A couple days ago, I went out to dinner with a group of Japanese law professors here in Tokyo. One of the Japanese academics, who today is generally libertarian, told me that he had previously been a Marxist. I asked him what led him to change his mind. To my surprise, he said that it was a result of reading Isaac Deutscher's books on Leon Trotsky. Deutscher was a Western Trotskyite who wrote a famous three-volume biography of Trotsky seeking to prove that Stalin had taken Soviet communism in the wrong direction, but that things would have gone much better if only Trotsky had won the power struggle between them in the late 1920s. The Japanese professor, however, deduced that Deutscher's critique of Stalin was applicable to communism more generally, not just the Stalinist variant. Thus, he quickly moved from Trotskyism towards giving up Marxism entirely.

Upon reflection, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that Trotskyism played such a role in his transition away from Marxism. Trotskyism was also a way-station for many Western intellectuals who became dissatisfied with the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s, but wanted to cling to communism. Eventually, many of them gave up communism entirely (Irving Kristol is a particularly famous American example). It would seem that at least some Asian intellectuals followed a similar path. In this very limited sense, Trotskyism had a positive impact on the world.

On balance, however, I still don't understand the fondness for Trotsky shared by many Western leftists (and even a few formerly leftist conservatives I have met). The truth about Trotsky is that he was a brutal mass murderer. Trotsky was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people during the era of War Communism (1918-22 [corection: 1918-21]). Together with Lenin, he (not Stalin) established the Gulag system, the secret police, and other major institutions of Soviet repression. Trotsky also played a leading role in engineering the first, abortive collectivization of Soviet agriculture - which led to a deliberately engineered famine that killed several million people in 1920-21. Richard Pipes' book Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime has a good discussion of Trotsky's role in these and other early Soviet atrocities.

As bad as Stalin was, it's possible that Russia and world would have been even worse off had Trotsky defeated him in the late 1920s. After all, Trotsky broke with Stalin in the 1920s in large part because he thought Stalin wasn't going far enough in repressing "bourgeois elements," collectivizing agriculture (which eventually led to an even bigger deliberately engineered famine in the early 1930s), and promoting communist revolution abroad. In exile in the 1930s, Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union should not ally with the western democracies against the Nazis because both were "capitalist" powers, and neither was preferable to the other. Had Trotsky won, life would have been better than under Stalin for members of the Communist Party; Trotsky was less interested in purging the party comrades. But it might have been even worse for everyone else.

Western admirers of Trotsky often praise him for his criticism of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. However, as Leszek Kolakowski points out in the chapter on Trotsky in his comprehensive history of Marxism, Trotsky had no objection to political repression as such. He was very much in favor of ruthless persecution of non-communists, including even non-communist socialists. Trotsky merely objected to the repression of his own followers. Praising Trotsky for opposing Stalin's purges is a bit like praising the Ku Klux Klan as champions of free speech because they oppose laws banning racist hate speech. Obviously, The Klan would have no objection to censorship if they could be the censors themselves. The same point applies to Trotsky - except that he murdered, repressed, and censored far more people than the KKK ever did.

In today's Wall Street Journal, historian Lesley Chamberlain reviews a recent biography of Leon Trotsky and concludes that he "was not a bad man:"

We are left weighing a multiple ­tragedy, of a man so loyal to an ideology he died for it; of an ideology that in one form or another killed ­millions; and of a 20th century in which political ­radicals world-wide called themselves Trotskyists and believed that Lenin was good and Stalin bad, that even if the Soviet Union was a degenerate workers' state, the real thing could be established elsewhere. Trotsky had people killed. But . . . [he] was not a bad man.

Well, let's see. Trotsky was responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, helped mastermind the establishment of one history's worst totalitarian regimes, and broke with Joseph Stalin in the 1920s in part because he thought that Stalin wasn't going far enough in extending Soviet totalitarianism at home and exporting it abroad. Other than that, he was a helluva guy. If that record isn't enough to qualify you as a "bad man," I don't know what is.

Chamberlain's piece does imply two possible justifications for the claim that Trotsky wasn't so bad. First, like other Trotsky defenders, she puts a positive spin on his opposition to Stalin's show trials of the 1930s. However, as I explained in this post, Trotsky had no objection to political repression as such; when in power, he practiced it himself on a massive scale. He merely objected to the persecution of his own followers and other Soviet communists who had fallen out of favor with Stalin. Trotsky supported the murder or imprisonment of non-communists, including even non-communist socialists.

She also implies that Trotsky, "a man so loyal to an ideology he died for it," may not have been so bad because he and his followers believed in his cause and the rightness of their actions. By that standard, of course, virtually every mass murderer can be excused. Adolf Hitler believed that he was doing the right thing just as much as Trotsky did.

Most of the above may seem obvious. There would be no need to even bring it up if it weren't for the fact that some prominent Western intellectuals continue to defend Trotsky, (as well as some other communist mass murders, such as Che Guevara).

Ever since Stalin and the USSR lost their luster in the eyes of most Western leftists, some of them have searched for alternative communist heroes supposedly untainted by Stalinism. Thus, the continued lionizing of people like Trotsky and Che Guevara, and (in the 1960s) Mao and Ho Chi Minh. Unfortunately, their alternative versions of communism turn out to be not much better than the Soviet original, and in some cases even worse. Chamberlain is a serious historian who has written interesting books on Soviet repression, such as this one. The fact that she could write a review like this and publish it in the Wall Street Journal suggests that the persistence of Trotsky apologism isn't limited to fringe elements of the far left. I doubt that Chamberlain is one of the people who still yearn for a kinder, gentler communist hero to worship. But she echoes some of the arguments of those who do.