BOOKS
~51i
THE ARMED INTELLECTUAL
THE PROPHET UNARMED: TROTSKY 1921-9. By Iseec Deutscher.
Oxford University Press. 1959. $9.50.
The Prophet Unarmed
is the best thing Mr. Deutscher
has yet written. It is a much better book than his overpraised Stalin
biography a decade ago, and it is superior also to the earlier volume
in his projected trilogy on Trotsky. This is not to say that it is
faultless in matter or tone: the very first sentence of the preface,
with its labored evocation of Carlyle's biography of Cromwell,
strikes a jarring note. Similar traces of pompousness are not fre–
quent; Mr. Deutscher has become more urbane, but as a stylist he
still tends to solemnity. Yet this second volume establishes him as a
historian of the Russian Revolution. The student in search of
de–
tail will continue to go to Mr. Carr for an exhaustive study of the
intra-party conflicts of the mid-twenties, but he will henceforth
have to reckon with Mr. Deutscher. For in this new work Trotsky'S
fall from power is at last brought into proper focus and related to
the crisis of the Soviet regime after Lenin's death. Even those who
do not accept Mr. Deutscher's somewhat pedantically Leninist
reading of the facts can learn from him, and few will fail to find
his account fascinating:
if
only because it reflects something of the
somber drama of those days.
In 1921, with the civil war over, Trotsky was at the height of
his power and prestige; in 1929 he was expelled from the USSR,
never to return. What happened in the intervening eight years?
The story has been told before-notably by Trotsky himself-and
its
outline might seem familiar
by
now. But Mr. Deutscher has had
access to the unpublished Trotsky archives at Harvard, and his
analysis does add something new. In particular he makes it clear
how impossible it was for Trotsky to hold his own
in
the Politburo
and the Central Committee, once Lenin's essential support had
been withdrawn. He even suggests that Trotsky knew this, or at
least was subconsciously aware of it. Certainly his tactics became
increasingly suicidal as time went on, and by 1927-28-when his
