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Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary | 
| Author: Bertrand M. Patenaude
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $27.99
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Rating:  9 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1St Edition
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0060820683
Dewey Decimal Number: 947.084092
EAN: 9780060820688
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Product Description
Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much passion, controversy, and curiosity as Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was that rare combination of the man of ideas and the man of action. His role in historyâhis epic rise and fall, his fiery persona, his violent end in Mexico in August 1940âholds a fascination that transcends the history of the Russian Revolution. Based on extensive firsthand research, this groundbreaking biography examines Trotsky's remarkable life from the perspective of his last exile in Mexico. Bertrand M. Patenaude masterfully interweaves the story of Trotsky's final years in Mexico with flashbacks to pivotal episodes in his career as a young Marxist, revolutionary hero, Red Army chief, Bolshevik leader, outcast from Stalin's USSR, and ultimately heretic of the Kremlin, targeted for assassination by its secret police. He vividly recounts the contentious Dewey Commission hearings and the passionate debates among liberals and Communists in the United States and Europe over the Moscow Trials and the charges made against Trotsky. Drawing on Trotsky's private correspondence and diaries, as well as the testimonies of his American bodyguards and secretaries, Patenaude sheds 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 became victims of the Great Terror. Patenaude also turns to KGB files to document Stalin's efforts to eliminate the man he considered his nemesisâincluding a failed commando raid on Trotsky's home three months before his death. Gripping and tragic, Trotsky brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history's most captivating and important figures.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 Recommended February 23, 2010
Patrick J. Brunet
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
A GRIPPING TALE OF REVOLUTION,LOVE AND MURDER October 8, 2009
Paul Gelman (HAIFA , ISRAEL)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
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.
The Final Nightmare for the Perennial Dreamer January 1, 2010
Gary Strickland (Chandler, Arizona United States)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
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 offers a detailed account of Trotsky's years in Mexico that serves to complete the work of Service. The book is highly readable and rather interesting as backdrop to the undeserved veneration accorded Trotsky by his devoted disciples during and after his lifetime.
A moving and insightful account of Trotsky's final struggle August 25, 2009
Christopher W. Coffman (Sydney, Australia)
11 out of 16 found this review helpful
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.
Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary July 23, 2010
Lolita Watkins (small town Indiana)
I think this book deserves a wide readership. I'm not a scholar and I would like to preface the review by saying this book does not seem to have been written with the scholar in mind. I have no comment on the book's accuracy nor on Patenaude's conclusions as to the character of Trotsky, all I can say is that having read many biographical tome's on the topic of various famous men in history this one was a page turner. I found myself very interested in the people the author writes about, and he does it in a way that kept me wanting to read. He limited his book to a short period in Trotsky's life and that enabled him to go back and flesh out some of his history to give a better understanding to his character and to some of the quarrels Trotsky involved himself during the period covered without making the book overly long. Coincidentally I also read a novel called "Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver a good portion of the book covering the period of Trotsky's life when he lived in Mexico, the same period as Patenaude. The problem with Kingsolver's version of the events is that she fails to create an interesting character in her book. It seems odd that she a novelist could not present Trotsky as a real person. Admittedly Trotsky is not the protagonist but he is not a realized character, and to Patenaude's credit he brings to the reader a detailed portrait of Trotsky that is something besides the blandness that is achieved by Kingsolver. Kingsolver on the other hand has stated that she writes with a political purpose, and perhaps it fit her purpose to make Trotsky into a paternalistic fuzzy bear, even if she does admit that Trotsky was involved in an affair with Frieda Kahlo. Patenaude is not trying to make Trotsky into a cardboard hero or even a kindly old grandpa, he is trying to let his reader know who Trotsky was with all of his talents and all of his serious flaws. The true life tragedy of Trotsky's death is a great read, stylistically speaking. It flows well and the writing style, plotting arrangement, makes this a great story worth reading for the pure pleasure of reading.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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