A quote sometimes attributed to Trotsky is that “revolution is impossible until it is inevitable.” Not for the first or last time, Trotsky was wrong, and as the leader of a well-organized revolutionary movement who’d watched the Czar crush the rebellion of 1905, he certainly knew better. There is a tendency for events that were once chaotic, precarious, and ultimately consequential to seem inevitable once they’re chiseled into our tablets. Today, an equally dismissive approach suggests that those events were inevitable. In fact, they were neither.
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