The chief thing to be gained by visiting Soviet Russia is a feeling of the characters of the Bolsheviks. To a simple man that makes Bolshevism intelligible. Instead of writing another dissertation about it, therefore, I decided to compose the portrait of one of these characters. I chose Trotsky* because he seems to me the most universally gifted man in the world to-day. There is no one more wholesomely alive, more interested in all the interests of mankind. If we can understand how Trotsky became a Bolshevik, we shall have some human understanding of what Bolshevism is. For that reason my book is not a record of his achievements, but the story of his youth. I hope to write about those achievements also, but that is a different book. 0nly remember, while you read, that in 1905, at the age of twenty-six, this Jewish boy, standing at the head of the Petrograd Soviet of Worker’s Deputies, spoke with an authority in Russia not inferior to that of the czar. *His natal name was Bronstein.
Download Leon Trotsky The Portrait Of A Youth-Max Eastman-1925