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Abstract
This article investigates Isaac Deutscher’s left-wing critics, looking at a wide range of assessments of Deutscher’s biographies of Stalin and Trotsky and of his ideas, especially in respect of the possibilities of élite-led democratisation in the Soviet Union, written from various left-wing positions, including Stalinist, left-wing and right-wing social-democratic, and orthodox and dissident Trotskyist. Both the critiques and Deutscher’s ideas are then assessed in the light of events that have occurred since their publication and of information that has since come into the public domain.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, London: Oxford University Press, 1949. All references to Deutscher’s Stalin are to this edition unless otherwise noted.
2 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921, London: Oxford University Press, 1954; Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929, London: Oxford University Press, 1959; Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929–1940, London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
3 Paul Horecky, ‘Book Reviews’, The Journal of Politics, 16:4, November 1954, p. 755.
4 Max Shachtman, ‘A Critique of Deutscher’s Work on Stalin’, New International, September–October 1950, pp. 293–308; Max Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: I: A Review of Isaac Deutscher: An Analysis of Deutscher’s Biography of Leon Trotsky’, New International, March–April 1954, pp. 67–83; Max Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: II: Deutscher’s Analogy of Two Revolutions’, New International, May–June 1954, pp. 145–158; Max Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: III: The Stalinist Apologetics of Isaac Deutscher’, New International, July–August 1954, pp. 170–183.
5 Shachtman, ‘A Critique of Deutscher’s Work on Stalin’, op. cit., p. 293.
6 Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: I’, op. cit., pp. 67–68.
7 Shachtman, ‘A Critique of Deutscher’s Work on Stalin’, op. cit., p. 296, emphasis in original (all emphases in this essay are original unless otherwise stated).
8 Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: I’, op. cit., pp. 69–70, 83. Tony Cliff wrote that Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy was of ‘a high standard’ with a ‘careful and exhaustive collection of sources and documents’ and ‘majestic style’, but its ‘spirit’ was ‘in complete opposition’ to that of Trotsky: Tony Cliff, Trotsky: Towards October, 1879–1917, London: Bookmarks, 1989, p. 13.
See also George Breitman, ‘Deutscher’s Biography of Stalin’, The Militant, 31 October 1949, p. 3; George Breitman, ‘Why the Soviet Bureaucracy Is in Crisis’, The Militant, 22 June 1953, p. 3; Abe Stein, ‘Isaac Deutscher I: Apologist for Stalinist Totalitarianism? Workers’ Revolt or Kremlin “Democratisation”?’, Labor Action, 10 August 1953, p. 6; Emanuele Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition, Abingdon: Routledge, 2008, pp. 117–118.
9 Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, op. cit., pp. 486–522.
10 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Moscow: FLPH, 1939.
11 Andrew Rothstein, ‘Stalin: A Novel Biography’, Modern Quarterly, 5:2, Spring 1950, p. 100. In a book published a year later, Rothstein viewed the defendants in the Moscow Trials of the late 1930s as ‘a conspiratorial group’ which ‘on behalf of foreign states’ had engaged in ‘espionage, wrecking, sabotage and terrorist activities’: Andrew Rothstein, A History of the USSR, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951, p. 259.
12 Rothstein, ‘Stalin: A Novel Biography’, op. cit., pp. 100–101, citing Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., pp. 367, 568.
13 In particular, Vladimir Lenin, ‘Pages From a Diary’, Collected Works, Volume 33, Moscow: Progress, 1960–65, pp. 462–463.
14 Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., pp. 294, 340–343, 568.
15 Rothstein, ‘Stalin: A Novel Biography’, op. cit., pp. 109, 122–123, citing Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., p. 570.
16 Lawrence and Wishart advertisement, Modern Quarterly, 5:2, Spring 1950, p. 98; Derek Kartun, Tito’s Plot Against Europe, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1949, p. 7.
17 James Klugmann, From Trotsky to Tito, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1951.
18 George Orwell made the accurate observation that ‘it was only after the Soviet regime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it’: George Orwell, James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, London: Socialist Book Centre, 1946, p. 18. It does not augur well for the Maoists’ democratic credentials that they decided to abandon their allegiance to the Soviet Union only after Stalin’s successors had wound up the most repressive aspects of his rule.
19 William Ash, ‘Is Isaac Deutscher a Marxist?’, Progressive Labor, February 1967, pp. 59–63; Isaac Deutscher, ‘The “Culture” Riots — Mao at Bay’, The Nation, 31 October 1966, pp. 442–444; Isaac Deutscher, ‘On Socialist Man’, Marxism in Our Time, Berkeley: Ramparts, 1971, pp. 240–241.
20 Ash, ‘Is Isaac Deutscher a Marxist?’, op. cit., pp. 59–63; Deutscher, ‘The “Culture” Riots’, op. cit., pp. 442–444.
21 Deutscher, ‘The “Culture” Riots’, op. cit., pp. 442–444.
22 Isaac Deutscher, The Cultural Revolution in China, Nottingham: Spokesman, 1969, p. 11.
23 Ash, ‘Is Isaac Deutscher a Marxist?’, op. cit., pp. 59–63; Deutscher, ‘On Socialist Man’, op. cit., pp. 242–243, 247–248.
24 François Bondy, ‘Bolshevists and Biographers’, Socialist Commentary, September 1949, pp. 200–203. The review also covered, in far less detail, Bertram Wolfe, Three Who Made A Revolution: A Biographical History, New York: Dial, 1948; and David Shub, Lenin: A Biography, New York: Doubleday, 1948.
25 Prior to the Second World War, right-wing social-democrats tended to combine strong hostility to Soviet political practice and ideas with careful praise for Soviet economic and welfare policies. The Soviet invasion of Finland in late 1939 saw a sharp shift in their thinking, and they adopted the traditional right-wing anti-communist view which rejected the Soviet experience in toto and viewed the Soviet Union as an inexorable expansionist totalitarian threat to the world. Put in abeyance after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, this outlook returned with a vengeance shortly after hostilities ceased: Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union, 1929–1941, London: Francis Boutle, 2008, pp. 184–198.
26 Bondy, ‘Bolshevists and Biographers’, op. cit., p. 202. Wolfe was a former member of the Communist Party of the USA and the Lovestoneite Communist Party Opposition; Shub had been a right-wing Menshevik. By this time, both were devout anti-communists.
Another renegade from the official Communist movement, Franz Borkenau, made the same point when reviewing Deutscher’s Stalin, declaring that ‘the totalitarian dictatorship is not … a perversion of the Bolshevik revolution, but the inevitable consequence of Leninist theory and practice’: Franz Borkenau, ‘Stalin’s Political Contribution’, Commentary, January 1950, p. 93.
27 Bondy, ‘Bolshevists and Biographers’, op. cit., p. 202.
28 Orwell’s journalism was considerably less pessimistic than his last novel: in 1946 he suggested that the Soviet regime would either ‘democratise itself’ or it would perish, and that slavery was ‘no longer a stable basis for human society’: Orwell, James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, op. cit., p. 19.
29 Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., pp. 568–69.
30 Bondy, ‘Bolshevists and Biographers’, op. cit., p. 200. Borkenau echoed Bondy here, emphasising that ‘terror … is the all-embracing law of the Stalinist regime … , it cannot live without fresh blood and fresh enemies’: Borkenau, ‘Stalin’s Political Contribution’, op. cit., p. 97. The English translation politely omitted the hysterical final parts of the original version of Borkenau’s review, which not only dismissed Deutscher’s consideration that Stalinist terror mainly belonged to the past, but felt the Soviet regime could be one only ‘of terror without end, of hostility towards everything human, of horrors that carry no remedy and which can be cured only ferro et igni’: Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, pp. xii–xiii; Franz Borkenau, ‘Stalin im Schafspelz’, Der Monat, no. 14, 1949, p. 210. I thank Mike Jones for translating the German text.
31 For Cold War attitudes to Stalinism in Britain, see Paul Flewers, ‘The Unexpected Denunciation: The Reception of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in Britain’, Critique, 47:2, 2019, pp. 289–329.
32 Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., pp. 173–176.
33 Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, op. cit., pp. 486–522; Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, pp. 1–74.
34 Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: I’, op. cit., pp. 73, 76; Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: III’, op. cit., 176–177.
35 Tony Cliff, ‘The End of the Road: Deutscher’s Capitulation to Stalinism’, International Socialism, no. 15, Winter 1963–64, pp. 16–17.
36 Cliff, ‘The End of the Road’, op. cit., p. 20.
37 Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: I’, op. cit., pp. 76–77. Even those less ill-disposed towards Deutscher could share this viewpoint to some degree. The US Trotskyist Joseph Hansen stated that Deutscher saw ‘the crushing of democracy in the Soviet Union, regrettable as it may have been’, as ‘historically inevitable and even, in a certain sense, progressive’, for it permitted the economic development that he felt would underpin any future democratisation: Joseph Hansen, ‘Proposed Roads to Soviet Democracy’, International Socialist Review, Spring 1958, p. 47, my emphasis.
38 Having stated this, there is a qualification in respect of the coercion that accompanied the First Five-Year Plan and especially the collectivisation of agriculture, that Deutscher implied that once it was embarked upon, Stalin’s violent course could not be reversed without endangering the progress of the plan: Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, pp. 110–120. That implication apart, it is fair to consider that Deutscher saw the crushing of democracy under Stalinism as entirely retrogressive; indeed, he wrote that ‘as regards methods of government and political action, ideas and “moral climate”, the legacy of the Stalin era is worse than empty’: Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., p. ix.
39 Marcel Liebman, ‘Deutscher’s Biography of Trotsky’, Monthly Review Supplement, 1965, pp. 66–68. Deutscher’s treatment of this matter is covered in Paul Flewers, ‘The Prophet: Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky Trilogy’, Critique, 46:4, 2018, pp. 593–600.
40 Liebman declared: ‘All this sufficiently indicates how artificial is the contrast, often drawn, between the “proletarian democracy” which Russia is supposed to have experienced from 1917 to 1923–24, and the “Bonapartist and bureaucratic dictatorship” of the later years.’ — Liebman, ‘Deutscher’s Biography of Trotsky’, op. cit., p. 67. This, however, was an overstatement: there was considerable democratic debate within the Soviet Communist Party prior to 1923–24, compared to when Stalin’s faction had taken control.
41 Mike Jones and Alistair Mitchell, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, New Interventions, Summer 2011, p. 12. Jones and Mitchell’s claim that Lenin’s insistence upon a ‘centralised, hierarchical and disciplined party’ was ‘to ensure that the mass of party members follow the lead of this intelligentsia and are not led astray by other forces or views’ is a non sequitur. Lenin always insisted upon the vital need for a well-organised party, but this was in order to deal with the rigours of working within Tsarist Russia. Lenin did not consider that the working class needed to be endlessly shepherded by intellectuals. True, he felt, following Kautsky, that the ideas of socialism did not necessarily spontaneously arise in the working class through workers engaging in industrial action, and that such ideas needed to be brought into the working class. But he was confident that once won over to the ideas of socialism, workers would enthusiastically support them, join the socialist movement and play an increasingly important part within it. See Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is To Be Done’ in Context, Chicago: Haymarket, 2008.
42 Joseph Hansen, ‘Deutscher’s Life of Leon Trotsky’, International Socialist Review, Winter 1960, pp. 24–26.
43 Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., pp. 12–13.
44 Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., pp. 12–13.
45 Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, op. cit., pp. 90–96; Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., p. 12.
46 We have seen that Deutscher did feel that the Bolsheviks’ consideration of their organisation as a vanguard party played a part in this process: nonetheless, this became a negative factor only when objective conditions during the Civil War brought it into play; in short, this was a secondary factor in the Bolsheviks’ ascendancy above the working class: a symptom rather than a cause.
47 Hansen’s colleague George Breitman remarked that ‘the Bolshevik party did not degenerate after the revolution because Lenin had moulded it into a highly disciplined organisation … but because the revolution, instead of being extended from Russia to the more industrially developed countries of Europe, was defeated in the years after World War I … and confined to an economically and cultural weak and backward country’: George Breitman, ‘A Slick Distortion About Trotsky and Lenin’, The Militant, 5 April 1954, p. 2.
To be sure, the Soviet Communist Party became increasingly bureaucratised once the Bolsheviks’ hopes in a European revolution faded after the failure of the German Communist Party to seize power in 1923, but, unlike Breitman, Deutscher recognised that the process of bureaucratisation was already underway by that point.
48 Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., pp. 12–15.
49 Victor Serge, ‘A Letter and Some Notes’, New International, February 1939, p. 54.
50 Hal Draper, The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ from Marx to Lenin, New York: Monthly Review, 1987, pp. 80–105.
51 Ernest Mandel, Trotsky as Alternative, London: Verso, 1995, p. 133. Elsewhere, Mandel noted that Deutscher pointed out the dire consequences of the ban on factions in the Soviet Communist Party: Ernest Mandel, ‘Understanding Trotsky’, Socialist Outlook, no. 17, Summer 1989, p. 16.
52 Monty Johnstone, ‘The Ideas of Trotsky’, Cogito, no. 5, 1968, reproduced in Ted Grant and Alan Woods, Lenin and Trotsky: What They Stood For, London: Wellred, 2000, pp. 155–183.
53 Grant and Woods, Lenin and Trotsky, op. cit., pp. 98–101.
It is noteworthy that Cliff, one of Deutscher’s harshest left-wing critics, described the Bolsheviks’ ascendancy above the proletariat and condemned Trotsky’s justification for the militarisation of labour in terms quite reminiscent of Deutscher, albeit without actually mentioning him: Tony Cliff, Trotsky: The Sword of the Revolution, 1917–1923, London: Bookmarks, 1990, pp. 152–156, 164–168. Two of Cliff’s comrades made similar assessments of Trotsky’s dubious role; see Duncan Hallas, Trotsky’s Marxism, London: Pluto, 1979, pp. 32–33; John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution, Brighton: Harvester, 1981, pp. 71–82.
54 George Clarke, ‘A Monument To Trotsky’, American Socialist, April–May 1954, p. 29.
55 Michel Raptis, ‘Isaac Deutscher and Soviet Democracy’, in Socialism, Democracy and Self-Management, London: Allison and Busby, 1980, pp. 86–93; Paul Willen, ‘Leon Trotsky: Permanent Revolutionist’, The Reporter, 30 March 1954, p. 37. We shall meet Raptis below, under his Trotskyist cadre-name Pablo.
56 Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, op. cit., pp. 256–257, 449, 473.
57 Including one of his last articles: Leon Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism, Fascism and War’, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939–1940), New York: Pathfinder, 1977, p. 418.
58 For example, Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923, London: Bookmarks, 1982, pp. 264–302; Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1918–1923, Leiden: Brill, 2005, pp. 709–731, 839–849; Rob Sewell, Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London: Wellred, 2018, pp. 239–291.
59 For example, Walter Held, ‘Why the German Revolution Failed’, Fourth International, December 1942, pp. 377–382, January 1943, pp. 21–26; International Communist League, ‘A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern’, Spartacist, no. 56, Spring 2001, pp. 4–25.
60 For example, CLR James, World Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, London: Secker and Warburg, 1937, p. 187; Robert Black, Fascism in Germany, Volume 1, London: Steyne, 1975, p. 424; Ted Grant, ‘A Reply to Comrade Clifford’, The Unbroken Thread, London: Fortress, 1989, p. 94; Mandel, Trotsky as Alternative, op. cit., p. 39; David North, ‘The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners’, in The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, Oak Park: Mehring, 2014, p. 294.
61 Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: III’, op. cit., p. 173.
62 George Breitman, ‘Deutscher Worthless as Guide to Action’, The Militant, 12 April 1954, p. 2.
63 Grant and Woods, Lenin and Trotsky, op. cit., p. 127.
64 Jones and Mitchell, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 15.
65 Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, London: Folrose, 1976, p. 36.
66 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, London: Faber and Faber, 1937, pp. 15–16.
67 Shachtman, ‘A Critique of Deutscher’s Work on Stalin’, op. cit., p. 300.
68 Shachtman, ‘A Critique of Deutscher’s Work on Stalin’, op. cit., p. 303. Irving Howe broke from Shachtman to found Dissent, but nonetheless maintained his mentor’s argument:
Nothing can be more misleading than the analogy which so occupies Isaac Deutscher, the analogy between the bourgeois and socialist revolutions. Bourgeois society could develop without the direct political rule of the bourgeoisie; socialism cannot develop without the democratic rule of the workers or, if you will, the people. Much could be done for the bourgeois, everything must be done by the socialist working class. — Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, ‘Authoritarians of the Left’, in Irving Howe, Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism 1953–1966, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966, p. 306.
69 Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: II’, op. cit., p. 156.
70 Julius Jacobson, ‘The Anatomy of an Apologist: Isaac Deutscher as Theoretician’, New Politics, Spring 1966, pp. 50–51.
71 For example, Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, London: Pluto Press, 1974.
72 Shachtman, ‘A Critique of Deutscher’s Work on Stalin’, op. cit., pp. 303–304.
73 Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Tragedy of a Tragedian: An Appreciation of Isaac Deutscher’, International Socialism, no. 31, Winter 1967–68, p. 14.
74 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., p. 309.
75 Shachtman, ‘A Critique of Deutscher’s Work on Stalin’, op. cit., p. 296; Shachtman, ‘The End of Socialism: II’, op. cit., p. 152. Shachtman teetered on the brink of accusing Trotsky of capitulating theoretically to Stalinism. He thundered that socialists who adopted Trotsky’s theory would ‘capitulate theoretically to Stalinism, which consistency would demand be extended to a political capitulation’, and that Deutscher’s ‘adoption and adaptation’ of Trotsky’s theory led him into ‘downright apologetics for the new tyranny’, yet, despite the fact that the basis of Trotsky’s new outlook ‘was to be found in the doctrines of Stalinism’, he drew short, no doubt in deference to good taste, of charging Trotsky with the accusations he happily levelled at Deutscher and other like-minded socialists: Shachtman, ‘A Critique of Deutscher’s Work on Stalin’, op. cit., p. 304.
76 Breitman, ‘Deutscher’s Biography of Stalin’, op. cit., p. 3, citing Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., p. 294. A decade later, his comrade Sam Gordon claimed that Deutscher failed to ‘appreciate adequately … that the progressive side of the accomplishments of the Stalin era was a by-product of the Russian revolution in its Leninist (that is, internationalist) phase and of the defence of its concepts by Trotsky and the Opposition in the ensuing period’: Sam Gordon, ‘Restoring Trotsky’s Place in History’, Labour Review, June–July 1960, p. 66.
77 James Cannon, ‘Trotsky or Deutscher? On the New Revisionism and Its Theoretical Source’, Fourth International, Winter 1954, p. 11. Elsewhere Cannon said: ‘Despite Stalinism, isolated, backward peasant Russia, thanks to the revolution that gave it birth, has become the second industrial power in the world.’ — James Cannon, ‘Death of the Stalin Cult’, in The Twentieth Congress (CPSU) and World Trotskyism, London: New Park, 1957, p. 20.
78 ‘The New Stage of the Russian Revolution and the Crisis of Stalinism’, in The Twentieth Congress (CPSU) and World Trotskyism, London: New Park, 1957, p. 33.
79 David North, The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International, Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988, p. 477.
80 Robert Black [Robin Blick], ‘The Ironies of Isaac Deutscher’, Fourth International, April 1967, pp. 27–28.
81 Mandel, ‘Understanding Trotsky’, op. cit., p. 15. Grant also condemned Deutscher’s ‘attempts to glorify Stalin’s role’: Ted Grant, Russia: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London: Wellred, 1997, p. 330.
82 Leon Trotsky, ‘From a Scratch to the Danger of Gangrene’, In Defence of Marxism, London: New Park, 1975, p. 164.
Deutscher correctly noted that when arguing against Shachtman, he ‘tacitly revised the notion about the “wholly counter-revolutionary character” of Stalin’s foreign policy’: Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., p. 470. A few months previously, Trotsky’s emphasis was quite different:
The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organisation of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, wholly retain their reactionary character and remain the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution. — Leon Trotsky, ‘The USSR in War’, In Defence of Marxism, London: New Park, 1975, p. 23.
83 Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., pp. 552–555; see also Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., pp. 513ff.
84 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., p. 520. Sedgwick stated that ‘all expansion of Russian borders and Moscow influence represented the extension of collectivist (and hence revolutionary) hegemony: Deutscher therefore regarded the installation of Stalin’s banana republics in the Balkans after 1945 as yet another vindication of “Permanent Revolution”’: Sedgwick, ‘The Tragedy of a Tragedian’, op. cit., p. 14.
85 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., pp. 514–518; Deutscher, Stalin (1966 edition), op. cit., p. 556.
86 Cliff, ‘The End of the Road’, op. cit., p. 17.
87 Leon Trotsky, ‘The Founding of the Fourth International’, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938–1939), New York: Pathfinder, 1974, p. 87.
88 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., pp. 210–212. This gives some credence to Eric Hobsbawm’s assertion that Deutscher told him that he had always regretted leaving the official Communist movement: Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, London: Allen Lane, 2002, p. 202.
89 Michel Pablo, ‘Where Are We Going?’, International Information Bulletin, New York: Socialist Workers Party, March 1951, pp. 1–18.
90 ‘Orientation and Perspectives’, Fourth International, November–December 1951, pp. 184, 186.
91 Michel Pablo, ‘The Building of a Revolutionary Party’, International Information Bulletin, New York: Socialist Workers Party, June 1952, pp. 15–23.
92 Isaac Deutscher, Russia After Stalin, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953, pp. 53–73, 96, 163–165, 170–174, 221.
93 Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, London: Heinemann, 1952, pp. 138–140. Cliff pointed out sardonically that an élite-led process of democratisation in the Soviet Union had previously been predicted by the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer — just before the Moscow Trials: Cliff, ‘The End of the Road’, op. cit., pp. 10–11.
94 For the prevailing attitudes towards the Soviet Union amongst left-wing Labour Party currents, see John Callaghan, ‘The Left and the “Unfinished Revolution”: Bevanites and Soviet Russia in the 1950s’, Contemporary British History, 15:3, September 2001, pp. 63–82.
Deutscher was subsequently a great influence upon the contributors to the New Left Review; see in particular Perry Anderson, ‘Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism’, New Left Review, no. 139, May–June 1980, pp. 49–54. Pace Neil Davidson’s contention that ‘Deutscherism reached its maximum influence’ during 1975–89, I consider that its high-point was during the 1950s and 1960s: Neil Davidson, ‘Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet, His Biographer and the Watchtower’, Holding Fast to an Image of the Past, Chicago: Haymarket, 2004, pp. 102–108.
95 George Breitman, ‘How Stalinism Will Be Ended’, The Militant, 29 June 1953, p. 3; Cannon, ‘Trotsky or Deutscher?’, op. cit., p. 13. In the early 1930s, Trotsky was calling for militants within the Soviet Communist Party to remove in a constitutional manner the current party leadership; he was not expecting the bureaucracy to reform itself and democratise the political process: Leon Trotsky, ‘Problems of the Development of the USSR’, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1930–1931), New York: Pathfinder, 1973, pp. 225–226.
96 Breitman, ‘How Stalinism Will Be Ended’, op. cit., p. 3.
97 Tom Mercer, ‘The Fall of Beria’, Labour Review, January–February 1954, pp. 26–27.
98 Paul Willen, ‘Will Stalinism Now Reform?’, Commentary, January 1954, p. 96.
99 Michael Harrington, ‘Russia: What Next?’, The Anvil, Fall 1953, pp. 26–28, citing Isaac Deutscher, Russia: What Next?, New York: Oxford University Press, 1953; Deutscher, Russia: What Next?, op. cit., p. 208. Breitman recognised that the reforms were ‘designed not to weaken the dictatorship but to strengthen it’, to ‘secure a broader base of support or tolerance than it did under Stalin’ and ‘to consolidate its position’: Breitman, ‘How Stalinism Will Be Ended’, op. cit., p. 3.
100 Lewis Coser, ‘But On Other Terms … ’, Dissent, Summer 1954, pp. 235–236.
101 Isaac Deutscher, ‘A Reply To Critics’ and ‘Post-Stalinist Ferment of Ideas’, Heretics and Renegades, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955, pp. 202–204, 216–217; Isaac Deutscher, ‘Russia in Transition’, Dissent, Winter 1955, pp. 23–39.
Even after Deutscher had elaborated upon what he had originally written about the relationship of modernisation and the possibilities of reform, Hansen would insist that he regarded ‘the rise and decline of Stalinism as an automatic economic process, directly and wholly linked to the development of Soviet industrial capacity’: Hansen, ‘Proposed Roads to Soviet Democracy’, op. cit., p. 47.
102 If at first glance paradoxically, this also enables us to comprehend why Deutscher was willing and able far more deeply than many of his left-wing critics, and especially many Trotskyists, to investigate the problematic features of Bolshevism in power. If, as he believed, the fate of the revolution was more a case of its being deferred than betrayed, then there was less need for him to counterpose a pristine Bolshevism to a degenerate Stalinism, and less of a need to draw a discreet veil over the Bolsheviks’ questionable actions and ideas that inadvertently assisted the subsequent rise of Stalinism, on the grounds that the consequences of these negative factors could be and indeed were being overcome in the post-Stalin era.
103 John Callaghan’s account of the left in Britain stated that Deutscher was an influence upon Pablo, the ‘Pabloite’ faction led by John Lawrence in the British Trotskyist group, and the Cochran–Clarke group in the USA: John Callaghan, The Far Left in British Politics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, p. 68.
104 ‘Against Pabloist Revisionism’, Fourth International, September–October 1953, pp. 4–7.
105 James Cannon, ‘Letter to Daniel Renard’, International Committee Documents 1951–54, Volume 1, New York: Socialist Workers Party, 1974, pp. 23–25.
106 George Clarke, ‘Stalin’s Role, Stalinism’s Future’, Fourth International, January–February 1953, pp. 8, 13.
107 Morris Stein, ‘Letter from M Stein’, Fourth International, March–April 1953, pp. 57–58.
108 George Clarke, ‘Reply by George Clarke’ and ‘Shake-Up in the Kremlin’, Fourth International, March–April 1953, pp. 58–61.
109 ‘Against Pabloist Revisionism’, op. cit., pp. 98–112.
110 Those expelled from the SWP formed the American Socialist Union; it was asked by the International Secretariat to be its US section, but it declined.
The wing of the Fourth International led by Pablo then adopted the name of the International Secretariat; up to the split this was merely the name of the Fourth International’s leading committee, with no factional connotations.
111 ‘A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World’, International Committee Documents 1951–54, Volume 3, New York: Socialist Workers Party, 1974, pp. 132–137.
112 George Breitman, ‘Why the Soviet Bureaucracy Is in Crisis’, op. cit., p. 3; Breitman, ‘How Stalinism Will Be Ended’, op. cit., p. 3.
113 Cannon, ‘Trotsky or Deutscher?’, op. cit., pp. 10–11. Trotskyists in Britain had been writing to the SWP about Deutscher’s supposed influence from at least as early as the previous August: Sam Gordon to SWP Friends, 23 August 1953; Gerry Healy to James Cannon, 7 September 1953, in Cliff Slaughter (ed), Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume 1, London: New Park, 1974, pp. 238–241, 267. So why the public reticence?
114 Cannon, ‘Trotsky or Deutscher?’, op. cit., pp. 10–11, 14. There is also in the sheer fury of Cannon’s attack upon Deutscher a sense of his realising that had Deutscher’s concept of élite-led democratisation of Stalinist countries actually to come to fruition, and had Pablo’s line been successfully implemented, then this would have put the raison d’être of the Fourth International seriously into question. As Cannon wrote, Pablo’s ideas ‘would undermine its historical function as an independent political movement, convert it into a left cover of Stalinism, and prepare its liquidation’: Cannon, ‘Trotsky or Deutscher?’, op. cit., p. 16. From being the revolutionary leadership in waiting, the Trotskyists would suffer the indignity of being relegated to a mere ginger group, with a task that at the most would amount to pushing the Stalinist parties leftwards or keeping them to their word.
115 Cannon, ‘Trotsky or Deutscher?’, op. cit., pp. 10–11, 15. Breitman happily repeated a particularly nasty insinuation from the Ceylonese Trotskyist paper Samasamajist, in respect of Deutscher’s writings on Stalinist ‘revolutionary conquest’: ‘That’s the theme that will pay well. The Stalinists will not mind that. Nor will the imperialists — it helps their war plans. Deutscher gets publicity (and cash).’ — George Breitman, ‘Distortions on Bolshevism and Stalinism’, The Militant, 19 April 1954, p. 2.
116 Peng Shu-Tsi, ‘Pabloism Reviewed: From Pablo to Cochran, Clarke, and Mestre’, in Cliff Slaughter (ed), Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume 2, London: New Park, 1974, pp. 201–202, citing Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., pp. 552–555; Pablo, ‘Where Are We Going?’, op. cit., p. 13; Deutscher, Russia: What Next?, op. cit. Isaac Deutscher, Russia: What Next?, New York: Oxford University Press, 1953, pp. 208–209; Michel Pablo, ‘The Post-Stalin “New Course”’, Fourth International, March–April 1953, pp. 35–39; Cannon, ‘Trotsky or Deutscher?’, op. cit., p. 15. ‘Burns’ was a cadre-name used by Gerry Healy.
117 Hansen, ‘Deutscher on Trotsky’, International Socialist Review, Winter 1964, p. 13. Hansen admitted that ‘some harsh and even unjustified things were said of Deutscher’: Hansen, ‘Deutscher on Trotsky’, op. cit., p. 13. Gordon also subsequently apologised:
Insofar as the present writer was involved, although only in private correspondence quoted by Cannon, in these unjustified remarks, a personal apology and explanation is in order. I was not acquainted with Deutscher at the time and knew little about him beyond what appeared in print and what others in England related to me [that is, gossip — PF] … Later on, particularly after 1956, I had occasion to recognise that I erred … It was then obvious to me that I had done him an injustice. — Sam Gordon, ‘Deutscher’s View of the Trotskyists: I’, World Outlook, 17 April 1964, p. 27.
118 Ernest Tate, Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s: A Memoir, Volume 2, London: Resistance Books, 2014, pp. 154, 162.
119 For example, Gordon, ‘Deutscher’s View of the Trotskyists: I’, op. cit., pp. 25–29; Sam Gordon, ‘Deutscher’s View of the Trotskyists: II’, World Outlook, 24 April 1964, pp. 32–37; Pierre Frank, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, World Outlook, 8 September 1967, pp. 755–756; Tariq Ali, ‘A Tribute to Isaac Deutscher’, Socialist Challenge, 11 August 1977, p 13; Ernest Mandel, ‘Mandel on Deutscher’, Socialist Challenge, 1 September 1977, p. 14; Ken Tarbuck, ‘Ten Years Without Deutscher’, International, Autumn 1977, pp. 41–46.
120 Gerry Healy to James Cannon, 7 September 1953, in Slaughter (ed), Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume 1, op. cit., p. 267. We have already seen how Cannon had publicly broadcast the scurrilous personal remarks about Deutscher that Gordon had made in a letter of August 1953.
The British Section of the International Committee, led by Healy, had a shadowy existence until it emerged in 1959 as the Socialist Labour League; in 1974 it became the Workers Revolutionary Party.
121 Bill Hunter, ‘Under a Stolen Flag’, in Cliff Slaughter (ed), Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume 3, London: New Park 1974, pp. 3–5, 8.
122 Sam Gordon, ‘Restoring Trotsky’s Place in History’, op. cit., pp. 64–69; Brian Pearce, ‘Russia’s World Policy’, Labour Review, October–November 1960, p. 99; HS, ‘Inevitability’, Labour Review, Summer 1962, pp. 61–62.
123 Isaac Deutscher, ‘The Irony of History in Stalinism’, Labour Review, December 1958, pp. 132–134; Isaac Deutscher, ‘Pasternak and the Calendar of the Revolution’, Labour Review, Spring 1961, pp. 11–16, 25–28.
This appreciative public stance was to be conveniently forgotten once the Healyites were to turn against Deutscher: both Robert Black and Cyril Smith sharply attacked his review of E H Carr’s Socialism in One Country, but forgot to state that it had appeared, without the slightest editorial demurral, in the group’s theoretical journal: Deutscher, ‘The Irony of History in Stalinism’, op. cit., pp. 132–134; Black, ‘The Ironies of Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 20; Cyril Smith, ‘The Practice and Theory of Isaac Deutscher’, Labour Review, November 1977, p. 335.
124 Tate, Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s, op. cit., p. 162.
125 Black, ‘The Ironies of Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., pp. 18–20.
126 Smith, ‘The Practice and Theory of Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 325. This was not surprising: ‘After the publication of his Stalin in 1949, Deutscher’s position was utilised by Michel Pablo and his assistant Mandel in their wholesale revision of Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism.’ — Smith, ‘The Practice and Theory of Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 338.
127 North, The Heritage We Defend, op. cit., pp. 216, 456.
128 Deutscher, Russia After Stalin, op. cit., p. 168.
129 Cited in Abe Stein, ‘Isaac Deutscher II: Apologist for Stalinist Totalitarianism? Workers’ Revolt or Kremlin “Democratisation”?’, Labor Action, 17 August 1953, p. 6.
130 Isaac Deutscher, ‘Russia in Transition’, Universities and Left Review, 1:1, Spring 1957, pp. 10–11.
131 Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., p. 462.
132 Despite Hansen’s remark that those expelled from the SWP in 1953 had ‘capitulated to Stalinism’, the ASU viewed the Hungarian Uprising in a very positive light. Harry Braverman wrote in its magazine that the final stage of the uprising, based on workers’ councils, ‘bore the greatest promise for the future of socialism in Eastern Europe’, did not ‘fit readily into Deutscher’s scheme of pro- and anti-communism’, and ‘hinted at the birth of new forms of socialism’: Hansen, ‘Deutscher on Trotsky’, op. cit., p. 13; Harry Braverman, ‘Fissures in the Prison Walls’, American Socialist, January 1958, p. 21.
133 For example, Cliff, ‘The End of the Road’, op. cit., p. 19; Julius Jacobson, ‘Isaac Deutscher: The Anatomy of an Apologist’, New Politics, Fall 1964, pp. 99–103; Jacobson, ‘The Anatomy of an Apologist’, op. cit., pp. 77–78; Black, ‘The Ironies of Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., pp. 30–31; Davidson, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 97.
134 Howe and Coser, ‘Authoritarians of the Left’, op. cit., p. 297.
135 Irving Howe, ‘Isaac Deutscher: Freedom and the Ash-Can of History’, Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism 1953–1966, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966, p. 177.
136 Deutscher, ‘Pasternak and the Calendar of the Revolution’, op. cit., pp. 11–16, 25–28; Howe, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 178.
137 Irving Howe, Trotsky, London: Fontana, 1978, p. 173, citing Leon Trotsky, ‘The USSR in War’, In Defence of Marxism, London: New Park, 1975, p. 11; Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., pp. 468–469.
138 Black, ‘The Ironies of Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 25. See also ‘The New Stage of the Russian Revolution and the Crisis of Stalinism’, op. cit., p. 33; Chris Harman, ‘Success and Failure’, International Socialism, no. 31, Winter 1967–68, p. 37; Grant, Russia, op. cit., p. 332.
139 Hansen wrote that ‘many members of Communist parties, shaken by the events, began reading forbidden literature’ and although still wary of Trotsky’s works, came across Deutscher’s writings: ‘Having begun dipping into Trotskyism in this way, they thirsted for more. Through Deutscher, some of them eventually found their way to Trotskyism. Deutscher’s position under these circumstances proved to be a bridge from Stalinism to Trotskyism.’ — Hansen, ‘Deutscher on Trotsky’, op. cit., p. 13.
140 Reviewing in 1960 the second volume of Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Christopher Hill, who had left the CPGB in 1957, wrote that the first volume ‘was very nearly perfect as a biography’: Christopher Hill, ‘Book Reviews’, Soviet Studies, 11:3, January 1960, p. 317. Notwithstanding the impact of the ‘Secret Speech’, it is highly unlikely that he would have written that had he remained a party member!
141 Jon Bloomfield, ‘A Caricature of Marxism’, Marxism Today, June 1975, p. 179; Mark Harrison, ‘Socialist Democracy: Some Problems’, Marxism Today, June 1976, p. 198.
142 Johnstone, ‘The Ideas of Trotsky’, op. cit., pp. 166–167. Johnstone later considered Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy to be ‘invaluable’: Monty Johnstone, ‘Trotsky and the Popular Front’, Marxism Today, November 1975, p. 349.
143 Monty Johnstone, ‘Back in the USSR: The Past Catches Up’, Marxism Today, March 1985, pp. 13, 17. Somewhat surprisingly, a member of the staunchly anti-Stalinist Independent Labour Party considered that Deutscher’s prognoses from the 1950s ‘might be becoming a political reality’ with Gorbachev’s reforms: John Wilson, ‘Isaac Deutscher: A Reappraisal’, ILP News and Views, November 1987, p. 5.
144 See in particular Isaac Deutscher, ‘The Failure of Khrushchevism’, The Socialist Register, London: Merlin, 1965, pp. 11–29.
145 Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., p. viii; Cliff, ‘The End of the Road’, op. cit., pp. 15–16. See also Jacobson, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., pp. 107–110.
146 Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., p. viii.
147 Isaac Deutscher, ‘Khrushchev, Mao and Stalin’s Ghost’, The Reporter, 19 February 1959, p. 14.
148 William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, London: Simon and Schuster, 2003, p. 322.
149 Jacobson, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, pp. 104–105.
150 The lower estimate is in J Arch Getty, et al, ‘Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Prewar Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence’, The American Historical Review, 98:4, October 1993, p. 1040; the higher figure is in Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998, p. 329.
151 Irving Howe, ‘Why Stalin Needs Slaves: Forced Labor Under Bureaucratic Collectivism’, New International, December 1947, pp. 264–268.
152 Stein, ‘Isaac Deutscher I’, op. cit., p. 6.
153 Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., p. 343.
154 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., pp. 110–120.
155 Deutscher, Stalin, op. cit., p. 256. We have already seen that he considered that ‘as regards methods of government and political action, ideas and “moral climate”, the legacy of the Stalin era is worse than empty’: Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., p. ix.
156 Reviewing the third volume of Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Shachtman cited Deutscher’s assertion that the Terror ‘prevented the managerial groups from consolidating as a social stratum’, and concluded: ‘So, during the universalised massacre in Russia, Stalin saved it from … capitalism! Deutscher must have an irrepressible strain of cheerfulness in him. Some people find a silver lining in every cloud. Deutscher can find one even in the hecatombs of Stalin.’ — Max Shachtman, ‘Personal and Political Dimensions’, Dissent, Summer 1964, p. 362, citing Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., p. 306. It takes quite a bit of imagination to detect any sense that Deutscher drew any satisfaction from Stalin’s Terror. Drawing unwarranted conclusions about Deutscher seems to have been an irresistible temptation for the bureaucratic collectivist school.
157 Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1993, p. 178; Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941, New York: Norton, 1994, pp. 272–296; Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery, New York: Hill and Wang, 1999, p. 267.
158 Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Henchmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him, London: Random House, 2004, p. 240; Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting For Hitler, 1929–1941, New York: Penguin, 2017, p. 338; Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography, London: Macmillan, 2004, p. 315. It should be noted that in the final edition of his Stalin, Deutscher revised his thinking in respect of the assassination. Following the passage in the original edition that stated that Kirov’s guards had known in advance about the Nikolayev’s intentions but had done nothing to prevent it, he added: ‘Had Stalin also known about it and connived? Nothing is certain; but he used Kirov’s death to justify his conclusion that the time for quasi-liberal concessions was over.’ — Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 355. Deutscher’s second thoughts therefore coincide with several contemporary mainstream accounts.
159 Deutscher, Russia: What Next?, op. cit., p. 70.
160 Isaac Deutscher, The Great Contest: Russia and the West, London: Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 80.
161 Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967, London: Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 37.
162 Thomas Balogh, ‘The Political Economy of the Cold War’, in T E M McKitterick and Kenneth Younger (eds), Fabian International Essays, London: Hogarth, 1957, p. 47.
163 Tom Kemp, ‘The Giant Strides of Russia’s Planned Industry’, Newsletter, 7 November 1957, pp. 211–212.
164 Ernest Mandel, ‘The USSR From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Congress of the CPSU’, Fourth International, Winter 1959, p. 18.
165 Peter Wiles, ‘Economic Growth’, Survey, no. 47, April 1963, p. 82.
166 This is discussed in Flewers, The New Civilisation?, op. cit., pp. 75–79.
167 Paul Willen, ‘What Manner of Change in Russia?’, Dissent, Winter 1955, p. 73, citing Deutscher, ‘A Reply To Critics’, op. cit., p. 197. A similar point was made by the US Trotskyist John G Wright, who questioned Deutscher and others who accepted ‘uncritically and unthinkingly the Kremlin’s statistics’ and its ‘quantitative approach to Soviet industrial growth’:
Bureaucratic rule and management is expressed in the low coefficient of effective use of machinery. It is evidently lowest in Soviet agriculture, where two-thirds of the machinery, by official admission, remained idle, failed to fulfil daily shift-quotas … Soviet labour productivity lags sadly behind ‘comparable levels’ of the more developed countries, with the lag, again, most acute in agriculture. Stalinist rule is expressed in the aggravation of another key problem of production — quality. — John G Wright, ‘The Soviet Union Under Malenkov’, Fourth International, Winter 1954, p. 25.
168 Cliff, ‘The End of the Road’, op. cit., pp. 13–14.
169 Alec Nove, ‘Economic Growth’, Survey, no. 47, April 1963, pp. 76–77.
170 Isaac Deutscher, ‘What Can Ex-Communists Do?’, The Reporter, 25 April 1950, p. 8.
171 Cliff, ‘The End of the Road’, op. cit., p. 20. The Indian Trotskyist Kunal Chattopadhyay wrote: ‘Thus, Deutscher categorically gives up the option of a proletarian anti-Stalinist struggle.’ — Kunal Chattopadhyay, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, Kolkata: Progressive, 2006, p. 552.
172 Sedgwick, ‘The Tragedy of a Tragedian’, op. cit., p. 11. Ken Tarbuck, a former member of Cliff’s group, agreed: ‘He not only manned the “watch-tower” — as he modestly put it — but he also helped to keep alight the torch of Marxist scholarship in a world that seemed to be all but totally dominated by imperialism and Stalinism.’ — Tarbuck, ‘Ten Years Without Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 43.
173 Isaac Deutscher, ‘Myths of the Cold War’, in David Horowitz (ed), Containment and Revolution: Western Policy Towards Social Revolution: 1917 to Vietnam, London: Anthony Blond, 1967, pp. 24–25.
174 Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution, op. cit., pp. 106–107.
175 Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution, op. cit., pp. 59–60, 107.
176 Mandel, ‘Mandel on Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 14. See also Joseph Hansen, ‘Report on the International Situation’, International Socialist Review, January–February 1968, p. 9.
177 Smith, ‘The Practice and Theory of Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 338. Cliff’s comrade Chris Harman also failed to notice any shift in his thinking in his final work: Harman, ‘Success and Failure’, op. cit., p. 37. Tarbuck was less categorical, feeling that there was ‘an undoubted change in nuance between his formulation of 1953 and that of 1967’, but ‘this basic ambiguity remains’: Tarbuck, ‘Ten Years Without Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 46. Emanuele Saccarelli, very much influenced by the International Committee, wrote four decades after Deutscher’s death that ‘he never wavered from his convictions about the progress of de-Stalinisation’: Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism, op. cit., p. 120.
178 Tony Cliff, ‘The End of the Road’, Neither Washington Nor Moscow: Essays on Revolutionary Socialism, London: Bookmarks, 1982, pp. 166–191; Cliff, Trotsky: Towards October, 1879–1917, op. cit., p. 16. There was also no indication of Deutscher’s new-found hopes for the repositioning of the class struggle within nation-states.
Davidson, a member of Cliff’s group, subsequently declared that Deutscher’s latter-day writings and actions ‘do not suggest the attitude of a man contemplating the world from a watch-tower’: Davidson, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 109.
179 Julius Jacobson, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Isaac Deutscher: The Anatomy of an Apologist’, in Julius Jacobson (ed), Soviet Communism and the Socialist Vision, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1972, pp. 1–6, 86–162.
180 Isaac Deutscher, ‘Ideological Trends in the USSR’, Socialist Register 1968, London: Merlin, 1968, p. 17; Deutscher, The Cultural Revolution in China, op. cit., p. 7.
181 Black, ‘The Ironies of Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., pp. 18–31; Smith, ‘The Practice and Theory of Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., pp. 325–347. But even those Trotskyists who were well disposed towards him saw this as a negative factor; see, for example, Frank, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., pp. 755–756; Mandel, ‘Mandel on Deutscher’, op. cit., p. 14.
182 Especially Jacobson, ‘Isaac Deutscher’, op. cit., pp. 112–121 (1964); pp. 108–118 (1966).
183 Sedgwick, ‘The Tragedy of a Tragedian’, op. cit., p. 11.
184 Deutscher 1949, pp. 569–570.
185 Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, London: Secker and Warburg, 1939. We have been threatened with a translation of Domenico Losurdo, Stalin. Storia e critica di una leggenda nera, Rome: Carocci, 2008; hopefully, we will not have to wait too long for a translation of Jean-Jacques Marie, Staline, Paris: Fayard, 2003.
186 Verso should soon be publishing a new edition of Stalin, with an introduction by Gonzalo Pozo, who is writing a biography of Deutscher.
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Paul Flewers
Paul Flewers is a freelance historian. He received a PhD in history from the School of East European and Slavonic Studies, University College London. He is the author of The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union, 1929–1941 (2008), the editor of George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist (2005), and 1933: Warnings from History (2021), and co-editor with John McIlroy of 1956: John Saville, EP Thompson and ‘The Reasoner’ (2016). Email: [email protected]