Trotsky: A Biography
By (Author) Robert Service
Pan Macmillan
Pan Books
1st June 2010
16th April 2010
Unabridged edition
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Far-left political ideologies and movements
European history
947.084092
Winner of Duff Cooper Prize 2010 (UK)
Paperback
656
Width 130mm, Height 197mm, Spine 41mm
448g
Revolutionary practitioner, theorist, factional chief, sparkling writer, ladies man (e.g., his affair with Frieda Kahlo), icon of the Revolution, anti-Jewish Jew, philosopher of everyday life, grand seigneur of his household, father and hunted victim, Trotsky lived a brilliant life in extraordinary times. Robert Service draws on hitherto unexamined archives and on his profound understanding of Russian history to draw a portrait of the man and his legacy, revealing that though his followers have represented Trotsky as a pure revolutionary soul and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin and his henchmen, the reality is very different, as this masterful and compelling biography reveals.
Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and of St Antony's College, Oxford. He has written several books, including the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, Russia: Experiment with a People , Stalin: A Biography and Comrades: A History of World Communism, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. Married with four children, he lives in London.