Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967)
Author of Stalin: A Political Biography
About the Author
Isaac Deutscher was born in 1907 near Krakow and joined the Polish Communist Party in 1926. After his expulsion in 1932, he maintained his opposition to the general drift of Comintern policy in the 1930s. He moved to London in 1939 and continued his journalistic activity until 1946, devoting the show more rest of his life to historical research show less
Series
Works by Isaac Deutscher
Los sindicatos soviéticos 3 copies
Reportagen aus Nachkriegsdeutschland 2 copies
Den avväpnade profeten & Den förvisade profeten : Trotskij 1921-1929 resp. 1929-1940 (1960) 2 copies
Los años de formación 1 copy
Trocki - Naoružani prorok I 1 copy
Trotsky 1-2 1 copy
Silahlı Sosyalist Cilt:1 1 copy
Silâhsız Sosyalist C:2 1 copy
Associated Works
Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2003) — Contributor — 84 copies, 1 review
We Accuse: A Powerful Statement of the New Political Anger in America (1965) — Contributor — 8 copies
New Left Review I/105: The Nationalist Enigma, Sept/Oct 1977 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1907-04-03
- Date of death
- 1967-08-19
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Jagellonian University, Kraków
- Occupations
- historian
journalist
biographer
political activist
poet - Organizations
- The Economist
The Observer - Relationships
- Deutscher, Tamara (spouse)
- Nationality
- Austria-Hungary (birth)
Poland
UK (naturalized 1949) - Birthplace
- Chrzanów, Austria-Hungary (now Poland)
- Places of residence
- Kraków, Poland
Warsaw, Poland
London, England, UK - Place of death
- Rome, Italy
Members
Reviews
Very solid biography--more detailed than is perhaps necessary at times, but it's so well organized that you can skim over some of the more turgid debates, knowing that you'll be able to find that debate should you ever need to, which, I hope, you won't. It's ultra-intellectual, in the sense that Trotsky's wife appears in about two sentences, and otherwise we're just talking about the minute discussions that, in some sense, determined the disastrous course of the Russian transition from shit show more (Tsarism) to shit ('communism').
It's also remarkably balanced. I was expecting Trotsky to come off much better than he did, frankly. Deutscher gives us a man who came up with all sorts of horrible ideas before Lenin did, but had the good fortune to lose the debate when his ideas were particularly noxious, so Lenin could take the short term glory and long term hatred, while Trotsky got all that love as the anti-Stalin... despite being totally proto-Stalin, but with a much, much (much) better personality and brain and luck. Weird stuff. show less
It's also remarkably balanced. I was expecting Trotsky to come off much better than he did, frankly. Deutscher gives us a man who came up with all sorts of horrible ideas before Lenin did, but had the good fortune to lose the debate when his ideas were particularly noxious, so Lenin could take the short term glory and long term hatred, while Trotsky got all that love as the anti-Stalin... despite being totally proto-Stalin, but with a much, much (much) better personality and brain and luck. Weird stuff. show less
Mr Deutscher makes it clear in his forward to this book that he is no acolyte of Stalin. He also promises not to make the work a destruction of all for which Stalin stood.
I think that he makes an excellent job of this. I have a far greater understanding of the man and the leader than I did before hand. Stalin was an administrator, not a political mentor. He clung to Lenin's works as his guiding star but, practicality meant that he veered further and further from Marxist-Leninist theory.
It show more is not just Stalin, Lenin before him, had been in favour of rule by the proletariat but, being unable to accept that anyone but himself knew what the people wanted. It is a strange irony that a revolution which was genuinely for the people, almost before its activation, began to pare the acceptable voices to whom it was willing to listen. It was Lenin that threw out the Social Democrats and the Mensheviks. Stalin continued to shave the unacceptable members until, there was only himself. In his final years, he purged and re-purged his leadership until no one was safe.
Deutscher could have made this a real hatchet job. He does not so do: he explains how this came about - if Stalin had not pushed the country to the brink of despair, he wouldn't have been able to grow its industrial base at such speed and it is likely that Hitler may have been successful in the Second World War. That Russia was cast aside by the West afterwards was cruel beyond measure. Stalin was left with little choice but to return to a series of punishing five year plans to rebuild the broken country. His distrust of the West, whilst understandable, lead to his putting military strength too far ahead of comfort for the people.
From being the hero of WW II, he rapidly degenerated to a sad, fearsome dictator. show less
I think that he makes an excellent job of this. I have a far greater understanding of the man and the leader than I did before hand. Stalin was an administrator, not a political mentor. He clung to Lenin's works as his guiding star but, practicality meant that he veered further and further from Marxist-Leninist theory.
It show more is not just Stalin, Lenin before him, had been in favour of rule by the proletariat but, being unable to accept that anyone but himself knew what the people wanted. It is a strange irony that a revolution which was genuinely for the people, almost before its activation, began to pare the acceptable voices to whom it was willing to listen. It was Lenin that threw out the Social Democrats and the Mensheviks. Stalin continued to shave the unacceptable members until, there was only himself. In his final years, he purged and re-purged his leadership until no one was safe.
Deutscher could have made this a real hatchet job. He does not so do: he explains how this came about - if Stalin had not pushed the country to the brink of despair, he wouldn't have been able to grow its industrial base at such speed and it is likely that Hitler may have been successful in the Second World War. That Russia was cast aside by the West afterwards was cruel beyond measure. Stalin was left with little choice but to return to a series of punishing five year plans to rebuild the broken country. His distrust of the West, whilst understandable, lead to his putting military strength too far ahead of comfort for the people.
From being the hero of WW II, he rapidly degenerated to a sad, fearsome dictator. show less
I detailed career biography of Stalin from underground international communist revolutionary to calculating, megalomaniacal, cruel head of national communism. post-Cold War is really a postscript here. The Cold War details show evidence of empire building and a view of Russian people that I feel Putin may share:
Russia is taught to distrust and despise the world outside, to glory in nothing but her own genius, to care for nothing but her own self-centered greatness, to rely on nothing but hershow more
own selfishness, and to look forward to nothing but the triumphs of her own power. Stalinism tries to annex to Great Russia all the feats that the genius of other nations has had to its credit. It declares it to be a crime for the Russian to entertain any thought about the greatness, past or present, of any other nation-to 'kow-tow to western civilization' and a crime for the Ukrainian, the Georgian, and the Uzbek not to kow-tow to Great Russia.show less
Megalomania and xenophobia were to cure the people of their sense of inferiority, render them immune to those attractions of the western culture by which generations of the intelligentsia had been spellbound, protect them against the demoralizing impact of American wealth, and harden them for the trials of the Cold War and, if need be, for armed conflict. The heat of the chauvinistic agitation was a measure of the war fever in which the country lived.
Wow! This is some biography. The whole entity, over three volumes, exceeds 1500 pages - I'll get there!
Part one, takes us through the scant details of Trotsky's birth and early years, to the revolution, his transformation from semi-pacifist to the People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and his post war flirtation with control of the workers,
Isaac Deutscher is an ideal scribe for this work: his knowledge of soviet politics, at the time, must be unparalleled and he is scrupulously show more fair. He praises Trotsky's bravery and foresightedness, when he is in advance of the thinking of the soviet, but also chastises his willingness to accept the rejection of his views and his unstinting work and vocal support for solutions with which he does not agree.
The picture that arises from this book is of a great man with flaws... and haven't we all got those? Russia was not ready for socialism, it needed to go through a capitalist phase. I can well see why Trotsky and Lenin would not wish to hear that view and how easy it must have been to believe that communism was coming to the world. It is just a pity that the first iteration of this form of government should have been such a disastrous failure. show less
Part one, takes us through the scant details of Trotsky's birth and early years, to the revolution, his transformation from semi-pacifist to the People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and his post war flirtation with control of the workers,
Isaac Deutscher is an ideal scribe for this work: his knowledge of soviet politics, at the time, must be unparalleled and he is scrupulously show more fair. He praises Trotsky's bravery and foresightedness, when he is in advance of the thinking of the soviet, but also chastises his willingness to accept the rejection of his views and his unstinting work and vocal support for solutions with which he does not agree.
The picture that arises from this book is of a great man with flaws... and haven't we all got those? Russia was not ready for socialism, it needed to go through a capitalist phase. I can well see why Trotsky and Lenin would not wish to hear that view and how easy it must have been to believe that communism was coming to the world. It is just a pity that the first iteration of this form of government should have been such a disastrous failure. show less
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