What do you think?
Rate this book
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 1914; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early 1920s 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 1923; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the 1920s; 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 oratorical skills and his preference for writing over politicking, his inept handling of political factions and coldness toward associates, and his aversion to assuming personal power.
Although Trotsky s followers clung to the stubborn view of him as a pure revolutionary and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin, the reality is very different. This illuminating portrait of the man and his legacy sets the record straight."
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 1914; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early 1920s 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 1923; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the 1920s; 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 oratorical skills and his preference for writing over politicking, his inept handling of political factions and coldness toward associates, and his aversion to assuming personal power.
Although Trotsky s followers clung to the stubborn view of him as a pure revolutionary and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin, the reality is very different. This illuminating portrait of the man and his legacy sets the record straight."
648 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
108 people are currently reading
2178 people want to read
About the author
Robert Service
42 books268 followersThis author is the British historian of modern Russia. For the British-Canadian writer of Yukon poetry, see Robert W. Service.
Robert Service is a British academic and historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
He is the author of the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, A History of Twentieth - Century Russia, Russia: Experiment with a People and Stalin: A Biography, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. He wrote a marvelous book on communism titled Comrades Communism A World History (International Bestseller). He is married with four children.
Robert Service is a British academic and historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
He is the author of the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, A History of Twentieth - Century Russia, Russia: Experiment with a People and Stalin: A Biography, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. He wrote a marvelous book on communism titled Comrades Communism A World History (International Bestseller). He is married with four children.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 110 reviews
June 11, 2022
“There are many reasons for [Trotsky’s] enduring appeal. He was thrown from the pinnacle of power before his later ideas could be tested in practice. He was a brilliant advocate as writer and orator. He gained sympathy for his personal plight after being deported…And he died a martyr’s death.”
- Robert Service, on Leon Trotsky, in Trotsky: A Biography
With this biography, I felt like I turned a corner in my study of Russian history. Long a dilettante, dabbling in popular biographies and dwelling endlessly on the executed Romanovs in Ekaterinburg, Robert Service’s Trotsky represented another, higher level. An introductory graduate course, so to speak.
Trotsky, after all, is not an easily digestible figure, at least in comparison to boldly defined characters such as Tsar Nicholas II or Joseph Stalin. Furthermore, Service is not exactly an easily-readable historian. In tackling this challenge, I would have to reach higher, intellectually, and dig deeper, as a reader.
***
Trotsky is a major figure in Russian-Soviet history. He stands alongside Lenin and Stalin as one of the three major figures of the Russian Revolutionary period. Despite his importance, he’s harder to pin down. He defies a simple summary.
Unlike those other two, Trotsky never held a top leadership post. He was – I am told, since I cannot read or write Russian – a brilliant orator and writer, a man of ideas with a blazing ability to transmit them. He figured large in the revolution, especially his direction of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.
Despite this, Trotsky endures in large part because he never got to fulfill his promise. Exiled and then murdered by Stalin, most of his plans remained just that: plans. Trotsky lives on in a theoretical alternate universe, where communism bloomed under his direction. In that way, he’s like a superstar athlete struck down before his time, leaving the gilded fantasies of what might have been.
***
Service’s biography of Trotsky takes us from birth to an ice-axe in the skull in 501 pages of dense text. It is is divided into four parts, each part consisting of a number of relatively short chapters. Part One concerns Trotsky’s childhood (when he was known as Leiba Bronstein) in present-day southern Ukraine, the son of a relatively well-off farmer. It follows him through his time as a young revolutionary, his marriage to Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, their joint exile to Siberia, and Trotsky’s escape. It also traces his attempts to unite the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
Part Two deals with Trotsky’s role in the Russian Revolution, including his actions during the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, which saw Russia withdraw from World War I, and his role as People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. This section ends with Trotsky at the apex of his powers.
Part Three is focused on his downfall, because this is a Russian story, and there must be a downfall. Lenin suffers a debilitating stroke, General Secretary Stalin tightens his grip on a burgeoning dictatorship, and Trotsky attempts to lead a left opposition to Stalin’s policies. Despite Trotsky’s best efforts, he is sent to internal and ultimately external exile. (This was obviously before Stalin began dealing with every trouble with a bullet).
Finally, Part Four covers the waning days of a fading émigré, a period marked with failed attempts to break back into Soviet politics. If you thought this story didn't have enough twists – communist godfather turned enemy of the state – Trotsky even had an affair with Frida Kahlo, while staying at her pad in Mexico.
It ends, of course, with that aforementioned ice axe.
***
This is a lot of ground to cover, with very little breathing space, but Service does a good job of structuring things for maximum clarity. He follows an overall chronological narrative, giving us the events of Trotsky’s life in sequence. He intersperses this arc with thematic chapters that don’t lend themselves to a thorough discussion within the main story. These chapters, on topics such as Trotsky’s Judaism, his home life, and his relationship with various women, amplify Trotsky’s personality, and provide a nice counterpoint to the narrative of his frenetic and busy life.
In terms of style, this certainly didn't wow me. I liked this book, and learned a lot, but the prose runs the gamut from workmanlike to inelegant. Service’s sentences are rather mundane, and often times did not flow together. When reading, I generally don’t think about mechanical aspects like flow and transitions, unless those are missing. Here, they’re often missing. One topic tends to bump into another. There also tends to be too much repetition, the repeated hammering of the same nails.
That’s not to say this is a hopelessly dry read. The material is inherently interesting, and is filled with betrayals and escapes and grudges and affairs and a Soviet agent with an ice axe and a mission. Moreover, Service is prone to bits of energetic editorializing, where he breaks free from recounting the moments of Trotsky’s life, and instead gives us his interpretation of the man’s character. Trotsky lovers will hate this part (which I’ll touch on in a moment); I found it rather entertaining.
***
In terms of accessibility, this straddles the line between an academic treatise and a mainstream history designed for a mass audience. Service is narrowly focused on Trotsky, meaning he has little or no time for larger contextual explanations. For example, the larger outlines of the Russian Revolution – the Provisional Government and the fate of Nicholas II – are entirely ignored. If you aren’t already familiar with the big picture, there is a chance you will be horribly lost.
I definitely noticed this lack of handholding. At times, when I got to sections on unfamiliar topics, I bogged down a bit. For instance, when Service dealt with Trotsky’s pre-Revolution role in developing and proposing various communist theories, I was overwhelmed by the sloganeering, the abstracted principles, and the slew of disembodied names I was asked to recall. I’m not a student of Marxism (nor will I be), so it might have been nice if he’d explained a bit more what Trotsky desired.
***
In the realm of content, this book was embroiled in a minor – in relative terms, very, very minor – controversy with regards to Service’s depiction of Trotsky. This is frankly depicted in the wildly diverging star-ratings this has received.
Robert Service is a rather highly regarded British historian and author; he was once a professor at Oxford; and he has specialized in the history of the Soviet Union. Without blindly genuflecting towards his expertise, this says a lot to me.
Despite Service’s resume, however, Trotsky’s publication was met with some harsh criticism, particularly a piece published by the American Historical Review that alleged numerous factual errors. I can’t speak intelligently about all the ins and outs of Trotsky’s life, and whether Service has every fact down cold. Nevertheless, despite having more pressing obligations (literally everything), I did read the AHR piece, and in my opinion, several of the factual “errors” are pretty mild. One of them, for instance, refers to the book’s alleged misnaming of the assassinated Austro-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand. In Trotsky, Franz Ferdinand is referenced as “Archduke Ferdinand.”
Yeah, he dropped the Franz.
Not exactly pants-on-fire stuff.
***
What Service’s critics are really upset about, of course, is Service’s conclusions. He acknowledges his subject’s world-historical import, but he doesn’t like him much. He seemingly goes out of his way to point out his many flaws, and scoffs at the notion that Trotsky might have saved the Soviet experiment, bringing a worker’s utopia into actual being.
I need to learn much more about Trotsky to have a strong opinion about him. Still, it’s worth noting that the question of bias cuts both ways. The people attacking Service are, by and large, supporters of Leon Trotsky. Therefore, the working definition of “bias” seems to be “anyone who takes a position different from me.” Ultimately, Trotsky believed that it was okay to kill as many people as necessary to usher in a new and allegedly-better world. On this point, Trotsky and I are in disagreement.
To that end, I’ve noticed the angry comments on other reviews of this book by Trotskyites, many of them parroting the Marxist Newspeak that forms an impermeable barrier around their arguments.
Thankfully, most people in the world aren’t busy engaging in counterfactual historical arguments about the legacy of a man who died 77 years ago and who – in his later years – looked a bit like a Jim Broadbent in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But this is the internet, and if you happen to love Trotsky, and hate his detractors, and want to discuss that with me, let me assure you, I will ignore the invitation.
***
My goal in reading Trotsky was to inch towards that forbidding rabbit hole of Soviet history. For that purpose, this is a solid volume. It is comprehensive, if not complete; approaches its protagonist from a variety of angles; and it manages a decent balance between Trotsky the theorist, with his talk of world revolutions, centralism, and factionalism, and the earthy, telling details of Trotsky the man.
- Robert Service, on Leon Trotsky, in Trotsky: A Biography
With this biography, I felt like I turned a corner in my study of Russian history. Long a dilettante, dabbling in popular biographies and dwelling endlessly on the executed Romanovs in Ekaterinburg, Robert Service’s Trotsky represented another, higher level. An introductory graduate course, so to speak.
Trotsky, after all, is not an easily digestible figure, at least in comparison to boldly defined characters such as Tsar Nicholas II or Joseph Stalin. Furthermore, Service is not exactly an easily-readable historian. In tackling this challenge, I would have to reach higher, intellectually, and dig deeper, as a reader.
***
Trotsky is a major figure in Russian-Soviet history. He stands alongside Lenin and Stalin as one of the three major figures of the Russian Revolutionary period. Despite his importance, he’s harder to pin down. He defies a simple summary.
Unlike those other two, Trotsky never held a top leadership post. He was – I am told, since I cannot read or write Russian – a brilliant orator and writer, a man of ideas with a blazing ability to transmit them. He figured large in the revolution, especially his direction of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.
Despite this, Trotsky endures in large part because he never got to fulfill his promise. Exiled and then murdered by Stalin, most of his plans remained just that: plans. Trotsky lives on in a theoretical alternate universe, where communism bloomed under his direction. In that way, he’s like a superstar athlete struck down before his time, leaving the gilded fantasies of what might have been.
***
Service’s biography of Trotsky takes us from birth to an ice-axe in the skull in 501 pages of dense text. It is is divided into four parts, each part consisting of a number of relatively short chapters. Part One concerns Trotsky’s childhood (when he was known as Leiba Bronstein) in present-day southern Ukraine, the son of a relatively well-off farmer. It follows him through his time as a young revolutionary, his marriage to Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, their joint exile to Siberia, and Trotsky’s escape. It also traces his attempts to unite the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
Part Two deals with Trotsky’s role in the Russian Revolution, including his actions during the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, which saw Russia withdraw from World War I, and his role as People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. This section ends with Trotsky at the apex of his powers.
Part Three is focused on his downfall, because this is a Russian story, and there must be a downfall. Lenin suffers a debilitating stroke, General Secretary Stalin tightens his grip on a burgeoning dictatorship, and Trotsky attempts to lead a left opposition to Stalin’s policies. Despite Trotsky’s best efforts, he is sent to internal and ultimately external exile. (This was obviously before Stalin began dealing with every trouble with a bullet).
Finally, Part Four covers the waning days of a fading émigré, a period marked with failed attempts to break back into Soviet politics. If you thought this story didn't have enough twists – communist godfather turned enemy of the state – Trotsky even had an affair with Frida Kahlo, while staying at her pad in Mexico.
It ends, of course, with that aforementioned ice axe.
***
This is a lot of ground to cover, with very little breathing space, but Service does a good job of structuring things for maximum clarity. He follows an overall chronological narrative, giving us the events of Trotsky’s life in sequence. He intersperses this arc with thematic chapters that don’t lend themselves to a thorough discussion within the main story. These chapters, on topics such as Trotsky’s Judaism, his home life, and his relationship with various women, amplify Trotsky’s personality, and provide a nice counterpoint to the narrative of his frenetic and busy life.
In terms of style, this certainly didn't wow me. I liked this book, and learned a lot, but the prose runs the gamut from workmanlike to inelegant. Service’s sentences are rather mundane, and often times did not flow together. When reading, I generally don’t think about mechanical aspects like flow and transitions, unless those are missing. Here, they’re often missing. One topic tends to bump into another. There also tends to be too much repetition, the repeated hammering of the same nails.
That’s not to say this is a hopelessly dry read. The material is inherently interesting, and is filled with betrayals and escapes and grudges and affairs and a Soviet agent with an ice axe and a mission. Moreover, Service is prone to bits of energetic editorializing, where he breaks free from recounting the moments of Trotsky’s life, and instead gives us his interpretation of the man’s character. Trotsky lovers will hate this part (which I’ll touch on in a moment); I found it rather entertaining.
***
In terms of accessibility, this straddles the line between an academic treatise and a mainstream history designed for a mass audience. Service is narrowly focused on Trotsky, meaning he has little or no time for larger contextual explanations. For example, the larger outlines of the Russian Revolution – the Provisional Government and the fate of Nicholas II – are entirely ignored. If you aren’t already familiar with the big picture, there is a chance you will be horribly lost.
I definitely noticed this lack of handholding. At times, when I got to sections on unfamiliar topics, I bogged down a bit. For instance, when Service dealt with Trotsky’s pre-Revolution role in developing and proposing various communist theories, I was overwhelmed by the sloganeering, the abstracted principles, and the slew of disembodied names I was asked to recall. I’m not a student of Marxism (nor will I be), so it might have been nice if he’d explained a bit more what Trotsky desired.
***
In the realm of content, this book was embroiled in a minor – in relative terms, very, very minor – controversy with regards to Service’s depiction of Trotsky. This is frankly depicted in the wildly diverging star-ratings this has received.
Robert Service is a rather highly regarded British historian and author; he was once a professor at Oxford; and he has specialized in the history of the Soviet Union. Without blindly genuflecting towards his expertise, this says a lot to me.
Despite Service’s resume, however, Trotsky’s publication was met with some harsh criticism, particularly a piece published by the American Historical Review that alleged numerous factual errors. I can’t speak intelligently about all the ins and outs of Trotsky’s life, and whether Service has every fact down cold. Nevertheless, despite having more pressing obligations (literally everything), I did read the AHR piece, and in my opinion, several of the factual “errors” are pretty mild. One of them, for instance, refers to the book’s alleged misnaming of the assassinated Austro-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand. In Trotsky, Franz Ferdinand is referenced as “Archduke Ferdinand.”
Yeah, he dropped the Franz.
Not exactly pants-on-fire stuff.
***
What Service’s critics are really upset about, of course, is Service’s conclusions. He acknowledges his subject’s world-historical import, but he doesn’t like him much. He seemingly goes out of his way to point out his many flaws, and scoffs at the notion that Trotsky might have saved the Soviet experiment, bringing a worker’s utopia into actual being.
I need to learn much more about Trotsky to have a strong opinion about him. Still, it’s worth noting that the question of bias cuts both ways. The people attacking Service are, by and large, supporters of Leon Trotsky. Therefore, the working definition of “bias” seems to be “anyone who takes a position different from me.” Ultimately, Trotsky believed that it was okay to kill as many people as necessary to usher in a new and allegedly-better world. On this point, Trotsky and I are in disagreement.
To that end, I’ve noticed the angry comments on other reviews of this book by Trotskyites, many of them parroting the Marxist Newspeak that forms an impermeable barrier around their arguments.
Thankfully, most people in the world aren’t busy engaging in counterfactual historical arguments about the legacy of a man who died 77 years ago and who – in his later years – looked a bit like a Jim Broadbent in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But this is the internet, and if you happen to love Trotsky, and hate his detractors, and want to discuss that with me, let me assure you, I will ignore the invitation.
***
My goal in reading Trotsky was to inch towards that forbidding rabbit hole of Soviet history. For that purpose, this is a solid volume. It is comprehensive, if not complete; approaches its protagonist from a variety of angles; and it manages a decent balance between Trotsky the theorist, with his talk of world revolutions, centralism, and factionalism, and the earthy, telling details of Trotsky the man.
September 20, 2025
Into the Dustbin of History
Robert Service is one of the masters of Russian history and so anything by him is well worth a read. I have not read a bad book by him and look forward to picking them up. His biography of Leon Trotsky is no difference and is one again a fascinating read, from someone who knows his Soviet politics. As service presents at the start of his book, this is a biography of one of the leaders of the October Revolution in 1917, written not by a Marxist or Trotskyist. This is essential in understanding the would be dictator. The reader is able to shed away the propaganda and deliberate mistruths to understand this character.
From reading this book Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein to a successful Jewish farmer from the Ukraine) is revealed to be neither a great man or an exceptional character. He is also not an alternative to the terror of Stalin. In fact he had just under 10 years of extreme influence as Russia collapsed into a living hell before he was finally shunted out by Stalin, a master of political manoeuvre and born to be a dictator. Following his exile first to Istanbul in a new Turkish nation under Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) and then to Norway before finally being invited to Mexico, Trotsky was irrelevant to European and Marxist politics and slowly lost this influence.
Trotsky was a man of extreme talent and energy in his youth and as Service explains was a revolutionary, not a politician. An extremely charismatic and gifted writer and speaker he was able to whip up support of troops and workers alike to spur the Red Army to victory during the civil war. Using the trains to move constantly up and down the country to inspire and drive the country. Towards the end of his life, he was a man of contradictions, one of ignorance, hypocritical and lacking any academic fervour. Exile had left him behind. He agreed with the murder of the Tsar, his young family and any Romanovs that the Bolsheviks could get their hands on, but could not understand why Stalin targeted his kin. He changed his stances on Leninism and Marxism and was confused why the revolution had turned to mass terror, even though it was born in blood and that is how the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks had always stated the revolution had to come about. He didn’t know much about philosophy, understand modern literature or even who Einstein really was. He also left his wife Alexandra and their two young girls for his long term partner Natalia. However predictably he then cheated on her in exile, before returning and probably committing infidelity again.
A man on the periphery of the Bolsheviks, he was his own man. Believing in a world wide revolution rather than consolidating it in the USSR, his disputes with Stalin and inability to keep up with the Man of Steels intrigues caused his downfall. Criticism from afar did not save him and he met his violent end, in the same way as so many of his own victims. Leon Trotsky is gone and so is the general wider support for his ideas. The book shows that he needs to stay buried. He was not an alternative and safer, more humane option to Stalin. As Service explains, he was just as malicious and violent. A great book of a widely overrated and largely uninteresting character.
Robert Service is one of the masters of Russian history and so anything by him is well worth a read. I have not read a bad book by him and look forward to picking them up. His biography of Leon Trotsky is no difference and is one again a fascinating read, from someone who knows his Soviet politics. As service presents at the start of his book, this is a biography of one of the leaders of the October Revolution in 1917, written not by a Marxist or Trotskyist. This is essential in understanding the would be dictator. The reader is able to shed away the propaganda and deliberate mistruths to understand this character.
From reading this book Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein to a successful Jewish farmer from the Ukraine) is revealed to be neither a great man or an exceptional character. He is also not an alternative to the terror of Stalin. In fact he had just under 10 years of extreme influence as Russia collapsed into a living hell before he was finally shunted out by Stalin, a master of political manoeuvre and born to be a dictator. Following his exile first to Istanbul in a new Turkish nation under Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) and then to Norway before finally being invited to Mexico, Trotsky was irrelevant to European and Marxist politics and slowly lost this influence.
Trotsky was a man of extreme talent and energy in his youth and as Service explains was a revolutionary, not a politician. An extremely charismatic and gifted writer and speaker he was able to whip up support of troops and workers alike to spur the Red Army to victory during the civil war. Using the trains to move constantly up and down the country to inspire and drive the country. Towards the end of his life, he was a man of contradictions, one of ignorance, hypocritical and lacking any academic fervour. Exile had left him behind. He agreed with the murder of the Tsar, his young family and any Romanovs that the Bolsheviks could get their hands on, but could not understand why Stalin targeted his kin. He changed his stances on Leninism and Marxism and was confused why the revolution had turned to mass terror, even though it was born in blood and that is how the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks had always stated the revolution had to come about. He didn’t know much about philosophy, understand modern literature or even who Einstein really was. He also left his wife Alexandra and their two young girls for his long term partner Natalia. However predictably he then cheated on her in exile, before returning and probably committing infidelity again.
A man on the periphery of the Bolsheviks, he was his own man. Believing in a world wide revolution rather than consolidating it in the USSR, his disputes with Stalin and inability to keep up with the Man of Steels intrigues caused his downfall. Criticism from afar did not save him and he met his violent end, in the same way as so many of his own victims. Leon Trotsky is gone and so is the general wider support for his ideas. The book shows that he needs to stay buried. He was not an alternative and safer, more humane option to Stalin. As Service explains, he was just as malicious and violent. A great book of a widely overrated and largely uninteresting character.
November 17, 2019
The Leninist who wanted to outlenin Lenin, the purist of the communist world revolution, the mightiest pen of Oktober. An insufferable Smart Alec who always presumed others to fall in line with his views and never developed a realpolitik instinct. Even without Stalin, somebody would've sidelined him after 1924.
Perhaps I don't like to root for the loser. Perhaps Trotskiist theory is too incoherent to be convincing. Perhaps he's inevitably become the might-have-been among Marxists.
The story of Trotski shines, however, whenever it looks around the man. It's a front seat to the Oktober Revolution from its 1905 roots to beyond the NEP. Much more than Stalin, where everybody is in bit of a rush to the 30s.
So that's a very evened out 3 stars.
Perhaps I don't like to root for the loser. Perhaps Trotskiist theory is too incoherent to be convincing. Perhaps he's inevitably become the might-have-been among Marxists.
The story of Trotski shines, however, whenever it looks around the man. It's a front seat to the Oktober Revolution from its 1905 roots to beyond the NEP. Much more than Stalin, where everybody is in bit of a rush to the 30s.
So that's a very evened out 3 stars.
December 1, 2015
It was interresting to read both a biography of Staline and Trotsky. This one is quite different than Kersaudy's book. In Stalin's biography, there is many photos, short chapter, it is reading like a novel. Here it is an university work. Trotsky interest me because it is a french passion (not the better). Many politicians, journalist and other was trotskyst when they were young. It is a good school for manipulation and success in business. But the method is always the same, and when you have the key, it is easy to win.
Trotsky had no pity, he was a murderer. If he had the power, I think that he would have been quite worse than Stalin. We should set up statues with Ramon Mercader who killed him.
Trotsky had no pity, he was a murderer. If he had the power, I think that he would have been quite worse than Stalin. We should set up statues with Ramon Mercader who killed him.
January 28, 2021
A very informative read of the life of one of the most influential politicians on the world scene in the first half of the last century. One of the top three visionaries/fanatics who brought about and entrenched the Russian revolution.
The book is very well researched, and replete with intimate details of Trotsky's life. It complements, and dispels many of the myths of the previous body of scholarship, the central pillar of which was Trotsky's own writings. However, I did spot one mistake (the author describes how the Russian Black Sea fleet sailed all the way to Japan only to be sunk, when it was in fact the Baltic fleet - the Black Sea fleet was unable to leave its home waters due to a blockade by Turkey), which makes me wonder whether there aren't any others.
Like many of the best books I have read, I came across this one by pure chance at an open-air second-hand book stall on the South Bank. I had been meaning for years to read up on this particular character's life and work, and this book doesn't disappoint. Like all great revolutionaries, he was a flawed genius (as was his arch-rival Stalin, but in a more cynically pragmatic, and ultimately more successful way). He was a supreme orator, a workaholic with single-minded dedication to the Cause. He was also a brilliant military commander, and it is largely thanks to his constant presence (by train) on three fronts that the new revolutionary government was able to secure control over that vast country - against not only a rebel admiral and two rebel generals, but also against their former allies in WWI (after pulling out of the war, the new government initially controlled an area only the size of the medieval Russia inherited by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century). But he also had no compunction in condemning large numbers of people to misery and death in the pursuit of his Cause. Or in fabricating his legend, subsequently expunging embarrassing details.
And what was this great Cause? A theory of Dictatorship by the masses based on Marx's economic theories (that themselves have later been shown to be neither universal nor infallible). The theory that ultimately prevailed within the inner circle of revolutionaries, who answered to no-one but themselves, and in which dog literally ate dog. What passed for the rule of law in imperial Russia was cast scornfully aside, ushering in one of the most bloody period of Russian history (possibly the most bloody, between the Tatar invasion, and WWII).
He was also incredibly arrogant - and his arrogance was to be his downfall. He saw no need to build alliances within the Soviet inner jungle, and was ultimately checkmated by the politically more astute Stalin. After 11 years in exile in Turkey and Mexico during which he constantly attempted to foment a comeback, he was finally full-stopped by a hitman sent by his nemesis in 1940 (the second attempt on his life within a few days).
He also enjoyed the status of international celebrity in trendy socialist circles (as did Tito and Castro in later decades - not that I am tarring them with the same brush), regarded romantically as not only the definitive expert on the Soviet Union, but also as an honourable man who had refused to compromise on his principles and was suffering as a result. Many millions of ordinary people suffered a worse fate as a direct result of the economic policies he advocated and implemented.
What lessons can be drawn from this book? Perhaps the clearest is that charismatic and determined individuals can change the course of history at critical moments of international crisis - and that such radical changes, promising no ceiling to the aspirations of ordinary people, can instead take away the floor constituting the basic certainties that make ordinary life possible. They are no more infallible than anyone else, and are at their most dangerous when they come to believe the adulation of the masses is confirmation of their genius.
The book is very well researched, and replete with intimate details of Trotsky's life. It complements, and dispels many of the myths of the previous body of scholarship, the central pillar of which was Trotsky's own writings. However, I did spot one mistake (the author describes how the Russian Black Sea fleet sailed all the way to Japan only to be sunk, when it was in fact the Baltic fleet - the Black Sea fleet was unable to leave its home waters due to a blockade by Turkey), which makes me wonder whether there aren't any others.
Like many of the best books I have read, I came across this one by pure chance at an open-air second-hand book stall on the South Bank. I had been meaning for years to read up on this particular character's life and work, and this book doesn't disappoint. Like all great revolutionaries, he was a flawed genius (as was his arch-rival Stalin, but in a more cynically pragmatic, and ultimately more successful way). He was a supreme orator, a workaholic with single-minded dedication to the Cause. He was also a brilliant military commander, and it is largely thanks to his constant presence (by train) on three fronts that the new revolutionary government was able to secure control over that vast country - against not only a rebel admiral and two rebel generals, but also against their former allies in WWI (after pulling out of the war, the new government initially controlled an area only the size of the medieval Russia inherited by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century). But he also had no compunction in condemning large numbers of people to misery and death in the pursuit of his Cause. Or in fabricating his legend, subsequently expunging embarrassing details.
And what was this great Cause? A theory of Dictatorship by the masses based on Marx's economic theories (that themselves have later been shown to be neither universal nor infallible). The theory that ultimately prevailed within the inner circle of revolutionaries, who answered to no-one but themselves, and in which dog literally ate dog. What passed for the rule of law in imperial Russia was cast scornfully aside, ushering in one of the most bloody period of Russian history (possibly the most bloody, between the Tatar invasion, and WWII).
He was also incredibly arrogant - and his arrogance was to be his downfall. He saw no need to build alliances within the Soviet inner jungle, and was ultimately checkmated by the politically more astute Stalin. After 11 years in exile in Turkey and Mexico during which he constantly attempted to foment a comeback, he was finally full-stopped by a hitman sent by his nemesis in 1940 (the second attempt on his life within a few days).
He also enjoyed the status of international celebrity in trendy socialist circles (as did Tito and Castro in later decades - not that I am tarring them with the same brush), regarded romantically as not only the definitive expert on the Soviet Union, but also as an honourable man who had refused to compromise on his principles and was suffering as a result. Many millions of ordinary people suffered a worse fate as a direct result of the economic policies he advocated and implemented.
What lessons can be drawn from this book? Perhaps the clearest is that charismatic and determined individuals can change the course of history at critical moments of international crisis - and that such radical changes, promising no ceiling to the aspirations of ordinary people, can instead take away the floor constituting the basic certainties that make ordinary life possible. They are no more infallible than anyone else, and are at their most dangerous when they come to believe the adulation of the masses is confirmation of their genius.
June 1, 2021
This is a thorough yet engaging biography of the man who might have been, but never was the leader of the Soviet Union.
I have heard pro-communists say that Communism would have worked under Trotsky and the Soviet Union would have achieved its Marxist goals if the crazy, paranoid Stalin hadn't made it to power.
Those people should read this book. Trotsky was every bit as ruthless and inhumane in his tactics in his tireless efforts to create a "Communist Utopia" as Stalin was. The difference was Stalin had more people on his side.
What fascinated me was Service's description of Trotsky's single-mindedness. His entire life was consumed in making a Soviet. He had no conscience about destroying a country, including starving out the people he claimed to be fighting for.
He wanted liberty from the aristocracy, but he did not want anyone to have freedom from him.
Due to his general lack of diplomacy, he succeeded in alienating even those who might have sided with him.
While in Mexico there were many artists and poets and philosophers from Europe, Mexico, and America who saw what they wanted to see in him and made him their poster boy for their cause.
These people were not enough to get him into power, primarily because they were armchair socialists, more concerned with mimicking the fashionable prattle of the day about socialism than actually doing anything to undermine their personal wealth.
Frida Kahlo became quickly bored with him, as she did with all her lovers, and she and her husband Diego Rivera, never practiced what they preached. They were contemporary virtue signalers.
In America H.L. Mencken wanted to donate much of his library to Trotsky, something Trotsky wasn't interested in. Other supporters were John Dewey, who did his best to integrate Marxist values into the American educational system-do you wonder why our young people voted for Bernie Sanders?
In the end, Stalin got him, but I don't know if Trotsky cared. He was slowly disintegrating, bit by bit, anyway. I think the end, as gruesome as it was (why a pick ax, for pete's sake?) must have come as a relief.
I have heard pro-communists say that Communism would have worked under Trotsky and the Soviet Union would have achieved its Marxist goals if the crazy, paranoid Stalin hadn't made it to power.
Those people should read this book. Trotsky was every bit as ruthless and inhumane in his tactics in his tireless efforts to create a "Communist Utopia" as Stalin was. The difference was Stalin had more people on his side.
What fascinated me was Service's description of Trotsky's single-mindedness. His entire life was consumed in making a Soviet. He had no conscience about destroying a country, including starving out the people he claimed to be fighting for.
He wanted liberty from the aristocracy, but he did not want anyone to have freedom from him.
Due to his general lack of diplomacy, he succeeded in alienating even those who might have sided with him.
While in Mexico there were many artists and poets and philosophers from Europe, Mexico, and America who saw what they wanted to see in him and made him their poster boy for their cause.
These people were not enough to get him into power, primarily because they were armchair socialists, more concerned with mimicking the fashionable prattle of the day about socialism than actually doing anything to undermine their personal wealth.
Frida Kahlo became quickly bored with him, as she did with all her lovers, and she and her husband Diego Rivera, never practiced what they preached. They were contemporary virtue signalers.
In America H.L. Mencken wanted to donate much of his library to Trotsky, something Trotsky wasn't interested in. Other supporters were John Dewey, who did his best to integrate Marxist values into the American educational system-do you wonder why our young people voted for Bernie Sanders?
In the end, Stalin got him, but I don't know if Trotsky cared. He was slowly disintegrating, bit by bit, anyway. I think the end, as gruesome as it was (why a pick ax, for pete's sake?) must have come as a relief.
December 29, 2018
I continue to be fascinated by the Bolshevik Revolution, because in its success there are many lessons. Unbiased history and biography of the Bolsheviks is a relatively recent phenomenon; prior to 1991, a combination of lack of primary materials and philo-Communism among Western historians meant very few objective books were published. Since 1991, though, the balance has shifted, even if plenty of Communist-loving propaganda is still published by major historians, because the global Left has always, and continues to, fully support the goals and methods of Communism. They mostly just keep it a bit more quiet in public than they used to.
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 2009. 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’ utopia, has been maintained with a straight face by a great many influential people all around the world. He is second only to the loathsome “Che” Guevara as the object of idolatry by the modern Left. Thus, since Service shows definitively that Trotsky was just as much an evil killer as Stalin or Lenin, philo-Communists were not pleased, and attempted to, among other things, suppress publication and dissemination of his book. They were not successful, though of course the point of such suppressions is not to succeed against people like Service, but to warn the less established that they must toe the line.
Service has much appreciation for Trotsky’s virtues, however. He was brilliant, an outstanding writer and polemicist, decisive, and personally brave. He lost the competition to succeed Lenin because of his limitations—inability to build coalitions, ability to make enemies, and failure to see where events were leading. Trotsky inspired loyalty in those who followed him, and hatred in those he opposed. Unfortunately for him, over the decades the former group shrank in size, and the latter grew, until he was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City. Perhaps indicative of the mental hold he had over others, the last words (in 1978) of Ramón Mercader, his assassin, were “I hear it always. I hear the scream. I know he’s waiting for me on the other side.”
Trotsky was born Leiba Bronstein, in southern Ukraine, in 1879. His father was what was later called a kulak; his grandfather was an agricultural colonist who came south as part of the plans of Alexander I to make the lands near the Black Sea more productive, mostly be resettling Jews. At age eight Bronstein was sent to a state school in Odessa. At age sixteen, he fell in with bad company and became a Marxist true believer, mostly only in the discussion circle sense. Doubtless, like other politically active sixteen-year-olds, what he had to say was very tedious. His little group, aiming at higher ambitions, had no trouble raising money to cause trouble for the authorities; Service notes that they “set about gathering money from sympathizers: this was normal procedure at the time since not a few wealthy citizens either disliked the Imperial political order or wanted to defend themselves against being associated with it in any future revolutionary situation.” Their activities consisted of writing and disseminating revolutionary propaganda; Bronstein quickly discovered the genius for writing and polemic that set him apart for his entire life. But in 1898, when he was nineteen, Bronstein and all the other members of his group were arrested for revolutionary agitation.
Unlike under later, ideological, regimes, this didn’t mean all that much to a young man. In fact, such an arrest enhanced his reputation among his peers. After some time in a comfortable jail, during which he got married to another revolutionary from his group, Bronstein was sentenced to four years in “administrative exile”—i.e., he was sent to a village in Siberia, a stock Tsarist punishment. There he was free to do as he pleased. But rather than serve out his sentence with his wife and, soon enough, two babies, he learned of Vladimir Lenin’s publication in Germany of a new underground newspaper, Iskra (“Spark”). He wanted in; he wanted to be relevant; he was nothing if not vain and self-centered; therefore he assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that he was critical to this movement. So he “escaped” in 1902, abandoning his wife, and went to Geneva, where some of the Iskra board members lived. Lenin, however, was in London, where the real action was at, so off Bronstein went, changing his name to Trotsky for good measure, and soon taking up with Natalya Sedova, who was his partner for the rest of his life.
At this time, there were many Marxist groups, cutting across borders, and few clear lines. Trotsky sometimes lined up with Lenin, sometimes not, and vicious political arguments, in print and in person, were the norm among all Marxists. Lenin and Iskra were important, but by no means dominant. In 1903 the main Russian group, the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, with Lenin leading the former. Trotsky was neither (after briefly being a Menshevik). Among other things, Trotsky soon enough was accusing Lenin of Jacobinism, as opposed to truly representing the proletariat. But in 1906 Trotsky (along with many other leaders of the new St. Petersburg “Soviet”) was arrested again, and sentenced to more Siberian exile. Naturally, he escaped on the way, and went back to London, but quickly moved to Vienna, where he stayed until the war began.
Trotsky was prominent in Marxist revolutionary circles, but not dominant. He was not a member of, much less a leader of, any faction. Unlike Lenin, he tried to be a uniter, not a divider (a task hampered by his vanity and arrogance; he was always happy to let everyone know who the smartest person in the room was). Unsuccessful at being elected to party leadership, he set out to write his way to relevance, through books and magazines, but mostly through writing in the new newspaper Pravda. That newspaper is remember by those who lived through the 1980s as the punch line to a bad joke, but at this time was highly influential.
World War I upset the apple cart. It reshuffled the position of all the Marxists; some, like Lenin, resolutely advocated Russian defeat as the most likely route to civil war and the worker’s revolution. Others abandoned Marxism. Trotsky held steadfast in his belief in proletarian revolution, trying to hold all the threads together, and participating in the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference, pushing a successful “moderate” line that ultimately Lenin temporarily endorsed. The French quickly tired of Trotsky, who had moved to France as a magazine correspondent, and deported him to Spain, and the Spanish deported him to New York, where he proceeded to agitate some more. But in 1917 the February Revolution overthrew Nicholas II, and Trotsky hurried back to Russia.
The events following are expertly covered by Sean McMeekin’s excellent recent "The Russian Revolution," in a much more interesting fashion than Service. The Bolsheviks were not shot out of hand by the Kerensky government, as they should have been, and they managed to seize power. This was due in large part to Trotsky’s skill; Service quotes him as describing his approach, “The attacking side is almost always interested in seeming on the defensive. A revolutionary party is interested in legal coverings.” His tactical skill, along with his oratory and writings, were critical components of Bolshevik success. Upon taking power, they, with Trotsky’s leadership and full approval, immediately began a reign of bloody terror that within a few weeks dwarfed the past century of Tsarist political repression. In the Civil War, Trotsky, despite no military background, took command of the Red Army with considerable success, considerable bravery, and considerable brutality. Trotsky was in favor of the Civil War, like Lenin, because it gave them the best chance to exterminate as many enemies of the Revolution as possible, a chance they took every advantage of.
After the Bolsheviks won the Civil War, though, Trotsky’s political position began to erode. He had made a lot of enemies, and many Bolsheviks were worried that Trotsky fancied himself the Russian Napoleon, and would try to become him after Lenin’s death. (No doubt his obsessive need to win at games, like Napoleon, contributed to that view.) Internal disputes grew among the victors, revolving around such matters as how independent trade unions should be (Trotsky thought not independent at all, since the state now fully represented the workers). Still, Bolshevik consolidation of power through terror continued, with Trotsky leading the charge, openly endorsing terror and killing (something his supporters have tried to hide or downplay for decades), while manipulating Western governments into recognizing and funding the new Communist regime, and attacking the Russian Orthodox Church.
Soon enough, Trotsky’s main competitor for second-most-important, after Lenin, became Stalin, who while not as smart, was more clever and more politically astute. Most importantly, all Stalin wanted was to be in charge, while Trotsky was happy to be an important man in a working power structure. Gradually Trotsky was edged from power, forming an informal “left opposition,” and watching his influence slip away. This process really accelerated when Lenin became disabled and then died; towards the end, as Stalin tightened his grip, Trotsky still retained his famous rapier wit: “At one meeting addressed by Trotsky a zealous official switched off the lights. Trotsky declared: ‘Lenin said that socialism was the soviets plus electrification. Stalin has already suppressed the soviets, now it’s the turn of the electricity.’ ”
But the end came—Trotsky was internally exiled, then deported to Turkey. From there, he went to Mexico, still trying to breathe life into the dying ashes of his international influence. He created the Fourth International, which modern Trotskyists like to think is relevant, and corresponded with various people. He wrote books, in part for money, but mostly to get out his point of view, often glossing over inconvenient parts of his past. But his influence inside the Soviet Union was zero, and his entire family remaining in Russia (including his first wife) were killed (one of his two sons was died in France after an operation, probably assassinated). He therefore outlived all his four children. Trotsky also amused himself by having an affair with that nasty piece of work, ugly Stalinist painter of ugly paintings Frida Kahlo, who was the wife of the artist Diego Rivera, in whose house Trotsky found refuge for a time (along with his partner, Natalya). Trotsky never lost faith in Communism; he just thought Stalin had perverted it and made it tyrannically bureaucratic, but that the Soviet Union was still a shining beacon, and capitalism (meaning the West) was doomed (which it is, or probably is, but not for the reasons Trotsky thought, which are obviously laughable at this remove, although to be fair between the Great Depression and the World Wars the argument was a bit stronger then).
Trotsky was tried in absentia by Stalin and sentenced to death. Western intellectuals and Communist fellow travelers of the time (but I repeat myself) took the verdict as valid, and believed, for the most part, that Trotsky was indeed a betrayer of the Revolution. He still had some supporters, but a lot more enemies, and plenty of those on the Right, too, obviously. After a botched attempt by a group of Mexican Communists, Stalin succeeded in getting Mercader into Trotsky’s guarded compound, taking advantage of Trotsky’s refusal to believe that bad people were everywhere out to get him, whereupon Mercader bashed his head in with an ice axe.
Trotsky has had an earthly afterlife, not because of his genius, but because the Communist delusion needed something to coalesce around after the myriad unparalleled crimes of actual, in-practice, Communism were revealed. Thus, starting in the 1960s, significant segments of the international Left have claimed to be inspired by, or followers of, Trotsky, although given that his works were neither original nor comprehensive nor coherent, this says more about his “followers” than it does about Trotsky. In Russia, of course, he has no relevance at all—as Service puts it in one of his few non-pedestrian writing passages, there he is “an antiquarian curiosity, something to be discussed along with Fabergé eggs, Ivan the Terrible or peasant weaving patterns.” (My sole complaint about this book is the writing style, which is very plain and very choppy. Perhaps this is a taste thing, since it’s Hemingway-esque, if less descriptive in tone, and I think Hemingway is grossly overrated. Maybe Service thinks the opposite. But short sentence follows short sentence, endlessly, and no flow ever develops, so the reader has to plow through the paragraphs, like an icebreaker through Arctic ice. The facts are all there, but it’s only a small step from plain and choppy to bullet points. Still, one can communicate through bullet points, so I suppose this is not a fatal problem, just an irritating one.)
The author does not obsess about Trotsky being Jewish, but he does not ignore it. The fact was central to Trotsky’s life: in his youth as an orthodox Jew, and from his teen years on as an atheist Jew, his Jewishness played a significant role in his decision-making. Part of this was that he sometimes resonated with other Jews, given the common background, but most of it was more meta than that—it was not his Jewishness, but his awareness of other people’s awareness of his Jewishness. Thus, he hesitated to take too prominent a role in certain situations, knowing that the Revolution might not benefit from an increase in anti-Jewish sentiment. And there was plenty of that, Trotsky or not, in part because the Bolsheviks’ enemies used any criticism at hand, and in part because there were, in fact, lots of Jews among the Bolsheviks, something that was used quite a bit against Jews in later decades. Service quotes the classic formulation of the impact, from Jacob Maze, Chief Rabbi of Moscow, “Trotsky makes the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the bills.”
I learned quite a lot new from this book, though it was mostly interesting detail about Trotsky, not about the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution, or Communism. There has been a recent vogue among some on the fringy Right to ascribe the success of Communism to a supposed appeal to low status people in Russia and elsewhere, offering them higher status in exchange for loyalty to Communism. (The purpose of this analogy is to offer a parallel to today’s Left, which supposedly offers higher status to people who, due to biology or oppression, are low status. This is, apparently, called “Bioleninism”; I’ve run across it in my examination of some of these fringes.) As a historical analog, it makes no sense, and like so many ideas on the fringy Right, such as those of Mencius Moldbug, it seems to appeal to those who have no real grasp of history. (On the other hand, as a secondary explanatory device only of today’s Left, it actually isn’t bad at all. It’s the claimed historical analogies I object to as false.)
It is simply not true that Russian Communism recruited primarily from the lower status castes of Russian society. If that were true, it would have been peasants who dominated Communism, and actual peasants never wanted anything to do with Communism. Rather, it was people like Trotsky—intellectuals on the make and on the rise. Communists successfully recruited all across the societal spectrum. For example, most of the Bolsheviks’ military officers were former Tsarist officers, all through the ranks—a policy that Trotsky insisted on, that professionals run the Red Army, not amateurs. But those officers weren’t drawn to Communism by its offer of higher status, which they already had—some thought the Bolsheviks the lesser of two evils, some thought they could help control the Bolsheviks, some were non-political. And as Service notes, and is commonly noted in histories of the Bolsheviks, massive funding for their activities was provided by high-status people who were either ideologically sympathetic or simply as an insurance policy. Such examples could easily be multiplied. Certainly, some Bolsheviks came from humble circumstances, but all successful societies, of whatever political stripe, have mechanisms for bringing the most talented into the running of society. Typically this is through the Church or through the military; some, like the Ottomans, are better at it than others. But to suggest that what drove Bolshevism’s initial success was low-status individuals getting back at those who lorded it over them is bad history. True, within a few decades it was mediocrities all the way down, but that merely shows a poorly organized system, or one inherently defective, not one that appeals to low-status people.
No, what the Bolsheviks offered was heaven on earth, and to each man, the most important driver of human action, transcendence, the ability to participate in the formation of this heaven. In Trotsky’s own words: “Man will become incomparably stronger, more intelligent, more subtle. His body will be more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical; the forms of daily existence with acquire a dynamic theatricality. The average human type will rise to the level of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. It is above this ridge that new summits will rise.” Or, as Service says, “[Trotsky] never recoiled from his belief that the October Revolution was the first great glimmering of the dawn of the global socialist era.” “He believed in the achievability of a universal order which would totally liberate the human spirit.”
Transcendence is a far more powerful driver than status seeking, and it is that which explains the lure of Communism through the past century. No doubt the modern Western Left, with its obsessive focus on emancipation from imaginary oppression, offers increases in status, and a complete divorce of status from merit, more so than formal Communism did, but that is not its main attraction. Such emancipation is a type of seeking after transcendence, even if it has more immediate benefits for some, and it is the collective belief in being able to remake the world to achieve “new summits” that provides the dynamo inside the Left, which is fundamentally a religious belief. I am not sure, given how central this urge is to human nature and the grip it clearly maintains on so many people, how to destroy that dynamo. Probably by providing and drawing people to an alternate, more powerful, religious belief, something that the spiritually decayed West has failed at through the past century. What Trotsky’s life teaches us is that very smart and very talented people can wholly buy into such beliefs, and their drive to achieve transcendence, and the costs they are willing to impose, should never be underestimated.
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 2009. 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’ utopia, has been maintained with a straight face by a great many influential people all around the world. He is second only to the loathsome “Che” Guevara as the object of idolatry by the modern Left. Thus, since Service shows definitively that Trotsky was just as much an evil killer as Stalin or Lenin, philo-Communists were not pleased, and attempted to, among other things, suppress publication and dissemination of his book. They were not successful, though of course the point of such suppressions is not to succeed against people like Service, but to warn the less established that they must toe the line.
Service has much appreciation for Trotsky’s virtues, however. He was brilliant, an outstanding writer and polemicist, decisive, and personally brave. He lost the competition to succeed Lenin because of his limitations—inability to build coalitions, ability to make enemies, and failure to see where events were leading. Trotsky inspired loyalty in those who followed him, and hatred in those he opposed. Unfortunately for him, over the decades the former group shrank in size, and the latter grew, until he was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City. Perhaps indicative of the mental hold he had over others, the last words (in 1978) of Ramón Mercader, his assassin, were “I hear it always. I hear the scream. I know he’s waiting for me on the other side.”
Trotsky was born Leiba Bronstein, in southern Ukraine, in 1879. His father was what was later called a kulak; his grandfather was an agricultural colonist who came south as part of the plans of Alexander I to make the lands near the Black Sea more productive, mostly be resettling Jews. At age eight Bronstein was sent to a state school in Odessa. At age sixteen, he fell in with bad company and became a Marxist true believer, mostly only in the discussion circle sense. Doubtless, like other politically active sixteen-year-olds, what he had to say was very tedious. His little group, aiming at higher ambitions, had no trouble raising money to cause trouble for the authorities; Service notes that they “set about gathering money from sympathizers: this was normal procedure at the time since not a few wealthy citizens either disliked the Imperial political order or wanted to defend themselves against being associated with it in any future revolutionary situation.” Their activities consisted of writing and disseminating revolutionary propaganda; Bronstein quickly discovered the genius for writing and polemic that set him apart for his entire life. But in 1898, when he was nineteen, Bronstein and all the other members of his group were arrested for revolutionary agitation.
Unlike under later, ideological, regimes, this didn’t mean all that much to a young man. In fact, such an arrest enhanced his reputation among his peers. After some time in a comfortable jail, during which he got married to another revolutionary from his group, Bronstein was sentenced to four years in “administrative exile”—i.e., he was sent to a village in Siberia, a stock Tsarist punishment. There he was free to do as he pleased. But rather than serve out his sentence with his wife and, soon enough, two babies, he learned of Vladimir Lenin’s publication in Germany of a new underground newspaper, Iskra (“Spark”). He wanted in; he wanted to be relevant; he was nothing if not vain and self-centered; therefore he assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that he was critical to this movement. So he “escaped” in 1902, abandoning his wife, and went to Geneva, where some of the Iskra board members lived. Lenin, however, was in London, where the real action was at, so off Bronstein went, changing his name to Trotsky for good measure, and soon taking up with Natalya Sedova, who was his partner for the rest of his life.
At this time, there were many Marxist groups, cutting across borders, and few clear lines. Trotsky sometimes lined up with Lenin, sometimes not, and vicious political arguments, in print and in person, were the norm among all Marxists. Lenin and Iskra were important, but by no means dominant. In 1903 the main Russian group, the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, with Lenin leading the former. Trotsky was neither (after briefly being a Menshevik). Among other things, Trotsky soon enough was accusing Lenin of Jacobinism, as opposed to truly representing the proletariat. But in 1906 Trotsky (along with many other leaders of the new St. Petersburg “Soviet”) was arrested again, and sentenced to more Siberian exile. Naturally, he escaped on the way, and went back to London, but quickly moved to Vienna, where he stayed until the war began.
Trotsky was prominent in Marxist revolutionary circles, but not dominant. He was not a member of, much less a leader of, any faction. Unlike Lenin, he tried to be a uniter, not a divider (a task hampered by his vanity and arrogance; he was always happy to let everyone know who the smartest person in the room was). Unsuccessful at being elected to party leadership, he set out to write his way to relevance, through books and magazines, but mostly through writing in the new newspaper Pravda. That newspaper is remember by those who lived through the 1980s as the punch line to a bad joke, but at this time was highly influential.
World War I upset the apple cart. It reshuffled the position of all the Marxists; some, like Lenin, resolutely advocated Russian defeat as the most likely route to civil war and the worker’s revolution. Others abandoned Marxism. Trotsky held steadfast in his belief in proletarian revolution, trying to hold all the threads together, and participating in the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference, pushing a successful “moderate” line that ultimately Lenin temporarily endorsed. The French quickly tired of Trotsky, who had moved to France as a magazine correspondent, and deported him to Spain, and the Spanish deported him to New York, where he proceeded to agitate some more. But in 1917 the February Revolution overthrew Nicholas II, and Trotsky hurried back to Russia.
The events following are expertly covered by Sean McMeekin’s excellent recent "The Russian Revolution," in a much more interesting fashion than Service. The Bolsheviks were not shot out of hand by the Kerensky government, as they should have been, and they managed to seize power. This was due in large part to Trotsky’s skill; Service quotes him as describing his approach, “The attacking side is almost always interested in seeming on the defensive. A revolutionary party is interested in legal coverings.” His tactical skill, along with his oratory and writings, were critical components of Bolshevik success. Upon taking power, they, with Trotsky’s leadership and full approval, immediately began a reign of bloody terror that within a few weeks dwarfed the past century of Tsarist political repression. In the Civil War, Trotsky, despite no military background, took command of the Red Army with considerable success, considerable bravery, and considerable brutality. Trotsky was in favor of the Civil War, like Lenin, because it gave them the best chance to exterminate as many enemies of the Revolution as possible, a chance they took every advantage of.
After the Bolsheviks won the Civil War, though, Trotsky’s political position began to erode. He had made a lot of enemies, and many Bolsheviks were worried that Trotsky fancied himself the Russian Napoleon, and would try to become him after Lenin’s death. (No doubt his obsessive need to win at games, like Napoleon, contributed to that view.) Internal disputes grew among the victors, revolving around such matters as how independent trade unions should be (Trotsky thought not independent at all, since the state now fully represented the workers). Still, Bolshevik consolidation of power through terror continued, with Trotsky leading the charge, openly endorsing terror and killing (something his supporters have tried to hide or downplay for decades), while manipulating Western governments into recognizing and funding the new Communist regime, and attacking the Russian Orthodox Church.
Soon enough, Trotsky’s main competitor for second-most-important, after Lenin, became Stalin, who while not as smart, was more clever and more politically astute. Most importantly, all Stalin wanted was to be in charge, while Trotsky was happy to be an important man in a working power structure. Gradually Trotsky was edged from power, forming an informal “left opposition,” and watching his influence slip away. This process really accelerated when Lenin became disabled and then died; towards the end, as Stalin tightened his grip, Trotsky still retained his famous rapier wit: “At one meeting addressed by Trotsky a zealous official switched off the lights. Trotsky declared: ‘Lenin said that socialism was the soviets plus electrification. Stalin has already suppressed the soviets, now it’s the turn of the electricity.’ ”
But the end came—Trotsky was internally exiled, then deported to Turkey. From there, he went to Mexico, still trying to breathe life into the dying ashes of his international influence. He created the Fourth International, which modern Trotskyists like to think is relevant, and corresponded with various people. He wrote books, in part for money, but mostly to get out his point of view, often glossing over inconvenient parts of his past. But his influence inside the Soviet Union was zero, and his entire family remaining in Russia (including his first wife) were killed (one of his two sons was died in France after an operation, probably assassinated). He therefore outlived all his four children. Trotsky also amused himself by having an affair with that nasty piece of work, ugly Stalinist painter of ugly paintings Frida Kahlo, who was the wife of the artist Diego Rivera, in whose house Trotsky found refuge for a time (along with his partner, Natalya). Trotsky never lost faith in Communism; he just thought Stalin had perverted it and made it tyrannically bureaucratic, but that the Soviet Union was still a shining beacon, and capitalism (meaning the West) was doomed (which it is, or probably is, but not for the reasons Trotsky thought, which are obviously laughable at this remove, although to be fair between the Great Depression and the World Wars the argument was a bit stronger then).
Trotsky was tried in absentia by Stalin and sentenced to death. Western intellectuals and Communist fellow travelers of the time (but I repeat myself) took the verdict as valid, and believed, for the most part, that Trotsky was indeed a betrayer of the Revolution. He still had some supporters, but a lot more enemies, and plenty of those on the Right, too, obviously. After a botched attempt by a group of Mexican Communists, Stalin succeeded in getting Mercader into Trotsky’s guarded compound, taking advantage of Trotsky’s refusal to believe that bad people were everywhere out to get him, whereupon Mercader bashed his head in with an ice axe.
Trotsky has had an earthly afterlife, not because of his genius, but because the Communist delusion needed something to coalesce around after the myriad unparalleled crimes of actual, in-practice, Communism were revealed. Thus, starting in the 1960s, significant segments of the international Left have claimed to be inspired by, or followers of, Trotsky, although given that his works were neither original nor comprehensive nor coherent, this says more about his “followers” than it does about Trotsky. In Russia, of course, he has no relevance at all—as Service puts it in one of his few non-pedestrian writing passages, there he is “an antiquarian curiosity, something to be discussed along with Fabergé eggs, Ivan the Terrible or peasant weaving patterns.” (My sole complaint about this book is the writing style, which is very plain and very choppy. Perhaps this is a taste thing, since it’s Hemingway-esque, if less descriptive in tone, and I think Hemingway is grossly overrated. Maybe Service thinks the opposite. But short sentence follows short sentence, endlessly, and no flow ever develops, so the reader has to plow through the paragraphs, like an icebreaker through Arctic ice. The facts are all there, but it’s only a small step from plain and choppy to bullet points. Still, one can communicate through bullet points, so I suppose this is not a fatal problem, just an irritating one.)
The author does not obsess about Trotsky being Jewish, but he does not ignore it. The fact was central to Trotsky’s life: in his youth as an orthodox Jew, and from his teen years on as an atheist Jew, his Jewishness played a significant role in his decision-making. Part of this was that he sometimes resonated with other Jews, given the common background, but most of it was more meta than that—it was not his Jewishness, but his awareness of other people’s awareness of his Jewishness. Thus, he hesitated to take too prominent a role in certain situations, knowing that the Revolution might not benefit from an increase in anti-Jewish sentiment. And there was plenty of that, Trotsky or not, in part because the Bolsheviks’ enemies used any criticism at hand, and in part because there were, in fact, lots of Jews among the Bolsheviks, something that was used quite a bit against Jews in later decades. Service quotes the classic formulation of the impact, from Jacob Maze, Chief Rabbi of Moscow, “Trotsky makes the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the bills.”
I learned quite a lot new from this book, though it was mostly interesting detail about Trotsky, not about the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution, or Communism. There has been a recent vogue among some on the fringy Right to ascribe the success of Communism to a supposed appeal to low status people in Russia and elsewhere, offering them higher status in exchange for loyalty to Communism. (The purpose of this analogy is to offer a parallel to today’s Left, which supposedly offers higher status to people who, due to biology or oppression, are low status. This is, apparently, called “Bioleninism”; I’ve run across it in my examination of some of these fringes.) As a historical analog, it makes no sense, and like so many ideas on the fringy Right, such as those of Mencius Moldbug, it seems to appeal to those who have no real grasp of history. (On the other hand, as a secondary explanatory device only of today’s Left, it actually isn’t bad at all. It’s the claimed historical analogies I object to as false.)
It is simply not true that Russian Communism recruited primarily from the lower status castes of Russian society. If that were true, it would have been peasants who dominated Communism, and actual peasants never wanted anything to do with Communism. Rather, it was people like Trotsky—intellectuals on the make and on the rise. Communists successfully recruited all across the societal spectrum. For example, most of the Bolsheviks’ military officers were former Tsarist officers, all through the ranks—a policy that Trotsky insisted on, that professionals run the Red Army, not amateurs. But those officers weren’t drawn to Communism by its offer of higher status, which they already had—some thought the Bolsheviks the lesser of two evils, some thought they could help control the Bolsheviks, some were non-political. And as Service notes, and is commonly noted in histories of the Bolsheviks, massive funding for their activities was provided by high-status people who were either ideologically sympathetic or simply as an insurance policy. Such examples could easily be multiplied. Certainly, some Bolsheviks came from humble circumstances, but all successful societies, of whatever political stripe, have mechanisms for bringing the most talented into the running of society. Typically this is through the Church or through the military; some, like the Ottomans, are better at it than others. But to suggest that what drove Bolshevism’s initial success was low-status individuals getting back at those who lorded it over them is bad history. True, within a few decades it was mediocrities all the way down, but that merely shows a poorly organized system, or one inherently defective, not one that appeals to low-status people.
No, what the Bolsheviks offered was heaven on earth, and to each man, the most important driver of human action, transcendence, the ability to participate in the formation of this heaven. In Trotsky’s own words: “Man will become incomparably stronger, more intelligent, more subtle. His body will be more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical; the forms of daily existence with acquire a dynamic theatricality. The average human type will rise to the level of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. It is above this ridge that new summits will rise.” Or, as Service says, “[Trotsky] never recoiled from his belief that the October Revolution was the first great glimmering of the dawn of the global socialist era.” “He believed in the achievability of a universal order which would totally liberate the human spirit.”
Transcendence is a far more powerful driver than status seeking, and it is that which explains the lure of Communism through the past century. No doubt the modern Western Left, with its obsessive focus on emancipation from imaginary oppression, offers increases in status, and a complete divorce of status from merit, more so than formal Communism did, but that is not its main attraction. Such emancipation is a type of seeking after transcendence, even if it has more immediate benefits for some, and it is the collective belief in being able to remake the world to achieve “new summits” that provides the dynamo inside the Left, which is fundamentally a religious belief. I am not sure, given how central this urge is to human nature and the grip it clearly maintains on so many people, how to destroy that dynamo. Probably by providing and drawing people to an alternate, more powerful, religious belief, something that the spiritually decayed West has failed at through the past century. What Trotsky’s life teaches us is that very smart and very talented people can wholly buy into such beliefs, and their drive to achieve transcendence, and the costs they are willing to impose, should never be underestimated.
December 8, 2019
Gustave Flaubert wrote that, if you write the biography of a friend, you should write it as if you were taking revenge for him. It follows that, if your write the biography of an enemy, you should write it as if you were taking revenge on him.
Robert Service certainly had something like this in mind when writing this book, as witnessed by his own remarks that: If Mercader's ice axe didn’t finish Trotsky off, I hope my book does. And even before he wrote the book he called Trotsky "an appalling figure".*
So no love there. Personally I don't mind this at all. I don't believe in 'neutral' or 'objective' journalism or history writing, only the mad pretentions thereof, which are always best dropped. So someone setting out to write an antagonistic biography of someone, and is open about that antagonism, that is not only perfectly legitimate, but even preferable to pretending to be 'objective'. As long as the piece of journalism or history writing holds itself to standards of fairness and accuracy, there's no problem with taking a stance at all.
Robert Service, however, apparently did neither. The weirdest thing for me is when Service projects motivations onto Trotsky that he (or we) would have no way of knowing. Sometimes Service even explicitly states that the available sources (often Trotsky's own writing) say something different about his motivations, but Service then simply ignores his sources and makes something up based on his personal feelings on Trotsky.
For instance in chapter 5 (p.52 in my edition) Service informs us that a young Trotsky, after spending 2,5 months in solitary confinement in 1898, wrote to his future wife Alexandra that he was feeling suicidal. But then Service tells us: "He was never genuinely suicidal; his comment was designed to make her want to protect him." How does Service know this? He doesn't say. The endnote only refers to the letter to Alexandra in which Trotsky wrote he was feeling suicial. Service simply overrules the only available source on Trotsky's inner feelings, believing his own mind-reading powers to be more reliable than the actual sources.
There are unfortunately more instances of this, especially concering Trotsky's relationship with his family. Trotsky can express all the grief and regret he wants in letters and his diary, but Service always knows better and keeps repeating how "heartless" and "self-absorbed" Trotsky was when dealing with his parents or his children and first wife. In this respect the book reminded me of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story, which benefited greatly from similar mind-reading abilities.
So not very fair then. But is it at least accurate when it comes to facts outside of Trotsky's mind? According to Bertrand M. Patenaude, who is Robert Service's fellow fellow at the Hoover Institution (note: this means not a Trotskyist), writing in the American Historical Review, it is not. In fact the attack from Patenaude was so unsparing that it was described thusly:
And all this is a shame, because I think Trotsky really does deserve the kind of critical treatment Service had in mind. Because, while the fact that Stalin was a pretty bad guy is now almost universally accepted, Lenin and Trotsky are still remembered by many (though certainly not everybody) as the benevolent Old Major and Snowball. Which, in my opinion, is also neither very fair nor particularly accurate.
____
* BBC Radio 4's "Great Lives" series, with Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service, aired August 8 2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD54q...
Robert Service certainly had something like this in mind when writing this book, as witnessed by his own remarks that: If Mercader's ice axe didn’t finish Trotsky off, I hope my book does. And even before he wrote the book he called Trotsky "an appalling figure".*
So no love there. Personally I don't mind this at all. I don't believe in 'neutral' or 'objective' journalism or history writing, only the mad pretentions thereof, which are always best dropped. So someone setting out to write an antagonistic biography of someone, and is open about that antagonism, that is not only perfectly legitimate, but even preferable to pretending to be 'objective'. As long as the piece of journalism or history writing holds itself to standards of fairness and accuracy, there's no problem with taking a stance at all.
Robert Service, however, apparently did neither. The weirdest thing for me is when Service projects motivations onto Trotsky that he (or we) would have no way of knowing. Sometimes Service even explicitly states that the available sources (often Trotsky's own writing) say something different about his motivations, but Service then simply ignores his sources and makes something up based on his personal feelings on Trotsky.
For instance in chapter 5 (p.52 in my edition) Service informs us that a young Trotsky, after spending 2,5 months in solitary confinement in 1898, wrote to his future wife Alexandra that he was feeling suicidal. But then Service tells us: "He was never genuinely suicidal; his comment was designed to make her want to protect him." How does Service know this? He doesn't say. The endnote only refers to the letter to Alexandra in which Trotsky wrote he was feeling suicial. Service simply overrules the only available source on Trotsky's inner feelings, believing his own mind-reading powers to be more reliable than the actual sources.
There are unfortunately more instances of this, especially concering Trotsky's relationship with his family. Trotsky can express all the grief and regret he wants in letters and his diary, but Service always knows better and keeps repeating how "heartless" and "self-absorbed" Trotsky was when dealing with his parents or his children and first wife. In this respect the book reminded me of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story, which benefited greatly from similar mind-reading abilities.
So not very fair then. But is it at least accurate when it comes to facts outside of Trotsky's mind? According to Bertrand M. Patenaude, who is Robert Service's fellow fellow at the Hoover Institution (note: this means not a Trotskyist), writing in the American Historical Review, it is not. In fact the attack from Patenaude was so unsparing that it was described thusly:
Every so often, one scholar will assess another’s book so harshly that it becomes legendary.This piece first tears to shreds Service's claim that his book is "the first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside of Russia who is not a Trotskyist.", which is, according to the piece's author, "plainly and inarguably quite untrue." Then it quotes Patenaude at some length, giving us some idea what sort of details Service gets wrong in this book:
'“I have counted more than four dozen [mistakes],” he writes. “Service mixes up the names of Trotsky's sons, misidentifies the largest political group in the first Duma in 1906, botches the name of the Austrian archduke assassinated at Sarajevo, misrepresents the circumstances of Nicholas II's abdication, gets backward Trotsky's position in 1940 on the United States' entry into World War II, and gives the wrong year of death of Trotsky's widow. Service's book is completely unreliable as a reference…. At times the errors are jaw-dropping. Service believes that Bertram Wolfe was one of Trotsky's ‘acolytes’ living with him in Mexico (pp. 441, 473), that André Breton was a ‘surrealist painter’ whose ‘pictures exhibited sympathy with the plight of the working people’ (p. 453), and that Mikhail Gorbachev rehabilitated Trotsky in 1988, when in fact Trotsky was never posthumously rehabilitated by the Soviet government.”'So neither very fair nor particularly accurate. Though, in fairness, I have to agree with Service's response that these inaccuraries are not very serious. More consequential accusations of inaccuracies are leveled by David North, a writer for the World Socialist Website (a Trotskyist organization), and they often seem to relate (again) to Service's secret method of knowing what Trotsky's inner motivations are. Besides this, I also found the book an unnecessarily boring read, perhaps due to the focus on bureaucratics, but maybe it's just that the style of writing doesn't suit me.
And all this is a shame, because I think Trotsky really does deserve the kind of critical treatment Service had in mind. Because, while the fact that Stalin was a pretty bad guy is now almost universally accepted, Lenin and Trotsky are still remembered by many (though certainly not everybody) as the benevolent Old Major and Snowball. Which, in my opinion, is also neither very fair nor particularly accurate.
____
* BBC Radio 4's "Great Lives" series, with Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service, aired August 8 2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD54q...
July 8, 2011
Read this after watching Hitchens and him debate at some stuffy Hoover Institute roundtable. Littered with factual errors, which are at least finally getting exposed at the academic level http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/ahr....
August 11, 2016
After his death Trotsky has enjoyed better press in the west than he had had in his lifetime. Service shows how it was/is out of proportion to his qualities as a person and as a political leader. Robert Service documents who he was personally and politically through this new scholarly work.
Service, particularly in the later chapters, shows Trotsky to be a self-involved, arrogant, intolerant, and tin eared man with a gift for prose. He demands loyalty and doesn't appreciate the costs others must pay for supporting him and his lost cause. He mourns the loss of his children, but it is hard to tell what the feelings really were. Natalya, who sacrifices herself for him is casually betrayed... a betrayal that could have consequences far beyond the dire ones for his family.
From what is presented, it's easy to conclude that Trotsky could never have won the power struggle with Stalin. His sense of timing was off. He didn't showcase Lenin's warning on Stalin until it had consequences for him. His actions upon his expulsion from Moscow and later expulsion Russia itself, show an incredible naivete for someone of his position. In the last chapter, Service gives words to the impression you get as you read this, which is that Trotsky doesn't really want leadership responsibility, he wanted to write more than to lead.
Service gives little to suggest a better outcome had Trotsky won against Stalin. While he some modern management ideas, such as using qualified, if not ideologically pure, military officers who had served the Tsar, he was still an authoritarian. In the aftermath of the Revolution, he stifled dissent. His response to the Kronstadt Revolt was not to sort out the issues, but to dispatch an army. In his later years he praised Russia's invasion of Poland for its re-appropriation of property with no thought for the lives or losses of the Poles. The post-revolution ruling elite was stacked with authoritarians so there is no reason to conclude that Trotsky would derail the culture of execution and pre-emptive censorship.
The hair splitting differences between groups and individuals is mentioned, and fortunately, for me, not belabored. The prose in the chapters on his early life and on his death by assassination stand out in a book with many well written chapters. My only disappointment is that Trotsky's father's new status after losing his farm in the revolution and his death are given little description and no analysis.
There is a lot to digest. This book is not for the casual reader, but highly recommended for those interested in Russian history.
Service, particularly in the later chapters, shows Trotsky to be a self-involved, arrogant, intolerant, and tin eared man with a gift for prose. He demands loyalty and doesn't appreciate the costs others must pay for supporting him and his lost cause. He mourns the loss of his children, but it is hard to tell what the feelings really were. Natalya, who sacrifices herself for him is casually betrayed... a betrayal that could have consequences far beyond the dire ones for his family.
From what is presented, it's easy to conclude that Trotsky could never have won the power struggle with Stalin. His sense of timing was off. He didn't showcase Lenin's warning on Stalin until it had consequences for him. His actions upon his expulsion from Moscow and later expulsion Russia itself, show an incredible naivete for someone of his position. In the last chapter, Service gives words to the impression you get as you read this, which is that Trotsky doesn't really want leadership responsibility, he wanted to write more than to lead.
Service gives little to suggest a better outcome had Trotsky won against Stalin. While he some modern management ideas, such as using qualified, if not ideologically pure, military officers who had served the Tsar, he was still an authoritarian. In the aftermath of the Revolution, he stifled dissent. His response to the Kronstadt Revolt was not to sort out the issues, but to dispatch an army. In his later years he praised Russia's invasion of Poland for its re-appropriation of property with no thought for the lives or losses of the Poles. The post-revolution ruling elite was stacked with authoritarians so there is no reason to conclude that Trotsky would derail the culture of execution and pre-emptive censorship.
The hair splitting differences between groups and individuals is mentioned, and fortunately, for me, not belabored. The prose in the chapters on his early life and on his death by assassination stand out in a book with many well written chapters. My only disappointment is that Trotsky's father's new status after losing his farm in the revolution and his death are given little description and no analysis.
There is a lot to digest. This book is not for the casual reader, but highly recommended for those interested in Russian history.
February 27, 2015
-Algunas personas son tan buenas que parecen tontas. Otras son tan tontas que parecen buenas.-
Género. Biografía.
Lo que nos cuenta. Aproximación a la vida, obra y, tal vez, quién sabe, mentalidad del líder revolucionario soviético Liev Davídovich Trotski.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género. Biografía.
Lo que nos cuenta. Aproximación a la vida, obra y, tal vez, quién sabe, mentalidad del líder revolucionario soviético Liev Davídovich Trotski.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
February 24, 2020
I have read Stalin by the same author and saw his book chat with Brian Lamb on C-Span Book TV. This 600 page biography of Trotksy is summarized on Page 459 which states, Trotsky failed to explain how the common objectives of communism could be fulfilled. He was an idealist.
November 23, 2009
An even-handed review of the complex and contradictory character of Trotsky. A charismatic man, with abundant literary gifts, including polemics and oratory, absolutely committed to revolution. His fearless leadership and organizational skills are celebrated in his pivotal roles in the October Revolution and the Red Army. His factiousness led to his demise from party leadership, expulsion, exile, death, and murder. Despite his many gifts, the myth of Trotsky is debunked by his egotism, coldness, lack of introspection, and human empathy. The romanticized vision of Trotsky's leadership of the soviets is revealed to be no better, and possibly worse, than Stalin, due to similar governing methods of terror and totalitarianism. Trotsky dedicated his life to the 'proletarian revolution.' After reading this account, it's with a bittersweet awareness that his talents were directed a to misguided experiment. Personally, he avoided self-negation precisely by not deviating from the cause, but one can't help to feel that his purpose and talents were compromised.
November 8, 2015
quite good a biography of Trotsky avoiding the hagiography around his name
February 4, 2012
Leon Trotsky has long sidestepped the sort of scrutiny and criticism meted out to Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin for their roles in the establishment of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. This has occurred for a variety of reasons, including his break with Stalin, his exhaustive writings that critiqued Stalin, and his assassination (which made him a martyr), most likely ordered by Stalin. But perhaps the biggest reason he has escaped comparatively unscathed is that for those on the far left, Trotsky is the only potential hero they can dredge up from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. To admit that Trotsky was as much of a tyrant and cold blooded killer as his compatriots in that fateful year is to admit that the entire Marxist enterprise was incapable of efficiently producing anything other than corpses, and to be forced to confront Marxism's responsibility for creating Stalin. By embracing Trotsky, Marxists can pretend to distance themselves from reality and sustain the canard that Marxism has anything of worth to offer us.
British historian and Oxford professor Robert Service concludes his trilogy of biographies of the three primary architects of the Soviet Union ("Lenin" and "Stalin" being the other two) with the best and most important volume. The Trotsky we meet here is a man who never believed in basic human rights, never believed that people should have the power to choose their own leaders, and never believed that any of his own ideas could possibly be wrong.
As we follow Trotsky through his days as a member of the Politburo and head of the Red Army, we see a man who reveled in executions, random killings, and full-throttle warfare. More importantly, Service documents how Trotsky was the first of the Bolsheviks to introduce the idea that terror against civilians was a legitimate means of empowering the state. We learn that Trotsky provided the arguments for severe state censorship of all ideas. Most damning, Service shows how it was Trotsky, through his writings in the 1920s, who provided the crucial intellectual underpinnings for what became known as Stalinism. By the 1930s, when Trotsky was in exile and the Great Terror was in full swing, even Trotsky himself recognized that Stalin was enacting Trotsky's ideas, and he had little complaint about this aspect of Stalin's rule. His biggest concern with Stalin wasn't that the man was killing people by the millions, it was Stalin's failure to forcefully spread communism into Europe that Trotsky found most despicable.
The left has long insisted that Stalin betrayed the Revolution, and that he was an aberration from true Marxism. The underlying lesson of Service's three exceptional inquiries into the lives of the men who put Marxism to the test is quite the opposite. Stalin, Service shows us, was the natural result of communism in action. Had Trotsky, not Stalin, emerged triumphant from the struggle to succeed Lenin, Service makes it clear that the death toll wouldn't have been significantly lower. Stalin may have ordered Trotsky's killing (this has never been conclusively documented, but it hardly seems plausible that he didn't), but what Service makes clear is that Trotsky was ultimately killed by the cause to which he had devoted his entire life. And he was just one of what, by conservative estimates, were one-hundred-million victims of a political/economic theory that led to the world's first and, in the end, deadliest totalitarian state.
This is the truth about Leon Trotsky.
British historian and Oxford professor Robert Service concludes his trilogy of biographies of the three primary architects of the Soviet Union ("Lenin" and "Stalin" being the other two) with the best and most important volume. The Trotsky we meet here is a man who never believed in basic human rights, never believed that people should have the power to choose their own leaders, and never believed that any of his own ideas could possibly be wrong.
As we follow Trotsky through his days as a member of the Politburo and head of the Red Army, we see a man who reveled in executions, random killings, and full-throttle warfare. More importantly, Service documents how Trotsky was the first of the Bolsheviks to introduce the idea that terror against civilians was a legitimate means of empowering the state. We learn that Trotsky provided the arguments for severe state censorship of all ideas. Most damning, Service shows how it was Trotsky, through his writings in the 1920s, who provided the crucial intellectual underpinnings for what became known as Stalinism. By the 1930s, when Trotsky was in exile and the Great Terror was in full swing, even Trotsky himself recognized that Stalin was enacting Trotsky's ideas, and he had little complaint about this aspect of Stalin's rule. His biggest concern with Stalin wasn't that the man was killing people by the millions, it was Stalin's failure to forcefully spread communism into Europe that Trotsky found most despicable.
The left has long insisted that Stalin betrayed the Revolution, and that he was an aberration from true Marxism. The underlying lesson of Service's three exceptional inquiries into the lives of the men who put Marxism to the test is quite the opposite. Stalin, Service shows us, was the natural result of communism in action. Had Trotsky, not Stalin, emerged triumphant from the struggle to succeed Lenin, Service makes it clear that the death toll wouldn't have been significantly lower. Stalin may have ordered Trotsky's killing (this has never been conclusively documented, but it hardly seems plausible that he didn't), but what Service makes clear is that Trotsky was ultimately killed by the cause to which he had devoted his entire life. And he was just one of what, by conservative estimates, were one-hundred-million victims of a political/economic theory that led to the world's first and, in the end, deadliest totalitarian state.
This is the truth about Leon Trotsky.
May 3, 2021
Another dead Bolshevic bites the dust...and not a moment too soon.
For a long time, I was under the wildly held and disseminated impression that Trotsky was somehow an alternative to Stalin, the more humane face of communism, and if things would have gone differently and Trotsky had succeeded in the power struggle following Lenin's death, things would have turned out differently.
Well, this biography of Trotsky certainly dispels that myth.
Trotsky was a Bolshevic to the core with all that implied: ruthlessness, dedication to the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (read dictatorship of the party elite or a bunch of self-appointed Marxist scholars at the start), unscrupulousness to methods, willingness and desire to execute and silence any sign of opposition to the great Bolshevic Revolution of 1917. He was in charge of the Red Army on his famous killing train, other socialist factions he mercilessly pursued and executed (Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries), and ultimately the masses, the very proletariat (the Kronstadt soviet sailors revolt is a famous episode) in the name of whom the famous communist Revolution was waged.
Where Trotsky, the constant revolutionary, was unlucky is in that he was no rival for the political astuteness and single-minded determination of a leader like Stalin. He was too arrogant, too disdainful, too superior and he made few friends among his Bolshevic comrades when he absolutely had to in the early 1920s. He was considered a divisive Napoleonic figure (and his leadership of the Red Army unluckily for him aided that) and he was ostracised way before he had been able to exert any real control on the party events following Lenin's death.
In politics as in his personal life, Trotsky had many followers but very few close friends. There is very little pity or sympathy one feels for Trotsky, a man so blind and zealous he pushed all close relatives to an early or untimely death including his daughter and son.
A haughty and in so many ways naive man, Trotsky finally fills the space he should have filled in my historical knowledge of this incredibly destructive period in world history. Goodbye to all that.
For a long time, I was under the wildly held and disseminated impression that Trotsky was somehow an alternative to Stalin, the more humane face of communism, and if things would have gone differently and Trotsky had succeeded in the power struggle following Lenin's death, things would have turned out differently.
Well, this biography of Trotsky certainly dispels that myth.
Trotsky was a Bolshevic to the core with all that implied: ruthlessness, dedication to the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (read dictatorship of the party elite or a bunch of self-appointed Marxist scholars at the start), unscrupulousness to methods, willingness and desire to execute and silence any sign of opposition to the great Bolshevic Revolution of 1917. He was in charge of the Red Army on his famous killing train, other socialist factions he mercilessly pursued and executed (Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries), and ultimately the masses, the very proletariat (the Kronstadt soviet sailors revolt is a famous episode) in the name of whom the famous communist Revolution was waged.
Where Trotsky, the constant revolutionary, was unlucky is in that he was no rival for the political astuteness and single-minded determination of a leader like Stalin. He was too arrogant, too disdainful, too superior and he made few friends among his Bolshevic comrades when he absolutely had to in the early 1920s. He was considered a divisive Napoleonic figure (and his leadership of the Red Army unluckily for him aided that) and he was ostracised way before he had been able to exert any real control on the party events following Lenin's death.
In politics as in his personal life, Trotsky had many followers but very few close friends. There is very little pity or sympathy one feels for Trotsky, a man so blind and zealous he pushed all close relatives to an early or untimely death including his daughter and son.
A haughty and in so many ways naive man, Trotsky finally fills the space he should have filled in my historical knowledge of this incredibly destructive period in world history. Goodbye to all that.
May 19, 2018
قبل از اینکه برای اولین بار شروع به مطالعه راجب زندگی استالین بکنم، نسبت بهش احساس احترام می کردم. فکر می کردم در رابطه با انسان بزرگی کتاب می خونم اما، خب تعداد صفحات زیاد کتاب در بر دارنده ی تعداد بی شمار جنایاتش بود. میلیون ها ادمی ک کشت، هر چند خون بهای کشته شدگان باعث پیشرفت شوروی بود اما، زیر این پیشرفت میلیون ها نفر تو اردوگاه های کار اجباری مردن، توی دادگاه های نمایشی یا سرکوب اعتراضات کارگری یا کشورگشایی ها کشته شدن. و این کشور گشایی حتا یک جور هایی با فلسفه انترناسیونالیستی هم در تعارض بود.
بدون شک در بدو انقلاب بلشویکی اکتبر 1917، در همون ابتدای کار ک لنین و تروتسکی شروع به سرکوب کردن اعتراضات کارگری کردن، این سئوال برام پیش اومد ک این دیگه چجور انقلاب پرولتری ـه ک توش کارگرا رو سرکوب می کنن؟ تفاوت عمل و اعتقاد، عوام فریبی .. نخوت ذات انسان. شاید تروتسکی قدر استالین خون ریز نبود، شاید دم از دموکراسی سوسیالیستی طور می زد و استالین رو مجکوم می کرد بخاطر جنایاتش، بخاطر هم پیمان شدنش با رایش سوم اما یک جورایی تروتسکی، با اصل اعمال استالین مخالف نبود. یعنی شاید اگه خود تروتسکی هم دبیرکل حزب می شد، انسان خون ریزی می بود. همونطور ک وقتی کمیسیار خلق ارتش بود هم انسان های بی گناه زیادی رو کشت. تروتسکی عاشق انقلابش بود، و برای حفظ این انقلاب همونطور ک لنین و استالین نشون دادن حاضر به تعارض با اصول سوسیالیستی و پرولتری بود. قطعا تروتسکی اندازه ی استالین آدم نمی کشت اما، مثل انتخاب کردن بین بد و بدتر می مونه. به نظرم تروتسکی اگه دبیرکل حزب می شد، همونقدر ازش به بدی یاد می کردن ک از استالین یاد می کنن. عطش تروتسکی برای انترناسیونالیست، برای سوسیالیست کردن اروپا به مراتب بیشتر استالین بود. البته به جهان مختلف هم می شه حدس و گمان زد، شاید اگه تروتسکی در راس کار باقی می موند انقلاب سوسیالیستی آلمان شکست نمی خورد و هیچوقت حزب فاشیسم اونجا پیروز نمی شد. البته این به معنی این نیست ک اینطوری هیچ جنگ جهانی دومی اتفاق نمی افتاد و کاملا برعکس، احتمالا حتا زودتر هم این اتفاق رخ می داد. همونطور ک اگه استالین چهار پنج سال بیشتر زنده می موند، بعید نبود ک جنگ حهانی سومی هم تو اروپا به وجود میومد.
بدون شک در بدو انقلاب بلشویکی اکتبر 1917، در همون ابتدای کار ک لنین و تروتسکی شروع به سرکوب کردن اعتراضات کارگری کردن، این سئوال برام پیش اومد ک این دیگه چجور انقلاب پرولتری ـه ک توش کارگرا رو سرکوب می کنن؟ تفاوت عمل و اعتقاد، عوام فریبی .. نخوت ذات انسان. شاید تروتسکی قدر استالین خون ریز نبود، شاید دم از دموکراسی سوسیالیستی طور می زد و استالین رو مجکوم می کرد بخاطر جنایاتش، بخاطر هم پیمان شدنش با رایش سوم اما یک جورایی تروتسکی، با اصل اعمال استالین مخالف نبود. یعنی شاید اگه خود تروتسکی هم دبیرکل حزب می شد، انسان خون ریزی می بود. همونطور ک وقتی کمیسیار خلق ارتش بود هم انسان های بی گناه زیادی رو کشت. تروتسکی عاشق انقلابش بود، و برای حفظ این انقلاب همونطور ک لنین و استالین نشون دادن حاضر به تعارض با اصول سوسیالیستی و پرولتری بود. قطعا تروتسکی اندازه ی استالین آدم نمی کشت اما، مثل انتخاب کردن بین بد و بدتر می مونه. به نظرم تروتسکی اگه دبیرکل حزب می شد، همونقدر ازش به بدی یاد می کردن ک از استالین یاد می کنن. عطش تروتسکی برای انترناسیونالیست، برای سوسیالیست کردن اروپا به مراتب بیشتر استالین بود. البته به جهان مختلف هم می شه حدس و گمان زد، شاید اگه تروتسکی در راس کار باقی می موند انقلاب سوسیالیستی آلمان شکست نمی خورد و هیچوقت حزب فاشیسم اونجا پیروز نمی شد. البته این به معنی این نیست ک اینطوری هیچ جنگ جهانی دومی اتفاق نمی افتاد و کاملا برعکس، احتمالا حتا زودتر هم این اتفاق رخ می داد. همونطور ک اگه استالین چهار پنج سال بیشتر زنده می موند، بعید نبود ک جنگ حهانی سومی هم تو اروپا به وجود میومد.
July 1, 2013
I read this book for a very VAIN reason- the fact that it was discredited by the American Historical Review. It would be safe to say that Robert Service has done a great DISSERVICE to Trotsky.
I must say that I do suffer from ignorance to a high extent in understanding fully,the author's unarmed attack on trotsky. I had to read quiet a bit about Trotsky, Permanent Revolution and the origin of the theory by Engels and Marx. Even then it was impossible to understand this seething hatred of him.
After having read the same author's other book on Stalin- this came as a shock. Most of the prose consists of redundant adjectives showing the author's abhorrence toward the leader. Why write in thousands of sheets what can be said in a few scores?
All the Commuism apart though, the book makes for a monotonic read. The author is so hell bent on complete assassination of Trotsky that much else has been considered "beside the point" by him.
Give it a shot if you are prepared to get bored and waste a lot of good reading hours on a lop-sided version of history by a great writer. :)
I must say that I do suffer from ignorance to a high extent in understanding fully,the author's unarmed attack on trotsky. I had to read quiet a bit about Trotsky, Permanent Revolution and the origin of the theory by Engels and Marx. Even then it was impossible to understand this seething hatred of him.
After having read the same author's other book on Stalin- this came as a shock. Most of the prose consists of redundant adjectives showing the author's abhorrence toward the leader. Why write in thousands of sheets what can be said in a few scores?
All the Commuism apart though, the book makes for a monotonic read. The author is so hell bent on complete assassination of Trotsky that much else has been considered "beside the point" by him.
Give it a shot if you are prepared to get bored and waste a lot of good reading hours on a lop-sided version of history by a great writer. :)
June 20, 2021
Only useful as a demonstration of everything that’s wrong with historical scholarship today—factual inaccuracies, no dialogue with the source material, and an inability to thoughtfully mediate between historical circumstances and the individuals they produce. Add some moralizing judgements disguised as analysis, and you have a neat summation of much of the field of history today. You may even win a Duff Cooper Prize if you follow this mediocre formula, well-suited for a time like our own with few new ideas. 1/5
February 9, 2013
Well written, well supported, though actually a bit lean through the years of the Revolution.
February 15, 2021
به نظرم قبل از خوندن هر کتابی از شخص تروتسکی ،به ویژه انقلاب روسیه ،این کتاب رو باید خوند .یه بیوگرافی خوش قلم با ترجمه بی نظیر جناب بیژن اشتری که لذت خوندنش رو سه چندان میکنه
October 11, 2012
A critical biography of Leiba Bronstein (Better known to the world as Leon Trotsky), Service does an excellent job of exploring the life, the complexities, and the many hypocrisies of this giant of 20th century history. From his early intellectual ferment to his heroics in the October revolution and Civil War, Service illustrates a man of fixed ideological belief - a demagogue, an intellectual, but most importantly a deeply inhumane individual.
Trotskyists have always asserted that the USSR would never have degenerated into totalitarianism if Trotsky had only have pipped Stalin to absolute control of the communist regime following the death of Lenin. They claim he was a democrat with fundamentally humane inclinations. As Service demonstrates this was simply not the case. Trotsky held most people in contempt and was extraordinarily selfish and egotistical. His supposed humanitarianism is a myth, one that can easily be debunked by his conduct in the civil war (As well as his despicable suppression of the Kronstadt mutineers who demonstrated in favour of a democratic system and against the budding totalitarianism that was evident long before the ascent of Stalin) His dogmatism, his inherent lust for violence, his inability for compromise all indicate an intellect clowded by its own egotism. His was an undoubtedly eloquent and sophisticated pen; but he had a tendency for unnecessary alienation. He was a bad politician and a brilliant orator.
For all his talk about 'democracy is the life blood of socialism' there is actually very little evidence that he truly believed in a democratic socialism. When he was in a position of authority he was consistently in favour of uncompromisingly oppressive policies.
This man was no saint.
The biography itself is rather conventionally written; the sentences lack cadence and Service is uninspiring in his delivery. It is a functional work. Furthermore his analyses of leftist revolutionary thought is shallow and almost non existent. His analysis of Trotsky's political writing are similarly woefully inadequate. Read this book for a strictly historical account (With some fair minded and much welcomed criticism), but find the deeper political analyses elsewhere.
Based on what this book set out to accomplish (Re-evaluate the life of Trotsky and liberate him from the various hagiographers) I would have to say that it is groundbreaking scholarship, a transformational book. But its shortcomings are apparent also.
Trotskyists have always asserted that the USSR would never have degenerated into totalitarianism if Trotsky had only have pipped Stalin to absolute control of the communist regime following the death of Lenin. They claim he was a democrat with fundamentally humane inclinations. As Service demonstrates this was simply not the case. Trotsky held most people in contempt and was extraordinarily selfish and egotistical. His supposed humanitarianism is a myth, one that can easily be debunked by his conduct in the civil war (As well as his despicable suppression of the Kronstadt mutineers who demonstrated in favour of a democratic system and against the budding totalitarianism that was evident long before the ascent of Stalin) His dogmatism, his inherent lust for violence, his inability for compromise all indicate an intellect clowded by its own egotism. His was an undoubtedly eloquent and sophisticated pen; but he had a tendency for unnecessary alienation. He was a bad politician and a brilliant orator.
For all his talk about 'democracy is the life blood of socialism' there is actually very little evidence that he truly believed in a democratic socialism. When he was in a position of authority he was consistently in favour of uncompromisingly oppressive policies.
This man was no saint.
The biography itself is rather conventionally written; the sentences lack cadence and Service is uninspiring in his delivery. It is a functional work. Furthermore his analyses of leftist revolutionary thought is shallow and almost non existent. His analysis of Trotsky's political writing are similarly woefully inadequate. Read this book for a strictly historical account (With some fair minded and much welcomed criticism), but find the deeper political analyses elsewhere.
Based on what this book set out to accomplish (Re-evaluate the life of Trotsky and liberate him from the various hagiographers) I would have to say that it is groundbreaking scholarship, a transformational book. But its shortcomings are apparent also.
May 14, 2020
The world likes its underdogs. When it doesn't have one it makes one. The world also likes cruel men who are less cruel than other men. Leon Trotsky checks both boxes. Here is a great and highly readable, extremely opinionated account of the life of one of the most venerated communist heroes of the twentieth century. He is remembered today as a dissenter, a maverick, and a man of supreme passion. All of those qualifiers are quite accurate however this book contributes proportion to the figure by also highlighting his erratic ideological temperament. He seems to have always spoken his mind, he is not much of a hypocrite in that but he was particularly self-contradictory and in his own writings (according to the author among politician-writers he is second to only Churchill), he always selectively quoted himself and the rest to justify his often unreasonable views. Trotsky comes through as a very power-hungry person, not position-hungry (he displayed self-restraint in moments of acquisition of power because of his being a Jew); he tried to rub his meditated ideological positions against the party, nation, and populace. He was a brilliant leader. He not only led very successfully the October Revolution but also the Red Army to victory in the Civil War as the Commissar of Foreign Affairs. In moments where the book explores his charisma in public visible life, Trotsky glitters glamorously. The strength of the book lay in its focus on details in Trotsky's opinions and especially in relation to raging Soviet debates. The book is most interested in that. Interest in his personal life suffers just a little as a result perhaps.
April 3, 2010
A straight forward biography of the real life Emmanuel Goldstein. Service focuses more on Trotsky's intellectual development, rather than on the more exciting elements of his life. It feels like every meeting he ever went to is described in detail, while the two years he spent leading the Red Army during the wars after the Revolution (despite having no military experience) go by too quickly. Of course, that is a reflection of Trotsky's milieu. He and the other Communists were intellectuals and revolutionaries who spent most of their time pre-1917 going to meetings and furiously denouncing one another, along with bourgeois capitalism. (Soviet politics proceeded along the same path until Stalin put an end to all that fussin' & fightin'). Still, for all the talk of Trotsky's writings, I still couldn't tell you what a "Trotskyist" is, except maybe that they are an admirer of Trotsky. Also, Service does not provide any sort of primer for basic marxist thought, which can make it difficult for beginners to follow what is going on when Stalin and Bukharin gang up on Trotsky. Also, Service doesn't state this explicitly, but Trotsky was clearly a dictatorial personality who did not hesitate to use the power of the state to kill off those whom he considered the enemies of the Revolution. Despite his gifts and unquestionable dedication to the cause, there was little in the man to admire. I feel like there could be a better biography out there, but will take this over the lame-o apologias that have preceded it.
January 22, 2014
I think I have to disagree with the other reviewers who accuse Robert Service of being non-partial, or biased against Trotsky. Obviously there was several character flaws in David Bronstein that inevitably must appear in any true study of the man. Trotsky was vain, but at the same time lacked self-conscious of his actions. He was an individualist who advocated collectivism. He had a habit of using people until they were no longer politically useful. His reaction to the Kronstadt rebellion was heavy handed and hypocritical. On the other hand he is an amazing character in the history of the Soviet Union. He possessed a rhetorical flourish that cut down his enemies with a stroke of the pen. He was a master political operator, a hard worker who avoided the drink, and created the Red Army from the pieces of the Imperial Russian Army despite having no prior military experience. I don't think the Soviet Union however would have been that much different under Trotsky after the death of Lenin. Trotsky was instrumental in the creation of the secret police services during the Red Terror, which would later claim a higher body count than the Nazi SS (and also killed more communists than Hitler). Trotsky didn't believe in "constructive criticism", and was equally vengeful against his enemies as Stalin. Overall the cast was set for the Soviet Union during the creation of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Which despite the context of two decades of aristocratic led war and conflict in Russia is a very dangerous thing to excuse or advocate.
April 29, 2010
This was a really interesting book, I wish it would've talked more about his ideas though. Here's what you need to know about Trotsky:
He was ruthless. The popular idea is that if he would've taken over after Lenin instead of Stalin things would've been really different. In some ways it probably would have (He would've tried much harder to encourage socialist revolution in other countries, he never thought the USSR would last without "continual revolution") but it sounds like he would've been every bit as brutal as Stalin to people he didn't like.
He was courageous. The stories are pretty incredible, time after time he went headfirst into really dangerous situations. From this book you really get the feeling that the USSR never would've happened without him or Lenin, they really are the only two people indispensable to the cause. Even in exile and right to the very end he never backed down.
He had no political talent. Which makes how far he went even more amazing.
Like I said I wish the book would've talked more about his ideas. There is some ideology in the book but I really wanted more. From what I did get though I'm even more convinced that socialism is wrong wrong wrong. My biggest problem is how authoritarian it is. These guys hated liberals as much as they hated the imperialists.
He was ruthless. The popular idea is that if he would've taken over after Lenin instead of Stalin things would've been really different. In some ways it probably would have (He would've tried much harder to encourage socialist revolution in other countries, he never thought the USSR would last without "continual revolution") but it sounds like he would've been every bit as brutal as Stalin to people he didn't like.
He was courageous. The stories are pretty incredible, time after time he went headfirst into really dangerous situations. From this book you really get the feeling that the USSR never would've happened without him or Lenin, they really are the only two people indispensable to the cause. Even in exile and right to the very end he never backed down.
He had no political talent. Which makes how far he went even more amazing.
Like I said I wish the book would've talked more about his ideas. There is some ideology in the book but I really wanted more. From what I did get though I'm even more convinced that socialism is wrong wrong wrong. My biggest problem is how authoritarian it is. These guys hated liberals as much as they hated the imperialists.
August 31, 2012
Service closes his trilogy with another captivating portrait. What emerges is a picture of a selfish man who really didn't know better even when things were turning against him in the battle of succession after Lenin's death. Again, for me at least, the most interesting aspect was Service's analysis of Trotsky's marxism. Even more so than Lenin, Trotsky's connection to 'the source' seems to have been idiosyncratic, to say the least. Practical concerns overrode theory even when the man was clearly at his best as a provider of ideological justification for the October Revolution and its (embattled) legacy. His inconsistencies prove the point. Again, as with Lenin and Stalin, Service clearly points out how Trotsky was never the idealised socialist, but an architect of state terror and other aspects easily condemned in hindsight. Hagiography this is not--Service is much more critical of Trotsky than the other two revolutionaries. Perhaps this is because unlike with Trotsky, the faults of the others have been unanimously agreed upon by historiography. I wouldn't read this as the only source of information, but it does--with its faults--balance some of the more praising interpretations.
September 19, 2012
I started this book as my final instalment following Service's books on Stalin, Lenin and Comrades. If you read these books from the knowledge and perspective that the author is not a left wing idealists or supporter then they are quite enjoyable to read. On the other hand if you are a hardened communist then you will no doubt hate these books. The weakest of the volumes for me has been Lenin. Jeepers it took some reading. Stalin was by far the most interesting. Trotsky was very interesting on so many levels and if you like books about political intrigue and history you will enjoy this book. As for Robert Service and the complaints about his historical license, etc. as with all writers of history time will be their jury. Service has done a professional and informative job. Not perfect. He allows his own political bias to emerge on the odd occasion, which is his weakness as a writer, but don't let this put you off. Simply use your own intelligence.
March 8, 2013
An exhaustive (you can tell my how long it has taken me to finish it), dense and illuminating biography of Leon Trotsky. Service has done a remarkable job collecting, researching and writing the tome. Probably the best biography of Trotsky available, but not for the timid or the merely curious; those who do not want to know every available detail of Trotsky's life, but only an overview, best look elsewhere. For the rest of us, the history nuts or the student of modern history, this is the biography to get.
June 4, 2017
Very good. Objective and not a hagiography by any means. Might read Stalin and Lenin by the same author.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 110 reviews