Leon Trotsky was a Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founding leader of the Red Army. Had the revolution developed more normally -- that is, under peaceful circumstances, as it had in 1912 -- the proletariat would always have held a dominant position, while the peasant masses would gradually have been taken in tow by the proletariat and drawn into the whirlpool of the revolution. But the war produced an altogether different succession of events. . . .