My Life

"This is one of the books I read when I was starting to move into historical study. It’s a wonderful memoir of a childhood and young adulthood. Trotsky is a wonderful writer. I think he is one of the two great political writers of the 20th century, the other being Winston Churchill . But, as you move through the book, you get a very strong sense of a man who is justifying his own politics and his own career choices. He gets less and less attractive and less and less plausible as the first half of the book gives way to the second half. In that sense it was a very influential work for me because I started thinking that he was a very attractive man and I ended up thinking that he was a very unattractive politician whose self-justification for the terror and the dictatorship and the ultra centralist discipline that he imposed didn’t have much merit. Autobiographies are always attempts at self-justification and they always involve evasion and selectivity and sometimes outright falsification. I was really lucky when I researched Trotsky for my biography, to get the original manuscripts for Trotsky’s My Life. And it was really impressive to go through the manuscript and see what bits he altered before they appeared in the final edition. Well, he cuts down on the references to his disputes with Lenin and he cuts down on references to the Jewish background of several of his early acquaintances. He cuts down on examples of his own behaviour where he showed vacillation or feeble-mindedness. His published work is a much leaner and much more effective attempt at self-justification than the original draft. Oh, I find them all fascinating. I have had a really fortunate life to be able to look at the prism of the Russian Revolution through the lives of these three extraordinary men. They were all very talented, dynamic and, in many ways, very disagreeable in personalities. By taking their individual lives you can look at political structures, social behaviour and you can look at the cultural environment. “I think Trotsky is one of the two great political writers of the 20th century, the other being Winston Churchill.” I think for me Trotsky was the most culturally sophisticated of the three, Lenin was the most politically astute and Stalin was the most enigmatically, compulsively dangerous. They were all in favour of terror, dictatorship and the one-party state. There is not much doubt that, bad as two of them were, the third – Stalin – was the worst of the lot."