Nehru’s Admiration for Trotsky

Here are three extracts from Jawaharlal Nehru’s synopsis of world history called Glimpses of World History which he put together in the early thirties as a series of letters to his daughter. The extracts date from April and July 1933. Given that Nehru wrote Glimpses in a series of jails where he barely had access to any literature, his assessments of the Russian Revolution and admiration for Trotsky’s role in it are quite extraordinary. Like most of the book (1129 pages in the Penguin edition), the extracts reproduced here were written in the District Gaol, Dehra Dun.

Nehru on Trotsky