[PEN-L:30029] a great headline!

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: a great headline!

Long live the nun-killer!

Paul Foot

Wednesday September 4, 2002

The Guardian [UK]

Elegant language is the speciality of the novelist Martin Amis, and he scales the heights of elegance in the attack on the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in his new book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Trotsky, writes Amis, was "a f*cking liar and a nun-killer". [censorship mine]

As he pursues his theme that Trotsky paved the way for the Stalin terror, however, Amis seems to miss a few relevant facts. For instance, Trotsky - a brilliant writer and agitator - was opposed to Stalin and his policies from 1923, even before Lenin's death. He continued that opposition so relentlessly that he was banished by Stalin in 1927, and spent the last 13 years of his life dodging Stalin's killers and organising a small band of followers to contest Stalinist tyranny all over the world. Almost all his close family was hunted down and murdered by Stalin's agents. In 1940, in Mexico, he too was murdered by a Stalinist hit-man.

After his death, Trotskyists sustained his ideas and his opposition to the regime in Russia. Their line was best summed up in the slogan: "Neither Washington Nor Moscow, but International Socialism." Trotskyists opposed the Russian invasion of Hungary and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Trotskyists played their part in the downfall of the Stalinist regimes of eastern Europe and cheered the demolition of the Berlin wall. They kept alive the idea of a socialist society run from below that would liberate the masses (or "yobs" as Amis so tastefully calls them) from poverty, ignorance and disease. They were, in short, rather quicker off the mark in recognising and opposing the Stalinist menace than Martin Amis, who seems to have discovered it now, well over a decade after it was toppled.

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Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine