My Life, Leon Trotsky

by Leon Trosky

Paperback

Published January 1, 1960

Reviews

[Octavia Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first major work by Trotsky that I've read since "The Revolution Betrayed" in March '23. His autobiography, aside from his journalistic flourishes, is a critical work that has the same feel in terms of intentions as his theoretical work. Every question of political contention he internalized are used as a buttress to his current position and narrative. His close relationship with Lenin and Lenin's positive appraisal of Trotsky's worth are hammered into the reader, and his partial political collaboration with Stalin as well as his attempts at reconciliation after exile are absent. He downplays the early alignment with the Mensheviks as his own being too conciliatory as he watched Lenin’s attacks on the unity of the editorial board. He defends his momentary political deviations, admits his mistakes rarely, and misses no opportunity to castigate political enemies and people who he views as traitors, snakes, middlewits, or cowardly hangers-on.

When I see Trotsky now in this book, I see a very sharp, nervous mind locked in Soviet Russian polemics for three decades. His temper also comes through in some places. Trotsky writes eloquently about a great deal of people and pays tribute to the dead when they inevitably come to the forefront of the page, and often his words reveal some old wound or pet peeve. Every anecdote is paired with a "biting insight" from Trotsky revealing the underlying political machinations, and this breathes a lot of life into his work.

Yanovka and early chapters are unique in their own right, almost pastoral in genre, but then come the tales of schoolboys, the development of his scholarly ego, and his first forays into politics. “The Break” is such a neat self-reflection on the material conditions of Russia, “the reverberations of the eighties” which influenced him at 17 to become ill at ease with the order of men. I would say the first part of the book wraps up with chapter 10, because after that we finally enter the world of Iskra and the RSDLP and the Trotsky trivia hour type facts wrap up.

I enjoy the convivial boy’s club atmosphere of the party congress which so quickly descends into the break, and Trotsky’s own analysis of his choice to side with the “softs” as a result of his closeness with Martov, Axelrod, and Zasulitch (two of those names being blank faces for me) and his alienation from Plekhanov, who would later break with the Bolsheviks anyway. Plekhanov’s own distaste for Trotsky is pretty funny as a detail in its own right.

Stories of out-of-control landlords and are interspersed with Trotsky’s decrying of Menshevist opportunism and his own seeming political coming-of-age story in the year 1905 with his involvement in the St. Petersburg Soviet. Again, it’s this strange admixture of a slice-of-life story with the pertinent politics of the period.

These personal stories take a back-seat as soon as Trotsky’s out of the internment camp after New York City, because whoo boy, the revolution of 1917 obviously is of great importance to a Trotsky committed to combatting his excision from history by Stalin’s “school of falsification.”

He lived in a train for a while.

I’m tired of the summarizing so I’m just going to cut this down.

I have to recommend this work solely for its value as a sort of epic historical document, or maybe a personal document of a historical man, but be prepared for a Trotsky with his defenses up. I don't doubt that the work has been so thoroughly warped by this self-strongmanning that I have to question some of the details, and look for more context outside the work, but even still I found him ultimately endearing. Even after being so disgracefully ejected, he’s forced into this precarious position of defense of the soviet union as a worker’s state, and his political opinion of Stalin as a prisoner of reactionary elements is just one of those things captured in this book that he would later move on from theoretically. Joffe’s note on Trotsky’s failure, that he lacks Lenin’s unyielding will, that he’s a creature of compromise seems to resonate with me. Every moment where there was a critical political opportunity to remove instead of compromise with Stalin, he failed to act. I wonder if he took that critique to heart.

Here's to more learning about Trotsky, I guess. I'm thinking about his policies now in their historic times, which'll help me work out my own thoughts on his internationalism and approach to the peasant question, and the fate of the USSR after Lenin in general.

[Jalen Sowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was skeptical when I bought this book given that there are two things I’m not particularly impressed with - autobiographies and communism. Autobiographies tend to be too self-congratulating for my taste and communism..well I don’t think I have to explain that. However, after reading this book, I can say that it was one of my favorite books I’ve read in 2024. While I came away no more convinced of his politics, I gained an appreciation for the political movement that was driven largely in part by Trotsky and largely for the generation of political thought leaders of the first half of the 20th century.

Trotsky was a rural child, raised in a farming family, considered somewhere in the mix of the bourgeois class and proletarians, depending on the timing and context. He was sent to an all-boys school where he fell in love with reading, which became his portal to the world. Coupling this with time spent in larger Russian cities, he evolved from a typical early 20th century cosmopolitan to eventually getting swept up in the Marxist movement. From there, he rose in influence using a combination of continuous education and, most importantly, an impressive ability to articulate himself and his arguments through written word, writing nearly 70 books and 30,000 written documents while leading a revolution and experiencing multiple exiles and imprisonments.

It does make one wonder if it is possible for people of this intellectual magnitude to have the same kind of influence in the modern world. Are there any leaders of political thought in the world who have this kind of dedication to their ideas and ability to drive a narrative as he did? I’m not sure. The conditions of the early 20th century seemed to have created possibly the most influential class of politicians in modern history. Do any of our politicians trust that the general public (or even the aristocratic class itself) has the attention span to drive home ideas and a movement like Trotsky? These are questions this book left me with.

However, in the end, Stalin and his cronies successfully pushed Trotsky out of the picture quite quickly and easily, so while his ideas got pretty far, in the end he did not complete his largest task of a communist revolution driven by the proletariat class. I think it was a fitting end to his journey, given what the 20th century taught us about communism. In the end, Communists at their core want to believe that people can come together and put aside power games for the working class, but it fails every time as it assumes it can wash away human greed and incompetence. It didn’t even take 5 years after the beginning of the Revolution for human greed and lust for power, in the form of Stalin, to push Trotsky not only out of the picture, but off of the continent, where he would be assassinated in Mexico.

In summary, Trotsky was an intellectual who had a lot of traits worth emulating - curious, industrious, visionary, bold, and principled in his own way; however, he was flawed in his stubbornness and inability to evolve when history needed him to. When push came to shove, he let authoritarians walk all over him without much of an actual fight, which would prove to be foreshadowing for the trend for communism through the 20th century.