Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence

On 20'h August 1940 Leon Trotsky's life was brutally ended when a Stalinist agent brought an ice axe crashing down on his head. Among the works that he left unfinished was the second part of his biography of Stalin. Trotsky's Stalin is unique in Marxist literature in that it attempts to explain some of the most decisive events of the 20'h century, not just in terms of epoch-making economic and social transformations, but in the individual psychology of one of the protagonists in a great historical drama. It is a fascinating study of the way in which the peculiar character of an individual, his personal traits and psychology, interacts with great events. How did it come about that Joseph Stalin, who began his political life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended up a tyrant and a monster? Was chis something pre-ordained by genetic factors or childhood upbringing? Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides the answer to these questions. In the present edition we have brought together all of the material chat was available in English from the Trotsky archives at Harvard University, and supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published. On the eve of the centenary of the October Revolution, we believe that Trotsky's Stalin is relevant and inspiring as never before.