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Title: My Life by Leon Trotsky, J. Hansen ISBN: 0-87348-144-5 Publisher: Pathfinder Press Pub. Date: June, 1970 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Life is Beautiful when you fight to change the world!
Comment: The phrase "Life is Beautiful" in the Italian film came from one of Trotsky's diaries, written in exile, when Trotsky's friends, family, and comrades were being harassed, slandered and murdered by Stalin, when he himself faced imminent assasination. Read this book and you will see how Trotsky's life became valuable for him because he decided to fight oppression, decided to learn about the world to fight, and never stopped fighting. Maybe your life can be beautiful if you read this book, and decide to fight like Trotsky did.
The introduction by the late Joseph Hansen Trotsky's secretary in Mexico is worth the price of the book. Joe explains how the household and work center in Mexico functioned, about how Trotsky valued hard work, but also valued celebrating comrades birthdays, hobbies like raising rabbits, trips to sites of Mexican history. Reading this also tells you how Joe organized the staff at World Outlook/ Intercontinental Press
Rating: 5
Summary: Against mystification.
Comment: When I decided to write this review, I had to choose between the various reasons why it's so beautiful and important. But, above all, I think that, in a world where the necessity of Marxist was supposedly to be more deeply felt than ever, what repels most people that would be liable to lend an ear to it is the repelling Stalinist mythology of the revolutionary as the relentless, ruthless, single-minded, google-eyed fanatical. Trotsky, on the contrary begins by assessing that, although his life was out of the ordinary, he neverthless remained a men with a penchant for a well-ordered ordinary life; that he found pleasure in seeing a well-ordered table or a well-kept fence; that he didn't becomne a revolutionary out of a feeling of opression, but because of being faced with a life that, although prosperous, offered him nothing but grey drudgery and no opprtunity for individual achievement; that he, like all revolutionaries, was a man like any other. I think that would be reason enough to commend this modern classic to the reader of today, outside from the wonderful style, the importance of the events narrated and so much else.
Rating: 5
Summary: Not great history but readable autobiography
Comment: Leon Trotsky was a Bolshevik revolutionary who helped overthrow the Provisional Government and to institute the rule of what was to be Communism in Russia. He joined the Bolsheviks late just prior to the October revolution prior to that he had been a Menshevik. As a Menshevik he had been prominent in the 1905 uprising and had been one of its key figures.
Trotsky was a journalist but he was an inspirational speaker. He was one of the most important players in the coup which resulted in the take over of power in 1917. He turned out not only to be a talented revolutionary but he founded the Red Army and was able to ensure victory of the Soviet regime in the Russian Civil War.
After the war he was generally thought likely to be the successor of Lenin. He however expected the leadership to be given to him on a platter. His rivals Kamanev, Zinoviev and Stalin were more cunning than him and ousted him from power. He traveled he world and eventually settled in Mexico.
Trotsky became one of the Soviets most ardent critics and developed a theory that it had spawned a new form of ""bureaucratic government". He wrote tirelessly and tried to set up a communist movement in opposition to the Stalinist model. In Russia Stalin used his existence as a basis for creating a fictitious opposition and murdered thousands of suspected "Trostkyites".
Trotsky was not only a figure of importance but he was a skilled writer and his autobiography is well written and in parts both touching and amusing. It however gives a somewhat sanitized picture of a violent period in Russia's history. The use of terror and the role of security services are downplayed.
The book however is easy to read and gives a insight into the thought process of the revolutionary mind.
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