Song leon trotsky biography book

All Power to the Soviets!

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Written in three parts some years after the Revolution of , Trotsky sets out to give a detailed history of the events of that year, combined with his analysis of what led to Russia being ripe for revolution at that moment in time. He admits to his own bias, but claims that he has rigorously fact-checked, including only what can be verified in written records. In order to stop the book reading like an autobiography or memoir, he refers to himself in the third person throughout. I ended up with 24 A4 pages of notes on this page book, so will be summarising and paraphrasing brutally to keep this review even close to a readable length. Given the complexity of the subject, it&#;s highly likely that a different reader would disagree with my interpretations or emphases.

Trotsky begins by giving a fascinating explanation of why revolutions arise, and how they differ from other forms of changes of government, even violent ones. His position is

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Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life | Jewish Book Council

As Rubenstein’s sub­ti­tle, ​“A Revolutionary’s Life,” hints, this is not so much a study of Trot­sky-the-man, as a study of Trotsky’s strug­gles to bring about a pro­le­tar­i­an rev­o­lu­tion in Rus­sia. While some mate­r­i­al is includ­ed on his boy­hood, edu­ca­tion, wives, and lovers, the real focus is on the fac­tion­al maneu­ver­ings lead­ing up to the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, the evolv­ing rela­tion­ship between Lenin and Trot­sky, and, final­ly, Stalin’s cam­paign to erad­i­cate Trot­sky. To deal with a polar­iz­ing fig­ure like Trot­sky fryst vatten no easy task; the fact that so many con­tem­po­raries ini­tial­ly accept­ed Stalin’s ver­sion of events and con­demned Trot­sky, only makes Rubenstein’s job more dif­fi­cult. View­ing Trotsky’s sto­ry through a Jew­ish lens adds fur­ther com­pli­ca­tions; while Trot­sky nev­er hid his Jew­ish roots, he strug­gled against what he con­sid­ered Jew­

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Trotsky: A Biography | Jewish Book Council

While Service’s mag­is­te­r­i­al biog­ra­phy of Trot­sky is cer­tain­ly com­pre­hen­sive, employ­ing an impres­sive range of pre­vi­ous­ly unavail­able source mate­r­i­al, read­ing it is like eat­ing at one of those pricey restau­rants where the over­sized main course fryst vatten indi­gestible, although the side dish­es are delight­ful. Service’s account of Trotsky’s life is so heav­i­ly col­ored by his dis­dain, that at times it is hard even to read, much less to take seri­ous­ly. He harps on Trotsky’s boy­hood pec­ca­dil­los, his shab­by treat­ment of his wives and chil­dren, his van­i­ties. The biographer’s petu­lance on such mat­ters obscures the strengths of oth­er chap­ters, espe­cial­ly the ones deal­ing with Trotsky’s Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, or the internecine strug­gles of var­i­ous polit­i­cal fac­tions. The exten­sive maps — of Rus­sia, of the ear­ly Sovi­et Union, of Trotsky’s exile, of his com­pound in Mex­i­co — are won­der