isaac deutscher's brief lives

(This article is about 1,400 words long, so will take approx. 5 minutes to read).

I’m about halfway through Isaac Deutscher’s biographical trilogy about the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, recently re-published in one volume by ‘left’ publishing house Verso (I like to promote their occasional 80%-off ‘flash sales’ on social media: fill your boots). 

I say ‘halfway’ – we’re up to the New Economic Policy (1921-2), also Lenin’s gravely ill and may not have the strength and tenacity to make his increasing misgivings about Stalin known within the Politburo and Central Committee of the world’s first Communist state, so things are about to go badly awry for Our Man. 

(Some books take a while to get through, of course; Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals took me three years).

One thing to say in recommendation of Deutscher is that this isn’t jargon-ridden, dry, sectarian or anything of that kind – sure, there’s a certain level of detail, you’d expect that, but he’s alive throughout to the human implications and costs of what he describes, first for the revolutionaries themselves during the long years of underground struggle (Lenin and comrades keeping the show on the road in Edwardian London, dodging secret police and keeping on the right side of English neighbours and landladies rather recalls Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, one of my favourite short novels) and then for them and Russia more generally during the tragic outworkings of war, civil war, famine, industrial collapse and nascent ‘proletarian’ dictatorship. 

More positively, though Deutscher approvingly quotes Carlyle in framing what he intends, I was also reminded of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (perhaps because I haven’t read Carlyle). There’s the same humane irony, the same deft use of footnotes and, above all, the same ability to sketch within single paragraphs entire lives which, while minor in overall world-historical terms (like your life, my life), were nevertheless illustrative of the times and milieux within which they were lived. For instance:

The most original character is this pléiade [involved in the production of Pravda in Swiss exile during World War I] was Adolphe Yoffe. A young, able but neurotic intellectual of Karaite (fn26) origin, Yoffe was sharing his time between academic work, contributions to Pravda, and psychoanalysis. Through Yoffe, Trotsky met Alfred Adler (whose patient Yoffe was), became interested in psychoanalysis, and reached the conclusion that Marx and Freud had more in common than Marxists were prepared to admit (fn27). In Vienna Yoffe struggled desperately with recurrent nervous breakdowns; and the contributions which he produced with painful effort needed much editorial rewriting. Trotsky did his best to befriend him and to boost his self-confidence. In 1917 Yoffe was one of the chief actors in the October insurrection and later in the peace negotiations of Brest Litovsk. (In his private papers Trotsky remarked that the revolution ‘healed Yoffe better than psychoanalysis of all his complexes’.)(fn28). Yoffe was to repay Trotsky’s friendship with boundless devotion, and in 1927 he committed suicide in protest against Trotsky’s expulsion from the Bolshevik party.

(fn26) The Karaites were a sect which abandoned rabbinical Jewry in the middle ages to return to the pure Gospel. 

(fn27) After the revolution Trotsky appealed to Bolshevik scholars to keep an open mind to what was new and revealing in Freud. Sochinenya, vol. xxi, pp. 423-32. 

(fn28) The Trotsky Archives. 

(Isaac Deutscher, incidentally, knew a thing or two about revolutionising one’s own view of the world and form of life, also about lives shadowed by history and tragedy. His own ‘brief life’ – or, if you like, Wikipedia page, I love the twenty-first century, don’t you? - runs as follows: a gifted Talmudic scholar in youth, he tested the question of God’s existence by deliberately eating non-kosher food at the grave of a tzadik on Yom Kippur. When nothing in particular happened, he assumed the null hypothesis. He then escaped the Holocaust quite by chance, as he was in the U.K. as the London correspondent of a Polish newspaper at the outbreak of the Second World War. In later life, he wrote about Jewish identity, socialist internationalism and the political realities of the Middle East, seen in the light of one another).

So why should you read this ‘magisterial’ (humanities jargon) biography of Trotsky now? 

Well: because liberalism and centrism came juddering to a halt on or about 9^th November 2016 (yes, it’s still alive but then there’s also a living Jacobite heir to the British throne, goes by the name of Franz, Duke of Bavaria, nice enough chap); the political terrain we’ll now need to live in and contest comprises climate catastrophe, extinction rebellion, Gotterdamerung capitalism facilitated and enabled by new and sinister forms of highly managed, highly surveilled (and, likely, ‘illiberal’) democracy, and so on and so forth. 

In this new landscape, there’ll likely to be both old (reanimated, repurposed) and new ‘-isms’; in a landscape where the same public figure can claim to be anarchofabulous and ‘literally a communist’ (back in the day, someone in the actual 1920s Comintern would’ve had a word), it’s all up for grabs. A world to win and all that.

(See also - if you haven't yet - Ash Sarkar calling Piers Morgan out on Good Morning Britain for being, as he is, an unpleasant, rude far-right troll rather than any kind of serious journalist). 

Of course, what we all need to do more than ever is learn to distinguish truth from lies – and, because we live embodied lives rather than as ‘brains in jars’, this has to be a broad process of psychological maturation as well as a narrow one of ratiocination and logic. In my late teens, I was fascinated and rather seduced by Marxism (sketchily understood; grasped by reading beginner’s guides and attending occasional meetings the way a moth attends occasional lightbulbs) even as first the “people’s democracies” of Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union itself imploded. Adolescents aren’t known for their groundedness and their realism, of course. 

Trotsky’s words, in Literature and Revolution, particularly thrilled me: 

The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

Wow, what’s not to like about that? Bring it on! 

Except that these kinds of sentiments and promises are, in a sense, unmoored, free-floating, not backed up with hard currency – and I think what’s also more discernible now than then (speaking historically as it’s 2019 rather than 1919, but also personally following two or three decades of actual life experience) is that these kinds of sentiments are more like mysticism and faith arising from the eschatological Judaeo-Christian heresy that Marxism-Leninism arguably was rather than the science that it pretended to be (see also scientism, Karl Popper etc). If this framing of Marxism-Leninism sounds far-fetched, recall that Deutscher entitled the three volumes of his original biographical trilogy ‘The Prophet Armed’, ‘The Prophet Unarmed’ and ‘The Prophet Outcast’; you’ll find the concept of prophecy in the Bible (and in Walter Brueggemann if you also read theology), you won’t find it as such in Marx.

Similarly, you’re perhaps deceiving yourself about point of King Lear, Faust, Capital or whatever if you’re too awe-struck, too genius-rapt: there are geniuses for sure but, as life is lived in its particulars, it’s not a useful foreground concept when reading literature or philosophy. 

There’s a whole character typology (or, better, development stage) that this links to, more benevolent when it comes to humanity in general than to actual persons in particular, which Carl Jung has thought and written brilliantly about, and which Stephen Johnson’s more recent integrative work also covers. This is highly relevant in thinking about Leon Trotsky, the anti-war activist of Zimmerwald who went on to lead the Red Army, the liberationist who fired on the workers at Kronstadt etc etc.

The New Left thinkers of the 1960s – meaning Perry Anderson, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall and the like, with Isaac Deustcher was a kind of patron saint – were also engaged in thinking some of this through, asking themselves questions about how history, culture and identity politics intersect and whether there’s a Marxian humanism worth digging out from under the rubble of vanguardism and Sovietism [see, for example, E.P. Thompson's Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines in the New Reasoner #1, Summer 1957]. 

One wonders how these aren’t urgent questions once again and why their work isn’t flying off the shelves. Perhaps it is (if Corbynism were better, it would be), my bourgeois dilletantism is such that I haven’t even phoned Verso’s offices to ask for updated sales figures. At least I let you know about their flash sales, however: just call me the Martin Lewis of the critically-engaged left.

(See also: Stefan Collini celebrating, in 2010, the 50^th anniversary of the New Left Review, founded in 1960).