Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence

On 20'h August 1940 Leon Trotsky's life was brutally ended when a
Stalinist agent brought an ice axe crashing down on his head. Among
the works that he left unfinished was the second part of his biography of
Stalin.
Trotsky's Stalin is unique in Marxist literature in that it attempts to explain
some of the most decisive events of the 20'h century, not just in terms of
epoch-making economic and social transformations, but in the individual
psychology of one of the protagonists in a great historical drama. It is
a fascinating study of the way in which the peculiar character of an
individual, his personal traits and psychology, interacts with great events.
How did it come about that Joseph Stalin, who began his political life as
a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended up a tyrant and a monster? Was
chis something pre-ordained by genetic factors or childhood upbringing?
Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal
archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides the answer to these
questions.
In the present edition we have brought together all of the material chat was
available in English from the Trotsky archives at Harvard University, and
supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian. It is the
most complete version of the book that has ever been published. On the
eve of the centenary of the October Revolution, we believe that Trotsky's
Stalin is relevant and inspiring as never before.