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heart and will. Remarkable as was his career as the organizer of
the October revolution and of the military defense of that revolu·
tion in the Civil War, even more remarkable was the richness of
personality, the vigor and brilliancy of mind, the moral steadfast·
ness, the bold and passionate devotion to the revolutionary cause
in a period of worldwide reaction-all those qualities which came
out so triumphantly in the years of exile, in Prinkipo, in France,
in Norway, and finally in Mexico. As a man, Trotsky was always
greater than his actions, great as these were.
We are slowly coming to realize that, in this period, Trotsky
was irreplaceable. There is no one to take his place, no intellectual
leader who even pretends to the succession. When the GPU axe
penetrated Trotsky's brain, it extirpated a great deal more than
the life of a sixty-one year old Jewish exile named Lev Davidovitch
Bronstein.
Trotsky's personal quality comes out when we compare him
with a bourgeois statesman whose talents and career have a curious
similarity to his own, namely, Winston Churchill. Like Trotsky,
Churchill is a master of words, both in oratory and writing, and
also a formidable man of action. The defense of Britain organized
with such imagination and vigor by Churchill is comparable to
Trotsky's defense of the young Soviet Union. Churchill's history of
the last war,
The World Crisis,
is comparable in scope and rhetori·
cal power to Trotsky's history of the 1917 revolution. Both men are
especially impressive as individuals, conscious of their own intel–
lectual power, contemptuous of the restraints and prudences of
organizationally-minded people. The attitude of the British middle
classes towards Churchill, a mingled admiration and distrust of
his "cleverness," is a parody of the attitude of the Old Bolsheviks
towards Trotsky, also an "outsider" much too brilliant and domi–
neering to be either brushed aside or accepted. And just as Trotsky,
for years isolated and distrusted, was perforce accepted as their
leader by the Old Bolsheviks when the revolutionary crisis de–
manded his extraordinary talents, so Churchill, similarly isolated
throughout his long career in British politics, finally had to be
given supreme power when the Empire entered on its life and death
struggle.
