Trotsky, circa 1922. Photograph: Corbis/Hulton-Deutsch Collection

When it came to art, Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) confessed he was never more than a dilettante. On the subject of literature, however, he could claim to be an authority. In the years following the 1917 Russian Revolution, Trotsky became Soviet Russia’s most influential literary critic and, despite numerous and powerful foes—Joseph Stalin chief among them—its most effective advocate of freedom in all of the arts.

Trotsky began writing literary criticism in 1900 in the midst of a two-year exile in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, imposed by the czarist government for his role as a member of the South Russia Workers’ Union. While in exile, he became a regular contributor to the Irkutsk paper Eastern Review. The young radical stood up for literary tradition. In an appreciative essay devoted to Nikolai Gogol in 1902, on the 50th anniversary of the writer’s death, Trotsky defended the author of Dead Souls from fellow radicals who found Gogol’s social criticism too timid. When all was said and done, Trotsky argued, Gogol was the “father of Russian comedy and the Russian novel,” the first “truly national writer.”

“The novel is our daily bread,” Trotsky once remarked. He had a strong preference for realist works—the French novelists Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola were among his favorites. Only socially conscious literature truly satisfied him. In two early essays about Leo Tolstoy, he praised the novelist’s prodigious talent for invoking character and atmosphere—his “miracle of reincarnation”—but scorned the author’s focus on a world of aristocrats and peasants, as well as his flights into religion.

In the first decade of Bolshevik power, Trotsky’s reputation for tolerance in the arts left him vulnerable to charges of encouraging bourgeois individualism and spreading defeatism on the cultural front. The idea of a proletarian culture was in vogue among writers and radical theorists in Moscow and Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). An influential movement called Proletcult argued that prerevolutionary art and literature belonged in history’s dustbin along with the former ruling classes, replaced by proletarian art untainted by bourgeois influences. Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, whose personal taste in art was conservative—he enjoyed the works of Chekov, Pushkin, and Turgenev—resisted Proletcult’s agenda.

Trotsky’s major contribution to this battle over the future course of Soviet culture was Literature and Revolution, a volume of literary criticism published in 1924. The book’s principal theme was the indispensability of tradition, even in the homeland of communism. “We Marxists have always lived in tradition,” Trotsky argued, “and we have not ceased to be revolutionaries because of it.” He opposed the notion that art and literature of past epochs reflected merely the economic interests of now-vanquished social classes. Great art, he declared, was timeless and classless. The proletariat’s rule, too, he said, would be brief and transitory, giving way to a classless socialist society and a universal culture.

At the moment, however, the Russian worker was a cultural pauper, in Trotsky’s estimation. The proletariat’s immediate challenge was not to break with literary tradition but rather to absorb and assimilate it, starting with the classics. “What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoevsky,” he wrote, “will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious. . . . In the final analysis the worker will become richer.”

Meanwhile, stated Trotsky, the central task of the Bolshevik Party was to exercise “watchful revolutionary censorship” against any artistic movement openly opposed to the revolution. In the absence of such a threat, however, the Party should assume no leadership role. Art, Trotsky insisted, “must make its own way and by its own means.”

Bertrand M. Patenaude teaches history at Stanford University. He is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (2002). His essay is adapted from Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary (copyright © 2009 by Bertrand M. Patenaude), by arrangement with HarperCollins.