A Letter to Laurence Rees,

Dear Laurence Rees,

Thank you for your response to my previous message. I understand the practical limitations that influence any historical account, especially one aimed at a wide audience like 'World War Two: Behind Closed Doors.' However, starting the narrative in 1939 carries important historiographical implications. By leaving out the internal party conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s—particularly the rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin—you inherently omit the political developments that led to the Stalinist regime whose wartime diplomacy you examine.

In your lecture at Coventry Cathedral, you warned of the dangers inherent in “airbrushing” elements out of history.¹ It is precisely in this spirit that I raise concern about the absence of any discussion of Stalin’s systematic destruction of the Marxist generation within the Soviet Union. When you write that Stalin “had no opposition inside the party,”² the reader is left with the impression that this absence was natural or unproblematic. In fact, the lack of opposition was the result of a deliberate and violent campaign to eradicate the Left Opposition and all those who defended the revolutionary internationalism of 1917.

You note that you cannot outline your views on Trotsky without “several thousand words.”³ I recognise the complexity of the subject. Yet your reference to Professor Robert Service—whose biography of Trotsky has been criticised for factual inaccuracies and for diminishing the political significance of the Left Opposition⁴—raises an important question. Do you share Service’s interpretation of the Trotsky–Stalin struggle? I am not asking for agreement with Trotsky’s political positions, but rather for a brief indication of your own assessment of his historical role.

The Great Purges were not merely an expression of Stalin’s personal paranoia; they were a political response to the continuing influence of Trotsky’s ideas and to the possibility of a Marxist alternative to Stalinism.⁵ To exclude this struggle is to present Stalinism as an inevitable development rather than as a counter-revolution within the revolution. This tendency is increasingly visible in recent historiography, including the biographies of Trotsky by Geoffrey Swain and Ian Thatcher, both of whom minimise the political content of the Left Opposition and reduce Trotsky to a marginal or doctrinaire figure.⁶

An accurate understanding of Trotsky’s role—and of the Left Opposition more broadly—is essential for any serious attempt to comprehend the evolution of the Soviet state. Without it, Stalin’s wartime diplomacy appears detached from its political origins, shaped only by geopolitics or personal psychology rather than by the violent suppression of an alternative Marxist programme.

Thank you again for your note. I hope you will consider offering even a brief outline of your views on Trotsky, as this would clarify the interpretive framework within which Behind Closed Doors was conceived and written.

Yours sincerely, Keith Livesey

Footnotes

1. Laurence Rees, public lecture at Coventry Cathedral, date referenced in correspondence.
2. Laurence Rees, World War Two: Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis, and the West (London: BBC Books, 2008), p. 94.
3. Rees, reply to author, reproduced in correspondence.
4. For critiques of Service’s Trotsky: A Biography (2009), see David North, In Defense of Leon Trotsky (Mehring Books, 2010), and Bertrand Patenaude’s review in The American Historical Review, 115:3 (2010).
5. See Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), chs. 3–5; Pierre Broué, The History of the Bolshevik Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), pp. 421–480.
6. Geoffrey Swain, Trotsky (London: Pearson Longman, 2006); Ian D. Thatcher, Trotsky (London: Routledge, 2003). For critical assessments, see Fred Williams, “Two Biographies of Trotsky,” World Socialist Web Site, 2007.