Bee Trotsky A Revolutionary Analysis

"The life of a revolutionary would be quite impossible without a certain amount of 'fatalism'.” (xix) From the foreword to the farewell, Trotsky makes his criteria clear when speaking of revolutionaries. He doesn't require that they all be stellar politicians or inspiring leaders, just that they be sincere in their revolutionary efforts as he said of Eugene Debs (pg 275). According to Trotsky, a true revolutionary has passion and temper and heeds his own intellectual interest when deciding what he believes to be the truth. He must have energy to fight and the wit to win. A perfect revolutionary would be ready to die for the cause because the cause is his life. But above all, they understand a place within the scheme and make it their own because "to understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one’s own place – that is the first duty of a revolutionary."(xix)

Trotsky speaks extensively of this duty when he mentions Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, whom Trotsky considered to be "the most complete and finished revolutionary type"(pg 408). Smirnov had …show more content…
These five are "association with one another, theoretical work, the struggle under a definite banner, collective discipline, the hardening under the fire of danger." (pg 503) He believed that revolutionaries were made of the same social material but that these five components helped in shaping the personal qualities that set revolutionaries apart from the rest of the world populace. In his opinion, revolutionaries were a special breed of men. Revolutionaries were men that labored together under one hope: a hope for change and a change that they could all believe in. As Trotsky reached the end of his story he said that "the revolutionary can only follow one rule: Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra," (pg 531) or "do what you must, come what may." By this rule and this rule alone, the revolution will never