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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2017
Like Thucydides, Xenophon and Josephus, Napoleon and Churchill, Leon Trotsky had to wait to write his major history until defeat had deprived him of the possibility of making history. But all his life he was a writer by avocation, and a history-maker by vocation. “Beginning in 1897,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I have waged the fight chiefly with a pen in my hand.” When he was writing for Iskra he chose a nom de guerre-not to say nom de plume; it was Pero, the Russian word for pen.
Unlike Lenin, Trotsky looked often at himself in the mirror of history and consciously treasured his personal historic role. After 1905, in which year he played a more important part than any other revolutionary leader, he chose the first moment of respite, exile in Vienna, to write Die Russische Revolution: 1905 (Vienna, 1908 and 1909).
1 Trotsky, Leon,My Life (New York, 1930), p. viii.Google Scholar
2 The Mensheviks tended to sum up their aims in the formula“bourgeois democratic revolution”; Lenin's algebraic formula had been“democratic dictatorship of the prole-tariat and the peasantry” “people's government” summarizes the immediate aim of the Socialist Revolutionaries; Trotsky's formula was“permanent revolution, beginning as a dictatorship of the working class and ending in world revolution.”
3 Trotsky, Leon,The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman (3 vols.;New York, 1932), I, 255.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., p. 256.
5 The episode is in Trotsky's History, Vol. II, but the words of Trotsky's speech are recorded in
Sukhanov, N. N.,The Russian Revolution: 1917, trans. Joel Carmichael (New York, 1955), p. 446.Google Scholar In Sukhanov's original 
, the episode and the words quoted are in Vol. IV, pp. 423–35.
6 The words were cited to me by the late Wladimir Woytinsky, who represented the Soviet Executive Committee in the debate with Trotsky in Anchor Square. They will be pub-lished in Woytinsky's posthumousStormy Passage, to be released by Vanguard Press in 1961.
7 Trotsky, ,History, I, 14–15.Google Scholar
8 ibid., p. 236.
9 The justification for this term will be found in the last sentence of this article.
10 Trotsky, ,History I, xviii–xix.Google Scholar
11
…, VI, 188 ff.
12 Ibid., p .190.