Hannah Arendt Collection: The Prophet Armed

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College, we came across one of the volumes of The Prophet Armed, a three-volume biography written by Isaac Deutscher on the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Arendt made a number of annotations in her copy of Trotsky's biography. For instance, on page 136, she annotated with a vertical line the following passage:

A thousand railwaymen on strike are politically more effective than a million scattered villagers.

On the opposite page, she positions a vertical line adjacent to two passages. The first reads:

He [Lenin] kept his mind open and waited to see whether the peasantry would not form its own revolutionary party, with whom the Socialists would have to deal as with an equal partner.

This is followed by the second passage:

He wondered whether that priest, the son of a Cossack, who had led the workers of the capital to the Winter Palace and thereby helped to open the sluices for the revolution, was not the harbinger of an independent and radical peasant movement.