Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-1935

by Philip Pomper

These two notebooks were discovered while Philip Pomper was doing research at Harvard’s Russian Research Center for a book on Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin after the Russian Revolution and were published by Columbia University for the first time in 1986. They present fascinating new insights into Trotsky’s philosophy, politics, and psychology and this volume is a significant addition to an understanding of his revolutionary career. They shed new light on his relationship to Lenin and Bolshevism, his criticism of dialectics and Darwin evolutionism, and his reflections of Freudian psychology as he ponders the relationship of the unconscious mind to the philosophical issues surrounding dialectics. The original Russian text of the notebooks, prepared and annotated by Felshtinsky, is also presented here to make the material available to readers of Russian.

162 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 1998

About the author

Dr. Philip Pomper, Ph.D. (University of Chicago, 1965; M.A., 1961; B.A., 1959) is William F. Armstrong Professor Emeritus of History at Wesleyan University. His major fields are Russian History, Modern European History, and Psychohistory. He became an associate editor of the journal History and Theory in 1991.

Reviews

[Liza · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author(s) who wrote the introduction and conclusions went on a tangent in appraisal to Shachtman's "common sense" as opposed to Trotsky's "dialectical materialism." Also tried to explain the so-called split b/w Lenin and Trotsky. Anyway, other than that, some of Trotsky's notes here are very valuable.

But the book is not worth the $13.