Trotsky: A Biography
By Robert Service (Pan Macmillan, £25)
Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
By Bertrand Patenaude (Faber and Faber, £20)
There was a fad among popular historians in the 1980s and 1990s to produce works of “virtual” or counterfactual history, as a way of answering some of the intriguing “What if?” questions. What if Napoleon had succeeded in invading England? What if America had never won independence? This was more than an amusing game. Some excellent historians, Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts among them, worked on books that contained important ideas that could not have been explored within the constraints of real time.
The great hypothetical debate on the left for 60 years has been this question: what if Leon Trotsky instead of Stalin had emerged as leader of the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin in 1924? Would the tragic and blood-soaked failure of the communist experiment have worked out differently?
As both of these excellent books show, Trotsky’s great genius was as a writer—“he could not bear to write an ugly sentence,” Robert Service says in his biography, which is an exaggeration, but not by much. Before he acquired the nom de guerre Trotsky, the young Lev Bronstein, as he was born, was known in Russian revolutionary circles as The Pen. He used his great literary gifts to write the narrative of the Bolshevik victory and of where it turned sour. Extraordinarily, it remained for seven decades the story that was told about communism, as often on the right as the far left.
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