*From The Lenin Archives- On The Centenary Of His Philosophical Treatise "Materialism And Empiro-criticism "-A Guest Commentary

On The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905-

By Frank Jackman

For the attentive reader of this unabashedly left-wing publication which moreover not only takes history seriously but commemorates some historical nodal points worthy of attention today I have drawn attention this month of January to the 100^th anniversary of the assassinations of key nascent German Communist Party leaders Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and Karl Liebknecht the heart of the left-wing German workers movement. In that commentary I noted that history in the conditional, especially when things turned out badly as they did in Germany with the failure of the Communists to take power within a few years of the Armistice and aid the struggling isolated and devastated Russian revolution, is tricky business. There were certainly opportunities closed off by the decimation of the heads of the early German Communist Party that were never made up. That failure helps in its own way to pave the road to the Nazi takeover and all that meant for Europe and the world later. I also cautioned against stretching such conditionals out too far without retreating to an idea that the rise of the Nazis was inevitable. Give it some thought though.
History in the conditional applies as well to events that would in the future turn out well, well at the beginning in any case, and that leads to the role played by what many parties including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky referred to as the “dress rehearsal” for the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. That was the Revolution of 1905 which although it was shattered and many of the leading participants either killed, exiled or banished still provided some hope that things would turn on that proverbial historical dime in the end. The key organization structure set up in 1905, the Workers Soviets, councils, which in embryo provided the outline for the workers government everybody from Marx and to his left argued for to bring socialist order to each country, to the world in the end almost automatically was reestablished in the early days of 1917. Who knows in conditions of war and governmental turmoil what would have happened if that organizational form had not already been tested in an earlier revolutionary episode. Again, let’s not get too wide afield on history in the conditional on this end either. Think about those episodes though as we commemorate that 1905 revolution. 


   

Click on title to link the Vladimir Lenin Internet Archive's copy of his philosophical treatise in defense of the Marxist worldview, "Materialism and Empirio-criticism"

Workers Vanguard No. 945
23 October 2009

In Defense of Dialectical Materialism

(Quote of the Week)

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the publication of Materialism and Empirio-criticism,written by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin in 1908 during the period of victorious reaction following the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution. This work is a powerful repudiation of bourgeois philosophical idealism—embraced at the time even by some Bolshevik leaders—which in the end always amounts to a defense of reaction and the status quo. In the excerpt below, Lenin provides a concise exposition of the Marxist materialist outlook.

Yesterday we did not know that coal tar contains alizarin. Today we have learned that it does. The question is, did coal tar contain alizarin yesterday?

Of course it did. To doubt it would be to make a mockery of modern science.

And if that is so, three important epistemological conclusions follow:

1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our sensations, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.

2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there cannot be any such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known....

3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other sphere of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.

Once we accept the point of view that human knowledge develops from ignorance, we shall find millions of examples of it just as simple as the discovery of alizarin in coal tar, millions of observations not only in the history of science and technology but in the everyday life of each and every one of us that illustrate the transformation of “things-in-themselves” into “things-for-us,” the appearance of “phenomena” when our sense-organs experience an impact from external objects, the disappearance of “phenomena” when some obstacle prevents the action upon our sense-organs of an object which we know to exist. The sole and unavoidable deduction to be made from this—a deduction which all of us make in everyday practice and which materialism deliberately places at the foundation of its epistemology—is that outside us, and independently of us, there exist objects, things, bodies and that our perceptions are images of the external world.

—V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909)

On The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905-

On The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905-

By Frank Jackman

For the attentive reader of this unabashedly left-wing publication which moreover not only takes history seriously but commemorates some historical nodal points worthy of attention today I have drawn attention this month of January to the 100^th anniversary of the assassinations of key nascent German Communist Party leaders Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and Karl Liebknecht the heart of the left-wing German workers movement. In that commentary I noted that history in the conditional, especially when things turned out badly as they did in Germany with the failure of the Communists to take power within a few years of the Armistice and aid the struggling isolated and devastated Russian revolution, is tricky business. There were certainly opportunities closed off by the decimation of the heads of the early German Communist Party that were never made up. That failure helps in its own way to pave the road to the Nazi takeover and all that meant for Europe and the world later. I also cautioned against stretching such conditionals out too far without retreating to an idea that the rise of the Nazis was inevitable. Give it some thought though.
History in the conditional applies as well to events that would in the future turn out well, well at the beginning in any case, and that leads to the role played by what many parties including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky referred to as the “dress rehearsal” for the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. That was the Revolution of 1905 which although it was shattered and many of the leading participants either killed, exiled or banished still provided some hope that things would turn on that proverbial historical dime in the end. The key organization structure set up in 1905, the Workers Soviets, councils, which in embryo provided the outline for the workers government everybody from Marx and to his left argued for to bring socialist order to each country, to the world in the end almost automatically was reestablished in the early days of 1917. Who knows in conditions of war and governmental turmoil what would have happened if that organizational form had not already been tested in an earlier revolutionary episode. Again, let’s not get too wide afield on history in the conditional on this end either. Think about those episodes though as we commemorate that 1905 revolution. 

  

On The Anniversary Of The Revolution Of 1905- From The Pen Of Vladimir Lenin-For The Youth-Recruit More Widely And Boldly-A Letter to A. A. Bogdanov and S. I. Gusev (1905)

Click on the headline to link to the Lenin Internet Archives.


On The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905-

By Frank Jackman

For the attentive reader of this unabashedly left-wing publication which moreover not only takes history seriously but commemorates some historical nodal points worthy of attention today I have drawn attention this month of January to the 100^th anniversary of the assassinations of key nascent German Communist Party leaders Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and Karl Liebknecht the heart of the left-wing German workers movement. In that commentary I noted that history in the conditional, especially when things turned out badly as they did in Germany with the failure of the Communists to take power within a few years of the Armistice and aid the struggling isolated and devastated Russian revolution, is tricky business. There were certainly opportunities closed off by the decimation of the heads of the early German Communist Party that were never made up. That failure helps in its own way to pave the road to the Nazi takeover and all that meant for Europe and the world later. I also cautioned against stretching such conditionals out too far without retreating to an idea that the rise of the Nazis was inevitable. Give it some thought though.
History in the conditional applies as well to events that would in the future turn out well, well at the beginning in any case, and that leads to the role played by what many parties including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky referred to as the “dress rehearsal” for the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. That was the Revolution of 1905 which although it was shattered and many of the leading participants either killed, exiled or banished still provided some hope that things would turn on that proverbial historical dime in the end. The key organization structure set up in 1905, the Workers Soviets, councils, which in embryo provided the outline for the workers government everybody from Marx and to his left argued for to bring socialist order to each country, to the world in the end almost automatically was reestablished in the early days of 1917. Who knows in conditions of war and governmental turmoil what would have happened if that organizational form had not already been tested in an earlier revolutionary episode. Again, let’s not get too wide afield on history in the conditional on this end either. Think about those episodes though as we commemorate that 1905 revolution.  


   

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
************
V. I. Lenin

A Letter to A. A. Bogdanov and S. I. Gusev

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Published: First published in 1925 in the magazine Proletarskaya Revolutsia, No. 4 (39). Published according to the manuscript.
Source:Lenin Collected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, Moscow, Volume 8, pages 143-147.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs and The Late Isidor Lasker
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2003). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text• README

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February

11, 1905

I wired my consent to your changes yesterday, although I emphatically do not agree with what I could gather from your letter. But I am so sick of this procrastination, and your questions seemed such a mockery, that I just gave it up, thinking, If only they did something! If only they gave notice of the Congress, any kind of notice, so long as they gave it, instead of just talking about it. You will be surprised at my use of the word mockery. But just stop and think: two months ago I sent my draft to all members of the Bureau.[1] Not one of them is interested in it or finds it necessary to discuss it. And now—by wire.... A nice business: we talk of organisation, of centralism, while actually there is such disunity, such amateurism among even the closest comrades in the centre, that one feels like chucking it all in disgust. Just look at the Bundists: they do not prate about centralism, but every one of them writes to the centre weekly and contact is thus actually maintained. You only have to pick up their Posledniye Izvestia[2] to see this contact. We, however, here are issuing the sixth number of yet one of our editors (Rakhmetov) has not written a single line, either about or for Vperyod. Our people “talk” of extensive literary connections in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, and of the Majority’s young forces, while we here, two months after the issuance of the call for collaboration (the announcement of Vperyod and a letter in connection with it), have seen or heard nothing from them. The Russian committees (Caucasus, Nizhni-Novgorod, not to speak of the Volga region or the South) consider the Bureau a “myth”, and with perfect justification. We did “hear” from strangers about some sort of alliance between the St. Petersburg Committee of the Majority and a group of Mensheviks, but from our own people not a word. We refuse to believe that Bolsheviks could have taken such an imbecilic, suicidal step. We did “hear” from strangers about a conference of Social-Democrats and the formation of a “bloc”, but from our own people not a word, although there are rumours that this is a fait accompi. Evidently, the members of the Majority are anxious to be imposed upon again.

Our

only strength lies in utter frankness, in solidarity, and indetermined assault. But people, it seems, have gone soft now that we have a “revolution”! At a time when organisation is needed a hundred times more than ever before they sell out to the disrupters. It is evident from the proposed changes in the draft of the declaration and Congress call (set forth in the letter so vaguely as to be almost unintelligible) that “loyalty” has been put on a pedestal. Papasba[3] actually uses that word, adding that if the centres are not mentioned, no one will come to the Congress! Well, gentlemen, I can wager that if t h i s is the way you are going to act, you will never have a congress and never escape from under the thumb of the Bonapartists of the Central Organ and the Central Committee. To call a congress against the central bodies, in which lack of confidence has been expressed, to call this Congress in the name of a revolutionary bureau (which, if we are to pay slavish obeisance to the loyal Party Rules, is non-existent and fictitious), and to recognise the unqualified right of the nine Bonapartists, the League (ha! ha!), and the Bonapartist creatures (the freshly hatched committees) to attend that Congress, means to make our selves ridiculous and to lose all right to respect. The centres may and should be invited, but to accord them voting status is, I repeat, madness. The centres, of course, will not come to our Congress anyway; but why give them another chance to spit in our faces? Why this hypocrisy, this game of hide-and-seek? It is a positive shame! We bring the split into the open, we call the Vperyod-ists to a congress, we want to organise a Vperyod-ist party, and we break immediately any and all connections with the disorganisers—and yet we are having loyalty dinned into our ears, we are asked to act as though a joint congress of Iskra and Vperyod were possible. What a farce! The very first day, the very first hour of the Congress (if it does take place) will beyond doubt ring down the curtain on this farce; but until the Congress meets such deceit can do us untold harm.

Really,

I sometimes think that nine-tenths of the Bolsheviks are actually formalists. Either we shall rally all who are out to fight into a really iron-strong organisation and with this small but strong party quash that sprawling monster, the new-Iskra motley elements, or we shall prove by our conduct that we deserve to go under for being contemptible formalists. How is it that people do not understand that prior to the Bureau and prior to “Vperyod” we did all we could to save loyalty, to save unity, to save the formal, i.e., higher methods of settling the conflict?! But now, after the Bureau, after “Vperyod”, the split is a fact. And when the split had become a fact it became evident that materially we were very much weaker. We have yet to convert our moral strength into material strength. The Mensheviks have more money, more literature, more transportation facilities, more agents, more “names”, and a larger staff of contributors. It would be unpardonable childishness not to see that. And if we do not wish to present to the world the repulsive spectacle of a dried-up and anaemic old maid, proud of her barren moral purity, then we must understand that we need war and a battle organisation. Only after a long battle, and only with the aid of an excellent organisation can we turn our moral strength into material strength.

We need funds. The plan to hold the Congress i n L o n d o n is sublimely ridiculous, for it would cost twice as much. We cannot suspend publication of Vperyod, which is what a long absence would mean. The Congress must be a simple affair, brief, and small in attendance. This is a congress for the organisation of the battle. Clearly, you are cherishing illusions in this respect.

We need people to work on Vperyod. There are not enough of us. If we do not get two or three extra people from Russia as permanent contributors, there is no sense in continuing to prate about a struggle against Iskra. Pamphlets and leaflets are needed, and needed desperately.

We

need young forces. I am for shooting on the spot any one who presumes to say that there are no people to be had. The people in Russia are legion; all we have to do is to recruit young people more widely and boldly, more boldly and widely, and again more widely and again more boldly, without fearing them. This is a time of war. The youth—the students, and still more so the young workers—will decide the issue of the whole struggle. Get rid of all the old habits of immobility, of respect for rank, and so on. Form hundreds of circles of Vperyod-ists from among the youth and encourage them to work at full blast. Enlarge the Committee threefold by accepting young people into it, set up half a dozen or a dozen subcommittees, “co-opt” any and every honest and energetic person. Allow every subcommittee to write and publish leaflets without any red tape (there is no harm if they do make a mistake; we on Vperyod will “gently” correct them). We must, with desperate speed, unite all people with revolutionary initiative and set them to work. Do not fear their lack of training, do not tremble at their inexperience and lack of development. In the first place, if you fail to organise them and spur them on to action, they will follow the Mensheviks and the Gapons, and this very inexperience of theirs will cause five times more harm. In the second place, events themselves will teach them in our spirit. Events are already teaching everyone precisely in the Vperyod spirit.

Only you must be sure to organise, organise, and organise hundreds of circles, completely pushing into the back ground the customary, well-meant committee (hierarchic) stupidities. This is a time of war. Either you create new, young, fresh, energetic battle organisations everywhere for revolutionary Social-Democratic work of all varieties among all strata, or you will go under, wearing the aureole of “committee” bureaucrats.

I shall write of this in Vperyod[4] and speak of it at the Congress. I am writing to you in one more endeavour to evoke an exchange of ideas, to call upon you to bring a dozen y o u n g, f r e s h workers’ (and other) circles into direct contact with the Editorial Board, although ... although between ourselves be it said, I do not cherish the slightest hope that these daring ideas will be fulfilled, unless, perhaps, two months from now you will ask me to wire whether I agree to such-and-such changes in the “plan”.... I reply in advance that I agree to everything. Good-bye until the Congress.

Lenin

P.S.

You must make it your aim to revolutionise the delivery of Vperyod into Russia. Carry on widespread propaganda for subscriptions from St. Petersburg. Let students and especially workers subscribe for scores and hundreds of copies to be sent to their own addresses. It is absurd to have fears on this score in times like these. The police can never intercept all the copies. Half the number or a third will arrive, and that amounts to very much. Suggest this idea to any youth circle, and it will find hundreds of ways of its own to make connections abroad. Distribute addresses more widely, as widely as possible, for the transmission of letters to Vperyod.

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Notes

[1] See present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 540-42.—Ed.

[2] The Latest News.—Ed.

[3] See Note 22.—Ed.

[4] See pp. 211-20 of this volume.—Ed.

In Honor Of The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- The Dress Rehearsal To The Bolshevik-Led October 1917 Russian Revolution- “1905”

On The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905-

By Frank Jackman

For the attentive reader of this unabashedly left-wing publication which moreover not only takes history seriously but commemorates some historical nodal points worthy of attention today I have drawn attention this month of January to the 100^th anniversary of the assassinations of key nascent German Communist Party leaders Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and Karl Liebknecht the heart of the left-wing German workers movement. In that commentary I noted that history in the conditional, especially when things turned out badly as they did in Germany with the failure of the Communists to take power within a few years of the Armistice and aid the struggling isolated and devastated Russian revolution, is tricky business. There were certainly opportunities closed off by the decimation of the heads of the early German Communist Party that were never made up. That failure helps in its own way to pave the road to the Nazi takeover and all that meant for Europe and the world later. I also cautioned against stretching such conditionals out too far without retreating to an idea that the rise of the Nazis was inevitable. Give it some thought though.
History in the conditional applies as well to events that would in the future turn out well, well at the beginning in any case, and that leads to the role played by what many parties including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky referred to as the “dress rehearsal” for the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. That was the Revolution of 1905 which although it was shattered and many of the leading participants either killed, exiled or banished still provided some hope that things would turn on that proverbial historical dime in the end. The key organization structure set up in 1905, the Workers Soviets, councils, which in embryo provided the outline for the workers government everybody from Marx and to his left argued for to bring socialist order to each country, to the world in the end almost automatically was reestablished in the early days of 1917. Who knows in conditions of war and governmental turmoil what would have happened if that organizational form had not already been tested in an earlier revolutionary episode. Again, let’s not get too wide afield on history in the conditional on this end either. Think about those episodes though as we commemorate that 1905 revolution.  

   

In Honor Of The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- The Dress Rehearsal To The Bolshevik-Led October 1917 Russian Revolution- “1905”

On The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905-

By Frank Jackman

For the attentive reader of this unabashedly left-wing publication which moreover not only takes history seriously but commemorates some historical nodal points worthy of attention today I have drawn attention this month of January to the 100^th anniversary of the assassinations of key nascent German Communist Party leaders Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and Karl Liebknecht the heart of the left-wing German workers movement. In that commentary I noted that history in the conditional, especially when things turned out badly as they did in Germany with the failure of the Communists to take power within a few years of the Armistice and aid the struggling isolated and devastated Russian revolution, is tricky business. There were certainly opportunities closed off by the decimation of the heads of the early German Communist Party that were never made up. That failure helps in its own way to pave the road to the Nazi takeover and all that meant for Europe and the world later. I also cautioned against stretching such conditionals out too far without retreating to an idea that the rise of the Nazis was inevitable. Give it some thought though.
History in the conditional applies as well to events that would in the future turn out well, well at the beginning in any case, and that leads to the role played by what many parties including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky referred to as the “dress rehearsal” for the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. That was the Revolution of 1905 which although it was shattered and many of the leading participants either killed, exiled or banished still provided some hope that things would turn on that proverbial historical dime in the end. The key organization structure set up in 1905, the Workers Soviets, councils, which in embryo provided the outline for the workers government everybody from Marx and to his left argued for to bring socialist order to each country, to the world in the end almost automatically was reestablished in the early days of 1917. Who knows in conditions of war and governmental turmoil what would have happened if that organizational form had not already been tested in an earlier revolutionary episode. Again, let’s not get too wide afield on history in the conditional on this end either. Think about those episodes though as we commemorate that 1905 revolution.  

   

January 09, 2013

Book Review

1905, Leon Trotsky, translated by Anya Bostock, Random House, New York, 1971

The author of this book, a central Soviet leader of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and of the Bolshevik-led revolution in 1917 as well as one of the 20th century’s larger-than-life revolutionary figures, Leon Trotsky, noted, as have others, that the unsuccessful 1905 revolution acted as a “dress rehearsal” for the Bolshevik-led October 1917 revolution. And thus this book was intended to, and does, give a bird’s eye view from a key participant about the lessons to be drawn from the failure of that first revolution, both the strategic and tactical military and political lessons. And from reading many histories of the October of 1917 revolution from all kinds of political perspectives, Trotsky and Lenin at least, learned those lessons very well.

The presentations in this book actually were written in several different periods, the central part was written while Trotsky was in European exile in 1908(after a harrowing escape from the hazards of a court-imposed internal Siberian exile). Trotsky first hones in on a sociological, political, economic and cultural overview of the trends leading up to the 1905 events. He also analyzes the key “sparking” event, the January 9th march (old calendar) by the hat-in-hand workers to petition the Tsar for the redress of pressing grievances that turned into a massacre, the subsequent months long waves of political and economic strikes that forced some timid Tsarist constitutional innovations in October, the creation of the soviets (workers councils) in that period and its subsequent arrest as a body, and the pivotal, although unsuccessful, Moscow insurrection that ended the period of active revolutionary upheaval. Other parts of the book include polemics against various liberal and social democratic opponents (more on those below), the trial of the Soviet deputies, including Trotsky’s stellar use of the courtroom as a platform to defend the Soviet’s actions from strikes to insurrection. The very last part, which kind of puts paid to the period, is a detailed description of his Siberian escape, the stuff of legend.

A quick summary of the basic strategic concepts of the Russian revolution is in order here to make sense of what the various working class organizations (and others) were trying to achieve in the 1905 revolution. It comes down to three concepts: the Menshevik social-democratic view (also essentially shared by the liberal capitalists, the peasant-based social-revolutionaries, and most of the radical intelligentsia) that economically backward (compared to European capitalist and imperialist development), peasant-dominated (including vast peasant-dominated national minorities), and autocratic Russia was ripe for a bourgeois revolution of the Western-type led by the bourgeois before any thought of socialism could be projected; the Bolshevik social-democratic view which also argued for a bourgeois revolution of a more or less short duration but with the understanding that the Russian bourgeois was too tied to world imperialism to lead such a movement and also argued that it would be led by an alliance of the urban workers carrying the bulk of the peasantry with them (especially on the long unresolved land question); and, the Trotsky radical social-democratic view that the urban workers (and urban allies) also including that Russia mandatory peasant alliance would not only fight for the historic gains associated with the bourgeois revolution (quench land hunger, create a unified nation-state, form some kind of popular government with wide representation) but, of necessity, also form a workers and peasants government to start on the road to socialist construction. That is the core of his theory of permanent revolution (later, in the late 1920s, extended to other countries of belated capitalist development) associated thereafter with his name.

This thumbnail sketch does not do justice to all the intricacies of each position but, after reading this book one should understand those positions better and note, at least in passing, that Trotsky seems even in 1908 to have the better of the argument after having seriously drawn the lesson of his own experience and observed that the Russian bourgeoisie, for many reasons, had no heart to lead a revolution and were quite comfortable making its peace with Tsarist society. He also noted that the peasantry was too amorphous, too driven by its land hunger, and too scattered in the countryside to lead a modern revolution. But that is music for the future. Certainly even in 1908 (or earlier) as he was fighting a rear-guard action against his various political opponent, including Lenin) to defend his political perspectives he earned the title bestowed on him by George Bernard Shaw as the “prince of pamphleteers.” Even one hundred years later I am glad, glad as hell, that I am not the one that he is polemizing against with his pen. The wounds still would not have healed.

Of course the theory of permanent revolution, recognized as such or codified in full or not later by the Bolsheviks, turned out to be the fighting formula for the Bolshevik-led October revolution. The liberal bourgeoisie (led by the Kadet Party) turned out to be even more venal that it had been in 1905; the Mensheviks tried to pass a camel through the eye of a needle to try to keep giving power to the bourgeoisie, including taking part in their provisional government; and the social revolutionary-led peasantry turned to the Bolsheviks (at least important elements, including the peasant soldiers) when the latter supported land seizures by the poorer peasants. An attentive reader will see that scenario develop in embryo after reading this important eye witness work.

Note: There is no where else that this observation fits comfortably above so I will place it here. Those familiar with Trotsky’s role in the Bolshevik revolution as the military organizer of the Petrograd insurrection and later, under conditions of civil war, as War Commissar, where he led the red armies against the whites will be surprised to find that he was very perspective about the military necessities of the class struggle even in 1905. If one looks at the fastidiously dressed Trotsky in the famous picture taken of him in his prison cell while awaiting trial along with the other 1905 Soviet deputies one would not take him for a future class struggle warrior. Make that fact an added factor in my characterization of him as one of the 20th century's larger-than-life revolutionary figures.