A dramatic chronicle of revolutionary, politician, and political theorist Leon Trotsky’s final years in exile in Mexico.
Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much passion, controversy, and curiosity as Leon Trotsky. His role in history—his epic rise and fall, his fiery persona, his violent end in Mexico in August 1940—holds a fascination that transcends the history of the Russian Revolution. Bertrand M. Patenaude masterfully interweaves the story of Trotsky’s final years 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. Gripping, tragic, and based on extensive firsthand research, Trotsky brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history’s most captivating and important figures.
Praise for Trotsky
“Excellent, exciting. . . . Trotsky charts with novelistic flair and in archival detail, the progress of the plot that culminated in Trotsky being killed with an ice axe in 1940.” —Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Sunday Times Telegraph (London)
“This book deepens and enhances the sense of tragedy that always attends contemplation of “the Old Man” and his last struggle.” —Christopher Hitchens
“Betrand Patenaude tells a masterly story of a brilliant, cornered man and, along the way, of a misguided century.” —The Wall Street Journal
“A captivating account. . . . Patenaude paints a vivid portrait of Trotsky, a flamboyant, Westernized intellectual. . . . This is a dramatic, event-filled portrait of a turbulent, half-forgotten era.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)