Trotsky

The book was very interesting even though the copy was quite old and the letters difficult to read. The story does not include the earlier years when Trotsky was at the apogee of his revolutionary career, exactly as the title suggests. The events described give us an idea how long the secret arm of the USSR could reach during the Stalin era and possibly now under Putin. The Russian tradition of clandestine interventions in foreign soils have originated much earlier, during the Peter the Great’s reign. Nevertheless, this kind of illegal behavior is not unique as even smaller countries like Israel and Turkey follow “terroristic” practices when Their “national” interests are “threatened”. In the present case Democratic Mexico failed to protect an invited visitor, even though it is not entirely clear if Trotsky had not decided unconsciously to put an end somehow to his life that had become unbearable after the death of all his children.
The book is well written and keeps the reader interesting alive until the end.

Extremely well-written and researched about the last year or so of Trotsky’s life. A lot of detail about his life and the context of Mexico is described. The talented and influential painter Sequieros is shown to be a murderous thug. The vast and vicious conspiracies against Trotsky by Stalin, Hitler, and the FBI demonstrate Trotsky’s continued importance in the fight for human liberation.

“Trotsky, Downfall of A Revolutionary” is a deeply researched history of the last years of Leon Trotsky ending outside Mexico City in August 1940 with a prospector’s pick to his skull. Patenaude interweaves the story of the Old Man’s time in Mexico, his heroics at the beginnings of the Russian Revolution, his rise to power and fame, his break with Stalin, his exile to Turkey, Paris, Norway and Mexico, sharp vivid profiles of Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican mural artist, and his randy wife, Freda Kahlo, the widely acclaimed artist with whom Trotsky had an affair. True to the historian’s craft, Patenaude does not fictionalize how the coup de grace struck when the assassin infiltrated the Trotsky compound and when he and Trotsky were alone; the details of the lead up and post attack response on the blood stained Trotsky are gruesome. The author clearly read deep into the Trotsky archives at Harvard and plumbed the machinations of the highly efficient GPU/NKVD. He grasps why Stalin,not Trotsky, won out in the titanic struggle for post Lenin Soviet supremacy and how Stalin’s ruthless, vengeful efficiency led to Trotsky’s death. Like a well oiled killing machine, Stalin went after Trotsky’s family and friends and in laws and annihilated all of them. The brilliant Trotsky is presented as purposeful, supremely arrogant, argumentative, disrespectful of his American benefactors , and possessed of an out dated utopian view of the success of Red October in contrast to the murderous practical brutality of his arch enemy, Joseph Stalin. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, all of this passes into the pages of history, but Bertrand Patenaude’s book is an honest retelling of a major force and event in the history of world Communism.

Leon Trotsky: revolutionary, Red Army commissar, dreamer, exile, assassination victim. There are few people who have lived the life of Trotsky. He was certainty at the vanguard of 20th century history.

Bertrand Patenaude has written a biography of Trotsky that covers his time in Mexico after fleeing Europe and seeking sanctuary in a more distant third country. And sanctuary was key. Trotsky was forever and increasingly in the sights of Joseph Stalin. Trotsky was everything that Stalin was not. He was bold, daring and spellbinding while Stalin was cautious, plodding and cruel.

I found Patenaude’s book to be quite compelling. I knew little of the details of Trotsky’s time in Mexico and it was fascinating for them to be brought to life. Patenaude is a good writer who has mastered his brief. He also clearly showed that Trotsky for all his boldness and daring could be spectacularly nave. Nowhere was this more the case than with his assassination. How could a man who had survived previous attempts on his life be so trusting of people? How could a man smuggle an ice pick into Trotsky’s house underneath a raincoat on a hot day?

I recommend this book to readers of general history. Trotsky was with little doubt one of the more influential figures of the 20th century. Ignore his politics. Here he had both admirers and detractors. Indeed, he still does. However, his impact was significant. Read this book to understand a small portion of the enigma that was Leon Trotsky.

A better title for this book would have been Trotsky: the Exile Years or even more specifically, Trotsky: the Exile in Mexico. That is what this book is all about. For those seeking more, as I was, you’ll be disappointed. There is little or nothing about Trotsky’s development into a revolutionary during the rule of the czars, nor is there much about how Trotsky rose through the Bolshevik movement to the unofficial second highest position, behind Lenin. I also would have appreciated more (although there is some) about Trotsky’s role in deveoping the Red Army. The exile years in Mexico are covered in great detail, more than I needed, while the development of the person, his successes and evolution of his beliefs as a young man, is sorely lacking.

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