Quick questions on Trotsky historiography and interpretations: HSC Modern History Personality

From 1929 the Soviet historiographical apparatus treated Trotsky as an enemy of the revolution. The History of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (1938), Stalin's official textbook, deleted Trotsky from the October Revolution and the Civil War and presented him as a fascist agent from the 1920s. The Short Course was distributed in hundreds of millions of copies in the Soviet Union and translated for the international Communist movement. Soviet historiography on Trotsky from 1929 to 1988 worked within this framework, though with diminishing intensity after 1956.

Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography is the major scholarly biography of Trotsky and the canonical Western account. The trilogy consists of:

Pierre Broue's Trotsky (Fayard, Paris, 1988) was the major French scholarly biography. Broue (1926-2005) was a French Trotskyist historian who had spent his life editing the journal Cahiers Leon Trotsky and the Bulletin of the Opposition. His 1,100-page biography updated Deutscher with the documentary sources released between 1963 and 1988.

The opening of the Soviet state and party archives in 1991-1992 transformed the source base. The major works of this phase:

Robert Service's Trotsky: A Biography (Macmillan, 2009) is the major contemporary biography in English and the major revisionist account. Service (b. 1947) is the Oxford historian who had earlier produced biographies of Lenin (2000) and Stalin (2004) in a single trilogy.

The major post-2009 work is Bertrand Patenaude's Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009), which focuses on the Mexican exile and the assassination. Patenaude is the leading current authority on the Coyoacan years and was a major critic of Service. Joshua Rubenstein's Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life (Yale, 2011) is a shorter but well-judged biography for general readers.

It is the contemporary high-profile revisionism; the Patenaude critique has limited its scholarly authority.

Isaac Deutscher was a participant in the 1920s movement, not a detached academic.

Volkogonov is critical from a post-Soviet liberal position. Rogovin is sympathetic from a late-Soviet Trotskyist position.