Isaac Deutscher
was born in Cracow, Poland, in 1907.
A journalist, he joined the Polish Communist Party in 1926. However,
he was expelled in 1932 because he was critical of Joseph
Stalin.
On the
outbreak of the Second World War Deutscher moved
to England and began writing for the The Observer. He also
became chief European correspondent for the Economist.
Deutscher
wrote several books about the Soviet Union
including Stalin (1949), Soviet
Trade Unions (1950), Russia after
Stalin (1953), Trotsky: The Prophet
Armed (1954), Heretics and Renegades
(1955), Trotsky: The Prophet Unarmed
(1959), The Great Contest (1960),
Trotsky: The Prophet Outcast (1963)
and Ironies of History, Essays on Contemporary
Communism (1966). Isaac Deutscher died in Rome in
1967.
Since his
death books published include Lenin's Childhood
(1970), The Unfinished Revolution: Russia
1917-1967 (1974), Marxism in Our
Time (1974), Soviet Trade Unions
(1984), The Great Purges (1984)
and Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays
from Four Decades (1984).
(1)
Isaac Deutscher, Stalin (1949)
Stalin
appointed Andrei Zhdanov to succeed Kirov as the governor of Leningrad.
Zhdanov was a young, capable, and ruthless man, who had purged the
Komsomol of deviationists and distinguished himself in arrogant attacks
on Tomsky during the fight in the trade unions. Stalin could rely
upon him to destroy the hornets' nest in Leningrad. In the spring
of 1935 tens of thousands of suspect Bolsheviks and their families
were deported from Leningrad to northern Siberia.
(2)
Isaac Deutscher, Stalin (1949)
In Tsarist days political offenders had enjoyed certain
privileges and been allowed to engage in self-education and even in
political propaganda. Oppositional memoranda, pamphlets, and periodicals
had circulated half freely between prisons and had occasionally been
smuggled abroad. Himself an ex-prisoner, Stalin knew well that jails
and places of exile were the 'universities' of of the revolutionaries.
Recent events taught him to take no risks. From now on all political
discussion and activity in the prisons and places of exile was to
be mercilessly suppressed; and the men of the opposition were by privation
and hard labour to be reduced to such a miserable, animal-like existence
that they should be incapable of the normal processes of thinking
and of formulating their views.
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