Trotsky biography isaac deutscher

Isaac deutscher trotsky trilogy

  • Originally published in 1954, Deutscher's magisterial three-volume biography was the first major publication to counter the powerful Stalinist propaganda.
  • The prophet: the life of leon trotsky by isaac deutscher
  • He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs.
  • Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much controversy as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

    • The prophet: the life of leon trotsky by isaac deutscher...

    James D Young 1964

    Deutscher’s Trotsky

    Source: Political Quarterly, Volume 35, no 2, April-June 1964. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

    Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-40 (Oxford University Press, pp 543
    The Essential Trotsky (Unwin Books), pp 251

    The Prophet Outcast is the third and final instalment of Isaac Deutscher’s monumental biography of Leon Trotsky.

    Isaac Deutscher has taken a whole decade to complete this trilogy, and the result is a major biography in the tradition of bourgeois scholarship. In the Marxist sense, however, he is a brilliant chronicler rather than a major theoretician.

    Notwithstanding his great literary gifts, wide erudition and considerable partisan political experience as a Trotskyite fellow-traveller, Isaac Deutscher unwittingly betrays his theoretical inadequacy by persistently excusing his hero’s false prophecies and faults as ‘the faults of someone who was ste