Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary

by Bertrand M. Patenaude

Book Overview

In Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, Stanford University lecturer Bertrand M. Patenaude tells the dramatic story of Leon Trotsky's final years in exile in Mexico. Shedding new light on Trotsky's tumultuous friendship with painter Diego Rivera, his affair with Rivera's wife Frida Kahlo, and his torment as his family and comrades become victims of the Great Terror, Trotsky : Downfall of a Revolutionary brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060820683
• ISBN13: 9780060820688
• Release Date: August 2009
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Recommended

Patenaude's last book, Big Show in Bololand: the American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, won the 2003 Marshall Shulman prize for outstanding work in Russian/Soviet history. His new book Trotsky, Downfall of a Revolutionary is equally well-written and carefully researched but, unlike Big Show in Bololand, is aimed at the informed general reader. It is a well-composed narrative of the former Lev Bronstein's exile and murder after being one of the most important players in the Russian Revolution. Despite Trotsky's brilliance and ability, he was easily out-maneuvered by Stalin in the politically charged atmosphere of 1920's Moscow and exiled. Stalin never forgave Trotsky for Trotsky's opposition and obsessed about destroying him because he symbolized all that Stalin despised. To be associated with Trotsky, even with the most tenuous or mythical ties, would eventually mean death. After one short chapter narrating this background, Patenaude directs the rest of the text on Trotsky's exile and Stalin's efforts to kill him. Patenaude bases his work primarily on the Trotsky archives at Harvard and at Patenaude's home institution of Stanford, as well as recent Russian and English language secondary material. Traditional footnotes are not used, rather, the reader must go to the endnotes for sourcing which are tied to the short but very strong bibliography. Many photographs are interspersed throughout the text to humanize a man portrayed by Stalin and his followers as the devil incarnate. Russian history is often a tough read, the long, ostensibly unpronounable words and unfamiliar places seemingly promise the wading into the topic will be real work. Patenaude, however, has proven himself to be such an extremely capable literary stylis that this work will be far, far more accessible to the non-academic reader while, at the same time, his first-rate research will satisfy the professional scholar. Patenaude is poorly served by the publisher whose text composition software sometimes runs words together so closely when justifying margins that the reader must re-read some sentences to understand the content. Nevertheless, despite this quibble, it is another estimable work by a top-flight historian performing at the pinnacle of his craft. I wish he would do a book on the NEP or the Ukrainain famine.

Best Book on Trotsky,the Failed Liberal

This is an interesting look at the revolutionary life of Leon Trotsky.Revolution was coming to Russia,and Trotsky was one of the Leftists riding the crestwave of change.The cold steel framework needed to be built first.Well before any rosy frills could be added.Trotsky had a tough time selling Western Boheimian ideals.Later,with the Nazi christianised pagans becoming polemic ,Trotsky's rose-colored plans of a liberal Soviet society were scrapped.The Nazi menace was the ideal beast for Stalin to rally the Soviet workers against and unify his absolute power.From the first encounter between Stalin and Trotsky,there was mutual disdane for each other.Trotsky was educated,wealthy,worldly,sophisticated and upper-tier Jewish.Stalin was brash,coarse,provincial,earthy and of the distrustful peasants.Russia was on its way into becoming a world power and it was to be done so, through force of the hammer and sickle,and not the pruning-shears from a country garden.Trotsky had good ideas,yet it was too soon to germinate and cultivate ,now his time was running out.Trotsky's ideas were ahead of their time.The liberal side of the Soviet politburo never forgot Trotsky's values.In 1953,Stalin was being toasted ,at a dinner party,by some of Trotsky's secret circle.The next day Stalin was dead.Stalin had crushed the Nazis,and the liberal Trotskites felt he was now an old war-horse who could not be refitted as a servile plough-horse.This is excellent politcal theatre.Any student of history looking for a worthy read on Trotsky's post revolutionary days ,would find this book interesting reading. (A good Miller's Analogy here would be Ernst Roehm/Hitler is to Filip Golobski/Stalin.)Both were strong loyal party followers from the start.Both were appointed as the new heads of the internal state security police.Both were homosexuals.And both were killed off by their leader bosses,when their liberal behaviors conflicted with party ethos and public image.)

The Final Nightmare for the Perennial Dreamer

I strongly recommend that you read Trotsky: "Downfall of a Revolutionary," Bertrand M. Patenaude, Harper Collins (2009), in conjunction with Robert Service's "Trotsky: A Biography," Harvard University Press (2009); (read Service first). Patenaude provides a detailed account of Trotsky's years in exile that is unrivalled. The reader will gain greater insight into the man's later years as he grew older yet unflexible in his commitment to his faith in the ultimate triumph of Marxism. Patenaude is a fine writer; he moves the reader dramatically along as he details the events leading up to and culminating in the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico. At the same time, he intersperses his account with reminiscences of Trotsky's intellectual, political, and psychological development in earlier days. The reality is that even Trotsky was unable to set forth a consistent explication of what all the nonsense was about "dialectical materialism." "Few comrades even professed to understand its meaning." (Patenaude, p. 222) Many of his followers and fellow-travelers were enthusiastic about Trotsky and his views because of their own naivety. "They were blind to Trotsky's contempt for their values. They overlooked the damage he aimed to do to their kind of society if ever he got the chance." (Service, p.466) The truth is that Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and his acolytes were (and still are) iconoclasts and sloganeers, and nothing more. "Civilization can only be saved by the socialist revolution. . . . Only that which prepares the complete and final overthrow of imperialist bestiality is moral, and nothing else. The welfare of the revolution - that is the supreme law." - Trotsky, "Their Morality and Ours: The Moralists and Sychophants against Marxism" (1938) (Service pp. 470-1) There is an interesting little book written by a child of American Trotskyists, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, "When Skateboards Will be Free," Dial Press (2009), that reveals the vacuity of blind faith in bankrupt ideology. He notes that his father, a life-long social revolutionary activist, "will gladly hold forth on the largest of subjects: the social evolution of human beings since Homo habilis; the materialist underpinnings of ancient civilization; the French Revolution; the Cold War. . . . The subjects he chooses are usually so vast, so breathtaking, that one can be forgiven for failing to realize how hollow the information is that he imparts. . . . It doesn't matter if he himself knows the intimate details of the topics on which he expounds; his concern is with Truth." (Sayrafiezadeh, p. 134; to his credit, Sayrafiezadeh, when confronted by his girlfriend with the questions: What does it mean to be a communist; what is socialism? ultimately concludes: "I guess I don't know what I'm talking about." pp. 253-4) Despite Trotsky's literary flair and his historic role in dramatic 20th century events, one rightly wonders whether, in the end, he knew what he was talking about. Bertrand M. Patenaude

A GRIPPING TALE OF REVOLUTION,LOVE AND MURDER

At the beginning of 1939,a man by the name of Pavel Sudoplatov was on his way to meet Stalin.The meeting between these two men sealed the fate of Trotsky, who was at that time living in Mexico.As Stalin put it then:"Trotsky should be eliminated within a year". And so,the process towards the assassination of Stalin's arch-enemy has begun. Trotsky was among many Jews who thought that Communism would deliver them and the world of all the social evils in the world.His real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein and was born in the Ukraine in 1879.After his rise and quarrels in the Bolshevik party, he was exiled by Koba (aka Stalin )and was dispatched to Turkey, where he was doing all he could in order to get a visa which would enable him to live in another country.From Turkey he and his wife moved to Norway, where the much- awaited visa for Mexico has finally arrived. After some days ,the couple has landed on the Mexican shores and it was there where they would spend the rest of their days, until the Spanish-born assassin Ramon Mercader had terminated the life of Trotsky. In this biography, we get a panoramic description of Trotsky's final years in Mexico.Based on Trotsky's private correspondence and diaries as well as his archives and testimonies of his American bodyguards and many secretaries,Mt.Patenaude offers the reader a fascinating and thrilling story about Trotsky. This is done in a series of flashbacks, in which Trotsky's various life episodes are brilliantly told and analyzed.The reader is informed about Trotsky the revolutionary, the lover, the husband and grandfather, the author and thinker,the paranoiac and the naive one.He had a brief affair with the painter Frida Kahlo, who was Diego Rivera's wife.Rivera, the mural painter, fell under the spell of Communism and both men had an admiration for each other until this came to an end for reasons the reader will find out when he/she finishes reading this book. The author also discusses in detail the hearings of the Dewey Commission which set out to inquire the charges made against Leo Trotsky in the Moscow trials. Another excellent aspect of this book is the way the thirties are described:the age of Stalinistic terror and the the Spanish Civil War.There were many parts to Trotsky:the intellectual, the military commander, the jealous and erotic husband, the ideologue and revolutionary.Besides Trotsky, there are other minor characters accompanying the hero of this study, and they are mainly artists and left-wing intellectuals of the thirties.Many of them belonged the bohemic world of those years. Read this book and you will get a detective as well as a very serious historical tale and study of one of the most controversial and intriguing personalities that peopled this earth.All this in spite of the fact that the end of the story is well-known.

A moving and insightful account of Trotsky's final struggle

I was delighted to see this book appear, because I've always wanted to know more about the last several years of Trotsky's life, when he had been exiled to Mexico, the last country on earth that would give him asylum, and was holed up with his wife, grandson, and bodyguards in a house owned by the artist Frida Kahlo. Trotsky owed his safe haven to the direct intervention of Kahlo's husband, the great muralist and revolutionary firebrand, Diego Rivera. Of course, Stalin's GPU was on the hunt, and it was only a question of time before the assassins closed in, and Trotsky knew it. I don't think I'm giving much away by saying that Trotsky was brutally assassinated with an icepick blow to the head by a GPU operative who had insinuated himself into the confidence of the Trotsky household. Patenaude has done a superb job with this material. His sensitive, insightful, and well-written account is so replete with irony, pathos, and tragedy that there really isn't much point to adding more to this review except to say that Trotsky has found the biographer he deserves in Patenaude.