Robert Service completes his masterful trilogy on the founding figures of the Soviet Union in an eagerly anticipated, authoritative biography of Leon Trotsky. Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources including family letters, party and military correspondence, confidential speeches, and medical records, Service offers new insights into Trotsky. He discusses Trotsky’s fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to bring into a unified party before 1914; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early 1920s as the progenitor of political and cultural Stalinism. Trotsky evinced a surprisingly glacial and schematic approach to making revolution. Service recounts Trotsky’s role in the botched German revolution of 1923; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the 1920s; and his assumption that peasants could easily be pushed onto collective farms. Service also sheds light on Trotsky’s character and personality: his difficulties with his Jewish background, the development of his oratorical skills and his preference for writing over politicking, his inept handling of political factions and coldness toward associates, and his aversion to assuming personal power. Although Trotsky’s followers clung to the stubborn view of him as a pure revolutionary and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin, the reality is very different. This illuminating portrait of the man and his legacy sets the record straight. “Trotsky, even before one of Stalin’s agents found him in Mexico and assassinated him with an ice axe, was a romantic figure to those who believed that if only he had succeeded Lenin everything would have been better. Service, who has also written studies of Lenin and Stalin, does an excellent job of dispensing with such notions… Service’s book, unlike much writing about Trotsky, is the work of a historian, not an ideologue, and the better for it.” ― New Yorker “Robert Service fashions a vivid portrait of this brilliant, merciless ideologue, who did not hesitate to drag his country kicking, screaming and bleeding toward the utopia he dreamed of creating for it… [Service] approaches Trotsky without emotional or ideological attachment. He has also mined a rich lode of newly accessible archival material, including documents that reveal Trotsky’s support for cruel methods while Lenin was still actively leading the government… More than anything else, Service compels us to look at Trotsky as he really was rather than to accept the image that Trotsky conjured for himself.” ― Joshua Rubenstein , Wall Street Journal “If only, his adherents argued, it had been Trotsky who had succeeded Lenin and not Stalin, then the USSR might have been spared its famines and its terrors, its show trials and its denials of freedom… Now, 50 years after the last full-scale biography of Trotsky in English, Robert Service has turned his attention to this myth―and has, effectively, assassinated Trotsky all over again… If one can imagine the most obnoxious middle-class student radical one has ever met―bitter, sneering, arrogant, selfish, cocky, callous, callow, blinkered and condescending―and if one freezes that image, applies a pair of pince-nez and transports it back to the beginning of the last century, then one has Trotsky… Service makes it absolutely plain that Trotskyism was Stalinism in embryo… Seldom has the pathology of the revolutionary type, and its murderous consequences, been more mercilessly exposed than in this exemplary biography.” ― Robert Harris , Sunday Times “In a sober narrative thick with political details, both fresh and familiar, Service deflates the notion that the Old Man offered either a humane or plausible alternative to his unlamented comrades. The only major difference between Trotsky and his fellow Bolshevik leaders was that he never got the chance to wield total power… Service is the first major biographer of Trotsky to portray him as myopic villain instead of defeated prophet.” ― Michael Kazin , The Daily Beast “In this astonishingly comprehensive book―Robert Service has trawled almost every archive on the planet that has any reference to Trotsky―we get a clear picture of Trotsky’s political development, his part in the 1917 revolution, his differences with Lenin, his break with Stalin and, finally, the years of exile and agitation in which he attracted a ragbag of bizarre followers and made the mistake of professing that there was a form of communism different to Stalin’s… This is a superb work of scholarship, and above all leaves the reader in no doubt as to the evil of Trotsky, not just in politics but in his personal life… If you seek to know about this crucial figure in the history of Marxism–Leninism, this book will tell you everything.” ― Simon Heffer , Daily Telegraph “Robert Service delivers an outstanding, fas