Hot For Trotsky

The new movie The Trotsky, about a Jewish Montreal High School kid who thinks he's the Russian revolutionary reincarnated, sounds like a hoot. But as this article in Slate from a few years back by Clive James reminds us, Trotsky, a fanatical, amoral, mass-murderer, is hardly someone any kid should want to emulate:

After being murdered at Stalin's orders, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism. Trotsky could write and orate, he loved women, and he presented enough of a threat to the established Soviet power structure that it should want to track him down to his hiding place in Mexico and rub him out. It followed, or seemed to follow, that Trotsky must have embodied a more human version of the historic force that sacrificed innocent people to egalitarian principle: a version that would sacrifice fewer of them, in a nicer way. Alas, it followed only if the facts were left out.

It was true that Trotsky, in those romantic early days in Paris, was a more attractive adornment to the cafe than Lenin. In the Rotonde, where Amedeo Modigliani settled his bill with drawings and paintings when he lost at craps, Lenin could at least defend "socialist realism" against Fauvist painter Maurice de Vlaminck, whereas Trotsky couldn't even get a job as an artist's model (too small). But the Russian civil war that turned Trotsky into one of the century's most effective amateur generals also unleashed his capacities as a mass murderer. The sailors at Kronstadt, proclaiming their right to opinions of their own about the Revolution, were massacred on his order. The only thing true about Trotsky's legend as some kind of lyrical humanist was that he was indeed unrealistic enough to think that the secretarial duties could safely be left to Stalin. His intolerance of being bored undid him. But his ideas of excitement went rather beyond making love to Frida Kahlo, and at this distance, there are no excuses left for students who find him inspiring. Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution will always be attractive to the kind of romantic who believes that he is being oppressed by global capitalism when he maxes out his credit card. But the idea was already a dead loss before Trotsky was driven into exile in 1929. He lost the struggle against Stalin not because he was less ruthless but because he was less wily...

Funny how fascist mass-murderers are rightly looked upon with horror, but Communist mass-murderers get put on posters and paintings, and have adoring films made about them.