LEON TROTSKY.  The Balkan Wars 1912-13.  New York:  Pathfinder. 
1980.

Trotsky's work-from-Viennese-exile, these wartime articles for
various pro-Marxist newspapers, is a terribly important
collection of documents.  On the first (surface?) level it is an
elegant montage of Balkan social, political and intellectual life
in the period preceding and during the Balkan Wars.  Trotsky's
direct observations and interpolations on Balkan life are
disturbingly insightful, and issued in sometimes surreal detail. 
Describing to an educated Marxist-leaning audience a train ride
out of Bucharest:  "The velvet covering of the seats is soaked in
sweat . . . and one's neighbors to the left and right seem red
hot . . .(422)"  This evocative description of sensual detail
transcends the specific individual and allows the reader to
experience a vicarious solidarity with unknowns, all unknowns,
who struggle and sweat.
     On a second level, Trotsky illustrates the transferability
of experience that is critical to the universal applicability of
Marxist principles.  He picks up the Marxist schema and overlays
it on the Balkans.  Trotsky is not attempting, however, to use
the Balkans as an ideological show-and-tell that the Russians
should apply to their own situation, at least not as a main
intention.  There is no "thus it is in the Balkans, so you should
do this at home."  This fine point might be misinterpreted
because of Trotsky's pointing out of similarities,  as in the
berating of Soviet and Balkan (particularly Bulgarian)
newspapers.  Rather, Trotsky illustrates that since the politics
of oppression and exploitation are manifested in both at home and
abroad then Marxism has validity as an all-encompassing economic
and political philosophy and should therefore be implemented at
home.     On a much more nebulous level, though, Trotsky learns
some specific, applicable lessons from the Balkan situation.  One
such lesson is that there is not always an agitating proletariat
(or even bourgeoisie) present and inclined to effect a revolt. 
Sometimes the revolution of the people must come from the elite
(!):  "[referring to Turkey] . . . the state organized within
itself the militant vanguard of the bourgeois nation in
formation:  the thinking, critical, discontented intelligentsia
(10)."  Is this the seed of his idea that Russia's lame
bourgeoisie would need the assistance of another social group to
carry out it's (continual) revolution?  And is it coincidence
that this intellectual would later organize the Red Army?
     Because of Trotsky's ideological stance (he had participated
in the failed 1905 revolution) the reader would expect a fairly
constant and insidious outflow of propaganda.  While Trotsky's
work may justifiably labeled propaganda it is more important as a
social document, a record of the intellectual and emotional life
of Balkans peoples.  His reporting (or talented fabrication), for
example, of the experiences of soldiers and citizens is poignant
and appropriate to his purpose.  Both Trotsky and the collators
of this work keep their biases on respectably short leashes; the
glossary, thoughtfully provided by the collators, is usable with
very little filtering.  When Trotsky's enthusiasm for Marxist (or
at least "Marxist," in the sense of the adaptation and increasing
deterministic tendencies of Engels) doctrine comes out it does so
unabashedly.  One has to wonder if Trotsky was not aware of his
own over-the-top banner waving at these seemingly rare times: 
the occasional "Long Live International Socialism!" is hard to
mistake for sneaky propaganda.  Trotsky seems at times like this
to either be a true zealot or a pragmatic actor (given his exile
writings on the subject on the oppression of women and the
treachery heaped upon the Revolution he certainly seems to have
been writing in Good Faith).  
     Exposed to the dangerously sharp mind and perception of
Trotsky in his journalistic writings it is easy to understand why
Stalin took action against him this thinker.  An intellectual of
Trotsky's magnitude, able to move crowds and write even political
articles beautifully, is a threat to any autocrat.

     Jason Carr
     The University of Texas at Arlington
     Arlington



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