Isaac Deutscher Papers

Period  1929-1967 (-1972)
Total size   7.35 m.
Consultation Not restricted

Biography

Born in Chrzanów, Galicia, Austria-Hungary 1907, died in Rome 1967; journalist, Marxist historian; moved to Cracow in 1923, to Warsaw in 1925; joined the Komunistyczna Partia Polski (KPP) in 1926, member of the Polish section of the International Left Opposition from 1929; expelled from the party in 1932; became supporter of Trotsky and followed the `entrance-tactic' by joining the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (PPS) 1935-1937; edited and contributed to many periodicals (most of them illegal and irregular); emigrated to Great Britain in 1939; regularly contributed political commentary on developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to The Economist, The Observer, the Tribune and other periodicals; at the same time engaged in historical research; published biographies of Trotsky and Stalin and wrote on cold war issues.

Content

Correspondence, mainly from the early fifties with political friends and left-wing historians like Edward H. Carr, Daniel Guérin, Ernest Mandel, Roman Rosdolsky, Alfred Rosmer, Bertrand Russell and others; correspondence with his publishers; 23 prewar letters from Leon Trotsky to Trotskyists (all published); original drafts etc., sometimes heavily edited, of his publications `Stalin, `Russia after Stalin', `The Trotsky Trilogy', `Heretics and Renegades', `Russia in Transition', `The great Contest', `The Age of Permanent Revolution', `Ironies of History', `The unfinished Revolution', `The Non-Jewish Jew', `Russia, China and the West', `Lenin's Childhood', `Marxism in our Time'; drafts of miscellaneous writings: articles, lectures and broadcasts; file on the International War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm 1967; press clippings of most of his articles from 1944 onwards.

Arrangement

The IISH acquired the Isaac Deutscher Archive in 1977; for the convenience of visitors of the Institute letters from H. Brandler, M. Eastman, R. Rosdolsky, A. Rosmer and others were removed from the alphabetical files, where they were preserved before 1977 (inv.nrs. 81-89); the collection contained a larger amount of printed documents, but they have been incorporated into the IISH library; this is one reason why the present metrage (7.35 metres) differs from the one given in the 'Guide to the International Archives and Collections'(1999); another is the packing of the documents in folders rather than in the files used previously

Processing information

List made by Hermien van Veen in 2000