Bertrand M. Patenaude

I bought this book when it first came out and when I began reading it, for some reason it didn't grab me and I put it aside. Having just read it now, years later, I cannot imagine what the problem was. This is a brilliantly-written and thoroughly-researched study of the very last years of Trotsky's life, the years of his exile in Mexico leading up to his murder by a Soviet agent in 1940. Patenaude tells the story well, with few signs of bias. Only once does he judge Trotsky negatively, referring to him as "the man who helped create the first totalitarian state, which even now he championed as the world's most advanced country". Much of the story is quite familiar territory, and yet it was still deeply sad to read of the fates of all those involved in this story -- the assassin Ramon Mercader feted in Moscow as a hero, the attempted assassin (the painter David Siqueiros, who led an earlier, botched raid on Trotsky's compound) going on to a glorious career as an artist, and the betrayal by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, once Trotsky's closest friends in the country and his protectors, who went on to become Stalinists, members of the Mexican Communist Party. The Trotsky Patenaude discovers is a difficult man and a terrible politician, but a loving husband and father as well. Highly recommended.… (altro)

The author gets lost in background minutia from time to time, but for someone like me who knew next to nothing about Trotsky before reading the novel Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver, and Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens some of the background is necessary.

Skip this book and try something else if you believe that the only good communist is a dead communist. Read it if you are interested in understanding some of the complexities and differences between the various factions that were born and then died in the 20th Century.

I like all four of the other reviews that precede mine, so I merely second their comments instead of repeating them.… (altro)

What I really wanted was a biography of Trotsky's life. This is not that book. Bertrand Patenaude's book is specifically about Trotsky's 4(ish) years in Mexico and his assassination.

Richly detailed (sometimes too much so), the reader is taken into the tumultuous life of Trotsky as he tries to fend off Stalin, NKVD, the GRU, among other things. While trying to keep his revolutionary ideas alive, and promising the Mexican government not to interfere with their politics in exchange for asylum, Trotsky's life is an uneasy one.

It is true that his paranoia about Stalin and his assassination attempts was not mere paranoia. It is also true that Trotsky was not an easy man to work for or with. His stubbornness led to a revolving door of staff members and the decay of many friendships, including artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Books like Trotsky give me a richer understanding of how the world got from "there" to "here." In this case, from the October Revolution in 1917 (which I wrote a paper about) to Stalin, Kruschev and, eventually Gorbachev and "glasnost." The thing about Marxist/socialist theory is that it routinely seem to fail to take into consideration humanity's inherent greed for money and power. Some of us just weren't hugged enough when we were kids.

Nit: Just how many times does the reader need to be told that Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were the major muralists of Mexico of that time?… (altro)