A short life of the author
Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 7 November 1879 – 21 August 1940) was a Marxist revolutionary, Soviet politician, military commander, and writer whose intellectual range and literary gifts made him unique among the leaders of the Russian Revolution — a man who could organise an insurrection, command an army, and write a three-volume history of the revolution he had led, all at a level that would have been remarkable if he had done only one of these things. His murder by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940 completed the arc of a life that embodied the promise and the catastrophe of twentieth-century revolutionary politics.
Early Life and Revolutionary Activity
Trotsky was born in Yanovka, Ukraine, the son of prosperous Jewish farmers. He was drawn to revolutionary politics as a teenager, arrested for the first time at eighteen, and exiled to Siberia at twenty-one. He escaped using a forged passport bearing the name “Trotsky” — taken, according to legend, from one of his jailers — and made his way to London, where he met Lenin and joined the editorial board of Iskra (The Spark), the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party’s newspaper.
The relationship with Lenin was productive but fractious. When the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, Trotsky initially sided with neither faction, advocating unity. He spent the years between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in exile — Vienna, Paris, New York — writing, organising, and developing his theory of “permanent revolution,” which argued that socialist revolution in backward countries could not stop at the bourgeois-democratic stage but must proceed immediately to workers’ power.
The Revolution and the Red Army
Trotsky returned to Russia in May 1917, allied himself definitively with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and became the principal organiser of the October Revolution. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee, he directed the insurrection that brought the Bolsheviks to power — a fact that Stalin would spend decades trying to erase from the historical record.
As People’s Commissar for War (1918–1925), Trotsky created the Red Army virtually from nothing and led it to victory in the Russian Civil War against the White armies, foreign interventions, and internal rebellions. His armoured train, from which he directed operations across the vast fronts, became legendary. The military achievement was extraordinary: Trotsky built an effective fighting force of five million men from the wreckage of the imperial army, improvised logistics across a collapsing infrastructure, and held together a new state that was simultaneously fighting on multiple fronts.
The History of the Russian Revolution (1930–1932)
Trotsky’s masterwork, written in exile on the island of Prinkipo (Büyükada) in Turkey, is a three-volume history of the February and October Revolutions of 1917 that is simultaneously a work of historical scholarship, a political argument, and a piece of literary art. The book is written from an explicitly Marxist perspective — Trotsky makes no pretence of neutrality — but its intellectual scope, its psychological acuity, and its narrative power place it among the great works of historical writing in any tradition.
Trotsky’s method combines structural analysis — the economic forces, class conflicts, and institutional dynamics that made revolution inevitable — with vivid portraiture of individuals: Lenin’s strategic genius, Kerensky’s fatal vacillation, the Tsar’s obtuse incomprehension. The result is a history that explains why events happened while making the reader feel what it was like to be present when they happened.
Edmund Wilson, in To the Finland Station, called it “the most brilliant work of history written by an active participant.” Even historians hostile to Trotsky’s politics have acknowledged the book’s power.
My Life (1930)
Trotsky’s autobiography, also written on Prinkipo, covers his life from childhood through his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929. It is a partisan document — Trotsky settles scores, justifies decisions, and attacks his enemies — but it is also a compelling narrative of a life lived at the intersection of politics, war, and ideas. The book’s best passages describe the texture of revolutionary life: the arguments, the pamphlets, the prison cells, the escapes, the moments of decision when history turns on the actions of individuals.
Literature and Revolution (1924)
Written while Trotsky was still in power, Literature and Revolution is one of the most important Marxist works of literary criticism. Trotsky argues against both the “proletarian culture” advocates (who wanted art to serve immediate political purposes) and the formalists (who wanted art to be autonomous). His position — that socialist revolution would eventually create the conditions for a genuinely free and universal culture, but that in the meantime artists should be given maximum creative freedom — was humane, intellectually sophisticated, and ultimately irrelevant, since Stalin’s cultural policies moved in exactly the opposite direction.
The Revolution Betrayed (1937)
Written in Norway, The Revolution Betrayed is Trotsky’s analysis of what had gone wrong with the Soviet Union under Stalin. He argued that the USSR had undergone a bureaucratic degeneration — a new ruling caste of party officials had appropriated the gains of the revolution for themselves — but that the fundamental economic achievements of the revolution (state ownership of the means of production, planned economy) remained intact. The book’s analysis of bureaucratic power anticipated later sociological work on authoritarian systems, though its faith in the salvageability of the Soviet economic model has not been vindicated by history.
Exile and Assassination
After losing the power struggle to Stalin following Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky was progressively marginalised: expelled from the Politburo in 1926, expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, exiled to Alma-Ata in 1928, and deported from the Soviet Union entirely in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico, writing prolifically while watching as Stalin’s show trials systematically destroyed the Old Bolsheviks — his former comrades and allies.
On 20 August 1940, Ramón Mercader, a Spanish NKVD agent who had infiltrated Trotsky’s household, struck him in the head with an ice axe. Trotsky died the following day. He was sixty years old.
Collecting Trotsky
The History of the Russian Revolution (1932, Simon and Schuster, 3 volumes) in first American edition is a significant collectible, bringing $500–$2,000 for a complete set. My Life (1930, Scribner’s) first editions are also sought. Russian-language editions of Trotsky’s works are extremely scarce due to systematic suppression in the Soviet Union. Items bearing Trotsky’s signature are rare and valuable.