Books

THE PROPHET ARMED (TROTSKY: 1879-1921), by Isaac Deutscher. Oxford University Press, New York. 528 pp. $6.

Stalin is “waiting in the wings” as Mr. Deutscher concludes this first half of what is to be a two-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. It is the year 1921. The revolution has, by fair means or foul, weathered a series of wracking trials; and it is plunging into others which will witness its destruction in the triumph of absolute dictatorship. The leaders of the revolution are still its heroes—Lenin, Trotsky, their colleagues. Having held onto victory against fantastic odds, they and the revolution with them, will perish —Lenin dying in 1924, fearful of bureaucratism’s menace; the others, most of them, victims of assassination at the hands of the “committee man.” Significantly, too, it is the year in which the Bolshevik Party, with whatever misgivings, outlaws oppositional groupings. Calling his last chapter R...