(4 of 4)
Having seen one revolution succeed after Russia had cracked under the stress of war, Trotsky acquired a lasting faith in the virtues of conspiracy. He never recognized, even when the world revolution failed to materialize, that most of his plotting was futile. His Fourth International (formed in Manhattan in 1928 by three expelled members of the Communist Party) proclaimed itself the party of the real workers' revolution, but it was split by schisms, numbered less than 5,000 members. Trotsky still believed the revolt of the workers would succeed. The force of that illusion made him a greater man than Joseph Stalin. It made him the man who did more to shake the world in his time than any except Lenin and Hitler.
The Reaction of most men to Leon Trotsky's death—but not of his former comrades in Moscow—was horror. For the moment it was all but forgotten that Trotsky himself was a terrorist. The world's dwindling community of civilized minds realized only that it had lost one of the supreme masters of prose of its time, wondered whether that brain had completed its last work—the biography of its implacable persecutor, Dictator Stalin. They wondered too what part the approaching completion of the biography might have played as a motive for the crime.
Possibly they would never know. They did know that about half of Trotsky's Life of Stalin was in Manhattan, already translated into English; that the rest, completely written but unrevised and untranslated, was in Mexico City. Publishers were not sure when they could go through with publication.
As far as Author Trotsky was concerned, publication of his Life of Stalin meant little. His literary reputation rested solidly on the three fat, incomparable volumes of his History of the Russian Revolution—his account of the social upheaval which he did much to inspire, foment and direct, and of which he had become the literary executor.
In Trotsky's murder, the strong arm of dictatorship had reached from one hemisphere to the other. But so low had the intellectual level of Communism fallen that there was not left an orthodox or heterodox Marxist capable of phrasing for murdered Comrade Trotsky 13 words comparable to those he spoke into the hush that followed Lenin's death: "Lenin is dead. The words are like great rocks falling into the sea."