Mehring Books is proud to announce a new, expanded edition of In Defense of Leon Trotsky by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North.
This work contains a devastating refutation of biographies of Trotsky published in recent years by three British historians: Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain and Robert Service. Through a marshaling of facts and detailed analysis, North explains that these works continue the campaign of historical falsification against Trotsky first initiated by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the 1920s. In particular, North’s refutation of Service’s biography has, in the words of Germany historian Hermann Weber, exposed Service as one who “deals in lies, falsifications of history, dubious references and even anti-semitic prejudices.”
The significantly expanded edition contains a new foreword, four new chapters and two appendices. The additional material includes three lectures for German audiences in Berlin, Leipzig and Mainz, written as answers to apologists for Service’s biography. The fourth chapter, an essay on the 70th anniversary of the assassination of Trotsky, is a paper that was delivered at the 2010 conference of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
The new appendices include a review of Service and North’s books by historian Bertrand Patenaude, originally published in the American Historical Review, and a letter from 14 historians from Germany, Austria and Switzerland opposing the publication by Suhrkamp Verlag of a German edition of Service’s biography. In Defense of Leon Trotsky is of immense contemporary as well as historical significance. As North writes in the foreword to the second edition, “Trotsky’s life will remain the subject of the bitterest controversy as long as his ideas retain the power to influence the outcome of on-going political and social struggles. The attacks directed against Trotsky are aimed not only against a figure in history, but against a man whose vision of world socialist revolution remains to this day a source of inspiration and hope for the future of humanity.”
This book is critical reading for anyone seeking to understand Trotsky’s life and the enduring relevance of his ideas.
To order your copy click here .
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-893638-36-5
Author: David North
Publisher: Mehring Books
Pages: 259