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Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary

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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.

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.

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.

If Shakespeare had been of an era after Trotsky, the immortal playwright could have added another classic to his grand tragedies about Caesar, Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet. The life of Lev Davidovich Bronshtein -- Trotsky -- had all the elements that Shakespeare found essential for his great dramas: a larger-than-life personality, magnificent talents, gigantic flaws, monumental historic wars, pursuit by an incarnate villain and a tragic, violent death. The Shakesperean Trotsky would have lived for ages.

Dmitri Volkogonov's biography of the Number Two man (after Lenin) of the Bolshevik Revolution would have given grist to Shakespeare's mill for the Russian biographer's study of Leon Trotsky gives a good view of the man caught up in the spell binding events that shaped Trotsky's time. Volkogonov, a former general in the Soviet army, became chairman of the Russian Declassifying Commission after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus had access to the super secrets of the old regime. But it is not necessarily the revelations of some of those ultra secrets which makes this biography such a compelling drama. It was Trotsky himself, his life, his great talents, his impossible dreams and his pursuit by one of the Twentieth Century's most vile villains which rivets the attention, plus Volkogonov's hard-driving narrative so admirable translated by Harold Shukman.

A leading member of the October Revolution which abruptly transformed Russian history, Trotsky was one of the most prominent Marxist intellectuals. He was considered by many to have been Lenin's heir-apparent. Writer, historian, spell-binding speaker, Trotsky led the Red Army in the Civil War which followed the Revolution and was one of those in the inner circle who helped create the disaster that became the Soviet Union. Early on, however, he saw Joseph Stalin as his nemesis. And Stalin recognized Trotsky as an obstacle to his own ambitions. Thus began an historic persecution, and finally the international flight of Trotsky to avoid being killed by Stalin's doctrinaire assassins. Oh, this is high drama, indeed, and the Volkogonov-Shukman description makes the most of it.

The electrifying description of Trotsky's ultimate death in the surrealist surroundings of Mexico after a zealot Stalinist jams an ice-pick into his skull reads like a movies script -- as the actually event certainly must have seemed.

This book is a must for the general reader interested in Russia of the 20th Century and a valuable addition to those who are serious historians.

Highly recommended for all those really interested in soviet History. Academically well researched. Amazon shoul make a special discount for it.!!!

"The entire structure of Leninism is at present based on lies and falsification and carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own destruction."

Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, known as Trotsky, the one time Social Democrat, one time political opponent of Lenin, one time war correspondent, one time toast of radical society dilatants, one time People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, one time member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, and finally political fugitive and Stalinist purge victim wrote the above quote in 1913. Dmitri Volkogonov's book, Trotsky, provides a stimulating portrait of this fascinating personality and the various roles/political outlooks that he struggled through.

To start let's consider Volkoganov's view of the 2nd Party Congress held in London in the summer of 1903. Far from repeating the usual interpretation, he offers a new one, namely that instead of being simply a question of party organization which divided the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, it was "over a difference in the theory and practice of revolutionary methodology. The congress formalized the coexistence of two parallel tendencies: one radical, revolutionary and uncompromising, which would characterize the Bolsheviks; the other reformist, evolutionary and parliamentary, which was to become the hallmark of those henceforth known as Mensheviks" page 29. As the author mentions, it is also interesting to note that the original platform of the RSDLP advocated democracy, secret suffrage, inviolability of the person, freedom of thought, speech, press, movement, assembly, strikes and trade unions as well as other similar goals.

How did all these noble dreams of a great humanist state end up as a mass gulag? The answer in one word is Lenin. Lenin, the egotistical nihilist, rejected out of hand any "bourgeois theory", relying solely instead on his own interpretation of Marx and Engels. Any non-Bolshevik political opponent was subject to the worst sort of derogatory comments and personal attack. In March of 1917, Lenin arrived in revolutionary Petrograd unwilling to compromise with anyone and enjoying unlimited financial resources thanks to the German General Staff. Trotsky, who had since joined the Bolsheviks, supported Lenin's hard line unquestioningly. While the Provisional Government worried of an attack from the right, Lenin, ever the cynical opportunist, promised an end to the war and land to the peasants. Bolshevik agitators spread through the army to convince the troops to desert or simply ignore the orders of their officers. By October the stage was set, a radical party of limited support and scope was able to overthrow what remained of the Provisional Government with little effort or bloodshed, but by rejecting all compromise and by ruthlessly exercising complete power, Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks made the Russian Civil War a reality. After the October "Revolution" Trotsky became ever more important to Lenin, whose effectiveness as a speaker was limited. As Yaroslavsky described him at the time, Trotsky was "a man most profoundly dedicated to the revolution, a man who has grown up to be a tribune, with a tongue as finely honed and flexible as steel, a tongue that can cut his enemies down, and a pen which scatters a wealth of ideas like handfuls of artistic pearls." Page 82.

Perhaps the author's most important view is that the tragedy that became the Soviet Union required each of the Bolshevik triumvirate to play the part he was most suited for. Lenin was the ruthless opportunist, his unquestioning will to destroy and control by terror setting the tone and shape of the entire system. Stalin was the pathological paranoid master of conspiracy, the consolidator, basically a fascistic criminal, who had got his start in the Party as a bank robber. And Trotsky? He provided the siren's song for the masses, the pure light of his reason projected to attract a storm of adolescent and unquestioning human devotion and energy willing to follow whoever held the red flag. Is it any wonder that Trotsky didn't outlast the Civil War period by very long? After his expulsion, Trotsky provided the excuse for Stalin's tyranny, even supplying the ideological framework for the disasterous "Second October Revolution" of 1928-40. The Bolshevik system required all three and played itself out in a very mechanical, a very deterministic way, success meant retaining absolute power and in that one sense, the only goal with any meaning for Lenin, it was successful until 1991 when the machinary collapsed.

Why do unrepentant Leninists in the West continue with the charade that Bolshevism held any hope for mankind? Pride and egotism, along with a cynical and patronizing view of humanity blind them to the shambles all around them, block their noses from the smell of the grimacing, yet rancid Leninist corpse that they have strapped to their backs. That and the role they play as scarecrow/whipping boy for the reactionary and Reaganist right which automatically labels any opposition to the corporate-dominated national security state as "communism" gives them a false, yet ego-enhancing, sense of importance. In other words they'd love to stop acting like trick dogs, but they can't give up the attention they get.

This book and the author's biography on Lenin tell the whole sordid history. Time for the "left" to finally bury the Leninist corpse and decide on a counter-argument that exposes Reaganist "behind-closed-doors-government". What America especially needs is a new urge and will to protect our basic human rights and liberties, such as the original goals of our Founding Fathers or, for that matter, of the RSDLP. Nobody needs another utopian ideology, such as Leninism or some deluted, "people-friendly" version of Reaganism, but a pragmatic program that sees humanity, its natural physical environment and its artifical economic environment for what they are and responds accordingly.

As someone who is interested in the Russian Revolution, I have to say that Volkogonov's biography is inaccurate. He makes false claims, which he never backs up. (For example, Volkogonov states that Trotsky was corrupt, early on his book, but he never presents any supporting facts for this assertation.) He also grievously misquotes Trotsky as saying, "It is impossible to organize an army without repression. It is necassary to give soldiers the choice of death at the front or the rear." This is only a part of the original quote, taken from My Life, by Trotsky, which reads, "It impossible to organize an army without repression. It is necassary to give soldiers the choice between death at the front or the rear. That was the principle of old armies, but we organized an army on the principles of the October Revolution." The point is not to disput the accuracy of Trotsky's statement, but to get an idea of what he said.
I am sure Mr. Volkogonov worked very hard on his book, but reviews by disillisioned ex-communists are not really the best source of information about revolutionaries. As Chris Harman says, "You have to sympathise with a revolution to write about it." This is because without sympathy, no one will understand what motivated the Bolsheviks, or any other bunch of revolutionaries. It seems to be popular now to beat dead Marxists even deader. Whatever our political opinions, it does no good to judge Trotsky from the view-point of the 21st century, after the collapse of Stalinsim. People have to be judged in the context of their time. Ignoring the battle between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks also gives a distorted view of Trotsky, who, like all Russian Marxists of his time was deeply changed by the split. Hate to say it, but, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary is an ax job. Ironic, huh, that Trotsky's biography whould be called an ax-job. There should be a limit on the number of those one person can get. For a REAL analysis of Trotsky, I would go for Isaac Deutscher's biography (it's three volumes but is absolutely fascinating, I read the first book in two days. GREAT books.) A warning with those books, however, is that Vol. 1 seems very pro-Trotsky, until the end, where Deutscher brings up some very tough questions about Trotsky's involvement in the so-called "Labour-armies". W. Bruce Linclon has written an amazing trilogy of books about the Russian Revolution in general, though it essential to read his Red Victory to gain a clear understanding of the conditions facing the Bolsheviks at the end of the Civil War. Trotsky's autobiography (My Life) is also a good source, though like all autobiographies, it has to be taken with a grain of salt. A warning about My Life- it is very interesting but contains some passages that might require liberal use of the Marxists Internet Archive's Dictionary of Marxism. I hope readers will turn to more balanced sources than Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, when researching Trotsky's life. A modern-day Marxist could easily blow off Volkogonov's work as crap. Deutscher's sympathetic but relentless biography is impossible for anyone to brush off or forget.

A brilliant insight into the life and times of a man dedicated to the Idea of Revolution first, and socialism, etc, second

Attempting to make the most interesting political figure of the twentieth century seem absolutely boring would be quite an obstacle for most people, especially when you have access to the Soviet Presidential Archive, but Dmitri Volkogonov has somehow achieved this task with flying colors. The historian Isaac Deutscher wrote a three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky in the 1950's, and his writings were far superior to this biography of Trotsky by Volkogonov, which was written within the past decade!

The playright Edvard Radzinsky had the same access to the Presidential Archive that Volkognov had, yet his biography of Stalin was one of the most informative books I have ever read. Perhaps Volkogonov attempted to take advantage of the newly established market economy in Russia by producing as many books as he could(at the expense of research and lucidity of writing), and after they attained a respectable amount of success, he walked away with all the money(of course he died in 1995, so I guess his family now is now taking the money). He tells the reader everything they could have found elsewhere(even on Microsoft Encarta!), such as Trotsky's birth in Yanavka in 1879, the Russian Social Democratic split in 1903, his first encounter with Lenin, his role as the founder of the Red Army, etcetera, and etcetera. This is all fine if you're not familiar with Trotsky life, but it's not fine if the author has access to as exclusive as documents as the Presidential archive. A prospective reader would have expected a book that claims to be a "breakthrough reinterpetration" of Trotsky to live up to it's name, but I found that it almost certainly didn't. Although [this] is a good price for a Hardback book with a dustjacket, I would still recommend that you just look at MSN Encarta's description of Trotsky, you learn all of the same stuff that Volkogonov somehow crammed into 488 pgs(maybe this is what he did to write the book, who knows?). Edvard Radzinsky has written books about Rasputin, Nicholas II, and Stalin, so there's always the possibility that he'll write a biography of Trotsky, and maybe even Lenin(tasks which would undo all of the damage that Volkogonov has done to the prestige of the Presidential Archive).