Trotsky: A Biography
Trotsky: A Biography
Westerners sympathetic to the ideals of socialism have often speculated about the development path of the Soviet Union if Leon Trotsky () and not Joseph Stalin () had served as Vladimir Lenin's () successor. Taking Trotsky's post-exile criticisms of Stalinism at face-value, radicals such as Isaac Deutscher and Max Eastman have argued that a Trotsky-led regime would have been non-bureaucratic and humane. Robert Service, professor of Russian History at Oxford University, counters such speculative thinking with his new biography on Trotsky. Coming after his previous biographies on Lenin and Stalin, Service claims that Trotsky is the "first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist" (xxi).1
What makes Service's account different from earlier, well known biographies of Trotsky is that its focus is not on the intellectual meat of Trotsky's voluminous political writings, but rather on the often surprisingly mundane aspects of his personal life. Believing that it is "in the supposedly trivial residues rather than in the grand public statements that the perspective of his career is most effectively reconstruct
Trotsky: A Biography
Robert Service completes his masterful trilogy on the founding figures of the Soviet Union in an eagerly anticipated, authoritative biography of Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources including family letters, party and military correspondence, confidential speeches, and medical records, Service offers new insights into Trotsky. He discusses Trotskyâe(tm)s fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to bring into a unified party before ; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early s as the progenitor of political and cultural Stalinism. Trotsky evinced a surprisingly glacial and schematic approach to making revolution. Service recounts Trotskyâe(tm)s role in the botched German revolution of ; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the s; and his assumption that peasants could easily be pushed onto collective farms. Service also sheds light on Trotskyâe(tm)s character and personality: his difficulties with his Jewish background, the development of his oratorical
Trotsky: A Biography - Hardcover
Synopsis
Revolutionary practitioner, theorist, factional chief, sparkling writer, &#x;ladies&#x; man&#x; (e.g., his affair with Frieda Kahlo), icon of the Revolution, anti-Jewish Jew, philosopher of everyday life, grand seigneur of his household, father and hunted victim, Trotsky lived a brilliant life in extraordinary times. Robert Service draws on hitherto unexamined archives and on his profound understanding of Russian history to draw a portrait of the man and his legacy, revealing that though his followers have represented Trotsky as a pure revolutionary soul and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin and his henchmen. The reality is very different, as this masterful and compelling biography reveals.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
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