The three succeeding portraits on the covers of this trilogy (which originally appeared volume by volume in 1954, 1959, and 1963) show the ardent young radical journalist and activist, the more mature Soviet tactician and commander of the Red Army, and the snowy-headed exiled sage. To have had a part in two revolutions, wrote Thomas Paine, was to have lived to some purpose. Trotsky took a leading part in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and also in many other political and military upheavals, from the Balkans to China, and was perhaps the most prescient writer of his day in warning of the true menace of National Socialism. Yet his most enduring and tenacious battle was against the monstrous regime that had resulted from his earlier exertions.

It is this, combined with the revolutionary credentials that he possessed, that helps explain the large footprint of Trotsky and Trotskyism among intellectuals. To start with a few American examples, Trotsky makes a magnetizing appearance in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. He caused Mary McCarthy to write one of her most penetrating essays ("My Confession"), about herd behavior in the radical smart set. Clement Greenberg partly founded his seminal article "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" on a passage from Trotsky's Literature and Revolution. Norman Mailer acknowledges as his own political inspiration a Trotskisant maverick named Jean Malaquais. Shift the scene a little, and we have no difficulty deciphering the figure of Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, or in recognizing the secret "book within a book" in that novel (The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism), as a derivative of Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed. Nearer the present time, the hero of Milan Kundera's The Joke has only to write "Long Live Trotsky!" on a postcard in order to find out precisely how, why, and when a "joke" under communism has gone too far.

Nor was this the only nervous establishment that found him a specter difficult to exorcise. Winston Churchill, in an acidulated portrait in Great Contemporaries, depicted Trotsky even in impotent exile as having been the "ogre" of international subversion. (He perhaps could not forgive one of the two men to have outgeneraled him in the field, the other being Kemal Atatürk.) A.J.P. Taylor tells the story of how an Austro-Hungarian minister, upon being warned by a nervous colleague that a too-precipitate war with Russia in 1914 might mean revolution, demanded to know who would lead this revolution: "Herr Trotsky of the Café Centrale?" (Trotsky's time in the cafés of Vienna was not wasted.) In late 1939 the French ambassador Robert Coulondre had his last meeting with Hitler before the coming of war. The Führer was in a boastful mood, Coulondre recalled in his memoir, having just concluded a pact with Stalin, and spoke of the inevitability of further triumphs. The ambassador sought to sober him by warning of the unintended consequences of conflict. "You are thinking of yourself as victor," Coulondre said, "but have you given thought to another possibility—that the victor may be Trotsky?" Hitler leaped to his feet, as if "he had been hit in the pit of the stomach," and yelled that this threat was reason enough in itself for Britain and France to capitulate at once. It would be amusing to know if Churchill ever learned of this conversation.