Trotsky

Immediately after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, during the brief ‘end of history’ period, there were several books, from the right and the left, that covered similar territory to Paul Mason’s surprising and provocative Reds. But there has been almost nothing of the kind – a comprehensive narrative history of the ideology and the politics of communism – for a couple of decades. Communism had seemed so dead, so defeated, so apparently unable to rise again, even to those who once purported to believe in it, that interest became minimal, confined to a few university history departments offering courses on the Cold War. As Mason writes: ‘To everyone born after 1989… communism seems like a distant nightmare.

In June 2022, Vladimir Putin tipped up at a party at the headquarters of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. This was to mark, of all things, the centenary of the country’s programme of deep-cover spies, who live for years abroad under elaborate false identities while passing secrets back to their masters at home. The weirdness of that espionage hoopla, just four months after the invasion of Ukraine, leaves one wondering what other bizarre birthday events Putin might have in his diary. The 85th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, perhaps? Ah, you can imagine the banter. The cracker hats. The roll-out noisemakers.

The upheavals convulsing the Russian empire in 1917, Victor Sebestyen argues convincingly, were the seminal happenings of the past century. From them directly stemmed the second world war, the Cold War, the collapse of European imperialism and the dangerous world we inhabit today. There are many weighty modern accounts of these epochal events by historians such as Richard Pipes, Robert Service and Orlando Figes, and it is these that Sebestyen chiefly relies on in this brisk, well-informed and chilling account. He makes no pretence of original research. How did Trotsky’s childlike vision become a nightmare system, dependent on evil, oppression and violence?