English

David North to speak at Leipzig Book Fair

On Saturday, March 19 at 1:30pm, David North, chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, will present his book In Defense of Leon Trotsky at the Mehring Books stall at the Leipzig Book Fair.

Based on an in-depth analysis, North’s work criticizes three recently published biographies of Leon Trotsky by the British historians Robert Service, Ian Thatcher and Geoffrey Swain. In the course of his critique, the author raises urgent and troubling questions about the state of contemporary historical scholarship.

The biography of Trotsky by Robert Service will appear in German this summer in an edition published by Suhrkamp Verlag. As David North has shown, this work is nothing less than a diatribe against Trotsky containing manifold errors and distortions, many of which restate old Stalinist slanders against the Russian revolutionary.

 

In addition to North’s talk, Mehring’s stall at the fair will highlight its recent publications, including John Reed’s lively eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution in 1917, 10 days that Shook the World, the photo album Red Star Over Russia by David King, and Alexander Rabinowitch’s historical work, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Bolshevik Rule.

On Sunday at 12:30pm, Wolfgang Zimmermann will present the first volume of the seven-volume series, Was there an Alternative?, by the late Russian historian and sociologist Vadim Z. Rogovin. Rogovin’s work is comprehensive history of the Soviet opposition to Stalinism during the period 1922-1940. The first volume in the series is entitled Trotskyism.

 

Event details are below:

 

Mehring Books at the Leipzig Book Fair
Thursday, March 17 to Sunday, March 20
Hall 5, Stand B102

Book presentation: In Defense of Leon Trotsky by David North
Saturday, March 19 at 1:30pm
Nonfiction Forum in Hall 5, Stand A210

 

Book presentation: Trotskyism by Vadim Z. Rogovin
Sunday, March 20 at 12:30pm
Nonfiction Forum in Hall 5, Stand A210