Trotsky
A Biography


By Robert Service
December 2009
Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781405053464
600 pages
$57.50 Hardcover


A brilliant reexamination of Leon Trotsky by the bestelling and critically acclaimed author of Lenin: A Biography, Stalin: A Biography and Comrades

Revolutionary practitioner, theorist, factional chief, sparkling writer, ‘ladies’ man’ (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.


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