This is a spellbinding tale, told by a great storyteller, and each reader will have a saddest moment. Mine is in 1935: In a cottage in a remote French village, Trotsky and his second wife, Sedova, hear two men pass by singing the Internationale. Although drawn to the song by a powerful compulsion, they have to stay hidden because these proud Communists might discover who they are and denounce them to the party, causing their death or deportation.

Still, Trotsky never gave up on Communism, refusing to side with bourgeois governments against the state led by Stalin, his sworn enemy, even as the purges targeted anyone suspected of Trotskyist sympathies. (One of the most interesting and curious documents of this period is Their Morals and Ours, an exchange about violence and political morality with John Dewey, who had taken it upon himself to investigate, and eventually reject, the accusations made against Trotsky at the Moscow trials of the late 1930s.) Trotsky's refusal to declare that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers' state ultimately drove away many of his intellectual fellow travelers, including Eastman and Serge.

Deutscher keeps the reader on tenterhooks as the story reaches its horrifying conclusion in 1940. Stalin had long since become absolute ruler, most Old Bolsheviks were dead, millions were in labor camps and primitive Russia had been brutally dragged into the modern world. Refusing "to let his existence become cramped by fear and misanthropy," the exiled onetime leader of the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolshevik insurrection, the Soviet Union's first foreign minister and first commander of the Red Army, sits down at his desk in a Mexico City suburb to read an amateurish article by a shadowy character who, posing as his bumbling follower, had wormed his way into Trotsky's household. After reading one page, "a terrific blow came down upon his head" from an ice pick. "His skull smashed, his face gored, Trotsky jumped up, hurled at the murderer whatever object was at hand, books, inkpots, even the dictaphone, and then threw himself at him. It had all taken only three or four minutes."

The word "tragedy" comes to mind again and again in reading Deutscher's Trotsky biography, not only because Trotsky's death was part of the enormous human catastrophe that was Stalinism but also because he helped call up and contribute to the very force that destroyed him and his followers. And, as in classical tragedy, Trotsky's strengths are inseparable from his weaknesses. Our appreciation of the trilogy as literature thus entails a political and historical understanding of where the man, and the Bolshevik Revolution, went wrong.

Deutscher notes Trotsky's puzzling unwillingness to combat Stalin until it was too late, attributing it to a sense of superiority that kept Trotsky from taking the party secretary seriously as an antagonist. But there are deeper reasons for Stalin's victory over Trotsky. Much earlier, during the famous Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903, Trotsky had denounced Lenin's notion of a vanguard party as "substitutism" and had accused him of "trying to force the pace of history." Indeed, he only reconciled with Lenin and decided to join the Bolsheviks in July 1917, three months before the Revolution. During the crucial next few years Trotsky's high position derived from his élan for analysis, public persuasion and organization under crisis, Stalin's from his capacity to create a network of loyalists and install them in positions of privilege and power. The party man easily outmaneuvered the brilliant revolutionary.

Trotsky's reliance on his powerful mind and his relative disinterest in creating personal relationships and networks take us deeper into the heart of the matter, namely that Trotsky's Marxism was of little use in negotiating the new situation created by the Bolshevik Revolution. Stalin sought power; Trotsky did not. In the void of backward Russia in which the Bolsheviks ruled in the name of the workers but stood above all social classes, the "base" of workers so trusted by Trotsky mattered less than the "superstructure" of increasingly self-interested party officials appointed by Stalin. The reality that sealed Trotsky's and the Soviet Union's fate was not Marxist at all.

An effort to understand where the October Revolution went wrong leads us to the illusion that made it possible. Deutscher observes that Lenin and Trotsky fervently hoped that Bolshevik success in Russia would set off revolutions throughout Europe, and that they could not have acted to seize power without their "world- embracing hope to embrace a world-shaking deed." But what was the origin of this belief at the heart of Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution"? "History produced the great illusion and implanted it and cultivated it in the brains of the most soberly realistic leaders when she needed the motive power of illusion to further her own work." She? Needed? Her work? In a strange Hegelian twist Deutscher makes history with a capital "H" the active force, rather than Lenin or Trotsky or the Russian workers--as if these people were merely its vessels, as if History's hidden rationality could be discerned in Bolshevik irrationality.

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