The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929-1940 (A Galaxy Book ; Gb 607) [Paperback]

Isaac Deutscher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 29, 1980 | Series: A Galaxy Book ; Gb 607 (Book 607)

This volume, the culmination of the author's trilogy, follows Trotsky's extraordinary life from his banishment from Russia to his brutal murder in Mexico.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In the 1930s, Trotsky, with a handful of followers, attempted to block the path of Stalin’s relentless hurricane of betrayal and murder. His epic defence of the soul of the Revolution against its bureaucratic executioners was a torchlight in the storm. In one of the very greatest modern biographies, Isaac Deutscher redeems the legacy of this astonishing revolutionary and humanist thinker. (Mike Davis )

The three volumes of Isaac Deutscher's life of Trotsky ... were for me the most exciting reading of the year. Surely this must be counted among the greatest biographies in the English language. (Graham Greene )

He has told the story more accurately and with fuller detail than ever before....compulsory reading for anyone interested in the history of Soviet Russia. (A.J.P Taylor - New Statesman )

He has told the story more accurately and with fuller detail than ever before. His book is compulsory reading for anyone interested in the history of Soviet Russia and of international communism. (A. J. P. Taylor )

This is the critical voice the velvet revolution faded out. The republication of Deutscher’s classic trilogy is good news for a new generation who want to know what went wrong with communist-style socialism. (Sheila Rowbotham )

Deutscher is an exceedingly vivid writer with a sense of style, and a warm and understanding sympathy for his hero: this makes him a first rate biographer. (Times Literary Supplement ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Isaac Deutscher was born in 1907 near Krakow and joined the Polish Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1932. He then moved to London where he died in 1967. His other books include Stalin and The Unfinished Revolution. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 562 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 29, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192810669
• ISBN-13: 978-0192810663
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,393,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brian Wayne Wells, Esquire, reviews "The Prophet Outcast", May 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky : 1929-1940 (The Trotsky Triology Series) (Hardcover)

This is the final volume of Isaac Deutscher's famous three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary. Deutscher's biography is the standard biography of Trotsky by which all other biographies of Trosky are measured.

Picking up the life of Trotsky from the time of his first exile from the Soviet Union in 1929, this book carries the story of the later portion of Trotsky's life all the way to his murder in Mexico in 1940.

Deutscher's writing is enticing and holds the interest of the reader. The book is also wonderfully indexed and serves as a guide to the voluminous writing of Leon Trosky during the last phase of his life.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Hagiography of a traitor to the revolution, July 14, 2011

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 (Paperback)

Deutscher wrote of `the Trotsky legend' - which he promoted. Lenin vanished, as Deutscher ludicrously called Trotsky `the leader of October' and the `intellectual initiator of industrialization and planned economy'.

Trotsky said that Stalin was the grave-digger of the revolution, but there was no counter-revolution in the Soviet Union until 1991, when Boris Yeltsin restored capitalism there. On the notion that Trotsky made an original contribution to Marxism with his theory of `permanent revolution', we should note that Lenin wrote in 1905, "From the democratic revolution we shall at once, and just to the extent of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution."

The leader of Trotsky's Fourth International, Ernest Mandel, wrote accurately that Yeltsin "follows in Trotsky's footsteps." (Socialist Worker wrote absurdly that the counter-revolution brought "the workers of the USSR closer to the spirit of the socialist revolution of 1917, not further from it.")

Trotsky encouraged all sections of his sect to interfere in each other's affairs, so he wrote endless letters telling Belgian Trotskyists why the French Trotskyists were squabbling, and vice versa. Deutscher depicts the Trotskyists' squabbles, feuds and splits, all driven by ego, all mimicking in a minor key their master's monstrous ego. Deutscher notes Trotsky's `fiascos, fallacies, and miscalculations', especially, later, `his fiasco with the Fourth International'. (Incidentally, even Trotsky opposed the SWP's dogma of `state capitalism'. As Deutscher explained, "The concept of state capitalism was meaningless where no capitalists existed.")

In response to the German Communist Party's disastrous policy, Trotsky called on the Soviet Union to attack Germany, thus risking the Soviet Union's survival on war and also justifying Hitler's propaganda that Germany was being encircled by hostile powers.

In 1936, in `The revolution betrayed', Trotsky wrote, "If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism is incomparably stronger. If it is not paralysed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the régime which issued from the October Revolution."

So, without revolution in the West, the Soviet Union was doomed. But there was no revolution in the West, yet imperialism did not sweep away the Soviet régime. So Trotsky's forecast was wrong, as well as defeatist.

Trotsky said that Stalin was both progressive and reactionary in the Soviet Union, but always reactionary abroad. So, according to Trotsky, a workers' state was an agent of counter-revolution. Denying the Soviet Union's revolutionary nature led straight to absurdity.

Deutscher wrote, "It is probable that had there been no Teheran and Yalta compacts, western rather than eastern Europe would have become the theatre of revolution." So Deutscher thought that the Soviet Union should not have made these peace agreements, agreements that helped to stop the USA and Britain attacking the Soviet Union, in Churchill's `Operation Unthinkable'.

This whole biography is a travesty of history, as objective and accurate as Michael Gove's biography of `Michael Portillo, the future of the right'.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars DEFEATED,BUT UNBOWED, August 2, 2006

By 

Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 (Paperback)

THIS YEAR MARKS THE 66TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ASSASSINATION OF LEON TROTSKY-ONE OF HISTORY'S GREAT REVOLUTIONARIES. IT IS THEREFORE FITTING TO REVIEW THE THREE VOLUME WORK OF HIS DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHER, THE PROPHET ARMED, THE PROPHET UNARMED, THE OUTCAST.

Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of the great Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky although written over one half century ago remains the standard biography of the man. Although this writer disagrees , as I believe that Trotsky himself would have, about the appropriateness of the title of prophet and its underlying premise that a tragic hero had fallen defeated in a worthy cause, the vast sum of work produced and researched makes up for those basically literary differences. Deutscher, himself, became in the end an adversary of Trotsky's politics around his differing interpretation of the historic role of Stalinism and the fate of the Fourth International but he makes those differences clear and in general they does not mar the work. I do not believe even with the eventual full opening of all the old Soviet-era files any future biographer will dramatically increase our knowledge about Trotsky and his revolutionary struggles. Moreover, as I have mentioned elsewhere in other reviews while he has not been historically fully vindicated he is in no need of any certificate of revolutionary good conduct.

At the beginning of the 21st century when the validity of socialist political programs as tools for change is in apparent decline or disregarded as utopian it may be hard to imagine the spirit that drove Trotsky to dedicate his whole life to the fight for a socialist society. However, at the beginning of the 20th century he represented only the one of the most consistent and audacious of a revolutionary generation of mainly Eastern Europeans and Russians who set out to change the history of the 20th century. It was as if the best and brightest of that generation were afraid, for better or worse, not to take part in the political struggles that would shape the modern world. As Trotsky noted elsewhere this element was missing, with the exceptions of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and precious few others, in the Western labor movement. Deutscher using Trotsky's own experiences tells the story of the creation of this revolutionary cadre with care and generally proper proportions. Here are some highlights militant leftists should think about.

On the face of it Trotsky's personal profile does not stand out as that of a born revolutionary. Born of a hard working, eventually prosperous Jewish farming family in the Ukraine (of all places) there is something anomalous about his eventual political occupation. Always a vociferous reader, good writer and top student under other circumstances he would have found easy success, as others did, in the bourgeois academy, if not in Russia then in Western Europe. But there is the rub; it was the intolerable and personally repellant political and cultural conditions of Czarist Russia in the late 19th century that eventually drove Trotsky to the revolutionary movement- first as a `ragtag' populist and then to his life long dedication to orthodox Marxism. As noted above, a glance at the biographies of Eastern European revolutionary leaders such as Lenin, Martov, Christian Rakovsky, Bukharin and others shows that Trotsky was hardly alone in his anger at the status quo. And the determination to something about it.

For those who argue, as many did in the New Left in the 1960's, that the most oppressed are the most revolutionary the lives of the Russian and Eastern European revolutionaries provide a cautionary note. The most oppressed, those most in need of the benefits of socialist revolution, are mainly wrapped up in the sheer struggle for survival and do not enter the political arena until late, if at all. Even a quick glance at the biographies of the secondary leadership of various revolutionary movements, actual revolutionary workers who formed the links to the working class , generally show skilled or semi-skilled workers striving to better themselves rather than the most downtrodden lumpenproletarian elements. The sailors of Kronstadt and the Putilov workers in Saint Petersburg come to mind. The point is that `the wild boys and girls' of the street do not lead revolutions; they simply do not have the staying power. On this point, militants can also take Trotsky's biography as a case study of what it takes to stay the course in the difficult struggle to create a new social order. While the Russian revolutionary movement, like the later New Left mentioned above, had more than its share of dropouts, especially after the failure of the 1905 revolution, it is notably how many stayed with the movement under much more difficult circumstances than we ever faced. For better or worst, and I think for the better, that is how revolutions are made.

Once Trotsky made the transition to Marxism he became embroiled in the struggles to create a unity Russian Social Democratic Party, a party of the whole class, or at least a party representing the historic interests of that class. This led him to participate in the famous Bolshevik/Menshevik struggle in 1903 which defined what the party would be, its program, its methods of work and who would qualify for membership. The shorthand for this fight can be stated as the battle between the `hards' (Bolsheviks, who stood for a party of professional revolutionaries) and the `softs' (Mensheviks, who stood for a looser conception of party membership) although those terms do not do full justice to these fights. Strangely, given his later attitudes, Trotsky stood with the `softs', the Mensheviks, in the initial fight in 1903. Although Trotsky almost immediately afterward broke from that faction I do not believe that his position in the 1903 fight contradicted the impulses he exhibited throughout his career- personally `libertarian', for lack of a better word , and politically hard in the clutch.

Even a cursory glance at most of Trotsky's career indicates that it was not spent in organizational in-fighting, or at least not successfully. Trotsky stands out as the consummate free-lancer. More than one biographer has noted this condition, including his definitive biographer Isaac Deutscher. Let me make a couple of points to take the edge of this characterization though. In that 1903 fight mentioned above Trotsky did fight against Economism (the tendency to only fight over trade union issues and not fight overtly political struggles against the Czarist regime) and he did fight against Bundism (the tendency for one group, in this case the Jewish workers, to set the political agenda for that particular group). Moreover, he most certainly favored a centralized organization. These were the key issues at that time. Furthermore, the controversial organizational question did not preclude the very strong notion that a `big tent' unitary party was necessary. The `big tent' German Social Democratic model held very strong sway among the Russian revolutionaries for a long time, including Lenin's Bolsheviks. The long and short of it was that Trotsky was not an organization man, per se. He knew how to organize revolutions, armies, Internationals, economies and so on when he needed to but on a day to day basis no. Thus, to compare or contrast him to Lenin and his very different successes is unfair. Both have an honorable place in the revolutionary movement; it is just a different place.