TROTSKY: A BIOGRAPHY
Robert Service
Macmillan, $67.95hbk
There are generally reckoned to be three stages in writing about historical figures - bunk, debunk and rebunk.
Knowledge of the life of the major Russian revolutionary and philosopher Leon Bronstein Trotsky available in English has enjoyed 100 years of bunk.
This stems mainly from his own writings, and notably his personal account of the 1917-18 Russian Revolution, and the popular three-volume 1950s biography by his disciple Isaac Deutscher.
Now, finally, comes debunk.
A well-reputed writer, Robert Service, has written an incisive and detailed account of Trotsky that is the product of massive research.
It is simply astonishing, however, that Service should have devoted so much time and effort to writing about a man he so evidently disliked.
This is a petty, mean-spirited life of a man even Service admits contained elements of greatness.
His Trotsky is an insincere exhibitionist, a man in love with himself, a man with no friends and who didn't deserve to have any, a man who was totally selfish and who treated the woman in his life badly.
All that is probably true, but the author wildly over-emphasises it.
All revolutionaries are obsessive.
Trotsky had to be to make an impact.
His contemporaries in the revolutionary movement - European revolutionaries generally, but Russian ones especially - were too.
How they all hated each other, and how they (successfully) undermined each other.
When the incompetence, venality and selfishness of the tsarist autocracy finally led to despair and revolution, the various Marxist and other revolutionary factions did not create the situation.
They simply took advantage of it.
The leaders of the factions were all hiding overseas among Russia's inveterate enemies.
The revolutionaries agreed to unite under the political and philosophic leadership of Lenin and the military leadership of Trotsky who, without any military experience, turned himself into the Russian Carnot - the civilian organiser of victory in the French Revolution.
Like Carnot, his influence soon evaporated.
Service does some justice to Trotsky's contribution and status during the earlier 1905 proto-Revolution, and reluctant justice to his role during the 1917-18 Revolution and subsequent Civil War.
Trotsky was a brilliant orator, superb propagandist, and methodical organiser (among a bunch of disorganised amateurs).
He was no military strategist or tactician, because those are trades that can only be learned by experience.
Trotsky created and imposed himself politically on the war machine, so had to learn by his mistakes, of which Service is happy to point out that he made many.
After the end of the Civil War, and the early death of Lenin, it was all downhill for Trotsky.
His influence within the Communist Party soon diminished; he was sent into internal exile in Siberia, and then external exile in Turkey, Norway and Mexico where, in 1940, he was assassinated on Stalin's orders with an ice-pick to the skull.
Service maintains Trotsky's influence never recovered from his loss of status in Russia, but that is not quite true.
The more Stalin's reputation began to suffer in the 1950s, especially after Khruschev's secret speech in 1956, the more disenchanted Marxists began to admire Trotsky.
European revolutionaries in the 1960s and '70s found much to agree with in Trotsky, things that their hero (compulsively disputatious as he was) might well have refuted.
In shorthand, the difference between Stalin and Trotsky became: the former supported the slogan "socialism in one country [Russia]", while the latter supported "international socialism".
It was and is, of course, vastly more complicated than that.
So now we await an English-language rebunk - a life of Trotsky that is not absurdly admiring while not so determinedly antagonistic.
• Oliver Riddell is a Wellington writer.
