Volume 1, Number 11 · January 23, 1964
The Great Outsider
By Philip Rahv
The Prophet Outcast
by Isaac Deutscher
Oxford, 543 pp., $9.50
The Basic Writings of Trotsky
edited by Irving Howe
Random House, 427 pp., $5.95
When on August 30, 1940, an agent of Stalin's drove an ice-axe into Trotsky's skull, the news scarcely caused a ripple of interest among intellectuals of the American Left. Except for the small group of Trotskyites—a group even then in the process of dissolution—most of them cared nothing for Trotsky and his ideas. Power is what they respected and Trotsky had none. His unique intellectual genius and his greatness as Marxist leader and strategist of revolution was of no interest to them; nor were they moved by his past achievements as the principal organizer of the October insurrection and victorious commander of the Red Army in the Civil War. They had attached their loyalty to the Soviet Union, and in no sense to Marxism. Insofar as they took Marxism into account at all, it meant merely what, at any given moment, Stalin said it meant.
Review, 2205 words
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