War and Memory: Trotsky’s War Correspondence from the Balkan Wars

Abstract

Based on a critical reading of Trotsky’s celebrated The War Correspondence, this article addresses the complex links between war and memory. It offers a detailed analysis of the correspondence, arguing for its present relevance in several aspects, beyond its polemical brilliance: firstly, its detailed information and personal evaluation of the socialist movement in the Balkans; secondly, its testimonies of wounded officers, soldiers, and prisoners of war, reproduced in extenso, in combination with interviews with politicians, serve as a rarely preserved primary source. The article considers The War Correspondence’s formative significance on Trotsky himself by juxtaposing it with his later autobiography and political activities, and follows his evolution from a passionate defender of liberalism to one of its most bitter opponents. It finally utilises the distinction between lieux and milieu de mémoire to comment on the present memory of wars and the centenary of the Balkan Wars

Keywords

• Trotsky, Balkan Wars, memory, war, socialism, liberalism.

References

1. 1 Pravda had 25 issues between 3 October 1908 and 23 April 1912, and with its non-factional politics became popular with industrial workers as well as with different émigré factions. In 1910, for a brief period from January to August, it was made the central, and thus partyfinanced, organ of the temporarily reunified Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
2. 2 Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at Autobiography, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930, p. 127.
3. 3 Leon Trotskii, Sochinenia, Seria II. Pered istoricheskim rubezhom. Tom VI. Balkany i balkanskaia voina. Moskva, Leningrad, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1926. The collected works of Trotsky – Sochinenia – were conceived as a major enterprise comprising 23 volumes in seven series. Editorial work began in 1923 and the volumes began to appear from 1924 onwards. In fact only 12 volumes were published (3 appeared in two parts, thus 15 volumes altogether) before work was suspended in 1927 when Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In January 1928 he was banished to Alma Ata and in February 1929 was exiled to Turkey where he stayed until 1933. A digitised version of all volumes in Russian can be accessed from Lubitz’ TrotskyanaNet (LTN) at http://www. magister.msk.ru/library/trotsky/trotsky.htm; Volume 6 can be found at http://www.magister. msk.ru/library/trotsky/trotm083.htm [last visited 22 March 2013].
4. 4 Leon Trotsky, The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky. The Balkan Wars 1912-13, transl. Brian Pearce, New York, Monad Press; Australia, Pathfinder Press, 1993, (first published 1980). The phrase ‘Third Balkan War’ is sometimes used by journalists and historians to refer to World War I (as in Joachim Remak’s famous 1971 article in The Journal of Modern History), but is mostly used to refer to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s: Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: the Third Balkan War. London, Penguin Books, 1992.
5. 5 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1954, p. 228.
6. 6 Trotsky My Life, p. 227.
7. 7 Ibid., p. viii.
8. 8 Thus, he wrote dismissively of the remarkable Georgian Menshevik Tsereteli (1881-1959), who had joined the Provisional Government after the February Revolution as Minister of Post and Telegraphs, and returned to Georgia after the Bolshevik Revolution, from where he finally emigrated to Paris in 1923, that he ‘had a profound respect for liberalism; he viewed the irresistible dynamics of the revolution with the eyes of a half-educated bourgeois, terrified for the safety of culture. The awakened masses seemed to him more and more like a mutinous mob’, ‘ [i]t took a revolution to prove that Tsereteli was not a revolutionary’ (Trotsky, My Life, p. 289). And he did not mince his words about the tragic leader of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970), whom he thought ‘personified the accidental in an otherwise continuous causation. His best speeches were merely a sumptuous pounding of water in a mortar. In 1917, the water boiled and sent up steam, and the clouds of steam provided a halo’ (ibidem). The revolution should be viewed from a ‘world’ point of view, concluded Trotsky, ‘to avoid getting lost in complexities’ (ibidem). His greatest wrath, however, was heaped on Pavel Miliukov (1859-1943) – a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets), right-wing Slavophile and promoter of Russian imperialism and later an intractable foe of Bolshevism who was editor-in-chief of Rech, the organ of the Kadets – the true bête noire of The War Correspondence.

9. 9 See readers’ reviews of the book on Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/War-CorrespondenceLeon-Trotsky-1912-13/dp/0913460680 and www.amazon.com/War-CorrespondenceLeon-Trotsky-1912-13/dp/0873489071[last visited 5 April 2013]. Some read it because it is ‘an indispensable background to the fighting going on in the region today’ providing a déjà vu picture. Others appreciate it for its anti-imperialist passion and materialist analysis. Still others see precursors of Serbian mass murder of the Albanians, or read it for the roots of anti-Semitimism in Romania. Some are fascinated (or perhaps nostalgic given the paucity of today’s print journalism) by the profundity of discourse, the ability to bring in complex analyses of the economy, politics and religion in an expressive style.
10. 10 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, pp. 3-4.
11. 11 Ibid., pp. 3, 12-13.
12. 12 Ibid., p. 3.
13. 13 Dimitîr Genchev, Pîrvoapostolite na ideala, Sofia, Izdatelska kîshta ‘Khristo Botev’, 2006, p. 23.
14. 14 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, p. 38.
15. 15 Ibid., p. 39.
16. 16 Given the fact that Trotsky lived at the time and place of the blossoming of the sophisticated Austro-Marxism, his own views on the rise of the national ideal were deterministic, not to say dogmatic: ‘Economic development has led to the growth in national self-awareness and along with this a striving for national and state self-determination.’ (Ibid., p. 157.)
17. 17 Ibid., p. 12, 39-41, 152.
18. 18 Ibid., p. 49.
19. 19 Ibid., p. 82.
20. 20 Ibid., p. 76.
21. 21 Ibid., p. 53; The Zajecar revolt in Serbia was brought down with ‘Asiatic ferocity’. 22 Ibid., p.58.
22. 23 Ibid., pp. 54, 157.
23. 24 In the chapter on post-war Romania, however, he juxtaposes the Bulgarian army of ‘free, literate peasants, possessing the vote’ and the ‘Romanian army of serfs’; Ibid., p. 390.
24. 25 Ibid., pp. 73-74.
25. 26 Trotsky, My Life, p. 204; Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp. 155-157.
26. 27 Bulgarian Central State Archives, TsDA, Sp 3049 B, pp. 35-37.
27. 28 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, p. 117.
28. 29 Ibid., p. 288.
29. 30 Ibid., p. 134.
30. 31 Khristo Kabakchiev (1878-1940) was a leader of the Bulgarian Workers Social Democratic Party (the ‘Narrows’). Educated as a lawyer, he was the editor-in-chief of its print organ ‘Rabotnicheski vestnik’ (1910-1923). In 1927 he emigrated to the USSR.
31. 32 Leon Trotskii & Khristo Kabakchiev, Ocherki politicheskoi Bolgarii, Moskva, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923. The articles in question are ‘“The Balkan Countries and Socialism”’ (The War Correspondence, pp. 29-37) and ‘Echoes of the War’ (Ibid., pp. 213-225).
32. 33 The War Correspondence, p.194.
33. 34 Ibid., p. 194-197.
34. 35 Ibid., p. 194.
35. 36 Ibid., pp. 211-212.
36. 37 Ibid., pp. 117-131, 266-271. While Trotsky does not acknowledge his source, this was most likely Dimitrije Tucović, the founder of the Serbia Social Democratic Party and the editor of Borba and Radničke Novine. During the Balkan War in which he was mobilised, Tucović wrote extensively about atrocities against the Albanians, later published as Srbija i Albanija: jedan prilog kritici zavojevačke poliike srpske biržoazije, Beograd, Kultura, 1946.
37. 38 Ibid., pp. 287-312.
38. 39 Ibid., pp. 304-305.
39. 40 Ibid., p. 329.
40. 41 Ibid., p. 258.
41. 42 Ibid., pp. 26-261.
42. 43 Ibid., pp. 263-264, 282. Given the eminent stature of Simeon Radev (1879-1967) as one of the major political and intellectual figures in the modern history of Bulgaria, this abuse is especially jarring. Trotsky admits that Radev was “‘a journalist not without talent”’ (p. 263), but his condescending dismissal is ridiculous. By 1912 Radev, who had graduated in law from the University of Geneva and was an active journalist and diplomat, as well as a highly cultivated intellectual, had published his major history of post-1878 Bulgaria – The Builders of Modern Bulgaria – a work that is still considered a masterpiece.
43. 44 Petko Yurdanov Todorov (1879-1916) was a major poet, dramatist and writer. As a high school student he was influenced by socialist ideas and was in contact with Jean Jaurès. He studied law in Bern and literature in Leipzig and Berlin. In 1905 he became a co-founder of the Radical-Democratic Party. In 1912 he was on Capri where he befriended Maxim Gorky. He died in 1916 from tuberculosis.
44. 45 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, p. 277.
45. 46 To his credit, Trotsky saw the Balkan War as having “‘more in common with the Italian War of Liberation of 1859 than it has […] with the Italian-Turkish War of 1911-1912”’; Ibid., p.152; In a remarkable article “‘Bulgaria’s Crisis”’ he even agreed with the analysis of a Bulgarian officer, who admonished Trotsky that “‘the duty of Russian journalists, and especially of those who are combating the reactionary nonsense of the Slavophiles, is to explain the rile and significance of a free, independent, and strong Bulgaria for the destiny of Southeastern Europe”’; Ibid., pp. 346-347.
46. 47 Ibid., p. 278.
47. 48 Ibid.
48. 49 Ibid., p. 279.
49. 50 Ibid., pp. 282-283.
50. 51 Ibid., pp. 283-284.
51. 52 Ibid., p. 304. Trotsky evidently used the dispatches of Vasil Kolarov from his diary as an officer in the Balkan War, which he published regularly in Rabotnicheski vestnik. They were published separately only in 2001 as Pobedi i porazheniia. Dnevnik. Sofia, Izdatelstvo ‘Khristo Botev’. Kolarov (1977-1950) was a lawyer and one of the leaders of the Bulgarian Workers Social Democratic Party (the ‘Narrows’). Following 1923 he lived in emigration in the USSR. 53 Ibid., pp. 284-285.
52. 54 Ibid., p. 148. The famous report of the Carnegie Commission came to a similar conclusion that “‘war suspended the restraints of civil life, inflamed the passions that slumber in time of peace, destroyed the natural kindliness between neighbours, and set in its place the will to injure. This is everywhere the essence of war”’ (Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Washington, D.C., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914, p. 108).
53. 55 Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp. 180-181.
54. 56 Ibid., pp. 182-185.
55. 57 Cited by Slavoj Žižek, “‘Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, or, Despair and Utopia in the Turbulent Year of 1920’”, in Leon Trotsky (ed.), Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, London, Verso, 2007, p. vii.
56. 58 Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, “From the Café Bulgaria in Sofia to the Courage of Italians in the Balkans and the Military spirit of Désarrois”, quoted in Leah Dickerman (ed.), Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2012, p.136.
57. 59 Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tumb-Adrianopoli: Ottobre 1912: Parole in libertà, Milano, Edizione Futurista di Poesia, 1914.
58. 60 Le Figaro, 20 February 1909. English translation from James Joll, (1960)Three Intellectuals in Politics, New York, Pantheon Books, 1960, p. 140.
59. 61 Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, p. 421.
60. 62 Leon Trotskii, Terrorizm i kommunizm. Peterburg, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1920. The book was immediately translated into English and published as Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism). New York, Workers Party of America, 1920. It was published, with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, and by Verso in 2007. It can also be accessed online at www. marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/index.htm
61. 63 Karl Kautsky, Terrorismus und Kommunismus: ein Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte der Revolution, Berlin, Verlag Neues Vaterland, 1919, p. 133.
62. 64 Ibid., p. 152.
63. 65 Ibid., p. 154.
64. 66 Trotsky, My Life, p. v.
65. 67 Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1966, pp. 107-108.
66. 68 I am adapting the argument by Bruce Lincoln on fables, legends, history and myth; Discourse and the Construction of Society. Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and Classification, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 24-25.
67. 69 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 195.
68. 70 Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire”, in Les lieux de mémoire, Paris, 1984, p. 1: xxxiii, cited in Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, Hanover, University Press of New England, 1993, p. 148.
69. 71 In Bulgaria, alongside a plentitude of other minor publications, the Institute for Historical Reseacrh published a de luxe edition of war memories: Balkanskite voini 1912-1913. Pamet i istoriia, Sofia, Akademichno izdatelstvo, Prof. Marin Drinov, 2012.
70. 72 Bulgaria alone has more than 700 websites dedicated to some aspect of the centennial. A game by Joseph Mirand, Balkan Wars, can be downloaded. It is only on these websites that one can gauge the reaction of the younger people to the anniversary, ranging from openly nationalistic ones to others critical of any display of jingoism. Even these blogs, however, which are usually fiery and confrontational, are relatively subdued.
71. 73 See, in particular, http://www.100godini-nalkanskivoini.bg, the rubric on monuments, which lists dozens of monuments that should be or are under repair.