Re: [Marxism] Fw: N.K. Krupskaya: Revolutionary Fighter

["Graham M." <gkmilner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Comrade Cox,
                               I thank you for the quoted reference to a
comment Krupskaya may have made about Trotsky.   I would be interested to
know the source for that quotation.

   As I understand it Krupskaya's relations with Trotsky were at times quite
warm and close.   For example when she and Lenin, and Trotsky and his
partner Natalya Sedova and their sons, shared apartments in the Kremlin
during periods of the Civil War, the two families were apparently quite
close (see Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy on this).   Krupskaya wrote to
Trotsky while he was convalescing just after Lenin's death, and assured
Trotsky that Lenin's attitude to him had remained essentially the same as it
had been at the time of the first meeting of the two men in London in the
early 1900s.   Krupskaya's description of Trotsky's arrival at the Lenin
household in London, after Trotsky's escape from Siberian exile and his
traverse of Continental Europe, is a wonderful vignette, and one of many
valuable sequences in what is an exceptional memoir (ie. 'Memories of
Lenin').    As I pointed out in my essay on Krupskaya, she took the
conference floor and defended Trotsky against his denigrators in the 1924
party congress.

   When Krupskaya decided to leave the Left (United) Opposition after
several years of involvement in it, Trotsky still retained warm feelings for
her, and Deutscher cites a heartfelt letter Trotsky drafted to her on May 7,
1926 ('The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky: 1921-1929' [Oxford, 1973] p.333n

   I would not deny that Trotsky had, in some ways, a rather imperious
bearing, and could be slightly aloof.   Lenin, in his 'Testament', had after
all observed that Trotsky was too concerned with 'the administrative side of
things', while he praised Trotsky's great abilities and  fine qualities in
other respects.   Trotsky was sensitive to the interests of women, and his
writings on the 'woman question', collected in 'Women and the Family' (New
York, Pathfinder Press, 1970), demonstrate clearly enough that his positions
in this area are in the Marxist tradition and are well in advance of their
time.   'Women and the Family' contains a valuable extract from Trotsky's
book 'The Revolution Betrayed', published in 1936,  dealing with the effects
of the Soviet Thermidor on women and family relations in the USSR under
Stalin.


In solidarity,



Graham Milner

----- Original Message -----
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
<marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 4:34 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Fw: N.K. Krupskaya: Revolutionary Fighter


> "Talking to Trotsky was like talking to the Minister Plenipotentiary of
> a sovereign state."
> Krupskaya
>
>
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