Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Would Communism under Trotsky have been different? As a personality, Trotsky was far more appealing than Stalin. In some ways, this anti-individualist was a true Renaissance man: brilliant orator, tough administrator, incisive historian, spectacular general. But he was also a fanatic and almost as contemptuous of human freedom as Stalin. In power alongside Lenin, he hamstrung trade unions, conscripted labor, suppressed opposition, and drove the Mensheviks from office with words that would in time be used against him: "Go where you belong from now on-to the rubbish can of history...
...Hounded Exile. As this third and last and most dramatic volume of Deutscher's biography opens, Trotsky has finally been ejected from the party by Stalin, and, with his wife Natalya, deported to Princes Islands off the coast of Turkey. There the pair set up house in a dilapidated villa they rented from a bankrupt pasha. Trotsky became friendly with the local fishermen and often went out to sea with them...
...seekers and a few GPU undercover agents flocked to the island. Trotsky plunged into an enormous correspondence with Trotskyites, who formed devoted, quarrelsome little groups in just about every country in the West. Trotsky did his best to unite them and boost their morale. He was genuinely appalled by Stalin's mass slaughter of Russia's peasantry and said so. But he confused his followers by scrupulously refusing to call for Stalin's overthrow and by defending Stalin's incredibly Machiavellian foreign policy-even the invasion of Finland. He was always afraid of a bourgeois restoration...
Eventually Trotsky chafed at his isolation. He applied for visas to other countries. But at the time, Stalin was considered the "moderate" who was content to establish "socialism in one country," while Trotsky was the firebrand who wanted to spread revolution everywhere. Democratic governments were understandably reluctant to extend their hospitality to a man who would advocate their overthrow. Finally, in 1933, France agreed to admit him, provided he did not meddle in French politics. Trotsky complied, but local Stalinists, as well as Nazis, would not let him be. They pressured local authorities to keep him on the move...
Closing In. Back in Russia the monstrous purge trials were under way. One after another, the old Bolsheviks took the stand, confessed monotonously to fantastic plots and implicated Trotsky. The more of them the maniacal Stalin murdered, the more he seemed to fear Trotsky. "The frenzy with which Stalin pursued the feud, making it the paramount preoccupation of international Communism, beggars description," writes Deutscher. "There is in the whole of history hardly another case in which such immense sources of power and propaganda were employed against a single individual...