Ideas that kill

Trotsky in Exile - Peter Weiss (trans. Geoffrey Skelton, Pocket Books, 1973)

I'm not sure how widespread this school of thought actually is, but I know that studying Soviet Russia in my youth, there was a strain of counterfactual imagination that wistfully contemplated how different things would have been had Trotsky outmaneuvered Stalin in the years following Lenin's death. In this world, we might have seen a kinder, gentler communism.

Ugh. While sure, the only thing we can really know is that Trotsky's USSR (and the rest of the world around it) would not have looked like Stalin's, it's certainly difficult to believe he would have ushered in some sort of socialist utopia. Trotsky was just as violent, just as conniving, and by a long shot more dedicated to the worldwide part of the worldwide proletarian revolution.

To me, Weiss's Trotsky is of the "man, if only it could have been him" ilk. We visit him in set pieces that travel around in space and time, Trotsky exiled from Soviet Russia at the same time he re-lives moments from his life in prison and exile from tsarist Russia, his intellectual debates and disagreements with Lenin, the chaos of revolution, and the show trials that cemented Stalin's consolidation of power.

I have to keep reminding myself that this play was written during the Cold War, during the Brezhnev Era and just a year after the Prague Spring. (The play dates to 1969, later published in English.) And not only that, it was written by a naturalized Swede of German and Jewish origin. I have the luxury of both a chronological and emotional remove. But still, I don't know how I was supposed to feel about Trotsky, as an intellectual or a revolutionary. Or certainly as a husband or father.

Or maybe I just don't get plays.