Review of David North, In Defense of Leon Trotsky

GAIDO, DANIEL FERNANDO

The Russian Review

Wiley-Blackwell

Lugar: Kansas City; Año: 2010 vol. 20 p. 349 - 350

0036-0341

David North’s book consists of four essays. Part I contains two lectures addressing Trotsky’s life and ideas. The subsequent two essays contain an informative overview of the development of Trotsky studies in the Anglo-Saxon world, from the publication of Isaac Deutscher’s sweeping biographical trilogy to the recent appearance of several works highly critical of Trotsky. The real focus of the book is the author’s criticism of what he calls “the post-Soviet school of historical falsification”; that is, the three hostile biographies of Trotsky written in the short span of seven years by Professors Geoffrey Swain, Ian Thatcher, and Robert Service. North provides incisive refutation of several major claims made by these authors, whose work he finds reminiscent of the anti-Trotsky campaigns of the Stalinist regime. The one limitation of In Defense of Leon Trotsky is that it deals only with recent English-language scholarship on Trotsky, such as the sympathetic biography by the French Marxist scholar Jean-Jacques Marie or Pierre Broué’s monumental Trotsky, neither of which has been translated into English. Each of these works provides a substantial corrective to the three biographies reviewed by North.