Isaac Deutscher and his left-wing critics

Abstract

This article investigates Isaac Deutscher’s left-wing critics, looking at a wide range of assessments of Deutscher’s biographies of Stalin and Trotsky and of his ideas, especially in respect of the possibilities of élite-led democratisation in the Soviet Union, written from various left-wing positions, including Stalinist, left-wing and right-wing social-democratic, and orthodox and dissident Trotskyist. Both the critiques and Deutscher’s ideas are then assessed in the light of events that have occurred since their publication and of information that has since come into the public domain.