Books: The Hell-Black Night

THE PROPHET OUTCAST by Isaac Deutscher. 543 pages. Oxford. $9.50.

THE BASIC WRITINGS OF TROTSKY edited by Irving Howe. 427 pages. Random House. $5.95.

He might have ruled the Communist world, but Joseph Stalin shouldered him aside. Ever since, Leon Trotsky has been the favorite martyr of those Marxists who feel that Communism was never given a fair trial because Stalin corrupted it.

Would Communism under Trotsky have been different? As a personality, Trotsky was far more appealing than Stalin. In some ways, this anti-individualist was a true Renaissance man: brilliant orator, tough administrator, incisive historian, spectacular general. But he was also a fanatic and almost as contemptuous of human freedom as Stalin. In power alongside Lenin, he hamstrung trade unions, conscripted labor, suppressed opposition, and drove the Mensheviks from office with words that would in time be used against him: "Go where you belong from now on—to the rubbish can of history!"

The difference is that the fanatic in power soon proves to be a monster; the fanatic who has lost his power sometimes assumes an aura of gallantry. Biographer Isaac Deutscher seems especially susceptible to this gallantry. An ex-Trotskyite and a respected writer on Communism, Deutscher has turned out an exciting, exacting biography that is very likely definitive, but he cannot prevent a touch of hero worship from creeping into his prose. Trotsky, Deutscher says, "strove to rally his fighters to the most impossible of causes. He sought to set them against every power in the world: against fascism, bourgeois democracy and pacifism; and against religion, mysticism and even secularist rationalism and pragmatism. He demanded unshakable conviction, utter indifference to public opinion, unflagging readiness for sacrifice and a burning faith in the proletarian revolution."

A Hounded Exile. As this third and last and most dramatic volume of Deutscher's biography opens, Trotsky has finally been ejected from the party by Stalin, and, with his wife Natalya, deported to Princes Islands off the coast of Turkey. There the pair set up house in a dilapidated villa they rented from a bankrupt pasha. Trotsky became friendly with the local fishermen and often went out to sea with them.

Trotsky was not lonely for long. Friends, reporters, curiosity seekers and a few GPU undercover agents flocked to the island. Trotsky plunged into an enormous correspondence with Trotskyites, who formed devoted, quarrelsome little groups in just about every country in the West. Trotsky did his best to unite them and boost their morale. He was genuinely appalled by Stalin's mass slaughter of Russia's peasantry and said so. But he confused his followers by scrupulously refusing to call for Stalin's overthrow and by defending Stalin's incredibly Machiavellian foreign policy—even the invasion of Finland. He was always afraid of a bourgeois restoration in Russia and would do nothing to jeopardize the regime, which was the only Communist government in operating condition.