By Leon Trotsky, edited by Alan Woods and Rob Sewell
A work eighty years in the making, here is Leon Trotsky's unfinished masterpiece: Stalin. On 20th August 1940 Trotsky's life was brutally ended when a Stalinist agent brought an ice pick crashing down on his head. Among the works 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 twentieth 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 the peculiar character of an individual and his personal traits and psychology interact with great events.
How did it come about that Stalin, who began his political life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended as a tyrant and a monster? Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides answers to these questions.
In the present edition, Alan Woods and Rob Sewell have compiled the material that was available from the Trotsky archives in English and supplemented it with additional texts translated from Russian. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published.