Thick and intensely researched but a pleasure to read, it should remain the definitive work for some time...This is a thoughtful, rewarding and essential contribution to 20th-century history. (starred review)
   --Publishers Weekly

Robert Service delivers an outstanding, fascinating biography of this dazzling titan. It is compelling as an adventure story--the ultimate rise and fall--but also revelatory as the scholarly revision of a historical reputation...The portrait of Trotsky's forgotten world of Jewish farmers and poverty-stricken Russian aristocrats is eccentric and intriguing. Trotsky himself hid much of his background that Service reveals for the first time...At the end of Service's revision, what remains of the Prophet? The intellectual, orator, manager of the Bolshevik coup and architect of the Civil War victory remain, but alongside them must be laid the mendacity of his memoirs, the ugly egotism and unpleasant, overweening arrogance, the belief in and enthusiastic practice of killing on a colossal scale, the political ineptitude, the limit of ambition. Apart from their famous row about "socialism in one country" versus international revolution, there was little politically between Stalin and Trotsky. It was personality that divided them and both personalities were highly unattractive. If Trotsky had become dictator, Service is clear that while Russia would have avoided Stalin's personal sadism, the same millions would still have been killed.
   --Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sunday Telegraph

In this astonishingly comprehensive book--Robert Service has trawled almost every archive on the planet that has any reference to Trotsky--we get a clear picture of Trotsky's political development, his part in the 1917 revolution, his differences with Lenin, his break with Stalin and, finally, the years of exile and agitation in which he attracted a ragbag of bizarre followers and made the mistake of professing that there was a form of communism different to Stalin's...This is a superb work of scholarship, and above all leaves the reader in no doubt as to the evil of Trotsky, not just in politics but in his personal life...If you seek to know about this crucial figure in the history of Marxism-Leninism, this book will tell you everything.
   --Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph

If only, his adherents argued, it had been Trotsky who had succeeded Lenin and not Stalin, then the USSR might have been spared its famines and its terrors, its show trials and its denials of freedom...Now, 50 years after the last full-scale biography of Trotsky in English, Robert Service has turned his attention to this myth--and has, effectively, assassinated Trotsky all over again...If one can imagine the most obnoxious middle-class student radical one has ever met--bitter, sneering, arrogant, selfish, cocky, callous, callow, blinkered and condescending--and if one freezes that image, applies a pair of pince-nez and transports it back to the beginning of the last century, then one has Trotsky...Service makes it absolutely plain that Trotskyism was Stalinism in embryo...Seldom has the pathology of the revolutionary type, and its murderous consequences, been more mercilessly exposed than in this exemplary biography.
   --Robert Harris, Sunday Times

Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of Russian History at Oxford University.

Read More by Robert Service:

• A History of Twentieth-Century Russia
• Lenin: A Biography
• Russia: Experiment with a People
• Stalin: A Biography
• A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin, Revised Edition
• Comrades! A History of World Communism
• A History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century, Third Edition