[10] Deutscher was born in Chrzanów, a town in the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in southern Poland), into a family of religiously observant Jews.

Deutscher first attracted notice as a poet, when he began publishing poems in Polish literary periodicals at the age of sixteen.

In an article "The Danger of Barbarism over Europe", Deutscher urged the formation of a united front of socialists and communists against Nazism.

"[14][16] In April 1939, Deutscher left Poland for London as a correspondent for a Polish-Jewish newspaper for which he had worked as a proof reader for fourteen years.

Released in 1942, he joined the staff of The Economist and became its expert on Soviet affairs and military issues, and its chief European correspondent.

[14] He was one of the so-called Shanghai Club (named after a restaurant in Soho) of left-leaning and emigre journalists that included Sebastian Haffner (also on The Observer), E. H. Carr, George Orwell, Barbara Ward and Jon Kimche.

In the book he gave Stalin what he saw as his due for building a form of socialism in the Soviet Union, even if it was, in Deutscher's view, a perversion of the vision of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

[citation needed] The Stalin biography made Deutscher a leading authority on Soviet affairs and the Russian Revolution.

Much of the material contained in the third volume was previously unknown, since Trotsky's widow, Natalia Sedova, gave Deutscher access to the closed section of the archives.

[20] As later revealed, Isaiah Berlin, who was asked to evaluate the academic credentials of Deutscher, argued against such a promotion because of the profoundly pro-communist militancy of the candidate.

[21] In the 1960s, the upsurge of left-wing sentiment that accompanied the Vietnam War made Deutscher a popular figure on university campuses in both Britain and the United States.

In 1965, Deutscher took part in the first "Teach-In" on Vietnam at the University of California, Berkeley, where thousands of students listened to his indictment of the Cold War.

[14] The G. M. Trevelyan Lectures, under the title The Unfinished Revolution, were published after Deutscher's sudden and unexpected death in Rome in 1967, where he went for an Italian TV broadcast.

But in the aftermath of the Holocaust he regretted his pre-war views, lamenting that "If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s, I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were to be extinguished in Hitler's gas chambers."

He argued the case for establishing Israel as a "historic necessity", to provide a home for the surviving Jews of Europe; and said that his anti-Zionism, which "I have, of course, long since abandoned ... was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, a confidence in European society and civilisation which that society and civilisation have not justified.

"[25] Regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Deutscher wrote the following allegory: "A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished.

The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and console the other sufferer; and the latter might have realized that he was the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had control.

"[26] Deutscher wrote the following passages in "The Israeli Arab War, June 1967" (1967): "Still we must exercise our judgment and must not allow it to be clouded by emotions and memories, however deep or haunting.