I had previously read the famous biography of Trotsky by Deutscher, also his biography of Stalin, but the present book has pushed both into the background. They may get a second look in due course.
The publisher's puff left gives a fair idea of the book, so I only add a few personal touches.
I take away the idea that Stalin's hatred of Trotsky was partly jealousy of a more charismatic and more obviously talented politician, partly fear of the lengths which Trotsky might go to to attack him from exile (perhaps a good bit of projection going on here, with Stalin projecting onto Trotsky what he would have done in like circumstances) and partly needing a handy scapegoat for the various big & small disasters attendant on the break-neck pace of industrialisation. And it was true that Trotsky kept up the attack, albeit only in words, in increasingly vitriolic terms until the end of his life. Would Stalin have eased off had Trotsky shut up?
It remains a bit of a mystery why the Trotsky myth and the Trotskyite party have survived the death of the man himself so long. He may have been a far more attractive person than either Lenin or Trotsky, but he shared with Lenin the task of building the machine which Stalin took command of and he shared with Stalin a lot of politics. It seems unlikely that he would have been a butcher in the same league as Stalin, but he had signed plenty of death warrants in his day and he shared the same belief in the efficacy of violence. Although, oddly, despite his hatred of Stalin and all his works, he never seems to have moved on from that to the practical matter of assassinating him. I am reminded of the bit in Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon' where the old bolshevik victim of a purge comes to acquiesce in his own execution for the things he should have done given his views - but did not. I am also reminded of the various voluble but incoherent Trotskyites (one of the particularly incoherent was a heavily accented post-graduate Italian) from my own days at LSE; I never did have any idea of what they were at or on.
Would Trotsky, had he taken over at Lenin's death, have done the business? He would not have executed most of the command of the Red Army just at Hitler was cranking up to invade, but would he have been able to force through the industrialisation which built the tanks which won the war? Would the weaknesses which cost him the leadership have been fatal had he got it?
Would assassination of Stalin have done the business? It seems unlikely that anyone quite as bad would have floated to the top - but it seems a lot more likely that the resulting mess would have fallen victim to Hitler, at least west of the Urals.
There is also a still-important theoretical issue. A hundred years and more ago soft scientists were seeking iron laws which would match the so successful iron laws of physics and chemistry, Freud being one example and Marx being another. So the revolutionaries believed that it was an iron law of history that the proletariat would triumph in the struggle for a brave new world. Which being so, what need was there to exert oneself, to put oneself at risk as a revolutionary? The iron law would make it happen anyway - there being echos here of another north European problem, that of pre-destination. The answer that Lenin and then Trotsky came to was that history needed to be given a shove, to my mind, a felicitous translation of whatever it was that was said in the first place. My own view, which has been aired either here in the other place before, is that there might well be underlying drivers, economic or otherwise, for what happens in history, but a fair amount is left to chance and the right individual floating to the top of the brew can make a big difference.
To close, I note the irony that we here in the UK are about to spend billions of pounds to sort out the Scottish question, one way or another, for what will probably be very little change on the ground. What line would one J. Stalin have taken in his days as Commissar for the Nationalities, when he had to grapple with rather more tricky nationalities - nationalities which continue to vex us all to this day?
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