Neal Ascherson

Revolution is a staircase. In February 1848, the poet Lamartine found himself in charge of a Paris revolution, from an upper floor in the Hôtel de Ville. He identified on the staircase something as specific as a tornado: a roaring double helix formed of those fighting their way upwards and those pressing downwards. It appears whenever a society mutinies and decides to make a new world. I...

“The real abyss separating Deutscher from modern historiography is a moral one. An average British history graduate today will have been taught to evaluate revolutions on a simple humanitarian scale. Did they kill a lot of people? Then they were bad. Showing that some of those killed were even more bloodthirsty than their killers is no extenuation . . . Isaac Deutscher saw history differently. His standards are not those of Amnesty International. Instead, he measures everything against the cause of the Revolution. The Trotsky trilogy has a spinal column of moral argument running through it which can be reduced to this question: did this or that course or idea help to fulfil the Revolution, or divert it from its true purpose?”

“Where is legality, as we understand it, when it is considered perfectly normal for the police and public prosecution staff to break into a defence lawyer’s office during a trial and seize all his files on his client – as happened last October in the case of Platon Lebedev of the Yukos oil corporation? Those who try to justify this sort of thing have to fall back on an argument which is venerable, brutal, dangerous and yet not to be dismissed out of hand. The argument is that legality is not an adequate weapon against those whose power is itself illegitimate, and who consider themselves above the law.”

“Mikheil Saakashvili is 36 years old, dark and already a bit joufflu, wildly talkative and often indiscreet. His own rhetoric is ebullient. He will break down Georgia’s monstrous corruption, bring order to the chaos of state finances, set the nation on a course towards the European Union, get rid of the Russian military bases, deal (we don’t yet know how) with the ten-year-old secession of Abkhazia . . . everybody wants to share his optimism, and to believe in their own vaulting expectations. But Georgians have seen a lot of false dawns.”

“He was not paranoid, as Stalin was, but somehow drew energy from the idea that everything and everyone in the cosmos treated him as an upstart, a stubby-fingered boor who must not be allowed to succeed. He would show them. He did show them. The chip on his shoulder was the biggest carried by any leader in history, Napoleon and Hitler not excepted. It was heavy enough to crush the world, and in the Cuba crisis of 1962, it very nearly did so.”