Isaac Deutscher's biography of Leon Trotsky, originally published as a trilogy, The Prophet Armed (1954), The Prophet Unarmed (1959) and The Prophet Outcast (1963), and later issued by Verso in a single volume as The Prophet, is at once the story of one extraordinary life and a history of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal. Deutscher follows Trotsky from his birth in 1879 to a Jewish farming family in southern Ukraine through his years as a young Marxist, exile and polemicist, his leadership of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1905, his central role in organizing the October insurrection of 1917, and his creation of the Red Army during the civil war. The second part traces his defeat in the struggle with Stalin after Lenin's death, when Trotsky's brilliance and arrogance proved no match for Stalin's command of the party machine. The final part follows his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929 and his wanderings through Turkey, France, Norway and Mexico, the destruction of his family and followers, and his assassination by a Soviet agent in 1940. Deutscher, born in 1907 in Galicia and expelled from the Polish Communist Party in 1932 for opposing Stalinist policy, wrote from London as a sympathetic but independent Marxist. He admires Trotsky's intellect and courage while criticizing his political misjudgments, including his own use of revolutionary terror. Running through the work is a moral question: what happens to a revolution, and to the people who made it, when means overwhelm ends. Written with novelistic sweep, it remains one of the great political biographies of the twentieth century.