Prophet Armed: The Life of Trotsky, 1879 to 1921 Book

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.