ing violently and
having to be carried off the ship. The British authorities kept them
interned for a month, but finally released them at the urgent demand of the
Foreign Minister of the Russian Provisional Government, Miliukov.

Such, in brief outline, is the history of the man Trotzky. It is a typical
Russian history: the story of a persistent, courageous, and exceedingly
able fighter for an ideal believed in with fanatical devotion. Lenine, in
one of his many disputes with Trotzky, called him "a man who blinds himself
with revolutionary phrases,"[17] and the description is very apt. He
possesses all the usual characteristics of the revolutionary Jewish
Socialists of Russia. To a high-strung, passionate, nervous temperament and
an exceedingly active imagination he unites a keen intellect which finds
its highest satisfaction in theoretical abstractions and subtleties, and
which accepts, phrases as though they were realities.

Understanding of Trotzky's attitude during the recent revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary struggles is made easier by understanding the
development of his thought in the First Revolution, 1905-06. He began as an
extremely orthodox Marxist, and believed that any attempt to establish a
Socialist order in Russia until a more or less protracted intensive
economic development, exhausting the possibilities of capitalism, made
change inevitable, must fail. He accepted the view that a powerful
capitalist class must be developed and perform its indispensable historical
role, to be challenged and overthrown in its turn by the proletariat. That
was the essence of his pure and unadulterated faith. To it he clung with
all the tenacity of his nature, deriding as "Utopians" and "dreamers" the
peasant Socialists who refused to accept the Marxian theory of Socialism as
the product of historic necessity as applicable to Russia.

The great upheaval of 1905 changed his viewpoint. The manner in which
revolutionary ideas spread among the masses created in Trotzky, as in many
others, almost unbounded confidence and enthusiasm. In an essay written
soon after the outbreak of the Revolution he wrote: "The Revolution has
come. _One move of hers has lifted the people over scores of steps, up
which in times of peace we would have had to drag ourselves with hardships
and fatigue_." The idea that the Revolution had "lifted the people over
scores of steps" possessed him and changed his whole conception of the
manner in whic