BOOKS THOUGHTS OF A GREAT REVOLUTIONARY REVEALED IN TROTSKY’S 1935 DIARY

‘IF a communist is musical, if he goes to concerts and theatres, we cannot expect him to sacrifice these pleasures if the situation does not require such a sacrifice.

‘If he is the father of a family and wishes to devote part of his life to his children, although we may ask much of him we cannot demand that he should neglect his children.’

So spoke Trotsky at the fourth congress of the Communst . International, in 1922. This diary* reflects a period in the later life of the great revolutionary when he had all too much occasion to concern himself with his children—who were being persecuted in the Soviet Union—and to seek consolation frém the music he loved.

PROFOUND

This was the latter part of his stay in France and the beginning of his stay in Norway, between February and September 1935.

It was a period of extreme frustration for Trotsky when, under police supervision, hindered and prevented at every turn from direct political activity, he had to watch the passing of the communist movement into a new phase of degeneration, with the people’s front and the Stalin-Laval communiqué.

‘There is something particularly nightmarish in the fact that the oppressed masses searching for a way out are being offered, under the labels of Marxism and Bolshevism, the very ideas in the fight against which Marxism was shaped and Bolshevism developed.’

The diary is full of profound. reflections .en a variety of topics On the beginnings of the ‘purge’ frenzy in“ Russia following the murder of Kirov, the campaign which was to culminate in the notorious Moscow trials of 1936-38:

PROCEDURES ‘Something there is out of order, very much out of order; “disorder” lies somewhere deep within the bureaucracy itself, or more correctly within its ruling stratum; the “amalgam” of dregs and trash is directed against some third element, not (Continued on back page)

* L. D. Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935 (Faber and Faber, 21s.)