Paul leblanc trotsky biography

By JEFF MACKLER

Paul LeBlanc, “Leon Trotsky,” Reaktion Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2015, 224 pages, $16.95 paperback

Paul LeBlanc’s new and admirable brief biography of Leon Trotsky comes on the 75^th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination in Coyoacan, Mexico, at the hands of Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader.

Trotsky, along with Vladimir Lenin, was the co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the world’s first socialist revolution. This was an event that changed the course of world history in establishing for the first time a government and state of the working class—a workers’ state—which abolished capitalism and ruled society through democratic working-class institutions (soviets) that advanced the interests of the vast majority.

Interest in the ideas of Leon Trotsky, as LeBlanc aptly notes, has far from waned in recent decades, with one or another book, novel, and other works—poems, plays, films—fo