpitude of a dictator or aggressor, but I can find few more extreme examples of it than Deutscher's attempt to present both the peasantry and their oppressors as culpable - but with the former lacking the essential nobility of the latter:

The smallholder perished [in the ensuing famine] as he had lived, in pathetic helplessness and barbarism; and his final defeat was moral as well as economic and political. But the collectivizers too were morally defeated; and, as we have said, the new system of agriculture was to labour under this defeat in years to come.

I can understand that Tony Blair was recommending Deutscher for political biography rather than acuity, but I certainly don't agree. There are fine critical studies of Bolshevik partisans by writers strongly sympathetic to their subjects' beliefs. I should single out a biography of the novelist Victor Serge by Susan Weisman, also published (in 2001) by Verso, which is an excellent study of a writer whose work ought to be better known. But Deutscher's trilogy about Trotsky is a work I would characterise as falling somewhere between the tendentious and the deplorable. The passage I have just quoted lies in the category of 'disgusting'.

This wasn't an aberrant feature of Deutscher's output, either. The Sovietologist Leopold Labedz published in 1962, before the publication of the last and significant volume of the Trotsky biography, an essay on 'Deutscher as Historian and Prophet' (later included in his book The Use and Abuse of Sovietology, 1989, pp. 33-58), which cites an extraordinary interview with an Italian newspaper, Espresso, from 14 and 21 November 1961. The Italian Communist leader, Pajetta, observed that those who exposed the crimes of Stalin 'have not been very helpful to the revolution', to which Deutscher replied:

I can agree with you on this point. Some years ago I wrote an essay about heretics and renegades directed against those ex-Communists who exploited the truth about Stalinism, or rather part of the truth about Stalinism, to help reaction....

Deutscher went on to say:

We should indeed not forget that European social democracy has a big responsibility for the birth of Stalinism, because by isolating and combating the revolution it contributed to its degeneration.

Of this, Labedz laconically remarks, 'In short, the Socialists first helped Stalinism to emerge, and then the ex-Communists helped reaction by telling the truth about it.'

When Tony Blair's comments on Deutscher were reported last week, the press coverage also noted his recommendation of Flat Stanley, a picture book first published in the 1960s that is a favourite of five-year-old Leo Blair. I'm with Leo on this.