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CHOICE Review

In this volume, a second-class thinker is treated with the high regard usually reserved for select luminaries. Trotsky was hardly a first-class revolutionary, but he had his historical moment in 1917 when Lenin needed his oratorical style (himself having none) and used him to move the sluggish Petrograders off the proverbial ``kopeck.'' Thereafter, Lenin, enchanted by Trotsky's talk, selected him for high positions in the Council of the Peoples Commissars. Knowing his own shortcomings, Trotsky cleaved close to Lenin's vest, but once the protection was gone, he hit a brick wall, the ``Old'' Bolshevik cabal, not ever fully realizing why his high posts had such a weak footing. Trotsky undoubtedly was a first-class journalist, and should be honored as such, but once driven into exile he was tempted at times to become an intellectual. This chastened and humiliated person became a center of attention for many Western intellectuals and artists, and, perhaps even against his own will, he began to play their games. But Trotsky had more than one iron in the fire. The crumbs that Pomper has picked up show how little time Trotsky had for intellectual work; they take up fewer than 40 printed pages. In published writings, the reader is sustained by Trotsky's metaphorical jabs and punches, bobbing and weaving, but these private doodlings only reveal a middling mind. The opaqueness and luminosity that similar notes of Marx would have had are not encountered here. Pomper's introductions and explications are the most interesting part of the volume. The scholarly apparatus is first class. Recommended for libraries concentrating on Trotsky's lore.-A. Ezergailis, Ithaca College