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The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921

(Trotsky #1)

Isaac Deutscher

4.31 · Rating details · 888 ratings · 58 reviews

Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much controversy as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible mark on revolutionary conscience; and yet there was at one time a danger that his name would disappear altogether from history. Isaac Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biogra ...more

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Paperback, 497 pages

Published January 17th 2004 by Verso (first published 1954)

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Jan 05, 2010 David rated it liked it

In my adorable years of late-teens and early-twenties 'radicalism,' some of my heroes (cultural, aesthetic, political) included Salvador Dalí, Karen Finley, Emma Goldman, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Rosa Luxemburg, Diamanda Galás, Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.D. Salinger, and Leon Trotsky. The motliest of crews, to say the least. Each member of this pantheon, although no longer gilded by the burnished and obscuring light of youth, retai In my adorable years of late-teens and early-twenties 'radicalism,' some of my heroes (cultural, aesthetic, political) included Salvador Dalí, Karen Finley, Emma Goldman, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Rosa Luxemburg, Diamanda Galás, Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.D. Salinger, and Leon Trotsky. The motliest of crews, to say the least. Each member of this pantheon, although no longer gilded by the burnished and obscuring light of youth, retains some measure of my affection -- either to a greater or lesser degree -- but no one has perhaps suffered a more precipitous drop on the pop charts of my esteem than Leon Trotsky. And deservedly so.

For the most part, whatever lingers of his reputation as a champion of the oppressed relies upon comparisons to Stalin, that paranoiac barbarian who elbowed him out of the Soviet Throne (a comparison which in most cases, except maybe with Hitler, will always favor the non-Stalin entity), and also upon speculation (or wishful thinking) that he would have been a far more palatable despot.

Admittedly, Trostky makes for a much more appealing intellectual icon than that swarthy, unrefined, not-entirely-evolved Georgian who seemed in many of his photographs to be on the cusp of a sinister smile: a product of knowing, perhaps, that he had your entire family dispatched to the gulag that very morning over breakfast. Trotsky, meanwhile, had the goatee, the big poofy leonine hairdo, and -- fuck yeah -- the pince-nez. When selecting an icon, always go with the one wearing the pince-nez as a rule of thumb.

As with everything, Trotsky's appeal is only relative. He's not so bad when you take what you know about him and draw up a color-coded chart comparing him to Mao and Stalin and Hitler and Idi Amin Dada and so on. But that's (maybe) because he never enjoyed the power they did. He never even came close to it.

The Prophet Armed was the first volume of Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. Since Deutscher liked Trotsky, both politically and personally, it's obviously a sympathetic account but never gives itself over to rapture or pure hagiography. This edition, published by Verso, contains more typographical errors than a reader should ever expect from a legitimate established publishing house. In other words, this editorial sloppiness is distracting and lends the impression (if only subliminally) that one is reading a bootleg or a spurious text. ...more

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Jun 23, 2012 Jim rated it it was amazing

Shelves: russia, biography

I read this first volume of three of Isaac Deutscher's massive biography of Leon Trotsky for a discussion group on Russian history. It turns out that seeing the Russian Revolution through the eyes of one man -- perhaps the most brilliant of the early Soviet leaders -- gave me a unique perception of Russia's successes and failures in those critical early years.

Communism started out more or less as an international debating society with branches all over Europe. It was only the proto-revolution of I read this first volume of three of Isaac Deutscher's massive biography of Leon Trotsky for a discussion group on Russian history. It turns out that seeing the Russian Revolution through the eyes of one man -- perhaps the most brilliant of the early Soviet leaders -- gave me a unique perception of Russia's successes and failures in those critical early years.

Communism started out more or less as an international debating society with branches all over Europe. It was only the proto-revolution of 1905 that showed Trotsky and Lenin that the whole thing was possible. What they didn't expect, however, was that the whole rest of the world did not march in lockstep with them. They conducted their revolution in the middle of World War I, while under attack by the Germans, succeeded in an almost bloodless overthrow of Kerensky's Menshevik government, then had to deal with several years of civil war against the White Russian forces of Denikin, Kolchak, and Wrangel -- not to mention an invasion of the Ukraine by the Polish. At the end of this time, Russia was in the middle of a famine, industrial production was way down, and something new had to be done.

Trotsky was not only the major player in the October Revolution, but founded the Red Army to combat the Poles and the Whites. As Deutscher writes:

It was his clear, consistent, and swift logic -- the logic of the great administrator -- that defeated Trotsky. His mind fixed on his objective, he rushed headlong into controversy, impetuously produced arguments and generalizations, and ignored the movement of opinion until he overreached himself and aroused angry resentment. The self-conscious administrator in him got the better of the sensitive political thinker and blinded him to the implications of his schemes. What was only one of many facets in Trotsky's experimental thinking [namely, a monolithic state] was to become Stalin's alpha and omega.

The first volume ends in 1921, as Trotsky was still in his prime, but beginning to run into opposition from Stalin and others.

On a squib of the back cover of my edition, Graham Greene states, "Surely this must be counted among the greatest biographies in the English language." To which I might add that it is a sine qua non for understanding how communism emerged from a theory into a large and powerful state. ...more

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Jan 17, 2019 Justin Evans rated it really liked it

Shelves: history-etc

Very solid biography--more detailed than is perhaps necessary at times, but it's so well organized that you can skim over some of the more turgid debates, knowing that you'll be able to find that debate should you ever need to, which, I hope, you won't. It's ultra-intellectual, in the sense that Trotsky's wife appears in about two sentences, and otherwise we're just talking about the minute discussions that, in some sense, determined the disastrous course of the Russian transition from shit (Tsa ...more

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Nov 05, 2010 Jeff Clay rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is a book of big ideas and actions to match. Once Big Ideas were the norm. We've moved beyond that: through the period of little, lean and mean ideas to the time of No ideas. Ideas have been replaced by positions (supported by its mutant step-child, talking points) and those usually appear fossilized. Action we do have. But unfortunately it comes from either Michael Bay or a drone.

But this book is about a different time. Big Ideas ruled and people could shape destinies armed with those idea ...more

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Jul 08, 2016 David M rated it really liked it

"Revolutions are true as movements but false as regimes." - Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic

First, this is not hagiography. Plenty of liberal historians have written biographies of American presidents; for a Marxist to write one of Trotsky is no more inherently biased.

In a little over a year the centenary of the October Revolution will be upon us, comrades. While the Soviet Union looks like a thoroughly discredited cause, the significance of this event may still be up for grabs. We hav "Revolutions are true as movements but false as regimes." - Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic

First, this is not hagiography. Plenty of liberal historians have written biographies of American presidents; for a Marxist to write one of Trotsky is no more inherently biased.

In a little over a year the centenary of the October Revolution will be upon us, comrades. While the Soviet Union looks like a thoroughly discredited cause, the significance of this event may still be up for grabs. We have not yet reached the end of history and capitalism continues to produce conflict and crisis.

I come to Deutscher's biography as a leftist, obviously. I think that for the last 50 years or so the greatest publication in English has been Perry Anderson's New Left Review. I'm no longer very active politically, but when I do have political conversations I'm often surprised to find that on many issues my views are apparently well to the left of liberal consensus.

Granted I don't have much in the way of a positive alternative to the neoliberal world order. Do such alternatives exist? Reading a biography of Trotsky may seem like a roundabout way to investigate this question, but then my temperament was probably always too baroque to make a good activist.

The crimes of the Bolshevism have been roundly and rightly denounced by people of all political persuasions. However, there have been those that have maintained that it didn't have to be that way. That the horrors of Stalinism were the accident of one particular man coming to power; that if Trotsky had succeeded Lenin history would have been very different. We might have an idea of Communism as something other than totalitarian terror. Does the Trotskyist view have any real merit?

I keep this question constantly in mind as I read Deutscher's biography. After volume 1, I have to say the case for Trotksy does not look good. As the original commissar of the Red Army, he oversaw the first use of revolutionary terror. He was the first strong advocate of the militarization of labor, which later became the hallmark of Stalin's planned economy. Indeed, Stalin would take many of his most brutal policies directly from his chief political opponent. The narrative of Stalin the tyrant versus Trotsky the heroic dissident often obscures this fact.
...more

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May 29, 2011 C rated it really liked it

The other reviewers are right to call this biography hagiography. Although, since the Soviets kept such a tight lock on their historical information, and one can never trust Stalin's press releases as genuine, perhaps the limited information Deuscher had access to really did paint Trotsky in such a pristine light. I'm dubious though.

The serious problem with this book is that Deutscher sets out on too many goals at once, and thus fails to consummate any of them. He tries to write a bio without b ...more

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Oct 02, 2008 Erik Graff rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Erik by: Edward Erickson

Shelves: biography

Having had my eyes opened about U.S. foreign policy by the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and my study of the history of the war in Southeast Asia, I joined the Young People's Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party, and Students for a Democratic Society, by my junior year in high school. I also made some older friends through the school's social science club, most of whom knew a lot more than I did and some of whom directed me to books about history, political s ...more

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Oct 23, 2018 Mike rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, read-in-2018, biography-and-autobiography

In Tariq Ali's autobiography he recounts reading Deutscher's famous biography of Trotsky one weekend while laid up with the flu, and it converting him into a trot and catalysing his joining the IMG. Perhaps the other two volumes are more inspirational but this one rather had the opposite effect on me.

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Jul 12, 2013 Antonio Nunez rated it liked it

For nearly all its existence since Lenin's death in 1924 Trotsky (aka Lev Davidovich Bronstein) was Satan in the Bolshevik's manichean view of the world. Most of the purges of the 1930s were allegedly meant to cleanse Soviet society and its key institutions (the Communist Party, the unions, the Red Army, the intelligentsia) of the Trotskyte taint that, like some sort of Original Sin, pervaded the proletarian dictatorship. Stalin tried to erase Trotsky from the history of the Revolution. He even For nearly all its existence since Lenin's death in 1924 Trotsky (aka Lev Davidovich Bronstein) was Satan in the Bolshevik's manichean view of the world. Most of the purges of the 1930s were allegedly meant to cleanse Soviet society and its key institutions (the Communist Party, the unions, the Red Army, the intelligentsia) of the Trotskyte taint that, like some sort of Original Sin, pervaded the proletarian dictatorship. Stalin tried to erase Trotsky from the history of the Revolution. He even erased Trotsky's physical attributes, not just by killing him in 1940, half a world away, but by obliterating his likeness wherever it might have been found.

This book, published fifty years ago, tried to counter the Stalinist plot against Trotsky by vindicating his key role in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, in the Civil War and in the establishment of the Red Army and the Soviet state. The author partially succeeds. Here we see Trotsky in all his glory, as perhaps he would have liked to be remembered, as a child prodigy who from humble rural beginnings quickly found his way in the world, as a professional revolutionary, as a brilliant polemist and orator, who even as a young man was seen as worthy counterpart to Lenin, and far above the rest of the Party, as a good hearted man who tried to promote harmony within the Party and failed at it, as a cultured, civilized "westernizer", much more appealing than the brutal Stalin, who came straight from the "log cabin" of czarist barbarism. He also came up with many good ideas, such as Lenin's New Economic Policy. Deutscher also gives us some of the darker sides to Trotsky's scintillating personna. He was proud and haughty, but brittle. He was abusive to others, often unnecessarily. He often let abstractions and daydreams take the place of reality. And he came up with many bad ideas, such as War Communism and the Militarization of Labor.

But, given Deutscher's profile (he was a Trotskyte) the book is often a competent whitewash. The author shares Trotsky's (and the Bolshevik's) worldview to a great extent, and sees the October Revolution as a worthy action. Mostly, he takes Trotskyte and Bolshevik motives as justification for their actions. He portrays opponents (such as the White Guards and nationalist Ukrainians and Poles) as illegitimate. Nowhere does the awfulness of Soviet rule, and the brutality of the Bolshevik leaders come through, except perhaps in their remarkably abusive writings. To find such bitchiness nowadays one would have to refer to the academic world, where the nastiness is commensurate to the irrelevance of that which is being discussed.

Also, the book is often not very readable as history. The author will often refer to future or past events in a single page, without indication of the precise dates, which makes this a hard book to read for someone not familiar with the October Revolution.

Having said this, a good reason to read this book is that it is beautifully written, and that the author really does get very close to his subject, which is mostly a negative in that he lacks perspective, but does bring the advantage of great liveliness which makes this a very good read. This reminds me of Preston's life of General Franco. Preston hated his subject and was unable utterly to develop any empathy with him, so the book was fairly arid and not insightful. Deutscher has the opposite defect: he gets too close, as perhaps does Nicholas Farrell to Mussolini. The ideal would be like Kershaw's Hitler or Short's Mao: far enough to look the monster in the eye, but not close enough to kiss him.

At this book's end, Trotsky is at the apex of his power, from which he would begin to slip during Lenin's final year. But this is better left to volume II, which I also hope to review.

So read the book, but don't take Deutscher at his word. Complement this with Volkogonov's Trotsky. And with Trotsky's own voluminous writings, which are often very amusing (particularly his biography of Stalin). ...more

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Nov 02, 2008 Daniel rated it it was amazing

This book is pretty effing incredible. It's a lot more than a biography. Deutscher presents the political events of the era and the theory that Trotsky grappled with and developed in some pretty rich detail.

Trotsky's life is the stuff of high drama. The social events of the time and place are inspiring. And Deutscher writes brilliantly. Boy, if this kind of history was taught in school...

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Sep 01, 2019 Carsten rated it it was amazing

Incredible part one to this three part biography. The way Deutscher is able to cover the political disputes between the differing factions is elucidating. Trotsky's portrayal in the book makes him out to be a "renaissance man" who's love of literature, journalistic creativity, and military might makes him seem almost superhuman. Definitely worth a read, even if only for the superb quotations Deustcher is able to use from Trotsky's own works.

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Mar 29, 2020 Differengenera rated it it was amazing

the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary stuff is really faultless but post, we begin to get a lot of stuff that seems to be suggesting that trotsky saw the whole of the trajectory of the degenerated worker's state coming a mile away but was faultless for everything done under his leadership, stalin a being of pure malice etc. not necessarily saying any of that is wrong, i'm not in a position to dispute, but the lengths which are gone to to underline trotsky's piety at every turn turns me off

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Jan 27, 2014 PAЯTHAИ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: russian

Volume 1, Trotsky - Prophet Armed, depicts not only the rise of Trotsky as a revolutionary star but the background history of imperial Russia in late 19th century, under Tsardom, struggling with illiterate peasantry and serfdom. Revolution was not the product of overnight work. Isaac Deutscher help us to know how the émigré leadership of future revolution worked in Western Europe for more than 15 years, when they were forced to go underground in Russia, their deportation to Siberia and enigmatic
Volume 1, Trotsky - Prophet Armed, depicts not only the rise of Trotsky as a revolutionary star but the background history of imperial Russia in late 19th century, under Tsardom, struggling with illiterate peasantry and serfdom. Revolution was not the product of overnight work. Isaac Deutscher help us to know how the émigré leadership of future revolution worked in Western Europe for more than 15 years, when they were forced to go underground in Russia, their deportation to Siberia and enigmatic escapes from polar circle camps, Operation of clandestine works, production of socialist news papers, grouping already progressed European socialists etc. Ideological differences made Trotsky to move away from Lenin resulting Mensheviks and Bolsheviks camps, both heading for the same cause. From 1905 to 1917 both Trotsky and Lenin were constantly attacking and defending each other. Trotsky always took the stand which made his comrades and enemies to suspect his intention and sincerity constantly. But his intelligence, knowledge, oratory skill to win masses kept him always on top order.

On the eve of 1917 October revolution, Lenin was in his hideout, stamped as German spy and fear of assassination or arrest, Stalin was unaccountably absent, What more, Trotsky lead the revolution like true General, with brave resolution and without bloodshed.

October revolution was followed by Russia’s withdrawal from WWI in Trotsky's initiative. Soon Civil war broke out; he formed Red Army and led from front like a Marshal not without ruthless. Ignoring Trotsky's reluctance, Bolshevik's Polish campaign was disastrous. Trotsky warned well in advance that Proletarian dictatorship in a foreign country is not possible by substituting Red Army or Russian Soviets instead of native call for revolution. When revolution lead to conquest in Russia, Bolsheviks tried for revolution in foreign soil by conquest. For another quarter century no revolution happened either in Europe or Asia. Trotsky's prophecy came true once again.

Lenin was a political genius, theorist, economist, émigré leader and unquestionable giant of his party, where as Stalin was Lenin's henchman, home bred expert of clandestine operations in underground, fund raiser by raiding Tsar's financial institutes, slowly anchored in Red Army and later arch enemy of Trotsky.

In 1930s Stalin spent billions of Roubles to erase Trotsky's role in revolution, millions murdered in the orchestrated great purge. But history already engraved Trotsky’s name in blood red letters.
...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Mikee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography, history

(Current)
I feel, if anything, more reverential about Deutscher's work than I did when I first read it two years ago. A sweeping, yet personal, perspective on one of the most dynamic periods in history. Yet my sympathetic association with Trotsky's ideas are diminished by a more careful read on how mercurial his passions could be and on his willingness to dispel niceties such as democratic freedom in pursuit of his aims (which themselves are a bit inconsistent during the latter years of his posit ...more

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Oct 12, 2012 Mark Desrosiers rated it liked it

Shelves: history, politics, scribblers

Isaac Deutscher is a perceptive historian and vivid prose stylist, and we're lucky to get this monumental portrait of the most quickly receding revolutionary of the last century. Trotsky was many things -- talented scribbler, devious escape artist, persuasive orator, wide-ranging theoretician, principled friend of the peasantry and proletariat (he came from neither class). But Deutscher can't erase the fact that, despite his charisma and brainpower, Trotsky was above all a stone bore. The Menshe ...more

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May 07, 2008 Tony duncan rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: leftists who want to see why we don't get shit done in the US

Shelves: politics

this is a brilliant work about one of the greatest political minds in History. Deutscher is quite sympathetic to trotsky and that might bother some people as trotsky had a hand in ruthlessly killing hundreds of thousands of people. Those are a lot of broken eggs for an omelet that didn't end up being so tasty.

But we get inside Trotsky's head in a way no other author I have read does. Trotsky was a genius, a committed revolutionary, and he had a few fatal flaws. He believed he understood more tha ...more

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May 26, 2012 Tripmastermonkey rated it really liked it

Shelves: politics

This is the first book I've been able to get through on the Russian revolution, and I found it fascinating. The author, Isaac Deutscher, was reading Shakespearean tragedies while writing the book, and the narrative of this book does indeed show an arc from triumph to tragedy (and this is only the 1st of 3 books he wrote on Trotsky's life). World events, personal pride and ambition (his own and that of others), grave mis-steps- all show up in this biography. For someone I came to truly respect in ...more

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Sep 26, 2008 Michael rated it liked it

Shelves: history

A very detailed if somewhat hagiographic look at Trotsky from his birth to the end of the civil war. Also, since it's an older book, it doesn't have access to the archives that were opened in the 1990s. For this reason, while it's a good book on Trotsky, it's missing some interesting information about the russian revolution as a whole that can be found elsewhere.

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Apr 30, 2007 James rated it liked it

Mind bogglingly thorough history of Trotsky that started out for me as an assigned book for a Russian History class. I ended up becoming really fixated on Trotsky, so I read all three volumes. Everything you've ever wanted to know about the birth of Soviet Union and more.

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Feb 08, 2010 Grady Ormsby rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: anyone interested in history or politics

End of volume one. End of the revolution. What good does it do to win the revolution and the civil war is there is nothing left? How do the workers unite when there is no more work, no more work places?

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Oct 06, 2019 Thomas S rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Deutscher has a nimble yet deep rasp of the personalities, pressures, and interactions among European Socialists and the Russian contingent, who lived in exile for many years. Not only is Trotsky's early life opened up beautifully, but his mental facility and imagination are shown without unnecessary use of adjectives or criticism. My previous reading had given me a sound understanding of Trotsky's life after being exiled by Stalin, but much of this book was new to me. His high talent for mathem ...more

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Dec 23, 2017 Antti Kauppinen rated it it was amazing

A sympathetic but not sycophantic portrayal of a remarkable man. Deutscher has no doubt socialism is the way to go, which helps him make good sense of the complex events of the Bolshevik revolution, though unfortunately at the expense of minimizing some of its worst aspects. I look forward to reading the further volumes.

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May 07, 2020 Cool_guy rated it really liked it

Reading this you get the sense that the Bolshevik revolution's descent into totalitarianism was inevitable; that despite Trotksy's humanism, which Deutscher convincingly argues was genuine, the circumstances of the revolution made terror necessary if it was to maintain state power. Basically, the revolution came too soon. The moment the uprisings in Germany were crushed, it was doomed

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May 10, 2020 Kelly rated it really liked it

Shelves: soviet-history

Best book on Trotsky i have ever read, but really gets bogged down with military strategy. Wanted to give it 5 stars, but just couldn't at the end of the day due to insane amount of needless information. Highly recommend If you are looking to read about the main protagonists of the Russian revolution. Top notch, will definitely need the next two in the series.

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Jul 28, 2017 Trevor Durham rated it liked it

Shelves: understanding-modern-russia, major-historical-figures-unveiled

OH WHAT INCREDIBLE DETAIL DEUTSCHER GIVES. I've also read half of the second volume, and I must say, the external reading he inserts to accompany Trotsky's path is daunting. Truly crucial if you want impeccable insights to Lev's earlier years.

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Jan 14, 2018 BOB rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, socialism, non-fiction, biography, marxism, trotskyism, russia

If it's hagiography it's damn good hagiography

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Sep 15, 2018 Sean Estelle rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction

Whew - this was an adventure. Reads relatively easily, gets into the weeds in the right parts, a partisan account but up front about that.... I'm excited to read the other two books in the trilogy!

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Oct 29, 2019 Doris Raines rated it liked it

NICE BOOK.

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Oct 07, 2020 Alexandre Andrade Sampaio rated it it was amazing

An astonishing inside look into the mind and actions of a complicated, flawed and yet brilliant person that co-led a complicated, flawed and yet brilliant revolution.

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May 14, 2018 Dale rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, nonfiction, favorites, russia

This first volume in Deutcher´s biography of Trotsky takes us through 1921. Deutcher paints a picture of a man who is brilliant, courageous, determined, principled, and stubborn.

Trotsky was born to a family of soon-to-be well-to-do peasants. He did very well in school, and had begun a course in mathematics. But while at University he came under the influence of student radicals, and though he initially held a skeptical stance, he was eventually convinced of the need for radical change to the aut This first volume in Deutcher´s biography of Trotsky takes us through 1921. Deutcher paints a picture of a man who is brilliant, courageous, determined, principled, and stubborn.

Trotsky was born to a family of soon-to-be well-to-do peasants. He did very well in school, and had begun a course in mathematics. But while at University he came under the influence of student radicals, and though he initially held a skeptical stance, he was eventually convinced of the need for radical change to the autocratic Tsarist government, and once convinced he threw himself into left politics with all his energy. This was to be a pattern that repeated many times in his career.

This is mostly a political / public biography, with scant attention paid to Trotsky´s personal life, other than some brief references to his leaving his first wife while in internal exile under the Tsar, and meeting and eventually marrying the woman (Sedova) who would remain with him until his death.

In the complex, dangerous, and violent aftermath of the October Revolution, during the civil war aided by foreign invasion, we are shown a tireless and effective Trotsky leading the Red Army against the forces of reaction and counter-revolution. He performed brilliantly, despite having no more than a brief academic acquaintance with the arts of war. His ability to assess a situation and take decisive action was remarkable. We also see that he was sometimes overruled by the Communist party leadership, to great disadvantage. But when overruled Trortsky nonetheless carried out his mission with dedication.

At the conclusion of the civil war, Trotsky urged a loosening of economic policy, as the only path to recovering the agricultural and industrial production that had been lost to the destruction of war. He was overruled, with the party leadership directing a continuation of ¨war communism¨: forced appropriations from the peasants, and labor production quotas. The loyal party member, Trotsky put that policy into place, despite his principles, and did so with his usual forceful determination. The result was disastrous, and a year later Lenin introduced the ¨New Economic Policy¨; too late to achieve what might have been achieved a year earlier. And in the intervening year, Trotsky had introduced a militarization of industrial production, leading to widespread dissent and even proto-revolutionary activity among the industrial workers.

This dissent eventually led to the Kronstadt uprising: the sailors at the Kronstadt base, who had been Trotsky´s loyal followers and instrumental in the overthrow of the provisional government in October 1917, rose again in defiance of the Soviet government. For good reason: the Communist party had suppressed opposition parties, even those that were socialist, and the Soviets were no longer the democratic bodies they had been. Power was being rapidly centralized into the hands of the party central committee.

As perhaps the biggest blot on Trotsky´s legacy, he was the most adamant about making an immediate counter-attack on Kronstadt. The revolt was violently suppressed.

Trotsky had much earlier predicted that a possible outcome of the ¨dictatorship of the proletariat¨ would be the concentration of power first into a single party, then into that party´s leadership, and finally into the hands of a single individual. And so it was. It need not have been so. The soviets had been truly democratic through the civil war, with only actually counter-revolutionary parties being suppressed - a necessity in time of war. But in the aftermath of the civil war, with peasants deeply resenting and resisting the forced food requisitions, and workers suffering from famine as a result, and the entire country exhausted by 7 years of war, revolution, and civil war, opposition to Communist party policy was widespread. The party saw that new soviet elections would sweep it from power, and they reacted by suppressing all political parties but their own.

It was a tragedy, and one that echoed through most of the 20th century. A tragedy not only for the Russian people, who were soon to have Stalinist terror inflicted on them, but also for the cause of socialism everywhere. ...more

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Biography Memoir

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About Isaac Deutscher

Isaac Deutscher

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Isaac Deutscher was a Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. His three-volume biography of Trotsky, in particular, was highly influential among the British New Left.

Other books in the series

Trotsky (3 books)

Books by Isaac Deutscher

The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-67

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Quotes from The Prophet Armed...

“I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.” — 6 likes

“Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.” — 5 likes

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