Jim’s Reviews > The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 > Status Update

History clearly shows [said Stalin] that the salt of the earth is gradually shifting eastwards. In the eighteenth century, France was the salt of the earth, and in the nineteenth—Germany. Now it is Russia.

The many years of political freelancing had left their traces on Trotsky. He did not possess the habits of free and easy teamwork which make the strength of a real leader of men.

If the illusory [Menshevik] government makes a hazardous attempt to revive its own corpse, the popular masses will strike a decisive counter-blow. And the blow will be the more powerful the stronger the attack. If the government tries to use the 24 or 48 hours still left to it in order to stab the revolution, then we will declare that the vanguard of the revolution will meet attack with attack and iron with steel.

Step down, Jules Guesde [French socialist turned government minister], get out of the cage, where the capitalist state has shut you up, and look around a little. Perhaps fate will for once, and for the last time, have pity on your sorry old age, and you will hear the muted sound of approaching events. We await them; we summon them; we prepare them.

Stalin, in the dark days before he began opposing Trotsky with nothing but preposterous calumny, made a remark which offers a clue to this chapter. Trotsky's strength, Stalin said, reveals itself when the revolution gains momentum and advances; his weakness comes to the fore when the revolution is defeated and must retreat.

'An historical Rubicon,' Trotsky wrote, 'is truly crossed only at the moment when the material means of government pass from the hands of absolutism into those of the people.' Such things, Professor, are never achieved with the signing of a parchment; they take place on the street and are achieved through struggle.'