Robert Service: Trotsky

I had already consumed Robert Service's book Comrades: Communism; A World History so thought it was time I read his books on the main founders of the USSR State - Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. So I started with Trotsky, perhaps the easiest of the 3 to review. We have all heard the phrases - a Leninist, a Trotskyist, a Stalinist. But what do they mean - what different views did each of these three propose and how did each of them build on the theoretical framework proposed by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, written in 1848.

It was an interesting read about one of the main protagonists in the famous 1917 uprising and one of the key players in the creation of the USSR. Yet his major personal flaws, his ruthless putdown of anyone who stood against him and his years of exile in which his world view stagnated, which are so clearly documented in this book, let us see the real man behind the legend. I would not want to be a Trotskyist after reading this book.

The following Amazon book review does a good job.

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.