ABSTRACT
Even his most determined enemies grant that Leon Trotsky was a great revolutionary, a reputation assured by his leadership of the Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Soviet in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and of the Red Army in the Russian civil war. But Trotsky’s status as a theoretician is less secure, at least among academics. That same strange alliance of conservatives and Stalinist supporters of the former USSR who have failed to eradicate the facts of Trotsky’s life have been more successful in denying the intellectual contribution that he made to the marxist tradition.
