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

THE PROPHET ARMED
Elevated above the crowd and feeling a multitude of eyes centred
on him, himself storming a multitude of hearts and minds
below-he was in his clement. A contemporary describes the
lean, tallish man, with large fierce eyes and large, sensual,
irregular mouth, perched on the platform like a 'bird of prey' . 1
In the admired speaker and writer there lived on, as he
himself put it, a 'barbarian struggling for self-preservation'.
Having found himself among the elite of the movement, he had
to lift himself intellectually by his bootstraps. He diligently
studied Marxism, which in this its golden age gave the adept a
solid mental equipment. Just before he escaped from Siberia
he had explored the intricacies of 'capitalistic circulation', with
its periodic crises, as they arc analysed with seeming dryness and
yet with the utmost dramatic effect in the second volume of
Das Kapital. Abroad he resumed this study. But the fascination
of Marxism kept his mind dosed to any extraneous idea or
phenomenon. On his arrival in London it had seemed to him
strange that Lenin should try to interest him in English historical
monuments. When he first visited Paris he similarly
defended himself against the assault of novel impressions. He
summed up his first view of Paris grotesquely: 'Very much like
Odessa, but Odessa is better.' The art treasures of the Louvre
bored him. What excited him most in France was the controversy
between the orthodox Marxists, led by Jules Guesde, and
the reformists who followed Jaures. He plunged into a crowd of
Parisian workers demonstrating against Millerand, the first
Socialist to become a minister in a bourgeois government and
then engaged in suppressing strikes. Marching in the crowd he
shouted 'all sorts of unpleasant things against Millerand'.
In Paris he met his second wife. She was Natalya Sedova, a
girl student who had taken him to the Louvre and tried to open
his eyes to paintings and sculpture. A few years younger than his
first wife, she, too, was a revolutionary. She had been expelled
from a boarding school for young ladies of noble birth at
Kharkov, where she had persuaded her classmates not to attend
not second in its grandeur to the antique Fatum. Social principles in their pitiless
compulsion, not less than Aeschylus' Fat~, can grind into dust the individual soul
if it enters into a conflict with them.' Sochintnya, vol. xx, p. 241.
1
V. l\frdcm, op. cit., \'ol. ii, pp. 7 ·9; P.A. Garvi, V0Jpomi11anya Sotsialdtmolcrata,
p. 385.