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"The Permanent Revolution" is the doctrine which Leon Trotsky has presented to the world. His theory: humanity, ever striving and ever changing, advances by a never ending series of revolutions. If so, the ''The Permanent Revolution" should be studied and guided by professional revolutionaries who would set up Revolution as a respectable profession.
In The History of the Russian Revolution (Simon & Schuster, Vol. I, $4), Revolutionist Trotsky tries to teach a few kindergarten elements of his profession. Who remembers that the French Revolution was partly provoked by French nobles and that some Russian nobles helped provoke the Russian Revolution? Remembering these things, Professor Trotsky lays down this general law:
"A revolution directed . . . against a nobility, meets in its first step an unsystematic and inconsistent but nevertheless very real co-operation not only from the rank and file nobility, but also from its most privileged upper circles."
Confirming this Trotskyian "Law of Revolution," the Grand Duke Alexander in his memoirs (see p. 22) relates how after Tsar Nicholas II, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armies, had ordered 13 cavalry regiments of the Imperial Guard to return from the War front and suppress the Bolsheviks in his capital, this order was suppressed and the Emperor was betrayed by his own General Staff. Together the Trotsky-Alexander books make meaty reading.
How Ladies Like Revolution is told by a lady for whom William Lyon Phelps writes a preface* and by another lady for whom Booth Tarkington writes an introduction.† Ably written by ladies for ladies, these books present, with a wealth of colorful detail the sometimes amusing and sometimes heart-rending means by which a lady gets through a major revolution somehow.
Dreadful though the sufferings of Lady Ponafidine were as she fled across the blizzard-swept Russo-Finnish frontier to safety, an exactly similar escape was made in even more trying circumstances by the present pretender to the Throne of Russia, Grand Duke Cyril, now safe in Paris. He not only waded through the knee-deep snow, fearing every moment to be shot by a Red frontier guard, but he also carried in his arms at the same time his pregnant wife.
Soviet Love, of which there is enough to keep the Russian birthrate rising, is deftly fictionized by Panteleimon Romanof in Without Cherry Blossom (Scribner, $2.50). In Russia the name Romanof (or Romanov or Romanoff) is fairly common.* Author Romanof's parents were peasants. His books are best sellers throughout the Soviet Union. In Without Cherry Blossom (short stories) he absorbingly presents both the sordid and the romantic sides of Red Love.
Working for the Soviets is the matter of fact name of a straight-from-the-shoulder book by a U. S. engineer of standing† who did a two-year stint for Josef Stalin & Co. on the asbestos end of the Five-Year Plan.