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Rh it would have occurred, it would have been very brief, for it would have faced a practically unified people.

The reasons usually advanced for the impossibility of Russia’s finding a democratic mean between the autocracy of Czarism and the autocracy of Bolshevism are such that they would also “prove” the English and French Revolutions impossible.

Our main concern, however, is not with the particular historical picture that would have unrolled itself if there had been no October. And at this point we are not at all concerned with its desirability. We believe that whether the world would have been happier or unhappier, better or worse, at any rate it would have been tremendously different; that future historians will consider the October Revolution as a turning point which opened a new era of weal and woe in the history of mankind; and that, on the available evidence, they will attribute to the event-making character of Nicolai Lenin the chief role in the achievement of that revolution.

The foregoing analysis of the event-making significance of Lenin in the Russian Revolution is still incomplete. It does not warrant acceptance unless it can be sustained against the thesis of one of the outstanding participants in its crucial struggles who maintains that the Russian Revolution was inevitable. In his remarkable History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky undertakes to prove, in conformity with Marxist principles, that the October Revolution was the only path possible in the development of Russia after the downfall of Czarism. His work abounds with sentences like: “The October Revolution advanced with a physical necessity.” It has “a deep natural inevitability.” It exemplifies “that mighty development of great revolutions.” Despite its obvious bias, which the author makes no effort to conceal, his study is a historical document of the first importance for an understanding of the period from February to October, 1917. It is the most plausible account the Bolsheviks have given of themselves.

But does it confirm his thesis?

In all of his historical writing two souls struggle within Trotsky’s breasts—the soul of the orthodox Marxist who must interpret history in line with the dogmas of his monistic creed, and the soul of the empirical investigator who must follow the