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 which Socialism was to come.  Still calling himself a Marxist, and believing as strongly as ever in the fundamental Marxian doctrines, as he understood them, he naturally devoted his keen mind with its peculiar aptitude for Talmudic hair-splitting to a new interpretation of Marxism.  He declared his belief that in Russia it was possible to change from Absolutism to Socialism immediately, without the necessity of a prolonged period of capitalist development.  At the same time, he maintained a scornful attitude toward the “Utopianism” of the peasant Socialists, who had always made the same contention, because he believed they based their hopes and their policy upon a wrong conception of Socialism.  He had small patience for their agrarian Socialism with its economic basis in peasant-proprietorship and voluntary co-operation.