The Trotsky Reappraisal

"In 1988 the Director of State Archives in Moscow, Yuri Afanasyev, declared that in the vital process of re-examining Soviet history Trotsky is 'the biggest blank spot'. Leon Trotsky is certainly one of the most important, talented and enigmatic figures in twentieth-century world history. In The Trotsky Reappraisal an exciting mix of Soviet scholars and Western academics offer a pioneering reassessment of Trotsky's personality, his role in the Revolution and the ensuing civil war, and his opposition to Stalinism." "Soviet historians have been released from decades of what one Russian has called 'ignorant certainty', and are now seeking to re-examine many key questions, including the process by which Stalin eliminated opposition and consolidated his power. Such investigations lead in many directions but must include the exploration of the intellectual richness of Marxism - long concealed by Stalinist dogma. In this context, too, the reappraisal of Trotsky is overdue."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Davidson explores classic themes in historical materialism as he explains: the moments of transition from the dominance of one mode of production to another; the process of social revolution which accompany these transitions; and the problem of nationalism, both as a theoretical challenge to Marxism's capacity for historical explanation and as a practical obstacle to socialist consciousness.

The Russian Revolution and Civil War in the years 1917 to 1921 is one of the most widely studied periods in history. It is also somewhat inevitably one that has generated a huge flow of literature in the decades that have passed since the events themselves. However, until now, historians of the revolution have had no dedicated bibliography of the period and little claim to bibliographical control over the literature. The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921offers for the first time a comprehensive bibliographical guide to this crucial and fascinating period of history. The Bibliography focuses on the key years of 1917 to 1921, starting with the February Revolution of 1917 and concluding with the 10th Party Congress of March 1921, and covers all the key events of the intervening years. As such it identifies these crucial years as something more than simply the creation of a communist state.

Without Trotsky there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution, but Trotsky was no Bolshevik. Providing a full account of Trotsky’s role during the Russian Civil War and concentrating on his time as an active participant in Russian revolutionary politics, rather than his ideological writings of emigration, Swain gives the student a very different picture of the Bolshevik Commissar of War. This radically new interpretation of Trotsky’s career spanning 1905-1917 incorporates the tense relationship between Trotsky and Lenin until 1917, and pays particular attention to the Russian Civil War and Trotsky’s military organisation and contribution to the war. Swain argues critically that Trotsky achieved where Lenin would have failed, suggesting that Trotsky was in the main part responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution.

There are few more divisive names in history than the Soviet communist Leon Trotsky. To some, he was a betrayer, a hypocrite, and a totalitarian, and yet to many others he was a revolutionary of high esteem, who battled an outdated, oppressive dynasty and helped to usher in a new political era, and whose name became a political moniker: trotskyist. Whether colored by disdain or admiration, one thing is certain: Trotsky was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. In Leon Trotsky, Paul Le Blanc delves deep into Trotsky’s life and relationships to reveal and make sense of his complex character and decisive actions. Interweaving dramatic historical events with examinations of Trotsky’s multi-faceted personality, he offers incisive views of the key facets of Trotsky’s life: his involvement with Soviet bureaucracy, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Hitler in the years before World War II. Illuminating Trotsky’s personal and political struggles and achievements, this balanced portrait will be invaluable to history students or anyone interested in the extraordinary lives that made up the twentieth century.

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.

This new biography provides a full account of Leon Trotsky's political life, based upon a wealth of primary sources, including previously unpublished material. Ian D. Thatcher paints a new picture of Trotsky's standing in Russian and world history. Key myths about Trotsky's heroic work as a revolutionary, especially in Russia's first revolution of 1905 and the Russian Civil War, are thrown into question. Although Trotsky had a limited understanding of crucial contemporary events such as Hitler's rise to power, he was an important thinker and politician, not least as a trenchant critic of Stalin's version of communism.