[lbo-talk] Trotsky's ashes made into cookies

[Joanna]

I spent a good many years reading Trotsky (with the exception of History 
of Russian Revolution). If one can know anything based on such reading, 
I would conclude that Trotsky was a brilliant, imaginative, fierce, 
common-sensical fellow who was also a great writer. Barbara Tuchman set 
him alongside Thucydides as a historian.

The fact that he organized and led the Red army to the defeat of the 
counterrevolution seems to me to be one of the great feats of all times: 
suggesting that he was a great leader and tactician who could inspire 
loyalty and courage among a starving, war-weary, ill-equipped mass of 
illiterate peasants and factory workers.

Even Orwell, who made a point of exposing communist idiocy, generally 
praised Trotsky -- in Animal Farm (Snowball), in 1984, and in Homage to 
Catalonia.

As part of working on a longish essay on Tillie Olsen, I went back and 
read his book "Literature and Revolution" in order to organize my 
thoughts on proletarian art/culture/novel etc. Most of what he wrote was 
extremely sensible and free of BS. His chief recommendations had nothing 
to do with what kinds of literature artists should write, but that the 
chief cultural goal of the party in the soviet union was the eliminate 
illiteracy.

Would write more, but have to run.

Joanna