I read History Today only intermittently, but individual contributions occasionally warrant closer attention. Your recent column, “Trotsky Offered Asylum,” was one such instance. Although the column’s remit is to revisit episodes from the past, the piece in question was not simply a concise historical vignette. It advanced — implicitly, but unmistakably — a particular interpretation of the political struggle that shaped the fate of the Soviet Union and the international workers’ movement in the twentieth century. It is on this point that I wish to register concern.
Your account presents the conflict between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin as a largely personal or factional contest, a “power struggle” in which Trotsky was the unsuccessful protagonist. This framing is not merely reductive; it effaces the political content of the dispute and thereby distorts its historical significance. The confrontation between Trotsky and Stalin was not an episode of intra‑elite rivalry but the decisive political question confronting the revolutionary movement after 1917: whether socialism could be constructed within the confines of a single, economically backward state, as Stalin and the emergent bureaucratic stratum maintained, or whether — as Trotsky argued — the survival and development of the revolution depended upon its extension to the advanced capitalist centres.
This was not a theoretical disagreement in isolation from social reality. Stalin’s doctrine of “socialism in one country” articulated the interests of a bureaucratic caste that had consolidated power at the expense of the working class and sought accommodation with the existing international order. Trotsky’s insistence on the primacy of world revolution defended the internationalist foundations of October and the strategic orientation of the early Communist International. The defeat of the Left Opposition was therefore not the personal defeat of one revolutionary leader by another; it represented the political triumph of a bureaucratic counter‑revolution over the programme of international socialism. The consequences were profound: the degeneration of the Communist International, the disastrous policies that facilitated Hitler’s rise, the suppression of the Spanish Revolution, and ultimately the Great Terror, in which the generation of Bolsheviks who had led the October Revolution was physically annihilated. None of this essential context appears in your narrative.
I would also draw attention to the language employed in your description of Trotsky’s assassination. Referring to Ramón Mercader as a “charming Spanish Communist painter” is not a harmless stylistic flourish; it obscures the fact that Mercader was an operative of the Soviet secret police, trained and directed by the GPU to carry out a political murder. Similarly, characterising the act of driving an ice axe into Trotsky’s skull as a “stab” is a euphemism that diminishes the brutality and political intent of the crime. Such choices of language have interpretive consequences: they aestheticise an act of state terror and detach it from the political struggle that motivated it.
Finally, your description of Robert Service as “Trotsky’s biographer” is misleading. Service’s book is not a neutral scholarly biography but a polemical work marred by factual inaccuracies and methodological deficiencies. These have been documented extensively, most notably in David North’s In Defence of Leon Trotsky, which provides a systematic critique of Service’s misrepresentations. Readers seeking a rigorous and balanced account of Trotsky’s life and political thought would be better served by Isaac Deutscher’s classic trilogy — The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast — which, despite certain interpretive limitations, remains the standard scholarly treatment.
Given the influence of History Today on a broad readership, the historiographical choices made in such columns matter. A more precise and politically informed account of Trotsky’s exile and assassination would contribute to a clearer understanding of one of the most consequential ideological and political struggles of the twentieth century.
