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Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources, Robert Service offers new insights. He discusses Trotsky's fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to unify; 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. 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.--From publisher description.… (more)
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Yet in this new source, the author aims to tear Trotsky down from his pedestal, and he does it hard. To be fair, he describes Trotsky's brilliance, his surprising military leadership, but also his political blunders with no mercy, and also does the most acidic attacks on his rough and arrogant character. Some go too far - I highly doubt that his daughter committed suicide solely because of him, for example. But some repair of distorted history occurs.
With this violent personality, would he have been any better than Lenin or Stalin? Well, those two set the bar abysmally low. In this time and place of black-and-grey morality, any man who offers the slightest chance of redemption is only too willing to be painted as the brightest star.
Still an interesting book, but treat it with a critical eye, as you should any Soviet history. I will leave with the end quote: "Death came early to him because he fought for a cause that was more destructive than he ever imagined."