Trotsky : a biography

The Resource Trotsky : a biography
Label
Trotsky : a biography
Title remainder
a biography
Statement of responsibility
Robert Service
Creator
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
  • Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources, Robert Service offers new insights. He discusses Trotsky's fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to unify; 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. 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.--From publisher description
  • "Trotsky expert David North undertook a thorough analysis shortly after the book was published two years ago by Harvard University Press. He came to the conclusion that Robert Service had violated basic standards of historical scholarship and his publisher had failed to exercise the necessary editorial oversight. A recent review of the book by the Trotsky biographer Bertrand Patenaude in The American Historical Review has completely confirmed the criticisms raised by North. North and Patenaude have pointed out a host of factual errors by Service ... Service{u2019}s sources are unreliable. Sources that are very difficult to access and hardly verifiable for most readers often have nothing to do with the claims made, or demonstrate the opposite. Contrary to the announcement of the book made by Suhrkamp, Service has not sought to deal with Trotsky and Stalin in an 2impartial and genuine3 manner. Instead, the aim of his work is to discredit Trotsky, and unfortunately he often resorts to the formulas associated with Stalinist propaganda."--Letter from historians to German publisher Suhrkamp on Robert Service{u2019}s biography of Trotsky, July 30, 2011
  • "It appears that he [Service] set out to thoroughly discredit Trotsky as a historical figure and as a human being. His Trotsky is not merely arrogant, self-righteous, and self-absorbed; he is a mass murderer and a terrorist, a cold and heartless son, husband, father, and comrade, an intellectual lightweight who falsified the record of his role in the Russian Revolution and whose writings have continued to fool generations of readers{u2014}a hoax perpetrated by his hagiographer Isaac Deutscher. In his eagerness to cut Trotsky down, Service commits numerous distortions of the historical record and outright errors of fact to the point that the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise is open to question. ... The number of factual mistakes in Service{u2019}s book is, as North says, {u2018}astonishing.{u2019} I have counted more than four dozen. ... Service{u2019}s book is completely unreliable as a reference.... At times the errors are jaw-dropping.3--Bertrand Patenaude, American Historical Review, June 2011
Biography type
individual biography
Cataloging source
DLC
Dewey number
  • 947.084092
  • B
Illustrations
  • illustrations
  • maps
  • plates
Index
index present
LC call number
DK254.T6
LC item number
S427 2009
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography

Context

Context of Trotsky : a biography

Work of

Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by University of Missouri Libraries. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.
Processing Feedback ...