Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary [Hardcover]

Dmitri Volkogonov (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 12, 1996

A reinterpretation of the life and ruthless career of Leon Trotsky, once known as a tragic figure in Soviet history, is based on Soviet and Western archives, interviews with surviving members of the Trotsky family, and members of NKVD hit squad ordered by Stalin to locate and kill Trotsky. 15,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although for years Trotsky had condemned Lenin as a potential dictator, in 1917 he became a radical Bolshevik, a hard-line Leninist committed to a one-party state with a monopoly of power sustained through terror and violence. Together with Lenin, the military leader and fiery orator (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879) liquidated opponents, inaugurated forced collective labor and unleashed a violent campaign against religion. Using hitherto unavailable materials from Soviet archives, Volkogonov, special assistant to Boris Yeltsin, persuasively argues that Trotsky, while preaching global revolution, helped Lenin lay the foundations of a repressive domestic system that grew organically into the totalitarian dictatorship presided over by Stalin, Trotsky's rival. Assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by one of Stalin's henchmen, Trotsky, according to this meticulous, dense political biography, shares responsibility for the Red Terror that claimed him as victim. Complementing Volkogonov's recent critical biographies of Stalin and Lenin, this compelling study lays to rest the image of Trotsky as a persecuted idealist, blameless victim of Stalin's duplicity.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Currently a special assistant to Russia's President Boris Yeltsin, Volkogonov (Lenin: A New Biography, LJ 10/15/94, and Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, LJ 9/15/91) has carefully mined mountains of newly released sources in this study of Trotsky. The latest effort is a well-conceived political biography that clearly redresses the paucity of reliable works on the enigmatic Trotsky. It captures his enormous energy, his restless intellect, and his unswerving faith in the inevitability of world revolution. Volkogonov's subject has a tragic Greek cast?from his meteoric rise under Lenin to his brutal demise under Stalin. The present work complements and frequently overshadows Isaac Deutscher's comprehensive three-volume study (1954-63). Recommended for all but the smallest collections.?Mark R. Yerburgh, Fern Ridge Community Lib., Veneta, Ore.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1ST edition (March 12, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684822938
• ISBN-13: 978-0684822938
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,466,867 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trostsky Comes Alive, May 23, 2001

By 

David A. Caplan "dave659" (Greenwich, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (Hardcover)

Volkogonov has written a very sensitive portrait of Trotsky. For specialists, of course, it should be combined with a reading of Deutscher's three-volume biography, but for general readers Volkogonov should suffice. Volkogonov's "Trotsky" is not as scholarly as Deutscher's masterly work, but it's more balanced. The author, a disillusioned former Communist, recognizes Trotsky's genius and portrays him in sympathetic and tragic terms, yet frequently reminds us that his subject was working under fatally flawed premises. Since he doesn't take communism seriously on an intellectual level, he spares us most of the details about theoretical clashes among the Bolsheviks over Marxist interpretations. He also reminds us that even though Trotsky never ceased criticizing Stalin's tyranny, his own role in the development of the murderous role of the CPSU was not innocent. Some readers may justly criticize Volkogonov's haphazard organization of his materials, but I find it doesn't detract from his work, and I rather enjoyed his more personal observations.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Man Destroyed By the Revolution He Made, November 24, 2005

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givbatam3 "givbatam3" (REHOVOT Israel) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (Hardcover)

Leon Trotsky is one of the most fascinating, and yet despicable
men in history. The most brilliant of the Bolsheviks who made the October Revolution in Russia and its number 2 leader during the Civil War that solidified the Communist regime, the man is truly an enigma. At a young age, he decided to use his talents to create a Marxist world-wide revolution and still at a young age, had already made a name for himself by moving into Lenin's close circle before the famous Second Party Congress that led to the formation of the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions and then to being one of the leaders of the abortive 1905 Revolution in Russia. It is already at this early stage we see the strange combination of far-sightedness combined with myopia that came to characterize him. This is manifested in Trotsky's correct realization that Lenin's formula for creating a tightly controlled movement ruled by the Center would ultimately lead to a one-man dictatorship. Yet, in spite of his almost prophetic perception of Lenin's flaws, when the February 1917 Revolution leading to the overthrow of the Tsarist regime occurs, Trotsky throws all caution to the wind and rejects all his previous criticism of Lenin and the Bolshevist path and wholeheartedly joins him in his plan to carry out a Bolshevik coup. With the success of the Bolsheviks in coming to power, Trotsky reaches the peak of his career, first as Commissar for Foreign Affairs given the unenviable task of negotiating with the Germans who were demanding immense
swaths of Russian territory. He then moves on to be Commissar for War. Here Volkogonov explodes one of the myths that has come up around Trotsky which claims that, overnight, this bookworm and orator suddenly became a military genius in creating the Red Army and leading it to victory over the White forces opposing the Bolsheviks. Volkogonov points out that Trostky, against the views of others like Stalin and Voroshilov supported the use of former Tsarist military officers (called "specialists") to lead the Red Army and they are the ones who really ran the war, even though their "ideological purity" was suspect. Trotsky's role, although important, was primarily to give motivational speeches to the troops and party cadres and to be the liaison with the government in Moscow.
We also now see the dark side of the man, in his support of mass terror, executions, confiscation of grain and the like, in order to bring about his Marxist "utopia".
With the victory of the Bolsheviks, coinciding with Lenin's deteriorating health, the other Bolshevik leaders, always jealous of Trotksy's eloquence and brilliance and his late "jumping on the bandwagon", began to plot to remove him.
At this critical point, Trotsky's myopia, combined with poor health come into play, and he easily falls into the trap of his enemies, the principle one being Stalin, and he is eased out of power. Even though Lenin viewed him as his successor, Trotsky (who was tricked into not coming to Lenin's funeral) is unable to use this and falls quickly.
After this, Trotsky's life quickly goes into a downward spiral. Because of his blind belief that world revolution (which the other Bolsheviks were rapidly losing interest in) is more important that "building socialism in one country", he is expelled from his posts, then the Politburo, then the party and then the USSR in short order. He spends the rest of his life in exile.
Although we again see his farsightedness in predicting that Stalin would reach an accomodation with Hitler, and then correctly predicting that Hitler would turn on Stalin and invade the USSR in 1941, we also see his blindness in refusing to view Lenin as anything other as a perfect saint and prophet (his cult of Lenin was just as extreme as that of Stalin's, only less cynical), and his ridiculous belief that Stalin's adoption of Trotsky's radical farm collectivisation in 1929 might lead to Stalin recalling him from exile. Stalin's show trials against "Trotskyism" sends Trotsky into a mantle of self-pity about all the "lies" being told about him, all the while ignoring his own role in creating the terror state and all the innocent victims he created. He denounces the Stalin terror against the Party, yet he criticized Stalin for halting the collectivization program that led 10 million deaths from terror and famine. All these contradictions lead in the end to Trotsky being isolated by the Marxists outside the USSR and the pathetic failure of his attempt to create a Fourth International. Finally, his own entourage is infiltrated by Stalinist agents, his close family members are murdered, and he is left alone in Mexico to face the inevitable-an assassin (Ramon Mercader) who easily gains access to the old man who lets down his guard because he is tired of being perpetually on the run from Stalin's murder machine. Mercader finally puts him out of his misery.
The life of Trotsky is a tragedy, the story of a man with great potential, who used it to create one of the most evil regimes in human history, and in the end he is consumed by it. This book is a good introduction to this fascinating figure. The author admits that Deutcher's book is very good, but for someone who wants a shorter introduction to the Eternal Revolutionary, this is a good place to start.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "TROTSKY- The Eternal Revolutionary", February 22, 2008

By 

L. Dequesada (JAMAICA,, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (Paperback)

This is probably the best biography written by Russian military historian Dmitri Volkogonov. Using previously unreleased data from the archives of the KGB and the Russian Communist Party makes this biography of Trotsky unique. He is critical of Trotsky exposing him as no better or worse than his "colleagues" Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. However I always detected in Leon Trotsky far more honesty and leadership quality than his victorious adversary Joseph Stalin, who was not only a mass murderer but had an uncanny ability for mendacity.
It is also my opinion that if Trotsky wouldn't have been assasinated (by order of Stalin) in Mexico in 1940, he would've evolved into an advocate of Progressive Populist Democracy as he slowly realized that it was the very same system that he helped create which caused him to fall from grace in the former and then newly formed USSR.
I highly recommend this book.