History of the Russian Revolution

"I chose this book because almost everything that people read about the Russian revolution is written by Westerners, partly because the official histories written under Stalin were incredibly boring and predictable. That all changed when the archives opened up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but there’s a gap all the same, which Trotsky tried to fill. Trotsky’s history of the revolution is obviously a work of propaganda. It’s not a reliable history at all. But it is a history written by one of the great movers in the revolution itself. Trotsky was the man who basically led the November putsch, and headed up the negotiations with Germany that took Russia out of the First World War. He then became minister for war, and turned out to be a brilliant general. So all-in-all an astonishing character, and also, handily, a terrific writer. Within the party his nickname was “the Pen”. His history of the revolution is essentially a justification of his role in it and of his political views, which came into direct conflict with those of Stalin. Trotsky believed, as everybody had at first believed, that social revolution meant international revolution – a global class war. Stalin betrayed that view with the introduction of [the political theory] Socialism in One Country, which effectively turned Russia into an enormous prison camp. Just after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Stalin was busy shaping the historical record in Russia, and Trotsky understood he needed to write a separate history of the revolution himself. He did so to champion what he considered to be the original object of the revolution, and also to confer on himself an authenticity that Stalin wanted to take away. But it’s a mistake, I believe, to think of Trotsky as a martyr or a saint. Like Lenin, he advocated violence and dictatorship, though he came to it later to the game. And like Lenin, he was both vain and dishonest, not least because while thinking of revolution in the conventionally Marxist way as the inevitable consequence of economic conditions, he went out of his way to manipulate those conditions. Why else hijack a revolution, or write a book when you’re thrown off the train? Why not just let the thing run its course? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter When Trotsky mentions himself in his history, he does so in the third person, like Caesar . It’s a book that pretends analytic detachment, but is, in fact, a colossal vanity mirror in which Trotsky examines his life’s work as he wishes others to examine it. But it is, I think, a much better read than the Russian lady at the London Library who first lent it to me was prepared to admit. The proof is that Trotsky has in some ways had the last laugh. Because although Stalin defeated and eventually murdered him, Trotsky remains the Christ of the Russian Revolution. Stalin is Lucifer, Lenin is God and Trotsky is his exiled son. In terms of propagating this view, this history-cum-autobiography was a very successful piece of work."