En savoir plus
Leon Trotsky played many roles throughout his life: young Marxist, revolutionary hero, Red Army chief, Bolshevik leader, outcast from Stalin''s USSR, and ultimately target for assassination by representatives of the government he had helped create. In this groundbreaking biography, Bertrand M. Patenaude masterfully interweaves the story of Trotsky''s time in Mexico with flashbacks to pivotal episodes in his career. In Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, Patenaude sheds new light on Trotsky''s final years, including his tumultuous friendship with painter Diego Rivera, his affair with Rivera''s wife Frida Kahlo, and his torment as his family and comrades became victims of the Great Terror. Gripping and tragic, Trotsky brilliantly illuminates the dramatic life of one of the most captivating and controversial figures in modern history. Bertrand M. Patenaude is a lecturer at Stanford University, where he is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. He is the author of The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, which won the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize. He lives in Menlo Park, California. ''Bertrand Patenaude tells a masterly story, of a brilliant, cornered man and, along the way, of a misguided century.'' - The Wall Street Journal