Leon Trotsky: Writer and Historian

Abstract

AS A revolutionary leader second only to Nicolai Lenin as a founder of the Soviet Union, Lev Davydovich Bronstein, under the conspiratorial pseudonym has probably secured for himself a firm place in the galaxy of history's great mena somewhat paradoxical situation for an avowed disciple of the famous scientific socialist, Karl Marx, whose philosophy of history deprecated the importance of the individual as a causative factor in history. In his writings, and especially in his personal life, Trotsky often slighted this aspect of Marxism. Lenin, one of the few men besides himself whom Trotsky sometimes exempted from the inexorable march of the dialectic, seems never to have glanced in the mirror of history or even to have thought what posterity would say of him, while Trotsky, on the contrary, often looked at himself, treasured his historic role, and was ready to make any personal sacrifice, not by any means excluding the sacrifice of his life, in order to remain in the memory of mankind with the halo of a genuine revolutionary leader.' For Trotsky, history was a harsh and implacable judge, and he always took pains to assure himself that he was on history's side or, better yet, that history was on his side; for its verdict, he acknowledged, carried no appeal. Thus in a well-known speech before the congress of Soviets in Petrograd on November 7,