Lev Davidovitch

Don't read history to find heroes. Any good history (or biography) is going to show feet of clay... We are all only human, filled with spite and self-justification and blind spots. Gandhi didn't get on with his children and Martin Luther King, Jr., slept around. In my continued reading about the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union, I know I will get round to Trotsky soon. I already know enough to say that he is no hero. He may have had fewer people killed than Lenin (although I don't know how we'd count the victims fo the Red Army) and certainly fewer than Stalin ("Uncle Joe" had long years in power, besides being much more of a son-of-a-bitch) but his hands are still red. (Pun not intended but accepted?) And when I consider that he jumped from the Mencheviks to the Bolzoviks in 1917, and already by 1920 and the end of the Civil War was being marginalized by Lenin, I want to ask if the moral association with that group of thugs was worth those brief years. But he jumped because he wanted power. And the Bolshoviks where the ones who were going to get it, because they were a group of thugs, because they were willing to do whatever it took in the way of murder and betrayal to get power. But I feel a little wistful for my imagined image of Trotsky. The firey orator, the thinker, the writer, the slut, the fighter for truth and justice... So, there's a list of some of my values. Never a bad thing to have. But no shelter from what I know to be the truth, when I start learning about his life, I will learn of repugnant things. And the reason why I prefer him over Lenin and Stalin... Lenin got his name from his writing. He moved from psuedonym to pseudonym, re-arranging the letters in his last name to create new names at need. Lenin is the one that stuck, or that made him famous. Stalin, ah yes, literally the man of steel. So telling. Trotsky? He took the name from the warden of a prison he escaped. That's a nice bit of surrealistic play.