History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Like Rosa Luxemburg, he averted his face from specifically Jewish sufferings, however appalling. When in power, he always refused to see Jewish delegations. As with other Non-Jewish Jews, the suppression of feelings which his political posture involved spread to his own family circle: he took no interest in the miseries of his father, who lost all in the revolution and died of typhus. Trotsky compensated for his indifference as a Jew by his volcanic energy and ruthlessness as a revolutionary. It is most unlikely that the Bolshevik Revolution could have succeeded or endured without him. It was Trotsky who taught Lenin the significance of workers’ soviets and how to exploit them. It was Trotsky who personally organized and led the armed uprising which actually overthrew the provisional government and placed the Bolsheviks in power. It was Trotsky who created, and until 1925 controlled, the Red Army, and who ensured the physical survival of the new Communist regime during the Civil War which came close to destroying it.55 More than anyone else, Trotsky symbolized the violence and daemonic power of Bolshevism and its determination to inflame the world.