isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

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PREFACE
will come as a surprise to some. For nearly thirty years the
powerful propaganda machines ofStalinism worked furiously to
expunge Trotsky's name from the annals of the revolution, or to
leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor. To the
present Soviet generation, and not only to it, Trotsky's life-story
is already like an ancient Egyptian sepulchre which is known to
have contained the body of a great man and the record, engraved
in gold, of his deeds; but tomb-robbers and ghouls have
plundered and left it so empty and desolate that no trace is
found of the record it once contained. The work of the tombrobbers
has, in this present instance, been so persistent thai it
has strongly affected the views even of independent Western
historians and scholars.
Despite all this, the record of Trotsky's life is still intact, preserved
in his own voluminous but now mostly forgotten writings
and in his Archives; in numerous memoirs of friendly and of
hostile contemporaries; in files of Russian periodicals published
before, during, and after the revolution; in minutes of the
Central Committee; and in verbatim reports of the Congresses
of the party and of the Soviets. Nearly all these documentary
sources arc available in public libraries in the West, although a
few of them can be found only in private libraries. I have drawn
on all these sources. Together with my wife, who shared equally
with me in research and has in many other respects contributed
greatly to this work, I made a special study of the rich collection
of Russian pre-revolutionary periodicals in the Hoover Library
at Stanford, California, where I found sources scarcely used before
by historians of Russian revolutionary movements. Together
with my wife I also studied the Trotsky Archives at the Houghton
Library, Harvard University, by far the most important collection
of original documents on Soviet history existing outside
the U.S.S.R. (A brief description of the Archives is given in the
bibliography at the end of this volume.)
I have therefore no ground for complaining here, as I complained
in the Preface to my Stalin, about paucity of biographical
material. This is due largely to the contrast between my chief
characters. Trotsky was as communicative about his life and
activities as Stalin was secretive. He allowed complete strangers
to delve freely into almost every aspect of his life; he himself
wrote an autobiography; and, what is more important, a strong,