"When was the last time that killings of human rights activists were so blatant, and so common?" The question posed in an October 29 Washington Post editorial referred to the wave of Russian political murders last year. The answer: "not since the time of Joseph Stalin."
A new book by Hoover Institution research fellow and Stanford history lecturer Bertrand Patenaude revisits that brutal era. No political figure suffered more at the hands of the Soviet dictator than the protagonist of Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins). Leon Trotsky and Stalin were key players in the 1917 revolution that brought Vladimir Lenin to power, but their ideological divide became "a line of blood," in the words of writer James T. Farrell. Once Lenin died and Stalin wrested control, he purged opponents—and those close to them—through show trials, imprisonment and execution. Expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky spent his exile in Turkey, France, Norway and finally Mexico from 1937. His assassination by pickax in 1940 capped the destruction, over years, of almost all his family and eight secretaries.
Patenaude, MA ’79, PhD ’87, focuses his colorful narrative on Trotsky's Mexican days but shifts back and forth chronologically—with detours to the Kremlin, New York, Paris and elsewhere—to tell the backstory and weave in contemporary events. The ideological twists and turns of Party principals and isms can faze the lay reader, but the author never loses his grip on the main attraction. (And the sideshows are pretty engaging, peopled with the likes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Saul Bellow, John Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller—even fired Stanford professor Edward Ross.)
Patenaude's Trotsky, thanks to extensive archives at Hoover and Harvard, is more hologram than portrait. Betrayals, affairs, fraught family relations, murder and suicide, cloak-and-dagger intrigue and miraculous escapes keep pages turning. Fishing trips, gardening and rabbit tending lend a quieter dimension to this giant, tragic figure.
