“There are many reasons for [Trotsky’s] enduring appeal. He was thrown from the pinnacle of power before his later id…“There are many reasons for [Trotsky’s] enduring appeal. He was thrown from the pinnacle of power before his later ideas could be tested in practice. He was a brilliant advocate as writer and orator. He gained sympathy for his personal plight after being deported…And he died a martyr’s death.”- Robert Service, on Leon Trotsky, in Trotsky: A BiographyWith this biography, I felt like I turned a corner in my study of Russian history. Long a dilettante, dabbling in popular biographies and dwelling endlessly on the executed Romanovs in Ekaterinburg, Robert Service’s Trotsky represented another, higher level. An introductory graduate course, so to speak. Trotsky, after all, is not an easily digestible figure, at least in comparison to boldly defined characters such as Tsar Nicholas II or Joseph Stalin. Furthermore, Service is not exactly an easily-readable historian. In tackling this challenge, I would have to reach higher, intellectually, and dig deeper, as a reader. *** Trotsky is a major figure in Russian-Soviet history. He stands alongside Lenin and Stalin as one of the three major figures of the Russian Revolutionary period. Despite his importance, he’s harder to pin down. He defies a simple summary. Unlike those other two, Trotsky never held a top leadership post. He was – I am told, since I cannot read or write Russian – a brilliant orator and writer, a man of ideas with a blazing ability to transmit them. He figured large in the revolution, especially his direction of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. Despite this, Trotsky endures in large part because he never got to fulfill his promise. Exiled and then murdered by Stalin, most of his plans remained just that: plans. Trotsky lives on in a theoretical alternate universe, where communism bloomed under his direction. In that …