Trotsky: Memoir and Critique

To this day, Leon Trotsky remains officially condemned in a nation he, with Lenin, was most responsible for establishing. He is still publicly regarded as the Soviet Union’s greatest traitor. Yet perhaps the changes now sweeping the communist empire offer hopes of posthumous acknowledgment of the man Lenin called ‘the best Bolshevik.’ In Trotsky , Albert Glotzer, a close associate of Trotsky in the 1930’s, provides a comprehensive and compelling portrait of the man and the movement he inspired.Glotzer vividly recounts the years during which Trotsky was in exile, documents Trotsky’s dramatic testimony at the Dewey Commission hearings in Mexico City, reviews his political role in Bolshevism, and eloquently explains his failure to be accepted by Soviet leaders after Lenin’s death. In chapters that alternate between absorbing first-hand anecdotes and acute appraisals of Trotsky’s prophetic insights, Glotzer shows why a man murdered more than forty years ago in Mexico still casts so large a shadow over the nation of his birth.