Isaac Deutscher

The Prophet Armed and Unarmed

From Fourth International, No. 7, Autumn 1959, p. 27.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Isaac Deutscher, a former Oppositional in the Communist Party of Poland, has been of late years settled in Britain as a historian, and is currently working on a three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. Of the two quotations we are printing, the first, from the first volume, The Prophet Armed, appears below; the second, from the second, The Prophet Unarmed, appears on page 80, at the end of Comrade Frank’s review of the book. Both volumes are published by the Oxford University Press.

But no matter how the course of events has swayed and diverged from the route he had mapped out in 1904–06, by the middle of the present century he seemed once again to have grasped the “main chance of things” correctly. Whether one reads his message with horror or hope, whether one views him as the inspired herald of a new age surpassing all history in achievement and grandeur, or as the oracle of ruin and woe, one cannot but be impressed by the sweep and boldness of his vision. He reconnoitred the future as one who surveys from a towering mountain top a new and immense horizon and points to vast, uncharted landmarks in the distance. True enough, from his coign of vantage, he could not take in the whole landscape below: patches of dense fog enveloped parts of it: and the play of distance and perspective looked different from what is seen in the valley. He misjudged the exact direction of a major road; he saw two or more separate landmarks merged into one; and he grievously overlooked one of the rocky ravines into which one day he himself would slip to his doom. But his compensation was the unique magnitude of his horizon. Compared with this vision, which Trotsky drew in his cell in the fortress, the political predictions made by his most illustrious and wisest contemporaries, including Lenin and Plekhanov, were timid or muddle-headed.

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