Quotes from Isaac Deutscher

Trees have roots, Jews have legs.

I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.

Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.

The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel.

The hunger for land: that great hunger which for more than half a century was to shake Russia and to throw her into a fever, body and mind.

It is necessary to distinguish the nationalism of the oppressing nations from the nationalism of the oppressed

The biographical interest of this now little-known essay lies in the fact that in it he expounded broadly a view of the organization and the discipline of the party identical with that which was later to become the hall-mark of Bolshevism, and which he himself then met with acute and venomous criticism.28 The

In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism — only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire.

the foreign policy of any government [...] is a prolongation of its domestic policy. This is all to often forgotten in a period of 'summit' meetings, when the public is led to believe that three or four Big Men solve, or fail to solve, the world's predicaments according to whether they have or do not have the wisdom, the good will, or the magic wand needed for their task.

In Athens the first police force was recruited from among the slaves because it was considered beneath the dignity of the free man to deprive another free man of freedom. What a sound instinct! Here you have the almost naively striking expression of the dependence of the bureaucrat on the property owner: it is the slave who is the bureaucrat because bureaucracy is the slave of the possessing class.

The gentry's jurisdiction over the peasantry was restored. The universities were closed to the children of the lower classes; the radical literary periodicals were banned; the nation, including the intelligentsia, was to be forced back into mute submission. Revolutionary

The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.

For a subject people, independent statehood is a vital necessity and an advance; but once such a people has reached the stage of independence nothing can be more retrograde for it than to fix its mind on that stage and to refuse to look beyond it. The nationalism of a sovereign people cannot claim for itself the justification claimed by the nationalism of an oppressed people.

The idea of a revolution through the people was gradually replaced by that of a conspiracy to be planned and carried out by a small and determined minority from the intelligentsia.

But on 1 March 1881 the conspirators succeeded in assassinating the Tsar. To

The works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx had been forbidden. Students' libraries and clubs had been closed; and informers had been planted in the lecture halls. Entry fees had been raised fivefold to bar academic education to children of poor parents.

By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.

The Central Committee will cut off its relations with [the undisciplined organization] and it will thereby cut off that organization from the entire world of revolution. The Central Committee will stop the flow of literature and of wherewithal to that organization. It will send into the field … its own detachment, and, having endowed it with the necessary resources, the Central Committee will proclaim that this detachment is the local committee.

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.