The historiography and modern interpretations of Leon Trotsky, including the Stalinist anti-myth, Isaac Deutscher's classic trilogy of 1954 to 1963, Pierre Broue's 1988 biography, the post-1991 archival opening, and Robert Service's revisionist 2009 biography

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to outline the historiographical evolution of Trotsky's reputation from 1940 to the present and to identify the key biographies and archival openings. Strong answers move chronologically through the Stalinist anti-myth, the Deutscher trilogy, the post-1991 archival reassessment, and the Service 2009 revisionism. Pierre Broue, Dmitri Volkogonov, and Vadim Rogovin are the named secondary historians.

The answer

Phase 1: The Stalinist anti-myth and the Trotskyist counter-narrative (1929 to 1953)

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.

Western anti-Communism produced a smaller, parallel anti-Trotsky literature from the right (especially Stephane Possony's A Century of Conflict, 1953) which treated Trotsky and Stalin as variants of a single Communist totalitarianism.

Trotskyism produced the counter-narrative. The major Trotskyist literature included Trotsky's own My Life (1930), History of the Russian Revolution (1932), Stalin (1940, posthumous 1946), and the collected pamphlets; James P. Cannon's The History of American Trotskyism (1944); Max Shachtman's various essays; and Joe Hansen's 1940 memoir With Trotsky to the End.

Phase 2: The Deutscher trilogy (1954 to 1963)

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

• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (Oxford, 1954). Trotsky from Yanovka through Brest-Litovsk and the early Civil War.
• The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929 (Oxford, 1959). The trade-union dispute, Lenin's incapacity, the struggle with Stalin, the Alma-Ata exile, and the early Prinkipo period.
• The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 (Oxford, 1963). The exile years and the assassination.

Deutscher (1907-1967) was a Polish-Jewish Trotskyist of the late 1920s who left the Polish Communist Party in 1932 and worked as a journalist in the West after 1939. His access to the Trotsky Papers at Harvard was unique among first-generation biographers. The trilogy combines a Trotskyist political reading with a sophisticated literary frame derived from Edward Gibbon and Marc Bloch.

The Deutscher trilogy established the major framework of Western Trotsky scholarship for the rest of the twentieth century. Its central propositions:

• Trotsky was the foremost Russian Marxist after Lenin.
• Permanent Revolution was the correct theoretical framework and was vindicated by October 1917.
• The defeat by Stalin was the result of structural factors (Lenin's death, the failure of revolution abroad, the Party apparatus) more than of Trotsky's mistakes.
• The Soviet Union became a degenerated workers' state under Stalin.

The biography has been criticised by anti-Trotskyists for its political alignment and by orthodox Trotskyists for what they regard as Deutscher's later softening on the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union.

Phase 3: Pierre Broue (1988)

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.

Broue's distinctive contribution was the detailed coverage of the exile years 1929-1940 and the Fourth International. The biography also worked through the smaller national Trotskyist organisations (Spanish, German, Greek, Vietnamese, Ceylonese, Bolivian) in a way Deutscher had not. The English translation appeared only in 2018.

Phase 4: Post-1991 archival opening

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

• Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: Eternal Revolutionary (1992; English 1996). Volkogonov was a former Soviet general turned post-Soviet historian; he had unique access to the Russian archives in 1991. The biography is sharply critical of Trotsky on the Civil War terror, on Kronstadt, and on the Brest-Litovsk strategy.
• Vadim Rogovin, Was There an Alternative? (7 volumes, 1992-2002, English translations 2009 onwards). Rogovin was the foremost late-Soviet Trotskyist historian. The series used the Russian archives to defend the Left Opposition's positions.
• Yuri Felshtinsky, Communist Party Documents on Trotsky (4 volumes, 1990s). Documents on the inner-Party struggle.

The cumulative effect of the archival opening was to confirm the broad Deutscher framework on most matters of fact (Permanent Revolution's authorship, the Civil War operational record, the inner-Party struggle's chronology) while opening new questions on Trotsky's Civil War conduct and on the late 1920s.

Phase 5: Robert Service (2009)

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.

Service's Trotsky presented:

• A sharply critical reading of Trotsky's personality (arrogance, vanity, hypocrisy).
• A reading of Trotsky as the suppressor of his Jewish identity.
• A reading of the Civil War years as Trotsky's authoritarian moment.
• A reading of the exile years as politically negligible.
• A reading of Permanent Revolution as theoretically incoherent.

The Service biography was awarded the 2009 Duff Cooper Prize. It was severely criticised by Bertrand Patenaude in the American Historical Review (June 2011), David North in In Defense of Leon Trotsky (Mehring, 2010; expanded 2013), and by Hermann Weber in the German press. Patenaude documented 86 factual errors in the book. The American Historical Review review concluded that the biography was "unreliable in matters of fact and uncomprehending in matters of politics."

The Service biography nevertheless became the most widely read recent biography of Trotsky in English. Its revisionist position is unlikely to displace the Deutscher trilogy as the major scholarly account.

Phase 6: After 2009

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.

The contemporary scholarly consensus, as expressed in the Cambridge History of Russia volumes 3 (2006) and in the Routledge Companion to the Russian Revolution (2018), treats Trotsky as the second figure of the October Revolution, the principal organiser of the Red Army, the major theorist of Permanent Revolution, and the major Marxist critic of Stalinism. The detailed assessment of his political mistakes in 1924-1927 remains contested.

How to read a source on this topic

Read the Deutscher trilogy as the literary baseline. Read Broue (1988) for the exile years. Read Patenaude (2009) for the Mexican years. Read Service (2009) with David North's critique to hand. Read Rogovin for the Left Opposition's own perspective.

Examples in context

Example 1. The Deutscher trilogy (1954 to 1963). Isaac Deutscher's The Prophet Armed (1954), The Prophet Unarmed (1959), and The Prophet Outcast (1963) shaped Anglophone reception. Deutscher's sympathetic Marxism produced both depth and partisanship. Pierre Broue's Trotsky (1988, English 2008) used the Harvard papers more critically.

Example 2. Robert Service's revisionism (Trotsky: A Biography, 2009). Service drew on previously closed Russian archives and emphasised Trotsky's character (arrogance, miscalculation) and his role in early Soviet violence (Kronstadt 1921, Tsaritsyn 1918). David North and other Trotskyists (In Defense of Leon Trotsky, 2010) and others pointed out methodological errors. Bertrand Patenaude's review essay (American Historical Review 2011) provided a balanced assessment.

Try this

Q1. Source A is an extract from Robert Service's Trotsky (2009). Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain the historiographical shifts since 1991. [5 marks]

• What the marker wants. Identify Deutscher trilogy, Broue critical biography, Service post-archive revision; cite the Trotsky archive at Harvard.

Q2. Evaluate the extent to which post-1991 archival access has transformed our understanding of Trotsky. [25 marks]

• What the marker wants. Weigh Russian archives, Harvard papers, and personal letters; use Deutscher, Broue, Service, Patenaude.

Q3. Compare the views of Isaac Deutscher and Robert Service on Trotsky's character. [10 marks]

• What the marker wants. Deutscher (heroic if flawed revolutionary) versus Service (abrasive, mistake-prone, complicit in early terror); judgement.