Trotsky in 1937, when he first arrived in Mexico.
With Trotsky, Robert Service completes his sweeping biographical trilogy of the three leading Bolshevik revolutionaries. While Lenin's and Stalin's dramatic roles in Russian and Soviet history are well known, Trotsky is perhaps most famous in popular culture for meeting an untimely death by ice axe in Mexico in 1940.
Stalin's decisions to exile Trotsky from the Soviet Union and then to order his assassination turned Trotsky into a martyr for many Western leftists. If only Trotsky had won the leadership struggle after Lenin's death in 1924, the story goes, the Soviet Union would never have become the murderous totalitarian state built under Stalin. Isaac Deutscher's sympathetic three-volume biography of Trotsky, and Trotsky's own autobiography, My Life, assiduously fed these beliefs. Service makes it his overt mission to destroy this rosy image of Trotsky, and his successful but heavy-handed efforts in this regard pepper the entire biography.
Service draws upon a range of fascinating sources - including early drafts of Trotsky's own autobiography - to paint a complex and contradictory picture of the revolutionary as both a leader and a man. On the positive side of the ledger, Trotsky comes across as a brilliant orator, a prolific writer and an unusually brave revolutionary. Service vividly describes Trotsky's risky escapes from Siberian exile and his daring as a military leader during the Russian Civil War. Trotsky always wanted to be in the thick of the action. At the same time, he was personally austere, avoiding alcohol and cigarettes, taking offence at foul language and preferring to live modestly.
Service focuses more sharply on Trotsky's negative aspects. He was arrogant, did not suffer fools gladly, had no real friends and viewed historical events through narrow ideological lenses. He approved of using terror on "class enemies" during the Civil War and supported the 1921 repression of the radical Kronstadt sailors, who had demanded that the Bolsheviks create a more inclusive workers' state. Service even takes a swing at the widespread belief that Trotsky had a prescient understanding of interwar politics, pointing out that Trotsky always and incorrectly saw a popular European communist revolution coming right around the corner.
Fans of Russian history will find much to enjoy in these pages, from the carefully documented discussion of Trotsky's failed attempts to unify Russia's leftists before the revolution to an intriguing section on his tragicomic interlude in Turkish exile from 1929 to 1933. Canadian readers will especially appreciate Service's recounting of Trotsky's detention in Halifax while en route to Russia in April, 1917, at a time when Trotsky desperately wanted to return home to take part in the evolving revolution. As he was dragged off the ship under British orders, Trotsky "shouted and kicked the sailors in impotent fury." When local authorities finally allowed him to continue his journey a month later, Trotsky reportedly "shook his fist at the English officers and cursed England" as the ship sailed away from port.
But Service's dogged determination to set the record straight means that the book often reads as a response to earlier works rather than a self-contained volume. Perhaps more seriously, it leads him to overstate Trotsky's sins in two key realms: his family life and his similarities to Stalin.
Service's biography is replete with curiously mean-spirited commentary on Trotsky's relationships with his parents, wives and children. For example, he writes of Trotsky's decision to escape Siberian exile in 1902 to continue his revolutionary work, "No sooner had he fathered a couple of children than he decided to run off." Yet Trotsky's first wife, Alexandra, a revolutionary herself, supported his decision, and Trotsky maintained regular contact with her and his two daughters, Nina and Zina, afterward. He even brought physically and mentally unstable Zina to live with him in Turkish exile in order to look after her health, during which time she set fire to the house and burned Trotsky's entire book collection.
Yet Service then blames Trotsky for Zina's suicide in 1933, claiming that Trotsky had mishandled her schizophrenia and, as a result, "Zina had gone to her death when a little dosing of paternal consideration might have made all the difference." The last chapter baldly states that "most of [Trotsky's] immediate family had gone to their deaths because of him," bizarrely blaming Trotsky rather than Stalin for the political repression of Trotsky's family members in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The repeated snide comments on Trotsky's family relationships jar uncomfortably with the accompanying evidence that Trotsky in fact cared deeply about his family members and went out of his way to support them.
Similarly, Service goes too far in trying to make the case that Trotsky and Stalin were in essence politically interchangeable. He rightly argues that a Soviet Union under Trotsky would still have been an authoritarian socialist state - Trotsky made no bones about his belief that the party should act decisively to build communism in the Soviet Union regardless of the consequences. Yet Trotsky, unlike Stalin, did not seek supreme power and much preferred collective party leadership (Service even cites this as a key reason for his defeat at Stalin's hands). A Soviet Union under Trotsky would thus probably have been spared the Stalinist cult of personality and the Great Terror.
Trotsky also saw Nazism as a menace from early on, and a Trotsky-led Soviet Union would never have signed the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. These two facts alone would have made the mythical Soviet Union under Trotsky quite different than the victorious Stalinist version, if still not especially laudable. One can roundly condemn Trotsky's methods and beliefs without insinuating that the USSR would have been no better off under his leadership than Stalin's.
In the end, though, the great contribution of Service's trilogy of biographies is to further demonstrate that individual leaders can indeed change the course of history. Without Lenin, as Trotsky himself acknowledged, there would have been no October Revolution in 1917. The talented yet deeply paranoid and bloodthirsty Stalin built the totalitarian Soviet empire as a personal fiefdom. For Trotsky's part, his unique skill in organizing the Red Army allowed the Bolsheviks to win the Civil War. As Service notes, the Civil War "was truly a close-run conflict between the Reds and the Whites." Without Trotsky's efforts, the Bolsheviks might have been consigned to the dustbin of history after mere months, rather than decades.
Juliet Johnson is associate professor of political science at McGill University. She is the author of A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System, and has published widely on post-communist finance and identity politics. She co-edits the journal Review of International Political Economy.