Abstract
Like Thucydides, Xenophon and Josephus, Napoleon and Churchill, Leon Trotsky had to wait to write his major history until defeat had deprived him of the possibility of making history. But all his life he was a writer by avocation, and a history-maker by vocation. “Beginning in 1897,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I have waged the fight chiefly with a pen in my hand.” When he was writing for Iskra he chose a nom de guerre-not to say nom de plume; it was Pero, the Russian word for pen. Unlike Lenin, Trotsky looked often at himself in the mirror of history and consciously treasured his personal historic role. After 1905, in which year he played a more important part than any other revolutionary leader, he chose the first moment of respite, exile in Vienna, to write Die Russische Revolution: 1905 (Vienna, 1908 and 1909).
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