We Need to Talk About Leon: Trotsky and the Dilemmas of Representation

A huge thanks to Claire Holliss for her thorough and careful critique of an earlier draft of this post. This draft is certainly fuller, and better, for her thoughts! It is also very long – if you would prefer to download it as a PDF and read offline, a copy can be accessed here.

 

As the feminist slogan goes, “the personal is political”. This strikes me as doubly true when thinking of representation in History teaching.

Firstly, our personal decision, as teachers, about who we give representation to in our teaching grants certain groups and individuals from the past the power and right to be seen and heard. This is of course not only political in a sense of abstract interpersonal power relations, but also in that it has become highly politicised, by groups and campaigns today who actively contest over which people should be included in the History curriculum.

Secondly, and more directly relevant here, when we select individuals to represent a wider group from the past in our History lessons, we grant those individuals remarkable power. Think about it for a moment: almost always posthumously, and certainly without their knowledge, these individuals in effect are authorised to speak, and even act as proxy, for others whose experiences we consider similar to theirs.

This means that we need to talk about representation. Beyond just which groups we encounter in History teaching (which is certainly important), whom we empower as representatives of those groups by giving weight and voice to their life stories and identities really matters. (What I mean by “representation” and “identity” is explained in a short post-script at the bottom of this blog post.)

For this reason, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the prominence of one individual in our course textbooks.

 

Trotsky and Three Dilemmas of Representation

There are a small handful of references to individual Jews in our A-Level course textbooks. Of these, by far the most recognisable is Communist leader Leon Trotsky.

But, amidst the general lack of other Jewish voices, the prominence of Trotsky worries me. If he is one of only a few Jews to be mentioned in course texts, we should expect him to be broadly representative of Russian and Soviet Jews more generally.

So is he?

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879 in present-day Ukraine to an assimilated family with Jewish heritage, Trotsky became a prominent Marxist theoretician and member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP), later joining Lenin’s Bolsheviks in 1917. An exceptionally accomplished intellectual, he also proved his mettle in conflict, leading the Red Army through the Civil War of 1918-21. He would become a key opponent of Joseph Stalin during the 1920s and 1930s before being assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940.

If the basics of his revolutionary career are familiar, Trotsky’s Jewish identity is less so. Where does his Jewishness fit into his story? And how representative is Trotsky of Russian and Soviet Jews?

In this post, I’ll dig into this knotty problem, addressing three dilemmas it raises for us as History teachers concerning diversity, inclusion, and representation in our classrooms:

1. Given the complexity and diversity of past societies, how do we choose who is represented in our classrooms?
2. As people have multiple identities, (how) can we prioritise one identity over another?
3. Given the complexity of individual identities, (how) can we acknowledge multiple identities at the same time?

A quick methodological note and a note of caution: considering wider questions of identity and representation, I’ll cite a couple sociological models. I’m not a sociologist. And this is not an attempt to explore or critique these models. Instead, I’ll try to use them to highlight certain points that are relevant to the issue of (Jewish) historical representation in the classroom, but certainly won't claim to be an expert in these areas of theory.

 

Dilemma 1: Who is represented in our classrooms?

Approaches to the question of representation in History teaching have shifted over the past few years. Some years ago, the focus seemed mainly to be on increasing the quantity of groups represented; that is, diversifying our curriculum to include stories of more groups than before.

More recently, focus has shifted towards improving the quality of groups’ representation; more specifically, ensuring the stories of previously marginalised groups are embedded into wider narratives in a way which gives them meaningful agency and avoids treating them as passive or through a lens exclusively of victimhood or exploitation. To quote Dan Lydon-Cohen, this means History teachers must “decolonise, don’t diversify”.

Overall, I think this is a welcome change of direction. But it leaves open a problem of scale. The past is huge, and the number of groups who could be represented almost limitless. In that case, who do we choose to represent in our classrooms?

I find Claire Holliss’ suggestion compelling here. She has argued that we should choose to represent those individuals who can give a “sense of period”, whose connections to the past help us to “illuminate” aspects of the wider stories we tell our students.

In the case of Russian and Soviet Jews, Trotsky illuminates a number of key aspects of the past. He was emblematic of well-educated, politically engaged, and secular-minded Jews in late-Imperial Russia, many of whom joined revolutionary parties like the RSDWP in an effort to force political change. This made him part of a group which, historian Robert Service argues, “thought and behaved as citizens of the entire world. This was a widening trend around the turn of the century in culture and science as well as in politics, and Jewish intellectuals were in the forefront of it.”

At the same time, Trotsky was neither unique nor entirely identical to others within this group. In order to bring out its scale and diversity, his story must be situated within a wider picture of Jewish intellectuals that includes other individuals such as the Menshevik leader Julius Martov, the Marxist theorist Alexander Parvus, and leaders of the Jewish Bund (a Jewish Marxist group) Esther Frumkin and Mikhail Liber.

Situating Trotsky's story within these other stories, however, takes for granted that we are telling the right stories in the first place. The focus and attention on Trotsky reveals something rather important about the types of stories we tell about the past. Despite addressing social, economic, and cultural developments, for our A-Level course at least, politics is consistently given the greatest attention; and within politics, it is the “high politics” of state and its political opposition which is prioritised. In that case, Trotsky – as first a revolutionary, then a statesman, and finally a political outcast – does indeed serve to give a valuable “sense of period” (and one that should, certainly, be part of our teaching). But the attention he is given also should also be a warning flag for the thematic and conceptual limitations of what we’re being asked to teach.

 

Dilemma 2: (How) can we prioritise one identity over another?

If Trotsky can help represent a particular trend in Russian and Soviet Jewish intellectual and political life, another question arises. Like all people, Trotsky was complex, with multiple identities. If this is the case, how do we choose which of his multiple identities was most important? And if his salient identity was not his Jewishness, what then?

This dilemma might be addressed by thinking in terms of what sociologist Roger Gould termed “participation identity”. Put simply, this concept acknowledges that individuals have multiple identities, but suggests that one identity becomes more important than the others when individuals choose to engage in one social or political movement over others.

In the case of Trotsky, his “participation identity” would seem most obviously to be that of a socialist intellectual. Thinking of him as representing Russian Jews, however, this approach runs us into a problem. Trotsky never denied his Jewish heritage, which he noted in Communist Party documents and his own autobiography. But he rarely chose to participate in politics explicitly as a Jew. As Robert Service puts it, Trotsky “saw himself, first and foremost, as a revolutionary Marxist; his ancestry, he insisted, was a matter of no account for him.”

At key moments Trotsky did give more weight to his Jewish identity. In 1926, for instance, he wrote to fellow Communist leader, Nikolai Bukharin, to raise his concerns about antisemitic slurs being made by Communist activists, urging him to oppose these outbursts in political discussions. But these occasions were rare, and they were not the primary motivating factor for his participation in politics.

In some ways, this makes Trotsky appear, as certain historians have suggested, as a “non-Jewish Jew”, especially by contrast with other individuals who took actions explicitly as Jews, such as Jewish Marxists who joined the Bund or Zionists who campaigned for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Trotsky himself was highly critical of both Bundists and Zionists for emphasising their Jewishness and separateness from wider society. (In this sense, focusing on Trotsky might actually allow us to teach by means of a sideways glance about other Jewish individuals and groups in Russian and Soviet politics. Perhaps his attacks on Zionists and Bundists could allow us to highlight those groups to our students. Nevertheless, this also makes me uncomfortable – if these people are so important to the story of Russian and Soviet politics [as indeed they are], surely we should try to let them “speak for themselves” as far as possible?)

The value of the concept of “participation identity” is that it allows us to prioritise one identity of an individual about whom we teach, helping us to decide in a logical way which group that individual might best represent. In this case, if we tell our students that Trotsky is an intellectual, a socialist, and a Jew, it also helps us to rank these identities by importance.

At the same time, there are a couple of things this concept does not allow us to do. Firstly, it does not allow us to overlook or discount other identities an individual might hold. Identity is not a zero-sum game. I might well identify myself as primarily a History teacher, rather than a white, British, middle-class male, but this does not stop me being all of these things as well. Similarly, Trotsky was not not Jewish just because he was a revolutionary Marxist. Multiple identities can co-exist simultaneously.

Secondly, the concept of “participation identities” does not tell us about how other people saw the individuals we teach about. Identities are not simply chosen by the individual. They can also be ascribed to the individual by others. I would never think of joining a political organisation campaigning for “men’s rights” and only tend to describe myself as “white” or “British” for the purposes of diversity reports and census forms; yet others might choose to emphasise these things about me for one reason or another. In the case of Trotsky, although he rarely emphasised his own Jewishness, this part of his identity was emphasised by others – typically as an antisemitic stick to beat him with. During the Russian Civil War, for example, anti-Communist propaganda often depicted Trotsky as a monstrous Jewish tyrant in an attempt to conflate Communism with Jewry. Clearly, in this instance, Trotsky’s Jewishness (in the form of vicious antisemitic caricature) is an important part of an identity constructed for him by others that can help give a (very unpleasant) “sense of period” for that time in history.

 

Dilemma 3: (How) can we acknowledge multiple identities at the same time?

The fact that individuals have multiple identities at once gives rise to third dilemma. If we are to focus on an individual’s identities when representing wider groups in our teaching, how do we acknowledge the fact of their multiple identities?

In one sense, the problem is categorical – if an individual can be said to have multiple identities, surely they can be said to be representative of multiple different groups.

In another sense, the problem is personal – if an individual can be said to have multiple identities, surely these different identities must interact with each other, shaping who that individual is and how they experienced the world around them.

Here, the concept of “intersectionality” seems useful. Coined by black legal scholar and feminist, Kimberlé Crenshaw, in 1989, intersectionality broadly describes how multiple identities overlap to shape someone’s lived experience in ways which are distinct to other groups and individuals. What might this mean? Using myself as an example again, although I may be particularly recognisable as a History teacher, my identity as a History teacher is also shaped by the fact of my being white, British, middle-class, and male. This makes my lived experience different to that of (for example) a black, female teacher.

In the case of Trotsky, it is clear that the fact of his Jewishness did impact on his lived experience as a revolutionary Marxist, even if he did not consider himself primarily to be acting as a Jew. Trotsky was acutely aware of the implications of his being Jewish, in particular in how this made him vulnerable to antisemitic attacks, so much so that he rejected a proposal in 1922 to become Lenin’s deputy in the Soviet government, for fear of the negative impact a Jew holding such high rank might have on the Communist Party and regime.

Indeed, in this manner Trotsky was actually part of a narrow but historically significant strand of Jewish public activists, prominent in Russia’s (non-Jewish specific) socialist organisations, who deliberately sought to play down their Jewish identity in order to participate in what they conceived as a universal revolutionary cause that transcended narrow ethnic and national identities. In this connection, sociologist Liliana Riga has argued that the “universalism of Russian socialism” provided a powerful motivation for Jews to join radical but non-Jewish specific socialist parties, especially the Bolsheviks, which they saw as a vehicle not only to destroy class, but also the ethnic and national inequalities that had shaped their personal experience of a discriminatory world to that point.

 

Tentative Conclusions

What does all this mean for Trotsky’s place in our A-Level History course? And what does it suggest for the question of representation in our History classrooms more generally?

Here are three broad conclusions

1. Although it is a challenge that cannot be completely overcome in classroom teaching, representing broad and diverse groups from the past in as accurate and rounded a way possible is something we should do – and this requires careful thought as to not only which groups we choose to include, but also whose stories we choose to do that representing.
2. The groups and individuals we choose to represent should be relevant and illuminating to the wider stories from the past we aim to tell – all groups and individuals are interesting in their own right; unfortunately, this alone isn’t enough of a reason to include them in a packed and time-limited curriculum. At the same time, we should be careful not to allow marginalised groups to be “spoken for” exclusively by those who are markedly different from them.
3. We should be cognizant of how individuals from the past chose to represent themselves in their own time. This can tell us a lot about the world they lived in and their own perceptions of it. This doesn’t mean that if someone (like Trotsky and his Jewishness) chose to downplay an aspect of their identity they can’t be used to represent another group with that identity. But it does mean we need to have a solid rationale for using them to represent that group.

In the next couple of posts on Jewish history, I'll present some approaches and lesson resources which allow us to represent voices and elements of that history that are often overlooked.

Further Reading

Brittney Cooper, “Intersectionality” in Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Oxford University Press (2015), pp. 385-406

Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune, University of Chicago (1995)

Claire Holliss, “Illuminating the possibilities of the past: the role of representation in A-level curriculum planning”, Teaching History 185 (December 2021), pp. 22-29

Dan Lyndon-Cohen, “Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in Key Stage 3 history curriculum”, Teaching History 183 (June 2021), pp. 50-57

Liliana Riga, The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire, Cambridge University Press (2012)

Robert Service, Leon Trotsky: An Autobiography, Pan Books (2009), esp. chapter 21, “Trotsky and the Jews”, pp. 199-207

 

Post Script: Representation and Identity in the History Classroom

Throughout this post, I’ve tried to frame the question of Trotsky’s inclusion in our course in terms of two interrelated concepts: representation and identity.

Commonly, when representing different groups in our teaching, we turn to individuals who we feel share in some way a key characteristic of those groups. This might be a common origin, beliefs or attitudes, or particular involvement in an area of life. Whatever the case, that individual in question is taken as representative of the wider group.

Insofar as this is the case, we are dealing with the question of identity. In other words, we are suggesting that the individual we have chosen to focus on is in some way identical to (the etymological root of the word “identity”), or at least substantially similar to, other members of that group. Taken to its furthest extent, if we focus on this individual in order to reveal wider key truths about the wider group we associate them with, we effectively give them the power of proxy to speak on behalf of that group.

It may well be, given limitations of time and student attention, that we are forced as teachers to represent groups through individuals in this way. Still, it is worth flagging up a problem inherent in this approach – no individual can represent fully the complex diversity of a wider group. This might seem obvious, but it raises an important consideration: if we are to ensure reasonably accurate representation of a group in History teaching, we surely need to have multiple individuals as representatives of that group, each reflecting different aspects of that group’s collective identity. (How we do this, faced with limited curriculum time and a huge range of history to teach is another matter.)