Trotsky

Life & Times

by David Renton

Short biography of the founder of the Red Army later out-manoeuvered by Stalin. Leon Trotsky became the leading spokesman of Russian Revolution, and was the founder of the victorious Red Army of 1918-1921, and did more than anyone to create the early soviet state.Yet Trotsky was out-manoeuvred by Stalin in the struggle to succeed Lenin. In the years followed, he developed the firts systematic critique of Stalin's dictatorship. In 1929, he and his wife were forced out of Russia, moving from Turkey to France, and finally to Mexico, where he was brutally assassinated by a Spanish communist in 1940.

Genres: Politics, History, Biography

185 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2004

About the author

David "Dave" Renton is a British academic historian and barrister.

He was born in London in 1972. His great aunt was the marxist historian, Dona Torr. His grandfather was the shoe designer Kurt Geiger. One uncle was an activist in Equity, the actors' trade union, while another was the Conservative MP Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry. He was educated at all-boys private boarding school Eton College where he became a member of the Labour Party. He then studied history at St John's College, University of Oxford.

Renton received his PhD from the University of Sheffield for a thesis on fascism and anti-fascism in Britain after the Second World War ( The attempted revival of British Fascism: Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1945-51 ) that was turned into the book Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the 1940s . He also became an academic historian and sociologist, teaching at universities including Nottingham Trent, Edge Hill and Rhodes University and Johannesburg University in South Africa.

Since 2009 Renton has practised as a barrister at Garden Court Chambers in London and has represented clients in a number of high-profile cases, especially concerning trade union rights and the protection of free speech.

He was for twenty-two years (1991-2013) a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and he has published over twenty books on fascism, anti-fascism, and the politics of the left.

Reviews

[Dan]

Very interesting. One of the few characters from the revolution who died with a clear conscience. He predicted all the problems with a Soviet dictatorship long before they happened (hence his unpopularity with Stalin)

Edit: Trotsky, like all the Bolsheviks, was capable of turning a blind eye to unspeakable barbarism and cruelty. Not as bad as Stalin, but certainly no clear conscience. I wonder how things would have turned out if he had taken over from Lenin.

[Matt Stevens]

Good little book about Trotsky. Helped to create the state, lost the state, vilified and hunted by the state, killed by the state.