Trotsky - A Biography - Tapa blanda

A massive study of Trotsky, a grotesque character, politically and personally, even by the demanding standards of communism.--Joseph C. Goulden"Washington Times" (12/28/2009)

Trotsky helps explain both the allure and the danger of the mass murderer who was affectionately known to his followers as "the Old Man."--Adam Kirsch"New Republic" (12/07/2009)

Thick and intensely researched but a pleasure to read, it should remain the definitive work for some time...This is a thoughtful, rewarding and essential contribution to 20th-century history. (starred review)-- (09/28/2009)

Robert Service delivers an outstanding, fascinating biography of this dazzling titan. It is compelling as an adventure story--the ultimate rise and fall--but also revelatory as the scholarly revision of a historical reputation...The portrait of Trotsky's forgotten world of Jewish farmers and poverty-stricken Russian aristocrats is eccentric and intriguing. Trotsky himself hid much of his background that Service reveals for the first time...At the end of Service's revision, what remains of the Prophet? The intellectual, orator, manager of the Bolshevik coup and architect of the Civil War victory remain, but alongside them must be laid the mendacity of his memoirs, the ugly egotism and unpleasant, overweening arrogance, the belief in and enthusiastic practice of killing on a colossal scale, the political ineptitude, the limit of ambition. Apart from their famous row about "socialism in one country" versus international revolution, there was little politically between Stalin and Trotsky. It was personality that divided them and both personalities were highly unattractive. If Trotsky had become dictator, Service is clear that while Russia would have avoided Stalin's personal sadism, the same millions would still have been killed.-- (10/11/2009)

In this astonishingly comprehensive book--Robert Service has trawled almost every archive on the planet that has any reference to Trotsky--we get a clear picture of Trotsky's political development, his part in the 1917 revolution, his differences with Lenin, his break with Stalin and, finally, the years of exile and agitation in which he attracted a ragbag of bizarre followers and made the mistake of professing that there was a form of communism different to Stalin's...This is a superb work of scholarship, and above all leaves the reader in no doubt as to the evil of Trotsky, not just in politics but in his personal life...If you seek to know about this crucial figure in the history of Marxism-Leninism, this book will tell you everything.-- (10/24/2009)

If only, his adherents argued, it had been Trotsky who had succeeded Lenin and not Stalin, then the USSR might have been spared its famines and its terrors, its show trials and its denials of freedom...Now, 50 years after the last full-scale biography of Trotsky in English, Robert Service has turned his attention to this myth--and has, effectively, assassinated Trotsky all over again...If one can imagine the most obnoxious middle-class student radical one has ever met--bitter, sneering, arrogant, selfish, cocky, callous, callow, blinkered and condescending--and if one freezes that image, applies a pair of pince-nez and transports it back to the beginning of the last century, then one has Trotsky...Service makes it absolutely plain that Trotskyism was Stalinism in embryo...Seldom has the pathology of the revolutionary type, and its murderous consequences, been more mercilessly exposed than in this exemplary biography.-- (10/18/2009)

Distinguishing the work is its extensive use of archival sources and rare contemporary published materials, much of it used for the first time in this biography. Service casts a critical eye on Trotsky's own writings and the interpretations of his followers and finds Trotsky's diagnosis of his defeat by Stalin self-serving and misleading...Service succeeds in recovering many of the aspects of Trotsky's life that the revolutionary and his followers tried to bury...A readable and persuasive biography that should be required reading for students of the Soviet Union and the history of world communism.-- (11/01/2009)

The idea that a humane communism could have come out of Trotskyism is pure romanticism, Service says. Yet, Trotskyites maintain even today that the tragedy of Soviet history lay in Trotsky's failure to win the battle of succession for leadership of the Soviet Union. Service's biography will not convince them otherwise. But for those with an open mind, Trotsky: A Biography shows that in the end, Stalin and Trotsky were blood brothers. Blood being the operative word.-- (11/17/2009)

Robert Service fashions a vivid portrait of this brilliant, merciless ideologue, who did not hesitate to drag his country kicking, screaming and bleeding toward the utopia he dreamed of creating for it...[Service] approaches Trotsky without emotional or ideological attachment. He has also mined a rich lode of newly accessible archival material, including documents that reveal Trotsky's support for cruel methods while Lenin was still actively leading the government...More than anything else, Service compels us to look at Trotsky as he really was rather than to accept the image that Trotsky conjured for himself.-- (11/18/2009)

Trotsky, even before one of Stalin's agents found him in Mexico and assassinated him with an ice axe, was a romantic figure to those who believed that if only he had succeeded Lenin everything would have been better. Service, who has also written studies of Lenin and Stalin, does an excellent job of dispensing with such notions...Service's book, unlike much writing about Trotsky, is the work of a historian, not an ideologue, and the better for it.-- (11/30/2009)