TELLS ABOUT TROTSKY ON FRENCH TELEVISION
PARIS -- Television fans in France got a welcome break from dull programs when Isaac Deutscher was interviewed April 14 on the third volume of his biography of Leon Trotsky which has_ just been published here under the title Le Prophéte Hors-la-loi [The Prophet Outcast].
In a fifteen-minute nation-wide program, Deutscher replied to a half dozen questions from the television critic, Pierre Desgraupes, who had carefully read the book, enabling Deutscher to bring out several important points before the huge television audience,
First of all, he stressed Trotsky's foresight, showing in particular how Trotsky had sounded the alarm on the danger represented by the Nazis in Germany, while Stalin at the time saw the Social Democracy and fascism as "twins." Deutscher also recalled how Trotsky had forecast the collapse of the Third Republic in France.
Desgraupes opened the way for Deutscher to indicate how Trotsky had viewed power as a means and not an end itself, how he was imbued with a feeling of the historic importance of his struggle, and. how tragedy came to Trotsky's family because of his principled political course,
Asked about the way in which Trotsky is viewed today in the USSR as a result of "de-Stalinization," Deutscher pointed out how the old charges about being an "agent of imperialism," a "spy," an “enemy of the people," etc., had been abandoned, being replaced by milder epithets such as “antiparty." Nevertheless Trotsky's works and the truth about him are still barred in the USSR.
Deutscher told the following anecdote.. Some students were
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reading one of Trotsky's books secretly at the home of one of them, ~“the ‘son of a high party official, when the father suddenly came in. “On catching sight of the book, he told them: “Do you know that you can get fifteen years in prison for what you're doing? Fifteen yeagst One of them responded: “We know it; but” the book is worth
In closing, Deutscher forcefully asserted his belief that Trotsky's ideas, now "below the surface" in the USSR, will begin to play a bigger and bigger role there,
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