Trotsky – A Biography (OBEEI) - Hardcover

Service, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674036158 ISBN 13: 9780674036154

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Product Description

A Biography

Review

`The author at last follows up his biographies of Lenin and Stalin with this well-researched working examining Trotsky's complex ideas and the reasons behind his exile and murder.'
--`The Hit List', The Independent on Sunday

`Seldom has the pathology of the revolutionary type and its murderous consequences, been more mercilessly exposed than in this exemplary biography.' --Robert Harris, Sunday Times Culture

`There is much to attract the general reader of biography and fascinating findings from the archives for the specialist. Service's biography is a Trotsky for our times...'
--Ronald Grigor-Suny, History Today

'bold and balanced biography.' --Guardian

'It's a complicated story and Robert Service is just the man to disentangle it. With biographies of Stalin and Lenin already under his belt, he has delved into unexplored archives and does Trotsky proud.'
--Seven, Sunday Telegraph

'Service is never unkind to his subject, but nor is he an acolyte. One of the great functions his book performs, aside from being a compelling read, is to flesh out a non-Trotskyite version of Trotsky... There is not moralism in Robert Service's narrative - and there is no need. It is plain from the facts that Trotsky was a quite brilliant historical phenomenon; and not a very nice man.' --Paperback of the Week, Observer

'a fascinating new slant on one of the leading figures behind the Russian revolution.'
--Choice Magazine

'Service's biography answers so many questions...The book contains details hidden for years, so jump in and relive the revolution.' --Nick Ellis, Bournemouth Echo

'The author uses his profound knowledge of Russia and of Bolshevism to give us the best and most nuanced biography of a man without whom the Revolution might well not have succeeded. This is not the Trotsky many in the dwindling left-wing intelligentsia have known. The Trotsky we see here was `arrogant and imperious', fully the equal of Lenin or Stalin in barbarity. At last, students of Soviet Russia have a biography they can trust.'
--Contemporary Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674036158
• ISBN 13: 9780674036154
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 648