Yale University Press
Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life
Key Metrics
- Joshua Rubenstein
- Yale University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780300137248
- 7.87 X 5.97 X 0.85 inches
- 0.88 pounds
- Biography & Autobiography > Historical
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both a world-class intellectual and a man capable of the most narrow-minded ideological dogmatism. He was an effective military strategist and an adept diplomat, who staked the fate of the Bolshevik revolution on the meager foundation of a Europe-wide Communist upheaval. He was a master politician who played his cards badly in the momentous struggle for power against Stalin in the 1920s. And he was an assimilated, indifferent Jew who was among the first to foresee that Hitler's triumph would mean disaster for his fellow European Jews, and that Stalin would attempt to forge an alliance with Hitler if Soviet overtures to the Western democracies failed.
Here, Trotsky emerges as a brilliant and brilliantly flawed man. Rubenstein offers us a Trotsky who is mentally acute and impatient with others, one of the finest students of contemporary politics who refused to engage in the nitty-gritty of party organization in the 1920s, when Stalin was maneuvering, inexorably, toward Trotsky's own political oblivion.
As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his preface, Leon Trotsky haunts our historical memory. A preeminent revolutionary figure and a masterful writer, Trotsky led an upheaval that helped to define the contours of twentieth-century politics. In this lucid and judicious evocation of Trotsky's life, Joshua Rubenstein gives us an interpretation for the twenty-first century.
About Jewish Lives:
Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present.
In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award.
More praise for Jewish Lives:
Excellent -New York Times
Exemplary -Wall Street Journal
Distinguished -New Yorker
Superb -The Guardian
Author Bio
Joshua Rubenstein is Associate Director for Major Gifts at Harvard Law School. He was the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA for 37 years.
His first book, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, was the first general history of the Soviet dissident movement. Tangled Loyalties, his biography of the controversial Soviet-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, came out in 1996. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, received a National Jewish Book Award.
He then edited The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov and The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories. His interpretive biography of Leon Trotsky is part of the Jewish Lives Series of Yale University Press. The Last Days of Stalin is his tenth book; it is scheduled to appear in Azeri, Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, and Ukrainian.
Source: Harvard University
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