Quotes About Trotsky

The destiny of mighty peoples,' said Trotsky, 'cannot be determined by the temporary condition of their technical apparatus.

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

In an interview recorded by Mark Edmundson in Trotsky Without Orchids, Bloom described faculty politics as Stalinism without Stalin. . . . All of the traits of the Stalinists in the 1930s and 19408 are being repeated . . . in the universities in the 1990s.

I remember my parents quarrelling. They would talk as if they were against each other's ideas about Trotsky, but it was just a couple arguing.

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.

Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.

In the traditional Russian and Nazi definition of Jewishness, where parentage and surname counts as much as religious and cultural affiliation, such a view is plausible. But what was Jewish except lineage about Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev, or Sverdlov? Some were second- or even third-generation renegades; few even spoke Yiddish, let alone knew Hebrew.

In the Cheka and the party, Lenin feared, Jewish brains were as much a drawback as an advantage, and the Jews themselves were only too aware of the backlash they might provoke. Lenin took care to see that Trotsky's name was removed from the commission set up to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church.

The time for princes and tsars and grand duchesses and especially holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, of murder and assassination. The bear had already become what it had been waiting to be, and the men who set it on its journey changed too. Lev became Trotsky, Vladimir took the name Lenin, and they stepped into a bright and furious modern world; blood red, and snow white.

It's Tolstoy, by the way," I say as I open the door. He turns around. "What?" Shut up, I tell myself. Shut up. "The writer of Anna Karenina. Not Trotsky. Trotsky was a revolutionary who was stabbed with a pickax in Mexico in 1940. But I can understand how the T thing could confuse you.