STALIN

Haymarket Books. New. New Haymarket Books, 2019 New Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was a key leader of the Russian Revolution Forced into exile in 1928, Trotsky devoted the rest of his life to fighting the degeneration of the revolution and rise of a new dictatorial regime Vilified and isolated, he fought an uncompromising battle with the Stalinist bureaucracy, defending the revolutionary and internationalist principles upon which the revolution was based In 1940, he was murdered by an agent of the Stalinist regime

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 20th 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 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 the answer to this question

In the present edition we have brought together all the material that was available from the Trotsky archives in English and supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published