Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921

I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.


Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.


The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.


The hunger for land: that great hunger which for more than half a century was to shake Russia and to throw her into a fever, body and mind.


By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.