Leon Trotsky

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From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, this annotation presents a clear-eyed exploration of Leon Trotsky's career, highlighting his complex nature as both a brilliant intellectual and a narrow-minded ideologue. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was an effective military strategist and adept diplomat who gambled the Bolshevik revolution on a fragile hope for a Europe-wide Communist upheaval. Despite his political acumen, he struggled in the power struggle against Stalin in the 1920s. As an assimilated Jew, he was one of the first to recognize the impending disaster for European Jews with Hitler's rise and Stalin's potential alliance with him. This portrayal reveals Trotsky as a mentally acute yet impatient figure, a keen observer of contemporary politics who neglected the organizational aspects of the party while Stalin maneuvered toward his political downfall. Joshua Rubenstein notes that Trotsky remains a haunting figure in historical memory, a revolutionary leader and masterful writer whose upheaval shaped twentieth-century politics. In this insightful account, Rubenstein provides a contemporary interpretation of Trotsky’s life and legacy.