" leaders, especially the provincials.’ He ‘wasn’t regarded as the official leader of the Party’, says Sagirashvili, another Georgian Menshevik in Petrograd throughout 1917, but ‘everyone listened to what he had to say, including Lenin - he was a representative of the rank and file, one who expressed its real views and moods’, which were unknown to émigrés like Trotsky. Soso was the ‘unquestioned leader’ of the Caucasians. Lenin, says Sagirashvili, ‘felt that behind him stood countless leaders from the provinces’.160 While Trotsky was prancing on the stage "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin