Raised on the Milk of the Wild Beast

A century after the great October putsch, it is interesting to return to what was written fifty years afterwards rather than a hundred years afterwards, so I dug out Isaac Deutscher’s book of essays Ironies of History: Essays on Contemporary Communism, published by Oxford in 1966. Such books have now gone the way of antimacassars and whalebone corsets, but that does not mean that they are entirely uninstructive. Indeed, there is probably no such thing as an entirely uninstructive book.

At the time Deutscher (above) published his Ironies, the Soviet Union seemed as permanent a feature of the modern world as, say, global warming. Deutscher himself had by then entered his brief phase (he died a year later) as superstar of the New Left, partly on account of his three-volume biography of his hero Trotsky, which offered willing dupes the hope of a humanistic totalitarianism, and more importantly because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, during which he formed a tactical alliance…