The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1924-1940.

This last of 3 volumes in Deutscher's biography caps an astonishing and captivating historiographical achievement. Deutscher weaves together character study, drama, and historical narrative to give an authoritative account of Trotsky's tragic final years, as the great leader waged a rearguard ideological struggle in the face of an avalanche of Stalinist harassment, slander, repression and murder. Simultaneously, Deutscher lays bare the blunders and disasters of the Communist International under Stalin's leadership, making clear how inexorably these failures followed from Stalin's deadened bureaucratic-centralist socialism. Deutscher's deft handling of the facts, personalities, ideas, and situations of the time is simply unparallelled, and makes for a tremendously enjoyable and informative read. His account of Trotsky's last hours left me in awed tears. Essential material for anyone exploring the question of where socialism went wrong in the 20th century.

THIS YEAR MARKS THE 66TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ASSASSINATION OF LEON TROTSKY-ONE OF HISTORY'S GREAT REVOLUTIONARIES. IT IS THEREFORE FITTING TO REVIEW THE THREE VOLUME WORK OF HIS DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHER, THE PROPHET ARMED, THE PROPHET UNARMED, THE OUTCAST. Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of the great Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky although written over one half century ago remains the standard biography of the man. Although this writer disagrees , as I believe that Trotsky himself would have, about the appropriateness of the title of prophet and its underlying premise that a tragic hero had fallen defeated in a worthy cause, the vast sum of work produced and researched makes up for those basically literary differences. Deutscher, himself, became in the end an adversary of Trotsky's politics around his differing interpretation of the historic role of Stalinism and the fate of the Fourth International but he makes those differences clear and in general they does not mar the work. I do not believe even with the eventual full opening of all the old Soviet-era files any future biographer will dramatically increase our knowledge about Trotsky and his revolutionary struggles. Moreover, as I have mentioned elsewhere in other reviews while he has not been historically fully vindicated he is in no need of any certificate of revolutionary good conduct. At the beginning of the 21st century when the validity of socialist political programs as tools for change is in apparent decline or disregarded as utopian it may be hard to imagine the spirit that drove Trotsky to dedicate his whole life to the fight for a socialist society. However, at the beginning of the 20th century he represented only the one of the most consistent and audacious of a revolutionary generation of mainly Eastern Europeans and Russians who set out to change the history of the 20th century. It was as if the best and brightest of that generation were afraid, for better or worse, not to take part in the political struggles that would shape the modern world. As Trotsky noted elsewhere this element was missing, with the exceptions of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and precious few others, in the Western labor movement. Deutscher using Trotsky's own experiences tells the story of the creation of this revolutionary cadre with care and generally proper proportions. Here are some highlights militant leftists should think about. On the face of it Trotsky's personal profile does not stand out as that of a born revolutionary. Born of a hard working, eventually prosperous Jewish farming family in the Ukraine (of all places) there is something anomalous about his eventual political occupation. Always a vociferous reader, good writer and top student under other circumstances he would have found easy success, as others did, in the bourgeois academy, if not in Russia then in Western Europe. But there is the rub; it was the intolerable and personally repellant political and cultu

This is perhaps the most "weak" part of the "Prophet" trilogy, in that Deutscher thought Trotsky's opposition to Stalin was, at the time it happened, useless, as Stalinism was the necessary mechanism of modernization that made a future fully-fledeged socialist society possible. Now, amid the smouldring ruins of Stalinism and with the former Soviet bloc reduced to a sorry parody of compradore capitalism of the Latin American style, one can be certain that, in the long run, Trotsky was right, after all, but then Deutscher puts his case so throughly that one can see precisely in what he was wrong and therefore how Trotsky managed to make so outstanding and unexpected a prevision as the final demise of Stalinism. Only that makes this book a necessary reading.

The last ten years of Trotaky's life was one of exile and assassination, an account worthy of the death of Jesus and Socrates. Mme Trotsky even remarked that her husband when mortally wounded look like Jesus taken down from the cross in an El Greco. It remains to me still incomprehensible that so many Communists and supporters of Communism did not come to Trotsky's defense and aid, allowing that thug Stalin to persecute him, to destroy his followers in morale and in life, and finally to send an assassin to finish him off. Granted that Trotsky's position against Stalin and in favor of the Soviet Union was perhaps too sophisticated for most Communists to rally to, he was after all still the greatest Communist figure after Lenin and perhaps even including Lenin. Trotsky would of course have been horrified to learn of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but had he led the Soviet Union after Lenin much might have been different and better for all concerned. He certainly was more right than Stalin about Hitler, about China, and about the dangers of extremist collectivization and industrialization, even though collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization were program he had initially advanced against the hesitations of Stalin. In the end Bolshevism has in Trotsky its hero and prophet which nothing can really take away. This reprint series, others have correctly noted, is marked by numerous typos and other errors.

This is the final volume of Isaac Deutscher's famous three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary. Deutscher's biography is the standard biography of Trotsky by which all other biographies of Trosky are measured. Picking up the life of Trotsky from the time of his first exile from the Soviet Union in 1929, this book carries the story of the later portion of Trotsky's life all the way to his murder in Mexico in 1940. Deutscher's writing is enticing and holds the interest of the reader. The book is also wonderfully indexed and serves as a guide to the voluminous writing of Leon Trosky during the last phase of his life.