Leon Trotsky A Revolutionary's Life

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both a world-class intellectual and a man capable of the most narrow-minded ideological dogmatism. He was an effective military strategist and an adept diplomat, who staked the fate of the Bolshevik revolution on the meager foundation of a Europe-wide Communist upheaval.

He was a master politician who played his cards badly in the momentous struggle for power against Stalin in the 1920s. And he was an assimilated, indifferent Jew who was among the first to foresee that Hitler’s triumph would mean disaster for his fellow European Jews, and that Stalin would attempt to forge an alliance with Hitler if Soviet overtures to the Western democracies failed.

Here, Trotsky emerges as a brilliant and brilliantly flawed man. Rubenstein offers us a Trotsky who is mentally acute and impatient with others, one of the finest students of contemporary politics who refused to engage in the nitty-gritty of party organization in the 1920s, when Stalin was maneuvering, inexorably, toward Trotsky’s own political oblivion.

As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his preface, “Leon Trotsky haunts our historical memory. A preeminent revolutionary figure and a masterful writer, Trotsky led an upheaval that helped to define the contours of twentieth-century politics.” In this lucid and judicious evocation of Trotsky’s life, Joshua Rubenstein gives us an interpretation for the twenty-first century.

ISBN-13: 9780300137248
Author : Joshua Rubenstein
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 10/15/2011

Editorial Reviews - Publishers Weekly

As much a myth and a legend as a man, Leon Trotsky is an individual of deep contradictions. One of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky was a theorist and architect of the Communist system. Though he helped create the authoritarian structure of the Soviet hierarchy, he pushed for greater openness within the system and suffered irreparable rifts, first with Lenin, then with Stalin. A dedicated intellectual and scholar and by all accounts smarter than Stalin, Trotsky was continuously outmaneuvered by his rival, who eventually had him exiled and assassinated.

Rubenstein, a historian of the Soviet Union, seeks neither to lionize nor to demonize his subject, and the complicated portrait that emerges is of a man with a keen curiosity for human nature, but prone to the most stubborn closed-mindedness, a brilliant strategist and tactician who repeatedly erred and miscalculated. The author is particularly interested in Trotsky’s engagement with his Jewish identity, which manifested mostly in the political sphere. Fast-paced and engaging, Rubenstein’s brief biography provides a solid introduction to the period and a detailed examination of a man much studied but little understood. (Oct.)

Meet the Author

Joshua Rubenstein is the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA and a longtime associate at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He is the author of Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg and is coeditor of The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov and Stalin's Secret Pogrom, both published by Yale University Press. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom received a National Jewish Book Award.