Watching the miniseries Trotsky, made by Russia’s Channel One in 2017, it is hard not be reminded of Christopher Nolan’s entries into the Batman franchise, both in ideology and aesthetics. In the first episode, we are treated to seeing Lev Bronstein, an idealistic and naïve revolutionary concerned with human rights, becoming the cold and devious Leon Trotsky, a man beguiled by power and fame, disinterested in the amount of blood on his hands.

This transformation is facilitated by the other Trotsky, Nikolai, the chief warden at Odessa Prison, a classical Dostoevsky-styled reactionary who warns the future Trotsky, over a game of chess, that liberating the Russian masses would lead to an untold level of destruction of society, and that power, once claimed, can only be exercised through terror. Trotsky is haunted by these words in his dark solitary cell and undergoes a terrifying metamorphosis, becoming in his words, the “greatest monster,” and he puts on the pelt of his jailer, through his adoption of the name Trotsky.

These scenes are highly reminiscent of Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman, the master of fear and darkness, under the tuition of the venerable Ra’s al Ghul. Both transformations belong to fiction. In his 1930 autobiography My Life, Trotsky assigns his choice of nom de guerre, written in a forged passport, to a completely random memory. Isaac Deutscher’s first volume of his colossal biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, identifies the source of the name Trotsky as originally belonging to a jailer, but one that was “obscure” and certainly not the chief warden of the Odessa Prison. According to Deutscher, Trotksy’s actual relationship with the gendarme in charge of his interrogations while imprisoned in Odessa was one of mockery.