By Jason Schulman

The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky

By Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky, published in France in 1951; Haymarket Books, 2015

Leon Trotsky ,By Irving Howe, Penguin Books, 1978

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a workers’ revolution led by a Marxist party with the intent of sparking a Europe-wide revolution, which never came. These two books on the leader of the Bolsheviks’ Red Army and the Marxist theorist of “permanent revolution” and “combined and uneven development” are worthy additions to any socialist’s personal library. One is co-written by Trotsky’s widow (herself a revolutionary) and an anarchist-turned-Bolshevik who joined Trotsky’s small international movement of anti-Stalinist communists (“Trotskyists”) in the 1930s. The other is by a former Trotskyist who became a founding editor of Dissent magazine and, with other erstwhile Trotskyists seeking a less “sectarian” existence, helped form what is now DSA.