Ordeal, Book Three

Three books written across twenty years, and a tally that can be checked.

In The Sisters, finished in Paris in 1921, Trotsky is named nought times and Stalin nought. In Nineteen Eighteen, written in the year of Trotsky's expulsion, Trotsky nought and Stalin once. In Bleak Morning, dated 22 June 1941 - the morning the German army crossed the frontier - Trotsky nought and Stalin six.

And this is what he does in those six. He issues timely warnings. He is despatched to the Kama and takes radical measures. He drafts the vast strategic plan, typed on bluish paper. He signs the decisive order as Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. He is pointed out across a hall as the one who crushed Denikin. Every function in that list belonged to the man who is not in the book.

It would be comfortable to conclude Tolstoy simply got worse. The books do not support it. This is the best of the three as a novel: Roshchin the monarchist officer crossing over, slowly and without flattery, and Makhno named more often than Denikin, on a bicycle at Gulyai-Polye. A man does not write those pages with his eyes shut.

Progress Publishers, 1965. Translated by Ivy and Tatiana Litvinov.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.