Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Leon Trotsky, leader of the Red Army.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By and Films To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Trotsky: A Biography, Robert Service, Belknap Press Of The Harvard University Press, 2009
I have, on more than one previous occasion, noted that the spirit of the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, animates the political material reviewed in this space, and is some ways the materials presented makes no sense without acknowledging that hard truth. I have also noted, as well, that of all the biographies, sketches, memoirs, etc. concerning the life and times of this extraordinary revolutionary that Isaac Deutscher’s three volume Prophet series done in the 1950s and 1960s still, to my mind, is the definitive such study of the man. After reading this Trotsky biography and another more specialized volume that centers on the last period of his life and his subsequent assassination by a Stalinist agent down in Mexico in 1940, both which have the benefit of the latest in archival, particularly Soviet archival, material I still hold to that opinion. However, the present book under review, gives a fairly decent exposition in one volume of Trotsky’s life, warts and all, from a liberal anti-communist academic perspective.
I admit to being somewhat surprised by Professor Service’s book. Not, as mentioned above for its expected liberal disdain for the Soviet experiment, that kind of expectation comes with wading into liberal academic territory. That disdain has been, moreover, telegraphed by Professor previously in his biographies of Stalin and Lenin. What is surprising is that Professor Service felt the need to write a biography of the fallen revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the year 2009 long after his ghost, and that of the Soviet Union, that he was instrumental in creating, especially its military structure, have left the scene and apparently no longer, according to his remarks at the end of the book animate world politics. Furthermore, while I believe this book has a certain merit as a contemporary Trotsky primer it certainly has not revealed much new in the way of biographical material despite the opening up of the archives. That is the sense, or one of the senses, that I mean when I say I continue to stand in awe of Isaac Deutscher’s exhaustive study.
For those not familiar with Trotsky’s life Service details his Ukrainian Jewish childhood, his early pre-revolutionary activities, his immersion into the Russian revolutionary milieu in Russian and in exile, his leadership of the Russian revolution of 1905 and after its defeat its defense , the pre-World War I free agent period, the struggle against World War I, the 1917 February and October revolutions where he links his fate with the Bolsheviks , the civil war to defend that October revolution, and Trotsky’s key role in creating the Red Army and the Communist International. He also details the post-Lenin inner-Bolshevik Party struggle where Trotsky’s star started to fate, his internal and then eternal exiles after his defeats at the hand so f Stalin, his fight to create the stillborn Fourth International to replace the Communist International in the fight for world socialist revolution and his assassination at the hands of a Stalinist agent in 1940. Along the way he also gives scope to Trotsky’s wide ranging literary and intellectual interest that permitted him to continue to make his mark on the political world after his exile, to make a living and to fund his various political projects.
In one sense it is hard for a biographer, any biographer, to say something new about such an open book political man as Leon Trotsky. Both because he wrote much, including his memoirs, My Life, self-serving as Professor Service believes or not, about his political life and positions from early on well before the Russian Revolution of 1905 and because the events that he was associated with left little room for not previously making it onto the pages of history. So what is left for a biographer, Robert Service or Isaac Deutscher included. Well, since no one has scoured the archives and found that Trotsky really did take German gold during World War I. Or that he really, as charged in the Moscow trials, was an agent of the Mikado, British imperialism or Hitlerite Germany then what is left is speculation, now apparently endless speculation, about his personal character flaws.
This is actually the ground that makes Service’s book interesting as he, like others before him detail Trotsky’s prickly personality, his failure to suffer fools gladly (or at all), his aloofness and haughtiness that made him less than the perfect choice for leadership of political factions in the struggle for power. Service’s Trotsky comes out loud and clear as being primarily one of the last of the free agent revolutionaries that while, perhaps, belonging to revolutionary organizations set their own agenda. That, in the end, was a key to Trotsky’s political undoing. Service also details more extensively than I have seen elsewhere some of Trotsky private traits like his late life affair with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, his health issues and his strained relationships with most of his kin folk.
For those who have not read a previous Trotsky biography and who understand that Professor Service is one of those liberal academics who see Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin as basically all part of the same anti-Western democratic political original sin, Bolshevism, then there is much that can be gleaned from his work. But, I always come back to this hard fact when dealing with the life of the much maligned, besmirched, and denigrated revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, warts and all, comes as close as any historic figure that has come out of bourgeois society to being the proto-type for the new communist man that humankind has products thus far. In that sense Leon Trotsky is in need of no certificate of revolutionary good conduct from Robert Service, Mikhail Gorbachev, this writer or the reader. Enough said.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By and Films To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Trotsky: A Biography, Robert Service, Belknap Press Of The Harvard University Press, 2009
I have, on more than one previous occasion, noted that the spirit of the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, animates the political material reviewed in this space, and is some ways the materials presented makes no sense without acknowledging that hard truth. I have also noted, as well, that of all the biographies, sketches, memoirs, etc. concerning the life and times of this extraordinary revolutionary that Isaac Deutscher’s three volume Prophet series done in the 1950s and 1960s still, to my mind, is the definitive such study of the man. After reading this Trotsky biography and another more specialized volume that centers on the last period of his life and his subsequent assassination by a Stalinist agent down in Mexico in 1940, both which have the benefit of the latest in archival, particularly Soviet archival, material I still hold to that opinion. However, the present book under review, gives a fairly decent exposition in one volume of Trotsky’s life, warts and all, from a liberal anti-communist academic perspective.
I admit to being somewhat surprised by Professor Service’s book. Not, as mentioned above for its expected liberal disdain for the Soviet experiment, that kind of expectation comes with wading into liberal academic territory. That disdain has been, moreover, telegraphed by Professor previously in his biographies of Stalin and Lenin. What is surprising is that Professor Service felt the need to write a biography of the fallen revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the year 2009 long after his ghost, and that of the Soviet Union, that he was instrumental in creating, especially its military structure, have left the scene and apparently no longer, according to his remarks at the end of the book animate world politics. Furthermore, while I believe this book has a certain merit as a contemporary Trotsky primer it certainly has not revealed much new in the way of biographical material despite the opening up of the archives. That is the sense, or one of the senses, that I mean when I say I continue to stand in awe of Isaac Deutscher’s exhaustive study.
For those not familiar with Trotsky’s life Service details his Ukrainian Jewish childhood, his early pre-revolutionary activities, his immersion into the Russian revolutionary milieu in Russian and in exile, his leadership of the Russian revolution of 1905 and after its defeat its defense , the pre-World War I free agent period, the struggle against World War I, the 1917 February and October revolutions where he links his fate with the Bolsheviks , the civil war to defend that October revolution, and Trotsky’s key role in creating the Red Army and the Communist International. He also details the post-Lenin inner-Bolshevik Party struggle where Trotsky’s star started to fate, his internal and then eternal exiles after his defeats at the hand so f Stalin, his fight to create the stillborn Fourth International to replace the Communist International in the fight for world socialist revolution and his assassination at the hands of a Stalinist agent in 1940. Along the way he also gives scope to Trotsky’s wide ranging literary and intellectual interest that permitted him to continue to make his mark on the political world after his exile, to make a living and to fund his various political projects.
In one sense it is hard for a biographer, any biographer, to say something new about such an open book political man as Leon Trotsky. Both because he wrote much, including his memoirs, My Life, self-serving as Professor Service believes or not, about his political life and positions from early on well before the Russian Revolution of 1905 and because the events that he was associated with left little room for not previously making it onto the pages of history. So what is left for a biographer, Robert Service or Isaac Deutscher included. Well, since no one has scoured the archives and found that Trotsky really did take German gold during World War I. Or that he really, as charged in the Moscow trials, was an agent of the Mikado, British imperialism or Hitlerite Germany then what is left is speculation, now apparently endless speculation, about his personal character flaws.
This is actually the ground that makes Service’s book interesting as he, like others before him detail Trotsky’s prickly personality, his failure to suffer fools gladly (or at all), his aloofness and haughtiness that made him less than the perfect choice for leadership of political factions in the struggle for power. Service’s Trotsky comes out loud and clear as being primarily one of the last of the free agent revolutionaries that while, perhaps, belonging to revolutionary organizations set their own agenda. That, in the end, was a key to Trotsky’s political undoing. Service also details more extensively than I have seen elsewhere some of Trotsky private traits like his late life affair with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, his health issues and his strained relationships with most of his kin folk.
For those who have not read a previous Trotsky biography and who understand that Professor Service is one of those liberal academics who see Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin as basically all part of the same anti-Western democratic political original sin, Bolshevism, then there is much that can be gleaned from his work. But, I always come back to this hard fact when dealing with the life of the much maligned, besmirched, and denigrated revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, warts and all, comes as close as any historic figure that has come out of bourgeois society to being the proto-type for the new communist man that humankind has products thus far. In that sense Leon Trotsky is in need of no certificate of revolutionary good conduct from Robert Service, Mikhail Gorbachev, this writer or the reader. Enough said.
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