Vol. 26 No. 23 :: 2 December 2004
Victory in Defeat
Neal Ascherson on Trotsky
The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-21 by Isaac Deutscher
The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-29 by Isaac Deutscher
The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-40 by Isaac Deutscher
"The real abyss separating Deutscher from modern historiography is a moral one. An average British history graduate today will have been taught to evaluate revolutions on a simple humanitarian scale. Did they kill a lot of people? Then they were bad. Showing that some of those killed were even more bloodthirsty than their killers is no extenuation . . . Isaac Deutscher saw history differently. His standards are not those of Amnesty International. Instead, he measures everything against the cause of the Revolution. The Trotsky trilogy has a spinal column of moral argument running through it which can be reduced to this question: did this or that course or idea help to fulfil the Revolution, or divert it from its true purpose?"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n23/asch01_.html