The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both a world-class intellectual and a man capable of the most narrow-minded ideological dogmatism. He was an effective military strategist and an adept diplomat who staked the fate of the Bolshevik Revolution on the meager foundation of a Europe-wide Communist upheaval that was not to be. He was a master politician who played his cards badly in the momentous struggle for power against Stalin in the 1920s. And he was an assimilated Jew who was among the first to foresee that Hitler's triumph would mean disaster for European Jews, and that Stalin would attempt to forge an alliance with Hitler if Soviet overtures to the Western democracies failed.

About the Author

Joshua Rubenstein is the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA and a long-time Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He has been a staff member of Amnesty International since 1975. His current responsibilities include organizing Amnesty’s grassroots membership in New England, New York, and New Jersey.

He is the author of Soviet Dissidents, Their Struggle for Human Rights and Tangled Loyalties, The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, a biography of the controversial Soviet-Jewish writer and journalist. He is the co-editor of Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Mr. Rubenstein received a National Jewish Book Award in the category of East European Studies for Stalin's Secret Pogrom. He is the co-editor of The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov. He also helped to edit and translate The Unknown Black Book, the Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories, which first came out in January 2008 and was re-issued in paperback in 2010.

Mr. Rubenstein’s latest book is Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life for the Jewish Lives series at Yale University Press; it was published in October 2011.