(Belknap/Harvard, pages, $35)
Western historians have been in thrall to the mythic aura Leon Trotsky created for himself—“until now,” said Michael J. Bonafield in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In his “iconoclastic yet rigorously balanced” new portrait of the fiery intellectual, Robert Service tears apart the romantic notion that Russia’s communist revolution might have had a happier outcome had Trotsky not been outmaneuvered, and ultimately assassinated, by his rival Josef Stalin. Tapping party correspondence and family letters, Service proves that Trotsky, while leader of the Red Army and a Politburo member, exceeded even Stalin as a “champion of state terror.”
Service’s portrait is hardly three-dimensional, said Michael Kazin in An “indictment,” no matter how thorough, is “not a biography.” If Trotsky was a monster, how did he become one? Service never even explains why “the son of prosperous landowners became a revolutionary in the first place.” Nor does he illuminate precisely how Trotsky managed to attract “a brigade of brilliant admirers” that included many leadin
Trotsky : A Biography
Robert Service completes his masterful trilogy on the founding figures of the Soviet Union in an eagerly anticipated, authoritative biography of Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources including family letters, party and military correspondence, confidential speeches, and medical records, Service offers new insights into Trotsky. He discusses Trotsky’s fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to bring into a unified party before ; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early s as the progenitor of political and cultural Stalinism. Trotsky evinced a surprisingly glacial and schematic approach to making revolution. Service recounts Trotsky’s role in the botched German revolution of ; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the s; and his assumption that peasants could easily be pushed onto collective farms. Service also sheds light on Trotsky’s character and personality: his difficulties with his Jewish background, the development of his or
Trotsky: A Biography
Robert Service completes his masterful trilogy on the founding figures of the Soviet Union in an eagerly anticipated, authoritative biography of Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources including family letters, party and military correspondence, confidential speeches, and medical records, Service offers new insights into Trotsky. He discusses Trotskyâe(tm)s fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to bring into a unified party before ; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early s as the progenitor of political and cultural Stalinism. Trotsky evinced a surprisingly glacial and schematic approach to making revolution. Service recounts Trotskyâe(tm)s role in the botched German revolution of ; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the s; and his assumption that peasants could easily be pushed onto collective farms. Service also sheds light on Trotskyâe(tm)s character and personality: his difficulties with his Jewish background, the development of his oratorical
Trotsky: A Biography
British historian Robert Service is not one of those, though. He has made a career of dispassionately analyzing Communists and Communism, including writing biographies of Lenin and Stalin. His reward for this is to be regularly attacked by Communists and their allies, and those attacks reached a fever pitch upon the publication of "Trotsky" in This because for a hundred years the fiction that Trotsky was the conscience of the Russian Revolution, the man who would have implemented “real Communism” leading to the workers’
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